Sorry to say I watched a lot of films last month:

1. The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood (1986) - a real odd one. Shot in 1976 but not 'ready for release' (whatever that means*) for another 10 years, the film takes place during the course of one day in the life of Faustus Bidgood, with a history of mental health problems and a Billy Liar like imagination, he works as a minor bureaucrat in the Newfoundland Department of Education. Lots of things are happening on this day. The final preparations for the annual charity concert in aid of crippled children are being made. The premier of Newfoundland has gone missing (again) leaving behind him cryptic clues - TV viewers are asked to help in the manhunt and could win a waffle iron if they come up with the solution as to his whereabouts. There is a child serial killer on the loose and the local TV's top children's entertainer, who dresses as a giant chicken, has resigned his job and gone on a three bottle bender while still in costume. One of Faustus' co-workers is pregnant but the father of the child is in doubt and Faustus' boss has a messianic dream of the future of education based on a vision he had when he saw his friend killed by a plummeting bag of frozen soup.
   
   
   
   Faustus, accompanied by his childhood imaginary friend, tries to hide from all this chaos by living in an alternate fantasy reality where they staged a coup, declared Newfoundland to be an independent state, and he became president promising to resign after one year but, as president, he has a decision to make and keeps having a recurring dream that he is in fact a lowly filing clerk. There are flashbacks from at least two different characters. The fantasy (or are they?) sequences are shot in grainy black and white, there is a film within a film which represents some of Faustus' memories as a documentary and then a film within that film which purports to be the first, never to be released, Newfoundland feature film ever shot. It sounds like an unholy mess and it almost is but, amazingly, all these strands (maybe with the exception of the film within the film within the film) neatly tie up at the end. I liked it.
   
   
   *Find out what 'that' means in an article from Cinema Canada - November 1986 here:


2. Star Trek (2009) - Meh.


3. The Jungle Book (1967) - Another Disney Friday night with the kids movie. Another very thin adaptation of a much loved book of my childhood. I do remember seeing this many many years ago in the cinema (I'm old enough to remember the days before the existence of museum pieces like VHS, Betamax, or even Laserdiscs) and hadn't seen it since. I was surprised at the amount of reused footage there was in it. Ka suffering the same fall from the same tree twice for example, and, as Daughter Number One pointed out, Bagheera climbs along the same tree branch several times - but then she has seen it four times.


4. Fugitive Alien (1987) - My first incomprehensible Japanese TV show edited into a movie-length pudding of bewilderments of the year. And first decent sighting of a SpaceBimbo this year too.
   
   
   
   
   Space Barbie
   
   
   
   Fugitive Alien tells the story of Ken, a 'Space Wolf', a killer elite space pirate, who has a crisis of conscience when out raiding one day and instead of gunning down a little boy (who also happens to be called Ken), he accidentally kills his best friend and fellow space pirate. Now an outcast and a traitor, he is mercilessly and relentlessly hunted for a few minutes until he escapes and joins the Earth Space fleet. After a lot of bewildering hanging about waiting for the story to really start his ship is sent on a mission to help another planet (populated by Japanese extras wearing Arab headresses) who are threatened by an enemy with a weapon so powerful it could destroy their 'whole constellation' (sic and wtf?). The second half of the film consists of Ken breaking out of jail on the Planet of the Japanese Arabs and springing one of the enemy soldiers too. Just as they are about to blast off for what our occasional narrator has called 'Their most exciting mission yet' the words 'To be continued' appear on screen and the thing just stops. Arse! What I have just spent an hour and a half watching turns out to be half an incomprehensible Japanese TV show edited into a movie-length pudding of bewilderment. The sequel, Star Force: Fugitive Alien II, was, according to the IMDb, released in 1986 - the year before the original. I wouldn't be surprised if this was true.
   
   
   
   A standard tool used by American producers dubbing foreign SF films into English is to include quick, cheap to make, insert shots of hands flipping switches, and interesting dials with obvious English wording on them. I guess they would often be replacing shots of dials and switches with Cyrillic or Japanese writing next to them but sometimes I think they were just used to cover what would have otherwise been clumsy edits. The American producers weren't too bothered about where these shots came from - I remember one film where the inserts were probably shot in the dubbing studio as they recorded the new soundtrack; all the switches and dials in the spaceship were marked with things like 'Peak Wow' and 'decibels'. These shots were usually only a couple of seconds long, if that, but wherever the new inserts came from, the producers usually employed someone who could spell. Not here:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   and how this briefly flashed up computer screenful of delivery details from a Utah metal products company to 25 East Union Avenue, North Salt Lake helped to identify the fleet of hostiles just outside the good guys' spaceship window is a total mystery.
   
   
   
   


5. Metropolis (1927) - I finally get to see what may well be the most complete, restored version of one of my long time favourite films (it is where my usual avatar comes from) - and I fall asleep.


6. Marooned (1969) - Three astronauts are trapped in their Apollo capsule and NASA (or 'the NASA' as one character pedantically refers to it here) attempts to rescue them before their oxygen runs out in 42 hours. This is a long film (134 minutes) and sometimes it felt like the 42 hours was playing out in real time with most of the screen time taken up with people reading screeds of numbers at each other. For once though the techno-babble was convincingly real and occasionally the film works, it does build up tension and the brief moments when emotions break through all the cold equations are more powerful because of it; Gene Hackman is particularly good as one of the doomed crew. I was less convinced by the ending which had a Russian spaceship turn up out of nowhere and one of the astronauts doing a Captain Oates but taking a third of their dwindling supply of oxygen with them. Not sure I followed the logic of that. I could have done with a bit more exposition in places.


7. Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds (1989) - Alex Proyas' first feature. An odd slow very low budget three hander. In a post apocalyptic future (fingerless gloves? check!) a brother and a sister live in a shack in the middle of a desert. He's in a wheelchair and dreams of flying, she's a religious bampot. One day a stranger arrives. The brother and the stranger build a flying machine and the stranger flies away. Some terrific visuals - even on the panned and scanned downloaded version I saw - more than made up for deficiencies in story and acting. Proyas' next film was The Crow.
   
   
   
   
   
8. MirrorMask (2005) - another début feature with stunning visuals. I loved it so did the kids. One of those films where all CGI stuff serves the story (or possibly was the story) rather than being added for sheer gosh-wowery.


9. Murder Party (2007) - I'm not a great modern horror fan so why I was watching a movie with someone holding two chainsaws on the front cover I'm not quite sure. Murder Party is a low/no budget horror/comedy that is almost funny in places. The plot is simple: a traffic warden finds an invitation to a Hallowe'en 'Murder Party' and decides to go. As soon as he arrives he is pounced upon by all the other guests who turn out to be an art collective in need of a victim for an artwork. It's a neat reversal of the usual low/no budget horror formula (take a bunch of teenagers to a deserted place and kill them off one by one). Here we have one victim and lots of killers. Things start to go wrong for our hero's captors when one of them has an allergic reaction to the non-organic raisins in his pumpkin cake and dies. Over the course of the evening the other 'artists', and several bystanders get themselves bumped off, in a variety of gory ways leaving our hero to go home. It almost works.


10. World Without End (1956) - another rewatch of an old favourite. Man's first manned mission to Mars (as always) goes horribly wrong and our gallant crew are hurled through time to a post-apoc world (this was the fifties so, damn!, no fingerless gloves) where brutish cave men rule the upper world and a dwindling scientific elite live below ground. The men of the future wear shiny futuristic caps and the women wear satin dresses with conical tits and hemlines that stop just below their bums. Our hero interlopers, with the aid of their standard issue handguns (so useful in a spaceship), and a home-made bazooka, fight off giant spiders, one-eyed mutant cavemen, and skulduggerous locals to save all the non-mutant cave men and get laid by the satin conical tit girls (though, this being the fifties, this last bit is only implied). If it wasn't so stodgily presented - for a lot of the time people stand in rows and take turns to tell each other stuff - this would be a real cracker.


11. Star Trek TNG: The Best of Both Worlds (1990) - every now and then I like to torture myself with a Star Trek movie. I've no idea why; I know they're tedious predictable shit even before I open the box, and, unlike most bad movies which are all unpredictably bad in their own special ways, Star Trek movies are all bad in the same ways. All so formulaic, self-referential and uninvolving that it's like watching the furniture being rearranged in someone else's house. Every now and then your hosts will stop and ask, "What do you think?" and you just have to be honest and say you can't tell the difference from the last time they asked you - though you suspect they might have swapped the sofas around.
    
    
    The Enterprise
    
    
    Star Trek TNG: The Best of Both Worlds was even more shittierly predictable and tedious than usual because it turned out to be a 'made for TV movie' cobbled together out of two regular episodes. (That'll teach me to read the small print a little more closely in future.) In this one the Enterprise meets the Borg again and Jean Luc P is captured and Borgified and everyone gets to recalibrate everything from the warp containment core to the kitchen toaster, and Jonathan Frakes (Ryker) gets more slow dolly shots moving in on him looking stern and decisive than any man in the history of episodic TV. And as most of these shots were done from a low angle to make him look heroic, we spent an awful lot of the 'movie's' running time staring up his nostrils. At least it made a change from watching him looking smug which is Frakes' other stock in trade pose.
    
    
    
    At one point Patrick Stewart made a weird noise just before he spoke a line which had all the hallmarks of a bit of real acting escaping onto the screen. It was very lonely.


12. Lifeforce (1985) - The first manned mission to Haley's comet finds an derelict space ship. Now anyone who has ever seen ANY movies knows that entering derelict spaceships is just asking for trouble. Unfortunately our valiant crew have spent so long training to be astronauts they never watched anything other than training videos and happily go exploring. Inside they encounter a bunch of dead aliens and three perfectly preserved nude humans in suspended animation. The female of the three probably has the most beautiful tits seen on any screen during the eighties. Hypnotised by naked knockers (as most men are) the crew drag the bodies on board and head back for Earth and the plot goes into out of control free-fall with the movie ending up with rampaging alien vampire zombies destroying London, (I think they were covering all the bases when they pitched this one:
    
    
    
    
    

    Writer: "It's a vampire flick, with zombies! - and aliens... ...and tits!" Producer: "I like it!"

    
    
    
    All Hail the Hypno-boobs!
    
    
    This film has a real reputation for being awful and I was surprised to find the the opening sequences weren't that bad, but it didn't take long to descend into totally confused garbage. Towards the end I gave up trying to follow what was going on - though actors kept telling me at great length - and just felt sorry for Peter Firth (who probably thought this was going to be his big Hollywood break)as he wandered about in a polo-neck jumper trying to be the hero but being confounded at every turn by the incoherent script.
    
    
    
    The first feature film to use Brent Cross Shopping Centre as a location and the second film I've watched in a row to feature Patrick Stewart being subsumed by an alien lifeform. He explodes in this one.


13. The Girl Cut in Two (La fille coupée en deux 2007) - by total coincidence Mathilda May, the naked hypno-boob girl of last night's film, was the first person on screen in The Girl Cut in Two. Inspired by the murder of Stanford White in 1906 the film tells the story of a TV weather girl torn between two lovers. A rich successful older novelist and a wealthy, but unbalanced playboy. The film asks us to believe that both men already detest each other - for reasons that are never really specified - and both of them instantly fall in love with the same girl within one day. She falls in love with one, marries the other - lots of post coital conversations, lots of people sitting round eating expensive meals and a hurried, patched together, scrappy ending that looks like it had been nailed into the script to stop the film going on for another couple of hours. I didn't believe a single frame of the whole damn thing.


14. Dream Warrior (2003) - a cinematic version of one of those bad self published novels which starts with enough backstory flashback voice-over intro to make you think you are watching a sequel (it isn't) and then just wanders around aimlessly wasting so much time you wonder why they didn't just include all that backstory in the main narrative and cut out all the waffle. A genuinely incompetent mess with a director who does amazingly inept things like using a point of view shot [handheld camera keeks round a pillar at two guards], then showing a wide of the actor whose point of view we are supposed to have experienced getting into position to see what we have just seen him see [sneak sneak up to the pillar then keek around it], then show us again what we have seen he has just seen now that he is finally in a position to see it. THEN - having established that handheld camera keeking round a pillar is a point of view shot - shows us the hero sneaking around in a series of handheld keeking round pillar shots without once hinting that there is anyone else around to be having these point of views of the hero. Garbage direction. Other highlights included Isaac Hayes being mystical in a purple burnoose:
    
    
    
    

    Hayes: Sometimes dreams are the only thing worth having! Hero: What are you talking about*?

    
    
    And, just to keep with self-published vibe, at least one typo in the credits; apparently there was someone responsible for 'UK Catsing'.
    
    
    I really hope I don't see anything quite so dreadful as this for the rest of the year.
    
    * Edit: I just realised this is even funnier if you do it in Cartman's voice.


15. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) - Okay, I was wrong. For years I've had this down in my head as one of those annoyingly overly cutesy films I never wanted to see again. Watching it tonight with the kids I was pleasantly surprised at how funny it was - once I had got over the semi-Americanisation. (Still hate the fucking songs though.) The kids were enraptured by it. Afterwards number one daughter wanted to find the book to see how Veruca Salt met her fate in the original because it was different here to the Tim Burton version; geese instead of squirrels. (It was squirrels in the book.) She also thought the TV room sequence was better here, though she didn't explain why.


16. Timecode (2000) - another coincidence-driven rewatch. While sorting through some boxes of VHS tapes, consigning the ones I now have on DVD to the charity shop pile, I found a tape with a couple of editions of Moving Pictures which was, by far, the BBC's best ever TV program about films and film making. I watched a chunk, including the Mike Figgis interview mentioned on the Wikipedia page I just linked to, then I started on the next box. First tape that my hand touched? Mike Figgis' Timecode. So I had to watch it.
    
    
    
    I remember being bowled over by it but this time I got really frustrated. Since first watching it I had read an interview with Figgis in which he talked about this film. Timecode was shot simultaneously on four cameras, the whole film consists of one continuous take from each of the cameras presented on a split screen like this...
    
    
    
    
    
    
    ...in which you have Salma Hayek, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Kyle MacLachlan, Stellan Skarsgård, Saffron Burrows all on screen, all acting at the same time in different locations. As the film progresses characters meet each other, cross from one strand of the story to another and from one corner of the screen to another - sometimes appearing in two or more quarters simultaneously from different angles. It is, as you may imagine very complex, and at times difficult to follow. In the interview Figgis said that he nudged the audience into watching particular parts of the screen with the sound. He mixed up the sound from the quarter/s he wanted the audience to concentrate on and faded out that from where he didn't. Simple and obvious enough, but I didn't know that the first time I saw it. This time, with that knowledge in my head, I was constantly fighting being pushed from one corner of the screen to another and desperately trying to make out conversations that were almost inaudible. I may investigate any available DVDs to see if there is one with an option to isolate the soundtracks - or even mix your own on the fly; that would be fun.


17. Ripley's Game (2002) - I never really understood the attraction of the Ripley character. I have tried to read a couple of the books and didn't get very far with either. Anthony Minghella's 1999 The Talented Mr Ripley Amazingly was, I thought, an interesting enough film but even though it charted the 'creation' of Ripley I still didn't understand him. As soon as John Malkovich appeared on screen in Ripley's Game I got it. Amazingly this went straight to DVD/Video in the States.


18. Jack the Ripper (1976) - very odd little Swiss/German take on the Jack the Ripper story which, apart from a couple of library establishing shots (one anachronistically putting the wrong queen on the throne), was shot entirely in Germany and looks it. Everything was just wrong. The architecture in particular and the furniture It all looked very un English. I suppose Germans get the same feeling of wrongness about Epping Forest standing in for Frankenstein country in all those Hammer films. Klaus Kinski did his usual going bonkers stuff - which is always fun - as the mad doctor / Jack the Ripper and got caught in the end - which added to the wrongness levels. Another Jess Franco film under my belt. Only another 148 or so to go.


19. Planet of the Apes (1967) - the superior original. I had forgotten how fantastic the score was. And so little of it too, very spare; unlike most Hollywood soundtracks these days. Jerry Goldsmith knew when to shut up and let the pictures do the work.


20. Ritana (aka Returner 2002) - Japan. A lone vigilante in the standard-issue, post Matrix, full-length leather coat shoots endless supplies of Ninja Yakuza, and helps a time-travelling cute girl rescue an alien (thus saving the world from the total pasting, end of human life, alien invasion which the girl has come back in time to prevent). Lots of explosions, lots of dodging slow-mo bullets while leaping 20 feet in the air shooting two hand guns in opposite directions mid somersault, lots of running around walkways and ducking behind pipes in an empty industrial site, not a lot of plot. Certainly nothing that hasn't been done a million times before in short stories, movies, TV shows, and comic books. Anime made flesh.


21. Survival Zone (1983) - Raking through the back room of one of the local charity shops today (I'm such a regular I get privileges) I hit bigbox VHS paydirt. A whole pile of cruddy films in crappy 1980s bigbox cases. First into the player tonight was this dreadful, post-apocalyptic piece of poo. After a voice-over telling us that the Neutron bomb war of 1987 has wiped out nearly all animal life on Earth, we find ourselves in South Africa. We meet a bunch of bestial, leather clad bikers who watch two of their number fight and then appear to eat the looser... we meet three nuns looking after a couple of orphans in a deserted mission... we meet handsome hunk who has just buried his mother and sets off in his Land Rover to see if there is anyone else alive... we meet a happy nuclear family living on a farm. That's about all you need to know really, it's standard western plot number 37b. Indians on the warpath, lone stranger, happy sheep farmers wanting no trouble. Exactly the same. Except with nun-eating involved."
    
    
    
    "For those who are about to eat us
    make us truly grateful, amen."
    
    
    So, still peckish after the nuns, the bikers attack the farm. The hunk arrives and we find he is called Adam Strong (no kidding) and the farm is called 'Eden farm' (could this be symbolic? or just bollocks?), farmer and family kill all the indians - sorry evil, nun-chomping bikers. Adam kills the head biker by whacking his head off with a spade. The End. Incidentally the head biker is the only one of the horde to speak. At one point while he is haranguing his troops and dumping backstory (they had all escaped from jail - presumably jails are neutron bombproof in South Africa) he actually says: "I warned you not to drink that contaminated water, now you are all mute!" A brilliant line which saved the writers from having to write any bestial dialogue for the cannibal bikers ("Pass the ketchup please."?) and the producers from having to pay actors to deliver them. This might all sound vaguely entertaining but it's so laboriously overwritten (apart from the bikers); everyone who does speak gets to deliver screeds of repetitive, aimless dialogue that does nothing to advance the plot and then goes round the block and does it all again just in case we missed any of it. There are whole scenes of endless pointlessness that are just baffling in their utter pointlessnessnocity. In an early one we watch Adam playing solo pool in an abandoned pub for a while till he gets bored and wanders upstairs into a room, he looks about a bit, turns on the shower - aha! water! - he decides to stay SUDDEN CUT AWAY TO SOMETHING ELSE TO FILL A GAP! and then he's asleep in bed. Something creaks. Something moves! A mirror cracks. He leaps out of bed. Suddenly there is full-on poltergeist activity going on all around him! He runs out of the hotel... meanwhile somewhere else...
    
    
    What had the sudden onset of poltergeist activity got to do with anything else in the movie? Sod all.
    
    
    There's a lot of SUDDEN CUTTING AWAY TO SOMETHING ELSE TO FILL A GAP! in this movie - usually accompanied by loud music to make it really obvious. (I think the sound editor hated the director's guts. "Look!" he seems to say, "The bastard fucked up again and had to SUDDENLY CUT AWAY TO SOMETHING ELSE TO FILL A GAP!") My favourite one came when we watch our hero setting a trap that involved some of the heavily foreshadowed dynamite he just happens to have around the farm. It's dark, he's in the cellar, there are nunaphagic bikers all around, he sneaks up a three step stepladder to do something trappy with some string and a nail, first step, second step SUDDEN CUT AWAY TO THE MOON IN A CLOUDY SKY! sneak back down the ladder, second step, first step... We have no idea what the hell he did up there - not that we are any wiser at the end of the movie either. Incredifuckingbly dreadful. I loved every second of it. (I forgot to check if there were any fingerless gloves in this one.)
    


22. Steel Dawn (1987) - I feel sorry for those people who don't sit through the credits at the end of movies. Apart from the odd lollipop, (like the Tibetan monk gag at the end of the end credits for The Adventures of Prescilla Queen of the Desert), you do find the most glorious names lurking in them. Steel Dawn for instance had a stunt person called Panica Protopapa (only other IMDb listing is as an actor way down near the bottom of a Marjoe Gortner movie: American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt). Not as good a name as Yolanda Squatpump but then very few names are.
    
    
    
    Steel Dawn is the usual post-apocalyptic desert stuff (Fingerless gloves? Check!) A stranger with no name (in the cast list he is just called 'Nomad') arrives at the farm of a widow and her son just as they are having trouble with the local megalomaniac land baron who wants to run them off their land blah blah blah. Sounds like every third cowboy movie ever made after Shane except there aren't any guns and everyone is dressed in BDSM fetishist wet dream leather gear and has HUGE hair. (The villain wears something Tina Turner would have been proud of; it looks like a couple of electrified stoats glued to his head.)
    
    
    Ooh! Get me, I'm so evil...
    
    
    
    As there are no guns on show, people fight with swords. The end result is that the movie looks less like a Post Apoc Western and more like a Post-Apoc Samurai movie. In the first half hour we get to watch Patrick Swayze walk a lot. I remember thinking he wasn't as good as Toshiro Mifune. Now that man could walk.


23. The Eye Creatures (1965) - Another of Larry Buchanan's fantastically dreadful TV remakes. This time Invasion of the Saucer Men gets the work-over. Aliens land but are defeated by middle aged teenagers shining their car headlights on them - eye monsters explode if you shine lights on them. Superbly dreadful with all the usual Larry Buchanan hallmarks of shoddiness: there are lots of over-long shots of people walking away from the camera and into a doorway. This is a classic Buchanan shot and quite often it signals the end of a scene. The scene often actually finished quite a while beforehand but Buchanan will usually wait till everyone has left the screen before he cuts to the next one. Not very good with transitions was Mr B. Not very good at anything really.


24. Cargo (2010) - I was a little disappointed, after all the good reviews I have read of this, that it wasn't better. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad, but I had worked out the plot about five minutes in and after that it was just watching the dominoes topple. It looked great and the lack of gunplay was welcome but it did press several of my dumb SF buttons: things like the size of the ship (the Kassandra), which was full of huge spaces all full of air at a breathable pressure.
    
    "Captain, I think we got a stowaway."
    "Okay, put on your suits and vent the ship. Next problem please."
    
    And the big engines firing all the time for four years! They only cut out about 30 seconds before they reach their destination; at which point the ship just stops (once the engines stop pushing it). At some point this ship goes FLT. It has to. Rhea, its destination, is 'four years' away from Earth. Proxima Centuri is about 4.2 light-years from us. So even if Rhea is around our nearest neighbour - and the implication is that it isn't - then the Kassandra must have gone faster than light to get there in the time. As it was constantly accelerating, when it got to Station 42 (aka Matrix in Space) it would have been doing at least lightspeed and, according to Einstein, would have accumulated enough relativistic mass to destroy the whole bloody planet as it hit.
    
    As for the moment when our heroine jet packs straight into the open airlock of the moving spaceship at the end....


25. Gay Niggers from Outer Space (1992)- probably the most crappily amateur film, with some of the worst production values and dialogue I have seen for years - but so stupid it was quite endearing and genuinely funny. (Very short too.)


26. Flesh+Blood (1985) - Paul Verhoeven's first English language feature which owes more than a little to Kurosawa and was the third film I've watched this week that has nice Photoshop chrome gradient filled lettering on the video's cover. (Well, it's one way of choosing what to watch; next week I'll only watch videos that have skulls with glowing eyes on the front of the box.) You could tell this film had a bigger budget than the other two because the graphic designers knew how to adjust the settings and make the chrome effect a little more complex and subtle. Not sure what to make of the film. I was reminded at various times of Kurosawa's Ran, Poe's Masque of the Red Death and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Rutger Hauer did his usual sterling stuff and Jennifer Jason Lee was naked a lot. Either is a good enough reason to watch a film.

Somehow it has become March without me noticing. Two days ago - a fact which caused me a little embarrassed today when I insisted the poor woman behind the counter at Blockbuster scanned the online voucher I had printed off. It would, in theory, have saved me a quid on the three DVDs I was attempting to buy from the three for a tenner bin. The voucher was valid till the end of February. She scanned it then told me it was out of date.
"It's valid till the first of March," I said. "It says so there, look!"
"Today's the second of March."
"It can't be. It was the twenty-eighth on Monday and today is only Wednesday so that means it's the thirtieth..."
"Of February...?
"Yes the thirtieth of... oh...."

It also means I have another month's worth of crappy movies to post up here and then I'll be caught up. But I'll do it tomorrow.

To keep you entertained until then, 'The 'Planet Stories' Fiasco', a part of my book that I am not writing - which has, over the last year or so, mutated from the world's worst science fiction book into the world's worst over-annotated bibliography of a non-existent author - is currently on display in the February 2011 edition of Mythaxis.

Sometime in the next couple of years I will finish the book I am not writing. I intend to make the book I am not writing exactly 50,000 words long - I read somewhere that for a book to count as a novel it has to be at least 50,000 words. My plan is to get to 49,998 words and then write 'The End' (or 49,997 words and write 'To Be Continued'; I haven't quite made my mind up). Once I've got enough words down - I'm currently about 13,000 words short - I will start deleting the really crap bits and replacing them with slightly better bits but still keeping it at exactly fifty-K words. I have no idea why I am doing this apart from the fact that it amuses me. When I've finally finally finished pratting about with it and decided that it is finally finally as funny as I can get it, I'll publish it somewhere as a free to air PDF and start writing dirty limericks for a bit. Or dirty haikus. Or just scrawling 'Bum' on pieces of paper. Something really short anyway.

Not a bad haul for £15

I got a day off today. Merriol has been urging me to do this for weeks but I finally got round to doing it today. About 50 miles away from us over on the other side of Scotland there is a barn-like shed full of antiques / junk / treasure that is only open on Thursdays and Saturdays. Every time we go past (which isn't very often) we stop and have a look and I spend most of my time prising things out of the kids' hands and yelling, "Don't touch! - Anything!".

Along one side of the shed is a vast pile of books. Some are on shelves others are in piles on the floor. Some of the piles have fallen over. There are occasionally pieces of furniture stacked on top of them. Every time I've been to the shed I've had to drag myself away vowing one day to come back alone and sort through the pile uninterrupted from one end to another and not stop till I finished.

I did it today. Drove over in the morning, spent two or three hours moving several thousand books a few inches to the left and filling up a box with battered old Penguins and lurid SF novels - and what looks suspiciously like a first edition of Elizabeth David's Italian Food. It has lost its dust-wrapper and is a little battered but no matter; it's MINE!


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Okay, catchup time. As threatened promised over the last couple of days, it's every crappy movie I watched for the last couple of months time:

December 2010

Confidential Report (aka Mr Arkadin) - for the umpteenth time. A scratchy mess of a film that just captivates me every time. Possibly my favourite Orson Welles film - until the next time I watch The Lady From Shanghai.

I Eat Your Skin aka Zombie Bloodbath (1964) - Two misleading titles, though people did eat, there were people with skin in the movie, and there were zombies. But it was total pants. It was total pants at the time it was made and remained on the shelf for six years before sneaking out as the support act in a drive in double bill.

The basic story concerns a playboy writer who travels with his agent, and a couple of other more disposable characters, to 'Voodoo Island' where he uncovers a fiendish plot by the boss white man. The boss white man is blackmailing the local maverick misguided scientist with the beautiful daughter (standard fixtures on small Caribbean islands at the time) into turning the 'natives' into indestructible zombies with which he can take over the world. The zombification process involves taking snake venom (via stock footage) and putting it in a nuclear microwave with a big flashing DANGER FORESHADOWING! sign on it, then injecting it into hapless natives. Mwahahaha! To help him in his scheme White Boss Bloke dresses up as a voodoo-doo priest, Papa Whatever, and goes around chopping off women's heads at orgiastic ceremonies. When he decides to chop off the blonde (and somewhat humpable) scientist's beautiful daughter's head, things go a bit wrong for him.

This movie probably does have one claim to fame, it boasts what may well be the the world's first on-screen zombie suicide bomber. A zombie carrying a box of explosives, helpfully marked 'Explosives', walks into the spinning propeller of the heroes' plane. Kaboom!

A couple of shots later, as our heroes (they weren't actually in the plane at the time) run away from the wreckage, and other unexploded zombies, we get a wonderful panning shot that lets us see, along the beach, the shadows of the entire film crew cast by the setting sun.

In the end you'll be glad to know the whole island* is blown up when the scientist deliberately overloads the nuclear microwave with the big flashing DANGER FORESHADOWING sign on it.

Avoid at all costs; I have made it sound far more fun than it actually is.

*or at least, a very small model of it.

Short Circuit - at last we break the musical loop on Pizza and Movie night! Not as good as I remember but the kids enjoyed it.

The Sadist (1963) - Pretty damn terrific and influential low budget shocker which still works.

The Master of Disguise (2003) - Bought for £1 in Morrison's. I paid about 99p too much. The case will come in use.

Black Narcissus (1947) - God Damn! I love this film. 100 minutes of the most beautiful erotically sensual celluloid art and craftsmanship.

There, that was relatively painless wasn't it?

January 2011

Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II (1994) - Rewatch. Not as weirdly odd as I remember. Maybe because I have seen the original since I first saw it.

Darkdrive (1996) - Rewatch. A possible exception to my 'ALL sf movies set in futuristic gaols are automatically pants' rule. Don't get me wrong, Darkdrive is definitely pants but, even on a second viewing, gets so genuinely confusingly weird by the end of it that I forgive it its sins of the first half.

War Between the Planets (1966) Rewatch - one of the classic 'Gamma 1' series of Italian SF movies made in the mid-60s, and maybe the weakest of the four. In this episode Earth is threatened with destruction by unknown forces which release a tidal wave of stock footage from 'all four corners of the globe' (sic). After about an hour of on-screen helplessness in which nothing much happens apart from technicians at consoles bark chunks of technobabble to one another while people in authority listen to them and say things like "This is fantastic! Why wasn't I informed before?", our hero gets it into his head to load an anti-matter bomb into a space ship and set off for somewhere not very well defined for some reason not made very clear to the audience. For a variety of equally obscure motives, almost everyone else in the cast with speaking parts follow him. They find a red glowing farting asteroid and decide to blow it up. After endlessly wandering around its glowing interior and strungling* with viciously inert rubber tentacles (see 35 second mark in the trailer for a good example), they finally succeed. The music was kind of groovy and the endless wandering around the same small alien set got hypnotically dreamlike towards the end but it wasn't really worth the effort to get there.

Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962) - Rewatch (I'm obviously in the mood to revisit some of the oddities I've discovered over the last couple of years.) A strange, strange little movie which was as oddly odd as I remember. (Helped no doubt by my downloaded copy being a few frames out of synch which had the effect of making everyone sound like they had dubbed themselves appearing in a foreign language movie.)

Alien Intruder (1993) - Straight to video shit from a first time director who stretched five minutes worth of story (an alien virus in the shape of Tracy Scoggins infects a spaceship crew's individual virtual reality sleep pods and makes them kill each other) out to two hours. Two hours in which we are expected to buy the phenomenal idea that people will fight and kill to sleep with Tracy Scoggins! Two hours in which we get to watch Maxwell Caulfield wishing he was back making quality products like Grease 2. (If you drew a straight line on Caulfield's graph of crappy shame between the points marking Grease 2 and the rural soap Emmerdale, where he now works, this movie would be well below it.) We also get to watch Billy Dee Williams playing some weird game in which he tries to put the stress on the wrong word in every sentence without the director noticing; I suspect he was trying to keep himself awake. And we also get to watch the future security chief of Babylon 5 snog his commanding officer. (Jeff Conaway and Tracy Scoggins - but only total geek fanboys would have: a.noticed, b.thought it noteworthy, c.found it pervily arousing. Luckily I score only 2 out of the 3, so there is still hope for me.) All in all another 75p well spent at the charity shop. Future prisons featured heavily in this one too. And why is it that any 'virtual reality' of the 80s and 90s will always have a bad Casablanca homage sequence in them?

La Scoggins

Shepherd (1999) - More post-apocalyptic nonsense (characters wearing fingerless gloves? Check!). Somewhere in Roger Corman's book How I made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime I seem to recall that he gave one sure-fire simple way of getting 300% out of any location involved in a car chase (or maybe it was mentioned in the Dov Simens' 2-Day Film School™ I once attended - I got in for free) either way the advice given was this: Put the camera down, have the cars drive past. Put an oil drum in the foreground and have the cars drive past the other way. While they're turning around for a final pass, set fire to the oil drum. Three set-ups without moving the camera. Advice the director of this turd took to heart. There isn't an exterior without at least one burning oil drum somewhere in the shot. Great attempts were made to give this movie a cultish vibe, great dollops of knowing 'weirdness' are thrown at the screen: David Carradine as a drunken ventriloquist whose dummy tries to strangle our hero, an unnamed character who is totally extraneous to the plot and does nothing more than vaguely comment on the action and ask unseen punters to place bets on what happens next, an old lady who spontaneously combusts in a restaurant for no apparent (and unexplained) reason - but none of it sticks. It's all too self-knowing and clumsy. It becomes irritating. What you end up with is a another poverty-row 'Sci-Fi' actioner with added, not very good, 'weird' bits climaxing (as usual) in a final showdown battle. This time the battle is between rival religious cultist leaders who can summons up a grand total of three stuntmen each. No amount of rapid-fire editing or well placed oil drums with gas burners in them could rescue it. C Thomas Howell hid behind a beard and got to pretend to bump uglies with four women - tough job but I suppose someone has to do it.

Cyborg 3: The Creation (1995) - Even I found this one hard going. But I do think I've found the nadir of Malcolm McDowell's career. I thought Moon 44 was the bottom of the curve till I saw Beings (aka The Fairy King or Ar) but this.... Sticking firmly to the Rule of Part 3s (they're shit!) this is the second sequel to a Claude Van Dammit! movie (Part 2 starred Angelina Jolie) and is the usual post-apocolyptic desert wasteland driving shooting and explosions crap. Mr McD, so prominently displayed of the box front, "Starring Malcom McDowell", has about four lines that contribute nothing to the plot - or any possible 'character development' that might have been going on. (I didn't see any.) At first I thought his scenes were footage left over from a previous 'Cyborg' movie - but he wasn't in either of them so that can't have been it. Maybe he was just driving past, saw the film crew, and said, "Give us a fiver and I'll be in your movie!". His scenes cannot have taken more than a couple of hours to shoot.

Armageddon (1997 aka Redline, Deathline) - One of those films in which an American Armed Only With a Handgun: A. out-shoots armies of hired goons out to kill him B. gets the girl. The film is set in slightly futuristic Moscow, was shot in Hungary and the American Armed Only With a Handgun is Dutchman Rutger Hauer. The endless army of goons out to kill him include topless women boxers and nude female assassins - and street bums. In one sequence our hero is on the run, his name and picture are flashed up on vast outdoor screens in a 'Moscow's Most Wanted' TV show (which re-enacted his 'crimes' as the Odessa Steps massacre from In Battleship Potemkin). There is a cash reward. A bunch of vodka-soaked down-and-outs make the connection. One points at our fugitive hero. Hey! He's the guy! There! Stop him! Suddenly, from nowhere, they all produce AK47s and start blasting away! It's almost a good joke but nothing is made of it and it falls flat on its arse; just turns into another improbable, overlong 'action' sequence - which makes me wonder if it was a joke at all. I hope it was because it was just about the only original idea in the movie. Mind you, the locations were interesting to look at and naked women are always welcome on my TV, even when attacking Rutger Hauer wearing boxing gloves, but the script was a confusing mess; I had no idea what was going on half the time and cared less for most. The music was a mess too, but an eclectic interesting mixture of a mess that ranged from Hardcore Techno to some serious Hardcore Cheesy Listening via Jewish folk music.

Caché (2005 aka Hidden) - A grown up film for a change. In which I didn't mind that I didn't know what was going on half the time because I wanted to know! It's nearly two hours long has lots of long static shots in which nothing much happens but I was gripped. I found myself scouring the screen, examining every passing face for a clue. I thought Juliette Binoche did a brilliant job. I will admit to feeling let down by the ultimate ambiguity of it all. Too much Hollywood. I've been conditioned to expect endings.

Escape from L.A. (1996) - Aha! Another outbreak of Burning Drumitis. Everywhere in PostApoc L.A. - burning oil drums. Even when our hero (Kurt Russel) and sidekick descend through a manhole into the sewers - burning oil drums. About half way through I started to recognise individual drums. There was one with two large holes near the top that kept turning up all over the place. The story was the routine pants and Steve Buscemi stole the show as usual.

Tinker Bell (2008 ) - Straight to DVD Disney movie which wasn't as indescribably awful as I was expecting. Daughter Number Two wanted Daughter Number One to see it and chose it as Friday Night Pizza Movie. A couple of passable, and well timed, jokes made me almost laugh and it was mercifully short on songs; there's only one which is delivered in that hideous, semi-operatic, overly precise diction style that Disney Princesses love so much. Half way though the show I found myself thinking that for a cartoon character Tinker Bell didn't half have nice legs. That was a weird moment.

Night of the Blood Beast ( 1958 ) - a formula Roger Corman alien-invasion low budget quickie. Towards the end - and the inevitable showdown in Bronson Canyon - I spent a lot of time trying to remember all the movies I had seen shot in that location. IMDb lists 261. A lot of them are TV episodes but have seen a vast number of the crap SF films shot there in the 50s and 60s: Teenagers From Outer Space, Robot Monster, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Earth vs. the Spider, and so on - oh! here's one I haven't seen: Beach Babes 2: Cave Girl Island - shot in 1988. Nice to know the tradition is alive. Off to Blockbusters to rent that one and see what the place looks like in colour.

Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell (1988 aka Deathstalker III) - Mexican shot sword and sorcery bollocks that left me as overwhelmed with indifference as the last time I watched it three years ago. In fact, so overwhelmed was I the last time, that I had completely forgotten I'd seen it until about halfway through - by then it was too late; rigor mortis had set in.

The Lady From Shanghai (1947) - I can never decide whether I think The Lady from Shanghai is my favourite of Welles' films or if it's Mr Arkadin. It's usually the one I have watched most recently.

The Sword in the Stone (1963) - Friday Night Pizza and Family Movie Fest. I've been avoiding watching The Sword in the Stone for most of my life for a couple of reasons: a. The book was a childhood favourite and even from an early age I knew that watching film versions of favourite books was a sure ticket to disappointment. b. It was made by Disney who, more than most, fucked up perfectly great books to make really mediocre films - especially during the 60s. I don't like Disney at the best of times but their animation in the 60s was just dreadful: scrappy, cheap, and obsessed with animating endless amounts of water cascading around the place. Here the story, which was not complicated to start with, has been simplified to the point of idiocy and made so bland it was almost unrecognisable. I read the book to my girls recently at bedtimes; they laughed all the way through the film but spent the next twenty minutes telling me the bits that had been left out from the book.

The Search for One-Eye Jimmy (1994) - a, not as funny as I remember it, indie comedy with a great cast: John Turturro, Samuel L. Jackson, Steve Buscemi, Sam Rockwell, Jennifer Beals, and New York based indie movie staple Anne Meara (I think it's actually illegal to shoot a movie in New York without her in the cast). There's not much of a plot and even less of a script.

Bunny and the Bull (2009) - I wanted to like this so much and I'm really struggling to understand why I didn't. Bunny and the Bull is an overly quirky Film Council (RIP) part-funded feature début from the director of the overly quirky TV series The Mighty Boosh. Benny and the Bull has "From the Director of the Mighty Boosh" writ large on the box, the stars of 'the Boosh', Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, appear in the film Everything screams "Compare this to The Mighty Boosh!". So I feel no guilt about doing just that. Now I like The Mighty Boosh. I like it a lot. Noel Fielding and the other one are direct comic descendants of the absurdist surrealism of the great Spike Milligan. The show packed more oddness into one 1/2 hour slot than most programmes achieved in a whole series. The show had great writing and a joyous combination of expensive set design and a scrappy make-do and cobble it together feel (in one episode the villain was an unwound Betmax cassette played by an actor festooned in unwound videotape).

The jokes and situations came at you thick and fast in the show. The film is a lot slicker, and the characters aren't played for laughs as much, but it just didn't deliver for me. The design and lighting are too good, when the action segues into our characters moving in an animated, modelled, or drawn - almost cartoon-like, landscape (which happens a lot) it all looks too well done. The only way I can think to explain it is when you see a drawing in a film or in an advert that is supposedly done by a child but is so obviously done by an adult trying to draw like a child. It somehow becomes incredibly phoney. I'm not explaining this very well am I? I do know that I thought it was very long. I was surprised to find it was only 97 mins long; I thought I had been watching it for at least 2 hours. The music was good.

Guys and Dolls (1955) - I have a soft spot for Guys and Dolls and pulled rank at the Family Friday Night Pizza and Movie Ritual by making my kids watch it. Only Holly stayed its 150 mins course but then she has an almost insatiable appetite for Hollywood musicals ("even when there is kissing in them"). It was the first time I'd seen it where it hadn't been panned and scanned and was in heaven seeing all sorts of details I'd never seen before. One of the things I enjoy so much about this film is watching Brando work. I don't know anything about the shooting but he looks like he's having such fun it's infectious.

The Adventures of Prescilla Queen of the Desert (1994) - Merriol's favourite film and as a 40th birthday surprise friends hired the local community cinema and we had an afternoon showing with everyone glammed up with glitter and false eyelashes. The best way to watch a film.

Send for Paul Temple (1946) - Workmanlike, very dated, British 'thriller' in which, true to form, expiring villains gasped out cryptic clues with their dying breaths (though how the landlord of the pub found hanged with his hands tied behind his back managed to write 'peng' in the dust on an overturned stool is never explained). The film showed its radio origins by having the characters constantly repeating to each other the few obvious clues they have gathered so far; this would have been useful, if not essential, in an episodic radio serial where listeners had to be bought up to date with the story, but was tedious in a 83 minute film.

The Astro-Zombies ( 1968 ) - I think this is the third or fourth time I've watched this very very bad film. I find it fascinating. It's ponderously slow, with every shot held to its maximum length in an attempt to stretch it out to a decent running time, but it does have a secret weapon: John Carradine. I have no idea why, but I could watch that man talk garbage on screen for hours. Here he's playing his usual misguided scientist who this time has managed to lose his prototype 'astro-zombie', a reanimated human cadaver with an artificial heart. The idea is that by thought transference the Astro-zombie would be able to take the world's greatest scientists into space without putting them in any danger. Unfortunately Dr. Carradine had only the brain of a 'psychopathic murderer' knocking about when the mark one was assembled - fill in the blanks.... Several grisly murders later, in the inevitable basement laboratory, Dr. Carradine and his hunchbacked mute assistant Franchot stand before a bank of electronic stuff with a lot of lights and buttons that make 'boopily boopily' noises when you push them..

"Now Franchot, the time has come to test our new brain. We must feed this memory circuit through the emotional quotient rectifier to determine if there is any residual impurity.... (Seventeen or so switches switched, buttons pushed, and rheostats twiddled later...) "I've introduced into the console the electrolitic limiters which should disallow interference with the programmed patterns function within the body mechanism. Actuate the heart circuit. Excellent! Before we can recall our first creation, we must attempt to override his emotional index by stepping up the voltage and transmission frequency... (More buttons, switches and rheostats are expertly fondled and suddenly screen is full of red flashing lights! The buttons, switches and rheostats are expertly, but rapidly, fondled in reverse order till they stop.) "It's obvious the frequency and voltage boost will not effect an override... Franchot, remove number nine from the thermal freeze casket and prepare him for brain transfer and total astro-mobilisation....

It's like music, like some free-form jazz science fiction scat singing. I wonder if he made it up as he went along, improvising around a few key points, or if someone actually wrote those lines and he learned them? I like to think the man is winging it. The Ella Fitzgerald of crap SF films.

*Strungle v. To simulate the act of strangulation by clutching the stranglator to your own throat, while pretending to struggle to be free. An act commonly seen performed in any cheap movie containing a giant octopus. A word I coined while watching Gog a couple of years ago.

Ignore yesterday's threat of bad movie stodge listing. You're off the hook for the day. On Wednesday Merriol and I went shopping in the Fort and raking through the back room of one of the charity shops (I'm such a regular I get privileges) I hit bigbox VHS paydirt. A whole pile of cruddy films in crappy 1980s bigbox cases. I've spent so much of this evening watching sweaty men in mullets hitting each other with bits torn off vehicles that there's no time left tonight to recap what I watched last month - or even the month before that.

Post-apoc mullet syrup

Tomorrow.

Last month, the Film Program on BBC Radio 4 asked their listeners to send in their film diaries for the month. I did. They mentioned my list on the show and linked to it. That was nice.

I haven't posted my usual 'every crappy film that I have watched' for some two months now.

You may want to miss the next couple of days of this blog...

Fark me!

My obsession with the peculiarities of Lidl's graphic design team continues:

Ever since the days of clockwork computers, every desktop publishing package / graphics tool worth its salt has had the facility to rotate things. If you want two pieces of identical lettering going in opposite directions on different sides of something - like a wrapper for a bar of chocolate for instance - you would have thought that it would be simplicity itself to type the in text, copy it, paste it, rotate the copy, then move the two bits of text to where you want them.

Lidl's graphikers seem to have to type it all out every time. Maybe they had been naughty and ate the chocolate after the photoshoot instead of returning it to the shelves for sale and this was a punishment.

Sadly this typo has been fixed recently - this flattened packet has been in my scanner for weeks waiting for me to get round to doing this.

My sense of humour sems to be coming back after its long winter's nap. Actually it didn't so much have a nap this year as pack its bags and leave, slamming the door on the way out and threatening never to return. I quite often have a midwinter dip. Last year I didn't - partially I suspect because the weather last winter was so mild: lots of light, very little rain. This year however, just to make up for it, the weather has been shitty cold, wet, and dark and the midwinter blues hit me really hard. So much so that I eventually gave in went to the doctor's, had a long chat and and got prescribed an SSRI. Despite my reservations and after making me feel very peculiar for a couple of weeks, they seem to be doing some good. Everything isn't such a relentless, thankless bloody chore any more. And as I said, my sense of humour seems to be coming back - for a trial period to see if we're still compatible.

The other day I was sitting in the bathroom reading an article in New Scientist about the possibility of using pulsars as a method of measuring hypothesised gravity waves (as you do) when I came across this diagram which just made me laugh out loud:

Hurray! I've got my sense of humour back. Or possibly someone else's who is a bit smarter than me.

I am still alive and I will breath life into this blog one day. Soon. Soon it will rise again. My hunchback assistant is scouring the web for spare parts and as soon as I've cobbled them all together and there is a climactic thunderstorm in the offing we'll have this thing up and about and tearing the arms off passing peasants in no time.

I got a letter from my bank today:

Dear Mr Baldwin, Account Number XXXXXXXXXX I write to advise that your above mortgage has now been repaid in full.

I stopped reading after that.

WoooooooooHoooooooo!!!!!!!!!

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

There's been a lot of air punching and random 'Yesssss!'ing going on all day.

I'll get used to it.

Over the last couple of years I have been, from time to time annoyed by a old memory of something I had seen in the cinema when I was a kid. A couple of vague images of jewels, men in red suits and some sort of ray gun - and an even more vague impression that it was a comedy of some sort. Tonight, quite by chance I trip over this:

And suddenly I'm 12 maybe or 13 years old again, in the balcony of a cinema in France, being utterly baffled. I was on an exchange trip. A French kid stayed with our family for two weeks and then I went over there to stay with his family. I think the idea was we would learn some of each other's language and make lifelong friendships that would mean we would never go to war with France again. As plans go it wasn't bad... I don't remember us going to war with France since I went - but I didn't learn much of the language, and I couldn't stand the arrogant little twerp I was paired with. What I did do was get drunk at the local pub, fall in love with a girl called Isabel, and get my hand down her friend's knickers (the friend's name, I'm ashamed to say, I don't remember) - and I also seemed to have gone to the cinema to see a rerun Italian superhero movie. My adolescence went downhill from there.

There are times when I know I'm getting old. One such moment came a couple of weeks ago at a drama workshop. Ilona who was taking the class told us all to pair off and stand facing each other 'about three feet apart'. A couple of the girls there, in their late teens I would guess, looked blank. "Just under a metre," I explained. Light dawned.

Another happened today. Listening to an otherwise interesting programme on Radio 4 about the little-known 1969 war between Honduras and El Salvador, I heard 'an expert' opine that the 1969 war between Honduras and El Salvador was so little-known because it had happened at the same time as Apollo 11 was on its way to the moon. Fair enough. Holding a war when the world's media is preoccupied with events off-planet might easily relegate your war to a footnote. I'm not arguing with that. What I object to is that he didn't say "Apollo eleven", he said "Apollo two". Rocky II, Godfather II, Apollo 11. Makes sense. Mind you he was "an expert" on football and therefore almost certainly pig ignorant about everything else. Though you would have thought someone in the BBC would have spotted it and tweaked it before it went out.

I'm feeling a terrible urge to write to Anne Robinson. "Dear Points of View, Oh Why oh why...."*






* moment number III.

So, it's cold. It hasn't got anything like above freezing for the past week and we've got no snow to play in. This means the ground gets really really cold. Without the cuddly blanket of insulating snow that the rest of the country is enjoying the ground here is just getting colder and colder. Having the sun disappear behind a mountain at about 1 pm doesn't help either.
Our water main froze sold then thawed. It had burst. Gush! gush! gush! Tomorrow I will be driving to the Fort to buy some piping and other bits and pieces, then spending the rest of the day wrestling it all under my floorboards, freezing my nuts off as I crawl around in the couple of inches of semi-frozen water down there.
But you don't want to hear about that do you? You want to read about all the crappy movies I watched last month.... I know I do.

1. The XYZ Murders (1985) - aka Crimewave. The Coen Brothers had just made Blood Simple, Sam Raimi had just made Evil Dead, somehow everyone involved thought this was going to be their first mainstream hit. The co-producer, Bruce Campbell, nicely summed up the resulting mess, in his book If Chins Could Kill;
   

   Overall, Crimewave is a lesson in abject failure - no matter how you slice it, the film was a dog, and everyone involved can pretty much line up to take forty whacks. As filmmakers we failed to execute a misguided concept and our studio refused us the benefit of any doubt

2. Æon Flux (2005) - stylish bit of comic book fun which I enjoyed far more than I was expecting to.
   


3. Day Watch (2006) - over-long, sloppy, incoherent mess of a sequel to Night Watch. In which the forces of Good and Evil do stuff, phone each other's mobiles every couple of minutes, and do lots and lots and lots and lots of unexplained mystical and CGI heavy SFX stuff for no particular reason (other than they did it in the first one which did make some sort of sense - or at least far more than this one). Somewhere buried under this barrage of wiz-bangery is a piss poor excuse for a story that stops every now and then to strain for laughs - which it fails to get. Even the usually sure fire laugh a minute body swap gag where our hero is thrust into a woman's body - only to pitch the woo to his own girlfriend - oh! the lesbian titillation! is so ineptly done you wonder why they bothered. The only mildly amusing bit in it was the moment when suddenly, at the height of all the mayhem and apocalyptical destruction, one of the characters just stops time. Sorry! What? Time. Stoped. Hero in peril, it's the end of the world and with no particular effort a character just stops time in its track. All I could hear in my head was Christopher Plummer, as the Emperor of the Galaxy in Star Crash, declaiming, "Imperial Starcruiser - Halt the flow of time!". It's the sort of crap Get out of Jail Free Card scriptwriters could pull out of their arse for 1970s, who-gives-a-shit? Italian SF movies - and Plummer had the decency to do it wearing a floor-length gold cape and an imperious wave of the hand. Here? Time just stops. 'Okay, were at the end of the movie. We can't think how to end the show so we'll just stop time and let our hero use the magic dingus ('The Chalk of Fate' no less) to put everything right.' Utter fucking pants.


4. The Killer Shrews - doesn't get any better with a second viewing


5. Easter Parade (1947) - never seen it before and was pleasantly entertained.


6. Den brysomme mannen (2006) - aka The Bothersome Man to us Anglophones. Weirdly funny (I laughed on the first cut without a word of dialogue having been spoken), slow, surreal allegory of something; Hell? Purgatory? or, as one astute and convincing reviewer on IMDb would have us believe, everyday life in Norway?


7. Twisted Brain (1974) - aka Horror High. Feeble Jekyll and Hydealike in which a nerdy high school type develops a drug that turns his guinea pig into a cat killing monster and himself into a rampaging beast who kills everyone who torments him, padded out with some tremendously vacant scenes in which nothing much happens at all. Set in the sort of American high school that has an oil-drum full of concentrated sulphuric acid in the biology lab, and props that conveniently rotate themselves 180º between shots to make it easier for people to impale themselves. Some seriously dreadful music too. Really the most terrifying aspect of the whole movie was waiting for the next music cue.


8. White Zombie (1932) - plodding Bela Lugosi melodrama which had some bravura opticals. There were some terrific use of wipes to create split-screen effects but the script and acting were terrible. Or are terrible. I don't know how it played at the time but it looks insanely dated now. Lines like:

   "Surely you don't think she's alive... in the hands of natives? Oh no! Better dead than that!"

   don't help. I am constantly intrigued by acting styles in old movies. In the early days of sound there was a whole range of gestures and attitudes which have just vanished over the years as actors struggled for 'naturalism'. The knuckle bite of repulsion. The outstretched arms walk of helpless yearning. The holding the invisible basketball of beseechment. All gone.
   
   
9. Farewell, My Lovely (1975) - not bad, not bad at all. I've been not watching his one for years because I am so fond of the original (well the Dick Powell version, there was an earlier version but that doesn't count) but I needn't have worried. Robert Mitchum is perfect in the part.


10. The Wizard of Oz - (again) and I nearly cried at the end (again).
    
    
11. Alien Vs Hunter (2007) - a fuckawful piece of shit straight-to-video Asylum knockbuster 'Starring' Dedee Pfeiffer which amazed me by being even worse than the two other Asylum knockbusters I've seen. I didn't think that it was possible to make something shoddier than Journey to the Center of the Earth but they had. THE only redeeming feature of the disk is on one of the extras where Dedee Pfeiffer in a 'making of' piece describes the 12 day shoot as even worse than guerilla movie making' "This," she says, "is baboon film making." And with that remark she cemented herself a special little place in my heart. (All together now: Aaaah!).
    


12. Red Planet (2000) - The first manned mission to Mars goes tits up. The movie fell to pieces before the end of the opening credits, the plot had more holes than a lace doily, and Terrence Stamp forgot to act - probably deliberately. He did play most of his scenes with Val Kilmer (the 'star' of the show) and was, presumably, instructed to make Kilmer look good. (As evidence for this almost certainly libellous assertion I'll point at a deleted scene included on the DVD where Stamp is playing opposite another actor and almost looks interested in what he is saying.) Another £1.20 (inc. postage) wasted on eBay. I really should learn shouldn't I? If it's going for £1.20 (inc. postage) on eBay there's probably a very good reason!
    
    Red Planet has more than its fair share of SF movie illiteracies and dead pure stupid moments but the one that made me really spill my gravy* while watching it tonight was the moment when heroic Val Kilmer - having walked for 19 hours across the Martian desert, survived attacks from a killer robot, an ice storm with temperatures of -50F, killer exploding nematodes, and all the rest, finally reaches the 30 year old Russian unmanned explorer which is to be his salvation. (It failed to launch see, so if he can hot-wire it and sit in the box on top where the Russians were going to shove rock samples, he might just make it into orbit - just in front of the mother ship piloted by Carrie-anne Moss five minutes before she has to burn the big engines and blast for home, because if she doesn't there won't be enough fuel to get back etc... - its one of those movies.)
    
    Anyway, arriving at the site of the 30 year old piece of shit Russian lander he prizes off a panel and fires up the 30 year old Russian computer within. Clickity-click! Aha here it comes now up on the screen...
    
    What?
    
    The Russians not only helpfully labelled everything on the outside of their unmanned lander in big letters, they also built in a 15 inch colour CRT monitor!?
    
    Why?
    
    Why would anyone spend god knows how many gazillion litregallonunits of rocket fuel first launching, and then gently landing, a computer monitor on Mars?
    
    You will be glad to hear that neither the writer nor the director of this turd have made a movie since.
    
    *I'm not really sure I know what that metaphor means - but I like it.


13. Atomised (2006) - The everyday story of two half brothers, both German, one a brilliant geneticist (and a virgin), the other a depressive neo-fascist high-school teacher who masturbates over his female pupils' homework. Two hours after the opening credits one of them is psychotic and the other is happy with his childhood sweetheart - and I didn't give a shit. The depressive neo-fascist high-school teacher who masturbates over his female pupils' homework is so repulsive you have no sympathy for him at all - even when his paraplegic swinger girlfriend commits suicide by throwing herself off her umpteenth storey flat balcony. And the brilliant virgin geneticist (pass the irony trowel will you, I think they missed a corner!) is so boringly bland and underplayed that they might as well have employed a photograph of him for most of the movie. The book on which this film is based is reckoned by some to be a true modern classic. I don't know about that but the film is a slow and tedious slice of soap opera. Actually I do give a shit. Here it is.


14. Death Race ( 2008 ) - And what a crock of crap that was too. A remake of a Roger Corman movie that makes the original look like a masterpiece (which in its own small subversive way it was) and proves, yet again, my assertion that:
    

    'Any SF movie set in a prison is shit - not 90% of them but ALL of them'.

    In Death Race Jason Statham is sent prison for murdering his wife, a crime he didn't commit. Once he's inside we are told, via some incredibly clunky exposition, that he is an ace racing driver and he's given the chance by the warden to take part in the Death Race of the title. If he wins he walks free. Pretty soon it's obvious that the warden had Statham's wife murdered so he would be sent to her jail so she could make money from the televised races. The race is in three parts and takes up most of the 100+ minutes running time. Lots of explosions and lots of car crashes and lots of frenetic cut cut cutting. The script for this movie must have taken up four or five pages the storyboards by comparison probably looked like a stack of telephone books. But as the dialogue runs along the lines of:

    "Okay, cocksucker. Fuck with me, and we'll see who shits on the sidewalk."

    I'm pretty glad there wasn't more of it. It's the sort of movie that thinks it's funny to call a part of the heavily armoured racing car 'The Tombstone', just so that Ian McShane (in the Morgan Freeman part) can point at it and say 'Tombstone'. Ho fucking ho. It's also the sort of movie who is so concerned that it might actually be taken seriously by its knuckledragging target audience that at the end of the show there is an end title card telling us that car stunts are dangerous and not to try them at home. Well duh!


15. Riverworld (2003) - 'Well poke me!' I thought, 'A movie based on a SF classic (albeit it one I didn't much like) I'll have a go at that.' My next thought was, 'I'll go get some popcorn'. It should have been 'Wait a minute... what's it doing on the notoriously crappy Movies4men channel'?
    
    Riverworld by Philip Jose Farmer is a storyteller's dream. In the first book of what became (for obvious reasons that will soon become apparent) a series, Farmer opens at the moment almost the whole of humanity, from the time of the first homo sapiens through to the early 21st century, is simultaneously resurrected along the banks of a river on an unknown planet. Basically Farmer can populate his stories with whoever he wants mixed and matched from any period in history and happily has Sir Richard Burton, Alice Hargreaves (the Alice of Alice in Wonderland), Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), King John, Tom Mix, Mozart, Jack London, Baron von Richthofen and Hermann Göring - interact with fictional characters in a quest to discover the purpose behind the creation of RiverworldRiverworld: the let's pretend it's a movie and not the pilot for a failed-to-materialize TV show, has a space shuttle pilot for a hero and the Emperor Nero as the villain. The river, despite being shown repeatedly in long shot as a river - you know, a RIVER - (an a pretty narrow on too) suddenly has crashing waves battering its banks and tides. Why? So the Emperor Nero (Mwahahaha!) can have our hero staked out at low tide, to drown as an offering to Neptune (don't worry, he was rescued by a seven year old girl - honest!). The resurrections in this version have been going on for 10 years prior to the start of the movie. Ten years in which the original arrivals have been able to knock up vast quantities of tools and machinery like a full-sized Mississippi paddle steamer - including some huge well-engineered cast iron gear wheels - and all sorts of wicked, fantasy-wank swords and spears, while living in the sort of rudimentary huts that movie set designers think look authentically 'medieval'. Some of the performances are TV movie adequate but Emily Lloyd (as Alice Lidell Hargreaves) turns in a hopelessly unconvincing attempt to act, really dreadful...
    
    Riverworld was remade earlier this year. The remake didn't spawn a series either. and their reincarnation. (End of cut and paste from Wikipedia... - and you thought I just knew stuff.) The


16. Carousel (1956) - a deathly dull (a few nice moments) two hour long musical which left me yawning but daughter number one distraught.


17. Queen of Blood (1966) - I'm not sure how many movies there are that can be summed up as 'the first manned mission to Mars goes (all together now!) horribly wrong', but I seem to have watched more than my fair share recently: Mission to Mars, Red Planet, and Battle Beyond the Sun. Queen of Blood is a low budget entry to the field that uses great chunks of technically impressive footage from Russian SF movies (including some from the source of Battle Beyond the Sun) and added a small dream-team, of low budget trash casting: Dennis Hopper, John Saxon, and Basil Rathbone. The end product is a short (81 min) and, at times, atmospheric and creepy little movie which makes me want to find more of the director's work.


18. The Alien Conspiracy: Grey Skies (2002) - link goes to my IMDb review. It's too shitty even to mention here.
    


19. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) - Colons appeared to be popular in film titles at the turn of the century. Early (first?) use of motion capture CGI doing what Japanese SF does best: incomprehensible bollocks of a story, big explosions, and animated females with cute bums. And lots of vehicles which transmorphicate at the touch of a button to the sound of bucketloads of hydraulic machinery noises slapped on the soundtrack. High score on the eye-candy meter but not a lot else.

Next month ART!

(Hah!)

Many many years ago (1993 or so) I worked as an extra on a movie. I spent several days lying around in a bog on a freezing hillside (it was late autumn) dressed in off the peg, medieval peasant rags pretending to be dead. (I was pretty good, I do inert very easily. I was a natural.) I then several days on the catering crew, peeling potatoes and making buckets full of Waldorf salad in the pitch black at 4AM. (I needed the money.)

A couple of years later the film emerged from wherever Warner Brothers had been trying to hide it and turned up in the Edinburgh Film Festival. I went to see it. I suspected it might be my only chance. (This was long before the days of everything being available via torrent, Youtube, ex-rental DVD, or even eBay.) The film was, I'm sorry to say, an incredible bore and to add insult to injury - I wasn't in it. Several days of near hypothermia and I wasn't even in the bugger.

Last night I found I was in it after all. Or at least in the cut that has been posted here on Youtube.

Just to save you from the pain of Vincent D'Onofrio's 'Irish' accent I'll tell you I appear around the 7:23 minute mark. Dead body carried on on stretcher screen left to disappear behind Robin Willam's shoulder centre screen. My entire on-screen movie career (to date). All two seconds of it - though I suspect I'm on longer in the widescreen version. And just for the record my 'Oirish' accent is bloody awful too.

Hello Mum!

Contemporary Variety Review

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) - That was jolly fun.

House of Whipcord (1974) - Another chunk of low budget 70s British schlock from the same director as Die Screaming Marianne. It had a few nice, dark and claustrophobic, set pieces. The film almost built up a real working horror atmosphere but was continually shooting itself in the foot by undercutting all that with the hurried parallel story which was taken at such a clip that the actors seemed to be almost tripping over themselves to get their lines out - possibly before the film ran out in the camera.

O'Horten (2007) - three days in the life of a retired Norwegian railway engineer. Slow, gentle, sometimes funny. I'm trying to work out how to build to a joke about closely observed train drivers, but it's not that good a joke so I won't bother.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) - Hmmmm. I wasn't disappointed exactly but I came away wishing I'd liked it more.

Frightmare (1974) - The third Peter Walker I've watched this week (I bought a boxset). Better constructed than the previous two. British movie acting of the 70s, as exemplified in these films, was really weird. Lines were delivered very briskly and clearly enunciated - even though the words arrive at a hell of a clip you don't miss any - but there's precious little acting going on behind them. It's all very mechanical. Mind you, the audience for this sort of thing wasn't paying to see acting going on. They were paying to see tits and arse and gory violence. Personally I could have done with more T&A and less GV - if only because it would have meant I spent less time looking at hideous 1970s clothing.

Robots - repeat viewing. Lots of eye candy and a few nice jokes but a paper thin story.

The Raven (1935) - Karloff and Lugosi in a totally bonkers and mercifully short (61 mins) second string Universal horror. Dreadful dialogue despite, or because of? there being eight screen writers involved? who knows. It did have a couple of flashes of genius though. Best lines came in this brief exchange between Samuel S. Hinds as Judge Thatcher and mad, Poe obsessed, Doctor Vollin played to the hilt by Bela Lugosi. The doc has the judge strapped to a slab in his high vaulted cellar - he has annoyed the doc by suggesting that his daughter might be better off without a psychopathic Rumanian weirdo in her life. From the ceiling a curved blade on a complex mechanism swings to and fro - it's the mad doc's recreation of the device from The Pit and the Pendulum...

Judge Thatcher (Looking upwards in dread) What's that? Doctor Vollin A knife. Judge Thatcher What's it doing!? Doctor Vollin Descending....

Which is a cracking bit of writing in anyone's books. I wish the rest of the show had been up to it.

Micmacs (2009) - Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I've not seen all of M Jeunet's films but the ones I have seen (Amelie, The City of Lost Children, Delicatessen) I have thoroughly enjoyed but this one just left me cold. The story seemed really unfocused and the quirky oddnesses that litter his movies just came over as very contrived and striving for a cuteness that they just didn't deliver.

Mission To Mars (2000) - Looks great. Some good work went into the design here, decent cast, some really seriously good camera work; De Palma does a nice line in long tracking shots which let the actors act knowing their performances aren't going to get completely fucked over line by line in the editing - and a script that stank the screen up. A seriously rotten script with every moment of tension or awe, or anything that wasn't mechanically technical, signalled by having the characters saying "My, God!" in a variety of intonations. Terror? "ogodogodod!", Wonderment "Ohhh my gahd!" et bloody cetera. There was lots of other less irritating stuff to laugh at too. Like a supposedly tense moment when the ship is hit by a meteorite. All the air is being sucked out into space. No one can find the hole. The air pressure inside the seriously huge interior of the ship (it's like a sports hall in there) is dropping by percentage points per second. No one can find the hole. Where's the hole? Someone goes out in a suit to see if he can see the air venting out from the outside. A character inside - whose helmet has been conveniently smashed, thus adding the impetus to the whole finding the hole thing (if his helmet hadn't been conveniently smashed everyone would have just suited up and fixed things in their own time) has the brilliant idea of squirting a tube of Dr Product Placement Pepper into the air. Follow the liquid! The soft drink floats in the weightless conditions and disappears into a crack in the panelling! "The hole's in section whatever!" Hole gets fixed. Huzzah! And all this happens in silence - apart from the music and the "Oh my Gods!" of the characters. There's brazzilions of gallons of air per cubic second being sucked out through a narrow gap and it doesn't make any noise at all? No thin whistling that would have given the game away perhaps?

Shortly after this our gallant crew abandon ship, form a conga line, and jump to a passing satellite to the sound of raucous laughter from the gallery.

20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) - Ray Harryhausen animated Venusian monster on the loose in Italy. I fell asleep after about fifteen minutes, woke up again half way through, and again at the end. Even in my befuddled state I managed to join the dots and discovered I hadn't missed much.

The Spiderwick Chronicles ( 2008 ) - Friday night Onigiri and Movie Night choice of number one daughter. It was 'a bit scary - but good'.

The Simpsons Movie (2007) - that was fun. I'm now going to have the Spider Pig Song going round in my brain for a week.

Gilda (1946) - Rita Hayworth? Fwaaaaaar!

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (Feb 15th 1962) - And back to the crap. The Brain that Wouldn't Die is your typical everyday story of deranged doctors, hideous mutations, crippled lab assistants and disembodied heads. It starts with a seriously creepy opening. A real chiller. The screen is black then this female voice plaintively whispers “Let me die… Let me die…!”. It's nicely creepy twelve seconds and probably the best bit of movie making in the whole film.

Dr Bill Cortner (brilliant medical man who has been pilfering body parts from his hospital and has a secret lab in his father's old country 'place') receives an urgent call. 'Something dreadful has happened'. In response he drives like a maniac to his lab only to crash the car, decapitating his fiancee in the process. Horrified he retrieves her head from the burning wreck, wraps his jacket around it and spends the next two and a half minutes (a fair chunk of a 70 minute movie*) running through the countryside with the head clutched to his chest like a rugby player making for the touchline. Run run run. He stops occasionally to do some acting: puff pant I'm tired! (wipe arm across forehead to indicate sweating and move on...), oh my god! what's that? Blood? My girlfriend's head is leaking!, stumble on steps leading to house, so tired, I'm in pain must get up... must sit down again... no! get up... etc. etc.

Kurt, his crippled assistant, opens the door... he stumbles in bundled head cradled like a baby... and then comes one of those bad movie moments that I live for.

Kurt: What's happened to you? Dr Bill A terrible accident... Got to save her... Got to save her... Kurt: What is it? What have you got here? Dr Bill Kurt, please! Sterilize the tubes and instruments, quickly! Kurt: What are you going to do? Aren't you going to look in the closet first?

Needless to say the doc saves his girlfriend's head and then, not bothering to wait and see if she's at all grateful (she isn't), rushes out to find her a decent body. This involves him driving around following girls, going to strip joints, and ogling the contestants in beauty contests before finally lighting upon a lesbian photographic model with serious facial disfigurements (oh the irony!). Meanwhile back at the lab the head and the monster in the closet have become friends, and after a bit of cajoling, the monster rips Kurt's arm off. Doc arrives with a drugged model, finds Kurt's body and after throwing a sheet over it and putting his next victim on the operating table, does the thing that all mad scientist's yearn to do and backs up against a door with a small hatch in it about face height with a homicidal monster on the other side - a homicidal monster, please note, that he knows has just ripped the arm off his long time assistant. Grab! Scream! Fight! Door off hinges, something highly volatile gets knocked over and the whole place goes up in flames. The only survivors at the end are the mutated monster in the closet and the lesbian near body donor. The End.

*Though I do seem to have watched a seriously cut version. IMDb lists it as 82 minutes and there is also, apparently, a 92 minute version which contains the same amount of story but more of the strippers and sleazy ogling stuff.

Fiend Without a Face ( 1958 ) - "We're facing a new form of life that nobody understands. I believe it feeds on the radiation from your atomic plant - and that it's evil!"

Brides of Dracula (1960) - The usual Hammer nonsense. Looks great and has loads of atmosphere but don't stop to think about the story. I had never really noticing how damn hansom Peter Cushing was before. Athletic too. He did a lot (if not all) his own stunts here.

Battle Beyond the Sun (1964) - Roger Corman made a bit of a habit of buying technically impressive but ponderously doom-laden Eastern Block SF movies and then totally screwing them up by re-editing, inserting new footage, and generally buggering about with them. This time the film was Небо зовет (Nebo zovyot) a two hour ponderous doom-laden Russian epic about a total failure to land on Mars. It's amazing how often Russian SF movies end in glorious but noble failure, (this time the Imperialist Capitalists' rival mission to the Red Planet got in the way by having to be rescued en route). Corman didn't do the chop jobs himself, he was always surrounded by eager young wannabees desperate for any kind of screen credit and this time he gave the job to a young and hungry lad called Francis Ford Coppola. Everyone has to start somewhere. But as someone pointed out to me when I was an eager (but not so young) wannabee working for the man. "Yes, a lot of famous people started out with Corman. But they got famous after they left."

Blood Suckers (1972) - sometimes you get the feel of a movie in the first few moments. Even if the director is wrong footing you and deliberately making you think the film is about one thing, and then making you realise later it is about something else entirely, you will have a fair idea what you are in for very quickly. Quite often you can tell within a very short time how good or bad the movie is too. With Blood Suckers you know before the opening shot has finished that what you are watching is deliriousfully fuckeduply awful. By the end of the opening sequence the film has racked up more crashingly bad edits than the average crap movie maker will use in a whole feature. Bad edits that had characters jumping around the set like lottery balls. An exhaustive few minutes internet research let me know why. Apparently the film suffered real financial problems. (The money ran out / was withdrawn before they had finished shooting.) The film was shelved and a couple of years later the distributors assembled what footage there was into as good a shape as they could get, slapped on a voice-over narration to cover the gaping chasms in the storyline, and then added a six minute drug-fueled orgy sequence. This sequence got them up to a decent 83 minute run time and gave them a legitimate excuse to put some tits on the poster - at which point the director (whose previous credits included Gonks Go Beat) got his name taken off. Which is a pity, because the orgy sequence (available as an extra in the Prism DVD version, available from all good Poundland shops) is the best thing on show and far better made than the rest of the badly acted, badly staged incoherent dross that surrounds it. I know I may be slightly biased here but, even putting aside my abiding fascination with boobs, the orgy sequence is a masterpiece in comparison. Highlights include watching John Steed (sorry Patrick McNee) chase a buxom vampire up a hillside on a donkey, such shoddy lighting that a central black character appears as a silhouette for most of the movie (they couldn't afford one reflector!?), and David Lodge (one of Spike Milligan's cohorts in several series of Q "I was in Cockleshell Heroes") as a Greek general.

Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) - a Roger Corman comedy notable only for having the endearingly dumbest monster committed to film.

NTF cookie monster no like kiss kiss by Père Ubu, on Flickr

The House of Mortal Sin (1976) - aka The Confessional Murders, another from the Peter Walker boxset, this time a twisted tale of murder and - well, more murder. This time the twist is the sexually frustrated psychopathic killer is a Catholic priest and his victims include his own mother. By far the best of Peter Walker's films that I have seen. Plotwise it's a load of bollocks like all the others but he really got the atmosphere right with this one, helped by a terrifically weird location; the interior of the presbytery is a character itself. Wonderfully claustrophobic dilapidated and creepy. Very good on claustrophobic and hemmed in is Mr Walker, things go a bit tits up when you can actually see what's happening on the screen and there's dialogue but some nicely creepy stuff going on here. Most wonderfully creepy though is an actress I had never consciously come across before owning this box set. Sheila Keith. She appears in several of Walker's movies playing similar roles - nice kindly, middle-aged woman who turns out to be: a cannibal with a penchant for attacking her victim's skulls with electric drills to get at the juicy bits (Frightmare), running a secret private prison and hanging the women inmates for offences as trivial as stealing a piece of bread (House of Whipchord), living as a housekeeper to a priest she has been in love with for 30 years - and torturing his senile mother on a daily basis all the time, and finally in

The Comeback (1978) - she lures a pop singer, played by Grammy award winner Jack Jones, into her house and starts to drive him insane by killing his estranged wife and leaving bits of her around the place for him to find. And for good measure, bricking up his new girlfriend (Pamela Stephenson) in with the mummified remains of her long dead daughter. In the end though she is accidentally killed by an axe wielded by her husband, played by Bill 'Compo' Owen. Not as engagingly weird as it sounds, there is a limit to the number of times I can watch what is essentially the same couple of shots of an American crooner going to sleep and then waking up in the middle of the night, getting out of bed, clumsily putting on his dressing and opening his bedroom door. This film reached that limit about half way through. I may never want to see an American crooner get out of bed ever again. Except maybe Rudy Vallee, I think I could stand to watch Rudy Vallee get out of bed.

Here's a little (713 words) SF short story I wrote last night.

Knock... Knock...

I got nothing against aliens. Some of my best friends have got too many eyes and leave slime trails around the office. The one thing about aliens is that most of the time they tell you the truth. Something to do with those universal translator things getting confused. If the circuits can't match up the words with the body language and the brain wave patterns they just fritz up. It means we humans can't lie to them either. This is a good thing. Most humans have trouble reading other humans' body language, trying to pick up subtle non-verbal clues from a hairy jelly on legs just never going to happen. Consensus is that The Universal Peace is glued together by the shortcomings of the translators. Basically you know where you stand with an alien - which is upwind if you can. Most of them smell dreadful.

So, one day after work, I'm sitting in Dino's bar, next to the air conditioner, when Flygol slithers in. Flygol's a Gumph - one of those blue spongy lizard things with all the tentacles. He sees me drinking whatever it was I was drinking (Dino claimed it was whisky) and he gets himself a whatever it is he is drinking (which looks like moose snot with lumps) and comes over and joins me.

His translator box squawked. "Greetings, fellow wage-slave worker-unit," he said.

"Salutations fellow downtrodden toiler," I replied. "And how are things in the Department of Lengths?"

"Superb as always. No deaths for at least three days - a new safety record!"

"Now that is good news - another drink to celebrate?"

The Gumph swished his moose snot and tossed it back. As usual I managed to avert my eyes. I once had the misfortune to see a Flygol's mouthparts extrude themselves into a glass and empty the contents. It was not an experience I ever wish to repeat.

"Most assuredly!" he said. "More drinks!" He banged his glass down. "Dino! Another one of these," he pointed at my glass "and another one of those - whatever they are."

Several whiskies and snots later we were hammered. We had exhausted the rituals of company small talk, segued neatly into company gossip, and were past that and deep in the realms of upper management character assassination when Flygol suddenly said, "That reminds me: Why are all Xynumbians dyslexic?"

"No idea," I said, "Why are all Xynumbians dyslexic?"

"They can't help it. It's genetic. It's in their DAN!"

It took me a moment to notice that he was obviously awaiting a response. And a longer moment to realise that he had told me a joke and that it was slightly funny. I laughed. It seemed to satisfy him.

No alien had ever told me a joke before.

I told him one back.

I said, "How can you tell a Banavian Gussic from a Fromb?"

Flygol's translator was silent for a moment then made a query noise.

I hit him with the punchline. "Because the Gussic freems a bentel!"

Flygol fell off his stool. His palps flapped. He floundered around gasped for air. He vented acetylene. He was in paroxysms of what I hoped was laughter. (If he was dying, the Department of Length's safety record was screwed again.) After a few minutes of flapping around on the floor like a fish having a fit, he regained his composure and crawled back up the stool, wiping away fluids leaking from a couple of orifices as he came.

"Because the freems a bentel..." he repeated, "very good, very good. I'll have to remember that one." He toyed with his glass a moment then leaned towards me. I was polite; I held my breath and tried not not pull away too far.

"New model translator," he said, tapping it, "Prototype. Built-in cognitive dissonance filters. Very hush hush. Is a secret."

I drunkenly patted his nearest tentacle. "Don't, pal, worry," I hiccuped "I won't tell."

"Good chap," he said. "Good chap, I've always liked you. You know, for a human, you're all right. Yes, you are all right... You're my pal, you are. "

His eye-stalks levelled with my face and we matched gazes.

"But if you ever lay a hand on my sister...."

We both fell off our stools this time.





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