A Nation of Shopkeepers

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

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

The scene:
Morrison's supermarket.

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

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

"May I have a chicken please?"


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

"Normal or 'Extra Tasty'?"


Me:
(Like a fool)

What's the difference?


Bovine Lump:
(Pointing)

These are normal. These are 'extra tasty'.

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

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

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

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

   Quote:

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

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

   
   


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


3. Shorts - Pizza night!


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

A Wee Dilemma

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

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

Next day Holly is walking upstairs with Daisy:

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

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

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

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

CAUTION
VERY HOT WATER
THANK YOU

February

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

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

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

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

I warn you: this is hypnotically addictive:

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January...

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

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

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


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

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

   Before
   
   After
   
   
   

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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Answers:
ǝlʇsɐɔ ɥƃıɥ ǝɥʇ uı uɐɯ ǝɥʇ s,ʞɔıp ʞ dılıɥd ɯoɹɟ sı ,uǝspuǝqɐ, ǝɥʇ
ɹnoɟ-ʎʇɥƃıǝ uǝǝʇǝuıu s,llǝʍɹo ɯoɹɟ sı ,uıǝʇsploƃ, ǝɥʇ

Feck! It's a month since I last blogged. I will do better this year. Promise. Just to start the ball rolling I'm going to clear the decks of...

Roll of drums please...

All The movies I watched in December! Yaaaaay!

Oh come, on it's not that bad.

December

1. Sunshine -


2. The Time Machine (2002) - I didn't mind too much that they had moved the location to New York, I didn't mind too much that our hero was given a love interest (who dies early on in the film thus giving him the Hollywood motivation to invent the Time Machine to go back and rescue her). I didn't mind too much that the innocent, aimless, childlike and docile Eloi are here depicted as an aware and innovative bunch of bronzed, muscled, tattooed hunter-gatherers (though the fact that some of them spoke flawless American English after 80,000 years did make me snort peanuts), I don't even mind that the Morlocks suddenly had a complex, hivelike social structure (grafted on from Wells' The First Men in the Moon) but what I do mind. What I really do mind is the hero jamming a watch into the rapidly spinning components of his time machine, jumping off, out-running a whole bunch of specially bred killer orcs - sorry, 'morlocks' - and then being pulled to safety (just in time!) to avoid the unamed, unexplained, and unexpected deux ex machina temporal explosion light show special effects bonanza he just created which wipes out all signs of badness without touching any of the good guys. "Dunno how to end the movie, guys! So why don't we just throw a shitload of SFX at the screen and get out while everyone is still going 'Oooooh! shiney!'?" "Sounds good to me, it usually works." The author went on to write Star Trek 10 and no-one was surprised.

1. Feast of Flesh (1965) - The wonderful thing about crap cinema is that it knows no boundaries. Bad cinema,like great music, is truly international. So, made in Argentina in 1965 Feast of Flesh (aka Placer sangriento, and The Deadly Organ) is a weirdly dreamlike tale (I think there was a story) about a homicidal killer dressed in a pac-a-mac, rubber mask and gloves, and wearing a Beatle wig, lurking around a beach hotel, injecting nubile young bikini-clad women with heroin, hypnotising them with weird music (handily available on 45rpm 7" single), and fondling their boobies before killing them. An awful lot of boobies in this film. A lot of nipples too. They do things differently down South America way. Not that I'm complaining. Two inept policemen try to uncover the mystery assassin but when they're on screen it's all very dull - they are very stupid; it takes them two days to think of asking two eye-witnesses what make and colour the killer's car was. "Silver Porche? Hmmmm - make a note of that, sergeant."
   
   
   
   
   
   I'm not really a Lesbian you know, I'm a red herring...
   
   
   
   When our masked weirdo and the crumpet is on screen its much more interesting, and very odd. Very odd indeed. Half the time it's a very bad Beach Party type movie with a sketchily drawn predatory lesbian and a couple of gay boys, other times it's hand held arty weirdness with POV shots swapping bodies, long takes in which nothing happens, jump cuts and all very dark, 'One Big Light' lighting. If David Lynch had directed Beach Blanket Bingo with John Alton lighting it (in a hurry), it would have looked like this.


2. Salvage (1979) - They don't make 'em like this any more - more's the pity. Salvage is a TV movie, it's cheap, it's silly, and it's fun. The story: a rich bored scrap dealer builds a spaceship in his junk yard and salvages all the stuff left behind by one of the Apollo missions. After a couple of almost crises, the gallant crew of two return to a heroes' welcome. That's about all that happens but watching it I was reminded that America used to have (or at least used to sell itself as having) this whole attitude of 'get up and go', 'let's put on the show right here in the barn!', 'we can do it - all we need is a bit of gumption and some Good Old American know how'. What happened to that? I liked it (though I knew it was all bollocks). It was aspirational, it held out the promise of better things. These days everything American seems so self-centred and whiny. Salvage is total nonsense of course - navigating in space using a sextant!? - but jolly nonsense. I enjoyed it. It reminded me more than anything of the sort of short story Robert Heinlein used to write back in the 1940s even before one of the characters name-checked 'Destination Moon!' in the dialogue.


3. Count Dracula's Great Love (1975)- (aka El gran amor del conde Drácula, Cemetery Girls, Cemetery Tramps, Count Dracula's Greatest Love, Dracula's Great Love, Dracula's Virgin Lovers, I diabolici amori di nosferatu, Le grand amour du comte Dracula, The Great Love of Count Dracula, and in Finland: Draculan suuri rakkaus. So know you know.) By 1975 Spanish film-makers had discovered what Italian film-maker had always known. Filling the screen with boobs makes money. Unfortunately they hadn't solved the 'how to make them fit into a coherent story' problem. The story they did come up with here involved the hoary cliche of the coach-full of nubile young women (in different coloured dresses so we can tell them apart) breaking down just outside Dracula's castle and having to spend the night... nail on some guff about reincarnation, the love of a virgin needed to restore Dracula's daughter to life and lots and lots and lots of walking about just to fill up the running time - and that's about it. Oh, one thing makes it stand out. This is possibly the only vampire movie in which Dracula commits suicide by deliberately driving the stake through his own heart - though, it must be said, there was no one else to do it. By the time we got to the final reel everyone in the cast, apart from our no longer virgin heroine, was a vampire. As is usual in this sort of film most of the cast were out acted by their own breasts. Mucho bueno los knockas, si!

1. Critters (1986) - It took it's time setting things up and, though it was cheesy and the SFX clunky, the acting and script were well above the level I was expecting. Above average 80s popcorn trash.

1. Journey to Middle Earth ( 2008 ) - Holy mother of crap! What a piece of shit! Okay, here's the premise - and please remember while you are reading this, that this is supposed to be based on a book by Jules Verne. The US military/industrial combine is about to do its first test run of a matter transmitter. They have a base in the US and one in Stuttgart (which is, as far as I recall, in Germany). So, wanting to test out this ground-breaking new piece of ultratech, does the combined intelligence of the US military combine (played by four actors - one of whom has a lip piercing) test the device with a guinea pig? or a white mouse? or even something totally inert like a house brick? (If you answered yes to any of those you really haven't been paying attention to the level of 'logic' in the movies I watch, have you?) No. The combined intelligences send through six - not one but SIX! - fit, young, busty women wearing combat trousers, and those tight grey vests that show up sweat very well. Just in case Stuttgart (which I'm still pretty sure is in Germany) wasn't civilised enough for our Amazons they carried with them binoculars, water canteens, radio communication equipment, rucksacks full of gear, and even automatic rifles! Needless to say they don't get to Stuttgart and end up being chased around a subterranean world populated by dinosaurs and giant spiders until some of them are rescued by the chief scientist in a giant atomic-powered, laser cannon firing, earth boring machine developed in the lab next door by - wait for it - his estranged wife. And you could see how that plot line is going to end before the end of the sentence can't you? The acting in this is god awful. Almost porn movie bad. The sort of acting where you can tell people are supposed to be worried because they chew their bottom lip.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   As a graduate of the Joey Tribbiani school of acting she has deliberately not learned her next line and is trying to read her script which she placed upside down on the floor next to her before the shot began.
   
   
   A straight to ex-rental bin movie that amazingly had a 'limited' release in the US.
   
   Woweee! The production company responsible for this piece of poo, the bandwagon-jumping, rip-off artists: The Asylum, are making a version of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars with Tracy Lords as Dejah Thoris! Fucking priceless! (The fact there is another, more expensive version of this, out of copyright, work in the pipeline is a mere coincidence.)

1. Nuns on the Run - pretty terrible but after 30 minutes of Nacho Libre ( one of my few abandoned films this year) anything would be funny.

1. Circuitry Man - having been bemused to bits by the sequel which I watched back in June, I finally got to see the first one thanks to internet buddy Kubla Kraus who loaned me his copy in return for a candy bar. (Isn't the Internet wonderful!?) I was slightly less bemused by Circuitry Man than I was hoping to be. It dragged in places, spending far too long on the beauty shots but it had some really inventive low budget tricks - including one fight sequence which took place off camera and still managed to be very funny. It was odd enough to make me want to hunt up the only other film the director has done; Mix (2004). This might prove to be a bit more of a challenge as it only seems to have been shown in Hungary and not yet released anywhere on DVD. I'll have to email the director...

1. Car Wash - I like Car Wash. I have no idea why, it's not exactly action-packed, the characters a quickly sketched in and don't really develop much during the course of the show, in fact nothing much happens at all but it works.

1. Curse of the Swamp Creature - Not sure how many John Agar films I've seen this year but this has to be the worst. As an added bonus it was directed by Larry Buchanan, a director so inept he elevated anything he touches into fever-dream territory. This, as far as I am concerned, and I'm sure you know, is a good thing. Curse of the Swamp Creature is one of a small group of films he made for television by reworking old American International pictures. His movies are almost delirious, people moving between tiny sets with very little, or sometimes no, rhyme or reason via the medium of long sequences of people just walking about. The films of his that I have seen also have an absurdly high people just walking about in longshot to dialogue ratio. Walk. Walk. Walk. Cross-fade to more walking. The character arrives at a house we have never seen before and walks in through the front door. We hold on the front door. And hold on the door... and hold... the character finishes whatever they were doing in the house (we often never find out) comes out... and starts to walk back the way they came...
   
   Agar was probably on set for a maximum of two days on this one. Most of his scenes are silent, walking about shots with only a few moments where he gets to speak. At the 'climax' of the film, the mad doctor releases his Swamp Creature from his lab. "Kill them! Kill them!" he shrieks, pointing at the sullen mob of bemused off-screen extras. (They're supposed to be a vengeful mob whipped up into a fever pitch by a Voodoo priest but they just stand there in a row looking badly-dressed and bemused.) "Kill them!" shrieks the mad doc. The swamp creature ambles off in the oposite direction and into the outdoor covered swimming pool full of alligators the doc has been using to dispose of the bodies. Agar releases the doc's wife from her cell and the two of them also amble over to the pool where the wife pleads with the Monster. The Monster writhes with inner turmoil, the doc screams with maniacal fervour, and Agar, the star of the movie, just stands there. He doesn't even move his head. Just stands there waiting to go home. This must have been a real fun shoot*. Anyway, the Monster grabs the doc, throws him to the 'gators then jumps in as well.
   The end.
   
   
   I need to see Buchanan's Mars Needs Women.
   
   *On reflection I think his silence was more to do with the lack of on-location sound recording. Most of the outdoor stuff in this flick seems to have been shot MOS and Agar obviously wasn't available (or affordable) to do the ADR.

1. Creature of Destruction - More Larry Buchanan fever dream stuff, this time concerning a stage psychic, his beautiful assistant and a series of motiveless murders committed by a man in a rubber monster suit who, in the end, turns out to be some sort of manifestation of the beautiful assistant's inner bestial nature - I think. Anyway the monster just vanishes when she is shot dead so I guess that is what we are supposed to think. But after 80 minutes contending with dialogue like this it's a bit difficult to think anything:
   
   
   
   
   
   

   Capt. Dell: Lieutenant Blake... Lt. Blake: Yes? Capt. Dell: Lieutenant, I'd like to point something out to you. Now - I saw those bodies and whoever mutilated them has a very special problem Lt. Blake: Yes, I realise that; tell me something new, captain. Capt. Dell: I am a psychologist. Lt. Blake: Well, as a psychologist what is your opinion of this 'doctor' Basso and his monster theory? Lt. Capt. Dell: That anything is possible? As a scientist I keep an open mind. Blake: Yes Captain, anything is possible...

   I've worked out the Larry Buchanan shooting technique. If I work this up, I could end up with a Dogma 95-like manifesto for crappy movie makers the world over:
   

   
   

   • Shoot it once, without sound and loop in the dialogue in the 'studio' afterwards. Shooting without sound is cheap. If the actor fluffs his line - so what? As long as everyone else keeps going, whole scenes can be covered in two or three takes. One wide shot and then a close-up of the more reliable actor in the scene - and "Thank you! on to the next set-up, guys! Come on, let's pick up the pace here - we've only got four days to shoot this turkey!".
     
     

   
   

   • Don't record any Wild Track or Atmos - techy terms for ambient room tone - ie the sound that a room makes when there's nobody making any noise in it. I know that sounds a bit Zen but different kinds of silence are very useful in the editing process. But you don't need it. Not if the whole sound track will be laid down by actors standing around a microphone and library music will be played under every scene. Spot sound effects will be needed from time to time but there's no need to try and match the acoustic of your sound effect to the supposed acoustic of the location. In Creature of Destruction seventeen people applauding on a beach sounds exactly the same as a hundred people applauding in a busy night club.
     

   
   

   • Fade out or cross-fade at the end of every scene - with all the money you saved not doing synch sound you've got a few dollars in the budget for opticals. (Always a good general rule of thumb in film editing: Not sure how to get out of a scene? Fade to black.)
     
     

   
   

   • Don't squander a penny more than you have to on hiring anything for longer than you have to - I did spend a chunk of this movie wondering why the lead sometimes wore an Air Force uniform, and sometimes didn't, until I realised he only wore it indoors. By the time they got round to shooting all the outdoor, daytime, stuff it had been sent back to the hire company. (Or the guy they had blagged it from went back on duty.)
     

   
   

   • Another good no-budget trick of the day was to get some poor wannabe pop singer and his band to contribute one of his 'swinging numbers' and fill the screen with gyrating tits and hips for five minutes as middle-aged teenagers Watusi their way to utter obscurity... And I just spent 45 minutes editing the example of this from the movie to show you and my editing program just went and crashed. Had I saved? Had I buggery. Grrrrrrrrr. -
     
     
     No... Hang on! I just found it, sorry:
     
     
     
   
   

It's that time of year again.

All over the world proud parents are suffering.

"Andthentheangelwentuptotheshepherdsand
theywereafraidandsaid
weareafraidandtheangelsaiddon'tbe
afraidforthebabyjesusisinthestable
sotheywentothebabyjesusandtherewas
maryandadonkey... "

School nativities.

By my calculations I have another ten years of the buggers to sit through. By the time Eben is treading the boards with a tea-towel wrapped round his head and a stuffed toy sheep under one arm for the final time I will be 60 odd and have been watching my kids be Angels, Josephs, Marys, Kings, and all the rest for 15 years. (Unless of course M and I have another kid in which case the clock is reset to minus ten again).
I don't mind school nativities too much. I can't stand organised religion in any shape or form and would happily see it banned from all schools the world over but for most kids it's their first real taste of drama and performance - both of which are GOOD things in my book. But why are school nativities so incredibly bland? Why do they always miss out the gory bits? (The Slaughter of the Innocents anyone?) And why no school Passion Plays at Easter? I can't believe there isn't one kid in every school the teachers wouldn't love to see nailed to a tree.

I just like the idea of little Timmy rushing home from school in floods of tears: "Daaaad! Waaaaaah! They picked me to play Jesus!"

I am a very cruel man.

All the crap movies I have watched last month. Fortunately it is a very short list.

1. Wild Wild World of Batwoman aka She Was a Hippy Vampire (MST3K) - Oh God!


2. Il gatto a nove code (1971) - Dario Argento does a Hitchcock with Ennio Morricone as his Bernard Herrmann.


3. Our Man Flint - Stupidly sexist semi-spoof of the Bond films which was actually a funnier than I was expecting - and a lot funnier than the Austin Powers movies which covered the same ground. Our Man Flint played it straight. No mugging to camera. The story was cigarette paper thin (blue ones) but had a rather groovy design and music vibe which I rather enjoyed.
   
   
   
   
   .
   You are not a pleasure unit....
   
   
   And, after careful repeated watching, at various speeds, of the seven or eight frames in which this girl is pulled from behind the glass panel before disappearing out of frame, I was able to answer one of those technical questions that has long bugged me about shower scenes in American movies of this period - answer: they wear flesh coloured bikinis.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Ah well. Another evening well spent then.


4. The Blue Umbrella (2005) - Merriol found this one, cruising through Blockbuster for suitable movies for the kids. We didn't realise it was in Hindi till it was in the machine and we were all snuggled up to watch it. It is, not to beat about the bush, a wonderful film. It's simple little tale of a poor Indian village girl who meets a Japanese tourist and swaps her amulet for the tourist's blue umbrella. The Umbrella is stolen, the thief is unmasked and eventually the girl forgives him. That's it. And it tore me up. Shredded me. I was in tears. Simple straightforward movie making, wonderfully acted, beautifully shot, and brilliantly edited. Not that it is perfect - even caught up in the emotion of the story, I noticed a few odd moments - a couple of line crossings, and a weird bit of focus pulling at one point which made me think the dialogue had been rewritten post-production and this was only usable shot the editor had. Sometimes I really wish the part of my brain that notices this sort of stuff would JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP! - till after the movie had finished at least. A delightful film.


5. Yor, the Hunter from the Future - about which I have already waxed lyrical.
   
   
6. When Worlds Collide (1951) - 1951 was a good year for heavily biblically subtexted SF movies. (See The Day the Earth Stood Still - last month?) This time it's Noah and the Flood that got reworked.


7. Stardust - the Neil Gaiman one, not the David Essex one. And I was more than pleasantly surprised. It was nice to see the CGI serving the story for a change and not the other way around. And when things are going well I do really like 'the part of my brain that notices this sort of stuff', despite what I said a few movies ago. Towards the end of Stardust there is a tremendous battle between three witches and our hero, who is trying to rescue his true love from being sacrificed by them. Two of the witches are killed in the course of the fight but, just at the moment when the third, and strongest, witch has the helpless heroine and the hero at her mercy, there is sudden pause and we get a small panning shot from her POV of the desolation caused during the conflict. There is no one else in the room. There is no help coming for our heroes. The witch slashes with her knife - and frees the captive heroine. The witch turns away from them, what good are youth and beauty to her? Her sisters are dead what's the point?
   The shot we just saw wasn't really there to show us there was no hope for the heroes - though it did do that job very well - it was there to show us the witch's realisation that her life has no meaning any more.
   As the newly united lovers walk away, a cunning look comes over the witch's face and she attacks them again. She was toying with them. Now her sisters are dead she will not have to share the power that their deaths will bring her. The POV shot was her making sure they were dead. One simple shot and three different interpretations/uses of it presented - bang bang bang - one after the other. Great bit of movie making.


8. Teenage Monster - One of the few cowboy monster movies. Not a genre that caught on. Off the top of my head I can only think of a few others: Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, Billy the Kid vs. Dracula ... erm .... Anyway! Using standing sets, three horses, no continuity girl, and about four interiors:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   (one of which is very strangely framed at the top - presumably the low angle they chose to shoot it from let the camera see the top of the set and the studio ceiling - until they shoved a piece of cardboard in the way) our gallant crew of no budget movie makers - also responsible for The Brain From Planet Aurus (qv.) - tell the story of a widowed mother and her son who, after possibly being struck by a fragment of meteorite - the narrative is a little vague about the details - and finding gold in their mine, move to the outskirts of town where the widow romances the sheriff and the boy (now grown up to be a hairy homicidal giant) kills people with relentless monotony.
   In the end the boy beast, with the usual instincts of the doomed tragic monster type, heads for the local high ground where he throws the blackmailing scheming minx, who has pretended to befriend him, off the top of a cliff before being shot down like the hairy teenage monster that he is. The End - of a very long 65 minutes.


9. War Of the Worlds - Not the Tom Cruise one, the 1953 George Pal one with Gene Barry. Better than I remember. The scenes where the mob take the scientists' vehicles, and wreck their chances of finding a weapon to defeat the seeming invincible Martians, must have been a real shock at the time. The conventions of the day would have had our heroes pulling a plot device out of the hat at the last moment ("It's crazy - but it might just work!") and saving the day but here, just at the point where you would expect this to start taking place, frantic selfish people spill out all over the screen and rip that hope away from the audience. Must have been much more disturbing to the well-ordered, conformist America of the Eisenhower years than it is today.


10. War Of the Worlds - The Tom Cruise one. Which was better than I expected and which I was quite enjoying - until the moment when Tim Robbins' character appeared on screen. Then it went tits up very fast. I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them. Tom Cruise's character spends most of the movie running away, doing vaguely sensible things and generally not behaving like an action movie hero at all. So all that 'sensible' semi-realistic stuff almost outweighed all the bullshit stuff that was going on around him. Martian machines buried underground for millennia? Ray guns that vaporised people but not their clothes? - or at least not their outer garments, it seemed to vaporise their bras and panties pretty neatly, but has trouble with jeans and sweatshirts. I'll even let him get away with surviving having half a Jumbo Jet fall on his house, but it's later, having lost one of his kids and alone with his daughter, when things go wrong. In a scene almost recognisably drawn from a scene in the book, our hero meets a character called Ogilvy hiding in a cellar. (In the book Ogilvy was an astronomer, the character in the cellar was just called 'the artilleryman' though parts of Robbis character are also drawn from 'the Curate' in the book.) There are Martians all over the place and they are trapped, forced to keep quite in case they are discovered. Ogilvy's character is digging a tunnel and his continuous noise is putting them all in jeopardy. Our hero decides he has no option but to kill Ogilvy to save his own and his child's lives. He blindfolds his daughter and tells her to to sing while he goes to do the deed. This could have been - should have been - a horrible, terrible moment. Our decent, hard-working, loving family man forced to do something so horrible to protect those he loves. But it isn't. It isn't because the film-makers chickened out of making it a horrible terrible moment by making the character of Ogilvy creepyily weird, possible paedophile, so repulsive that people just wanted him disposed of. There was no moral ambiguity. Cruise was acting his cotton socks off in this scene but the moment had gone. Ogilvy was broad brush-stoke evil and therefore Cruise's character was entitled to dispose of him. Wouldn't it have been so much more interesting if Ogilvy had been nice. Helpful, friendly, nice - but just dangerously noisy. Wouldn't that have been one hell of a scene? Damn right it would. Oscar time all round I think, but Hollywood leading men don't kill 'nice' people do they? Three minutes later (having remembered he's an action hero) Cruise is blowing up previously impregnable Martian war machines with a couple of hand grenades he just happens to find lying about and reuniting his family. The End.


11. The Great Garrick - a 1937 piece of nonsense directed by the great James Whale (better known for Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and Showboat) which I love dearly. It's a flimsy piece of froth, totally set-bound and stagy but fun. It is my perfect Sunday Afternoon Movie. It's a shame and a puzzlement that it has never been released on VHS, DVD, Laserdisc - or any other home format you care to mention. I've had a treasured copy, taped off the telly some 20 or so years ago, and only recently managed to find a copy on line. The quality isn't the best but it'll do till someone at Criterion or somewhere rediscovers it and restores it.-