Half way through September and I haven't bored the world with what I watched in August yet.

Soon remedied...

1. Toy Story - Gets better every time I see it.






2. Tarzan, The Ape Man (1981) - I think I would have to be paid to watch this again. Dear god. I'm a bloke, and like most blokes I know I am somewhat fascinated by boobs. Boobs are incredibly brilliant things for all sorts of reasons (most of which I won't go into now) but dammit, I need something else in a 107 minute movie. A story? Some dialogue? Some direction? - John Derek, Bo's husband was cameraman and director and obviously thought that the world shared his obsession with seeing his wife get wet - every scene seems to involve Bo falling into water, or going for a swim, or having a bathe, or getting washed down. It's like being relentlessly pummeled with Pirelli Calendars or old Penthouse magazines. 107 minutes of watching Bo Derek (who also produced the movie) getting wet, jiggling her boobs about a bit, and doing 'acting' does not for a enjoyable evening make. (Does touching your mouth all the time count as acting?) Other highlights included Richard Harris (apparently bored out of his mind) seeing how loud he could shout, and wild Oran-outangs in Africa. Dull beyond belief. Mind you, it's not every day you get to see a movie producer kissed on the nipple by a chimpanzee.



The only vaguely erotic shot of the whole movie.



The Exterminating Angel - Luis Buñuel. Not seen many Luis Buñuel films yet but if they are all as good as this I will have to go hunting.



Kronos (1957) - Plodding Invasion from Space movie which hasn't got any better since I watched it last year but this viewing did provide me with one of my irritatingly abstract Namethatfilm Flickr group screen captures..





I watch these things way too closely for my own good, and I am not alone. The movie was identified, from this still, within a couple of hours....


The Island - shameless rip-off of Parts: the Clonus Horror (qv) which, despite (or more likely because of) having several shitloads of money thrown at it is a far far inferior film. Parts was by no means a perfect film but it tried hard to make itself credible. The only real thing we were asked to swallow whole and undigested in Parts was the fact that cloning was possible and that the clones of rich people could grow up from infancy, isolated and innocently ignorant of their true nature until their adult bodies were need for spare parts. In this piece of shit we are not only asked to believe that cloning is possible but that it is possible to clone people into adults. But also that, in defiance of the law which requires them all to be brain dead hunks of meat, it is also necessary to keep the clones fit active and happily aware - because the Evil Corporation* has discovered that if they don't give the clones a happy clappy life the organs fail within a few years. So, lots of scope for playing with ideas about what makes a human human and how far would we as individuals go to keep ourselves alive. Could we would we kill another version of ourselves to live longer? Lots of ideas to play with. All of which are totally ignored in favour of lots and lots and lots and lots of explosions and endless fights and explosions and shooting as our heroes are pursued by elite ex-SEAL security bods who fire off brazzilions of rounds of ammunition without hitting ANYTHING they aim at, manage to get their hands nailed to doors with a nail-gun (I kid you not) and are out run, out fought and out fucking everythinged by a three year old clone (who, until the day before, got his exercise being beaten on the X-Box by Scarlett Johansson). He's a lucky son of a bitch too is our hero. Here's the latter part of one of the chase sequences:

Our clones are on a flat-bed truck hiding under its load of train axles and wheels. A helicopter and many many trucks full of well-armed (but presumably cross-eyed) supergoons are in pursuit in a variety of vehicles. Ewan McGregor (for he is our three year old hero) accidentally pulls the only strap holding these several hundred tons of scrap metal onto the back of the truck. The axles start to fall off the truck. They smash into the following vehicles. Vans career all over the place. Car parts whang around like ping pong balls. The driver of the truck on which our heroes are fighting for their lives doesn't notice. He doesn't notice that his load has fallen off. He doesn't notice that the motorway behind him has suddenly turned into a demolition derby. He doesn't slam on the brakes. This. Is. Bollocks. Any truck driver in the world would slam on the brakes as soon as they started loosing their load. (I asked my Brother in law who is a Truck Driver). The baddies, now having run out of cars, launch two supersexy, two-man jet powered motorbikes after the truck. Ewan hits one of the drivers of one of bikes with a bit of chain he happens to find lying about - he finds bits of chain lying about and hits people with them with monotonous regularity in this movie - the people fall off the bike. Ewan and Scarlett get on the bike. They out-fly the pursuing baddies on the other bike and cause them to crash. (Obviously playing boxing with short blonde women on the X-Box is fucking good training for this sort of thing). Ewan and Scarlett crash into the side of a building. Ewan and Scarlett go right through the building in loving, plate glass smashing slow motion. They come out the other side of the building, fall off the bike, land on the stupidly huge, three storey high, bright red corporation logo the building has glued to the side seventy storeys up. They recreate the end of North By North West and Ewan hauls Scarlett to safety. The baddies arrive in a helicopter and start shooting at them. Other baddies arrive up the lift (this how we know it's 70 storeys) and start shooting at them from an open window. Shoot shoot shoot they go. Between them, these two sets of villains fire so many bullets in the general direction of the logo that they manage to bugger whatever is holding it onto the side of the building and it breaks away - all this without ONCE hitting our hero and heroine. For some unexplained reason the helicopter goes round the building while this is happening, looses altitude and reappears just in time for the logo to finally break loose and fall on top of it. Explosion. Falling helicopter. Falling three storey high corporation logo. Falling heroes. Some sixty storey of falling later all this stuff hits a building site. Massive amounts of flying scaffolding poles and building materials are now added to the maelstrom. The soundtrack is very very loud. The dust settles - and our two protagonists climb out of the wreckage without a fucking SCRATCH!

And that's just one of the chases.

*You knew there was going to be an Evil Corporation didn't you?


Bound - Lesbians vs The Mafia.



Lesbians, the Mafia AND drying paint!

Three years before they made The Matrix the Wachowski Bros. made this small neo-noir crime film which works on all its levels: it's smart, it's funny, and it's sexy. Loved it.


Track of the Moon Beast (1976 - well 1972 really but it was four years before the director - who was never allowed to direct again - could find a deaf / blind film distributor who would take it off his hands.) Track of the Moon Beast (aka nothing) Is a laboriously paced lo-budget, no-rehearsal variation on the Werewolf theme in which our hapless (and talentless) hero is struck by a chunk of moonrock which has been chipped off the moon by an asteroid (sic). A small piece of moonrock meteorite lodges in our hero's noggin and therefore, inevitably, turns him into a rampaging death-dealing creature when the moon is full. Just for a change he doesn't turn into a wolf-like thing but a giant lizard-like thing with predictable and tedious results. Monster. Girlfriend. Baffled police. Baffled scientists. Old legends. Scientist friend who puts two and two together - all the usual ingredients flacidly served up with amazingly inept direction. By the early 70s, after over 30 years of making this story, you would have thought that anyone who could point a camera in the vague direction of an actor could have done this with their eyes shut. Maybe that was the problem - maybe someone said "I bet I could make this movie with my eyes shut" and actually tried. It would explain a lot.



The movie's entire special effects budget.


I spent most of the film calling unused edit points. Unused because, presumably, there was nothing to cut to. It's a game I started very early on in the film. First real shot of the movie, which runs under the opening credits, is a motor cycle driving to camera. As the credits finish the bike pulls off the road middle distance and (slightly ineptly) parks. The rider starts to pull off his helmet - and that's where we should cut to a close up. Just as the rider pulls the helmet off. "Our hero ladies and gentlemen! You will be spending the next 80 plus minutes in this man's company so let's have a good look at him and show you what a good looking hunk he is..." except there is no cut because there's no close up; the rider pulls off his helmet, looks about a bit, gets off the bike, and before the opening shot has finally finished, half the audience have gone to sleep. There's a lot of that in this movie. Lots of whole scenes played out in wide shot. Very boring. Very slow.

I'm off to find the MST3K version now...


Invasion Earth: The Aliens Are Here ( 1988 ) - There are many contenders for the title of The Worst Film Ever Made - last night's movie, Track of the Moon Beast, is currently number sixteen on the IMDb's bottom 100 - but Invasion Earth: The Aliens Are Here is my preferred candidate for the title. It's shit. To quote my own IMDb review:


No matter how bad a movie is (and I have watched a LOT of bad movies recently) there is always some redeeming feature: a horrendously ill-written line, an idea that falls flat on its face, a moment of unintentional humour - something. There's always a little something that lifts it for a moment and leaves you with a warm nugget of discovery - something to hold on to as the rest of the mindless drivel flickers past your eyeballs... this movie's only redeeming feature is that it is just 78 minutes long. It is crap. Pure unmitigated, grade Z, unadulterated, high-fibre, total shit from the hopelessly confused start to the pathetically flat non-ending.
A second viewing some four years later hasn't improved it in the slightest. The central gag of the movie is almost good enough pass muster. I can hear the pitch now: "Aliens take over a small movie house and splice together footage from old SF movies to hypnotise the audience into.... er... well, we'll work out why later. But how about it? It'll be cheap!" They got the money but never did work out the why. Most of the movie's running time is taken up with cheap clips from older (much more interesting) bad old movies (or, even cheaper, their trailers) intercut with 'comedic' moments of people falling over and accidentally throwing popcorn over each other, and fantastically absurd and badly handled attempts to parallel (parody?) the action in the old movie on the screen with action in the cinema house itself; near the start there is a particularly incomprehensible sequence which intercuts between footage from The Blob, in which the titular blob* takes over a movie house, and the aliens taking over the movie house in which the clip from The Blob is being shown. It doesn't work. I have no idea what it was supposed be doing. Whatever it was the movie makers thought they were doing here, they failed. This is not uncommon in bad movies but most of the time you have an idea what the makers were trying to do.

*Not a phrase you get to write that often.


The Gunfighter - one of those great Westerns I have never seen before. It is wonderful. Apart from anything else, in these days when every sodding second of every sodding movie is scored, it was great to see a movie which had no music. No swirling syrupy violins telling you what you should be feeling at any particular frame. I may be wrong, but after the opening credits I don't think there is a single piece of non-diegetic sound in the whole film. The only piece of music comes right at the end as the congregation sing at Jimmy Ringo's funeral.


Over the Hedge - predicable bit of Dreamworks animation that takes all Pixar's usual bag of tricks and ticks and doesn't add many of its own. There were a couple of moments that made me laugh but the 'For the Adults' movie references were painfully clumsy and dragged it down. Naming a character 'Stella' just so another character can do the Marlon Brando / Streetcar "Stellaaaaaah!" thing is just plain insulting to the intelligence.


Young Frankenstein - Isn't Teri Garr wonderful? Opening a week-long Frankenfest on my telly (why not?) my favourite Mel Brooks film.


Blackenstein (1973) - Blacksploitation take on the Frankenstein story with some terrific expository dialogue:





"Yes, Eddy, Doctor Stein just won the Nobel Peace Prize for solving the DNA genetic code...".
Armless and legless Vietnam vet Eddy gets new arms and legs (where the utterly respectable Dr Stein gets them from is not explained) but Frankensteiny complications set in when creepy servant Malcolm deliberately swaps Eddy's 'DNA formula' for that of another patient (he's very woodenly in love with Eddy's wooden fiancée, Dr Stein's assistant, and wants his rival out of the picture). Most of the first half of the movie is made up of endless shots of the genuine 1930's Universal Frankenstein props in full colour, three people in white coats preparing injections, and establishing shots of the Doc's house (Enough already! We know where he lives!). The second half, shadowy disembowelings of hastily introduced 'characters' in dark alleys. It's a textbook exercise in padding. There is one wide shot of the lab in which the vague shadowy outline of our newly risen monster is seen walking slowly from screen right to screen left that runs for one minute and twelve seconds! - two shots later there is a phenomenally uninteresting 42 second shot of the monster walking away from the camera, in a location we have never seen before, and just in case you missed the shot in the lab it is repeated a few minutes later with fiancée girl asleep in the foreground. In the end the monster is eaten by police dogs! Utterly inept.


Lady Frankenstein (1971) - Frankenstein's daughter Tania (Tania Frankenstein?!?) attempts to avenge her father (killed by his own creation) by building a creation of her own. She does this by whanging her husband's brain in the body of a hunky but simple-minded servant boy. The usual rituals of by the numbers mayhem is served up but with a generous scattering of boobs and bums, and a wonderfully bonkers score which, on the crappy, legally downloaded copy I watched, drowns out great chunks of the rather strange dialogue. The movie has all the classic post Universal Frankenstein clichés. Torch-wielding mob, sparky things going ...zzzzzzzzzp! ...zzzzzzzzzp!...zzzzzzzzzp! in the lab, and the inevitable opening roof, up to which the soon to be animated corpse is lifted at the hight of the thunderstorm - though budgetary restrictions here meant that the platform only went as high as the top of a stepladder, and the lightning was simulated by a passing grip throwing some small fireworks about. That other staple ingredient of the Frankenstein myth, the moment when 'the monster' accidentally drowns a little girl he is innocently playing with, is presented with a real twist here. For no reason whatsoever (apart from the obvious) our smock wearing creation chances upon a couple mid bonk. She, as was the habit of Italians having sex in the seventies, is totally naked and he still has his trousers on. He runs away. She screams, gets picked up, faints and is thrown into a convenient river where she drowns. Creation number two kills creation number one, the torch wielding mob burn down the castle and creation number two strangles his wife/creator/employer (Frankenstein's daughter) while they are having sex in the lab. The End. Joseph Cotten (yes, that Joseph Cotten) played Frankenstein and the rather yummy Rosalba Neri played his daughter.




This isn't Rosalba Neri


Flesh For Frankenstein (1973 aka Andy Warhol's Frankenstein - and a shitload of other titles including the rather wonderful Up Frankenstein) A very gory very hysterical mess. It was only towards the end I realised they were trying for comedy and had been all the way through. I should have been tipped off when Udo Kier as the baron humps his half-finished female creation on the slab and then declaiming in his thickest Cherman accent: "To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life... in the gall bladder!" but I was having so much trouble trying to stay awake.



You did vat to mein gauwl blatter?


The dialogue was inane and the pacing leaden. I suspect - though I have no evidence, not that I've looked for any - that a lot of the dialogue was semi-improvised. Improvising is hard work even if you know where the scene is going and what information you need the audience to hear, doing it in a second or third language as these guys appeared to be doing, must be next to impossible. So, Germans improvising very obscurely black comedy with lots of tits and giblets thrown at the screen (it was shot in 3D). Got that? Good. Another film I watched so you don't have too.


House of Dracula - Dracula, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein's Monster, Misguided Kindly Doctor Turned Evil By One Of His Own Experiments, and (as a brilliant cherry on the cake) a Hunchback Nurse! incredibly dull trash heaven. Dracula turns up at a kindly doctor's cliff-top castle wanting to cured. So, by an amazing coincidence, does The Wolfman. When the doctors says he can cure the Wolfman but not before the next full moon our tormented lycanthrope throws himself off the cliff only to be swept into a sea cave that: (big breath) not only contains the preserved but inert body of the Frankenstein monster (apparently last seen sinking into quicksand!), but has the perfect temperature and humidity for growing the 'mold' with which the doctor plans to cure the Wolfman, AND also contains a hitherto unknown secret entrance to the castle. Phew! (I would guess our screenwriter was a two bottle a day man.)




Grrr! Grrr! erm... er... line?


So - not a lot happens after that. Dracula turns a tap during a blood transfusion and turns the doctor evil and just as the obligatory low budget mobette (What is the word for a small mob? Is there such a thing?) of torch wielding extras turns up wanting to know what's going on and where their pay-check is coming from, the doctor throws a couple of switches, revives the monster and the castle collapses in flames around their ears. The last of the Universal Frankenstein movies - Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein ( 1948 ) doesn't count - it's a sad ending to the saga spawned by the bonkers glory of James Whale's Frankenstein and the even better Bride of Frankenstein.


Singin' in the Rain - Friday night pizza movie choice of daughter number one who, at the tender age of seven, is showing an excellent taste in Hollywood musicals.


Mistress of Atlantis - G W Pabst's weirdly compelling version of the much filmed novel L'Atlantide by Pierre Benoît (this is the second of seven filmed over the years). I've never read the book and I imagine the story has been pared to the bone here but what reaches the screen is wonderfully hypnotic and dreamlike with minimal dialogue and almost every shot slowly re-framing, panning, tilting, or dollying. I wish I had a better copy. Like the one this screen capture came from:





For some reason I cannot begin to fathom I find images of wind-up gramophones in the desert strangely fascinating.


The Mole People (MST3K) - I also find the films of John Agar compulsive viewing too. So far this year I have seen him shrunk and shoved in a bottle (or was that last year) and had his body taken over by an evil discorporeal brain from another planet. He really is a dreadful actor. In this one he climbs a mountain falls down a hole and discovers a lost tribe of albino Sumarians who live on a diet of mushrooms, spend a lot of time whipping Mole Creatures, and are ruled over by Alfred from the Batman TV series - basically nothing much has changed since the last time I watched it a year ago. But that was the full vanilla version. Mike and the Bots added more than the usual amount of hilarity to this one.


Slipstream (1989) - odd one this one. As SF movie pedigrees go 1980s movie credits couldn't get much better than this: directed by the writer director of TRON, starring actors who had appeared in Star Wars, Aliens, and BBCs excellent Edge of Darkness, the producer of two Star Wars films was in charge, the editor had cut Alien and Legend, hell! even the conductor had worked on Robot Monster in 1953 (but I doubt if he boasted about it)*. What arrives on the screen is a weirdly disjointed long aeroplane chase which switches location from what looks like a very wet and miserable North Wales to a sunny and dusty Turkey without missing a beat, has Bob Peck playing a poetry quoting android, wandering a post apocalyptic wasteland in a business suit pursued by a blond, bearded, psychotic lawman Mark Hamill waving the kind of long-barrelled pistols only previously seen in Sergio Leone movies. The sort of climax takes place in an underground museum lorded over by F Murray Abraham. Very odd. I'm not sure it works - but the memory of it made me want to watch it again. It's not as good as I remember it, which is odd given that I see from my blog that I didn't particularly like it the first time I watched it.

*As an added bonus it also has the rather yummy Rita Wolf whose boobs were the only decent or memorable thing about My Beautiful Laundrette.


It! The Terror From Beyond Space - well, Mars actually. I seem to be in a rewatching mood this week. I first watched this one a year ago and this time I was struck mostly by the wonderfully efficient set design. Most of the action of the movie takes place in a spaceship, with the crew moving from deck to deck trying to outguess and kill the rampaging monster loose on-board. (It's Alien 20 years before Alien was written.) The space ship in the movie is a real spaceship, one of those 1950s pointy silver cigars with wings, and the decks were stacked up one on top of the other, like layers of a cake with a central set of ladders and hatches. Each deck was different but, on a second viewing, obviously shot on the same set. Walls were rearranged and it was dressed differently, different signs over the doors etc. - and bugger me it worked. It's a clever bit of set design. Babylon 5 used a similar, simple but effective trick. Each 'sector' of the station was called by a different colour 'Green sector', 'Blue sector', etc The corridor sets incorporated a coloured strip at about hip hight. It must have taken only minutes to strip off one colour and substitute another - "and here we are in Grey Sector!" It worked and... and my geekyness is showing isn't it?


Ghostbusters (1984)- I first saw Ghostbusters many many years ago. I didn't like like it. I just didn't understand why anyone though Bill Murray was in any way shape or form funny. Anything I saw him in just fell flat. Then a few years ago I saw him in Jim Jarmush's Broken Flowers and I got it. I suddenly saw what everyone else had been seeing in him all along. He was funny! So I was quite looking forward to watching this again. I still don't like it. It's not particularly funny, or scary or complicated. Couple of nice lines: "Listen... do you smell something?" and "Back off, man. I'm a scientist." have entered my Great Lines To Steal list. But the rest of it I thought was pretty blah. What was fascinating though was watching the other actors on screen finding Bill Murray funny. One shot had William Atherton, as the health inspector, in a OTS where Murray had his back to the camera. I don't know what Murray was doing - because we can't see his face - but Atherton was fighting hysterical giggles whenever he looked at him. The shot didn't sit well in the scene as Atherton's character was supposedly angry and aggressive at the time. he same thing happens in a similar shot with Sigourney Weaver - but she's supposed to be laughing so it works.


Laserblast (MST3K) - again.


Christmas on Mars ( 2008 ) - Low budget art SF film that looks good, sounds great, and has a weird otherness that makes you keep watching - but fails to be truly wonderful because the script, if there was one, is so thin as to make it near pointless. The Plot: Major Syrtis (the only obvious joke in the movie, folks) is living on Mars in a wonderfully realised junkyard of a base. This is what space stations will look like after a few years of habitation; it's a cobbled together, patched and repaired mess. It's what the spaceship in the SF movie that I'm never going to make looks like; the bastard offspring of Mir and Dark Star - anyway, back to the plot: It's Christmas eve 2055. The first baby on Mars is due to be born the next day. The 'oxygen generator' breaks down. Major Syrtis is organising a carol service but the man he has appointed to play Santa Claus is having hallucinations and runs out into the Martian surface wearing the Santa suit. He dies. An enigmatic (ie he has no dialogue) alien arrives and is told to put on the Santa suit. The enigmatic alien fixes the oxygen generator. The baby is born and the alien departs. The End. Christmas on Mars apparently took some seven years to shoot - a lot of it in sets built in the director's back garden and, though it looks wonderful, you would have thought that at some point over the seven years someone would have thought to write some dialogue that consisted of more than "Um..." and "Fuck!" I'm not against swearing. Far from it I think a good well-placed expletive can work fucking wonders. But when erm... every fucking line in the fucking movie is fucking um.. well... um... fucked up. Then... you know. Um.... er... you know - fuck it! This may be the way people talk in real life but movies aren't real life. Even movies that look like real life don't look like real life really looks. Even on Mars.


The Hapiness Cage (1972) - aka The Demon Within, The Mind Snatcher. A very young Christopher Walken gets his personality wiped in a very stagy set-bound adaptation of a play in the Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest vein. Not badly done but very wordy.

Normal Service Will Be Resumed Soon - Honest.

We Had Shepherd's Pie For Lunch... It Didn't Smell This Time...

I like books to have indexes.  Very useful, sometime interesting in their own right, and occasionally funny too - the indexes to Joe Queenan's If You Are Talking to Me your Career Must be in Trouble and Rich Hall's Things Snowball are particularly fun.   I think all books should have indexes - even fiction. (Especially fiction over 300 pages with more than four characters.)
Therefore imagine my teeth gnashing today when I was looking for a recipe for moussaka for tea and I came across this in Elizabeth David's Italian Food:

'Mousaka, 268'

I turn to page 268

'Considering that aubergines have been cultivated in Italy since the fifteenth century, it is odd that the Italians have evolved a dish of aubergines half as good as the Balkan moussaka...'

  - and that's it.  The only reference to moussaka in the whole damn book!

What IS the point?   What is the bloody point?

Oh Look - Sterile Fluff.

Me:
Daisy, Did I hear Mum shouting at you?

Daisy:
No, She was just telling me something in a very loud voice.

Tonight Daisy did dancing for us. This is her dancing the opening of The Wizard of Oz to the incidental music of Lawrence of Arabia.

I have spent most of today trying not to think of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson (in full Noel Coward, Brief Encounter mode) delivering The Human League's Don't You Want Me Baby

"You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when I met you."

It's really starting to annoy me

Another Small Snippet From The Screen-Play of My Life (No. 67)

Tonight, a pub meal down at the Laroch: (we have guests and no food)

Holly:
You know that the sign for water is H2O?

Me:
Yes.

Holly:
Is the sign for ice H2O cubed?

I'm back. I've just spent the last couple of weeks down at Merriol's parents, doing very little apart from play with the kids sleep too much, wander around charity shops buying books records and DVDs. I had a great time. Unfortunately I still managed to find time to watch a lot of bad films when no one was looking....

July

1. Monty Python and the Holy Grail - for reasons which I will explain later.
2. Krull - One of the dullest 'fantasy' films I know. Everything is so fucking ponderously slow... and I had to keep biting my lip and stop the MST3K type rifftrack that was bursting to get out of me because daughter number one was hooked ("I told you there would be kissing!") and it's one of Mrs JM's sacred childhood memories. But now I'm alone at the computer with none of my family shushing me or giving me 'stop pulling the ears off my teddy bear' glares...
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. The Alien Factor - The second film I have seen directed by Baltimore's other trash movie director, Don Dohler (the first, and much better one, is John Walters). I titled the review of the first Dohler movie; 'I would Rather Eat Other People's Earwax Than Watch This Piece of Drek Again'. Same goes for this one. Full of painfully long sequences where nothing happens, very slowly, usually showing various non-characters walking uphill through the woods, sometimes towards the camera, sometimes away - versatile director, our Don - and usually followed by the exact same sequence of shots shown in the reverse order with the characters running away from whatever they just found. The director must have been endlessly telling his 'actors' to 'walk to the top and then run back down as if something is chasing you'. Still, I had fun spotting the continuity errors and the shots made on the days when the 'heavy snow' mentioned so often in the script had melted. And I did learn one trick which I will remember when I come to direct a cheap movie about people getting ate by aliens in the woods. Make all your characters wear blue jeans, then shoot a few shots of someone's (anyone's) legs walking through weeds. It will cut in anywhere!
4. Fitzcarraldo (1982) - you know, sometimes you just have to put aside all the lesbian Bee girls, and rubber suit swamp monsters, and killer gorillas, and all that other good stuff and just watch Klaus Kinski going insane up a South American river for two and a half hours. The whole winching the boat up the hillside sequence was terrifying. I really wish I had seen this on the big screen.
5. Burden of Dreams (1982) - a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo. Turns out the reason the sequence showing the hauling the boat over the mountainside was so terrifying was because it was terrifying. The designer of the pulley system they used gave it a 70% chance of failing with a 'catastrophic' loss of life unless the film makers made changes. They didn't. He quit.
6. Phase IV (1974) - Much much better than I expected, this is the only feature film directed by Saul Bass, Oscar winning designer of animated title sequences (The Man With the Golden Arm, Psycho, Vertigo, Spartacus, Goodfellas etc.). After some (unexplained) cosmic event, desert ants start to demonstrate superior intelligence. Two scientists man a research base and attempt to communicate with them. This is what low budget movie making can be like. Basically the whole of the action of this movie takes place on one set, and one location. There are six actors seen on screen and four of them don't say much (one doesn't say anything before getting himself killed). And ants. There are a lot of ants. In super huge close up. Don't watch this if you don't like ants. I was very itchy at the end of it. The ending, after man and ant have come to some sort of understanding, is one of those enigmatic, post 2001: A Space Odyssey, looking forward to a possible bright new future for Mankind endings (sunrise and all) which were so popular at the time in SF movies. I like this kind of ending. It's optimistic without being patronising. All the plot lines and twists aren't ironed out and presented fully resolved, it leaves the viewer with the job of supplying their own ideas, it treats the audience as if it has some kind of smarts and isn't just popcorn-chewing, seat-buying fodder. (The fact that this isn't the director's original ending but was imposed by the Producer, is even more remarkable because - as I understand it - the director did originally want to cross a lot more Ts and dot a lot more Is for us.) And when did 'Possible Bright New Future' endings (must come up with a good pithy acronym for this) replace the old 'There Are Some Things Man is Not Meant To Know' endings of the 30s 40's and 50's. Was it 2001? I need to watch more movies to find out.....
7. Bee Story - the less said about this the better..
8. Idaho Transfer (1973) - So, back to the 1970s SF... Idaho Transfer is a time travel story in which a group of young students travel some 60 years into their future to find a post-apocalyptic wasteland. They don't make them like this any more. During the course of the story the heroine accidentally kills her much more sympathetic sister and ends dying herself when she is shoved into the fuel tank of a car by a passing motorist who finds her starving at the side of the road. Hardly a 'Possible Bright New Future' ending but not the pat Hollywood happy ending that would have been nailed on by the suits these days. Featuring a cast of mostly unknown or unprofessional actors who, for the most part, never did anything else. Slow and horribly dated in parts (Hippies never age well) this is a strangely disturbing little movie.
9. Mesa of Lost Women (1953) - a candidate for the most annoying soundtrack ever recorded. I first watched this film five years ago (IMDb comments). It hasn't got any better since.
10. Tank Girl (1995) - Almost against my better judgement I like the Tank Girl comics. They're stupid, violent, rude, and pointless but they are pure trash fun. The film is not. It's stupid right enough, (a bit) violent, (a bit) rude, and certainly pointless but it's not fun. Maybe the character was doomed to fail on the screen after all beer swilling, kangaroo snogging, tank driving, punkoid lad-ettes aren't that common in Hollywood films and the attempt to fill out the character, give her a back story and make her spend the last part of the movie running around trying to save a little girl from the clutches of the evil corporation is just pure formula bullshit imposed on an uncontrollable anarchic character*. The tank ends up as just another piece of window dressing. In the books it is a major part of Tank Girl's life (She lives in it. Hell, she even gets pregnant by it!). The film makers doubly nail their heads the coffee table of fortune's hostage (I lost control of that metaphor in the middle somewhere) by using a lot of Jamie Hewlett's original art in the movie, both in the opening credit sequence and, from time to time, intercut into the action. "It's wild!" You can almost hear the director telling the producers. "It's Wacky! Wild and 'With it'!" - Wrong! All it does is remind the audience how wonderfully inventive the comic was, and shows up how predictably pedestrian the film is. Bad move.
    
    
    
    
    * I know the marketing of a movie has very little to do with the making of a movie but the systems mishadling of the character is summed up most neatly by the movie's tag line: "In 2033, justice rides a tank and wears lip gloss." Tank Girl wasn't about Justice! It was about beer, and fags, and having sex with kangaroos, and playing baseball with live hand grenades.
11. Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987) - yet another adaptation of Richard Connell's short story "The Most Dangerous Game".
    
    First published in 1924, The Most Dangerous Game tells of a big-game hunter from New York, who falls off a yacht and swims to an isolated island in the Caribbean, there he is hunted by an insane Russian aristocrat who, bored with hunting animals, has taken up hunting human beings, the most dangerous animal of them all. The story has been reworked and adapted endlessly since it first hit the screens in the 1932 version starring Joel MaCrea which was, reputedly, shot at night on the jungle set of King Kong. There have been at least eight feature film versions since. This one is almost certainly the first to feature androids, mutant jungle beasts, and quite so much Victoria's Secret lingerie - often in the same shot.
    
    
    
    
    The other set.
    
    
12. Sex Madness ( 1938 ) - Oho! Cheap 1930's sex exploitation film which hammers home its message with a badly edited sledghammer. and some wonderfully over the top hammy acting. It does for STDs what Reefer Madness does for dope. After starting off clumsily setting up several posibly interesting, suitably sordid and lurid storylines; Lesbian seduction, M type child murderer driven to kill by a flash of knickers in a burlesque show, the son of the town's biggest blue nose reformer attending a drunken orgy with a fast chorus girl, the movie suddenly throws them all out of the window and we follow the trials and tribulations of Milicent, a chorine who, having won a beauty contest, goes to New York, gets the clap, then returns home to give a dose to her innocent childhood sweetheart. The film returns to the blue-noses' son towards the the end and the scene where he confesses to his father that he too is... gulp! 'a victim' has some of the most hilariously wooden acting I have seen for ages.
    
    The sound quality of the copy available here gave me one of the best unintentional laughs of the night. It took me several replays before I finally understood that the innocent Millicent wasn't telling her doctor:
    
    
    
    Millicent:
    Oh, it's just the usual sort of
    a story I suppose. After the contest
    was over I thought of all the
    wonderful things a girl ever dreams
    about - Fame! - and Fortune!
    - and Luncheon Meat!
    
    
    (It's at about 18 minutes in if you want to work out what she's saying for yourself.)
    
    
    
    
    Re-edited several times, and released under a variety of titles to gull the gullable ( aka Human Wreckage, They Must Be Told, Trial Marriage, About Trial Marriage... ) Sex Madness was the almost shot for horrendious line crossing shot 'inspiration' for the Social Disease! section of the very variable Amazon Women of the Moon.
13. Grease - I don't like Grease. I thinks it is a vastly overated film which, apart from Eve Arden and Stockard Channing (Hubba hubba!)*, has very little going for it at all - apart from making John Walters' Cry Baby and Hairspray look even better. Holly was entranced, though I'm glad she didn't ask too many questions about the lyrics:
    
    
    
    Quote:

    You know that ain't no shit we'll be getting lots of tit In Grease Lightning Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go Go grease lightning you're burning up the quarter mile (Grease lightning go grease lightning) Go grease lightning you're coasting through the heat lap trial You are supreme, the chicks'll cream for grease lightning Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go Purple french Tail lights and thirty inch fins oh yeah A Palomino dashboard and duel muffler twins oh yeah With new pistons, plugs, and shocks I can get off my rocks You know that I ain't bragging she's a real pussy wagon Grease lightning

    "Daddy? What's a 'pussy wagon'?"
    
    
    *(Just want to point out that that 'hubba hubba' is just for Ms. Channing alone, not Eve Arden, nice woman I'm sure she was.)
14. X ( 19xx ) - It's not called 'X' but just to prolongue MrBaliHai's enjoyment over at NameThatFilm I'm not revealing the name of this one just yet. - 'Brilliant' but cocky snot-nosed teenager with attidude is sent to the mysterious Psychological Institute just outside of town. We know he's a genius because his idea of fun is flushing half a pound of 'pure sodium' down the school's toilet to make them explode. He does scientific japes, see? Got to be clever. This is also the movie's idea of foreshadowing - that and all the 'Danger Sodium is used in this area!' signs all over the boiler room we know is destined to be the scene of the climax - every wall has at least one just in case any got lost in the final edit) At the Psychological Institute just outside of town our 'hero' discovers that the creepy doctor running it (and hypnotising the local population via his TV show) is in cahoots with a giant brain (complete with teeth, googly eyes, and a prehensile spinal column). With the help of his girlfriend and another more disposable male friend with a terrible mullet he destroys the brain just before the TV show goes nationwide. (Actually he does it alone, the bad mullet gets eaten by the brain (sic) after being somewhat useless, and the girlfriend gets TV hypnotised and chained to a pipe.) Made in Canada, X tries for weird unease and creeping visceral horror but blows it by throwing the monster at the screen within minutes and leaving itself nowhere to go. It looks like a cheesy low-budget David Cronenberg wanabee (One Cronenberger with cheese to go!) and ticks many of my favourite bad movie cliche boxes: Disembodied brains, gratuitous nudity, movies made in Canada always being set around Christmas*, prolonged chases up and down the same two stairwells (though no one did that leaping over the railing thing that has always baffled me), lousy location sound, and women doing that 'backing up to perfectly flat walls for no other reason that to have hands suddenly come bursting though the wallpaper to grab them' thing - I never can have enough of that.
    
    Or these...
    
    

    *Snow. As I have said before, the only reason for snow in a movie is that it's Christmas. The Christmassness in this movie is minimal. One brief snatch of Christmas music over a car radio, and a discarded Christmas tree on the sidewalk outside the hero's house in the dénouement. It's a measure of the movie's cheapnesss that in the final long shot of the street - in which we see the hero's garbage set out for collection - that his is the only house with a pile of garbage outside it. Either our hero's family are incredibly tidy and have their garbage out long before any of their neighbours - or the production company was so strapped for cash they couldn't afford more than one pile of empty cardboard boxes to dress the location.
15. The Saint (1997) - Do do di do doo doo doooooooo.... See Val Kilmer wear wigs! See Van Kilmer wear false moustaches! See Van Kilmer do funny foreigner accents! See Val Kilmer bore the pants off the audience! What a plod of a movie. What should have been a jolly James Bond meets Diabolik piece of fun turned into a long trudge of 116 minutes worth of bollocks as, on behalf of the Russian Mafia, Val Kilmer steals the 'formula' for cold fusion from a beautiful lady scientist (who keeps it tucked into her bra) and then changes his mind (when he discovers he quite likes what else she keeps in there as well). When was the last time anyone seriously built a movie around the only copy of a professor's secret formula written on a piece of paper? This is 1940's serial plotting - not in itself a bad thing, many an enjoyable movie has been built around recycling paper-thin ideas from paper-thin movies but few have taken themselves so deadly, ponderously, bum-numbingly seriously as this one does. Anyway. Not many complication ensue. Good triumphs over evil. The dénouement seems to take half the length of the movie again but I will remember it slightly fondly for one brief moment of classic bad movie acting. The Saint includes the most incredibly crap 'baddies telling each other the details of how clever they have been in their evil scheming just so the audience can hear' scene outside of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, "He! He! He!" type evil laughing and all. Who would have guessed all the heating oil for all of Russia had been syphoned off into a tank under the baddies' palatial hideout? Who indeed? And who but the Russian Mafia would happily discuss such things as Val Kilmer, disguised as a cleaning lady, plants a bug in their evil headquarters? Elisabeth Shue was pretty.

A new cartoon - First one I have done for months.


(It's not very good.)

New Word of the Day

Lycanthropithy - n. Concise werewolves.






I'll get my coat.

Finally got to the posh fish place for our delayed anniversary nosh last night, at five minutes before they shut and had a slap-up feed. Came home and had one of those horrendous loss of control, powerlessness dreams. Even though I had my back to all of the diners in the restaurant (apart from Merriol of course) and didn't see a single langoustine, even the close proximity of shellfish gives me nightmares.

In the dream I was somehow transported back to dull horrible Post-War 1947 Britain wearing my normal everyday 2009 clothes and, for some reason I can't remember, carrying a huge digital camera. After the usual horrible dream running around for a while getting chased by people, I realised I was stuck in 1947 and would have to find some way of making a living. I didn't even have any coins in my pockets (not that that would have done me any good because in 1947 they were still using Pounds, Shillings, and Pence). All I could think of were all the things I knew about the future: Buy IMB, Elvis and The Beatles would be really big, Superman's real name was Kal-El, Paul Foot would never be Prime Minister... but Ronald Reagan would become President of the USA - and I had absolutely no idea of how to exploit any of these fact because, though I knew how all of these things did happen, I had no idea how or why any of these things happened.
I had no idea how to buy IMB shares in 1947 (buying shares in Britain was, in those days, a game exclusively for the rich and semi-rich and played by an old-boys network to which I could never gain entrance.) Placing bets with huge odds on the result of (to me) foregone conclusions was a non-starter too as there were no betting shops until the 1960s. It was doubtful whether a backstreet bookie would even take an (illegal) bet on the outcome of the next US Presidential Election (Harry S Truman), let alone pay up when I won. I was stuffed. I woke up horrified about how shallow my knowledge is.

Meanwhile, over on the Name That Film (from an obscure still) Group over on Flickr, this screen capture which I had posted:

was correctly identified within minutes as coming from Monty Python and The Holy Grail.

I am not alone.

Just spent the last 36 hours in bed with a bug. Nothing to do with sea food - we never got there. So for tonight's entry read the last one apart from the Happy birthday America bit. That's gone.

Happy Birthday America, Happy Wedding Anniversary Us.

Merriol and I are going out. Together. Alone. No Kids. We are going out for a meal together, alone, with no kids. It's our seventh wedding anniversary. Merriol wants to do something 'a bit special' to mark the occasion. My initial suggestion of double helpings of macaroni cheese and chips at Tesco's cafe was not greeted with the unalloyed pleasure I was expecting. Apparently double helpings of macaroni cheese and chips at Tesco's cafe is not something enough. I have no idea what the particular 'something' it isn't is, as Merriol's disapproval of my plan was mostly expressed non-verbally, and from a different room. So we're going here instead, which is the best sea food place for miles.

Because it is a sea food place, Merriol is bound to order some giant multi-legged horror* and make slurping noises as she sucks the quivering flesh from its way too many legs while I stare at the picture on the wall behind her head, trying to eat my meal without looking down in case I catch a glimpse of whatever it is she's eating. (Please god, let them do steaks! - or macaroni cheese.) Gnyaaaa! I hate shellfish, especially the too many legged varieties. The snots in boxes I can cope with - just - but the scuttling buggers? no way.

I hope she's not planning on sex afterwards.



*Lobster, crayfish, earwig, something like that.

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

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


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

   "It will fill you with the joy of life"

   Quote:

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

   and the scary:
   Quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    
    

    
    
    

    has to tell these two people, playing nuclear scientists
    

    
    
    
    

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

    
    

    
    
    

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

    
    

    
    
    
    
    
    
    

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

    
    

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

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

    
    

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


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

    Cut to:
    
    

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


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

    Cut to:
    
    

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

    Cut to:

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

    Dr. Beaumont:
    
    Who are you?
    

    
    

    Dracula:
    
    Keep driving, I will tell you where.
    
    

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

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

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

    
    

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