- Watchmen (2009) - oh that was fun! The best comic book movie I've seen for a long time. I didn't mind the omissions and changes made to the material from the original in the slightest.
- Warlock (1989) - Another of my (mostly unconscious and accidental) attempt to work my way through David Twohy's entire back catalogue. After writing Critters 2, and long before The Chronicles of Riddick, Twohy knocked out this tale of an evil Warlock (Julian Sands) time travelling to contemporary LA (the terminus for all low budget time travel) pursued by ace witch hunter Richard E Grant wearing a 17th century mullet, a costume left over from one of the lesser Highlander movies, and a variable Scottish accent. Grant gives it all he's got but never really looks that comfortable with any of it. Julian Sands on the other hand is having a whale of a time hamming it up. The McGuffin here is 'The Grand Grimoire' a book so unspeakably evil that it has been broken up into three pieces and then cunningly hidden in a gay antique dealer's house, an Amish attic, and Richard E Grant's character's grave. Once the bits are assembled, the 'lost name of God' can be read and, when read backwards, the whole of creation can be undone. The moment where Sands' Warlock finally reads God's name is a classic. Lightning, thunder, swirling faux Industrial Light and Magic storm clouds. The Warlock is exultant:
"I know thy name!" he cries. " I know thy name!"
And then totally spoils the moment by not adding, "... and I know where you live!" - Jumanji (1995) - another one of those films I have avoided for years because it had Robin Williams in it. But, everyone having enjoyed the semi-sequel / remake Zathura: A Space Adventure, I thought I could put up with him for the duration of Pizza Night. I was more than pleasantly surprised. Williams was kept under control and not allowed to get mawkish and the film clipped along with so many inventive gags that I was laughing all the way through it. I'm not sure the It's a Wonderful Life homage/reference when William's character explored the town he had been away from for 26 years worked, that was a little bit clumsy and obvious, but once the narrative got back to the mayhem and the jokes it was a real treat.
- Universal Soldier (1992) - Between directing the incredibly terrible Moon 44 and the almost good Stargate Roland Emmerich directed Universal Soldier with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren hitting each other a lot. Sometimes they hit each other in slow motion, sometimes not. Sometimes they shoot each other, or throw hand grenades at each other, or drive each other off roads and over cliffs in speeding vehicles or blow up isolated gas stations to try and get rid of each other again (they'd already killed each other in the prologue). In the end one of them ends up going through some very spiky, motorised farm equipment. But it has a happy ending and there was a sequel.
- Universal Soldier: The Return (1999) - The sequel. More explosions, more guns, no Dolph Lundgren and none of the (limited) invention and fun of the original. The sort of pointless, explosion ridden shit that WWF WrestleMania fans wouldn't find too difficult to follow.
- Demonwarp (1988 ) - Somehow, for the life of me, I can't work out why this has never had a DVD release. I mean everyone wants to see a Bigfoot movie with zombies, naked women, aliens, and ritual sacrifice don't they? especially one starring George Kennedy (who I am happy to discover is still alive and still working at 85). Frankly I am baffled at this film's obscurity.
Demonwarp starts out routinely enough: before the credits, back in the cowboy days, a lone preacher is out for a walk with his horse (why he isn't riding it is never explained). The preacher is reading aloud from the Book of Revelation - which, in his copy of the Bible is at the front where you would expect Genesis to be - when something falls from the sky and makes a huge crater just off screen. The preacher praises the lord "It's The Second Coming!". After the credits we join George Kennedy playing Trivial Pursuit with his daughter while a point of view shot sneaks up on their rented cabin. Suddenly the door bursts in and something hairy knocks old George unconscious and absconds with girl. Cut to a 4x4 full of twenty-somethings info-dumping to each other about how "strange-shit" has been going on in Demon Woods for years. They arrive at the cabin and continue info dumping at each other for the next twenty minutes! (but both girls get their boobs out so it's a little less painful than it could have been - though the 'sex scene' was one of the dullest I've ever endured; two people mildly, and unenthusiastically, writhing while both desperately try to avoid touching anything that the other might consider an erogenous zone). All in all it's 30 minutes before the film actually gets going when Bigfoot strikes again by ripping out all the electrics from the Mystery Mobile and killing two of the boys.
Grrrrr... Grrrrr... Grrrpfff...
Oh bugger! can I try that again?Hero boy and the girls decide to hike through the woods to the road - though 'meander' would be a more accurate description for what they actually do. Meanwhile, in different places, a lone hiker and two nubile young women are also in the woods. The hiker looks like he was added later to pad out the running time; he adds nothing to the story and doesn't meet any of the other characters and was obviously shot without sound - he gets no lines but does get some "Hmmmm"s and "...!?"s dubbed in afterwards. He has a severed human hand thrown at him and is then chased round the same tree a few times by the bigfoot's legs (hiring the legs was obviously cheaper than hiring the whole costume). The two nubile girls get their boobs out and do some sunbathing before bigfoot turns up and rips one girl's head off and the other girl runs into the woods past the same tree several times. (Okay, I'm confused. Are there now two Bigfeet running around out there?)
Luckily I grabbed this bloodstained T-shirt as I escaped...The lone hiker is finally caught by bigfoot (number one?) and killed (silently). Lots of aimless wandering around later, the nubile girl meets up with the remains of Scooby-Do gang at the camp of George Kennedy (who has been wandering around the woods for a week laying bear traps and Wiley Coyote style tripwires with dynamite strapped to trees). The nubile girl is exhausted. "Get some water out of my tent," says George. Hero boy goes into George's tent / location production office and is attacked by the bigfoot! All that time wandering around looking for the bugger and it was in his tent all the time! Or is it another one? Who knows? Who cares? Fight fight fight and, as per Hollywood rule 67a subsection G, all the guns jam in the moment of crisis. The hero boy gets unconciousnicated, George gets a fatal battering and the girls...? Hero boy wakes up, grabs some dynamite and, picking a direction at random, determinedly wanders off. He finds dead George, he finds one of the girls shambling around with an eye hanging out of a socket, and he finds a cave full of zombies wearing Residents T-shirts and doing electronics.
Pass the soldering iron will you, Derrick?At this point my WTF?ometer went off the scale. Apparently for years the bigfoots have been stealing electronic equipment and bringing it to the cave where a mixed bag of undead have been repairing an alien spaceship that landed there years ago.
Writer: "It's a bigfoot flick, with zombies! - and aliens... ...and tits!"
Producer:"I like it!"
This sequence does contain one genuinely interesting shot where we watch a zombie replace a circuit board shot from underneath. It's a sudden and weirdly interesting intrusion in all the basic 'square on to the action' set-ups that make up the rest of the film. The director was obviously very chuffed with this shot because he repeats it another four times in a very few minutes. Meanwhile, back at the action.... the hero boy shoots the bigfoot (or one of the bigfeet - I've lost track) who transmogrifies into his own uncle! (the disappearance of the uncle - who we have never met before - was mentioned in all the earlier infodumping, but as there were probably boobs on screen at that point I wasn't listening to the finer details.) Hero boy finds that his two friends and his girlfriend are also in the cave. Boy one is tied up, boy two is a zombie and the girlfriend is inside the flying saucer about to sacrificed by the preacher we met in the pre-credit sequence*. He going to feed her vital bodily organs to a demon-like alien who he believes to be an angel.
Yum yum!.... Liver....After yet more fighting, boy one is injected with alien bigfooting serum - cueing what is probably the world's only Wolfman-like human-to-bigfoot transformation scene. Hero and girlfriend run away leaving him nobly holding the dynamite as he writhes in hirsute agony. As they run from the cave Hero boy and Girlfriend girl encounter Eye-dangling socket girl and shoot her dead - again - because she's a zombie (I think)... anyway there's a HUGE EXPLOSION in the cave and that's the end...
Time for you to jolt upright
in bed sweating a lot, darling... or is it? Two false 'it was all a dream - or was it?' endings later and the credits finally roll. Another the end.
Mind bogglingly crap.
*No sign of his horse though. - The Blob (1988 ) - Gory remake. Too slick to be bad but not good enough to be interesting.
- Prom Night (1980) - Tedious early mystery/slasher movie shot through that fuzzy softness filter they shot every Playboy centrefold of the period ( ...I am told). God it was boring in a very soft and fuzzy way. The director had seen some gialli and from time to time there were a couple of nicely set up stylistic bits, odd compositions, and a few interesting edits, but the one thing missing was any dramatic interest. If there was any possible opportunity to dissipate any feeling of tension that it had built up, the film would find it. And this wasn't anti-climaxing - building up the tension then letting the audience down with a bump for a moment before starting to ratchet up the terror again; it was just piss poor film making. The editing kept wandering off, taking us away to watch something else for far too long while we forgot about the mildly scary bit that we might have been possibly building up to. I'd guessed who the killer was in the first few minutes and the final marathon fight between the heroine and her boyfriend, and the killer on a disco floor (while the music kept on pumping - be-ba-pewwww!) just made me giggle. People cannot have life or death struggles to a disco beat - even in 1980 this must have been obvious.
- Black Rainbow (1989) - In the Deep South a fake medium starts to predict real events including murder, a fact which puts her life in danger when the killer comes after her. Not badly done - and it had Jason Robards who I think is wonderful in everything.
- Chasing The Deer (1994) - a film with 195 'Associate Producers' (ie investors) listed on the end credits, a terrible script that lurched from one undercooked cliché to another, and some frankly bafflingly amateur looking direction and editing that kept leaping the movie from one scene to another in alarming jumps. Though the production values for such a low budget film were excellent - I don't suppose there was a historical re-enactment society in the north of Britain that didn't end up in this show somewhere, and some of the locations were genuine - there were far far too many characters knocking about. In addition to the thin soap opera element (father and son separated by circumstances end up on opposing sides and die in each other's arms on the battlefield - yes, that hoary old chestnut of a story) there were dozens and dozens of other characters who would arrive on screen, address all those around them by their full rank and title so we knew who they were, before disappearing from the narrative never to be seen again (quite often taking all their friends with them). I guess the writers were aiming for some historical accuracy but time and time again I kept thinking, 'Oh god, not more Lord Whoevers and General Thisandthats. I don't need to meet all these people'.
People criticize 'Hollywood' movies for simplifying history, combining characters and trimming events to fit a convenient narrative structure, and watching this film I see why that process takes place. A film is not a history lecture, it doesn't come with footnotes and a reading list. First and foremost a film, even one based on historical events, is an entertainment. It can be polemical, emotive, manipulative and all those other things but unless it has some sort of a narrative that people engage with it's not going to keep its audience. Whatever 'message' (for want of a better word) the film maker wants to convey will be lost. I have no idea what the makers of Running the Deer wanted me to come away with. I didn't care about any of the characters I could identify, and I really had no clearer idea of the events of the 1745 Jacobite Rising than I couldn't have gleaned from any picture-book history of Scotland. The acting was adequate, though less than inspired (but given some of the clunky, very stagy dialogue the actors were asked to deliver I can't blame them for not setting the screen on fire. Most of the cast were unknown to me but Brian Blessed lent his beard to the occasion - and was the nominal 'star' of the show). Most of the time I felt I was watching some historical tableau of Scottish history presented by semi-professional actors. (A job I have done; I know what I'm talking about.)
There was however one really nice moment that suddenly set all the rest into context. For a few seconds the film actually looked like a film and not a 'living history' show. Before the final hopeless battle at Culloden there is a slow tracking shot of the ranks of Scottish troops facing the camera, arms at the ready, all speaking fervently in Gaelic. As the camera reaches one of our English speaking protagonists we hear his voice: "I am Alistair Campbell son of... etc.". Cut to Bonny Prince Charlie on his horse. He turns to his aide. "What are they doing?" he asks. The aide replies something along the lines of: 'they are reciting their lineage. It makes them remember who they are and brave in battle'. "Interesting... " says the prince, "Interesting... " Now that was a nice piece of film making. A moment where image, sound editing, and well delivered dialogue tell us something we don't know, show us something of the character of the men who are about to die, and something of the character of the prince for whom they are about to fight. (He has, after all, been leading them for months and only just noticed they do this before a battle?). Two shots worth saving surrounded by 90 minutes of padding.I did come away from Chasing The Deer with one thing: I now take great pride in the fact that we in Scotland can make bad films as good as any bad films from the rest of the world. - The Ambulance (1990) - my second Larry Cohen movie (the first was The Stuff in which a killer pudding threatens to eat America) and not, I hope, my last. Funny as hell. I haven't laughed so much in ages. Here's a slice of the cheesy action. Eric Roberts is on the trail of a mysterious ambulance that picks up ill people from the streets but never delivers them to a hospital.I'm afraid that Roberts' line, "You faggots! You faggots! You fight like stewardesses!" has just entered my top ten all time screen insults list.
- The Secret of Moonacre ( 2008 ) - I have from time to time read in film books and magazines phrases like: 'the script was a couple of re-writes away from being finished'. I never really understood what it meant till watching this. All the elements for a good enchanting family film were there (the costumes and sets in particular were excellent) and though the acting was variable, Dakota Blue Richards and Juliet Stevenson were very good; Natascha McElhone was just terrible - I'm sure she's a nice woman and has done good work but she was as wooden as hell here and totally unconvincing. The SFX, of which there were a lot, also varied from the adequate to the beautiful; there were some nice pictures on the screen. What didn't work for me, however, was the script which never gelled. It stopped and started, never really got going, and had very obviously lost whole sections during post production. The most obvious 'deleted scene' (not available on the bare bones DVD I watched) being the 'love / hate relationship' that developed between the heroine and Robin, her male opposite number in the enemy camp. At one point, later on in the film, our heroine says something to the effect of: "Robin? I never want to see him again..." before storming off with a coy expression that makes us think she doesn't really mean it (tcha! teenagers eh?). This would have been all well and fine if we had actually seen her and Robin obviously falling in love while hating each other on sight. As it was, I had to back peddle like hell in my head through the film to even work out who Robin was....
Lottery Funding was involved. - Black Caesar (aka The Godfather of Harlem 1973) - More Larry Cohen. A fairly straight reworking of the Warner Brothers gangster tropes of the 30s and 40s, only, this being the 70s, it's the rise and fall of a tough black gangster rather than an Italian or Irish. A bit more violent and explicit in the sex and language department (I think Larry Cohen must have used every racial epithet available in the English language in his script) than Warners got away with. A couple of moving scenes and some seriously good acting - I particularly liked the look of disgust and disbelief on our protagonist's face when, having been shot in the belly, he goes for help from his stooge, a fake preacher through whose church he launders money - only to find the man has really gone and got religion. The only help the reverend offers his erstwhile boss is to attempt to heal the gunshot wound by getting possessed by the Holy Spirit and the laying on of hands. A vast improvement on the sanctimonious Irish priests that Edmund O'Brien used to play so often in the originals.
Lottery Funding was not involved. - Balls of Fury (2007) - I was in the mood for something stupid and funny and this delivered both. Basically Balls of Fury is Enter The Dragon with all the sweaty bone crunching Kung-Fu substituted by life or death Ping Pong matches. It's really stupid joke that just about stays funny after being stretched out to ninety minutes, but I doubt if they would have made it without Christopher Walken casually stealing the show from about the halfway mark.
- Sabata (1969) - A Lee Van Cleef in a pretty standard Spaghetti Western. Van Cleef demonstrated his ability to stand iconicaly and his talent for staring suspiciously sideways out of the corner of his eye, while walking in a totally different direction to the one he was looking. He did that a lot. The camera crew had loads of fun with their zoom lens on every other shot. And one of the morally ambiguous protagonists has a banjo with a built in rifle. The music was hilarious.
- Second Sight (1989) - still working my way through the Big Box VHS Paydirt pile. Totally forgettable frantic comedy about a psychic detective. I mean really forgettable. I only finished watching it half an hour ago and I can't remember how it ended. I can remember the denouement, but not the climax. There was one vaguely funny gag in the whole thing but it's not worth the effort in telling. I do remember writing my own gags at a couple of points and thinking one of them was worth writing down for future use - but I've forgotten what it was. Why do I watch this stuff? I can't remember that either. It must have seemed a good idea at the time.
- Westender (2003) - Westender - what a terrible title for a medievalesque epic but, there you go, that's what they called it. Maybe it doesn't seem so bad in the USA but say Westender to me and I either hear the Pet Shop Boys in my head and / or conjure up an image of some posh, uptown version of Eastenders. Westender starts off very badly. A drunken gambler in a medievalesque bar (made from what appears to be machine plained, sawn timber) gambles away a ring, his final possession, gets into a fight, looses, and wakes up the next morning determined to get it back. The ring belonged to his lost love (she was burned at the stake apparently and he fished the ring out of the ashes). After a clumsy, exposition dropping, conversation with a gypsy girl he sets off to find the gambler who won the ring off him. He soon finds his man who, it transpires, has been robbed by bandits. Together they pursue the bandits in long sequences of very long, very beautiful and very languid shots with very little dialogue. Somewhere along the line I started thinking 'this looks like a short', a very long short but it had that shorty feel to it. Turns out I was right (yay me!); first-time director Brock Morse’s film school short script assignment grew into a 30-minute short that was filmed in three weeks, and, after gaining more funding, grew again into a full-length movie. It looks like several million dollars on the screen. It isn't, but it looks it (as an example of the limited budget one central character is played by the film's composer). The script picks up characters and drops them in a most unHollywood manner and never really gets much of a plot going, substituting instead a hero racked by inner turmoil - having your missus burned at the stake will do that to you - but by the time we get to the end of the show it has somehow turned itself into quite an interesting bit of film. Somehow. Just. I'm not entirely convinced it was worth the wait to get there but one of the better minimal budget student features I've seen. Spoiler: In the end he doesn't get his ring back but does rediscover what it means to be a man (or something else that ticks all the boxes in the 'Have you completed your Hero's Journey checklist'. Companion helper? Check... Supernatural aid? Check... Abyss: death and rebirth? Check... ).
- Hana-Bi (aka Fireworks 1997) - okay.... my first Takeshi Kitano film. Not sure if I liked it but I was certainly watching the screen the whole time. I think I'll have to see more of his films before I decide whether I did like this or not.
- Xizao ( aka Shower 1999) - nice simple sweet and touching film about daily life in a Beijing bathhouse.
- Spy Kids (2001) - Friday night choice of number one daughter, it's been a long day and she wanted something familiar - I think we have seen it twice before. I quite like Spy Kids, it has some nice moments.
- The Exterminator (1980) - After a recent bout of Far Eastern sub-titled art movies movies it's time to get back to the shit VHS pile. (Mind you one of the 'Art Movies' had at least seven or eight on-screen shootings, two off-screen shootings and a character loosing an eye in a particularly vicious chopstick-related incident.) Made six years after Death Wish (1974) and four years after Taxi Driver (1976) The Exterminator treads similar ground while looking like it was made long before either of them. A Vietnam vet bumps off the gang members who crippled his best bud ("That nigger was my best friend, motherfucker!"), he picks up a prostitute, sees scars on her and bumps off the pimp who did it to her (in the process shooting dead the state senator from New Jersey who likes to rape little boys in sleazy New York shitholes). He kills a Doberman with an electric carving knife, feeds a New York mobster through a meat grinder and shoots dead three Hispanic types who rob an old lady and tread on her glasses. Meanwhile a cop is sort of introduced, sort of has a fling with the crippled vet's doctor, and sort of investigates. For some reason the CIA decide to take over the case - not because a US Senator has been killed, but because, for some vague reason, having a vigilante killing mobsters is making the administration look bad two weeks before 'an election'. It's a muddled, unfocussed mess that takes itself far too seriously, takes too long to get wherever it goes (except where it jumps so far ahead of itself that it leaves the audience wondering what's happening), and then has a totally stupid Parallax View type ending that leaves our cop hero shot dead by a sniper's bullets as a voice over intones, "Washington will be pleased"
The shot where the cop goes for a Darwin Award, by cooking a hot dog by sticking two forks wired to the mains into it, has to be one of the oddest bits of business I've seen on the screen for a long time. It distracted me so much that I totally lost what the scene was about. I was too busy wondering if it was actually possible and / or common? Apparently it is possible.
There was a sequel!? - The Carpenter ( 1988 ) - another of those long forgotten, never released on DVD 'horror' flicks of the 80s. (And given that the only copy sold on eBay in the last 30 days went for 25p I can't see whoever owns the rights rushing to re-release it either.) This time a carpenter, who was executed in the electric chair, comes back from the dead to finish his dream house, now inhabited by a young married couple. She's just out of a hospital after a nervous breakdown, and he's screwing one of his student. At first only she can see the nocturnal visitor with a penchant for staple-gunning people's eyes shut. Is it all in her head? Or is she somehow responsible for the grisly murders? Did I care? Did I fuck. I was more interested in the director's insane overuse of tracking shots than anything that was happening between the characters. He was loving the hell out of his dolly was the director. The opening shot of almost every scene seemed to be a slow tracking shot watching someone who was going to be in the scene move slowly into a position to talk to another cast member. The movie was 89 minutes long I would guess a quarter of it was dolly shots with nothing happening in them.
- The Plumber (1979) - and unless I can find something called The Interior Decorator in my To Be Watched pile that's me out of job title titled films for a bit. Just before making a string of great films: Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, The Mosquito Coast, and Dead Poets Society Peter Weir wrote and directed this small, made for TV movie about the plumber from hell making life a misery for an academic. Not bad, not great, but not bad, not bad at all.
- Phantasm (1979) - This has been sat in my TBW pile for a couple of years now and I regret not having got round to it sooner. In Smalltownsville, somewhere in the Southern USA, strange things are going on in the local funeral home. Very strange things. In the end we discover the funeral director is an alien, reanimating human cadavers, compressing them to three foot two high dwarves, and then shipping them off in barrels to another planet to be used as slave labour. The Writer/Director (who was also cameraman and editor and, for all I know, caterer and honey wagon driver too) Don Coscarelli launched himself at the sort of plot Ed Wood might have baulked at but has done with style and self-knowing campness that makes it work. Not the greatest horror movie in the world but a damn fine B movie, way above the average. Very dreamlike in places.
- Beyond The Valley of the Dolls (1970) - In an effort to sort of convince my wife (and me) that I'm keeping all these huge piles of VHSs and DVDs around for some sort of reason, other than most of the shite I watch has no resale value even on eBay, I will from time to time, re-watch one. Beyond The Valley of the Dolls is a very strange movie and even funnier and weirder on a second viewing than it was on the first. Telling the story of the events leading up to a quadrupedal homicide and triple wedding, the film charts the arrival of a three piece girl band and their manager in LA and their rapid decline into depravity and corruption (ie sex and drugs and, because this is a Russ Meyer film, more sex) via some of the most bonkers, campest dialogue put on screen. My favourite two lines both come from the villain of the piece, record producer Ronnie 'The Z-Man' Barzell: .
"This is my happening - and it freaks me out!"
and the unforgettable:
"You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance!"
The editing is unbelievable; bang bang bang. It's almost like a metronome at times; all the cuts in some dialogue scenes appear to be exactly the same length no matter who is speaking or what is being said. It's very disconcerting. At other times the film goes into hyperdrive with everyone suddenly emoting in the manner of a daytime TV soap while syrupy music plays in the background. The scene where the doctor announces that the character who just attempted suicide on live TV may never walk again is an incredibly over the top send up of every daytime soap hospital scene. .
After all this strange camp parody, the brutal Manson Family-like murders at the end are suddenly very strangely upsetting. Especially as two of the victims are guilty of nothing more than being a happy lesbian couple. Even weirder is the sudden change in direction when, after the murders there is a fight in which the killer is shot, and the crippled would-be suicide suddenly feels movement in his toes - and the sun comes out - and everyone is happy and full of wonder and joy, surrounded by the mangled corpses of their friends right enough, but really, really happy for him. It's either a deranged masterpiece or the biggest pile of shit yet put on screen. I'm in the deranged masterpiece camp. - Cry-Baby (1990) - one of those films that just cheers me up no matter how often I watch it.
- Mission Without Permission (aka Catch That Kid 2004) - Three kids, one an ace climber, one a whizz hacker, the other a mechanical wizard rob a high-tec, super-secure bank - taking along a baby brother that one of them has to babysit. As stupid as it sounds but fun family stuff. My kids loved it; "Better than Spy Kids" said one, she's wrong but she is only six. The photography was very good.
- El Topo (1970) - one of those films that has been on the edge of my must see radar for years. A heavily religious surreal (very bloody) Tortilla Western made at the hight of the hippy era. It opens with a lone horseman holding an umbrella riding through a desert. Only when the horseman stops and dismounts do we realise he has a naked 7 year old boy riding with him. The black leather-clad rider makes the boy bury a teddy bear and a photo of his mother, then they both climb back on the horse and ride off. After that it gets weird. And then weirder. At the end, our 'hero', having been shot by his lesbian companions and spending untold years in a catatonic state being worshipped as a god in a cave, digs a tunnel to free his deformed worshippers. When he finally succeeds, with the help of his pregnant dwarf wife and his now grown up ex-monk son (who has sworn to kill him when they've finished), all the newly released troglodytes are massacred by the townsfolk who are then, in turn, massacred by our hero. Who then commits suicide by setting himself on fire. I'm sure it was all very pertinent at the time and obviously allegorical of the horrors of Vietnam but all these years later it left me pretty unimpressed as a film.
- Megamind (2010) - I haven't had so much fun with a movie for ages. For once (or finally) Dreamworks got the balance right and made an animated kids movie that was as much fun for their parents. I laughed often and frequently and left my critical faculties hanging behind the door about three minutes in and just enjoyed myself. Smart and funny.
- Frauengefängnis ( aka Barbed Wire Dolls, Caged Women 1975) - Another Jesus (Jess) Franco piece of shit. This time it's his take on the 'Women in Prison' genre. Like all WIP films it has lashings of lashings, rape, and lesbian seduction - and being a Jess Franco film has more pans, tilts, zooms and dodgy focus pulling in any given minute than most films have in their entire running time. (And more close-ups of female genitalia than the average movie manages too). All pretty sleazy, uninspiring, and forgettable apart from one truly weird piece of film making in the middle of the movie. One of the captive women is having a bad dream - cue flashback (complete with half a pot of Vaseline smeared round the lens) to the night her father tried to rape her. "No!" she screams, leaping naked from the bed and running out of the bedroom. He chases after her and grabs her hair, her mouth opens in a soundless scream and she is pulled backwards. (The scream is soundless because we are suddenly in slow motion the whole scene from here on in is played out in dreamtime slo-mo.) He throws her across the room and she ends up facing the wall. He comes behind her and turns her around. As she turns the actress hastily stifles a giggle and turns it into look of 'horror' and shoves him. He falls back, cracks his head on the mantelpiece and tumbles slowly to the floor as she runs out of the frame. End of flashback, cut back to her in bed having the bad dream.The really really odd thing about this scene (and it is really very odd indeed) is that the girl and the father were acting in slow-motion. The camera is running at normal speed; there's no post-production trickery (assuming this movie had any post-production). What's going on here is that the actors were doing that comedy slow-motion acting where everyone tries to look like they are underwater and breathing treacle - and convincing no one. Coming in the middle of a sweaty piece of low-rent, nasty, dirty old man, BDSM fantasy it is just plain very very weird.
So what?
Get out of my movie! - Suite 16 (1994) - Would-be psycho-sexual, cat and mouse shenanigans between a young immoral hustler played by some Dutch bloke who looks great naked, and a rich, wheelchair-bound recluse played by Pete Postlethwaite - who, I'm glad to say, kept most of his kit on for the whole show. A very long 90 minutes in which I failed to suspend my disbelief for an instant.
- The Atomic Brain ( aka Monstrosity 1964) - great title for a very dull tale about a mad old rich woman with an equally mad scientist (a 'Dr Frank' no less) in her cellar who spends his time transplanting animal brains into stolen corpses. He is looking for the breakthrough that will get him a Nobel Prize; she wants a new body to replace her wrinkled and worn out carcass - one of the three nubile servants she's just hired will do, but which one? The dark haired Hispanic one? no, she has a birthmark; best use her for the final experiment and graft a cat's brain into her head to see if using live humans is better than corpses. It works! Oh damn! The cat woman has escaped and half-blinded front-runner, statuesque blonde, Bea. (Whose 'English' accent is even weirder than Dick Van Dyke's in Mary Poppins.) So it's down to German girl Nina. Mad old lady makes out her will so that Nina will inherit everything and prepares to swap brains. Nina nearly escapes but ends up strapped to the basement operating theatre next to the walk-in 'atomic cyclotron' so necessary for brain transplant surgery. At this point Dr Frank has a moment of blinding clarity and realises that once the head-swap has been done he will be dispensable and maybe it would make more sense if the old lady were to die and the nubile girly to inherit the money while remaining under his control. Genius! The Nobel Prize is almost his! Then, for some utterly inexplicable reason, he sticks the old lady's brain into the empty cat and walks into the walk-in 'atomic cyclotron'. Vengeful, as only a mad old lady finding her brain compressed into a cat can be, the mad old lady compressed into a cat carefully presses the buttons and throws the lever that Dr Frank had conveniently explained in reel one would reduce the house to radioactive ashes.
Kaboom!!!
I've made it sound a lot more exciting than it was. - The Onion Movie ( 2008 ) - A sketch show film that in the end does suddenly manage to pull an almost coherent narrative thread out of its disparate parts. Sort of like Amazon Women on the Moon and Kentucky Fried Movie, and, like them, very hit and miss. Because of the newsroom linking device that runs all the way through I kept thinking it was like a flabby Americanised version of Chris Morris's The Day Today.
- Who's Harry Crumb? (1989) - unfunny comedy in which the only decent joke was used in the trailer. Watching Jeffrey Jones is always a treat and the cast were doing their best but no one was given anything in the way of funny stuff to do. All the 'humour' in the show was reserved for star (and producer) John Candy who seemed to think that getting a stuntman to pretend to be him and fall off things must be hilarious.
Friday, April 08, 2011
As promised this months marathon post of every film I watched last month (March).
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
I have to get a grip. I went to the local refuse disposal place today to dump a month's worth of Tetra Paks and six month's worth of accumulated bits of metal. I also took the vast pile of I Never Want to Watch That Again VHS tapes in the hallway. I need to get rid of the clutter! I need to make space! - I come home with an Edwardian dressing table I found in one of the skips. I don't think you are really allowed to take stuff away from the recycling place (ironically enough) but it was raining and the little men who shout "Oi!" were hiding in their hut. Basically, as usual, I came back with more than I went with. This cannot continue - but it's such a nice piece of furniture... No idea where it's going to go. I have to get a grip.
Friday, April 01, 2011
It's the first of April Hurrah! Time for me to unburden myself of all the badly made films I have watched this month. First, The Very Good News; I'm not going to do it (today).
Second, The Good News; I watched three or four decent films last month; the Bad News is I also watched some 30 or so crappy ones.
Second, The Good News; I watched three or four decent films last month; the Bad News is I also watched some 30 or so crappy ones.
Why? It's a question I often ask myself. Why do I seek out and watch such dreadful films as Universal Soldier: The Return, The Atomic Brain, and Demonwarp. Most of the time I ask myself the question as I'm actually watching the film. Why am I watching this shit? But sometimes I ponder on the question in a more general manner. The other day I thought about it while I was at the computer when someone asked me on a forum. This (tarted up a bit) is what I wrote in reply:
Why? To explain that I will first have to quote the oft quoted Sturgeon's Revelation:
“Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud.”The general interpretation of this, the way I think people tend to visualise it, is that there is this huge pile of crap with the 10% that is the good stuff sitting on the top. Like the yummy cream and sprinkles on the top of a trifle hiding all the cheaper custard, watery jelly, and soggy sponge lurking beneath.
I prefer to think of it as a bell curve where the X axis is frequency and the Y axis is quality... hang on, I'll draw it.
Like this:
The 90% crud is the shaded area in the middle, a vast uninteresting bulk of mediocrity and hackwork. It's the areas at the extreme edges, where the graph shallows out, that contain the fascinating stuff.
People learn by making mistakes. People learn from watching other people making mistakes. I am somewhat passionate about film and I learn more about film making by watching people repeatedly fucking up than I do by watching great films. I like to see how things work. A really great film usually sweeps me along and involves me so deeply that I get so wrapped up in the story and the telling of the story, that I don't really notice how the story is being told. With a bad film it's easy to step back from whatever narrative there is trying to get out and enjoy the spectacle of watching the film fall to bits. Other times it's fun trying to find a narrative structure. You suspect there is one in there but you're dammed if you can find it. Ed Wood was very good at this game. What the hell is going on?
Another reason for watching bad film makers fuck up is to marvel at how inventive they are. Every time I watch a bad film I'm amazed by their ability to screw up in new and interesting ways. I suspect, and I've said often, that 90% of comedy is based on failure. Whether it as simple as Laurel and Hardy failing to get the piano up the set of stairs in The Music Box or Woody Allen's 'sophisticated' inability to be happy, comedy is based on failure and ineptitude. (I'm not sure what the other 10% is based on - knob jokes probably.)
Watching grown-ups failing to string a simple series of standard shots together is endlessly hilarious to me. (I read self-published books for the same reason.) In one film I watched this month the director managed to use what was obviously intended to be the establishing shot for the sequence after the interior it was intended to establish. I suspect this because he had left himself no way of cutting from one scene to another within the sequence. It was horrible! It was so horrible I had to rewind and watch it three or four times just to see how truly horribly horrible it really was.
A mistake I shall not make when the meteorite of solid gold lands in my back garden. When I am suddenly and inexplicably wealthy I plan on starting my own production company.
Here's a long blog entry I did a couple of years ago with a totally different set of reasons for watching hypercrap movies.
http://anotherjunkmonkey.blogspot.co...1_archive.html
People learn by making mistakes. People learn from watching other people making mistakes. I am somewhat passionate about film and I learn more about film making by watching people repeatedly fucking up than I do by watching great films. I like to see how things work. A really great film usually sweeps me along and involves me so deeply that I get so wrapped up in the story and the telling of the story, that I don't really notice how the story is being told. With a bad film it's easy to step back from whatever narrative there is trying to get out and enjoy the spectacle of watching the film fall to bits. Other times it's fun trying to find a narrative structure. You suspect there is one in there but you're dammed if you can find it. Ed Wood was very good at this game. What the hell is going on?
Another reason for watching bad film makers fuck up is to marvel at how inventive they are. Every time I watch a bad film I'm amazed by their ability to screw up in new and interesting ways. I suspect, and I've said often, that 90% of comedy is based on failure. Whether it as simple as Laurel and Hardy failing to get the piano up the set of stairs in The Music Box or Woody Allen's 'sophisticated' inability to be happy, comedy is based on failure and ineptitude. (I'm not sure what the other 10% is based on - knob jokes probably.)
Watching grown-ups failing to string a simple series of standard shots together is endlessly hilarious to me. (I read self-published books for the same reason.) In one film I watched this month the director managed to use what was obviously intended to be the establishing shot for the sequence after the interior it was intended to establish. I suspect this because he had left himself no way of cutting from one scene to another within the sequence. It was horrible! It was so horrible I had to rewind and watch it three or four times just to see how truly horribly horrible it really was.
A mistake I shall not make when the meteorite of solid gold lands in my back garden. When I am suddenly and inexplicably wealthy I plan on starting my own production company.
Here's a long blog entry I did a couple of years ago with a totally different set of reasons for watching hypercrap movies.
http://anotherjunkmonkey.blogspot.co...1_archive.html
Friday, March 25, 2011
"She's Like a Banana With a Headache!"
I don't understand plumbing. Never have and I don't suppose I ever will. Once, many years ago while I was working for a living, I was employed as a building labourer. One day I was working on some alterations to a bathroom and had been told to take a shower unit off the wall. First thing I thought to do was check that the shower was disconected from the mains (it was an electric shower) I also made sure it was disconnected from the water mains. Electrics first; - and this is where I went wrong - I went to the main fuseboard, made sure the fuse marked 'SHOWER' was pulled (and then put in my pocket so it couldn't be accidentally put back in again by someone else as soon as I left). I made sure that the fuse in my pocket was in fact the right fuse and not the fuse for something else like the upstairs lights that had been mislabelled. I went back to the bathroom and tried to switch the shower on. No light. And no water comes out of the shower when I turn it on. No power. Good. Next I checked that the water to the bathroom was off by turning on the taps in the sink next to the shower. A dry gurgle and nothing. Sure now that it was safe to proceed, I unscrewed the shower's casing, disconnected the wiring (making the ends secure and safe in an insulated lump of chockblock). I unscrewed the couple of chunky screws holding the unit on the wall; now all I had to do was disconnect the water. I found the inlet pipe (not a difficult task as it was the only thing attaching the shower unit to the house) and selected a suitable spanner. Tea break soon. Great. Two twists of the spanner later and I felt a lurch. Suddenly I had a shower unit in my hands and a solid jet of water shooting horizontally past my face out of the pipe I had just been working; a solid jet of water that reached across the room, bounced back from the opposite wall, and hit me squarely between the shoulder blades.
Within seconds I was soaked through and my clothing weighed twice as much as I did. I was also screaming for help. I had dropped the shower unit (on my toe) and was leaning forward, both hands pressed against the pipe end. The water pressure was high so I didn't staunch all the flow but I did cut it down a little. The water that was coming out was now shooting up the inside of my sleeves and down out of my trouser legs, but as I couldn't get any wetter than I already was it didn't make much difference to me. My boss arrived. He took one look through the door at this screaming animated fountain, said "Fuck!" very loudly, and dived through the hatch in the floor that led to the underfloor crawl space. Within seconds he located the stopcock he had missed the last time he'd been down there and he cut the supply.
(This did make me wonder how he had managed to miss the bugger last time, but what the hell, everyone makes mistakes.)
What I should have done before anything else, was tried the shower. It was the type of electric shower that had to be connected to the mains and switched on before even cold water would come out. Switch off the power and nothing comes through even though there is a terrific water pressure behind it. Why it was on a different supply from the rest of the bathroom is (to me at least) a complete mystery.
Why am I bothering telling you all this? No idea really. The house we were working on was a reletively new build - less than ten years old at the time and all the plumbing was put in at the same time. My house is 130 years old and built before the village had any mains water supply. I don't know when it was first connected but the plumbing in it has been added piecemeal over the years by many people - me included. At the moment our upstairs toilet cistern won't stop filling up. You flush, it refills and, nine times out of ten, doesn't stop filling. This causes the excess water to go out the overflow with annoying gurgling noises. Nine times out of ten that it does this you have to wait for precisely the right moment and run the tap in the sink for 15 seconds then turn it off quickly - at which point the cistern makes a strange Grrrrrrrnk! noise and stops filling up. (The tenth time it doesn't and you have to flush it again or just put up with the gurgling all night.)
The really baffling part is why running the hot water in the kitchen downstairs should make the upstairs toilet suddenly start to fill up again and why turning on the kitchen sink cold water tap makes it stop.
Answers on a postcard please, because I haven't got a clue.
Within seconds I was soaked through and my clothing weighed twice as much as I did. I was also screaming for help. I had dropped the shower unit (on my toe) and was leaning forward, both hands pressed against the pipe end. The water pressure was high so I didn't staunch all the flow but I did cut it down a little. The water that was coming out was now shooting up the inside of my sleeves and down out of my trouser legs, but as I couldn't get any wetter than I already was it didn't make much difference to me. My boss arrived. He took one look through the door at this screaming animated fountain, said "Fuck!" very loudly, and dived through the hatch in the floor that led to the underfloor crawl space. Within seconds he located the stopcock he had missed the last time he'd been down there and he cut the supply.
(This did make me wonder how he had managed to miss the bugger last time, but what the hell, everyone makes mistakes.)
What I should have done before anything else, was tried the shower. It was the type of electric shower that had to be connected to the mains and switched on before even cold water would come out. Switch off the power and nothing comes through even though there is a terrific water pressure behind it. Why it was on a different supply from the rest of the bathroom is (to me at least) a complete mystery.
Why am I bothering telling you all this? No idea really. The house we were working on was a reletively new build - less than ten years old at the time and all the plumbing was put in at the same time. My house is 130 years old and built before the village had any mains water supply. I don't know when it was first connected but the plumbing in it has been added piecemeal over the years by many people - me included. At the moment our upstairs toilet cistern won't stop filling up. You flush, it refills and, nine times out of ten, doesn't stop filling. This causes the excess water to go out the overflow with annoying gurgling noises. Nine times out of ten that it does this you have to wait for precisely the right moment and run the tap in the sink for 15 seconds then turn it off quickly - at which point the cistern makes a strange Grrrrrrrnk! noise and stops filling up. (The tenth time it doesn't and you have to flush it again or just put up with the gurgling all night.)
The really baffling part is why running the hot water in the kitchen downstairs should make the upstairs toilet suddenly start to fill up again and why turning on the kitchen sink cold water tap makes it stop.
Answers on a postcard please, because I haven't got a clue.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Snap!
I'm developing a game to play while I do the housework. I have BBC Radio 4 on during the day1, and Radio 4 spends most of its time mildly entertaining me, or deeply irritating me depending on its mood. I find it very hard to turn off, even on those days when it's snarky and determined to get under my skin by being even more London-centric, fatuous, and patronising than usual.
I need a trigger to get me to turn it off when it's like that. Hence Radio 4 Bingo. I'm making a list of key annoying words and phrases that, when I hear someone using them on air, I can cross off a bingocard like grid. Once I've crossed off enough to shout "Bingo!", or "House!", (or whatever it is the mad old grannies who play bingo shout) I can turn off the radio.
I need a trigger to get me to turn it off when it's like that. Hence Radio 4 Bingo. I'm making a list of key annoying words and phrases that, when I hear someone using them on air, I can cross off a bingocard like grid. Once I've crossed off enough to shout "Bingo!", or "House!", (or whatever it is the mad old grannies who play bingo shout) I can turn off the radio.
So far the list is:
- 'Absolutely!' - when used in answer to a question - where 'yes' would have been a really good answer.
- 'Devastated' - double points if the so-called devastation is caused by something so trivial that you roll your eyebrows in disgust2. Earthquakes are devastating. Having it rain on your day out in Disneyland Paris is just a bit of a piss off.
- 'Issues' (as a noun).
- Any new (to you) verbing3 of a noun. Today I heard an avant-guarde art gallery curator saying, of a group of artists, "What we do here is forefront them."
- Any new (to you) piece of mangled English that makes you wish you knew more about grammar and syntax so could work out exactly what did just happened in your ears, e.g. today I heard "It depends how limitating it is..."
- Bad creative writing in the weather forecast; "Over the night-time period" being a favourite at the moment.
1 - Well, it's company innit?
2 - It takes practice.
3 - A point to me!
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
The Return of the Any Key
I had a rush of deja-vu to the head yesterday. This computer doesn't have a floppy drive (for younger readers, a floppy drive is what you put floppy discs into - and if you don't know what they are then the rest of this post is going to make very little sense. So, to keep the yoofs entertained while us oldies get on with things, here's a really fuck ugly painting of teen pop idol Michael Jackson (I think) that I just found at fineartamerica.com - $300 Dollars and it's yours to burn in the privacy of your own bonfire.
Where was I? [Gods! that is ugly.] Anyway, this computer doesn't have a floppy drive and on Saturday, at a car boot sale, between buying DVDs of films I'll never get round to watching because they are all too good and serious Art Films - not the explosion ridden crap with sweaty large-breasted women in that I usually watch - I bought a portable 3½" drive that plugs into a USB hole. It was a quid. The man who sold it me asked why I wanted it - the tenor of his voice suggesting he thought this was a totally obsolete piece of shit and that I was some kind of weirdo. I told him for the same reason I still had a Betamax player - you never know; one day it might come in really useful. Thus, I suspect, confirming his suspicions.
Saturday evening I plugged it in and lo and behold! it worked! Fine, brilliant, great and dandy! Oooh! I've got an A: drive again! Long time since I've seen one of them. I grab a few discs off the top of the tottering pile 3½" floppies in the office and spend a happy half hour finding they are full of stuff that I can't work out why I kept. After a while I got bored with trying to fathom why I thought I needed to keep copies of every autoexec.bat I had ever modified, put the discs back on the pile, and went on to play with other simpler pleasures, like looking up the stories behind favourite crappy movies on the IMDb.
And thence to bed.
Sunday morning, I turn on the computer, go off and make a cup of coffee while it fires up, come back coffee in hand to find the screen suspiciously black with some sort of message in white lettering... oh oh! This is usually not good news.
'Non system disc or disc error. Replace disk and strike any key to continue.'
Panic. Oh gods! The machine just died! What the hell is a 'Non system disc or disc error...'? It took a few moments but the penny finally dropped. I'd left a disc in the floppy drive. I ejected the disc and hit the any key. A wave of pleasurable nostalgia washed over me. I used to do that all the time. Panic I mean. Every time.
So that was it. Another exciting day at JunkMonkey mansions. I'm off to bed now to listen to a recording of a 56K modem on my battery powered early 80s Phillips Skymaster 3 personal cassette player:
Saturday evening I plugged it in and lo and behold! it worked! Fine, brilliant, great and dandy! Oooh! I've got an A: drive again! Long time since I've seen one of them. I grab a few discs off the top of the tottering pile 3½" floppies in the office and spend a happy half hour finding they are full of stuff that I can't work out why I kept. After a while I got bored with trying to fathom why I thought I needed to keep copies of every autoexec.bat I had ever modified, put the discs back on the pile, and went on to play with other simpler pleasures, like looking up the stories behind favourite crappy movies on the IMDb.
And thence to bed.
Sunday morning, I turn on the computer, go off and make a cup of coffee while it fires up, come back coffee in hand to find the screen suspiciously black with some sort of message in white lettering... oh oh! This is usually not good news.
'Non system disc or disc error. Replace disk and strike any key to continue.'
Panic. Oh gods! The machine just died! What the hell is a 'Non system disc or disc error...'? It took a few moments but the penny finally dropped. I'd left a disc in the floppy drive. I ejected the disc and hit the any key. A wave of pleasurable nostalgia washed over me. I used to do that all the time. Panic I mean. Every time.
So that was it. Another exciting day at JunkMonkey mansions. I'm off to bed now to listen to a recording of a 56K modem on my battery powered early 80s Phillips Skymaster 3 personal cassette player:
Shit, but that Michael Jackson picture is ugly.
Friday, March 11, 2011
All parents have nightmares and fears for and about their kids. Sometimes the fears are about what they will do, sometimes they are about what could happen to them. I won't list them. If you're a parent you'll know what they are; if you're not you won't really understand. (I didn't before I became a father and spent the first couple of years after my first daughter was born in a semi-permanent state of terror.)
Today one of my deepest fears became a reality.
Holly came home from school with a violin.
Today one of my deepest fears became a reality.
Holly came home from school with a violin.
Monday, March 07, 2011
Daisy! KerPlunk is not a Breakfast Cereal.
Oh I'm in trash movie heaven. A couple of weeks ago I found a pile of big box VHS tapes in a local charity shop and have been diligently working my way through them. Last night's offering was Demonwarp (1988) - and, for the life of me, I can't work out why this has never had a DVD release. I mean everyone wants to see a Bigfoot movie with zombies, naked women, aliens, and ritual sacrifice don't they? especially one starring George Kennedy (who I am happy to discover is still alive and still working at 85). Frankly I am baffled at this film's obscurity. I have been giggling all day at it's dreadfulness. Someone needs to let the world rediscover this masterpiece of shit.
I wonder how much it costs to buy the rights to a movie...
I wonder how much it costs to buy the rights to a movie...
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Sorry to say I watched a lot of films last month:
- The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood (1986) - a real odd one. Shot in 1976 but not 'ready for release' (whatever that means*) for another 10 years, the film takes place during the course of one day in the life of Faustus Bidgood, with a history of mental health problems and a Billy Liar like imagination, he works as a minor bureaucrat in the Newfoundland Department of Education. Lots of things are happening on this day. The final preparations for the annual charity concert in aid of crippled children are being made. The premier of Newfoundland has gone missing (again) leaving behind him cryptic clues - TV viewers are asked to help in the manhunt and could win a waffle iron if they come up with the solution as to his whereabouts. There is a child serial killer on the loose and the local TV's top children's entertainer, who dresses as a giant chicken, has resigned his job and gone on a three bottle bender while still in costume. One of Faustus' co-workers is pregnant but the father of the child is in doubt and Faustus' boss has a messianic dream of the future of education based on a vision he had when he saw his friend killed by a plummeting bag of frozen soup.Faustus, accompanied by his childhood imaginary friend, tries to hide from all this chaos by living in an alternate fantasy reality where they staged a coup, declared Newfoundland to be an independent state, and he became president promising to resign after one year but, as president, he has a decision to make and keeps having a recurring dream that he is in fact a lowly filing clerk. There are flashbacks from at least two different characters. The fantasy (or are they?) sequences are shot in grainy black and white, there is a film within a film which represents some of Faustus' memories as a documentary and then a film within that film which purports to be the first, never to be released, Newfoundland feature film ever shot. It sounds like an unholy mess and it almost is but, amazingly, all these strands (maybe with the exception of the film within the film within the film) neatly tie up at the end. I liked it.
*Find out what 'that' means in an article from Cinema Canada - November 1986 here: - Star Trek (2009) - Meh.
- The Jungle Book (1967) - Another Disney Friday night with the kids movie. Another very thin adaptation of a much loved book of my childhood. I do remember seeing this many many years ago in the cinema (I'm old enough to remember the days before the existence of museum pieces like VHS, Betamax, or even Laserdiscs) and hadn't seen it since. I was surprised at the amount of reused footage there was in it. Ka suffering the same fall from the same tree twice for example, and, as Daughter Number One pointed out, Bagheera climbs along the same tree branch several times - but then she has seen it four times.
- Fugitive Alien (1987) - My first incomprehensible Japanese TV show edited into a movie-length pudding of bewilderments of the year. And first decent sighting of a SpaceBimbo this year too.
Space BarbieFugitive Alien tells the story of Ken, a 'Space Wolf', a killer elite space pirate, who has a crisis of conscience when out raiding one day and instead of gunning down a little boy (who also happens to be called Ken), he accidentally kills his best friend and fellow space pirate. Now an outcast and a traitor, he is mercilessly and relentlessly hunted for a few minutes until he escapes and joins the Earth Space fleet. After a lot of bewildering hanging about waiting for the story to really start his ship is sent on a mission to help another planet (populated by Japanese extras wearing Arab headresses) who are threatened by an enemy with a weapon so powerful it could destroy their 'whole constellation' (sic and wtf?). The second half of the film consists of Ken breaking out of jail on the Planet of the Japanese Arabs and springing one of the enemy soldiers too. Just as they are about to blast off for what our occasional narrator has called 'Their most exciting mission yet' the words 'To be continued' appear on screen and the thing just stops. Arse! What I have just spent an hour and a half watching turns out to be half an incomprehensible Japanese TV show edited into a movie-length pudding of bewilderment. The sequel, Star Force: Fugitive Alien II, was, according to the IMDb, released in 1986 - the year before the original. I wouldn't be surprised if this was true.A standard tool used by American producers dubbing foreign SF films into English is to include quick, cheap to make, insert shots of hands flipping switches, and interesting dials with obvious English wording on them. I guess they would often be replacing shots of dials and switches with Cyrillic or Japanese writing next to them but sometimes I think they were just used to cover what would have otherwise been clumsy edits. The American producers weren't too bothered about where these shots came from - I remember one film where the inserts were probably shot in the dubbing studio as they recorded the new soundtrack; all the switches and dials in the spaceship were marked with things like 'Peak Wow' and 'decibels'. These shots were usually only a couple of seconds long, if that, but wherever the new inserts came from, the producers usually employed someone who could spell. Not here:
and how this briefly flashed up computer screenful of delivery details from a Utah metal products company to 25 East Union Avenue, North Salt Lake helped to identify the fleet of hostiles just outside the good guys' spaceship window is a total mystery.
- Metropolis (1927) - I finally get to see what may well be the most complete, restored version of one of my long time favourite films (it is where my usual avatar comes from) - and I fall asleep.
- Marooned (1969) - Three astronauts are trapped in their Apollo capsule and NASA (or 'the NASA' as one character pedantically refers to it here) attempts to rescue them before their oxygen runs out in 42 hours. This is a long film (134 minutes) and sometimes it felt like the 42 hours was playing out in real time with most of the screen time taken up with people reading screeds of numbers at each other. For once though the techno-babble was convincingly real and occasionally the film works, it does build up tension and the brief moments when emotions break through all the cold equations are more powerful because of it; Gene Hackman is particularly good as one of the doomed crew. I was less convinced by the ending which had a Russian spaceship turn up out of nowhere and one of the astronauts doing a Captain Oates but taking a third of their dwindling supply of oxygen with them. Not sure I followed the logic of that. I could have done with a bit more exposition in places.
- Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds (1989) - Alex Proyas' first feature. An odd slow very low budget three hander. In a post apocalyptic future (fingerless gloves? check!) a brother and a sister live in a shack in the middle of a desert. He's in a wheelchair and dreams of flying, she's a religious bampot. One day a stranger arrives. The brother and the stranger build a flying machine and the stranger flies away. Some terrific visuals - even on the panned and scanned downloaded version I saw - more than made up for deficiencies in story and acting. Proyas' next film was The Crow.
- MirrorMask (2005) - another début feature with stunning visuals. I loved it so did the kids. One of those films where all CGI stuff serves the story (or possibly was the story) rather than being added for sheer gosh-wowery.
- Murder Party (2007) - I'm not a great modern horror fan so why I was watching a movie with someone holding two chainsaws on the front cover I'm not quite sure. Murder Party is a low/no budget horror/comedy that is almost funny in places. The plot is simple: a traffic warden finds an invitation to a Hallowe'en 'Murder Party' and decides to go. As soon as he arrives he is pounced upon by all the other guests who turn out to be an art collective in need of a victim for an artwork. It's a neat reversal of the usual low/no budget horror formula (take a bunch of teenagers to a deserted place and kill them off one by one). Here we have one victim and lots of killers. Things start to go wrong for our hero's captors when one of them has an allergic reaction to the non-organic raisins in his pumpkin cake and dies. Over the course of the evening the other 'artists', and several bystanders get themselves bumped off, in a variety of gory ways leaving our hero to go home. It almost works.
- World Without End (1956) - another rewatch of an old favourite. Man's first manned mission to Mars (as always) goes horribly wrong and our gallant crew are hurled through time to a post-apoc world (this was the fifties so, damn!, no fingerless gloves) where brutish cave men rule the upper world and a dwindling scientific elite live below ground. The men of the future wear shiny futuristic caps and the women wear satin dresses with conical tits and hemlines that stop just below their bums. Our hero interlopers, with the aid of their standard issue handguns (so useful in a spaceship), and a home-made bazooka, fight off giant spiders, one-eyed mutant cavemen, and skulduggerous locals to save all the non-mutant cave men and get laid by the satin conical tit girls (though, this being the fifties, this last bit is only implied). If it wasn't so stodgily presented - for a lot of the time people stand in rows and take turns to tell each other stuff - this would be a real cracker.
- Star Trek TNG: The Best of Both Worlds (1990) - every now and then I like to torture myself with a Star Trek movie. I've no idea why; I know they're tedious predictable shit even before I open the box, and, unlike most bad movies which are all unpredictably bad in their own special ways, Star Trek movies are all bad in the same ways. All so formulaic, self-referential and uninvolving that it's like watching the furniture being rearranged in someone else's house. Every now and then your hosts will stop and ask, "What do you think?" and you just have to be honest and say you can't tell the difference from the last time they asked you - though you suspect they might have swapped the sofas around.
The EnterpriseStar Trek TNG: The Best of Both Worlds was even more shittierly predictable and tedious than usual because it turned out to be a 'made for TV movie' cobbled together out of two regular episodes. (That'll teach me to read the small print a little more closely in future.) In this one the Enterprise meets the Borg again and Jean Luc P is captured and Borgified and everyone gets to recalibrate everything from the warp containment core to the kitchen toaster, and Jonathan Frakes (Ryker) gets more slow dolly shots moving in on him looking stern and decisive than any man in the history of episodic TV. And as most of these shots were done from a low angle to make him look heroic, we spent an awful lot of the 'movie's' running time staring up his nostrils. At least it made a change from watching him looking smug which is Frakes' other stock in trade pose.At one point Patrick Stewart made a weird noise just before he spoke a line which had all the hallmarks of a bit of real acting escaping onto the screen. It was very lonely. - Lifeforce (1985) - The first manned mission to Haley's comet finds an derelict space ship. Now anyone who has ever seen ANY movies knows that entering derelict spaceships is just asking for trouble. Unfortunately our valiant crew have spent so long training to be astronauts they never watched anything other than training videos and happily go exploring. Inside they encounter a bunch of dead aliens and three perfectly preserved nude humans in suspended animation. The female of the three probably has the most beautiful tits seen on any screen during the eighties. Hypnotised by naked knockers (as most men are) the crew drag the bodies on board and head back for Earth and the plot goes into out of control free-fall with the movie ending up with rampaging alien vampire zombies destroying London, (I think they were covering all the bases when they pitched this one:
Writer: "It's a vampire flick, with zombies! - and aliens...
...and tits!"
Producer: "I like it!"
All Hail the Hypno-boobs!This film has a real reputation for being awful and I was surprised to find the the opening sequences weren't that bad, but it didn't take long to descend into totally confused garbage. Towards the end I gave up trying to follow what was going on - though actors kept telling me at great length - and just felt sorry for Peter Firth (who probably thought this was going to be his big Hollywood break)as he wandered about in a polo-neck jumper trying to be the hero but being confounded at every turn by the incoherent script.The first feature film to use Brent Cross Shopping Centre as a location and the second film I've watched in a row to feature Patrick Stewart being subsumed by an alien lifeform. He explodes in this one. - The Girl Cut in Two (La fille coupée en deux 2007) - by total coincidence Mathilda May, the naked hypno-boob girl of last night's film, was the first person on screen in The Girl Cut in Two. Inspired by the murder of Stanford White in 1906 the film tells the story of a TV weather girl torn between two lovers. A rich successful older novelist and a wealthy, but unbalanced playboy. The film asks us to believe that both men already detest each other - for reasons that are never really specified - and both of them instantly fall in love with the same girl within one day. She falls in love with one, marries the other - lots of post coital conversations, lots of people sitting round eating expensive meals and a hurried, patched together, scrappy ending that looks like it had been nailed into the script to stop the film going on for another couple of hours. I didn't believe a single frame of the whole damn thing.
- Dream Warrior (2003) - a cinematic version of one of those bad self published novels which starts with enough backstory flashback voice-over intro to make you think you are watching a sequel (it isn't) and then just wanders around aimlessly wasting so much time you wonder why they didn't just include all that backstory in the main narrative and cut out all the waffle. A genuinely incompetent mess with a director who does amazingly inept things like using a point of view shot [handheld camera keeks round a pillar at two guards], then showing a wide of the actor whose point of view we are supposed to have experienced getting into position to see what we have just seen him see [sneak sneak up to the pillar then keek around it], then show us again what we have seen he has just seen now that he is finally in a position to see it. THEN - having established that handheld camera keeking round a pillar is a point of view shot - shows us the hero sneaking around in a series of handheld keeking round pillar shots without once hinting that there is anyone else around to be having these point of views of the hero. Garbage direction. Other highlights included Isaac Hayes being mystical in a purple burnoose:
Hayes:
Sometimes dreams are the only
thing worth having!
Hero:
What are you talking about*?And, just to keep with self-published vibe, at least one typo in the credits; apparently there was someone responsible for 'UK Catsing'.
I really hope I don't see anything quite so dreadful as this for the rest of the year.
* Edit: I just realised this is even funnier if you do it in Cartman's voice. - Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) - Okay, I was wrong. For years I've had this down in my head as one of those annoyingly overly cutesy films I never wanted to see again. Watching it tonight with the kids I was pleasantly surprised at how funny it was - once I had got over the semi-Americanisation. (Still hate the fucking songs though.) The kids were enraptured by it. Afterwards number one daughter wanted to find the book to see how Veruca Salt met her fate in the original because it was different here to the Tim Burton version; geese instead of squirrels. (It was squirrels in the book.) She also thought the TV room sequence was better here, though she didn't explain why.
- Timecode (2000) - another coincidence-driven rewatch. While sorting through some boxes of VHS tapes, consigning the ones I now have on DVD to the charity shop pile, I found a tape with a couple of editions of Moving Pictures which was, by far, the BBC's best ever TV program about films and film making. I watched a chunk, including the Mike Figgis interview mentioned on the Wikipedia page I just linked to, then I started on the next box. First tape that my hand touched? Mike Figgis' Timecode. So I had to watch it.I remember being bowled over by it but this time I got really frustrated. Since first watching it I had read an interview with Figgis in which he talked about this film. Timecode was shot simultaneously on four cameras, the whole film consists of one continuous take from each of the cameras presented on a split screen like this...
...in which you have Salma Hayek, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Kyle MacLachlan, Stellan Skarsgård, Saffron Burrows all on screen, all acting at the same time in different locations. As the film progresses characters meet each other, cross from one strand of the story to another and from one corner of the screen to another - sometimes appearing in two or more quarters simultaneously from different angles. It is, as you may imagine very complex, and at times difficult to follow. In the interview Figgis said that he nudged the audience into watching particular parts of the screen with the sound. He mixed up the sound from the quarter/s he wanted the audience to concentrate on and faded out that from where he didn't. Simple and obvious enough, but I didn't know that the first time I saw it. This time, with that knowledge in my head, I was constantly fighting being pushed from one corner of the screen to another and desperately trying to make out conversations that were almost inaudible. I may investigate any available DVDs to see if there is one with an option to isolate the soundtracks - or even mix your own on the fly; that would be fun. - Ripley's Game (2002) - I never really understood the attraction of the Ripley character. I have tried to read a couple of the books and didn't get very far with either. Anthony Minghella's 1999 The Talented Mr Ripley Amazingly was, I thought, an interesting enough film but even though it charted the 'creation' of Ripley I still didn't understand him. As soon as John Malkovich appeared on screen in Ripley's Game I got it. Amazingly this went straight to DVD/Video in the States.
- Jack the Ripper (1976) - very odd little Swiss/German take on the Jack the Ripper story which, apart from a couple of library establishing shots (one anachronistically putting the wrong queen on the throne), was shot entirely in Germany and looks it. Everything was just wrong. The architecture in particular and the furniture It all looked very un English. I suppose Germans get the same feeling of wrongness about Epping Forest standing in for Frankenstein country in all those Hammer films. Klaus Kinski did his usual going bonkers stuff - which is always fun - as the mad doctor / Jack the Ripper and got caught in the end - which added to the wrongness levels. Another Jess Franco film under my belt. Only another 148 or so to go.
- Planet of the Apes (1967) - the superior original. I had forgotten how fantastic the score was. And so little of it too, very spare; unlike most Hollywood soundtracks these days. Jerry Goldsmith knew when to shut up and let the pictures do the work.
- Ritana (aka Returner 2002) - Japan. A lone vigilante in the standard-issue, post Matrix, full-length leather coat shoots endless supplies of Ninja Yakuza, and helps a time-travelling cute girl rescue an alien (thus saving the world from the total pasting, end of human life, alien invasion which the girl has come back in time to prevent). Lots of explosions, lots of dodging slow-mo bullets while leaping 20 feet in the air shooting two hand guns in opposite directions mid somersault, lots of running around walkways and ducking behind pipes in an empty industrial site, not a lot of plot. Certainly nothing that hasn't been done a million times before in short stories, movies, TV shows, and comic books. Anime made flesh.
- Survival Zone (1983) - Raking through the back room of one of the local charity shops today (I'm such a regular I get privileges) I hit bigbox VHS paydirt. A whole pile of cruddy films in crappy 1980s bigbox cases. First into the player tonight was this dreadful, post-apocalyptic piece of poo. After a voice-over telling us that the Neutron bomb war of 1987 has wiped out nearly all animal life on Earth, we find ourselves in South Africa. We meet a bunch of bestial, leather clad bikers who watch two of their number fight and then appear to eat the looser... we meet three nuns looking after a couple of orphans in a deserted mission... we meet handsome hunk who has just buried his mother and sets off in his Land Rover to see if there is anyone else alive... we meet a happy nuclear family living on a farm. That's about all you need to know really, it's standard western plot number 37b. Indians on the warpath, lone stranger, happy sheep farmers wanting no trouble. Exactly the same. Except with nun-eating involved."
"For those who are about to eat us
make us truly grateful, amen."So, still peckish after the nuns, the bikers attack the farm. The hunk arrives and we find he is called Adam Strong (no kidding) and the farm is called 'Eden farm' (could this be symbolic? or just bollocks?), farmer and family kill all the indians - sorry evil, nun-chomping bikers. Adam kills the head biker by whacking his head off with a spade. The End. Incidentally the head biker is the only one of the horde to speak. At one point while he is haranguing his troops and dumping backstory (they had all escaped from jail - presumably jails are neutron bombproof in South Africa) he actually says: "I warned you not to drink that contaminated water, now you are all mute!" A brilliant line which saved the writers from having to write any bestial dialogue for the cannibal bikers ("Pass the ketchup please."?) and the producers from having to pay actors to deliver them. This might all sound vaguely entertaining but it's so laboriously overwritten (apart from the bikers); everyone who does speak gets to deliver screeds of repetitive, aimless dialogue that does nothing to advance the plot and then goes round the block and does it all again just in case we missed any of it. There are whole scenes of endless pointlessness that are just baffling in their utter pointlessnessnocity. In an early one we watch Adam playing solo pool in an abandoned pub for a while till he gets bored and wanders upstairs into a room, he looks about a bit, turns on the shower - aha! water! - he decides to stay SUDDEN CUT AWAY TO SOMETHING ELSE TO FILL A GAP! and then he's asleep in bed. Something creaks. Something moves! A mirror cracks. He leaps out of bed. Suddenly there is full-on poltergeist activity going on all around him! He runs out of the hotel... meanwhile somewhere else...
What had the sudden onset of poltergeist activity got to do with anything else in the movie? Sod all.There's a lot of SUDDEN CUTTING AWAY TO SOMETHING ELSE TO FILL A GAP! in this movie - usually accompanied by loud music to make it really obvious. (I think the sound editor hated the director's guts. "Look!" he seems to say, "The bastard fucked up again and had to SUDDENLY CUT AWAY TO SOMETHING ELSE TO FILL A GAP!") My favourite one came when we watch our hero setting a trap that involved some of the heavily foreshadowed dynamite he just happens to have around the farm. It's dark, he's in the cellar, there are nunaphagic bikers all around, he sneaks up a three step stepladder to do something trappy with some string and a nail, first step, second step SUDDEN CUT AWAY TO THE MOON IN A CLOUDY SKY! sneak back down the ladder, second step, first step... We have no idea what the hell he did up there - not that we are any wiser at the end of the movie either. Incredifuckingbly dreadful. I loved every second of it. (I forgot to check if there were any fingerless gloves in this one.) - Steel Dawn (1987) - I feel sorry for those people who don't sit through the credits at the end of movies. Apart from the odd lollipop, (like the Tibetan monk gag at the end of the end credits for The Adventures of Prescilla Queen of the Desert), you do find the most glorious names lurking in them. Steel Dawn for instance had a stunt person called Panica Protopapa (only other IMDb listing is as an actor way down near the bottom of a Marjoe Gortner movie: American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt). Not as good a name as Yolanda Squatpump but then very few names are.Steel Dawn is the usual post-apocalyptic desert stuff (Fingerless gloves? Check!) A stranger with no name (in the cast list he is just called 'Nomad') arrives at the farm of a widow and her son just as they are having trouble with the local megalomaniac land baron who wants to run them off their land blah blah blah. Sounds like every third cowboy movie ever made after Shane except there aren't any guns and everyone is dressed in BDSM fetishist wet dream leather gear and has HUGE hair. (The villain wears something Tina Turner would have been proud of; it looks like a couple of electrified stoats glued to his head.)
Ooh! Get me, I'm so evil...As there are no guns on show, people fight with swords. The end result is that the movie looks less like a Post Apoc Western and more like a Post-Apoc Samurai movie. In the first half hour we get to watch Patrick Swayze walk a lot. I remember thinking he wasn't as good as Toshiro Mifune. Now that man could walk. - The Eye Creatures (1965) - Another of Larry Buchanan's fantastically dreadful TV remakes. This time Invasion of the Saucer Men gets the work-over. Aliens land but are defeated by middle aged teenagers shining their car headlights on them - eye monsters explode if you shine lights on them. Superbly dreadful with all the usual Larry Buchanan hallmarks of shoddiness: there are lots of over-long shots of people walking away from the camera and into a doorway. This is a classic Buchanan shot and quite often it signals the end of a scene. The scene often actually finished quite a while beforehand but Buchanan will usually wait till everyone has left the screen before he cuts to the next one. Not very good with transitions was Mr B. Not very good at anything really.
- Cargo (2010) - I was a little disappointed, after all the good reviews I have read of this, that it wasn't better. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad, but I had worked out the plot about five minutes in and after that it was just watching the dominoes topple. It looked great and the lack of gunplay was welcome but it did press several of my dumb SF buttons: things like the size of the ship (the Kassandra), which was full of huge spaces all full of air at a breathable pressure.
"Captain, I think we got a stowaway."
"Okay, put on your suits and vent the ship. Next problem please."
And the big engines firing all the time for four years! They only cut out about 30 seconds before they reach their destination; at which point the ship just stops (once the engines stop pushing it). At some point this ship goes FLT. It has to. Rhea, its destination, is 'four years' away from Earth. Proxima Centuri is about 4.2 light-years from us. So even if Rhea is around our nearest neighbour - and the implication is that it isn't - then the Kassandra must have gone faster than light to get there in the time. As it was constantly accelerating, when it got to Station 42 (aka Matrix in Space) it would have been doing at least lightspeed and, according to Einstein, would have accumulated enough relativistic mass to destroy the whole bloody planet as it hit.
As for the moment when our heroine jet packs straight into the open airlock of the moving spaceship at the end.... - Gay Niggers from Outer Space (1992)- probably the most crappily amateur film, with some of the worst production values and dialogue I have seen for years - but so stupid it was quite endearing and genuinely funny. (Very short too.)
- Flesh+Blood (1985) - Paul Verhoeven's first English language feature which owes more than a little to Kurosawa and was the third film I've watched this week that has nice Photoshop chrome gradient filled lettering on the video's cover. (Well, it's one way of choosing what to watch; next week I'll only watch videos that have skulls with glowing eyes on the front of the box.) You could tell this film had a bigger budget than the other two because the graphic designers knew how to adjust the settings and make the chrome effect a little more complex and subtle. Not sure what to make of the film. I was reminded at various times of Kurosawa's Ran, Poe's Masque of the Red Death and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Rutger Hauer did his usual sterling stuff and Jennifer Jason Lee was naked a lot. Either is a good enough reason to watch a film.
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
Somehow it has become March without me noticing. Two days ago - a fact which caused me a little embarrassed today when I insisted the poor woman behind the counter at Blockbuster scanned the online voucher I had printed off. It would, in theory, have saved me a quid on the three DVDs I was attempting to buy from the three for a tenner bin. The voucher was valid till the end of February. She scanned it then told me it was out of date.
"It's valid till the first of March," I said. "It says so there, look!"
"Today's the second of March."
"It can't be. It was the twenty-eighth on Monday and today is only Wednesday so that means it's the thirtieth..."
"Of February...?
"Yes the thirtieth of... oh...."
It also means I have another month's worth of crappy movies to post up here and then I'll be caught up. But I'll do it tomorrow.
To keep you entertained until then, 'The 'Planet Stories' Fiasco', a part of my book that I am not writing - which has, over the last year or so, mutated from the world's worst science fiction book into the world's worst over-annotated bibliography of a non-existent author - is currently on display in the February 2011 edition of Mythaxis.
Sometime in the next couple of years I will finish the book I am not writing. I intend to make the book I am not writing exactly 50,000 words long - I read somewhere that for a book to count as a novel it has to be at least 50,000 words. My plan is to get to 49,998 words and then write 'The End' (or 49,997 words and write 'To Be Continued'; I haven't quite made my mind up). Once I've got enough words down - I'm currently about 13,000 words short - I will start deleting the really crap bits and replacing them with slightly better bits but still keeping it at exactly fifty-K words. I have no idea why I am doing this apart from the fact that it amuses me. When I've finally finally finished pratting about with it and decided that it is finally finally as funny as I can get it, I'll publish it somewhere as a free to air PDF and start writing dirty limericks for a bit. Or dirty haikus. Or just scrawling 'Bum' on pieces of paper. Something really short anyway."It's valid till the first of March," I said. "It says so there, look!"
"Today's the second of March."
"It can't be. It was the twenty-eighth on Monday and today is only Wednesday so that means it's the thirtieth..."
"Of February...?
"Yes the thirtieth of... oh...."
It also means I have another month's worth of crappy movies to post up here and then I'll be caught up. But I'll do it tomorrow.
To keep you entertained until then, 'The 'Planet Stories' Fiasco', a part of my book that I am not writing - which has, over the last year or so, mutated from the world's worst science fiction book into the world's worst over-annotated bibliography of a non-existent author - is currently on display in the February 2011 edition of Mythaxis.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Not a bad haul for £15I got a day off today. Merriol has been urging me to do this for weeks but I finally got round to doing it today. About 50 miles away from us over on the other side of Scotland there is a barn-like shed full of antiques / junk / treasure that is only open on Thursdays and Saturdays. Every time we go past (which isn't very often) we stop and have a look and I spend most of my time prising things out of the kids' hands and yelling, "Don't touch! - Anything!".
Along one side of the shed is a vast pile of books. Some are on shelves others are in piles on the floor. Some of the piles have fallen over. There are occasionally pieces of furniture stacked on top of them. Every time I've been to the shed I've had to drag myself away vowing one day to come back alone and sort through the pile uninterrupted from one end to another and not stop till I finished.
I did it today. Drove over in the morning, spent two or three hours moving several thousand books a few inches to the left and filling up a box with battered old Penguins and lurid SF novels - and what looks suspiciously like a first edition of Elizabeth David's Italian Food. It has lost its dust-wrapper and is a little battered but no matter; it's MINE!
.
Along one side of the shed is a vast pile of books. Some are on shelves others are in piles on the floor. Some of the piles have fallen over. There are occasionally pieces of furniture stacked on top of them. Every time I've been to the shed I've had to drag myself away vowing one day to come back alone and sort through the pile uninterrupted from one end to another and not stop till I finished.
I did it today. Drove over in the morning, spent two or three hours moving several thousand books a few inches to the left and filling up a box with battered old Penguins and lurid SF novels - and what looks suspiciously like a first edition of Elizabeth David's Italian Food. It has lost its dust-wrapper and is a little battered but no matter; it's MINE!
.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Okay, catchup time. As threatened promised over the last couple of days, it's every crappy movie I watched for the last couple of months time:
December 2010
The basic story concerns a playboy writer who travels with his agent, and a couple of other more disposable characters, to 'Voodoo Island' where he uncovers a fiendish plot by the boss white man. The boss white man is blackmailing the local maverick misguided scientist with the beautiful daughter (standard fixtures on small Caribbean islands at the time) into turning the 'natives' into indestructible zombies with which he can take over the world. The zombification process involves taking snake venom (via stock footage) and putting it in a nuclear microwave with a big flashing DANGER FORESHADOWING! sign on it, then injecting it into hapless natives. Mwahahaha! To help him in his scheme White Boss Bloke dresses up as a voodoo-doo priest, Papa Whatever, and goes around chopping off women's heads at orgiastic ceremonies. When he decides to chop off the blonde (and somewhat humpable) scientist's beautiful daughter's head, things go a bit wrong for him.
This movie probably does have one claim to fame, it boasts what may well be the the world's first on-screen zombie suicide bomber. A zombie carrying a box of explosives, helpfully marked 'Explosives', walks into the spinning propeller of the heroes' plane. Kaboom!
A couple of shots later, as our heroes (they weren't actually in the plane at the time) run away from the wreckage, and other unexploded zombies, we get a wonderful panning shot that lets us see, along the beach, the shadows of the entire film crew cast by the setting sun.
In the end you'll be glad to know the whole island* is blown up when the scientist deliberately overloads the nuclear microwave with the big flashing DANGER FORESHADOWING sign on it.
Avoid at all costs; I have made it sound far more fun than it actually is.
*or at least, a very small model of it.
There, that was relatively painless wasn't it?
January 2011
La Scoggins
The jokes and situations came at you thick and fast in the show. The film is a lot slicker, and the characters aren't played for laughs as much, but it just didn't deliver for me. The design and lighting are too good, when the action segues into our characters moving in an animated, modelled, or drawn - almost cartoon-like, landscape (which happens a lot) it all looks too well done. The only way I can think to explain it is when you see a drawing in a film or in an advert that is supposedly done by a child but is so obviously done by an adult trying to draw like a child. It somehow becomes incredibly phoney. I'm not explaining this very well am I? I do know that I thought it was very long. I was surprised to find it was only 97 mins long; I thought I had been watching it for at least 2 hours. The music was good.
"Now Franchot, the time has come to test our new brain. We must feed this memory circuit through the emotional quotient rectifier to determine if there is any residual impurity.... (Seventeen or so switches switched, buttons pushed, and rheostats twiddled later...) "I've introduced into the console the electrolitic limiters which should disallow interference with the programmed patterns function within the body mechanism. Actuate the heart circuit. Excellent! Before we can recall our first creation, we must attempt to override his emotional index by stepping up the voltage and transmission frequency... (More buttons, switches and rheostats are expertly fondled and suddenly screen is full of red flashing lights! The buttons, switches and rheostats are expertly, but rapidly, fondled in reverse order till they stop.) "It's obvious the frequency and voltage boost will not effect an override... Franchot, remove number nine from the thermal freeze casket and prepare him for brain transfer and total astro-mobilisation.... |
It's like music, like some free-form jazz science fiction scat singing. I wonder if he made it up as he went along, improvising around a few key points, or if someone actually wrote those lines and he learned them? I like to think the man is winging it. The Ella Fitzgerald of crap SF films.
*Strungle v. To simulate the act of strangulation by clutching the stranglator to your own throat, while pretending to struggle to be free. An act commonly seen performed in any cheap movie containing a giant octopus. A word I coined while watching Gog a couple of years ago.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Ignore yesterday's threat of bad movie stodge listing. You're off the hook for the day. On Wednesday Merriol and I went shopping in the Fort and raking through the back room of one of the charity shops (I'm such a regular I get privileges) I hit bigbox VHS paydirt. A whole pile of cruddy films in crappy 1980s bigbox cases. I've spent so much of this evening watching sweaty men in mullets hitting each other with bits torn off vehicles that there's no time left tonight to recap what I watched last month - or even the month before that.
Post-apoc mullet syrup
Tomorrow.
Post-apoc mullet syrup
Tomorrow.
Last month, the Film Program on BBC Radio 4 asked their listeners to send in their film diaries for the month. I did. They mentioned my list on the show and linked to it. That was nice.
I haven't posted my usual 'every crappy film that I have watched' for some two months now.
You may want to miss the next couple of days of this blog...
I haven't posted my usual 'every crappy film that I have watched' for some two months now.
You may want to miss the next couple of days of this blog...
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Fark me!
My obsession with the peculiarities of Lidl's graphic design team continues:
Ever since the days of clockwork computers, every desktop publishing package / graphics tool worth its salt has had the facility to rotate things. If you want two pieces of identical lettering going in opposite directions on different sides of something - like a wrapper for a bar of chocolate for instance - you would have thought that it would be simplicity itself to type the in text, copy it, paste it, rotate the copy, then move the two bits of text to where you want them.
Lidl's graphikers seem to have to type it all out every time. Maybe they had been naughty and ate the chocolate after the photoshoot instead of returning it to the shelves for sale and this was a punishment.
Ever since the days of clockwork computers, every desktop publishing package / graphics tool worth its salt has had the facility to rotate things. If you want two pieces of identical lettering going in opposite directions on different sides of something - like a wrapper for a bar of chocolate for instance - you would have thought that it would be simplicity itself to type the in text, copy it, paste it, rotate the copy, then move the two bits of text to where you want them.
Lidl's graphikers seem to have to type it all out every time. Maybe they had been naughty and ate the chocolate after the photoshoot instead of returning it to the shelves for sale and this was a punishment.
Sadly this typo has been fixed recently - this flattened packet has been in my scanner for weeks waiting for me to get round to doing this.
Monday, February 21, 2011
My sense of humour sems to be coming back after its long winter's nap. Actually it didn't so much have a nap this year as pack its bags and leave, slamming the door on the way out and threatening never to return. I quite often have a midwinter dip. Last year I didn't - partially I suspect because the weather last winter was so mild: lots of light, very little rain. This year however, just to make up for it, the weather has been shitty cold, wet, and dark and the midwinter blues hit me really hard. So much so that I eventually gave in went to the doctor's, had a long chat and and got prescribed an SSRI. Despite my reservations and after making me feel very peculiar for a couple of weeks, they seem to be doing some good. Everything isn't such a relentless, thankless bloody chore any more. And as I said, my sense of humour seems to be coming back - for a trial period to see if we're still compatible.
The other day I was sitting in the bathroom reading an article in New Scientist about the possibility of using pulsars as a method of measuring hypothesised gravity waves (as you do) when I came across this diagram which just made me laugh out loud:
Hurray! I've got my sense of humour back. Or possibly someone else's who is a bit smarter than me.
Thursday, February 03, 2011
I am still alive and I will breath life into this blog one day. Soon. Soon it will rise again. My hunchback assistant is scouring the web for spare parts and as soon as I've cobbled them all together and there is a climactic thunderstorm in the offing we'll have this thing up and about and tearing the arms off passing peasants in no time.
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