I found it in Daddy's pocket - so it's MINE!

Oh god! another month gone and all I have done that's worth mentioning to the world is watch a load of crappy movies... Well.... er... I defrosted the freezer today - that's about as exciting as it gets around here at the moment. Actually it was quite exciting. Eben has a mania for shutting doors at the moment and that includes freezer doors, even when Daddy has his head in the way.

Every crappy movie I have watched in September with copious opinionated bletherings and a couple of pictures of under-dressed women.

1. Next (2007) - I think I've found my Turd of the Month already and it's only the 2nd. I really have to stop watching Nic Cage movies. It was his turn to fuck up a perfectly good Philip K Dick story (I'm sure there's a list list in some Hollywood producer's office and Dick's stories are dished out to people to go screw up; "Nic, How you doing? Listen, I got a 30 page short story here about a post-nuclear war world in which genetic mutations are ruthlessly suppressed. The first Homo Superior is discovered: a lion-maned, golden-furred, totally silent creature that appears to have the ability to see into the future - it'll make a great modern day action thriller with French terrorists planting a nuclear bomb in LA. Sound good? Let's talk.") The only things that have survived the trip from page to screen are the characters name and the foresight gimmick. The rest is pure Hollywood bullshit. At least it was short. 96 minutes.
   Barbarella ( 1968 ) - a masterpiece of High Trash. - well if you can High Art, why can't you have High Trash? Total nonsense from start to finish with a paper thin plot as ultra-hotty space bimbo Barbarella:

   
   
   

   is assigned to track down missing scientist Durand Durand (sic - Simon le Bon got it wrong) but you don't watch Barbarella for the story, you watch Barbarella for the opening sequence where Jane Fonda gets naked in free fall, you watch it for the scene where Durand Durand (still sic) has Barbarella strapped into his Excessive Machine, planning to kill her with pleasure - but the machine gives up first and bursts into flames, much to Durand's distress. "Have you no shame!" You watch it for incredible dialogue like this exchange as Barbarella is shown her winged lover dangling spread-eagled from a frame:
   
   

   Barbarella: (Holding a ray pistol to the Great Tyrant's head) De-crucify the angel! The Great Tyrant: What? Barbarella: De-crucify him or I'll melt your face!

   
   You watch it because it's unalloyed pleasure from start to finish. Pointless, decadent, excessive, sexy and cheesy in equal measure without a single message or subtext - and now the usual fuckwits are doing a remake.


2. The Odd Couple ( 1968 ) - I love watching Walter Matthau's face.


3. Mission Stardust (1967) - aka ...4 ...3 ...2 ...1 ...morte - a brilliant title for a terrible film. A rewatch and it was as dreadful as I remember but with a wonderful last line which I fully expect to come across sampled on a Kid Koala track one day. "The experiment has begun..."


4. The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) - a lot duller and ropier than I remembered.


5. Warriors of the Wasteland (1982) - Before it was a Frankie Goes to Hollywood track Warriors of the Wastelands was the title of this awful semi-homophobic/erotic Mad Max rip off.
   
   In a post-apocalyptic future (2019) a gang of ruthless religious psycho-faggots called the Templars kill everything that moves whilst wearing resprayed costumes from Starlight Express. Opposing them is one man, Scorpio, and his weird stalker boyfriend who has the endearing habits of firing explosive arrows into people's heads and misreading his lines. Together with a blond, blue-eyed, pre-teen boy genius they eventually get round to slaughtering all the baddies - a task so ludicrously easy you wonder why they never bothered before. Lots of phallic pointy things come out of cars and are inserted into other cars, people, or just shoot things. The 'hero' is captured at one point and is anally raped by his former boyfriend in front of an admiring crowd of men standing to attention while wearing crash helmets. (Every other shot in this movie is of cheap sublimated penises.) In the end our hero, wearing leather trousers and some seriously kinky transparent body-armor kills the head bad guy by, literally - would I lie to you?, screwing him up the arse with a giant auger bit at 200 miles an hour!
   
   Never have I seen such lame car chases - it's hard to feel any tension when our hero and villain are fighting on top of a converted golf buggy hurtling along at - oh, I'd say at least three miles an hour. For a film that features vehicles hurtling along at 'breakneck' speeds it's remarkable how far people don't travel in this film. The whole thing looks like it was shot in a quarry in two days.


6. UFO: Target Earth (1974) - I like this film. I like it a lot. My copy came as a part of a 50 movie DVD pack of classic SF films that no one has ever heard of and, of the 30 or so movies in there that are actually watchable, this is the one I keep coming back to - some are just too fucking awful to sit through, even for a battle hardened crap movie veteran like myself. (We have pissing contests you know, "You watched The Alpha Incident? Chicken feed! I watched Evil Brain from Outer Space! Beat that, looser!" ) UFO: Target Earth is a truly bewildering movie. It is transcendent. Somewhere along the way it stops being a bad film and sends the viewer a hypnotic trance-like state in which you are almost convinced there could be some point to watching it in the first place if you had even the slightest clue what the hell was going on. I have watched it several times now and I'm constantly amazed by its awe dropping incomprehensibility. It has a couple of starts, a lot of middle and an overextended end but none of them appear to be connected in any way. One of the wonderful techniques writer director Michael A. DeGaetano uses to create his overwhelming sense of otherness is his invention of 'the incredible budget-slashing one-sided telephone conversation shot' in which we get to watch, and listen to, long held shots of a secondary character holding a telephone to their ear and talking to our hero who is not only never seen but also never heard. I don't know whether this was a deliberate attempt to bring some kind of documentary-like verisimilitude to the show or whether the actor playing the lead had become so fed up with the shoot that he had just fucked off home and was unavailable for any insert shots but it's beautifully dreadful stuff.
   
   
   
   
   
   

   INT: NIGHT OR DAY, (WHO KNOWS?): NOISY COMPUTER ROOM. The room is a vast hall full of wardrobe sized computers with big whirling cartwheels of magnetic tape. This is a real location. Not a set. Cut to: Close up of a noisy dot-matrix printer printing out something scientific-ish - for a very long time... (16 seconds - I counted.) Cut to: Close up on assistant scientist sat at a desk with a telephone handset crushed to his ear. "Yeah, we're printing out your data now to see how your fixes are plotted... how's it look?... it looks wild, man, really wild... " Cut to: Close up of the noisy dot-matrix printer still churning away. (Assistant continuing over) "...Yeah, we should have a pretty good idea about where you should place your sensors... Cut to: Close up on assistant: " ... exactly ... yeah on the opposite side of the lake ... you know as far away from the camp-site as possible ... umm hmmm ... yep ... just a minute ... (he looks up and holds out the receiver) He wants to talk to you ... " Cut to: Looming face of elderly female scientist. She takes the phone and slows the action right down by doing some 'real, long pause listening' acting between her speeches - which she reads off the script cunningly disguised as the computer printout she's holding in her hand. "Alan, I want to know, and if you can't be absolutely scientific in your answer at least be calm ... did the old woman actually report a break up of lights? ... hmm ... and the structural steel discolourations ... could that be the metaphysical mind of your companion at work? ... (look of concern - or constipation - comes over her face) ... there are guards? ... and no report from the army ... hmmmm ... yes ... I'd like to report this to Dr. Wheeler ... unofficially of course ... I'll tell him you phoned ... cha ... cha ... I know, I know all of that but I just can't ... you can do it without me ... you don't need me ... yes ... I understand all that and thank you but I can't ... I'll keep an eye on the printouts here and if you need more help I'll see what I can do ... yes ... yes, I'll think about it, Alan ... I'll think about it ... all right ... goodbye. Cut to: Another few seconds of riveting, full on, dot-matrix action

   
   
   
   Of all that verbiage the only thing that is of any import to the plot is the bit about Alan placing his sensors "on the opposite side of the lake" because it vaguely sets up Alan going across the lake to do something unexplained while something incomprehensible happens to his female friend back at the camp-site.
   
   Who the hell 'Dr Wheeler' is is a total mystery - this is the only time he's mentioned and doesn't appear in the credits. Maybe the actor playing him fucked off home before he got on the set.
   
   Most of the people who appeared in this film never made another movie. Whoever was playing Dr Wheeler was lucky - he managed to avoid appearing in this one.
   
   
7. Cherry 2000 (1988 ) - Dang! Missed it by that much. Cherry 2000 is one of those movies that almost makes it. Stuffed full of weirdy goodness but never quite jelling. In a post (unspecified) apocalyptic world, a recycling manager from Anaheim goes in search of a replacement for his Stepford Wife like sex robot which fritzed out while he was making love to it on the wet kitchen floor. The only known supply of this particular model, the Cherry 2000 of the title, is located in a semi-buried casino somewhere in desert badlands. The badlands are controlled by a band of psychopaths who wear a natty line in Hawaiian shirts and pastel shorts and, when they are not shooting people in the head or throwing them off cliffs, are more than happy to dance the Hokey Cokey and eat sandwiches. To guide him across this dangerous terrain our hero hires Melanie Griffiths who wears a red wig and drives an early sixties Ford Mustang. Let the endless car crashes and gunplay begin....
   
   It's as bonkers as it sounds and it almost works. Reminded me more than a little of Circuitry Man and Buckeroo Banzii. It had that same funny deadpan oddness about the script. It's the sort of movie Tank Girl should have been. Some stunning locations, great stunt work and inspired (but weird) production design helped, but in the end it sinks under the usual B movie tropes of endless gunplay and the millions of disposable goons who couldn't hit their own face with a brick.
   
   
8. The Sisterhood (1988 ) - Dear mother of god! What a terrible film. In a post-apocalyptic future the usual Mad Maxims apply. Bands of warriors, mutants, battered vehicles, a 'Forbidden Zone', machinery left in an underground bunker for hundreds of years starting at the touch of a button, blah blah blah, all the usual shit. This time though a band of free warrior women in hotpants and gold painted plastic headbands roam free defying the normal Gorian rules.
   
   It may have just been the dreadful transfer on the DVD I watched (which looked like it was taken from a much played VHS copy) but the sound on this picture is dreadful. You really could tell the sound guys did not have a clue where to point the mike. People's voices disappeared into inaudible mumbles whenever they turned away from the camera, people in long shot were having to scream their lines to be heard, and anyone on horseback was drowned out by the clatter of the horses' hooves, even when the horses were at rest and the riders were having one of their tedious exposition laden conversations. Every time I watch a crappy movie I try to come away having learnt something. (One of these days my Premium Bonds are going to come up and I'll be free to make my own crappy movie.) Today I learned if you are shooting a conversation between scantily clad underachieving actresses sat on horseback you put a fucking blanket on the ground for the horses to stand on and point the fucking microphone at the actresses' fucking faces! Advice I shouted at the screen several times but the director took no notice.
   
   I also learned that I can watch no end of shit if it features sweaty women toting semi-automatic weapons.





Special praise has to go to one Jun Latonio who produced the incredibly dreadful 'original music' for the film - presumably by stealing the sound guys' good microphone and recording various video arcade games while he played them for a few hours.


9. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? - meh!


10. Il ritorno di Clint il solitario (1972) - aka The Return of Clint the Stranger and There's a Noose Waiting for You Trinity! and so on and so forth. A plodding spaghetti/paella western saved only by Klaus Kinski and Ennio Morricone who could, I suspect, between them save anything. Screw Chuck Norris. Even when they are obviously just doing it for the money and going through the motions (as they are here) they're still better than 90% of the material they work on. This had all the hallmarks of one of those films that no one gave a shit about.


11. 42nd Street (1933, or 1932, depending whether you believe the opening or the end credits) - I introduce daughter number one to Busby Berkeley. Number one daughter is delighted, "This is ridiculous!". I spot a previously un(IMDb)listed continuity error - the door number on an apartment changes between shots. I am a deeply sad, sad, sad man.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    One of the extras on the DVD was a contemporary short puffing the movie and contains snippets from the title finale number - including a couple of shots of this guy who didn't make the final cut. I can only presume the footage was from a rough cut or pre-release edit. The shot of the two boys dancing in front of the theatre, off to this guy's left (screen right), that appears a few moments later is different from the released version too.


12. Die Screaming Marianne (1970) - I've been reading a lot of interviews with, and conversation between, film directors recently; one thing keeps coming up, time after time, when well kent directors talk about the craft/art of directing and editing. They'll often refer to the 'rhythms' or 'beats' of a movie. I'm still really not totally sure I understand what they mean but I sure as hell know when it's missing. Die Screaming Marianne hasn't got a rhythm. It manages to both meander and stutter along simultaneously, some shots are held far too long, others seem to be cut ludicrously and abruptly short. An incredibly long 90+ minutes in which one of the villain's shirts is more horrifying than anything else that appears on screen.

You would have thought I would have been bored stupid by this by now but my on off stop start up down obsession with Lidl's packaging continues unabated:

The Great German Fruit Photograph Shortage part 34.7.

There is apparently only one picture of white grapes available to Lidl's design team. They've cunningly tried to disguise this fact by using it mirrored and slightly reduced in size on the mixed juice carton but here at JunkMonkey mansions we pride ourselves on spotting such things. (If we didn't pride ourselves on such things we would have to admit we we were sad obsessives with nothing else to do over the breakfast table but stare at cereal and juice cartons and try to join the dots.)

And talking of obsessive compulsive

It's Movie Time!

1. Hustler Squad (1976) - a tacky, low-budget Philippino version of The Dirty Dozen - with tits! WW2. Four women with nothing to loose are recruited and trained to infiltrate a secret island brothel deep in the heart of Japanese occupied Somewhere Vague in the Pacific. Their mission: to kill four high ranking Japanese officers who will be there for a bit of R&R. What a boring movie. Next time I'll check my facts before I part with my hard earned 50p at a car boot sale. I got confused and thought I was buying Hell Squad - in which a group of Las Vegas showgirls undergo commando training and organize a rescue operation when a diplomat's son is kidnapped by terrorists. An easy mistake.


2. Clash of the Titans (1981) - years since I've seen this and it has grown better than I remember it. Some wonderfully restrained dreamlike stuff aided by some great music.


3. Fortress (1992) - More proof, if proof be needed, that seeing the words 'futuristic prison' should have you reaching for the eject button before you've even finished reading the blurb on the back of the box. Jesus wept! I'm sure there is a SF prison movie to be made but this is not it.
   
   The highlight of the movie for me was the moment when our genius hacker expendable character escapee sits in the control chair of the master computer. He's realised, before any of the other muscle-necked piles of sweaty testosterone that have escaped with him, that the computer is really running the whole show. He types frantically. After three attempts he has cracked the password. (This is despite the fact that the very supersmart AI with the sultry woman's voice knows that the escaped prisoners are in the control room. "Hmmm," thinks the AI. "One of my 'Neutron Cannons' just accidentally exploded into blue goo the only person authorised to sit in that chair; the room is full of escaped prisoners; but what the hey, they got the password right after three attempts - I'll let them overide everything..." ).
   
   Once he has gained access to the supercomputers' central core (DOS prompt and all) our hacker genius types something along the lines of "Load killer virus"... What? What killer virus? Nothing about any killer virus has ever been mentioned before now. Not a sausage. Not until the moment he starts typing anyway - making me think a) all computers in the future come with killer viruses ready installed and b) the scriptwriters were making it up as they went along. Anyway, the killer virus loads ('loads'?). The genius types 'execute' (making me think that the core of this thing is more likely to be a ZX Spectrum than anything else) when, suddenly, a bunch of zombie clone killer droids burst in and machine gun him from the chair. A dozen bullets rip through his torso. He falls forward. Our hero (it's Christopher Lambert - sorry) leaps up and blasts the zombie clone killer droids to bloo gue with his endlessly un-emptiable machine gun. Safe again for the moment they help the hacker up. Coughing blood he reaches to the keyboard - and hits the [Enter] key. The system crashes. In the hands of a grown up director this could have been an almost good joke, here it was just another piece of ineptness.
   
   And just how big is Christopher Lambert's forehead? it's huge! It's fascinatingly huge and very distracting. It's hard to take a Tefal Scientist seriously as an action hero.
   
   OMGA! * They made a sequel!?


4. Dream Demon (1988 ) - This film is the result of an incredibly expensive version of the old I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue game 'One Song to the Tune of Another'. It's as if Humphrey Littleton had got a day job as chairman of British Screen: "Okay team, I want you to shoot Nightmare on Elm Street to the tune of Eraserhead but made in the style of an expensive TV commercial.".
   
   Bride to be Diana (played by the least of the Redgraves, Jemma) has a bad dream, wakes up and tells someone about it. Then she has another bad dream and wakes up and tells someone about it. She has yet another bad dream and wakes up... after about an hour of this I started to get just a wee bitty bored but then something happened! Jenny had another bad dream and woke up... and then she woke up again! Oooh! I was that surprised, I nearly woke up.
   
   If IMDB is to believed (and who am I to doubt it), the actress playing one of the leads as a young girl was four years older than the actress playing her as a grown up. Strange, but possibly true....
   
   Best line: "No." (As delivered by Timothy Spall while eating a Chinese takeaway. I know I'm not giving much away about the context but trust me; it was almost mildly amusing.)


5. Red Sonja (1985) - Conan with tits (and possibly smaller than Schwarzenegger's). Dull sword and sorcery nonsense with some terrific costume design. I'll say one thing for Italian SF and Fantasy movies, the costumes are always great. Over the top, impractical, and possibly dangerous to wear - but they look great. Apart from the costume and set design, and Ennio Morricone's usual wonderful work on the soundtrack, there's not a lot else that's worth a second look.


6. Flash Gordon (1980) - more great looking nonsense from same producer and possibly same costume/production designer as Red Sonja. (I did go to look it up on IMDb but kept getting distracted by discovering things like the fact that Robbie Coltrain was in it. He played "Man at Airfield", a non-speaking part; and that the priest in the Arboria sequence - where the future Chief Scout of Britain, Peter Duncan, is being initiated into the tribe - is played by John Osborne, the author of Look Back in Anger). Classy trash heaven.


7. Lemora (1972) - An interesting, if ultimately less than satisfying, low budget Lovecraftian Southern Gothic vampire movie. Most of the cast never did much more than this one film - this is the Director's only film - all of which is a pity, because there is some good stuff in here; it's weird and eerie, dream-like and with just that little bit more of the elusive 'something' could have been a classic creepy movie. As it is it's an almost classic creepy movie which runs out of steam and finds it hard to disguise its limited budget at times.


8. Telstar: The Joe Meek Story (2008 ) - I watch a movie that's based on real life and has no spaceships in! (Well, okay, one but it does also contain men recording the sounds of coins being dropped into a toilet!- as if that makes up for anything.)
   
   
   
   
   
   And it's pretty damn close to being brilliant.


9. Repo Man (1984) - one of these days I'll get a decent copy of Repo Man, my VHS copy is getting a bit worn and tattered, if nothing else to see if there really is a scene I remember seeing once in which two characters talk about the joy of Doritos.


10. Wonder Man (1945) - Danny Kaye film which was nowhere as funny as I remember but much more colourful. I remember it being in black and white. It isn't.


11. Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God (2005) - I haven't laughed so much in ages. It was like a parody of every overblown bollocky pseudo-medieval teenwank fantasy cliché in the book (or - as is common in this genre - three books). I especially loved the villain, played by Bruce Payne, who so wonderfully personified evil by dressing in black, assuming a gay smirk, and then doing pure Joey Tribiani style "sniff your own farts" acting. Amazingly awful.


12. Detective Story (1951) - Kirk Douglas chewing up the scenery as he plays a tough, driven cop dealing with his inner demons and the astounding revelation that his wife had slept with someone before they were married. Nice moments from the supporting parts, a couple of whom were Oscar nominated, but the noise of Douglas' constipated gurnings just drowned them out.


13. Build My Gallows High (1947) - (aka Out of the Past) Classic Noir directed by the great Jacques Tourneur. One of those movies where the twists and double-crosses just keep coming and coming. In the end the writer had backed our hero into so many corners that the only way to get out of the movie was to have him die. So he did.


14. Mambo (1954) - Long forgotten Italian/American melodrama which has the odd moment of interest but which appears to have suffered badly at the hands of censors or distributors. The original run time was 110 minutes, the US release comes in at 94; fifteen plus minutes of something has disappeared. Shelley Winters' character looks to be an obvious victim of cuts. She plays the Lesbian leader of a dance troupe. We know she's a Lesbian because she has short hair, wears trousers, and is called 'Toni' - how many more hints do you need? Towards the start of the film, the heroine (Giovanna) and Toni are sitting together in a train. When Giovanna suddenly gets up to leave, Toni reaches out to stop her only to have her hand is angrily brushed aside. It's just a moment, but a very obvious one, and it hints at a much deeper relationship between the two characters than is delivered in the prolonged flashback that immediately follows. Giovanna joins Toni's troup after she is raped by a count and spurns the avaricious manipulative sleeze-bag boyfriend who set her up. Giovanna definitely goes off men in a big way. But instead of enjoying any deeply romantic and / or physical relationship with Giovanna, Shelley's character is reduced to a few shots of gazing adoringly at her from the wings, and a few routine moments of generic hard-driving, hard-driven backstage impresario acting. (Think Warner Baxter in 42nd Street and Anton Walbrook in the Red Shoes.)
    

    
    
    
    
    The showdown between the two women, when Toni forces Giovanna to choose between her dancing career (and, by implication, Toni herself), and the low-life ex-rape-setting-up lover who has just walked back into her life, makes very little sense without there having been any deeper relationship between the two women. Especially as Toni, having been rejected, rushes off in a state of distress and dies under the wheels of a speeding car - leaving the whole audience to sit there and wonder, "Where did that come from? Talk about over-reacting!". Giovanna, having seen her girlfriend squished under the wheels of a car goes to live with the sleeze-bag - then marries the count (who, being a haemophiliac dies when sleeze-bag gets into a fist fight with him) before maybe wondering if being a dancer is what she really wanted to be all along and rejoining the dance troupe. Jeeso! Make your mind up, girl!
    
    Not terrible but not really worth resurrecting as a long forgotten classicut don't take my word for it, go watch it for yourself. It's out of copyright and downloadable here: http://www.archive.org/details/mambo


15. Mary Poppins (1964) - another of those films I have avoided for years but, after recently reading the book which I found to be quite odd and charming, and yielding to daughter number one's request for "Musicals with real people made in the last century." (Eight year old girls are weird) we sat down as a family to watch it. It was better than I was expecting and Dick Van Dykes' car crash of a (was it supposed to be Cockney?) accent was scab pickingly fascinating. I could have done with less singing and more story and daughter number one was disappointed that several favourite scenes from the book didn't make it to the screen.

*British internet slang: OMGA - 'Oh My Giddy Aunt!'

Another Snapshot from the Screenplay of my Life:

We're in Sheffield. All of us. It's an annual ritual variously named (depending on which of us you talk to) as 'Do we have to?' or 'A holiday'.

Part of the holiday - just in case there was any doubt about which camp I belong to* - usually involves a humungous amount of time traipsing around Meadowhall, shopping our socks off. Living in a wee, out of the way village in the picturesque splendour of the Scottish Highlands going and getting bombarded by a full, throttle in-yer-face onslaught of Western Consumerism is sometimes quite refreshing - for a bit.

After a couple of hours of relentless shopping. Daisy and I got fed up. Merriol and Holly were tenaciously and methodically working their way through the sale rails of the already incredibly cheap Primark and had about another three acres to go. So Daisy and I found somewhere outside (and a little cooler) to wait for them to emerge:

INT. SHOPPING CENTRE. DAY

Daisy:
Where shall we go Daddy?

Me:
Let's just sit here and watch people.
They're fascinating. They're all different.

Daisy:
...and they're top of the food chain!

FADE TO BLACK.

* did I get away with it?

Blog posts to be avoided number 137.

The more than usually large number of movies I have watched this month:

June

1. Astro Zombies (1967) - for some reason I find watching John Carradine endlessly twiddle knobs and talk total pseudo-technobabble hypnotically fascinating. Every time I watch this movie there comes a moment when I start to doubt my sanity. Tonight it was the in the scene where John C and his (of course) hunchbacked assistant are preparing a corpse for revivification. I realised for the first time that the unexplained but very shiny piece of low budget equipment they were having obvious trouble strapping to his head is in fact - a lampshade. I was watching two grown men strapping a lampshade to someone's head.


2. Android Apocalypse (2006) - Made for TV 'movie' set in the future where, after an unexplained ecological disaster which has left the whole world looking like a sand quarry in Canada, humankind lives, protected from the wasteland outside, in domed cities. A lowly manual worker is fired from his job and replaced by an android. The lowly worker hates androids; all his friends hate androids. The lowly worker kills an android in a fight and is sent to gaol chained to... go on, guess... yes, an android! (What a plot twist!) Anyhow the van in which they are being transported gets attacked by giant flying robots and they escape still chained together to be relentlessly pursued by... blah blah blah... What starts out as a updated version of The Humanoids, segues into a SFy version of The Defiant Ones, and then just descends into the usual explosionfest-driven melodrama in which abandoned cities ("What is this place?" "An abandoned city") are well stocked with piles of empty cardboard boxes for our heroes and villains to drive their 2004 model Jeeps into*.
   
   Now a little competition:
   
   You too can be a Hollywood (Canada) Scriptwriter!
   
   Here's the final shot of the movie: Android and lowly manual worker (no longer chained together), and lowly manual worker's wife are standing heroically looking down at the smouldering ruins of the evil android overlord's destroyed headquarters.
   
   
   

   EXT. DESERT. DAY Lowly Manual Worker's Wife: (To husband, indicating the android) Who is he? Lowly Manual Worker: (Use your skill, judgement and extensive knowledge of Hollywood cliché to fill in the final speech of the movie here.)

   
   
   
   

   Is it?

   • A. "I don't know; he just followed me home. Can we keep him?"
   • B. "My chiropractor."
   • C. "...He's my friend."

   
   Hint: Boak!
   
   
   *By which, of course, I mean they drive around in Jeeps that were made in 2004. They don't have a couple of thousand Dinky cars.


3. Goodbye Gemini (1970) - Swinging London Psycho-Thriller (que'st que s'est? fa fa fa...) which would have been an awful lot better if the actors playing the leads had been ten years younger.


4. The Princess Diaries (2001) - My heart sank when Daughter Number One picked this out. Disney + Princess? Oh Gawd. Please, no.... Being a father of two girls I should be getting used to this by now. I had seen The Princess Diaries before but it was a lot better than I remembered; there are some genuinely funny lines and some not bad acting. I was annoyed for a while by my inability to work out who Anne Hathaway was reminding me of - some of her mannerisms expressions were reminding me of another actor - towards the end I got it. She reminded me of Jeff Goldbloom - I think I need to get out more.
   


5. Inland Empire (2006) - sometimes my habit of not looking too closely at the back of DVDs I am just about to watch - in case the blurb reveals too many plot points - is not the cleverest thing to do. I love David Lynch's weird dreamscapes. I love the bewildering sense of 'otherness' they create. Had I realised Inland Empire was three hours long I may have chosen another night to be baffled, frustrated and 'othernessed'. Three hours! Good god. I didn't dream last night. Lynch had done it all for me.


6. Knowing (2009) - I'm an SF fan. I like SF. For the first half of this film it looked like I was watching a pretty interesting SF film which playing with ideas about determinism and predestination - at about the hour mark the tone changed and I realised I was just watching another CGI 'let's destroy everything in loving detail' Hollywood disaster cliché, and by the end of the second hour I was slack-jawed with disbelief as I watched heavy-handed Judeo-Christian Revelation tripe unfolding on the screen as shiny glowing angeliens took the 'chosen' children to the stars in giant silvery globe artichokes built to specs found in Ezekiel. (Cue beauty shots of two happy - presumably heterosexual - children running through beautiful untouched alien landscape towards a large Tree in the distance. The only thing that was missing were the names 'Adam' and 'Eve' tattooed onto their foreheads for the real knuckleheads in the audience who still hadn't got it.) This is all a great pity. Back in the days when he has less money Alex Proyas made some inventive movies The Crow and Dark City being best. (Dark City especially is great.) Now with a brazzillion dollars of CGI to play with he seems to have lost the point. There are some effective and tense moments in this movie but most of them are made so by camera work, editing, acting, and some (occasionally) damn fine music; all the old-fashioned, 'traditional' movie making skills in fact. When the CGI fills the screen it turns into a plodding bore. So boring and ponderous does this film become that at the end I was left wondering if there was something wrong with Nic Cage's testicles. After an hour of being bludgeoned with pixels flying in all directions I was more interested in the weird 'heroic' stance that Cage had assumed than in all the glowing shiny whirly, supposedly awe-inspiring SFX zipping about. Why was Nic Cage standing wide-legged like a Jack Kirby superhero cowboy? There was no reason for him to be standing like that. Even when he was talking to the less than convincing child actor pretending to be his son he stood like he was about to leap on a silver surfboard or pull out a Colt Pacemaker and shoot the bad guy*. I was glad when it was all over.
   
   *Or even a 'Peacemaker'.


7. American Madness (1932) - Early Frank Capra movie in which Walter Huston plays a decent honest banker nearly bought to suicide by personal troubles, a run on his bank, and the machinations of rich financiers - only to be saved in the nick of time by all 'the little people' he has helped over the years rushing in to make deposits when everyone else was wanting to take their money out. It's almost a dry run for Capra's best-loved film It's A Wonderful Life. It's interesting but not great. A few nice sequences - the bank filling up with people wanting to take out their money, at first a trickle, then a flood turning into a packed and panicking mob was nicely done but a lot of it was pure melodrama most of it delivered in that incredibly rapid, machine-gun style delivery of the time. Your sure had to listen fast when people got excited in the 30s.


8. The Thief of Baghdad - Alexander Korda.


9. Galaxy of the Dinosaurs (1992) - somewhere beyond awful. Shoddy amateur crap that wasn't even terrible enough to be funny. To paraphrase Wolfgang Pauli; it was not even bad.


10. The Bed Sitting Room (1968 ) - finally released on DVD! Though not quite in its original aspect ratio.


11. Stranded (aka The Shelter 2001) - not very good attempt at a serious nuts and bolts hard SF story - ie no monsters - in which the first mission to Mars goes horribly wrong. Unable to lift off again, and with limited resources to hand, the crew do the maths and realise only two of them stand a chance of surviving till any possible rescue mission could get to them. This is a standard scenario from a thousand magazine short stories over the years. A scenario pits human vulnerability against the cold impassivity of the laws of physics. I have never come across this story played out so flatly and dully as here. After the opening sequence, when the ship crashes in a series of tiny scenes and brief single shots interspersed with great slugs of black - a editing technique that was supposed to induce tension and confusion but just made me wonder if my DVD payer was having trouble playing the disc - we are introduced to the members of the crew coming to terms with the reality of their new situation. After a few laughable bad attempts at working out how to survive - the most logical and sensible thing they do is dismantle the acceleration couches and take them outside because they won't need them any more - three of them decide to walk to their deaths (taking as much oxygen as they can with them!?) and leave the doctor and the engineer to wait for rescue. After an eternity of watching three people walking around in space suits with an orange filter on the camera - on Mars everything is red - the survivors find the remnants of an ancient civilisation, a mysterious ancient oasis of air, water and lichen, "from which we will be able to extract protein". The end. As stories go it's not the worst I've ever seen; it successfully avoids falling into any number of low budget SF traps and the hardware looks good but, dear god, the script is awful! At no point in this film did any of the characters look or sound like the top-notch technician scientists they were supposed to be. The first people to set foot on Mars? These people would have been the elite, the best and most capable astronauts the world have ever seen. What arrives on screen are barely sketched-in outlines of characters with no depth or consistency. Just to give one example: the doctor is supposed to be a Christian. She tells us that it is against her religion to commit suicide, she insists, against opposition from her fellow crew-members that the dead captain is buried in the "Christian manner" yet, when she gets her way and the poor stiff is dragged outside for the funeral, she doesn't say anything religious at his graveside at all, preferring instead to recite (from memory!) a long extract from Robert Falcon Scott's diary (written shortly before his death during his ill-fated expedition to Antarctica). This clumsily sets up the "'Tis a far far better thing," type noble sacrifice that is to follow but does little to create believable characters. There are token nods towards making some hard science - during an angry exchange one character suggests they make power by building a windmill, the engineer says the wind is too thin - end of discussion. Where's the detail? I'm not saying they should have stopped the movie and had a lecture about the relative densities of the atmospheres of Earth and Mars but SF movie audiences are well used to sitting through screeds of nonsensical techno-babble - 'Captain, if we bypass the tachyon emissions through the warp core shielding this may have the effect of reversing the cloaking device's polarity!' - why not have some real science for a change? Bad script. And some really odd direction too.


12. Unknown World (1951) - which, despite all the crap I've watched after it, hasn't got any better since the last time I watched it five years ago.


13. The Phantom Menace (1999) - nor has this.


14. Starcrash (1978 ) - on the other hand just gets better every time I watch it. Okay, I know I'm redefining the word 'better' here but any movie that has Caroline Munro (best known to men of my generation as "you know, the sweaty bird from the Morgan's Rum adverts," and "the one with tits in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad") running around for most of the time in continuity defying leather space bikinis (not to mention the transparent space suits) has got to be worth watching fairly often hasn't it? My favourite line on this viewing was:

    
    
    
    

    Look! Amazons on horseback. I hope they are friendly!

    
    

    Oh to hell with it; it's weeks since I posted any pictures of semi-naked women on the blog - they Amazon's aren't friendly and here's Caroline struggling womanfully with them while saying "Let me go!" a lot...
    

    
    .
    
    
15. The Thing From Another World (1951) - a real cracker. The prototype 'trapped in a small set with a relentless killer-thing' that spawned a thousand reworkings but was never bettered (okay, Alien). It clips along, has some crackingly fast-paced, credible dialogue, a story that almost makes sense and doesn't outstay its welcome. It also contains one of the great lines of SF movie dialogue:
    
    
    
    
    

    Scotty: An intellectual carrot... the mind boggles!

16. The 6th Day (2001) - A Science Fiction Action Thriller which turned out to be not as awful as I was expecting - by a long chalk. The science fiction side of it was pretty well thought out - though the action side of it was pretty much by the numbers. A few of the jokes worked too. Not great, but does more than it says on the tin.


17. The Dark Knight (2006) - One of the better quids I have spent at a car boot sale recently.


18. Toto le héros (1991) - I seem to be rewatching a lot of stuff this month. Toto le héros is an odd dislocated movie which never really decides what it wants to be but is satisfying through whichever set of genre watching goggles you choose to wear. It's humorous, mysterious, funny, romantic (albeit incestuously) but above all very French.


19. Faeries (1999) - a weird mishmash of CGI, model work and crappy Saturday morning cartoon style 2D animation with some major talent in the voice cast (Kate Winslet, Jeremy Irons, Dougray Scott!?). Written by someone whose biggest claim to fame must be that she was a "creative consultant" on Fraggle Rock, and directed by someone who once had a job as an inbetween artist on SuperTed. Not unwatchable - but as close as I ever want to get. The kids seemed to enjoy it.


20. Attack of the 50ft Woman (1993) - Daryl Hannah remake. Somewhat underwhelming but a couple of nice lines - one of which I fully intend to work into the next script I write.


21. Destination Moon (1950) - and


22. Project Moonbase(1953) - in one evening. In less than two and a half hours I watch Robert Heinlein's complete output as a screenwriter. As a screenwriter he makes a good novelist.


23. Young Einstein ( 1988 ) - one of my 'Top Ten Favourite Moves Not Many Other People Has Ever Heard Of'.


24. Orlando ( 1992 ) - My umpteenth watching and I love it more every time I see it.

"It's very hard to get lipstick and nail varnish out of your belly button ..."

My unhealthy on/off, love/hate OCD-like relationship with Lidl's breakfast packaging continues:

Many moons ago I posted about the horribleness of this:

As you can probably tell from the above photo (taken with my usual skill on my trusty phone's crapo-cam) they have been re-jiggered. Not only is Goody Rice now known as Rice Snaps but the box has undergone a similarly radical rethink. The two Manga-lite yoofs characters remain but their super-untredy glovettes and bizarre radio-controller games console thing are gone. All they're doing now is just standing there. They're not even looking at the bowlful of product with the psychotic glee of all the other residents of Lidl's breakfast cereal packaging.

(It has just occurred to me that these two characters may have names and may even appear in a string of hilarious breakfast related adventures in some German children's comic - Das Beano or Der Dandy perhaps?)

The wonderfully sugar-stoned, radioactive soup dragon on the front of their Golden Puffs, on the other hand, is more than making up for their lack of interest. I think this creature is as fascinated as I am by the fact that the Golden Puffs floating about, mid-air in the foreground are way smaller than the ones lying in the bowl.

Maybe they swell up really fast as they absorb strange white semi-solid liquids, or maybe the front of the box was designed by the incompetent idiot who produced this handy pie chart of recommended daily food intakes on the back:

Starting at the top and working clockwise: 40% + 20% + 15% = 75%. Last time I looked 75% of something was three quarters - which means those three slices of pie should reach round to about halfway through the milk and cheese slice - whatever happened to the famed reputation for German precision?

I think the Koala Brothers are trying to take over the country.

The Koala Brothers, for those of you who don't have weans, is a well above average, animated kids' TV show featuring the gentle, problem-solving adventures of a couple small Australian marsupials called Frank and Buster and their friends.

Frank and Buster - or vice versa

One of the catchphrases they use in the show is, "We're here to help." They say it all the time. "We're here to help." Frank and Buster fly a little yellow plane and much of the packaging associated with this show features them in the plane towing a banner which says: "We're Here to Help".

Do your own uncomfortable segue from the Outback of Australia to the Highlands of Scotland here because I can't think of one.

My village is not big. It does have have a shop (a Co-op with a Post Office) and a part-time bank (RBS - only open Tuesdays and Fridays 9:30 - 3:30 with an hour off for lunch in the middle.)

Yesterday I noticed the sack of cheap (i.e. unwashed) potatoes I had bought from Morrison's in the Fort had a Customer Service Helpline.

"Hello, you're though to the dirty
potato hotline. How may I help you?"

I'm convinced there is more to this than meets the eye. I also wonder what kind of advice the helpline hands out, given that, above their phone number, there is this wonderful piece of advice.

Do people really need to be told to wash the dirt off food before they 'use' it?

I suspect koala bears think they do.

My recent post about who captained the England World Cup squad in 1966* has caused some confusion amongst the other reader of this blog. I would just like to set the record straight. The England World Cup squad of 1966 was captained by Bobby Moore - not Roger Moore, Henry Moore, Patrick Moore or any one else. Bobby Moore. This bloke:

Bobby Moore, former bass player with Thin Lizzy

* Apparently they won; did you know that?

Why isn't anything fucking simple?
I spent three hours the other day faffing about with mysterious things I should not mess about with in my router settings. I was trying to get something called 'Port Forwarding' set up - I know it sounds like a hangover from the days of the East India Company; "Yes, brigadier, we took the clipper to Port Forwarding don't y'know?", but it's really something to do with letting malicious Russian hackers poke about in your machine while you download crappy old movies from other crappy old movie addicts. Anyway, after spending three hours doing all this, and finally getting it working, I had an attack of the paranoias, updated all the security stuff I have onboard, and managed to fuck it all up again.

Nuts!

---

Another brief snippet from the Screenplay of my life:

INT. DAY. THE KITCHEN.

Holly:
Daddy, who was John The Baptist?

Daddy:
He's a character in the Bible, sweetheart. Went round saying the Messiah was coming and then got his head chopped off.

Holly:
Was that when Slomm...? Sall...?

Daddy:
Salome?

Holly:
Yes! That's when Salome did the Dance of the Seven Veils - and when the last veil fell off, everyone could see her bum. (PAUSE) There's no accounting for taste.





.

Run Away! - It's Movie Time

Dudley Do-Right (1999) - Guilty secret; don't tell anyone but I quite like Brendan Fraser's comedies, hell, he made bits of the misbegotten Bedazzled remake almost watchable. There's something about his dumb but amiable boy-child persona of that somehow works for me. It didn't work here. Dudley Do-Right was, I guess, supposed to recreate the success of George of The Jungle made two years earlier. Both films were based on kids' TV cartoon series created by Jay Ward, and both co-starred a Python member. What was gloriously silly in George of the Jungle just turned deathly dull here. There were a couple of moments that raised a smile and Alfred Molina obviously had a whale of a time playing Snidely Whiplash but even running at a mere 83 minutes it felt very long. Comedies shouldn't feel long.

Earth Girls are Easy (1988 ) - Christ! the Eighties were weird. Somehow I seemed to have missed them entirely. (I was probably drunk.) Watching this makes me think I didn't miss much.

Hot Fuzz (2007) - I ended up liking this a lot more than I thought I was going to. I'm sure I missed a lot, not being a great fan of overly violent cop movies, but I laughed frequently and often nevertheless.

Sin ton ni Sonia (2003) - Mexican black comedy. I suspect it is an acquired taste but there were bits of this that did make me laugh.

Eden Log (2007) - I don't think the 'Log' of the title is meant as a synonym for 'turd' but it might as well be. For 98 minutes we get to watch a nameless mud covered character wander around the insides of a cave system disguised to look suspiciously like the inside of a 1970s Art School. (That's when everyone was making 'Installations' and 'Environments' out of sheets of plastic and bits of piping.) After 90 minutes or so of unexplained tedium and messy camerawork the protagonist discovers what the audience had worked out about three minutes into the film, plugs his belly button into a tree root (for no apparent reason) watches all the lights in the city go out (for no apparent reason). He is sad (for no apparent reason). The End. Imagine the crappiest post-Akira anime plot you can think of then reduce the number of characters to three, then give it to a French film student director who thinks he has just invented the cinema. And you'll have some idea of the sheer pretentious awfulness of this piece of merde. (The 'Making Of' feature is hilarious, full of gushing people describing the director's 'Vision' - my favourite was the one who was almost wetting his knickers over the director's genius idea that the audience should know no more than the central character, as if this were the newest and greatest idea ever.)

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) - The plot is even thinner than I remember it but I still pretty much agree with my earlier self. Number one daughter was enraptured. I don't think she's ever said 'cooool!' so often during a movie before, giant robots, Zeppelins and eye-patch wearing female military officers are obviously her thing. She IS my daughter!

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) - George Clooney's slow but compelling account of journalist Edward R. Murrow's attacks on Joe McCarthy. Gripping stuff, beautifully underplayed by great ensemble cast. I have no idea how accurate it was but I was convinced.

Robotrix (1991) - In Hong Kong a female cop with the very Chinese name of 'Selina', is killed during the kidnapping of a Sheik's son. The prince (who for some reason has an Italian accent in the crappily dubbed 'English' version) was kidnapped by fiendish scientist & robot designer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, who wants the contract to build the Sheik's robot army. While he is waiting for the Sheik to agree to his terms, (which seem to consist of, "Let me build your robot army or I will drill more holes in your son's leg with my Black and Decker") Sakamoto commits Harakiri and transplants his evil mind into his latest robot creation - and then proceeds to go on a hooker-killing rampage. (Are these normal Chinese business practices?) Luckily, Japanese scientist Dr. Sara and her robot assistant Anne are standing by to donate their services, (phew!). The two of them transfer dead Selina's mind into a clone of her old body, and together they hunt down the evil whore-slaughtering robot and save the prince. Lots of soft-core bonking, absurd ultra-violence, and inept comedy ensue. The killer robot eventually has a shipping container dropped on him while he is standing in a car crusher. (Note to any evil robots who may read this: choosing a hideout with large overhead electro-magnets and gigantic hydraulic presses is not a good career move.) I think this may be the only movie outside of a Monty Python skit where a character is beheaded with a picnic basket.

Flesh Gordon (1974) - the famed porno pantomime which I watched purely in the name of research, honest, M'lud.

Emperor Wang, despot ruler of the planet Porno, beams his mighty 'Sex Ray' towards Earth, which has the effect of turning everyone into sex-mad fiends (the ray is represented on screen by someone holding a small firework just outside of the frame line). Impromptu orgies break out everywhere . Only one man can save the day, football player Flesh Gordon. Together with his girlfriend Dale Ardent and the variable accented Professor Flexi-Jerkoff, they set off towards the source of the sex ray. Cue a (sometimes shot for shot) reworking of the old Buster Crabbe serial with lots naked people all over the place, and as many penis references as can be shoehorned into the script. For a cheap piece of crap with wobbly sets, under rehearsed porn movie level acting and point-the-camera-at-the-actors-and-hope direction it is, sometimes, very funny. After enough repetition even lines like "Take that, you dildo!" can become amusing - if you haven't had enough sleep.

The research?

The local high school is putting on an end of term show based on Flash Gordon and, due to time considerations and other factors, it looks like I'm building the minimal sets and maybe writing some of it too. I was looking for jokes to nick. All concerned will be pleased to know I didn't find anything that I could use - well, not if I ever want to work around here again. Tomorrow night I start on all twelve gripping episodes of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940). Again. I did start tonight but fell asleep after ten minutes.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) - again.

G-Force (2009) - The shit I watch to keep my kids happy. "I got a brilliant idea, wait for it... Spy Kids but with Guinea Pigs! How can we lose? I'll get the Disney List of Required Clichés faxed over and we'll have the script done by Tuesday...."

Dracula (1992) - Big fun! I'd never seen it before (just brief snatches here and there - mostly over there, on the television). And though I thoroughly enjoyed it I'm not sure it really held together, it felt like there had been some real cuts made and the narrative felt a little disjointed towards the end but the atmosphere and effects were brilliantly creepy and often so simple! - well they were made to look simple, they were probably very complicated to do, but creepiness done by misdirection, subtle camera movements, reverse filming, great lighting and music and actors who know what they are doing ( ...erm... yeah, I know Keanu Reeves was in it... but... but everyone else was great!) is far more interesting and effective (and probably cheaper) than throwing a shitload of CGI at the screen.

Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (aka Doppleganger 1969) - repeat viewing. Not dreadful.

Catch 22 (1969) -

Hot Shots (1991) - More Americans in airyplaynes and, not surprisingly, Catch 22 is a lot funnier. There's something desperately unfunny about this movie that is made all the sadder by the cast trying so desperately hard to be funny. The most fun I had was watching Carey Elwes' eyebrows - that man acts from the bridge of his nose upwards, even when he's talking, the only bit of him that moves is his forehead.

Yellow Submarine ( 1968 ) - delightful. A no question about it, Pizza night choice of daughter number one who had never seen it before - I usually select a pile of possibles (anything from Disney CGI crap to Danny Kaye musicals) for the girls to choose from. This time H announced we were going to watch Yellow Submarine before I had a chance to get organised. She was enraptured by it - I'm going to make a cineaste of that girl yet. It's many years since I saw Yellow Submarine - I first saw it in the cinema when it was first released, I must have been eight or nine, and it still looks as good as it ever did even on our less than perfect pan and scanned VHS copy. Time to buy a DVD version methinks.

Kôkaku kidôtai aka Ghost in the Shell ( 1995 ) - I'm obviously in the mood for an animation binge this week. I've never really bothered to explore Anime. Ghost in the Shell is pretty damn good. A script way above the levels of most American SF movies (animated or not), interesting visuals, and some seriously wonderful music. From what I can gather, reading around a few sites, Ghost in the Shell is as good as Anime gets. I've started at the top.

A Scanner Darkly (2006) - Wonderfully fucked up and very funny adaptation of Philip Dick's wonderfully funny drug paranoia novel. The movie most faithful to the spirit of his books by far.

Southland Tales (2006) - having been baffled and frustrated the first time I saw this (was it 145 minutes of puerile wanking, possibly the biggest single waste of time money and talent put up on the screen that I can recall ever having seen? - or was it me just not getting it?) Tonight I sat down tonight to watch the even longer 160 minute 'Cannes Cut'. It's been several months since I watched the shorter version and, apart from a few shots of Janeane Garofalo pacing behind a desk doing not a lot, I can't say the extra fifteen minutes did anything to enlighten me. Still looks like overly ambitious pseudo-philosophical/mystical puerile wank to me.

Hans Christian Andersen (1952) - My kids are introduced to Danny Kaye and the gorgeousness of Technicolor. Paper thin plot, some nice enough songs and one knock out bit of staging. The moment in the ballet where the little mermaid runs into the sea is brilliant.

2010 (1984) - not as dreadful as I remember. But if there was ever a film that needed the first thirty minutes removing this is it. It may be faithful to the book (I don't know) but it's painfully dull and pointless. the story starts when our hero is woken up in space. All the sitting around talking about going in the first place and laboriously setting up the East West tensions that don't really go anywhere could have easily been left to the audience to fill in themselves later with a few helpful nudges. And preferably not delivered in the 'I am patching the holes in the narrative by pretending to read a letter to my loved ones voice' used all over the place here.

The Stuff (1985) - A killer pudding threatens to take over America. Only a slimy ex-FBI man, an advertising executive, the racist head of a private militia, and a seven year old boy can save the day. Nearly as crappily crap as it sounds. For the most part it is the usual mess of muddled story, sudden narrative jumps, and never explained incidents, all filmed with muddied sound and a very weird line in low angle shots that sometimes has the actors legs filling the screen for no understandable reason - but then, suddenly, right in the middle of all this dross is a very weird and spooky sequence where the seven year old boy realises his family has been taken over and brainwashed by the addictive pudding. Derivative? Certainly - I was reminded of William Cameron Menzes' Invaders from Mars, and episodes of the Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits - but for a few minutes the film really worked.

Here's a game I just invented that we can all play in the comfort of our own living rooms - well those of us living in the UK can. With the World Cup less than two weeks away let's all count how many times the BBC (and/or any other British based news organisation) mentions the fact that England won the Cup in 1966. I hardly watch TV and actively avoid sports coverage and I'm up to three already. One mention was really weird in that the paid commentator remarked that "no one would ever forget the moment that Roger Moore held the trophy aloft". I was only seven years old at the time and I think I would remember that - the Saint also captained the World Cup winning England team? Cool.

To avoid any further confusion, here is a quick and easy spotters' guide:

Henry Moore - sculptor of monumental abstract bronzes

Sir Thomas Moore - author of The Watchmen comic book

Demi Moore - maverick film director of Bowling for Columbine

Google Earthlings

The Google Earth streetview thing has got round to adding our village! (From the internal evidence in the images we guess the photos were taken sometime around last Easter.)

Click on the picture to have a wander around.

A piece of Lidl packaging I like:

Formil Non-Bio washing machine tabs. Been keeping my family's clothes vaguely clean for years. I like this box not because its well-designed, or weird, or funny. I like it because it is exactly the right size to keep all those newspaper give-away 'free' DVDs I keep buying from charity shops at 20p a go.

I've got boxes full of them.

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.