Go make some popcorn because, tonight, for one night only, it's every movie I have watched in June and what I thought of most of them. (Sometimes at tedious length.) It's not all words. There are pictures further down used for valid illustrative purposes, some of them are in colour, and one has naked people in it! There will not be a test at the end so I can tell you that the naked people are the ones not wearing any clothes.

1. Darkdrive - I often watch movies that make no sense in which characters keep doing stupid things that make no sense for them to do merely to keep the plot going ("Do NOT ever go into that fucking cellar!), or built on premises that defy most known logic to start with (The Giant Claw springs to mind for some reason) but Darkdrive really does make no sense. It starts out by looking like it is going to make sense - in an incredibly clunky, by the numbers clichéd manner; the first act is almost a paint-by-numbers assemblage of stock action thriller lines - but by the end all semblance of logic had been thrown out of the window and driven away to the local dump.
   
   At the start our hero is a whiz-kid programmer working for a morally dubious corporation who runs the penal system of the future by digitizing villains into a virtual prison - called guess what? 'The Matrix' - and 'terminating' the bodies. By the end of the movie he is trapped in the virtual reality prison with his dead wife and a little girl who had a couple of lines at the start of the show, caught in some endless looping mashup of Groundhog Day / Existenz / Overdrawn at the Memory Bank but with more guns and swearing. The hero meets himself and turns out to be the baddie as well. Though how he got there before he got there to find himself is never explained. In fact no one knows why anyone is in there - or indeed how they got there (Mrs Hero for instance was blown up by a booby-trapped picnic hamper in the middle of a field*, nowhere near the brazzillion tons of special effects - OK, a chair and an arc lamp - needed to get her husband Tronned). It almost becomes hypnotically wonderful, as if David Lynch had directed Time Cop. (A feeling heightened by great chunks of the music which was as near to being the Twin Peaks theme as you could get without being sued.) I may watch it again.
   
   * There's another How To Survive a B Movie tip for you; never, ever tell your husband you're pregnant just after he's walked out on an Evil Corporation.
2. Timelock - incredibly bad Future Prison movie in which sweaty leather-clad Vin Deisel wannabees run around a former mining asteroid turned penal institution shooting 20th century handguns at each other (as it was set in the 23rd Century, this is the equivalent of having James Bond run around with a muzzle loading flintlock) and generally being sweatily homo-erotically sadistic to everyone in sight. Pure crap. Not particularly enjoyable crap either. Zero imagination / WTF? points included the ship our villains planned to escape on needing a 3.5 floppy to get it to fly (I can't even start to think of an equivalent for today's transport - needing a quill and parchment to start the Space Shuttle?) and the side-kick baddy managing to smuggle not one, but two katanas (with scabbards) into the ultimate maximum security prison in the universe. Mindless bilge.
3. For Your Consideration - I like 'independent' low budget movies in which I know none of the actors (apart from Steve Buscemi who does seem to appear in them a lot) and I like low budget movies about low budget movie making - of which there are not that many and none as good as the wonderful Living in Oblivion (which starred Steve Buscemi). So I was quite looking forward to this one (despite it having Ricky Gervais in it). I was, I'm afraid, sadly disappointed by the end of it. There were nice moments but it all seemed so slight. Maybe that was the point. I stayed with the credits long enough to notice that one of the Assistant Property Masters was called Skip Crank which cheered me up a bit.
4. Southland Tales - I'm a bit of an ignoramus when it comes to all things modern. Not having a television habit beyond the ocassional hit from the BBC News channel, and loathing the whole 'Celeb' thing, I do miss a lot of what passes for Popular Culture these days. It was only when I looked up Southland Tales on the IMDb after watching it, that I found out I had just watched a Justin Timberlake movie. I know who Justine Timberlake is (it would be hard NOT to know who he is*) but I don't recall that I had ever actually seen him in the flesh as it were. And 'The Rock'**. He was in it too. Cool, never seen either of them in anything before. I won't try and give a synopsis of the movie - better men than me have tried and failed - but for the first 40 or 50 minutes I was in My Movie Happy place. Happily bewildered by a movie that seems to have lots of intersecting plot lines, presented in a layered disjointed fashion where you where never sure who was doing what and why. I love this feeling. The passing Philip K Dick references bedded me in. I was in Scanner Darkly / eXistenZ country. Slowly my happiness evaporated (or maybe just went away) and I started to get irritated, then bored, then very irritated (apparently you cannot be bored and irritated at the same time). What started out as weirdly fascinatingly paranoidly odd turned into repetitively messy and unconvincingly dull. And strangely familiar. The name Kevin Smith popped up in the cast list. I know the name Kevin Smith - director of Clerks, Dogma, and Chasing Amy. Kevin Smith it turns out is a good friend of the director. I disliked Dogma, and Chasing Amy for very much the same reasons as I ended up disliking this movie. They weren't movies they were comic books made flesh, out of control, mishmashes of over the top, juvenile ideas thrown at the screen in a hope that some of it sticks. Southland Tales was accompanied by a simultaneous release of three graphic novels which (or so I am told) help to make some sense of the movie. This is a sign of a writer / director totally out of his depth - or out of control. A movie should be able to stand on its own two feet not require three huge comic books to prop it up.
   
   Towards the end our most central character (hero?) puts a gun to his head and says something along the lines of:
   
   
   
   Hero:
   
   This is all in my head. A dream.
   I pull the trigger and it stops...
   
   
   Audience:
   
   Please... Pull the fucking trigger!...
   
   
   
   
   * (He's some sort of singer.)
   ** (He's some sort of wrestler?)


5. Creator - Peter O'Toole is an eccentric maverick medical scientist determined to clone his long dead wife; he hires a girl to donate eggs for his experiments. His student assistant falls in movie lurve with another student who develops Sudden Onset Movieitis Syndrome - Brackets Brain Close Brackets - and falls into a coma. After an off-screen bit of paperwork from O'Toole's character to stop the girlfriend having the plug pulled on her, and some overwrought "Don't die, my love! I know you can hear me!" acting from the boyfriend, she makes one of those bullshit soap opera, last moment instant recoveries. From persistent vegetative state to sitting up in bed smiling with backlit hair in less than a day.
   
   For some reason this thin, predictable, turgid movie is adored by people all over the world: the IMDb pages are full of gush about it:
   Quote:

   "It will fill you with the joy of life"

   Quote:

   "Getting through this movie is an emotional roller-coaster, the kind where when the ride is over you go, "WHEW!" But then again, you don't want it to end. The gift of this film is that when the lights came up at the end, it sent me back to reality with a different perspective that truly IS a gift."

   and the scary:
   Quote:

   "I have made every boyfriend I have considered being serious with watch this movie."

   (Every boyfriend?) Making loved ones (or even potential loved ones) watch favourite movies is always a dangerous thing to do. A long term relationship of mine came to a sudden stop when she insisted on making me watch one of hers: Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same - it all went downhill very fast after that. Creator doesn't have Jimmy Page climbing mountains in search of characters from the Tarot or Robert Plant poncing about Wales waving a sword looking for the Holy Grail but it does contain one of the most embarrassingly awful movie shower scenes I can remember. I will never forget it. Let's face it; "Fuck macramé!" is not a line you get to hear that often in a movie - let alone delivered during an 'erotic' shower scene.
   
   
   Fuck macramé!
   
   
   In the end every one has learned something and found true love and moved on and another 107 minutes of my life has been wasted.
6. Evil Roy Slade - Brilliant title. This week I are mainly watching Westerns. For several reasons I have a lot Westerns lying in the TBW pile. So this week I am going to watch nothing but cowboy movies. To start, a 1972 TV movie starring the great John Astin as the evilest dude that ever robbed a lot of banks. I remember seeing Evil Roy Slade some 30 years and it stuck in my head as one of those films that I would want to see again one day. Now I have. It's not as funny as I remember - but then, what is after 30 years? but it still made me laugh. Stuffed full of over the top sillinesses, "I learned a valuable lesson today. Never trust a pretty girl, or a lonely midget." and stupid sight gags: Evil Roy Slade trotting into town on the aforementioned midget's tiny pony was predictable but hilarious. "Look! they captured Evil Roy Slade - and half his horse!"
   
   Later Edit: The joke that is going to live with me the longest though, is the moment when the incredibly stupid Evil Roy Slade is told by the gang's accountant that they are broke. The accountant is a small, meek looking man in waistcoat and shirt, a caricature of a western clerk complete with one of those strap-on eye shade visors. He reels off a whole stream of figures while Slade stares at him in dumb incomprehension. Finally Slade says: "Where's the rest of yer hat?"
   
   Everytime I see one of those visors (and they seem to crop up in cowboy movies a lot) all I can think is: "Where's the rest of yer hat?"
7. Time Bandits - one day into my week long Westernfest and things are going pear-shaped already. What happened was this: we all sat down to our usual Friday night Family Movie and Pizza session as normal. Calamity Jane tonight. Merriol is happy that she was going to get to share one of her favourite films with the kids, I'm happy it's a western (sort of) and the kids are just happy that there's lots of mozzarella on the pizza. A couple of minutes in and it's apparent that our battered old VHS tape is no longer watchable and is driving the player into an auto-tracking fugue state. Out it comes and I grab the first possible replacement (my pizza was getting cold!). Time Bandits. Merriol enjoyed it again, the kids were captivated and I was happy to see there were four cowboys in the final sequence. Hurrah!
8. A Fistful of Dollars - It has been years since I have seen this and I had forgotten how utterly brilliant it is.
9. A Few Dollars More - after only two films I can't walk out of my walk-in airing cupboard (which has double doors) without a cowboy swagger.
10. The Good The Bad and the Ugly - Think that's me Sergio Leoned up to my eyeballs for a bit.
11. Calamity Jane - Merriol loves this, Holly was obviously captivated, I spent most of the time watching the editing. There are some very odd jump cuts in it during song/dance numbers where they have obviously switched from one take to another without cutting away to disguise the join. I don't know enough about song/dance number editing of the period to know if this was normal or not.
12. Night Train To Terror - So, God and Satan are sitting on a train and, having nothing better to do, they decide to watch three terrible movies that the producers made earlier out of the train window. To add to the agony the only other occupants of the train are the conductor and a 'rock' band (and their groupies) who spend the entire movie playing one song and break-dancing.
    

    
    Morph's evil twin....
    Claymation in horror movies just doesn't work, does it?.
    

    
    I have no idea where to begin with this one. I am used to watching bad movies but I have never encountered one that caused physical hurt to watch before. God this was dreadful. The three movies must have been pretty bad to start with - actually I know one was pretty bad to start with because I have seen it in one of its full length versions (it was re-edited and re-released under different names a couple of times) and one of the segments was made up from footage from a film that had never been completed - but released anyway. So, God and Satan watch three insane disjointed films:
    

    • Scream Your Head Off aka Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars - this is the one that was never finished before being released, but after they had released the unfinished film (straight to ex-rental video) they went and added more footage with a lookalike playing Marilyn Monroe trapped in a lunatic asylum where girls are being hacked to bits for spare parts..
    • Omenesque rip-off crap Cataclysm - aka Satan's Supper, aka The Nightmare Never Ends (how we wished), and.
    • Death Wish Club aka Carnival of Fools - these guys got a lot of mileage out of their films - in which a medical student and his porn star girlfriend are made to join in a suicide club..

    
    The films are made even more incomprehensible than they were to start with by being reduced to less than a third of their running time... (curiously they chopped out the plot but left all the gore and tits in) and then the train crashes killing everyone on board (apart from God and Satan of Course). Ow! I am in real pain.
13. Reefer Madness - I finally get to see Reefer Madness - another 50p (inc. postage) well spent on eBay. Reefer Madness, for those of you lucky enough never to have heard of it, is a 1936 film warning the parents of America about the evil of 'Marihuana' a drug 'more dangerous than heroin or cocaine' that was corrupting their twenty-something year old high-school children. Turns out to be pretty tawdry stuff - the movie, not the dreaded Mary Jane; one puff of 'The Weed' in this movie and you are on the Hop-head highway to a hell or murder, madness, and the uncontrollable giggles. A lot of my time watching this was spent wondering what the lighting guys thought they were up to. A lot of the scenes had the, for the time, pretty commonplace lighting gimmick of having the shadow of a Venetian blind cast diagonally against a blank wall in the background. Instant dramatic lighting. Always works. Except when your set designer plonks the window in the set and then puts curtains and pull down roller blind in front of it.
    
    
    
    
    "Where's that light coming from? Either I'm stoned...
    - or that window is a portal to another dimension!! Coool!"
    
    
14. Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II - I've had a copy of this knocking about for ages. Starring former porn queen Tracy Lords, and a bloke who played a baddy in Mad Max 2, it's one of those movies that gets bundled into those 10 Sci-Fi Classics That No One Has Ever Heard Of box-sets*. I'm sorry now I didn't sample this earlier. For a nothing budget sequel to a hardly-famous-to-start-with movie I had a lot of fun with this one. It's stupid comic book nonsense that didn't take itself at all seriously and contained a few half-way decent jokes, a couple of odd ideas, and a quoting of one of my favourite trash movie lines: "Welcome to my mind!" (cf. FreeJack - though Vernon Wells' delivery of it comes nowhere near as camp as Anthony Hopkins'). Any movie that ends with a former multi-millionaire escaped convict delivering a Shakespeare sonnet to a rock has to be worth a look. It is also possibly the only movie that has the villain explode when he sees the hero kiss the heroine. Not metaphorically explode, as in explode with rage or frustration, I mean literally explode as in explosives - and body parts bouncing off the ceiling and hitting the screen, that kind of explode. Why he explodes when he sees the hero kiss his girlfriend is a mystery. The writer / directors obviously decided it was time for the movie to stop so had the villain explode. Boom! The End.
    
    *(For some reason no one ever bundles the original, Circuitry Man, and new DVDs of it are marked upwards from $150 on Amazon!)
15. The Final Countdown - A US Navy aircraft carrier is magicked back by some unexplained time vortex thingie to December the 6th 1941 just in time (and position) to stop the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Just as they are about to stop the attack on Pearl Harbour the unexplained time vortex thingie reappears and brings them back to the present. End of story. Well that was 103 minutes of film time summed up in two sentences. I'm sure if I tried I could get it down to one. Or possibly a haiku. What a waste of time. Unless you like seeing shots of planes taking off from and landing on aircraft carriers of course - there's a lot of those. Shots of planes taking off and people walking away from the camera down the ship's corridors must occupy half the film's running time. About halfway through the movie there's a shot which sums up this whole thing for me. The captain, played by the producer's dad Kirk Douglas, walks onto the bridge of his ship. "Captain's on the bridge!" yells the officer in charge of yelling that sort of thing. Kirk walks to centre screen and thinks for a moment before turning round and leaving. "Captain's left the bridge!" shouts the same officer. What a pointless bloody shot! The whole film is like that, goes from point A to point A again via nowhere particularly interesting.
    
    The highlight of the film for me was, during one of the endless walking away down the corridor shots, watching a hapless extra (or possibly crew member) walk halfway out of a doorway in the foreground before realising he was in the wrong place and ducking back out of shot again
    
    The twee wee 'twist' ending is obvious from the moment it is set up just before the third act
16. Hideous Sun Demon - An atomic scientist is exposed to a dangerous new isotope and devolves into a lizard creature - but only when exposed to sunlight! Which is a bit of a shit when you consider he lives in southern California. The tedium was broken by the bad girl, bar-room singer's impressive cleavage and an interestingly new (to me) way of breaking a basic rule of movie direction. Full explanation (with diagrams) to follow when I can think straight again.
    
    Edit:
    Movie Making 101: Breaking the Line. 'Breaking the line' is one of those things that you see a lot in bad/cheap/don't-give-a-shit movie making. It's one of those technical rules that, though it's not inviolable (no rule is inviolable), seeing it broken, unless it is done deliberately and with great care, is a sure sign that the director doesn't know what he's doing. Imagine if you will a scene with two characters in it. For simplicity's sake, let's make it really obvious: two cowboys face each other down a deserted street. There's no one else in sight. The 'line of action' in this scene is an imaginary line drawn between the two cowboys and extending (in a straight line) beyond both of them down the street to infinity. The director now has to make a choice, which side of the line does he place the camera?* Once he has made that choice he should stick to it. Any shots made of this scene should be made from the chosen side of the line and only that side - until such time as something is done to either radically change the line (Cowboy 1 dives behind a horse trough), or the line of action ceases to exist (Cowboy 2 shoots his opponent dead), or a new line of action comes into the scene (the Sheriff steps out onto the sidewalk and the gunslingers see him - in this case you now have three lines of action: the original between Cowboy 1 and Cowboy 2, and the two new lines between Cowboy 1 and Sheriff, and Cowboy 2 and Sheriff.).
    
    So what happens if the director crosses the line and shoots the scene from both sides? Nothing much; the world doesn't end, and no one dies but the film crew wastes a lot of time and the editor gets a lot of useless footage that she can't edit together. Again, to make this crudely clear, imagine our two cowboys facing each other down the street. The director chooses to place the camera halfway between them shooting at 90 degrees to the line of action. He has a wonderful wide shot of the two cowboys facing each other in profile. Black Hat on the right, White Hat on the left. If he then takes the camera across the street (and across the line) turns it around, and then shoots the same scene from that angle he now has a wonderful wide shot of the cowboys facing each other in profile but this time with the Black Hat on the left, and White Hat on the right of the picture. Cutting between these two shots will make the two cowboys swap places, jump from one side of the screen to another. It won't cut together. It would look terrible. The audience would not know what is going on. Okay, that's a very crude example. No director, no matter how incompetent, would attempt to do such a thing (unless they had some specific need to do so, like revisiting the scene later in the movie as a flashback, or deliberately wanting to disconcert the viewer).
    
    Here's a more subtle example from Reefer Madness:.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    In this shot the line of action is between the lecturer and the audience as a whole. It's a pretty weak line of action. There's nothing else going on in this scene. He's talking, they're listening.
    
    
    
    
    
    

    In the next shot he's still talking, but he's facing the wrong way. The editor did a good job is disguising the fact that the director had fucked up by cutting into this shot as the lecturer was momentarily facing screen right but it still jarred.
    
    In Hideous Sun Demon the interestingly new (to me) way of breaking this rule came about when this man, playing a doctor
    

    
    

    
    
    

    has to tell these two people, playing nuclear scientists
    

    
    
    
    

    That their vaguely handsome colleague has turned into a solar-powered lizard.
    
    A simple enough set-up you would have thought. From these first two shots it's obvious that the doctor is sitting slightly side-on to the two scientist who are over to his left (screen right). A bit stagey perhaps but it does the job. When our lady scientist starts to speak however, the doctor turns his head to listen to her -
    

    
    

    
    
    

    and is suddenly looking off screen left! Why is he looking over there? We know lady scientist is sitting right next to her colleague off to his right so why is the doctor suddenly started making up his own lines of action and started staring over at the corner of the room?
    
    Later the director tries to convince us these three shots belong to the same scene:
    

    
    

    
    
    
    
    
    
    

    For the purposes of the plot these two are supposed to be looking at each other. They're not. If she's looking screen left in the wide shot at the top there, she should be looking screen left in the closer angle too. Fortunately for the director she has a magnificent pair of tits and since everyone would be staring at them, (and her incredibly crappy attempts to convince us she was playing a piano) very few people (crew and director included) were bothered about where her eye-line was supposed to be.
    

    
    

    * I'm deliberately excluding the possibility that he may chose to put the camera on the line of action to give the audience a Point of View shot (ie seeing, as it were, through the eyes of one of the cowboys), or a Sergio Leone type shot of a pair of boots straddling the frame with the other cowboy facing the camera in the distance. Both are perfectly permissible things to do but to keep this simple let's say he has to choose one side or the other.
    

    
    
17. Wild Wild Planet - a re-watch an 1960s Italian SF epic that makes less and less sense each time I see it.
18. La noche de Walpurgis - (which sounds a lot better than the The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman). Spanish / German Werewolf Vampire flick that goes through the usual motions: a werewolf seeking an end to his eternal torment, a vampire countesses bought back from the grave, vaguely lesbian vampire moves, people sliding stone slabs that conservatively weigh two tons from the tops of tombs with only minor grunting - but that's about it. Next!
    
19. People From Space - probably the lowest budget movie I have ever seen. $7,000 dollars. Four people get lost in the woods looking for a UFO. Basically it's The Blair Witch Project played for laughs. And I did laugh - a couple of times....
    
20. Horton Hears a Who -
    
21. The Incredible Petrified World - One of those movies that makes starts of by making no sense whatsoever and, by the end of it has you doubting your sanity. What I think happened in it was this:.
    
    After an interminable five minutes of footage of fish and an octopus with a voice over telling us of the mysterious wonders of the deep we discover we have been watching film taken by a deep sea diving expedition (despite there clearly having been reflections of rows of spectators in the glass of the aquarium tanks). A brief discussion about the wonders of diving bells follows and we are told that a new diving bell is about to be launched. We cut to a boat at sea with a big diving ball thingy on it. The intrepid crew: two men (one of whom we last saw wearing a hooded jacket and ogling the pianist's tits in Hideous Sun Demon) and two women. They descend. But something goes wrong! and the diving bell falls off the cable and plummets 'several miles' (sic) to the ocean bed. When the crew wake they find it is light outside. Curious. They don their scuba gear - and at this point I have lost the will to live. Not only has our writer - director managed to stiff us with one of the stupidist sets of the fifties we are also expected to believe they packed Scuba gear!
    
    
    
    
    
    
    (We spend a lot of time staring at this ladder and trying to see round it because more often than not it manages to obscure the faces of the actors as they deliver their lines - though, in a coup de cinema, when the other diving bell appears later in the movie it is painted black so as to make it clear, to anyone who was still watching, that This is not the same set! This is a different diving bell. Look! The ladder is a different colour!).
    
    
    

    
    

    
    They climb up the ladder in their flippers - an absurd sight worth the price of admission in itself - and swim upwards. The camera spends a lot of time at this point looking at the tightly rubber clad girls flapping about underwater and not a lot on the men, presumably this is an attempt by the directors part to distract the audience from wondering why, if they are 'several miles' underwater, they haven't all been crushed to a lifeless bloody pulp. Anyhoo, they all suddenly emerge in a cave! Light (Phosphorescence - which casts strong shadows) and air!. The boys go back to the diving bell and get the girls' shoes (I wish I was making this up). After wandering around the cave for a while they encounter a stock shot of a lizard and a hairy Ben Gunn type who has been living down there for 14 years after escaping from a sunken ship. (Honest!) It turns out there is no way out. They are trapped forever underground! The air that they are breathing is being belched out by a conveniently off-screen volcano. (Sic & WTF?) The boys make one last trip to salvage stuff from the diving bell just as:
    
    
    
    • The Other Diving bell (the one with the black ladder) just happens to be lowered to with a few feet of the first one.
      
    • The Old man tries to get a bit touchy feely with one of the women. "I like you best, let's kill the others."
      
    • The volcano explodes.
      


22. Queen of the Amazons - this movie must have one of the highest ratios of stock to shot footage ever used in a movie. All the characters do for most of the running time is standing in a row and pretending to look at tigers, or standing looking out of a ship's portholes pretending to look at hippos, or, very bizarrely, at one point looking through a telescope at antelopes jumping around in slow motion. The story starts in India but moves quickly to Africa (presumably they ran out of Indian stock footage after a few shots of elephants and tigers) but did stay long enough to give me one of the best unintentional laughs I have had out of a movie for - oh, minutes. A 'native' is just about to impart vital information to our heroine when a luger slowly emerges from behind a curtain.
    
    
    
    
    Hapless Turban Wearing 'Native':
    
    "Listen... I tell you..."
    
    
    
    Slow pan to the pistol emerging from between the curtains - BLAM! Scream!
    
    Cut to:
    
    
    The mysterious shadow of the mysterious villain talking on the telephone.
    
    
    Mysterious Villain:
    
    A native has just been killed in room 207,
    you will notify the police at once!
    
    
    
    Quick establishing shot as hero enters the murder room. Four white people stare down at the floor. Presumably there is a dead, not-white person at their feet.
    
    
    Father in Law:
    
    It's a lucky thing no one heard that shot.
    
    
    Young Male hero:
    
    What happened here?
    
    
    
    
    Father in Law:
    
    I don't know but with all this native unrest if the police
    ever get wind of this there's going to be trouble. Their
    investigation may detain us here for a month.
    
    
    
    Noises off. He turns and pulls back the curtain.
    
    
    
    Father in Law:
    
    Oh, it's too late! - the natives are rioting already!
    
    

    Cut to:
    
    

    Footage from a more expensive film of several hundred turbanned extras wellying the shit out of each other with rubber swords..
    


23. Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971) - aka Blood of Frankenstein, Satan's Bloody Freaks, Teenage Dracula, The Blood Seekers, and The Revenge of Dracula. Another pudding of bewilderments 'directed' by Al Adamson who was reponsible for the incoherent Blood of Ghastly Horror (see April). Apparently some three years in the making Drac. Vs. Frank. mutated during its protracted shoot from being a biker movie starring Russ Tamblyn into a horror movie starring J. Carrol Naish, Lon Chaney Jr., and the director's wife. Both stalwart character actors now fallen on hard times, Naish and Chaney were very obviously ill, Naish confined to a wheelchair, reading his lines from idiot cards with his one good eye - his glass eye, refusing to demean itself stared fixedly ahead - and Chaney was clearly unwell too - he had a serious problems with alcohol - and was reduced to playing a grunting whimpering mute. Neither made another film after this. Dracula was played with consumate woodeness by someone called Zandor Vorkov in his first and penultimate screen appearence. He did though get to deliver the best / funniest line in the whole movie, though I really doubt it was intended to be anything but deadly serious.
    
    Drac. has, via the medium of long tedious exposition, convinced carnival freakshow proprieter Dr. Duryea (aka Dr. Frankenstein) that all his recent woes are the fault of a certain Dr. Beaumont (who we have yet to met on screen). With Dracula's help Dr. Duryea revives the original monster which, somehow, Dracula happens to have lying around*. About an hour's worth of flashing lights and arcing electricity later the Monster from its slab began to rise and suddenly, to my suprise...
    

    Cut to:
    
    

    EXT. STREET. NIGHT.
    
    A neon sign: 'HOSPITAL'. A man climbs into a car and drives away.
    
    

    Cut to:

    INT. CAR. NIGHT.
    
    The driver suddenly notices he has a passenger. He starts with 'suprise' and puts the emphasis on the wrong word when he says:.
    
    

    Dr. Beaumont:
    
    Who are you?
    

    
    

    Dracula:
    
    Keep driving, I will tell you where.
    
    

    Dr B has another unsuccessful go at getting his only line right.
    
    

    Dr. Beaumont:
    
    Who are you?.
    
    Dracula:
    
    (His voice booming with echoing menace.)
    

    I am Known as the Count of Darkness, The Lord
    of the Manor of Corpathia... turn here.
    
    

    
    

    Dr. Beaumont was played by Forrest J Ackerman. A brilliant piece of casting which guaranteed the producers free publicity beyond their wildest dreams because Forrest J Ackerman was, amongst other things, the editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, a magazine dear to the hearts of horror film geeks the world over.
    
    * Apparently, the original idea was to have The Frankenstein Monster turn into a vampire but they couldn't get the fangs to stay in the actor's mouth when he had the monster mask on, so they abandoned the idea.
    
    
24. Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973) - Radiation and unspecified goo loving applied to naked women turns them into voracious lesbian Bee Girls who, like queen bees, only mate once, their male victim dying in exto/agony in the process. Lesbian Bee Girls can be easily spotted by their huge dark sunglasses, worn indoors and out, night and day; their propensity to fondle each other sensually at inappropriate moments (like their husbands' funerals); and their habit of emitting loud buzzing noises mid-bonk.
    Oh, you could also find out who was a Bee girl by pointing a "Photo-sensitive gamma count synthesiser" at them - but they can detect this and next thing you know you're likely to be getting the Bee treatment and being fondled by women wearing dark glasses, lab-coats and not a lot else. (Where do I get one?)

Women are different. Screw the feminist critique. Women are just different. I'm the stay at home parent. I am a bloke. I'm not the blokiest bloke you'll ever meet, but I'm still a bloke. Despite my best efforts both my girls have become seduced by the pink side of the force. The house is full of Barbie, Disney Princesses and other pinky pukeness.

Just now Holly (7) stood, staring into her new (pink) stuffed to bursting point wardrobe and said:

"I've got nothing to wear!"

Where do they learn this shit?

Arse!  Now my fucking sewer is blocked!

Things are stopping in our house at the moment. I have no idea why but over the last few weeks two DVD players have given up the ghost (one in the middle of a movie), a couple of CD players have decided they are only going to play the CDs they like*, the kids' computer just refused to even switch on, the toaster died a couple of days ago and, the same afternoon, the Sky-box remote controller somehow managed to get confused and think it was the TV 'sremote controller - all it would do was switch the TV off. Not on again. Just off. Then the Kettle died. Argh!

Oh - and the speedometer on the car crapped out on me on the way to Oban the other day. I was barrelling along, looked down and found I was (at least according to my dashboard) stationary. I pulled in at the next lay by and re-booted the car. I'm convinced 90% of everything can be fixed by switching it off and then back on again. (The other 10% involves duct tape.) It worked and I drove off at 30 miles an hour, and the speedo agreed with me.

I have also managed to fix the toaster, though that took a little more work. I had to saw a bit of the internal structure in half with a padsaw to get the casing off. (I laugh in the face of your fancy security tamper-proof screws! Hahaha!) And then, after prodding it relentlessly for half an hour, while marvelling at the fact that my toaster had two microchips in it, bent one of the components so it actually came into contact with the other component it was supposed to come into contact with - and now it works again. Hurrah! All that work to rescue a £5 Tesco toaster. (Why are there microchips in there?)

Flushed with sucess, I took the back off the kids' computer and peered into it as if I knew what I was looking at. (I don't.) I had a good look to see if there were any obviously exploded components. (There weren't.) I wiped the thin layer of dust from the bottom of the case with a wet-wipe - and put the case back on.
I turned to Merriol, said: "I dunno, what I'm doing in here. I think we're just going to have to buy them another one," and pressed the On button just to see what would happen. And the thing started up as if it had just come out of the factory. I should threaten inanimate objects more often.

The Sky remote got over its identity crisis the next day and is as good as new.

The CD players are holding out though; they still refuse to play anything other than The Smurfs Go Pop, and anything recorded by Simon and Garfunkle. I'm not sure what their demands are but I refuse to be blackmailed. We're buying a new CD player. Or rather we're buying another new CD player because as I typed this I remembered we did buy a new CD player last month - and had to take it back when it died on us after three days. The shop had run out of that particular model which allowed you to plug a USB stick into the side of it and we couldn't get another.

The DVD players we've bought to replace the two that died turn out to be the only DVD players on the planet for which there is no region hack. Which means I now have shelves full of crappy Region One movies bought from the States which I cannot watch - even if I wanted to. Which I now suddenly do. Because I can't.

I've been all over the web and all of the hacks I have found that are claimed to work - don't.

If you happen to know the region hack for a Technika DVDRAW08 please let me know. And if you know any way of hypnotising CD players into stopping sulking I would be grateful for that too.


*They have lousy taste.

Hide! It's My Time Of The Month Again

May

1. Robots - Predictable but fun. The kids liked it and I enjoyed the scenery.
2. The Green Slime - Most of which was spent staring, in horrible fascination, at the hero's hairstyle.
3. Clockstoppers - predictable teen SF with more plot holes and science fiction stupidities that I could count - but not terrible.
4. Fascination - more French naked ladies in a rented châteaux, only this time they're bourgeois lesbian vampires not aliens. And the plot made more sense - unless you asked yourself questions like, why are these two naked bourgeois lesbian vampires trying to have sex without actually touching each other? Mind you this is not the only movie. Most 'lesbian' sex in films seems to take place between actresses who appear to be in different countries to their partners - though maybe this is the way real lesbian sex is, I have no idea. I willing to do the the research though.
   
   
   
   
   
5. Night of the Bloody Apes - coo! Thanks to the mighty power of the Internet I get to see a film banned in the UK (well, until 1999 at least).
   
   A doctor's son is dying from Generic Terminal Non-specific Movieitis. To save his life Daddy hits upon the idea of giving him a blood transfusion from a gorilla - and just to make sure his system can cope with the more 'vigorous' blood, he gives him the gorilla's heart for good measure. Meanwhile, a sexy masked female wrestler, Lucy (who gains a good thirty pounds every time her stunt double steps into the ring) is having a crisis of confidence after putting her opponent into a coma. As chance would have it her cop boyfriend is assigned to find the missing ape.
   
   The morning after the operation, the 'cured' son undergoes one of those movie transformations which involves the poor actor remaining motionless for hours while eager make-up artists glue hair all over his face (only stopping every couple of minutes to have another frame of film exposed. It used to happen to Lon Chaney Jr a lot, apparently to help Lon keep his head in the right position as he got turned into the Wolfman, they used to make the 'pillow' on the bed he always seemed to end up lying on, out of plaster so it was a solid lump with a Lon Chaney Jr's head-shaped dent in it). In this case the whole process must have taken about twenty minutes because not only does our hero's head change but his entire body does too, suddenly he's not a feek and weeble invalid, he's a huge muscley Mexican wrester with a bad hair do and a shaven chest. He escapes. One (graphic) murder of a showering woman later, he's back strapped to Dad's basement operating theatre. To reverse the process Daddy needs a living human heart, luckily he has the coma wrestling girl from scene one lying about. (Everyone waits expectantly to see what the transsexual Mexican wrestling Gorilla transformation will be like).
   
   
   Gratuitous nudity
   
   Our monster escapes again and three bloody deaths and one rape (in which our victim enthusiastically kicks great swathes of artificial grass about to reveal the studio floor) later and he's got her heart in his chest. It works! - for a bit, then the son transforms back into the monster, rips the head off the lab assistant, tucks his dad up in bed (I kid you not!), scalps a cop, kills a couple of doctors, kidnaps a child and gets shot to death on the hospital roof. "It's really sad." says the heroine. The End.
   
   What I suspect got this film banned for so many years (apart from all the rather gruesome gratuitous violence) was the fact that the heart transplant operations in the movie used footage of real heart transplant operations. Strangely shocking seeing real blood and a real human heart beating in someone's hands with all this sweaty Mexican nonsense going on around it.
   
   Curiously the Monster is shirtless but his trousers come up to his sternum. It always baffles me about the mores of these movies that it's okay to show open heart surgery, naked women, clothed women getting strangled and raped, people getting their eyeballs poked out. But showing someone's belly button? No, now you're going too far. Other curiosities include one of the props, a book, which turns up in just about every set. It's never opened, used, or even mentioned, it's just there, on every desk in Mexico.
   
   And why every beat cop in Mexico has a cod Irish accents is another mystery.
6. The Apple - every now and then I just get totally lost for words. Back in the dark days of the eighties Cannon Films nearly took over the movie world. They owned Thorn EMI, cinema chains, movie studios, the works. Coming from practically nowhere they achieved all this by promising the Earth to anyone with more than $50 to invest, some interesting accounting practices, and sheer fucking chutzpah. And they made movies. Loads of movies. 43 in one year. None of them were any good and only the ones starring Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson took a cent after their first week.
   
   The Apple was their big musical.
   
   I have never seen Can't Stop the Music, the Village People's only movie, but I'm going to make a stab and say The Apple is probably ten times camper, twenty times worse, and has to be much funnier.
   
   The Apple has a paper thin story. In a totalitarian DiscoFuture (1994) where everyone wears silver suits with huge shoulders, And cars look suspiciously like late 1979 models with transparent domes and huge fins pasted on to them, a sweet innocent girl singer is seduced by the dark side and signs to the biggest agent in the business, the Satanic Mr Boogalow.
   
   
   
   Please allow me to introduce myself, .
   I'm a man of wealth and... oh...
   
   
   Her true love doesn't sign but instead wanders about for a bit trying to remember what his acting teacher told him to do in what was going to turn out be his only movie appearance; he gets drugged and has his brains fucked out at a Disco Orgy and finally meets a bunch of Hippies led by Joss Ackland (trying manfully to pretend he isn't in the movie by hiding behind a huge beard). The girl sees the error of her ways and walks out on Mr Boogalow and she and her boyfriend live happily in the park with the lovely flower people - aaaaaaah! BUT! Just as the Disco Police lead by the evil Mr Boogalow and his lawyers are about to arrest the "Refugees from the sixties" for helping her break her contract, and two minutes from the end of the movie, our wooden hero looks skyward and mumbles 'I'm sure Mr Topps will come and rescue us...' to which his missus looks somewhat puzzled - as does everyone in the audience - because this is the first time anyone has heard the name 'Mr Topps'. Cue heavenly music. Enter badly matted flying Gold Rolls Royce, Enter Joss Ackland (again) in a white suit and long blond wig (this time trying to hide behind a very dodgy Southern accent) who whisks them all off to heaven. The End. Seriously, that's it. A real, genuine unabashed Deux Ex Machina ending.
   
   
   
   Chariots of the Acklands
   
   
   According to the IMDb the audience at the premier were given complimentary copies of the soundtrack. They threw them at the screen causing 'extensive damage' (to the screen presumably, I don't think we can hold them responsible for damaging the movie. Far too late for that). I don't blame them for throwing things but can't help thinking they would have been better throwing them at the director.
   
   You can catch the trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BY9cvgrP1c
   
   To be fair to the movie (why AM I doing this?) the ending might not have originally been quite as Deux Ex Machinistic as the final result. The trailer seems to contain at least one (wedding?) scene with the Hippies that doesn't appear in the movie. My DVD has a run time of 86 minutes, the theatrical release was 90, but even if those missing 4 minutes did set up a mythical Mr Topps it could have only been in the last few minutes of the film. Still pretty DEMish.
   
   EDIT: I just realised the difference in running times between DVD and theatrical are almost certainly due to differing frame rates (cinemas project film at 24 frames per second, TVs run at 25 FPS - 30 in the US) but it turns out there is a longer cut still in existence and I do need to get out more don't I?
7. Madagascar 2 - Took the kids to see it at the local community cinema. I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn't nearly had a stand-up, knock-down fight with the digital 'projectionist' who wouldn't/couldn't see the problem with projecting a 16:9 movie at 4:3. "It just looks fucking WRONG! can't you see that? The shot, early on, when we see the little lion's POV of the gun barrel. The holes in gun barrels are round! - not oval!" What was even more depressing was that no one else seemed to notice. Or care. It's amazing how many people don't notice - or care - that whatever they are pointing their faces at is all squished up, or stretched out stupidly wide. I say 'pointing their faces' because they can't be watching it or they would notice. Wouldn't they?
8. The Atomic Submarine - Movie acting 101: Don't tread on the next guys lines. It is (or was) standard practice in Hollywood movie acting to leave your lines 'clean'. Don't start talking till the other person has finished, especially if you are in a setup that you know is going to be intercut with another angle of the same scene - ie same dialogue but with another actor's face filling the screen. The gaps in-between the lines when nobody is speaking are what the editor needs to seamlessly splice the different shots together. He may overlap the sounds to make it appear as if both people are speaking at once, or stretch the silence to increase the mood of the moment, or alter the timing of a gag, but he needs it clean to start with.
   
   This is a very clean movie. Almost every line of dialogue has a second long pause at the end of it before the next one comes in. Sometimes there are pauses in the middle of lines. Too. Which is odd.
   
   Whole swathes of (admittedly banal) dialogue in this movie came over so ponderously slowly that I thought I was watching a rough cut. But when the dialogue in question is of this quality you can forgive almost anything. The scene is a small corner of studio space made to look like the ward room of the Atomic Submarine USSS Dogfart by having some pipes and lockers placed against a wall:
   
   
   Scientist #1:.
   (Bringing in a photograph of a UFO that looks uncannily like the underwater thingie that has just attacked the sub.) I knew there was something familiar. Take a look... This picturewas taken by an amateur astronomer over New Mexico. I have had it since I served on the Air Force evaluation board for UFO reports.
   
   
   Explaining Acronyms Officer:
   Unidentified Flying Objects.
   
   
   Hero:.
   Then this is a flying saucer!...
   
   
   Scientist #1:
   That was the popular designation - yes.
   
   
   Officer:
   Weren't all the sightings in the sky? not underwater?
   
   
   Scientist #2:
   This would explain why there were never any reports of landings. It's quite possible that whoever or whatever inhabits this craft is not a land creature at all - but some sort of marine life...
   
   
   Another Officer:.
   That would make our little green men
   - actually little green fish.
   
   
   Hero:.
   Undersea Flying Saucers.... Hmmmm.
   
   
   

   The driver of the underwater flying saucer is wonderful a gloopy eyeball on a stick with tenticles that must have cost at least tens of dollars (most of the SFX budget went on filming the producers sons' toy submarines - presumably, from the quality of the footage, in the producer's bathtub) and is undoubtedly the inspiration for the one-eyed aliens in the Simpsons.
   
   

   Alien:
   At last Commander, we meet - as your people say... face to face!
   
   
   Hero:
   That's a face?
   
   
   
   
9. The Bamboo Saucer - A hot-shot test pilot is buzzed by a flying saucer, looses his job, and becomes obsessed with proving he wasn't seeing things. He is recruited go on a secret mission to 'Red' China where reports have arrived of a downed saucer similar to the one he described. The (US) military wants the saucer destroyed rather than let the pesky Commies get their hands on it. In China our gung-ho heroes meet A bunch of Russians on the same mission. An uneasy truce develops between the two parties and at the end the three surviving members fly the saucer to Switzerland (via Mars and Saturn) with a fervent plea that all mankind unite. And you know what? It's not bad. It's not great, don't get me wrong, but for a film that starts so badly - the opening shot is a stock footage pan of a plane taking off which we are expected to believe is the view out of a window. I don't know about you but my windows don't move to follow the action outside. It slowly develops into vastly different movie. The first couple of reels are pretty standard Cold-war, Commie-bashing rubbish SF - including a cutaway of this rather wonderful graph showing the test plane's altitude:
   
   
   
   A graph showing the pilot is so out of control of his experimental .
   jet aircraft that he apparently goes back in time for a bit .
   
   
   
   But by the time we get to the end the mood has changed completely with both Russian and American finding common cause (and yes, Love) and nearly everyone ends up dead (including our 'star'). The three characters that are left alive are trapped in a runaway spaceship they cannot understand, seemingly doomed to crash into Saturn. But they figure it out. Not that there's aren't some real howlingly bad bits along the way - I mean really, what are the chances of an alien spaceship's door mechanism being triggered by the hum of a portable electric razor? And whoever wrote the line:
10. The Strange World of Planet X - In 1958 Eros Films released The Strange World of Planet X (as well as the dementedly awful Fiend Without a Face). Just to prove the Brits could make bloody awful SF films too. In Planet X a government scientist and his assistants (one of them a WOMAN!) are trying to do something to something else with gigantically powerful magnetic fields. As it happens this is not a good idea because they accidentally dent the Heaviside layer and let in Cosmic Rays. These rays makes a tramp attack a girl in the woods and makes insects get really close to the camera so they look huge and then eat people standing further away. The movie is not exactly action packed. It's short; only 75 minutes but feels a lot longer. People just talk and talk and endlessly talk in that clipped British acting style that has, thankfully, long disappeared. Long takes (not in itself a bad thing) with stage trained actors taking turns delivering their lines towards each other before they forget them (preferably without moving their lips):
    
    "I have to say this now."
    
    "I'm glad you said that because I have to say this to you. Oh, and I have deliver a plot point."
    
    "Well I have a plot point of my own to deliver as well."
    
    "Really? Do you? That's rather good of you."
    
    "Would you like a cup of tea?"
    
    "Most kind, but no thank you. I have to go and get shot in the chest by a mad scientist. I have to attempt to persuade him from repeating the experiment and possibly dooming the world."
    
    "Do you?"
    
    "Yes, I do."
    
    "Sounds painful."
    
    "I expect it will be."
    
    "Well, Cheerio, old chap."
    
    "Cheerio. It's been nice acting in your general direction. I say, doctor Misguided, be a good fellow and put down the gun would you!"
    
    God it was boring. The script must have looked like a telephone book. So many words and so drearily delivered. Thank god for our hero Forrest Tucker who, being an American actor, managed to get out some of his lines as if he actually meant them - even if he knew they were garbage. Anyway, it all comes right at the end when the creepy stranger, Mr Smith, turns out to be a benevolent alien come to explain everything (at great length) and rescue everyone by painfully bad special effects.
    That's three movies in a row with Flying Saucers using magnetic lines of force for propulsion. Spooky.
11. Parts: The Clonus Horror - (MST3K) Much as I enjoy Mystery Science Theatre 3000's riffing on crappy crappy movies, they do sometimes get it very very wrong. They got it wrong here. MST3K works well when the audience is complicit, when the movie is undeniably dreadful and deserving of derision. Parts: The Clonus Horror is not a bad a movie (but could easily have been so much better). Clonus doesn't deserve deriding like this. The central premise is good and the story credible (well... just.) In short, after a few brief establishing shots showing a presidential hopeful on the stump who we know we will be coming back to later (because he is played by an actor we recognise) we find ourselves in a strange happy place with lots of happy healthy people jogging and biking and being happy. Occasionally one of the happy people gets to go to a mythical 'America' and is never seen again. One of the happy healthy people starts to question what is really going on and discovers that he is the clone of an important person, and so are all the other happy happy healthy people (clones of different famous people that is- they're not all clones of the same person. he might have noticed that a lot earlier). They are, he discovers, mere collections of walking spare parts, kept in happy ignorance till their organs are needed by their wealthy 'parents'. As used to happen, but is no longer the case in American movies, the good guys don't win. The bad guys win. The hero ends up in a body bag awaiting dissection, and everyone who has helped him along the way is disposed of by the evil henchmen of the corporation in charge of the project. Chief amongst them is the presidential hopeful of the opening sequence (I told you!). It's not brilliantly done but it was good enough for Dreamworks to clone it as their 2005 movie The Island (starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson). When The Island came out the director of Clonus threaten to sue the hell out of them. He submitted 90+ points of similarity between the movies, a judge said he had a case, and Dreamworks settled out of court for a substantial sum. What lets Clonus down is some pretty bland acting from an uncharismatic lead, and a lack of budget - though they did pretty well for the quarter of a million dollars they did have.
12. Earth Alien - aka Endangered Species. Eric Roberts is a cop chasing down a serial killer who turns out to be an alien hunter. Eric is helped by a mysterious stranger who turns out to be the Warden of the game reserve we know as the planet Earth. American cars it turns out are made out of napalm and nitroglycerine and explode if you look at them too hard. Turns out that the wintery look to the movie was more to do with it being shot in Lithuania, with a few American props dropped here and there, than anything else. Turns out I will watch any old shit if there is gratuitous nudity in the first ten minutes and the promise of more to come.
    
    
    
    Some more gratuitous nudity.
    
    
13. Inspector Gadget - 48 hours after watching this with the kids I have no memory of it whatsoever apart from the music. Do be do be di do do doo, do be do di dooooo... which I knew before hand anyway.
14. Riders to The Stars - First directorial chore by Richard Carlson (who you may remember from such films as It Came from outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and as a career high point, eloping with Bette Davis' daughter in The Little Foxes) in which top scientists are recruited for a secret project by aged venerable Herbert Marshall (who I last saw wielding a fire extinguisher at killer robots in Gog - but who may wished to be remembered more for a career high point role as Bette Davis' husband in - The Little Foxes.) All attempts to shoot a rocket into space have failed due to their coming back to earth with their molecular structure changed by the bombardment of Cosmic Rays. The metal is brittle and smashes like glass. Somehow meteorites don't get changed this way, the 'iron and steel' (sic) of which they are made is somehow invulnerable. Ergo... (scientists pace before blackboards racking their brain for a solution) ...somehow they must have a protective coating which gets burned off in the earth's atmosphere! What we need is a bunch of volunteers to sit on top of stock footage of V2 rockets and go capture an meteor before it looses the protective coating and bring it back for analysis. At this point the writers neatly and cleverly get round the gaping circular logical plot hole flaw in their story by skillfully ignoring it and hoping nobody will notice. Three scientist eventually get chosen and blasted off to scoop up meteors. Two of them (one of them played by the director) die. One returns (much to the relief of the female scientist and Herbert Marshall who turns out to be his dad). Herbert takes one look at the meteor in the scoop and announces it's "crystallized carbon - Rockets and space stations will be able to stand the bombardment of cosmic rays with a coating of crystallized pure carbon"..
    
    "Diamond" breaths the lady scientist.
    
    And with the image of the 1950s American space program launching blinged up V2s firmly stuck in my head (far more securely than anything the makers of Inspector Gadget managed to stick in there), I'm going to bed.
15. The Brain From Planet Arous - John Agar is a nuclear scientist whose body is taken over by the disembodied criminal brain of the title. Agar get to go "Mwahahaha!" a lot wearing scary contact lenses.
    
    
    .
    Are we having fun yet?
    
    
    Everyone else gets to act at thin air a lot when another disembodied brain from the planet Arous turns up and hovers around talking to his concerned family.
    
    For great periods people talk to the top right hand corner of their living room because the director told them that that is where the special effects guys would later place the floating brain - unfortunately he forgot to tell the special effects guys that this is what they were supposed to do (that or the money ran out) and so the poor actors spend a lot of on-screen time talking to lampshades.
    
    
    Spot the Brain Competition.
    
    
    Using your skill and judgment mark with a cross where
    you think the center of the giant floating brain should be.
    
    

    As it happens this second brain is a good disembodied brain come to save the world from the evil disembodied brain (both played by the same prop but with different voices) so, instead of taking over a human being, it merely possesses the family dog, popping out every now and then for a chat. I guess he had to pop out because having elderly actors talking to thin air is obviously cheaper than trying to teach a dog to talk. The evil disembodied brain has to pop out of our hero's head too. Once every 24 hours it has to stock up with oxygen. Our heroine leaves John a note and an axe. Brain pops out for a breather and John reads the note. Whack whack whack! End of movie, apart from the brief scene where the actress has to do kissing with John Agar again - which makes her wonder why she bothered.
    

    
    
    
    
    
16. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen - Terry Gilliam's finest baroque and roll masterpiece.
17. Endangered Species - (a different one). Many years ago, when I had vague ambitions to be involved in the making of movies, I conceived a (to me) brilliant way of making interesting feature films for very little money. Out there are thousands of wannabe movie makers all making short, low budget movies which they hope will be their calling card to bigger things. My idea was to take a bunch of these short movies, shoot some sort of framing device, preferably in some budget reducing confined location - five people stuck in a lift tell each other stories? - and release it as a feature film. Basically I had re-invented the Portmanteau movie and, done right, it could have been a very cheap way of making a semi-decent movie. You could even get the wannabees to cough up a submission fee to have their short even concidered for inclusion - after all, this was their way of (possibly) getting a (shared) director's credit on a REAL FEATURE FILM! Get enough submissions and you could be in profit before you've shot a frame of the linking footage. I did actually pitch this idea to a few people but nothing ever came of it.
    
    Now someone has done it. And it's fucking awful.
    
    Three short movies 'interwoven' with a linking story. Unknown to the mass of humanity, time traveling aliens are amongst us fighting for control of the future - an idea lifted almost verbatim from Fritz Leiber's Big Time stories. Where this movie differs from my idea (apart from the fact I would have used good short movies of which there are many) is that it tries to interlink the stories. Characters from the framing story watch, comment on, and talk to the characters in the previously shot films, a technique which, instead of weaving the disparate footages together, has the opposite effect.The intercutting actually heightening the vast differences in quality and style. It makes the movie even more fragmentary than it already is (for instance, one of the segments looks like it was made in the eighties and the quick contrasting of the clothes and hair, then and now, is startling). I will however have a fond memory of this movie for a moment of inspired low budget movie set dressing. The 'hero' of one of the segments (a Hispanic teenager called 'Fritz' no less) arrives in Las Vegas in the van the director's cousin borrowed from work just for this shot. To disguise the fact that they've borrowed the van, someone had the brilliant idea of getting some gaffer tape and sticking pages of the script over the logos and phone number...
    
    
    
    Fucking awesome, dude! No one will ever notice!
    
    
    
18. In the Dust of the Stars (Im Straub Der Sterne) - a change from the usual diet of American SF trash, Soviet Block SF trash! A group of cosmonauts answer a distress call from a planet only to find their help is not needed - or so it seems. The decedent bourgeois inhabitants they first encounter turn out to be the evil exploitative oppressors of the real inhabitants. Battle is joined and though victory is not theirs by the end of the movie, the newly invigorated downtrodden proletariat masses have a martyr and the leader of evil overlords knows he is staring eventual inevitable defeat in the face. Not very subtle but joyously different from the standard American Commie-bashing fare about loss of identity and soulless monsters consuming our vital bodily fluids. There was some gloriously odd costuming too, from the ludicrously outdated Flash Gordon black PVC minikilts of the bad guys, to the red leather flared cat suits straight out of an Abba fetishists wet dream worn by the females in the crew. Crank up the oddness with a villain whose hair is a different colour every time he's on, a spaceship that looks like the Post Office Tower, split screen scenes of mass hypnotism, and lots of fun with large snakes in a hall of mirrors, an utterly out-of-nowhere, non plot-driven naked dancer... (Full frontal communist nudity! "See! You, capitalist running dog, scum! We got boobies over here too!") you get the idea. Odd. Very very odd.
    
    
    .
    
    
19. Arthur and the Invisibles - Which I enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting to, but by god! the script needed editing. One of those films in which everyone delivers vast amounts of exposition very rapidly.
20. Eolomea - More Soviet Block SF. A little more sedate and certainly a lot less camp than the leather fetishists of In the Dust of the Stars. In this one spaceships ships are mysteriously vanishing. People investigate by standing around and talking to one another and there are some flashbacks to two characters' summer love affair - and it was all a bit dull. Turns out the ships weren't vanishing at all, just refitting before setting out to discover if there is life 'out there' beyond our solar system. A mission which is undertaken in a sense of noble purpose and self-sacrifice which is rare in American movies. (Other than the relentless corporate blandness of Star Trek). Not that I'm saying there isn't self sacrifice in American movies but it does tend to be more along the lines of: "It's no use captain (cough) I'm done for - you get the kids and Betty-Lou to safety. I'll hold them off here..." In Soviet SF there is a feeling of optimism. That Science, rather than unleashing endless mutated monsters and things man was best not knowing, is uplifting and ennobling. There are things we do not understand and they may well be wonderful. Let's find out. The future will be better, comrades, if we all work together! (I am getting an uncontrollable urge to lean forward at an unlikely angle with my chin pointed at the future while a flag flutters behind me. I wonder what Cultural Revolution SF was like - if there was any.)
21. Zathura: A Space Adventure - What jolly fun! despite the fact that our DVD player finally gave up the ghost just before the third act. Luckily I had bought its replacement this afternoon, so, after ten minutes wrestling cables and wondering just why I still have a Betamax player, I had it plugged into the insanely complex rat's nest of cables behind our pile of obsolete audio visual equipment we watched the end. The kids loved it. So did I. Mind you I have never seen Jumanji which, apparently, it closely resembles (it started life as the sequel). Jumanji has Robin Williams in it. I have seen enough Robin Williams movies in my life. (Including the one I am in.) I don't need to see any more.
22. AfterShock - Totalitarian post-apocalyptic future, kick-boxing, John Saxon, kick boxing, sub porn movie music, more kick boxing. I fall asleep. I wake up; John Saxon is still alive - so is the bloke with white trousers and the sword. When I wake up again John Saxon is dead and the alien who dressed like Nancy Reagan is going home (as she arrived) via the medium of a smoke flare filmed backwards. Hero in white trousers, astride a low powered motorcycle, rides off into the sunset (ie out of the disused paper-mill where they shot the film). I fall asleep again but stay awake just long enough to notice there is someone called Chuck Skull in the credits. Another 50p well spent in the Save the Cancer shop.
23. Martians, Go Home - not very funny (though I did laugh) adaptation of Frederick Brown's very funny novel of the same name. Which I now have to go read again.
    
    
    

Long time since I blogged. Not that things haven't been happening to me it's just I never seem to get round to writing any of it down. Today all five of us went to the Highland Folk Museum. Which I hadn't been to before. It's a wide open site dotted with reconstructed buildings from the area. The kids loved it. Inside one of the houses, a reconstruction of a crofter's house of some 300 years ago - heather thatched roof, no windows, dirt floor, Holly started playing with a beam of sunlight that was coming through the chimney hole in the centre of the roof. And I had a camera in my hand. It's not the greatest photo in the world but for once in my life I actually took a photo that captured the moment without getting in the moment's way.

Tomorrow: the relentless slog that is every movie I have watched this month while not doing this blog.

And then sometimes you just see pictures in the newspaper that make you go 'ewwww!'

I'm thinking of changing the name of my blog to 'Where Did I Get These Middle-Class Children From?'

Tonight, at tea, Daisy finally stopped prodding, and complaining about, the green goo on the side of her plate long enough to taste it.

"Mmmmmm I like Mushy Peas! At first I thought it was guacamole - but I like it!"

Eurovision

Who I voted for:



and:



How could I not vote for Dita Von Tees strutting her stuff in rubber and three semi-naked Roman centurions in silver Spandex.

As usual the British song was dreadful and someone I didn't vote for won.

(How both these songs came to be number 17 in the running order is something that has me baffled.)

I don't normally do the viral thing but...

It had to happen.

We took Eben to hospital yesterday.  It was nothing important but when he was born a routine check wasn't done - or if it was done the results weren't written down - so yesterday we had to drive all the way across the country to spend five minutes in a dark room with a consultant Radiographer to learn our son has an 'Unremarkable' bladder.

We took the opportunity of being (almost) alone to do some grown-up shopping. My parents had the girls for the day.  So free from the constant attention grabbing of my daughters, I'm standing in Waterstone's holding Eben with one hand, and flipping through some comic books graphic novels with the other when another customer, pushing a baby in a pram, spots my darling boy.  She goes all goey and we engage in the ritual exchanges that all new parents do so well:

Her:
Isn'thelovelyHowoldishe?

Me:
Fourandahalfweeks. 

Her:
Ohhe'ssolittle!

Me:
Don'tlethismotherhearyousaythat.Hewaseightpoundsten.

Then...

Her:
He's lovely. Are you his grandfather?

Me:
(Pause. Blink. Pause)  No... I'm his father...

Her:
Mummblemummbleoops! (Exit right)

Suddenly I don't want to buy a graphic novel comic book any more.  I want to go home*.







*Nice cup of cocoa, pipe, and slippers.

My favourite Joke at the Moment

A man goes to the zoo but it's only got one animal.  A dog.  It's a shitzu.

Happy Star Wars Day!

May the 4th be with you.

Thanks for reminding me, Brian.

23 - I think it's been closed for a while now...
Originally uploaded by Daveybot

Sad little photo from pal Daveybot which gave me an excuse to test the Flickr / Blogger thing I just set up.

Duck! It's Crap Movie Time Again

April

1. The Empire Strikes Back
   - with the kids. And I didn't fall asleep! Not that I had a chance answering questions like: "Star Wars is all about Doctor Who, isn't it, Daddy?"
2. Wavelength
   - forgotten but worthwhile low budget SF film which eschews elaborate special effects and cliché to deliver a nicely acted, well thought out little movie somewhat in the Starman, E.T. line.
3. Atom Age Vampire
   - badly dubbed and edited American 1960 Italian soap operatic pre-mashup mashup of a mad scientist Jekyll and Hyde killing women to extract something from them to make his beloved beautiful again (after she is horribly disfigured during a badly staged car crash.) I've no idea what the original was like but great chunks of this version made no sense whatsoever. At one point our only slightly (but soon to be totally) deranged benevolent scientist is about to perform a vital operation when the lights go out. He descends to the cellar and abuses his dumb devoted, but slightly pissed, henchIgor for letting the generator die. Exit henchIgor whimpering as our scientist (in operating gown) flips a couple of switches. The lights go on in the operating theatre. The patient anaesthetised on the table, osiliscope flickering away, big atomic thing in the corner flashing all its lights. His other assistant, beautiful devoted female scientist (aka victim number one) turns off the hurricane lamp. Back in the cellar the Doc heads for the stairs when he notices water dribbling from the wall. He stops. Looks at it. Picks up a sledgehammer lying nearby and, for no discerable reason whatsoever, spends the next seven shots whacking a bloody big hole in a brick wall and then crawling through it. Cut to nightclub hoochie coochie dancer with feathers on her bum...
   
   
   
   
   

   
   
   
   

   Internal memo from the producer: . Hey Luigi, How's the shoot going? We still don't know how to end the cellar scene so just fill the screen full of tits will you. Ciao.

   
   

   High readings on the bewilderometer for this one. Get your free, legal CrappyQuality copy HERE!
4. X the unknown Movie
   - I watched a movie. I remember watching it. I just have no memory whatsoever of what it was... EDIT: I found it. It wasn't a real movie, it was made for TV so doesn't count. It was crap though.
   
5. Wall E
   - better than I was expecting and some of the visuals were stunning.
6. The 27th Day
   - back to the 1950s SF crap, Yipee! In this one an alien gives seven total strangers, everyday folks from around the world, a weapon of mass destruction. The aliens want to take over the world and have a moral compunction about destroying sentient life - but none about giving the sentient life a means of conveniently wiping itself out. So a promising start (marred only by the typical parading of ignorance of the basics of physics and astronomy so common in movies. Apparently if you move at the speed of light, time stops - everywhere). The abductees are returned to the Earth with the power of its destruction in their hands. Nice set up for a bit of late 50s H-bomb cold war paranoia and moral debate. And there is a bit, and it's not bad; a bit talky and worthy - but it goes totally off the rails right at the end when our wizzoo scientist pulls a plot twist out of his arse and reveals that "all forms of energy fire, electricity, nuclear fission" have a good use as well as an evil use! With an unexplained interpretation of some, hitherto unmentioned, mathematical formuli containing "some symbols I have never seen before" he unleashes the weapons - but in a good way.
   
   The cast swiftly gather round a radio - budgetary shortcomings dictate that a lot of all-out heck and mayhem is delivered via news announcers, rather than being seen on screen -

   
   
   

   "Ladies and gentlemen here it is, The bulletin we have been waiting for. Scientists believe we have been bombarded with invisible rays from outer space. Reports pouring in from all over the globe confirm sudden and unexplainable deaths. All the cases have shown the same symptoms. All heard a high pitched almost supersonic noise, accompanied by acute agony and severe shock - followed by death. I know it's unbelievable! Fantastic! But the rays appear to have killed every person throughout the world known to have been a confirmed enemy of human freedom. Yes! The entire world is united in a spiritual unity unparalleled in its history. There are those who say it can't last but let us pray it does...".

   To which our scientist breathes a heartfelt "Thank God..." (which is the sort of thing you would say after wiping out millions of people after subjecting them to unspeakable agony. Shift the blame. God made me do it.)
   
   The film plays out with a brief coda in which the aliens are invited to come and use all the 'empty' parts of the planet (ie the bits where white people don't live) and the audience ejects popcorn that got lodged up its collective noses during the radio announcers speech. Presumably the aliens' superior technology will be of use burying all the dead evil people lying about too. The end. Probably the only film ever to climax with stock footage of the UN assembly in full session.
7. The Phantom Planet (MST3K)
   - the best dire 1950s Astronaut miniaturised by local atmospheric conditions on a dirigible asteroid movie I have ever watched - twice.
8. Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
   - I'm a sucker for movies with lots of punctuation in their titles, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has three exclamation marks! I mean how fucking cool is that!? and has the added benefit of being stuffed with large breasted women to distract you from the deficiencies of the 'plot' - which is: three large breasted Go-Go dancers kill a hot rodder and kidnap his bikini clad girlfriend. Driving across the desert they arrive at the ranch of a demented old wheelchair-bound, woman-hater and his two sons, one a well muscled simpleton, the other a sensitive soul. After some searching for the old man's hidden loot and some half hearted 'sex' and rape scenes the end of the movie is a Jacobean tragedy with everyone ending up dead - stabbed, or run down by speeding sports cars - apart from the girl friend and the sensitive soul. I've had the poster for this movie on my wall for years. It was good to finally see it - well, maybe not 'good' in the usual sense of the word... Here it is on Google video. The quality of the MP4 version on the 'Download video - iPod/PSP' link is pretty good, much better than the pixilated version on the main screen. The pre-credit sequence is wonderful. Pure cinema.
   
   
   
   The unmistakable smell of female.
   
   
   
9. Return of the Jedi
   
   
   
   

   
   My favourite shot in the Entire Star Wars saga.
   
   
10. Mission Mars
    - Lo budget SF which uses vast amounts of NASA footage in a variety of interesting ways - none of which make a lot of sense. I spent most of the running time watching the lead, Darren McGavin, listening. I like watching people listening in movies. Sometimes when I see a part of a movie on the television and, for whatever reason, the sound is down, I always look out for listening acting. It's easier to do when the sound is down because, duh! obvious!, you don't get distracted by the dialogue. (Another way of not getting distracted by dialogue is when it has become so meaningless that you no longer care or understand what the characters are saying - or why. Happens a lot in the kind of movie I watch. Happened in this one.) Darren McGavin is another of those know the face but not the name actors. 60+ years in the business. He's a great listener. He listened the hell out of this movie.
11. Rocket Attack USA
    - (MST3K) cold war propaganda at its cheapest. The director went on to make such masterpieces as: Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico. Which could end up as contender in my top 100 bad movie titles. The top place at the moment are taken by Rock 'N Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape, followed by Blood of Ghastly Horror (aka Psycho a Go-Go) which I shall be 'enjoying' tomorrow night.
12. Blood of Ghastly Horror
    

    - Oh My God! (as the young people say these days.) I am in a state of shock. An infuckingcredible movie. As far as I can work out, the history behind this patchwork hallucination is that in 1965, director Al Adamson produced and directed a very low budget, jewellery heist gone wrong movie called Psycho A Go-Go which seems to have had a terrific central performance and a plot device stolen from Night of the Hunter, and may have been intended as a comedy. It didn't sell because there were no names in it. Years later the director shot what appeared to be two sets of additional scenes, the first with John Carradine as a misguided scientist who, years before, had implanted a electronic device into a brain dead Nam vet with the inevitable consequence that he became a homicidal hoodlum - Carradine's 'confession' of this act cues great chunks of the 1965 film in flashback. (With me so far?) The homicidal hoodlum returns to the lab (new footage with the same actor) and kills his 'creator' in a laboratory featuring that staple of cheap set design, vast swathes of blackout curtain.
    

    
    The set was so small the operating table
    had to be propped up against a wall.
    

    
    

    The movie now seems to have been called The Man with the Synthetic Brain. When this version flopped, a second set of scenes was shot. In this, a framing device is added with detectives investigating a series of on-screen alley murders committed by a Zombie. Shortly after receiving, through the post, a colleague's head in a box - a shock lessoned slightly by it being heavily flagged up way in advance during the opening credits - they get to deliver these great crap lines:
    

    
    Chief Framing Device Detective:(READING FILE)
    
    Well I'll be a son of a bitch...
    
    
    Second Framing Device Detective:
    
    What is it Lieutenant?
    
    
    Chief Framing Device Detective:
    
    Everyone involved with the Corey case,
    
    with one exception - is dead!
    
    
    Second Framing Device Detective:
    
    What?... Do we know who it is?
    
    
    

    The Chief Framing Device detective stops tipping his chair back out of the frame long enough to fill in his underling on the Corey case and we flashback to the first set of added footage involving John Carridine as the mad scientist (thus neatly making Carradine's flashback that cinematic rarity, a flashback within a flashback). Further (post flashback) investigations lead the detectives to the lair of another mad scientist who turns out to be the father of the poor sap with the brain implant. Vengeful mad daddy has a nice line in vengeful zombie creation of his own (using more 'natural' voodooistic methods). The Director's wife stops by the studio long enough to get strapped to a table and have the second half of the heist movie flashbacked at her by daddy before he injects her with zombie juice. There is a short scene of constipated rampage (one mad scientist, two zombies, and three policemen, confined to a six foot square location - I think the cameraman stood on a chair) and just about everyone ends up dead. The End.
    
    
    Here's the wonderfully OTT trailer:
    
    
    
13. Horror of the Blood Monsters*
    - I'm going to hand over to a poster over on the IMDb for a bit here, I'm still in shock

    Ya gotta love Al Adamson. Only he would (1) take footage from a 20-year-old movie about gorillas in diving helmets ("Robot Monster"), (2) combine it with clips from a 30-year-old movie about elephants with hair mats glued to their sides ("One Million B.C."), (3) throw in parts from a God-knows-how-old Filipino movie about midget cannibals, half man/half lobster monsters and beer-bellied Chinese cavemen with snakes growing out of their shoulders (all of the aforementioned footage being in black and white), (4) spend $11.43 shooting new "connecting" footage (in color, no less) with an apparently--to be charitable--confused John Carradine and a bunch of actors who have trouble remembering their lines (among them a vapid blonde who is so incompetent that all her dialogue is dubbed in by someone else and who doesn't even have the decency to make up for it by getting naked), (5) put it out under at least 10 different titles and (6) try to pass each one off as a new movie. Go, Al!

    
    This is one brilliant movie. It so far beyond bad it comes out the other side again. I am so proud of myself for retaining control of my bladder when we saw the first shot of the spaceship landing.
    
    
    
    
    ..
    
    
    
    
    And here it is preparing to take off.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    A plastic kit model airliner and two pastry cutters! - it's genius!
    
    There is also a brilliant piece of use of stock footage from (I think) The Time Travellers in which the control centre on Earth is represented by an Over the Shoulders wide shot taken from the older movie intercut with two actors (costumed to look like the original actors whose backs we see) against the obligatory, No-Budget blackout curtain. Only after a few moments it becomes painfully obvious the Over the Shoulder shot is not stock footage at all. It's a stock one twenty-fourth of a foot. Its a freeze frame!
    
    Somewhere, during the bewildering intercutting between the tinted Fillipino cavemen endlessly fighting giant bats, lobstermen, and vampires, (sometimes in flashback!), the tinted intrepid explorers almost encountering the tinted stock footage from a couple of dinosaur movies while searching the new planet (ie Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park), and, finally, the colour footage of John Carradine back at the spaceship, talking to the rest of the crew by radio because they couldn't afford to take him on location... we suddenly get a sex scene!
    
    
    
    
    

    Two people, with electrodes strapped to their heads, snogging on a bed while around them lights flash in upturned test tubes and groovy Future Art stands on plinthettes. I was waiting for the voice over:
    

    
    

    Yes! Fucking in the Future will be fun! Modern science has many marvels in store for the married couples of tomorrow. The General Electric Orgasmomometer for instance guarantees satisfaction every time! Even for the most frigid of women! - even on those 'difficult' days!

    
    
    It turns out this scene does have something to do with the movie (or at least as much as any of the others do) when it turns out the man is our old friend from the control room, whose idea of foreplay is to irradiate his bed partner with the 'Dangerous chromatic radiation' our intrepid crew are encountering out in space in order to paste a hasty explanation for all the bizarre tinting of the rest of the movie.
    
    
    
    Did I mention the first five minutes of this thing were a vampire movie, with people getting attacked in the same alley used by the zombie in Blood of Ghastly Horror?
    
    I have another Al Adamson lined up for tomorrow night, but I might watch this one again.
    
    *AKA Blood Creatures from the Prehistoric Planet, Creatures of the Prehistoric Planet, Creatures of the Red Planet, Space Mission to the Lost Planet , Vampire Men of the Lost Planet. etc.
14. Brain of Blood
    - Sadly, an almost coherent Al Adamson movie - still not good, but not a bewildering mess like the last two.

Nerd Alert!

I read in the Sunday papers today (brilliant sorting out Holly's birthday party avoidance tactic* number 47**) that the new Star Trek movie involves all previous Star Trek TV series, movies, novels, comics and bubble-gum cards being an alternate reality. None of it 'really' happened - thus giving the creators a totally new new (ish) slate to write on. Am I the only person in the world for whom this brings back memories of the Man from Atlantis stepping out of the shower and discovering the whole Xth series of Dallas was just Pammy's nasty dream?
I loath Star Trek with a vengeance, partially because of its total self-referential, closed-loopiness which produces pointless, insultingly idiotic drek like Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country but hearing that the new people trying to defibrillate the DOA corpse of the franchise have thrown it all away and started again gives me hope. I look forward to reading what Star Trek fans make of it. If they hate it, I might actually watch it. If they love it, I won't.

Later:
Okay. Nerd Alert over. It's safe to come out now. (Though if someone could convince Warner Brothers to make Tales of The Rangers go away from the B5 universe I would be very grateful.)

Holly is seven tomorrow. It's hard for me to believe that seven years ago, I wasn't a father. It seems a lot longer than that! (Rimshot and canned laughter go here, thank you.)

Most of today was spent preparing for, and having, then clearing up after, her Birthday Party. Holly being 'a big girl now' had definite ideas about what she was going to have at her party. I was given my instructions: "make lots of sushi" (Holly loves sushi) and yesterday she and Merriol bought party food in Oban including; "those little brown sausages that are already cooked." (I would have taken this as a mortal insult, but, having burnt the last load of party sausages to charcoal, I took it as a compliment to my child rearing skills; she has learned something from me, even if it is only 'Don't trust your dad to cook small sausages'.)

Instead of games and all their attendant 'making sure everyone wins something' hassels, we did 'experiments'. Making volcanoes with baking powder, vinegar*** and washing up liquid, blowing up a balloon with baking powder and vinegar, and just plain blowing things up (Aluminium foil in hot water with washing soda = lots of hydrogen. Hydrogen + match = small bang. Un/fortunatly I didn't make the next logical step of filling a Balloon with hydrogen and having a mini-Hindenberg moment in the comfort of my own kitchen. The kids seemed to like it. The foaming messes of the 'volcanoes' went down best.







* - I have a dozen or so kids arriving in less than an hour and I'm still not sure what I'm feeding them.

** Number 48 is writing about number 47.


*** Malt not balsamic. I didn't want to appear too middle class.

Not a lot happened today. I finally got to go shopping - I had to; we've run out of food. Cooking the kids' tea last night consisted of opening three cans from the back of the long term rolling disasters and emergency food cupboard - God knows how long some of that stuff has been in there - and then warming up the contents of one of them. Actually we opened five cans but decided that tinned Guavas weren't supposed to be fizzy - or that colour - so their pudding of tinned fruit salad and evaporated milk went unenhanced.

So - nice day, lots of sunshine, went shopping, saw Dan, came home, spent the next five and a half hours getting my family to go to sleep. It's a quarter to midnight and they are all finally snoring. It's ME time! A quarter to fucking midnight. Whoop de doo... I'm going to bed - and not sleep. Just like I did last night because when I went to bed I did all the thinking I didn't have a chance to do during the day.

Here's the last thing I wrote in my bedside notebook last night:

Note for autobiography: "When in Paris we often went antique hunting on the Rue San Germaine. Once we we fined for shooting a chesterfield out of season."

Today's post is over here.

I can't get used to this.

For the past thirty years years I have been the only male in any house that I have lived in. Since my just after my post student days (and we are talking days not years) I have lived by myself or with women. For the past thirteen years it has been with Merriol for the past seven it has been Merriol, Holly, and Daisy - all female, all 'she's. Now Eben is here there's another male in the house. And it's very disconcerting. Several times a day I think people are talking about me when they're not. They're talking about him.

Since we bought him home my kitchen has been full of people. Every woman of child-bearing age, and older, within a five mile radius has called by, bringing us presents for the baby, little cards to remind us what sex he is, and staying for endless cups of tea and a cuddle of my small, hairy, very orange son and heir. "Hasn't he got a lot of hair?" they all ask, and "Oh he's a bit jaundiced isn't he?" I've been waiting for someone to say he looks like an Orang Outang for days. The jaundice is fading now and he's looking more babylike pink, so they've missed their oportunity.

I've had the same three conversations about the birth of, and relative sizes of, every baby born around here in the last 25 years and explained my shock / horror / bemusement at coping with someone else's tiny willy several hundred times. I'll be glad when we can get back to normal. Whatever that turns out to be.

Sometimes, as I'm automatically making yet another pot of tea for the assembled multidudes*, I hear Merriol say something like: "He did [whatever] this morning..." and for a moment I think "Oh no I didn't! I've never peed on the backs of my knees in my life! (Not that I remember anyway.)" It takes a moment for me to realise she is talking about my son.

After thirty years, it is very disconcerting to suddenly have to share a pronoun with someone else.


*The collective noun for a assembly of American surfers.

I did watch one more movie last month but forgot to add it to last month's list.

Spermula - Yep, you read that right, 'Spermula'.
I have no idea who (or why) the American distributors of this movie took it upon themselves to chop an original French, arty, soft porn movie into small pieces (with a blunt machete by the look of it), cut in several shots from the SF movie Silent Running, from two years earlier, and re-write the dialogue into some of the funniest stuff I have heard for ages. But I'm glad they did.

So instead of beautiful people swanning about the same rented Châteaux they shot every other French porn movie*, fucking each others brains out, and being torridly Gallic with each other over long meals, we get this:

Faced with imminent, unspecified destruction the invisible aetherial inhabitants of the planet Spermula set out to invade Earth "a tiny distant sphere, no more that a gnat's turd in the eye of god" by sending down an advance party in the form of beautiful women who wear couture dresses with necklines that stop at the navel and pout a lot - their master plan? fellate the male population of the world into impotence thus paving the way for the rest of their kind. And it's hilarious.

Part of the fun for me was trying to work out what the original was about. Whatever it was must have been weird enough before the massive re-edit involving as it did: a midget shooting down a model aeroplane with a sawn-off shotgun, a cardinal getting fellated in a swimming pool, vast quantities of rose petals shooting out of someone's bum, shoe licking, transvestites, contortionists etc. etc.

Apparently very hard to find as it has never been released on DVD - hell, it doesn't even turn up in IMDb.com's title search, unless you sneak up on it via one of the actors! - it is downloadable in Glorious CrapyQualityVision (R) from about halfway down this page if you feel so inclined.

Yet Another Short Scene From the Film Script of My Life

INT. KITCHEN. DAY.

The Baldwin family has just watched The Empire Strikes Back. Some of us for the first time.

HOLLY
Mummy, Darth Vader was Luke's dad!


DAISY
That's why they fight a lot.

I'll remember this when Eben is a teenager.

Another Short Scene From the Film Script of My Life

INT. KITCHEN DAY

HOLLY
You know those French fish
with the noses - or are they
 from Spain? The ones you have to give
 to the Queen if you catch them...?


ME
Sturgeon?


HOLLY
Well, if you get one, you have to give
it to the Queen. Drive it down to
 England and give it to her. (PAUSE)
I don't know what she does with them.


ME
Maybe she has a big fish tank.


HOLLY
Or a big cupboard.  Why are you laughing?
 It's not funny. Stop laughing or I'll
go and tell her. You shouldn't
laugh at the queen.

Oh No! I've Dropped My Castanets Down the Toilet!

I just don't get the card thing. I really don't. I suspect it's one of those women's things which, despite 100+ years of Feminism and the blurring of the gender divides, will forever baffle the average man. (And as Merriol will tell you, I'm pretty average in all sorts of ways). Women have been giving each other small pieces of cardboard according to the precepts of ever variable, and highly complex sets of rules since Jane Austen's day - and probably before that.

In Austen's time the cards were fairly small and plain and were part of an incredibly formal etiquette which determined one's standing in the pecking order of Society with a capital S; these days cards are larger, and are given as recognition of some event rather than a mere formal announcement of one's existence. They are often elaborate and expensive, and may well still form part of an incredibly formal system of etiquette; I have no idea. If there is such a system, I'm blissfully ignorant of it. I just know that getting cards seems to make Merriol happy and spending hours making them, happier still.

At the moment the house is full of elaborate and expensive cards saying "It's a Boy!".

It's a boy. This is a fact of which I am well aware, and of which I am constantly reminded by Eben's attempts to pee in my face whenever I change his nappy. It is also a fact that the fact my son is a boy is something we told the people who have given us all these cards. We know he's a boy! Why do people come round to the house, give us a small piece of cardboard in an envelope, then stand by expectantly as we open them, and then look pleased when we look pleased that they have given us a formal statement of something we told them in the first place?

This is as incomprehensible to me as the Japanese Tea Ceremony. At least you get a cuppa at the end of the Tea Ceremony. With the Card Ceremony you get a piece of cardboard which is then stuck up on a wall with Blu-tack to be totally ignored for three weeks. Why?

Here is a run down of the rules Austen's characters worked by. I wish someone would write down for me what's going on now, because I haven't got a clue.

Somehow I seem to have neglected to tell the world this year that, between waiting for Eben to arrive and watching all the crappy movies I have been watching so you don't have to, I have also, from time to time, picked up a book - and read it.

So before Eben takes up what time I have left over from making sure the girls aren't feeling left out and usurped by this small squealing thing called their brother here is what I've read over the last quarter. These may well be the last books I read for a while.

To be more accurate, it's Eben's bottom half that is taking up my time. Merriol is in charge of filling him up (there's a bit of biological determinism going on here) and I'm in charge of making sure he gets emptied and cleaned up. I've never changed a boy baby's nappy before and, well, I'm discovering things are different. First off, when you take their nappies off, girls very rarely pee in your face, or even - spectacularly - over the top of their own heads. When little girls pee it just bubbles up like one of those stupid little 'indoor water features' that clutter up garden centres. With boys it's more like a randomly directed, very small, high-powered water pistol. - The fact that very small children, of both sexes, always wait until a perfectly dry nappy is removed from them before peeing all over the place is just one of those things that generations of parents have had to learn to live with. It's a learning curve and in the case of Eben's pee, a parabola.

Lesson one in how to deal with very small penises was given to me in the hospital by one of the midwives who had had three boys of her own. Apparently you hold the thing down with a finger and wrap it up quick before it gets a chance to move.

Lesson two was given to me by our local midwife when I bumped into her in the coffee shop this afternoon; place something absorbent over the thing as soon as you open the nappy up - I like to think I would have eventually worked this one out for myself before I had too many facefulls - apparently in America you can buy little paper cups to drop over your darling baby son's microtackle to prevent this sort of random wettage (I haven't looked but I hope they are called 'Dicksy Cups'.) I'm experimenting with making little origami hats out of tissue paper.




January

1. Consider Phlebas - Iain M Banks
2. Hostage London - Geoffrey Household. I've only read two Geoffrey Household books. This one and his first: Rogue Male. Both contain what seems to me an extraordinary amount of creeping along hedges and sneaking about in open countryside.
3. Gimlet's Oriental Quest - Capt. WE Johns. Prompted by a thread on Palimpsest, where someone asked, 'Does anyone read Biggles books any more?' I realised I had the next best thing right at my elbow. A 'Gimlet' book by the same author. I read it. It's crap. I can see why they're not read any more. Aside from the expected casual racism: "It was a typically Oriental trick." etc. The story (it's not really a story, more of a chain of events and coincidences that eventually stop) was so thin, and the pace so sluggish that kids these days would see right through it within a few pages.
4. Lightning World - Trebor Thorpe (aka Lionel Fanthorpe). An early typo-ridden work from the master of crap SF. Fanthorpe hadn't fully yet developed his style of combining maximum verbiage with minimal content but the signs are all here. No discernible characters, a clichéd story that only gets going about two chapters from the end and then suddenly stops, and, of course, Fanthorpe's uniquely wonderful air of vagueness.
   
   Quote:

   When they had all descended Tony did a couple of experimental steps. That was another factor in their favour. The gravity was about two thirds earth normal - maybe not much over fifty per cent. He felt light and strong.

5. Ten Bad Dates With De Niro - Ed. Richard T Kelly.
6. Callahan's Crosstime Saloon - Spider Robinson.

February

1. Perry Rhodan 10 - 'The Ghosts of Gol' - I read one book this month. ONE! (I console myself with the fact that it is the shortest month of the year, but even so - ONE?!) And what a piece of shit it was too.

March

1. Magic Hour - Jack Cardiff the cinematographer responsible for so much that was brilliant about Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, The African Queen etc. Highly readable cinema autobiography lite which got really interesting when it got into the technical aspects of things, which it didn't do nearly often enough. I could have done with a lot more of how to make a scene look like it's lit by one candle, when in reality there are fifty lights hanging over the actors head and a lot less of Errol Flynn's drink problem.
2. Riverworld and Other Stories - By Philip Jose Farmer. Prompted by his death (not an obvious marketing move) and the fact that the book was at eye level in my To Be Read pile (I was lying down). I had been wondering for a while why I hadn't read more of his books. I remember now. I don't like them. Even after this short collection of stories I was irritated by his obsession with early morning erections and anal sex. Farmer's first published SF story in 1953 'shocked' the SF world, won him the Hugo Award for "most promising new writer" and is critically recognized as the story that broke the taboo on sex in science fiction. (Slathering BEM perverts drooling over pert nosed, full breasted daughters of venerable professors aside.) Farmer seems to have spent a lot of the rest of his life upping the sexual ante.
3. King of Cannes - Stphen Walker. Since I seem to spend most of my free waking time watching low-no budget movies it makes sense to spend the rest of my limited, not running around after the kids time reading books about low-no budget film making. This one is a cracker - though to be accurate it's a book about the making of a movie about the making of movies. Very, very funny and I suspect, from what I have seen of the real world of no hope film makers, very accurate. I only spotted three people I have met (very briefly) in real life - one turns out to be a multi-millionaire (there's a lot of money in shit films apparently).
4. Money from Holme - Michael Innes - thin little crime novel in which the only crime is the forging, by the original artist, of some already existing paintings. Felt like a short story stretched way beyond its length, or an idea in a notebook that never really went anywhere.
5. The Carpet People - Terry Pratchett. I've been carrying this one round in an inside pocket for weeks now. Finally finished it. Time to find a new, thin, easily losable book for the jacket.
6. The Bat Tattoo - Russell Hoban. Meh. If I hadn't been stuck on a bus with nothing else to read but the labels on my clothing I doubt if I would have bothered finishing it.

Folks, meet Eben Tobias.

A few more photos here.

We're home after two days in hospital (Merriol on a ward and me in a clean and serviceable industrial NHS barracks for long distance reletives and patients) and we're suddenly realising how unprepared we were for all this (ferinstance, as we were leaving to go up to the hospital - over the other side of the country in Inverness again - Merriol had the somewhat obvious idea that it might be a good idea to take some baby clothes with us. As it turned out the bag she grabbed on the way out did contain baby clothes but mostly toys and books. Mind you, I only got the car seat we had remembered we needed out of the attic after her waters had broken.

Hang on Eben, we'll get organised. I promise.

I'm typing this on a pissy wee hospital bedside console thing. Merriol in in the bed. Eben Tobias our new minted son is sleeping in the cot the other side of her. Both are well. I am in a state of shock. I have son.