Commercial Break

I've decided it's about time I joined the rest of the Twentieth Twenty-first century and carry advertising on this blog. One of the joys of reading all the crappy old SF books and magazines that I do is the adverts. They are, more often than not, a lot more interesting than the stories next to them.

Ferristance: turn this bloody dreadful 1950 front cover

And you will find this:

(Just to save your eyes, I've typicated it all out:

I.B. Am-bou-i

WILL SHOW YOU HOW TO

MAKE MONEY BY GROWING BAMBOO
Have You a garden
or Even a Back Yard?
WOULD YOU LIKE £1,000 A Year?

Then send me a 6d stamp1 and a large S.A.E. and I will send you a copy of that enthralling story "In the Cornish Jungle" demonstrating how you can get an income of £1,000 per annum growing these pretty plants. They work for you whilst you sleep or go on holiday. They still work for you on Christmas Day and Bank Holidays2. Why not turn your garden hobby into a profit? You who are reading this can start in your own garden NOW, and extend later when you are convinced.3
On the 28th Oct 1948, Mr Nisbet Cunningham of Lanarkshire, Scotland, wrote to say "the success of last year's clump of canes warrants the purchase of another. Enclosed find cheque etc.4"

Write: I.B. Am-bou-i care of

BRITISH BAMBOO GROVES, LTD5.,
37 Lanivet, Bodmin
Cornwall.

The SECRET OF THE EAST
LAID BARE TO WESTERN EYES6

--------CUT ALONG DOTTED LINE --------

1 For younger listeners I should point out that '6d' means 'sixpence' in pre-decimal money. It's not some strange request for a multi-dimensional postage stamp.

2 But not Yom Kippur

3 By annexing your neighbours' gardens!

4 "... and my wife's run off with a door to door shoe salesman; I think he's a Martian. Do you like the green ink? I make it myself from the saliva of baby monkeys...

5Who, curiously, have not filed any papers with Companies House recently.

6 Is it my imagination or does this sound pervy to you too?

Now for the ad...

Yes! You too can own this remarkable piece of 1950's junk memorabilia in the privacy of your own home! Just visit my eBay page and bid bid bid! You know it makes sense.

My occasional obsession with Lidl's packaging has been annoying me again this week. In particular, their apple juice:

What is it with Lidl's graphic design team that they can't afford to buy fruit? Their old grape juice carton used to have a huge pile of Photoshop cloned grapes on the front. The same few grapes repeated over and over again - though since posting about it last October the packaging has been changed and now has what looks like a real bunch of real grapes on the front - is this a coincidence? Probably, but I like to think someone in Herr Lidl's vast megabunker 'somewhere in Germany' read my blog and swung into action.

"Scheiß! Someone has noticed! Get me Helmut and a crack team of cheap graphic designers here at the double..."

So, to the apple juice carton. Five apples. Five juicy apples. But let's look a little closer... *

If you look at it for more than a few moments it's incredibly obvious that top left apple and bottom right apple are the same piece of fruit - possibly the same photo - just reversed with some semi-convincing drops of Freshness implying liquid painted in and a leaf slapped on in a place no apple leaf would ever grow in real life. Same for the other diagonal pairing, a different same apple** - reversed. I suspect the apple in the centre of the group is the same as the first one as well, it's just been shot from a different angle - but even if it isn't I find it hard to believe that Lidl's couldn't find more than three photogenic apples in the whole of Europe. Makes you wonder what the ones they are squishing up and putting in the cartons look like.

To stop myself going crazy thinking about this sort of thing (what else is there to do in Lidl's?) I took a look at the This Week's Offer bins. Aha! Cans of expanding polyurethane foam. Useful stuff - under the right circumstances. Cheap too. 'Squeasy' is a bit odd but what sold me on buying some was the label telling me I had '360º use of the can'. Brilliant! I hate only having 270º use of the can or even if you get really cheap shit from the Pound shop 90º use of the can. What really really sold me though, was the fact that in some part of Europe I have yet to identify, expanding polyurethane foam is known as 'pu-skum'.




* Ooh! Yes, let's!

** I know what I mean.

One of These Days I Would Like to Wake Up and Not Find Half a Swannee Whistle and a Pair of Maracas in my Wellies

For a couple of years now, during the less rainy, or 'tourist', season we have put up couch-surfers from all over the world and met some really interesting people. Over the weekend we hosted Yara who hails from Venezuela & Graeme from Scotland who, it turned out to my great delight, are both physicists.

Great! Someone who may be able to help me with my intermittent part time struggles with understanding the basics of Quantum Mechanics!

After dinner I gave Graeme a piece of paper and a pencil and got him to explain Schrödinger's cat, the double slit experiment, and wave–particle duality to me. Sometime later, after both he an Yara had tried their damnest not to confuse me, I was almost at the point of understanding that my not understanding the basics of Quantum Mechanics was due more to the fact that no-one understands Quantum mechanics and less to do with me being thick (which is what I had suspected) when I had to go read the kids bedtime stories. So we never did get onto superposition, tunnelling and all the other fun stuff that leaves me feeling about as brainy as a haddock when I read about it.

The point of all this is that, during this tabletop tour of my bafflement, Graeme mentioned that he had given a lunchtime talk at Cambridge about something obscure he was working on around the edges of Black Holes*. He didn't expect many people to attend, but, as there was free food, the entire faculty turned up** - including Steven Hawkin! So I've had quantum mechanics explained to me by a man who lectured Steven Hawkin!

I still don't get it but take great solace from this quote from Richard Feynman: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

Applying the inverse square rule of comedy I think that makes me an expert.




* I guess it's safer at the edges.

** These people aren't stupid.

To disguise the obvious fact that I haven't done any blogging for ages I thought I had better quickly paste another post over the top of the one I just added ( ie my usual monthly interminable list of crappy movies I have watched).

So, I'm happy to report that the kids and Merriol are all happy. The washing machine hasn't broken down (which means I'm happy) and I have recently spent an awful lot (far too much) time wondering why is it that every episode of Star Trek that I watch is crappier than the last one? This is starting to bother me. Recently, armed with a pocketful of loose change and faced with a wall of really cheap videos in a charity shop, I bought a whole pile of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I have no idea why. I hate Star Trek. But on those evenings when I'm not up to watching a crappy movie and I don't want to think for forty-five minutes, I'll bung one in the player. (Watching a crappy movie rather than episodic TV involves not thinking for ninety minutes and sometimes I just don't have the energy for that.)

It is impossible that every episode of Star Trek I happen to watch at random is crappier than the one I previously watched. (Unless I have by random chance hit the exact order of descending episode crappyness .) I suspect that if I watch a set of, say, ten episodes and when I have got to the end of the tenth episode immediately watched the first one again it would, somehow, appear to be crappier than the last one, despite the eight in between each being worse that the one before. I do not intend to try this experiment - there are limits that even I can't imagine overstepping and watching any episode of Star Trek more than once is one of them.

It's an interesting phenomenon, rather like the famous Shepard Scales which never reach an end*. Watching a whole series of Deep Space Nine must be like trying to live in a house designed by Escher.

I have been working on a method of trying to gauge the crappyness of any individual episode of Star Trek. The object being to find the crappiest episode ever, watch it, and then watch another one and see if it is an improvement.

So far the factors I have decided that need to be taken into consideration when evaluating the Crap Quotient of any given episode include:

• Does the Enterprise encounter an unknown energy field?
• How many of the crew members are possessed by an alien life form?
• How many common everyday words or idioms have to be explained to Spock/Data/Worf/Seven of Nine etc. (Extra weigh will be given to this question if it can be shown that any of the words of idioms explained had already been used correctly by Spock/Data/Worf/Seven of Nine etc. in a previous episode.)
• How often does Riker look smug?
• Does the hitherto unseen crew member with a speaking role survive to the end of the episode? (As if...)
  
• Does the episode take place on a faulty Holodeck or a parallel Earth that has, by some amazing coincidence, built a Paramount Studio back-lot exactly the same as the one on the real Earth.
• Does the episode have a crew member playing bland lounge jazz.
• Does the episode contain the word 'Recalibrate'.
  

All I need now is a team of willing volunteers and that Ig Nobel Prize is mine! Mwahahaha!



*I don't understand how they (it?) works either, despite having read and reread several different explanations.

April

1. Salute of the Juggers aka The Blood of Heroes (1989) - There are lots of sport movies where the underdog team, usually lead by some 'could have been a contender' has-been, wins through in the final moments of the movie. There are plenty of SF movies with brutal gladiatorial contests at their centre. There are many many movies where the young naive talented rookies grab a chance at the big time at the expense of those around them. Salute of the Juggers (a dreadful title) combines all three and, damn me, it gets away with it! In a post apocalyptic world - think Mad Max without the budget, Rutger Hauer (as the old has-been) and Joan Chen (as the new kid on the block) beat the living shit out of anyone who gets in their way as they try to win a game called 'jugging', the object of which is to shove a dog's skull on a stick before someone throws 100 rocks at a sheet of metal - or the other guys break your legs. There's precious little back story - or even front story. Most of the set (and costume) design consists of old tyres and chunks of Hessian sacking. The characters are paper thin and most of the time is spent watching people hitting each other in the face. But it bloody works. Not great, but well worth a look.


2. Alienator (1990) - Hooooo-boy! My DVD player now smells bad. Opening with an establishing shot lifted from a Gerry Anderson TV show and establishing Jan-Michael Vincent in my mind as one of the great bad actors of the century (even before we got to the opening credits) Alienator is your typical running-around-the-woods-staying-alive while-being-pursued-by-a-relentless-threat movie. This time the threat comes from a semi-naked seven-foot female android with a ray gun glued to her arm and a bleached ferret stuck to her head who is relentlessly pursuing an escaped killer, who dresses in one of Gary Glitter's cast-off stage costumes, and the fun-loving arseholes he befriends on Earth (well, they don't really befriend him - they run him over in their truck and don't bother leaving the movie afterwards).
   
   
   
   
   Is this a washing-machine component which I see before me? Come, let me clutch thee...
   
   The director, Fred Olen Ray, has made over 100 films. No-one has managed to watch any of them all the way through. The only other film of his I've tried to watch was called Bad Girls from Mars and I didn't get more than three minutes in before I gave up. Why don't I ever learn? Anyway, the Terminatrix is defeated when someone on a roof throws some chicken-wire over her this has the effects of "syphoning off all her electrons in alignment with the earth's axis" (sic) which is total unbelievable bollocks, anyone who has ever wrestled with chicken-wire knows you can't throw it off a roof like that. How he got it up there in the first place in the few second of screen time allowed for the act is a mystery too - it's dreadful stuff to work with, always goes in the wrong direction and then coils back at you, but anyway, even after she has had all her electron syphoned off she comes back to life and kills the real baddy. The end. ('Terminatrix'? Hmmmm, I think I just had a really bad movie idea...)
   
   Edit: And someone beat me to it... Terminatrix (1995) "In the future, killer sex-droids rule the universe... "


3. Encounters in the Deep (1979) - After a voice-over waffling about the mysterious mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle and the 'undoubted truth' of UFOs (the off-screen narrator interviewed an equally off-screen fictional scientist to prove it) a pulsating green light and a high-pitched noise sink a (not very big) model battleship. After a brief interlude, with some very dodgy dubbing work as an under-paid voice-over artist puts on a 'Black' accent ("Sho 'nuff, Sir") for a minor character, a honeymooning couple suffer a similar fate. The father of the girl finances a 'scientist', who has a radical new theory of something vague, to find her. An hour of screen time later, most of which is spent watching people swim about in Scuba gear or sat around on a boat having meaningless conversations, the daughter returns, magnificently backlight and surrounded by vasalene smeared on the lens:" Hello Daddy, come with me!" There are, she vaguely explains, aliens and they are beneficent. All the cast go away, walking slowly into light and smoke followed by a clunky spaceship shot.
   
   
   
   Uno effect especial.
   
   
   So, all the boring bits of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with a bit of Cocoon thrown in for good measure, all done at a leadenly plodding pace with all the characters speaking in 'Manglish'. The strange mangled English that appears in the mouths of Spanish and Italian actors when they get dubbed from a translated script - like this indigestible chunk of stream of conciousness prattle:
   
   
   
   

   Daddy Warbucks: "How do you explain it Peters?" Professor Peters: "The only explanation that is logical is the existance of strong magnetic fields - on the other hand what we have seen proves without a doubt, that these grottos were once on the surface." Daddy Warbucks: "Yes, but... Professor, forgive me. What I would like for you to explain what relation exists between the magnetic fields and the fact that once this region was not underwater - and the disappearances." Captain Whateverhisnamewas: "Umm... the explanation of those disappearances should be associated with the presence of underwater currents caused by the attraction of the magnetic fields." Professor Peters: "That however doesn't explain in any way those disappearances. We need some sign. So it seems that it is evident the cause of the phenomena, no one known factor exists - and only in this ocean is it possible to find a solution." Daddy Warbucks: "Would it be possible, Professor, for you to be more precise?" Professor Peters: "Well according to Ballantine's (?) theory there exist forces from outer space situated below the seas, John Spencer sustains, however, that other beings from outer space visit us periodically on this planet - carrying out authentic kidnappings. Unifying these two theories, I've come to the conclusion, that these disappearances are due to the workings of extra-human intelligences and that they work hidden in the depth of the seas." Daddy Warbucks:"In spite of common sense telling me otherwise, I hope that you will be able to prove what you say is true. The hypothesis I mean." Professor Peters: "In the future that which seems impossible will be normal. According to Einstein, these unidentified objects are a kind of space ship which existed on our planet millions of years ago, and are now trying to return." Daddy Warbucks:"I only hope this is scientific truth and not mere illusion."

   It's quite a relief when they stop talking and just swim around pointlessly for a bit. And even more of a relief when they all fuck off to outer space. A very long 82 minutes.
   
   The surrealness factor was ramped up slightly on this one by my copy* repeating a scene. The same couple of shots just immediately appears again for no reason. Very odd. But it does give you a chance to watch one of the actors suffering from a magnificent lack of direction. He's obviously been told to get out of the frame to let the shot focus on our leads as they have an earnest discussion, but has no idea why he's going. He delivers his line and then just ambles off.
   
   *Which came on the 23rd Century label - always a sign of quality.


4. Stalker (1979) - 163 minutes of staring at the back of three blokes heads as they wander round a desolate landscape being very bleak and Russian about everything.


5. Orgy of the Dead (1965) - a film of immense ineptitude which would have disappeared into obscurity if the (very meagre) script hadn't been penned by the famously not good Edward D Wood Jr. As it is, it is almost unwatchable. As a framing device, a couple have a car crash and witness 'The Emperor of The Night' watching a series of female undead dance in a graveyard. It's Tam O'Shanter but crap. The Emperor is played by fake medium, and Ed Wood regular, Criswell, who can't deliver a two word sentence without putting the emphasis on the wrong one, and the female 'undead' are portrayed by a stream of burlesque bump-and-grind 'dancers' who happened to be passing the studio door and needed a quick fifty bucks. I've got to say it; erotic dancing wasn't very erotic in the early 60s. At best it resembled badly done copies of the 'exotic' dances that inflamed the passions of actors playing Genghis Khan and various Roman Emperors in the sword and sandal epics of the fifties*, all arm waving and the odd 'oriental' head wiggle, but performed here wearing only a G-string and a wig; at worst it was"I'll just jog about making it up as I go along and throw in a couple of clumsy arabesques - to make it look arty - and shoogle my tits". The acts - and this movie was no more than a series of these girls shaking their bits - varied from the bored repetition of a nightly chore, to the cringingly inept (one girl was so embarrassingly clumsy and timid it felt shameful watching her), to the frankly weird - one girl's entire routine consisted of leaning forward and jiggling her right leg. This made her boobs bounce about like they were having epileptic fits - which she did for about 5 minutes of screen time. Okay... Yup... Next? After a while, bored, and thinking I didn't care if I never saw another boob again in my life (sic!), I checked the elapsed running time - 25 minutes. A long night.
   
   *"Have that one washed and brought to my tent!"


6. Aurora ( 1998 ) - micro-budget SF movie which played like Scott of the Antarctic meets Ice Cold in Alex on an alien planet, with next to no plot, SFX that had been done on a home PC, and some terrible direction in places - the director had no concept of the 'line of action' and dropped some real clangers - but it's better than any of the movies I've never made. Just. It was refreshing though to see a low budget SF film that didn't head off in the usual easy crowd pleasing body count slasher horror monster direction, there are only two deaths in this movie - one off screen and both are credible and not gratuitous. Most of the time is spent watching people walking across desert terrain or sitting in a tent.


7. The Last Patrol (2000) - Dolf Lungren in Mad Max mode. Odd.


8. Baron Prásil (aka The Fabulous Baron Munchausen 1961) - A wonderful Film. The copy I have is in Czech with Spanish subtitles but it doesn't matter. The visuals tell the story and are so stunning they don't really need any words - what few words there are are voice-over narration - (my good friend Mr. Bali Hai has a few on his Flickr photostream here). There isn't a bum frame in this whole movie.


9. Planeta Bur (1962) - Russian SF. Finally I get to see the original. I have previously seen two American 'versions' of this movie. Roger Corman got lots of mileage out of this one when he bought the US rights, releasing it as Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet in 1965 with the only female member of the first manned expedition to Venus edited out and Faith Domergue and Basil Rathbone edited in as replacements. Then, three years later in 1968, they in turn were edited out and a new sub-plot was added with Mamie Van Doren and sundry other busty young women added in the roles of Venusian mermaids (with some pretty obvious Californian Beach Bunny tan lines in inappropriate places if I remember rightly - I notice these things). The film was re-released as Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, the mermaid scenes were directed by Peter Bogdonavich. Like all Soviet SF that I've seen it's slow, contemplative, looks great, and what it lacks in plot and action makes up for in optimism and sheer 'otherness'. Not sure what I mean by 'otherness', but I like it.
   
   
   
   Basil Rathbone
   


10. THX 1138 - The not 'New Improved, All Singing All Dancing, Now With Added Special Effects!' Director's Cut that came out a few years ago, but the original 1971 cut* which confirmed some suspicions I had that all the buggering about and adding special effects did nothing much to improve things, but also confounded me slightly by showing that I had in some parts misremembered the movie. I had always though that, without exception, everyone wore white, and that the coloured clothing occasionally to be seen in the re-edit (hereinafter to be known as THX 1139) was another of Lucas' post hoc buggering abouts. I was wrong. There are brief moments where red and pink clothed extras are seen wandering about. It's a minor detail I know but one that whipped the carpet from under one of my set-piece fulminations about dicking about with perfectly very good movies for no real reason.
    
    The original trailer that came on the same disc is incredibly brightly coloured. The marketing people obviously thought they would have trouble marketing something so starkly white and abstract and managed to make the movie look more like a contemporary action thriller by using differently colour-corrected footage. (God, I'm such a nerd!)
    
    *Not strictly true. Apparently (according to IMDb) In the original release the movie includes a one minute clip from Things to Come (1936) before the opening credits. When re-released in the late-1970s this clip was replaced by a clip from the serial Buck Rogers (1939). So I just watched the late-1970s re-released version. (THX 1138½?)


11. Aquamarine (2006) - it had a mermaid in it; the girls were happy. I spent most of my time trying to work out why I was convinced it had been filmed in Australia (the film was set in Florida) and wondering how many times our lead actresses were going to do the 'Well, d'uh/did she just say that?' confused smile thing. Answers: Because it was, and lots.


12. The Chronicles of Riddick (2006) - okay, It's time to take David Twohy's toy box away from him. Back in the days when he had no money to throw shitloads of SFX at the screen he used to make, not perfect, but interesting SF movies like Timescape and The Arrival then he made Pitch Black... and there's another one on the way.


13. Moon (2009) - now this is what low budget SF film making can be! Character and plot driven with essentially one set, one actor and a good script - that made sense! (Pick me up off the floor!) Director Duncan Jones, in one of the extras on the DVD, mentions paying homage to Silent Running, 2001, Alien, and Solyaris (as we are now supposed to call it after the Soderberg remake colonised the name 'Solaris') and, bored as I am with the modern movies makers seemingly incessant need to homage everything they've ever watched, I'm more than happy to see someone returning to that kind of solid, 'grown up' Science Fiction school of film.


14. Strawberry Blonde (1941) - one of my all time favourite feelgood movies. Starring James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland (who never looked more gorgeous than in this film), Rita Hayworth, Alan Hale, Jack Carson, and George Tobias, it's a slight piece of fluff written by the brothers Epstein (who wrote Casablanca the next year), directed by Raoul Walsh (who had just made High Sierra), and photographed by the great James Wong Howe. Another Warner Brothers production line movie that worked. It appears never to have been released on DVD in this country and used VHS copies on Amazon start at £27.25!


15. 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) - what a soulless piece of shit! A real paint by numbers dumb dumb movie. Basically what happens is the world is doomed, and it stays doomed right up to a couple of minutes before the end of the movie when the rampaging intergalactic monster about to devour the planet just explodes and goes away because somebody does something unexplained for motives that aren't clear. The End. What!? All the characters (the heroes especially) are arseholes and played with such an amazing lack of enthusiasm it was almost painful to watch. I wonder if anyone on this movie woke up in the mornings and thought "Woohooo! We're making a movie!"? I doubt it. The only thing I can find positive to say about it is that it was better than the first one.


16. Critters 2: The Main Course ( 1988 ) - and before David Twohy made not perfect but interesting SF movies like Timescape and The Arrival he scripted drive-in fodder like this. A couple of of the gags made me laugh but half an hour later I couldn't tell you anything about either of them. Fortunately he did write in one of the vital SF movie ingredients - a large breasted semi-naked woman with a big ray gun - kept me amused anyway.
    
    
    
    Like I wasn't going to....
    
    
    
17. Neon City (1991) - Aha! I see how this one happened: one day the director suddenly didn't have a brilliant idea and went and filmed it. What ended up on the screen was Stagecoach done a la Mad Max. The post-apocalyptic overland bus to Neon City, populated with a set of stock characters, is attacked by Indians or mutant biker stuntmen or something. Whoever the baddies were, they were very anonymous and very easily disposed of. The tensions on the bus were not very tense and it was all very dull really. A very long 99 minutes. Not quite boring exactly but not as interesting as the people who made it thought it was.


18. Azur et Asmar (2006) - plodding (but pretty) animated fairy tale of love, adventure, and well-meaning heavy handed messages about racial tolerance. Lots of well-meaning heavy handed messages about racial tolerance. So many in fact that somewhere about half way through I was getting urges to go out and kick an Arab to make them stop.


19. How to Train Your Dragon (2010) - Great fun. Glad to see that someone in Dreamworks has finally had the courage to make a kids movie without all the referencing and homaging, and just have enough confidence in the material and the audience. The biggest thrills for me though was that I was watching it in a real cinema and I was watching it with both my daughters. A real Dad moment.


20. Ghost Rider (2007) - Nicolas Cage IS the Ghost Rider - stunt motorcyclist Johnny Blaze who gives up his soul to become a hellblazing vigilante, fighting power hungry Blackheart, the son of the devil himself. Back in the days when I read comics I always thought Ghost Rider was pretty crap. Even the presence of Sam Elliot doing his usually wonderful Western Narrator shtick fails to save the movie version from being pretty crap too. I haven't seen many Nicolas Cage films. Does he always do a lot of pointing? He seemed to spend half the time in this movie doing Elvis pointing at things.


21. Species 2 ( 1998 ) - what a Piece. Of. Shit. It made the first one look good. Seriously, this made Species look like a solid, well-crafted, race against time thriller. Species 2 was just an exploitative gory mess. Next! (At least number 3 doesn't have Mumbling Michael Madeson in it.) This one (2) does add an interesting and bizarre addition to the list of seemingly innocuous substances that will destroy rampaging aliens (Triffids dissolving in sea water etc.). The aliens in this series have a violent allergy to the DNA of people carrying the gene for Cycle Cell Anaemia (or even 'Sickle Cell Anaemia' - damn spellchecker). So, in the climax to this bloody mess, the hero plunges a pitchfork into the leg of the only black character and then jabs it into the alien - which promptly expires with a lot of screaming and thrashing about. Like I said, a piece of shit.
    
    
    
    The best bits
    
    
    
22. Project Shadowchaser (aka Shadowchaser 1992) - It's Die Hard with a killer android! Plodding bore with more "Oh for heaven's sake! Who wrote this crap?" moments than seven or eight of your standard averagely bad movies. Project Shadowchaser spawned three sequels. The two I have seen (3 & 4) have nothing to do with the first one, apart from having the same actor (Frank Zagarino) play an emotionless killer android. I have no idea what else he can do but he is very good at playing an emotionless killer android. Very good at turning his head 90º really fast without blinking. It's a talent.


23. A Little Princess (1995) - (again). I cried (again).

A Nation of Shopkeepers

How do we manage to do retail so badly in this country? We've been doing it for hundreds of years, and we all shop. Even the most self-reliant, hippy, back to the earth, grown your own wholemeal sandals type will at some point go to a shop and buy something. It's ranked high in the Nation's top two leisure activities. It's better than sex. (Mind you that link is to the Daily Mail - they probably said that shopping gives you cancer the next day, and that Gordon Brown was trying to export all retail therapy to Poland the day after that.) For whatever perverse reason, people in this country just love doing it shopping.

Why then - given that we are all experts at it, love doing it, and presumably have some idea of how we would like to be treated when we shop - do so many Britons turn into unhelpful, surly, disinterested, pig-ignorant arseholes as soon as they step behind the counter?

The scene:
Morrison's supermarket.

The Cast:
Me (Running late and with no time to cook when I get home from town.)
The Woman Behind the Roast Chicken Counter. (A bovine lump of inertia.)

Me:
(Admiring a vast array of seemingly identical roast chickens.)

"May I have a chicken please?"


Bovine Lump:
(Addressing, in a dull monotone, a spot somewhere to
the right and slightly above where I thought my face was.)

"Normal or 'Extra Tasty'?"


Me:
(Like a fool)

What's the difference?


Bovine Lump:
(Pointing)

These are normal. These are 'extra tasty'.

I swiftly bought a 'normal' non 'extra tasty' chicken and muttered dispiritedly round the rest of the shop. As I type, somewhere else in Scotland, a blogger is writing an entry about a mad hairy man pushing a chicken around a Fort William Supermarket muttering to himself.

This month's slew of crud. I don't know... the crap I watch to keep myself sane.

1. Logan's Run (1976) - That was long. And dull. I suspect the only reason this movie has lasted so long in people's affections - or at least in men of my generation's affections - is the scanty clothing worn (and taken off, on camera) by Jenny Agutter.
   
   
   
   
   

   As evidence I would like to submit this contribution submitted to the 'Goofs' for this movie on IMDb

   Quote:

   Continuity: When Jessica takes off her green tunic to put on the fur, she has very low-cut dark green underwear. Later when she slips on the ice running from Box, she is wearing lighter-colored underwear.

   Now there's a man who has worn out his rewind and slow-mo buttons. Yay! Thirty years later though, two hours does seem like an awfully a long time to sit through for a couple of brief flashes of Ms Agutter's boobs no matter what coloured tights she was wearing at the time.
   

   
   


2. Flashman (1967) - Italian Batman rip off set for the most part in London where 'Lord Alexei Burman' dons a cheap Power Rangers-like costume and bashes bad guys and foils an evil gang armed with the secret of invisibility. Not very good at all, even by the standards of cheap Italian knock-offs. I'm off now to contribute to its goofs section - apparently in 1967 Holloway Prison housed men.


3. Shorts - Pizza night!


4. Terror! Il castello delle donne maledette (1974) - aka Dr. Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (and an awful lot of other titles). An deliriously incoherent mess that took all the usual Frankensteiny tropes and added a few more - then threw away all the ones that made any sense. The scene where the necrophiliac dwarf and the last remaining Neanderthal man wordlessly discover each other and make friends to a piece of music scored for a solo trombone full of custard pushed my What the Fuck am I Watching?! buttons in all the right places.


5. Freakmaker (1974) - Oddly compelling bit of very cheap 70s horror. Directed, of all people, by Jack Cardiff. This was Cardiff's last directorial gig before he went back to doing what he did best - he was the cinematographer on Black Narcissus, The African Queen, and Conan the Destroyer among many others. Freakmaker (aka The Mutations) borrows from Tod Browning's Freaks and has a heavily made up Tom Baker as the owner of a touring freak show procuring healthy bodies for mad scientist Donald Pleasance's experiments. Pleasance is your standard misguided genius trying to create a hybrid race of plant/humans. His theory being that if we can synthesise our own food from sunlight, this will alleviate world hunger, put an end to war, and let the human race race achieve its 'full potential'. The fact that his most successful experiment to date looks like a green flip-top bin with tendrils and has to be fed on a diet of live rabbits isn't going to stop him, no sir. Not when there are conveniently available subjects like Julie Ege to experiment upon...
   
   
   (What's that you say? 'Just another cheap excuse for another gratuitous screen capture of a naked woman in a bath'? Would I ever...?)
   

   
   
   
   
   
   
   By an amazing coincidence there were naked women taking baths in Terror! Il castello delle donne maledette too. For years (from the days of the Lumiers I suspect) film-makers have struggled with the problem of coming up with decent excuses to get their leading actresses naked - in the seventies the most common solution was to have them take a bath. By an even more amazing coincidence this was the second film I watched tonight that starred Michael Dunn. He was the necrophiliac dwarf in the Spanish mess and the co-owner of the freak show in this one. When he was given something to get his teeth into, like he did here, he was a bloody good actor.


6. The Maggie (1954) - Gentle minor Ealing comedy with a few really nice moments, my favourite was a tiny scene (one shot?) that took place in an office well away from the main action where a secretary in a few words and a gesture sketches in a whole new dimension to the central character.


7. Gandahar ( 1988 ) - I came to Gandahar with fond childhood memories of director René Laloux's 1967 film La planète sauvage and was hoping for some real screen magic.
   I always try to learn something from every film I watch, this time I think I learnt that maybe sometimes the memory of a film is more vital,interesting and real than the film itself. I very much doubt if this is a new idea but I'm not going to put it to the test. I haven't seen La planète sauvage for many many years and having seen this I doubt if I ever will again, just in case I destroy those fond memories.
   
   I also learnt that if you read really really fast you can watch subtitled films on fast forward and not miss a sodding thing.


8. Princess Warrior (1989) - I doubt if there is any way of watching Princess Warrior that will make it bearable. In a female dominated society (Bad movie alert! Awoooga! Awooooga!) on another planet the queen is dying. She has two daughters, one good (blonde and prone to mooning about in a mini-toga), one evil (brunette and prone to carrying weapons and wearing leather fetish gear - hang on, I'll turn that siren off).
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   The dying queen anoints blondie as her successor. Swords are drawn as the evil daughter's faction stage an instant coup. Blonde is whisked to safety by her followers by shoving her into a handy matter transmitter (the only one on the planet) and sending her to some random destination to be rescued when the situation is normalised. The random destination turns out to be a over-lit bar in LA. As anyone travelling through the matter transmitter has to be naked (if they're not, they disperse into 'random ions') it's damn lucky that the bar is hosting a poorly-attended wet T-shirt contest and the newly-arrived, and totally naked, royal fugitive finds herself standing at the table with all the T-shirts on. Evil sister and two hench-women follow, as does much "Okay? Punch two three... kick two three... turn two three - you're supposed to hit me now..." fighting and the saddest, longest, most boringly repetitive excuse for a car chase put on the screen since Mack Sennet invented the idea. So far it is a toss-up between this and Alien Private Eye for my uncoveted 'Crappiest Film of The Year Award'. I think this one is winning, at least in Alien Private Eye you could hear the dialogue (you didn't want to but you could) here you could hardly make out vast swathes of dialogue for the bloody awful 'my mate's got a big synthesiser in his bedroom - he'll do it' music that was sloshing all over the place.
   
   Looking at the listing on IMDB I see that a couple of the alien girls were called 'Exzema' and 'Bulemia' - I suddenly think the makers thought they were making a comedy.


9. Monsters vs Aliens (2009) - See giant a Giant Robot destroy San Francisco in Gosh Wow! beautifully rendered Dreamworks computer animation.


10. Beginning of the End (1957) - See giant locusts eat Chicago! Or rather, watch Burt I Gordon film a few grasshoppers crawling around on some postcards of famous buildings intercut with Peter Graves (RIP) firing a Thomson submachine gun out of a window - and Morris Ankrum, as usual playing a general, barking orders down the telephone. I think Morris Ankrum must have owned his own uniform he appears so often in these sorts of movies as 'The General'. He probably turned up to auditions in it. "Yeah I can do a General, got my own suit too. Save you fifty bucks on the costume budget." Judging by the obvious lack of money on show here, that fifty bucks probably got him the part.


11. Plan 9 From Outer Space - To christen my new (to me) DVD player which, after performing the arcane ritual of: opening the tray, pressing 9 on the handset four times, waiting two seconds, pressing it again and then closing the tray, is now a multi-region player. I grabbed the first region 1 DVD that came to hand. For months now, ever since the last decent DVD player we had died a mysterious death two thirds the way through Zathura: A Space Adventure, I have been unable to play anything but region 2 or region 0 discs. For some reason the replacement resisted every effort to turn it into anything other than a European DVD player. That's the last time I buy a £15 DVD player from Tesco's. £30 from Lidl? Now you're talking! - it even has a USB slot in the front which will speed up the download to watching time somewhat considerably....


12. Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? (1969) - Any film that has Joan Collins playing a character called 'Polyester Poontang' has got to be worth a watch hasn't it? She sings too! Basically in this film we get to see Anthony Newly - he was big in the Sixties - have a mid-life crisis on a beach in Malta talking to the devil aka 'Good Time Eddy Filth', and an enigmatic godlike figure who tells an endless stream of not quite jokes. Newly and other characters are constantly breaking the fourth wall, stepping in and out of character, interacting with the film crew making the film we are watching and all sorts of other smart, clever stuff fashionable at the time. (The past may be a 'different country' but these days the Sixties are starting to look like a different planet.) The word Felliniesque (or something similar) is the word most often used to describe Merkin - once you've ignored the words 'crap', 'self indulgent' and 'twaddle' - and in a way it is... almost. It's clearly and unashamedly influenced by Fellini (he even gets an explicit name drop in the film) but it just doesn't work in the same way that Fellini's films do - and if I knew what the difference was I would be a rich and influential man. I suspect that part of the answer is that the film is in English. If this film had been in a language I did not understand and subtitled I suspect I would have come away from it with a different feeling. Maybe if I understood Italian I would hate Fellini's movies just as much as I hate Ken Russell's.


13. Gremloids aka Hyperspace (1984) surprisingly funny low budget 'what if Star Wars met Close Encounters?' spoof. It drags in places but is often a lot funnier than a lot of better-made 'comedies'.


14. Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) - Dr Jekyll, searching for The Elixir of Life (or even An Elixir of Life, I don't suppose he's that fussy really) finds himself transmogrifying into a woman with a penchant for wearing red and slaughtering prostitutes.
    Mixing the Jekyll and Hyde story with the Jack the Ripper story makes some kind of sense but adding Burke and Hare into the mix (60 years too late and in the wrong city) seems a bit odd. But then Hammer was never really one for historical accuracy - if you want to get really picky Jekyll's talk of creating a powerful anti-virus is pretty spectacular given that the first virus wasn't identified till 1898, ten years after the Whitechapel Murders (isn't Wikipedia wonderful? suddenly I'm an expert on the Victorian era).
    So, pretty routine late Hammer stuff, all swirling fog and dodgy cockney accents accents. There were some nice moments, the best of which was the first transformation. We've all seen the Jekyll>Hyde transformation before, the actor will clutch his throat as if he has just accidentally swallowed a bucket of phall, stagger under the weight of fifteen pints of Special Brew lager, fall out of shot behind convenient piece of furniture and emerge, after a suitably dramatic pause and a couple of hours spent in Make-up, covered in hair and with a lecherous gleam in the eye.
    Here he staggers across the set and slumps into a chair in front of a full length mirror, he lowers his head into his hands (the agony!) and the hand-held camera tilts down on him till his head and shoulders fill the screen, music music music, and the camera tilts up again, Jekll's reflection is hunched over in the mirror, slowly he looks up, (we see what he sees as the camera is now in an over the shoulder shot) he drops his hands from his face and there is the female Hyde staring back at him. Pretty impressive. I had a real 'Wait! How did they do that?' moment. Jekyll, played by Ralph Bates, hadn't been out of shot for the entire transformation and there were no cuts or cross-fades that would have allowed a substitution. Rerunning it a couple of times the trick became so bloody obvious and elegantly simple. Real Jonathan Creek stuff.
    In the few moments the mirror was out of shot and we were staring at the back of Jekyll's head and shoulders, the mirror was moved slightly, rotated a few degrees so that, when camera picked it up again, it wasn't showing the reflection of Jekyll sat in the chair as it had been before but the reflection of the actress playing Hyde, sat in an identical chair placed off to the cameraman's left. Clever stuff. So clever I guess this was the basis for the film's 'The sexual transformation of a man into a woman will actually take place before your very eyes!' tag-line. I wish the rest of the film had been that inventive.


15. The Quiet Earth (1984) - 0ne of those films I can watch again and again. This time I was struck by the wonderfulness of the sound editing.


16. Solar Crisis (1990) - Ho Hum, was that it? Japanese American co-production which tells the story of an international mission to lob a giant bomb into the sun thus stopping a Mega Flare from erupting and incinerating all life on earth. We know this is what is happening because the first third of the movie consists of people telling each other that this is what's going to happen. It got a bit boring after a while - even after learning that the flare turning the surface of the Earth to magma would only wipe out 95% of humanity - the other 5% presumably having had the foresight to hide in a fridge for the duration. Inevitably things go wrong - none of them were explained very well or generated much excitement. People got sweaty and shouted at each other a lot and the saboteur turned out to be the only crew member with a British accent (d'oh!). Meanwhile, back on Earth, there was another movie going on in which Charlton Heston searched for his grandson. Charlton Heston was playing the father of the International Mission to the Bomb Sun so the two story lines did have a slight relationship to each other but none that advanced either of them. On the whole, not good enough to be good but not bad enough to be good. The director had his name taken off the credits. Mind you, some of the shots of the space ships looked nice, they were very well done.


17. Hellboy (2004) - Fun to start with - but boy did it go on. A good 10/20 minutes off the running time wouldn't have hurt a bit.

A Wee Dilemma

I swear. Sometimes I swear a lot. I try not to swear in front of the kids but sometimes I just can't help it. Meeting foreign tourists driving on the wrong side of the road, as we did last week, does tend to to bring it out.

The other day, while talking to Merriol, Holly used the word 'fucking': "I couldn't open the fucking thing!" or something like that.
"Holly, don't ever say that word!"
"But Daddy says it!"
"Well he shouldn't and he's naughty. I don't want you to say it ever again. Promise?"
"I promise."

Next day Holly is walking upstairs with Daisy:

"Daisy, you're not allowed to say the 'F word'. That's 'fucking'. You're not allowed to say 'fucking'... or 'fucked', or 'fuck this', or 'fuck' anything. Okay? We're not allowed to say 'fuck'."

Later, I find this on the wall of their bedroom:

Now, here's the thing - do I correct her spelling?

Sorry this is not a better quality picture but trust me, hanging around inside men's toilets with a camera is not my idea of comfortable so I had to grab this with my phone.

CAUTION
VERY HOT WATER
THANK YOU

February

1. Night Watch (2004) - not sure what to make of this one. It was either total crap or really great fun - or both. I couldn't make my mind up while I was watching it and I still haven't made my mind up a day later. Whichever it turns out to be I felt bludgeoned after watching it. "There is room in your eyeballs for one more image and I'm going to hammer one in!" I'm going to leave it a few days before watching the next one.
2. Vampire Circus (1972) - A gloriously bonkers piece of late (more boobs less Cushing) Hammer nonsense with (among many other delights) Lalla Ward as a vampire acrobat.
3. Zoom: Academy for Superheroes (2006) - a Friday night kids pizza movie-night movie which promised little and failed to deliver. It's not that it was bad, it was just not very good. It looked good, the cast did their job, the design guys did their stuff, the cameraman got the people in the viewfinder and the director didn't do anything outrageously awful but it was all lacklustre. Nothing really jelled. It took ages to get going, scene followed scene without any seeming connection between them or momentum building up. The plot (such as it is) concerns a group of 'misfit' kids with special powers being trained by a has-been superhero to fight a returning super-villain. Sort of. Trouble was the villain of the piece was totally absent - after a long piece of off-camera exposition at the start of the show we just had to take it on trust that he would return by the end to provide a climax. There was a total lack of urgency about the, ill-defined, non-specific 'threat' he posed. So a second layer of threat was introduced: if the kids don't come up to expectations under our hero's guidance they will be artificially enhanced using the same dangerous technique which created the totally absent super-villain in the first place. Apart from the circular non-logic of that, it doesn't work in story terms as a threat because we haven't been shown the possible dire results of this treatment, to wit the totally absent super-villain they are being trained to fight.
   Often when I watch a film on DVD I will, afterwards, work my way through through any deleted scenes included on the disc. Most of the time you can see why they weren't used in the final cut - even without the director telling you. A scene may be funny, or have a nice moment but if it doesn't say anything you didn't already know (or find out later) what is the justification for including it? The big question is always: 'does it advance the story'? Most deleted scenes don't. Watching this film was like watching all the stuff that they could have easily cut, strung together. At the same time it contained odd jumps in the narrative that implied that scenes that should have been included, had been cut. At one moment our hero has hidden the kids and told them to stay hidden while he sorts something out, the next moment the kids are in a different location and being led to the very fate our hero was trying to save them without a word of explanation of how they got there.
   My girls both liked it; no scary bits.
4. Dick Tracy's Dilemma (1947)
5. Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947)
6. Darkman (1990) - "I hate Danny Elfman! I hate Danny Elfman! Shut the fuck up, Danny Elfman!" I'm sure I had more lucid thoughts about this bit of comic book nonsense but they were driven out of my brain by the bloody score. I hate being told what to think by an orchestra.
7. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs ( 2008 ) - I don't think I've laughed so much for ages. Curiously for a 'kids' movie neither of my two, aged 7 & 5, were impressed.
8. Species - Ooooh! Ben Kingsley can't half do a spooky 'I'm weirdly dangerous' look when he wants to. In this he's the weirdly spooky boss of a secret government project which mashes up Alien (near indestructible carnivorous ET designed by H R Geiger) with A for Andromeda (alien in female form created by scientists following instructions received via radio telescope) adds a wee bit of The Andromeda Strain (scientists locked in a sealed lab environment with an escaped deadly alien organism) and then, having run out of movies beginning with 'A' to steal ideas from, swiftly descends into a long plodding stop start chase (I think it was supposed to be a 'game of cat and mouse' but missed) culminating in people with big guns and bigger torches running around in sewers. Our hero is Michael Madsen, a man whose career totally baffles me - as in 'how does he have one?'. I've watched several of his films now and am still waiting for him to act. Someone must see something in him though - he currently has twenty-nine (29!) current projects listed on IMDb.
9. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) - And my third Bruce Campbell movie of the month. This, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Darkman.
10. Caligula (1979) - and the second movie in a row to contain great chunks of Khachaturian's Spartacus. (I may go back to my long abandoned Six Degrees game if this continues.) Caligula. There are many versions of this movie - some with lashings of gratuitous sex scenes and some without. There are, by my count, 13 different edits of this film listed at Wikipedia. At 98 minutes the copy I have turns out to be one of the shortest*. Is this a good thing? Not sure. I may have to go and find a longer version and sit through all that naked flesh (and more) again to find out.
    
    * ie the 101 minute edit running at British PAL system TV's 25 fps - which makes films run about 4% faster than at the cinema (24 fps).
11. Up Pompeii (1971) - my plan to Caligula again tonight - a longer version this time - fell to bits when I discovered the copy I had ... erm ... obtained - had what looked like Portuguese subtitles, was out of synch by a good couple of seconds and was os such a low resolution it looked like it was made up of animated Lego blocks. So, plan B: more togas and tits* in Up Pompeii - which turned out to be even more disastrously unwatchable than I could have imagined. For those non-Brits reading this, a bit of background. Up Pompeii was an early 70s British TV series set in Pompeii sometime just before Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. Classy stuff you would have thought, a BBC production about the Romans made at the dawn of the heady glory days of television. Quality! - wrong. Up Pompeii was a studio-bound sit-com with cheap sets and most of the 'laughs' gathered by playing the supposed licentiousness of the Romans off against the accepted level of BBC approved prudery and sexual inhibitions. Most of the jokes (and most of the plots) seemed to revolve around innuendo - mostly misunderstanding the word 'it' every time it popped up.
    
    Quote:

    Have you got the fruit for the orgy tonight? I'm just on my market to get it. Get it at the market? Why not wait till the orgy?

    and so on... and on... the gimmick being the central character, the slave Lurcio played by Frankie Howerd, spent most of the time breaking the forth wall and talking to the audience. Like many unfunny British TV sitcoms of the time Up Pompeii transferred to the big screen, and apart from the obvious charms of (briefly) watching Madeline Smith in the bath - - and a better cue for another gratuitous screen cap of a naked woman I have yet to think up ...
    
    
    
    
    
    ... and watching Michael Hordern work** there is bugger all fun to be had here. Don't get me wrong. I don't dislike cheap smut an innuendo (I've written enough of it in my time) it's just that this was just so bloody predictable and banal smut and innuendo.
    
    * I like tits.
    ** I like Michael Michael Hordern too - but for vastly different reasons.
12. Android (1982) - quirky little low budget movie which came out about the same time as Blade Runner and dealt with some similar ideas: how human can a robot really be? and for a low-budget bandwagon-jumper stuck in some very small sets it's really not bad. Not great, but not bad. Klaus Kinski keeps himself under control and doesn't chew the recycled scenery - some of which was designed by a young James Cameron - and despite the clunkiness of some of the special effects (1982 + low budget = Atari games console type graphics on the ship's monitors) it holds up pretty well.

That was fun. Fucking computers. Finally joined the rest of the Twenty-first Century* and got a wireless router - which is wired into our machine because, as far as I can tell it hardly wirelesses anything, even when the dongle aerial thing is actually plugged into the back of the computer on an extension cable and taped to the bugger. Somehow, by installing a wireless router,I have managed to screw up the mini-network I had that was working perfectly well until I touched it, and replaced it with something that does less and does it more slowly - apart from maybe letting my neighbours discover that I spend far too much time watching this sort of thing, over and over again if they should so wish.

I warn you: this is hypnotically addictive:

The long and the short and the tall of it is I also managed to somehow screw up Firefox while trying to fix the (as yet still unfixed) networking problem - so I spent an ENTIRE DAY not quite fixing Firefox before discovering that the problem wasn't with Firefox at all. It was a setting in Zone Alarm that had been changed by something - wireless router installation disc that didn't fucking work thus forcing me phone India a lot, I'm looking at you.
It's not been a good week.


* I still find that hard to type. Part of me is still seven years old and reading Thunderbirds comics everytime I think about it. The Twenty First Century! Fuck me! Where's my silver jump suit, my autogyro, and meals in a pill? I feel cheated.

My sense of humour seems to be waking up after its long winter's nap, which is good. I've been drawing a few cartoon ideas for the first time in ages. They'll get better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January...

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

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

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


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

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

   Before
   
   After
   
   
   

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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Answers:
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