I was playing with my vinyl tonight and posted a new entry on my much neglected Cheesybeats blog.

I have to get a grip. I went to the local refuse disposal place today to dump a month's worth of Tetra Paks and six month's worth of accumulated bits of metal. I also took the vast pile of I Never Want to Watch That Again VHS tapes in the hallway. I need to get rid of the clutter! I need to make space! - I come home with an Edwardian dressing table I found in one of the skips. I don't think you are really allowed to take stuff away from the recycling place (ironically enough) but it was raining and the little men who shout "Oi!" were hiding in their hut. Basically, as usual, I came back with more than I went with. This cannot continue - but it's such a nice piece of furniture... No idea where it's going to go. I have to get a grip.

It's the first of April Hurrah! Time for me to unburden myself of all the badly made films I have watched this month. First, The Very Good News; I'm not going to do it (today).

Second, The Good News; I watched three or four decent films last month; the Bad News is I also watched some 30 or so crappy ones.

Why? It's a question I often ask myself. Why do I seek out and watch such dreadful films as Universal Soldier: The Return, The Atomic Brain, and Demonwarp. Most of the time I ask myself the question as I'm actually watching the film. Why am I watching this shit? But sometimes I ponder on the question in a more general manner. The other day I thought about it while I was at the computer when someone asked me on a forum. This (tarted up a bit) is what I wrote in reply:

Why? To explain that I will first have to quote the oft quoted Sturgeon's Revelation:

“Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud.”

The general interpretation of this, the way I think people tend to visualise it, is that there is this huge pile of crap with the 10% that is the good stuff sitting on the top. Like the yummy cream and sprinkles on the top of a trifle hiding all the cheaper custard, watery jelly, and soggy sponge lurking beneath.

I prefer to think of it as a bell curve where the X axis is frequency and the Y axis is quality... hang on, I'll draw it.

Like this:

Graph by the_junk_monkey, on Flickr

The 90% crud is the shaded area in the middle, a vast uninteresting bulk of mediocrity and hackwork. It's the areas at the extreme edges, where the graph shallows out, that contain the fascinating stuff.

People learn by making mistakes. People learn from watching other people making mistakes. I am somewhat passionate about film and I learn more about film making by watching people repeatedly fucking up than I do by watching great films. I like to see how things work. A really great film usually sweeps me along and involves me so deeply that I get so wrapped up in the story and the telling of the story, that I don't really notice how the story is being told. With a bad film it's easy to step back from whatever narrative there is trying to get out and enjoy the spectacle of watching the film fall to bits. Other times it's fun trying to find a narrative structure. You suspect there is one in there but you're dammed if you can find it. Ed Wood was very good at this game. What the hell is going on?

Another reason for watching bad film makers fuck up is to marvel at how inventive they are. Every time I watch a bad film I'm amazed by their ability to screw up in new and interesting ways. I suspect, and I've said often, that 90% of comedy is based on failure. Whether it as simple as Laurel and Hardy failing to get the piano up the set of stairs in The Music Box or Woody Allen's 'sophisticated' inability to be happy, comedy is based on failure and ineptitude. (I'm not sure what the other 10% is based on - knob jokes probably.)

Watching grown-ups failing to string a simple series of standard shots together is endlessly hilarious to me. (I read self-published books for the same reason.) In one film I watched this month the director managed to use what was obviously intended to be the establishing shot for the sequence after the interior it was intended to establish. I suspect this because he had left himself no way of cutting from one scene to another within the sequence. It was horrible! It was so horrible I had to rewind and watch it three or four times just to see how truly horribly horrible it really was.

A mistake I shall not make when the meteorite of solid gold lands in my back garden. When I am suddenly and inexplicably wealthy I plan on starting my own production company.

Here's a long blog entry I did a couple of years ago with a totally different set of reasons for watching hypercrap movies.

http://anotherjunkmonkey.blogspot.co...1_archive.html

"She's Like a Banana With a Headache!"

I don't understand plumbing. Never have and I don't suppose I ever will. Once, many years ago while I was working for a living, I was employed as a building labourer. One day I was working on some alterations to a bathroom and had been told to take a shower unit off the wall. First thing I thought to do was check that the shower was disconected from the mains (it was an electric shower) I also made sure it was disconnected from the water mains. Electrics first; - and this is where I went wrong - I went to the main fuseboard, made sure the fuse marked 'SHOWER' was pulled (and then put in my pocket so it couldn't be accidentally put back in again by someone else as soon as I left). I made sure that the fuse in my pocket was in fact the right fuse and not the fuse for something else like the upstairs lights that had been mislabelled. I went back to the bathroom and tried to switch the shower on. No light. And no water comes out of the shower when I turn it on. No power. Good. Next I checked that the water to the bathroom was off by turning on the taps in the sink next to the shower. A dry gurgle and nothing. Sure now that it was safe to proceed, I unscrewed the shower's casing, disconnected the wiring (making the ends secure and safe in an insulated lump of chockblock). I unscrewed the couple of chunky screws holding the unit on the wall; now all I had to do was disconnect the water. I found the inlet pipe (not a difficult task as it was the only thing attaching the shower unit to the house) and selected a suitable spanner. Tea break soon. Great. Two twists of the spanner later and I felt a lurch. Suddenly I had a shower unit in my hands and a solid jet of water shooting horizontally past my face out of the pipe I had just been working; a solid jet of water that reached across the room, bounced back from the opposite wall, and hit me squarely between the shoulder blades.

Within seconds I was soaked through and my clothing weighed twice as much as I did. I was also screaming for help. I had dropped the shower unit (on my toe) and was leaning forward, both hands pressed against the pipe end. The water pressure was high so I didn't staunch all the flow but I did cut it down a little. The water that was coming out was now shooting up the inside of my sleeves and down out of my trouser legs, but as I couldn't get any wetter than I already was it didn't make much difference to me. My boss arrived. He took one look through the door at this screaming animated fountain, said "Fuck!" very loudly, and dived through the hatch in the floor that led to the underfloor crawl space. Within seconds he located the stopcock he had missed the last time he'd been down there and he cut the supply.

(This did make me wonder how he had managed to miss the bugger last time, but what the hell, everyone makes mistakes.)

What I should have done before anything else, was tried the shower. It was the type of electric shower that had to be connected to the mains and switched on before even cold water would come out. Switch off the power and nothing comes through even though there is a terrific water pressure behind it. Why it was on a different supply from the rest of the bathroom is (to me at least) a complete mystery.

Why am I bothering telling you all this? No idea really. The house we were working on was a reletively new build - less than ten years old at the time and all the plumbing was put in at the same time. My house is 130 years old and built before the village had any mains water supply. I don't know when it was first connected but the plumbing in it has been added piecemeal over the years by many people - me included. At the moment our upstairs toilet cistern won't stop filling up. You flush, it refills and, nine times out of ten, doesn't stop filling. This causes the excess water to go out the overflow with annoying gurgling noises. Nine times out of ten that it does this you have to wait for precisely the right moment and run the tap in the sink for 15 seconds then turn it off quickly - at which point the cistern makes a strange Grrrrrrrnk! noise and stops filling up. (The tenth time it doesn't and you have to flush it again or just put up with the gurgling all night.)

The really baffling part is why running the hot water in the kitchen downstairs should make the upstairs toilet suddenly start to fill up again and why turning on the kitchen sink cold water tap makes it stop.


Answers on a postcard please, because I haven't got a clue.

Snap!

I'm developing a game to play while I do the housework. I have BBC Radio 4 on during the day1, and Radio 4 spends most of its time mildly entertaining me, or deeply irritating me depending on its mood. I find it very hard to turn off, even on those days when it's snarky and determined to get under my skin by being even more London-centric, fatuous, and patronising than usual.

I need a trigger to get me to turn it off when it's like that. Hence Radio 4 Bingo. I'm making a list of key annoying words and phrases that, when I hear someone using them on air, I can cross off a bingocard like grid. Once I've crossed off enough to shout "Bingo!", or "House!", (or whatever it is the mad old grannies who play bingo shout) I can turn off the radio.

So far the list is:

• 'Absolutely!' - when used in answer to a question - where 'yes' would have been a really good answer.
• 'Devastated' - double points if the so-called devastation is caused by something so trivial that you roll your eyebrows in disgust2. Earthquakes are devastating. Having it rain on your day out in Disneyland Paris is just a bit of a piss off.
• 'Issues' (as a noun).
• Any new (to you) verbing3 of a noun. Today I heard an avant-guarde art gallery curator saying, of a group of artists, "What we do here is forefront them."
• Any new (to you) piece of mangled English that makes you wish you knew more about grammar and syntax so could work out exactly what did just happened in your ears, e.g. today I heard "It depends how limitating it is..."
• Bad creative writing in the weather forecast; "Over the night-time period" being a favourite at the moment.

This list will grow.

1 - Well, it's company innit?
2 - It takes practice.
3 - A point to me!

The Return of the Any Key

I had a rush of deja-vu to the head yesterday. This computer doesn't have a floppy drive (for younger readers, a floppy drive is what you put floppy discs into - and if you don't know what they are then the rest of this post is going to make very little sense. So, to keep the yoofs entertained while us oldies get on with things, here's a really fuck ugly painting of teen pop idol Michael Jackson (I think) that I just found at fineartamerica.com - $300 Dollars and it's yours to burn in the privacy of your own bonfire.

Where was I? [Gods! that is ugly.] Anyway, this computer doesn't have a floppy drive and on Saturday, at a car boot sale, between buying DVDs of films I'll never get round to watching because they are all too good and serious Art Films - not the explosion ridden crap with sweaty large-breasted women in that I usually watch - I bought a portable 3½" drive that plugs into a USB hole. It was a quid. The man who sold it me asked why I wanted it - the tenor of his voice suggesting he thought this was a totally obsolete piece of shit and that I was some kind of weirdo. I told him for the same reason I still had a Betamax player - you never know; one day it might come in really useful. Thus, I suspect, confirming his suspicions.

Saturday evening I plugged it in and lo and behold! it worked! Fine, brilliant, great and dandy! Oooh! I've got an A: drive again! Long time since I've seen one of them. I grab a few discs off the top of the tottering pile 3½" floppies in the office and spend a happy half hour finding they are full of stuff that I can't work out why I kept. After a while I got bored with trying to fathom why I thought I needed to keep copies of every autoexec.bat I had ever modified, put the discs back on the pile, and went on to play with other simpler pleasures, like looking up the stories behind favourite crappy movies on the IMDb.

And thence to bed.

Sunday morning, I turn on the computer, go off and make a cup of coffee while it fires up, come back coffee in hand to find the screen suspiciously black with some sort of message in white lettering... oh oh! This is usually not good news.

'Non system disc or disc error. Replace disk and strike any key to continue.'

Panic. Oh gods! The machine just died! What the hell is a 'Non system disc or disc error...'? It took a few moments but the penny finally dropped. I'd left a disc in the floppy drive. I ejected the disc and hit the any key. A wave of pleasurable nostalgia washed over me. I used to do that all the time. Panic I mean. Every time.

So that was it. Another exciting day at JunkMonkey mansions. I'm off to bed now to listen to a recording of a 56K modem on my battery powered early 80s Phillips Skymaster 3 personal cassette player:

Shit, but that Michael Jackson picture is ugly.

All parents have nightmares and fears for and about their kids. Sometimes the fears are about what they will do, sometimes they are about what could happen to them. I won't list them. If you're a parent you'll know what they are; if you're not you won't really understand. (I didn't before I became a father and spent the first couple of years after my first daughter was born in a semi-permanent state of terror.)

Today one of my deepest fears became a reality.

Holly came home from school with a violin.

Daisy! KerPlunk is not a Breakfast Cereal.

Oh I'm in trash movie heaven. A couple of weeks ago I found a pile of big box VHS tapes in a local charity shop and have been diligently working my way through them. Last night's offering was Demonwarp (1988) - and, for the life of me, I can't work out why this has never had a DVD release. I mean everyone wants to see a Bigfoot movie with zombies, naked women, aliens, and ritual sacrifice don't they? especially one starring George Kennedy (who I am happy to discover is still alive and still working at 85). Frankly I am baffled at this film's obscurity. I have been giggling all day at it's dreadfulness. Someone needs to let the world rediscover this masterpiece of shit.

I wonder how much it costs to buy the rights to a movie...

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!


.

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.