Star Trek vs Doctor Who

Come back!this isn't one of those nerdy 'Could the TARDIS beat the Enterprise in a fistfight?' bits of fanfic. (Apart from anything else the answer too is bloody obvious to even bother asking the question.) No, this is a moment of blinding revelation about the nature of Life, the Universe and episodic television. (Apart from the Life and Universe bits.)

Last night, via the medium of the BBC iPlayer, Holly and I finally got to watch Let's Kill Hitler, the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who. I love watching Dr Who with Holly. It's one of 'Our Things', a shared private bit of intergenerational fun. I loved Doctor Who as a kid and it's nice to be sharing the show with my children.

Halfway through last night's episode I remembered something that used to puzzle me. Not about Doctor Who but about Star Trek.

Star Trek first aired in 1966, three years after Doctor Who first hit the screen, and in its later revivals featured a strong theme of father/son relationships: Worf and Alexander, Pickard and Crusher Jr.* (and others eg), Benjamin and Jake Cisco, Data and his creator, and so on. ( In this one of the endless number of novels based on the series, even Spock discovers he has a son!)**. As I said, this strange emphasis used to puzzle me until I realized (long before I started doing the same thing with my own children) that Star Trek was one of the few shows that would be watched across the generations: by those who remembered the originals, and their children coming to it for the first time. (I guess that's why they called the first revival of the show Star Trek: The New Generation - I can be so slow on the uptake sometimes.) To capitalize on this Unique Selling Point the producers presented their loyal viewers with endless variations on the problems of male parent / child bonding. which usually ended with manly pats on the back and sometimes a hug. "I love you, son." " I love you too, dad." And at home on the sofa, father and son couch potatoes too would put aside their differences and America would be just that little bit better.

Last night I spotted that the BBC had realised they too had the same kind of cross generational demographic appeal and their show too was being watched by men and their kids. I say men because I don't remember girls being that interested in Doctor Who when I was kid. It may have changed with later reincarnations but in my day girls were far from interested. I doubt the women they grew into would be nostalgic for the real stuff. (Tom Baker is da man!)

The BBC's solution to the Star Trek problem (how do you keep grown males watching what is essentially a kids' show) is markedly different from Paramount's homely moral philosophy and re-enforcing of family values.

The BBC has gone for tits.

They've cast some serious crumpet as companions recently (okay, well maybe not Catherine Tate) and, most recently, cast the seriously crumpetty crumpet Karen Gillan as most recent female companion crumpet Amy Pond - and then dressed her up in male fetish fantasy button-pushing costumes like this:

WPC Amy Pond

and this:

Schoolgirl Amy Pond

and, most disturbingly***, this:

Japanese Sex Robot Amy Pond
(A bit of context here: this is a shape-shifting robot disguised as Amy)

(In next week's episode, Amy Pond disguises herself as a nun, and licks one of those really big Baby Doll lollipops - hereinafter known as 'lolitapops', and blows coy kisses at the screen.)

The Beeb has also called in the big guns by casting Alex Kingston as recurring character River Song. Now Alex Kington is undeniably:

• A. A good actress and
• B. Fwaaaaaaar!

...even without the director pointing the camera down the front of her blouse at every opportunity. Like this moment just after the moment Matt Smith has helpfully pulled open her jacket so we can all get a good look at her cleavage.

Thanks Matt. A truly inspired bit of upstaging there; I'm sure there was dialogue going on in this shot but I didn't notice any of it.

So, in short, Tits, the BBC's answer to keeping dads amused. Works for me.

Somewhere, as I'm typing this, the BBC is receiving an email pointing out that the two machine guns used by River Song to force a whole room of Nazi officials and their female companions to strip down to their underwear (did I mention this was a kids show?) were in fact 1943 issue Schmitt and Wesson .22 calibre semi-automatic breach loaders as the magazine was clearly of the semi-locking design patented by Otto Wangster in 1942 and thus it would be impossible for them to be in use in 1938 when this story was set.

Having made that up I suddenly feel an awful lot better about being fascinated by Alex Kingston's knockers for half an hour.

More next week. I hope.

----------

* I know Pickard isn't Crusher Jr.s real son (or did I miss that episode?) but the relationship is similar.

** The Doctor, it must be noted (Must it? Yes. Okay then... ) ended up having a daughter.

*** I can't make my mind up whether the disturbing bit is that they did it, or that I just thought they did.

It Looks Like People's Bums in an Airtight Container!

It's August here in the Highlands of Scotland. The bees are buzzing round the honeysuckle. Meadowsweet, orchids, saxifrages and all sorts of other flowers I don't know the names of are blooming in profusion. Blackberries are starting to ripen, a few black ones dotted in among all the reddening clusters. The heather is yet to bloom. The roads are full of bewildered tourists from all corners of the world, driving with interesting and life threatening inventiveness in all sorts of directions. And the B&B owners have been hanging out their No Vacancies signs for weeks now. It is, in short, Late Summer - and the Cancer Research charity shop in Fort William has just put this year's Christmas cards on display.

The world has, finally, gone fucking mad hasn't it?

Things like that are why I hide in the house and watch shit like this. That and the midges.

July's eyeball abuse list:

1. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) - Friday Night Pizza with the Kids Film - which I enjoyed a hell of a lot more than I thought I was going to. I have a natural aversion to Jim Carey but thought he did a terrific job as the evil Count Olaf.


2. Breath (2007) - a film that is, according to a quote from Variety on the back cover,
   
   
   
   

   "Quirky ... Marbled with weirdly comic and tender moments"

   and which caused me to formulate a new rule of films: 'Inside every slow, quirky Art House film, no matter how marbled with anything it may be, there is a semi-decent short screaming to get out'. Christ, I was bored. Even at a meagre 84 minutes it felt like a piece that was stretched out far too long. I managed to stay awake until the end credits, in the vague hope of some great redeeming moment which didn't arrive, and then promptly fell asleep for two hours - during which I developed a severe pain in the left-hand side of my neck from sleeping awkwardly.


3. Dance of the Dead ( 2008 ) - "On the night of the big High-School Prom, the dead rise to eat the living, and the only people who can stop them are the losers who couldn't get dates to the dance." Stupid, overly-violent and (at moments) very funny low budget zombie film. The lead, Jared Kusnitz, was great.


4. The Last Seven (2010) - Another £1 of 3 not very well spent in PoundWorld. (The other two films I bought at the same time were Bloodrayne 2, and Mega Piranha.) The Last Seven looked to be the most interesting of the the three as it promised to play with one of my fave SF book/movie tropes. The one that starts with one man waking up in a seemingly deserted Earth - The Last Man on Earth, The Quiet Earth, The World, the Flesh and the Devil etc. etc. After taking an age to get started (after what looked suspiciously like TWO nested framing devices, and watching one of the producers of the show doubling as an actor walking around London for ten or so minutes) I began to think I should have gone with Mega Piranha. At least that would have delivered what it promised on the case - oh, though looking at the case again, maybe not; the cover shows a fish eating an aircraft carrier, this from production company The Asylum, the people who couldn't get their alien's masks to stay inside their actor's shirts in their ultra-crappy Princess of Mars knockbuster.
   
   Ah well.
   
   Back to The Last Seven. So, seven very variable actors meet up in a deserted London, with variably from shot to shot wet/dry streets, and say "What the fuck is happening?" to each other a lot. None of them remembers a thing about who they are or what they are doing there. They start to have flashbacks which seem to interlink. The flashbacks (which get very repetitive and are not as oblique a piece of storytelling as the film makers seem to think) have something to do with an SAS op gone wrong, a cover-up and someone nailing their own hands to a table. There's also a mysterious black clad figure with bad teeth, a blindfold and lots of blood running down his face popping up and popping out the survivor's eyes with his thumbs from time to time. By the time the end of the film heaves itself into view and the remaining characters finally realize they are all dead (or nearly so) and have been since the start of the film, the audience is having a collective M. Night Shyamalan moment and saying 'Is that it? Is that why I have sat here for the last 90 minutes? They're all fucking dead?' Yep, that was it. What a crashing disappointment. Mind you, my 'They are all dead' detectors are pretty well developed. I have never seen an episode of Lost and I knew the characters in that were dead after the third episode just from what the people I knew who did watch it told me about it.
   
   
   
   The only thing that kept me there till the end was one of the actresses, Daisy Head, in her first feature film, wiping the screen with everyone else. The girl has got something.
   
   
   
   
   
   


5. Bolt ( 2008 ) - I was underwhelmed. The kids were entertained but not enthusiastic.


6. Mega Piranha (2010) - another straight to SyFy channel and pound-shop DVD pile piece of shit from The Asylum. 'Starring 80s Pop Sensation' Tiffany. (Who?) Mega Piranha has added a new person to my 'People I Want to Nail to a Wall Slowly' list. It's this guy:
   
   
   
   
   Bill Parker
   
   
   The 'editor' of the show, who, when presented with an Avid, seems to have randomly hit every available button in as short a time as possible, and added big Whoooosh! noises over every other cut in case we didn't notice how fucking cool his cutting was. Real ADHD editing. Leave nothing on the screen for more than 3 seconds, speed it, up slow it down, flip it, flop it, desaturate, 'hell, it's been over two minutes since we used that shot; we'll use it again, I wonder what this button does? Cool! cut paste - Y'know, I'm bored, why don't we let cat play with the keyboard for a bit? Hey! that's kind cool...'
   
   
   
   Amid all this hyperactive bludgeoning - there, I suspect, only to disguise the utterly shit script - he manages to do perfectly stupid edits like this:
   
   
   
   
   
   

   EXT: DAY: SWAMP The hero and two assistant heroes are on the run. Hero: Come on let's move out... You too, Gordon... They exit screen right CUT TO: EXT: DAY: ALMOST IDENTICAL BIT OF SWAMP Enter Hero screen left. Hero: Wait here.

   
   

   Actually, written down, it doesn't look that bad but on screen it looks terrible, like the characters have just taken only paces forwards and then stopped. I find it hard to believe they didn't have a single shot they could have cut away to to give a least a moment's impression of time passing. Not a single helicopter shot of jungles? reused CGI shot of cardboard piranhas? no shots of the bad guys combing the jungle for them? nothing? Nothing to rescue their hero from looking like an even bigger dick than he already looks? I don't believe it. Incredibly incompetent editing. And this was before we get to the content which included giant Piranhas eating nuclear submarines and ventriloquist SCUBA divers.
   

   
   

   This wasn't a film. It was a product.
   

   
   

   Actually my hat's off to one member of the crew: the composer who - if he is to be believed from his interview on the 'Making of' extra - only had 48 hours to score and record the soundtrack for the whole movie. He did an okay job.
   
   
7. BloodRayne 2: Deliverance (2007) - a straight to DVD Vampire western in which an evil vampire, Billy the Kid, and his posse of vampire cowboys take hostage the children of the small town of Deliverance. Cheesy, wobbly, loathed by many - just go read the bile heaped upon it IMDb reviews - and lurching from one over-cooked cliché to another without stopping; I rather enjoyed it. 90 minutes of stupid fun.

   
   
8. Return of the Killer Tomatoes ( 1988 ) - Rewatch of a joyously stupid film that just makes me laugh. I make no apologies.
   
   
9. The Invasion (2007) - the fourth(!) adaptation of Jack Finney's 1955 novel The Body Snatchers. The first one is a masterpiece of cold war paranoia, the second is a pretty damn good movie about cults and the alienation of modern cities (and it has that great downbeat ending with Donald Sutherland doing 'The Point'), the third I haven't seen but is highly regarded by some, and then there's this. Which is about Nicole Kidman getting 17 million dollars to appear in a movie. The first two adaptation ditch the novels pretty crappy WTF? cop out ending (the invading pods get fed up and float back off into space) and are better for it, the third (from what I've read) has an unsettlingly ambiguous "where're you going to run to?" ending, and this one has the combined scientists of the world pulling a vaccine out of their collective arses (in the nick of time) and crop spraying the world back to unhappiness once again, and you know what? It's shit.
   
   
   
10. Voyage of the Rock Aliens - a 1984 'Rock Science Fiction Musical starring Pia (Santa Claus Conquers the Martians) Zadora which made The Apple and Earth Girls are Easy look like masterpieces in comparison. If I tell you the best 'joke' in the whole film is that the high school to which the 30 year old Pia and her 25 year old boyfriend, Craig Sheffer, go is called 'Heidi' - Heidi High. Geddit? Eh? Geddit? - you'll have some idea about just how fucking dreadful this film was. I mean really fucking dreadful. I was on such a high after watching it. Hysteria. I should demand medals for watching this stuff.
    
    
    
    Somehow the producers managed to convince 90 year old, four times nominated, one time Oscar winner Ruth Gordon to appear in it as the local sheriff. Baffling.What you may probably find more baffling is the fact that I went on my hands and knees to find this DVD and then had to convince the guy behind the till to sell it to me. Here's the scene: I'm in Poundland in Dundee raking through the not very inspiring piles of DVDs (many of them reduced to 50p - that uninteresting) when I noticed that down behind the shelves was a pile of DVDs and CDs that had fallen through the gaps in the shelving and were lying in an unsorted heap on the floor, out of sight of the passing punters. I love unsorted heaps ; can't resist them. You never know what you'll find in an unsorted heap. (Except you do by now). So I was instantly on my knees shoving aside piles of Fly Fishing Expert 23: How to Catch Bigger Perch with Angus McSomeone and pulling out long lost treasures - like lots of other Fly Fishing Expert DVDs and - Voyage of the Rock Aliens. Bingo! When I got to the till the guy behind the counter scanned my DVDs. Voyage of the Rock Aliens made the till make a funny noise. Instead of going 'beep!' as it had done with all the other discs, it went 'BeepityBeepety'... The till man looked at his till.
    
    
    
    
    

    Till Man: Oh. This item has been withdrawn. Me: Why? Till Man: What? Me: Why has it been withdrawn? Till Man: No idea. Maybe it's been reported as faulty or something. Me: I'll take the risk. Till Man: What? Me: I'll take the risk. If it doesn't work I promise not to bring it back. Till Man: Ok. Beep!

    
    
    Like I said. Medals.
    
    
11. Mutant (1984) - over-long (or very wrongly paced) low budget small town zombie pollution crap.
    
    
12. The House on Sorority Row (1983) - Meh.
    

Nerdy Rant...

What is the point of CGI? I mean really? I have no idea any more. I used to know. Like most people I was gosh wow! blown away by the visuals in many a Hollywood film and have enjoyed more than my fair share of computer animated 'kids' films from Toy Story to Megamind but today, looking at the trailer for the soon to be released John Carter (of Mars), I really began to wonder.

Here's the thing. I'm not a total Comic Book/SF/fantasy film nerd. I'm not wetting my knickers in anticipation of the Avengers movie, haven't seen either of the Iron Man films, loath everything Trekkie, and don't have lustful thoughts about Wonder Woman, Deanna Troi, Agent Scully, the blonde one from Stargate, Claudia Christian, Seven of Nine, Number Six, Starbuck, Amy Pond or any of the women from Farscape*. I do not collect trading cards from any TV show or film, I do not engage in endless pointless on-line forum debates about whether the White Star ships from Babylon 5 could whup the USS Enterprise - NCC-1701 (it could) or any of the other total Comic Book/SF/fantasy film nerdy activities. I don't complain when Hollywood fucks up perfectly good SF stories and turns them into moronic Nic Cage films (well, not too much). And for the most part I actively avoid trailers and spoilers for new films. I like sitting down knowing as little as I can about a film. I like to just let them do their thing without having too many expectations or preconceptions in my head.

John Carter though...

John Carter is based on A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. One of those seminal books. I read it as a kid and it has stayed with me all my life. I read several of the sequels too. It's real thrilling daring-do nonsense fantasy adventure. Hard to read as an adult. I read A Princess of Mars for the first time in many many years recently; it is, quite frankly, awful. But the nostalgia for my lost sense of wonder carried me through. Like so many books important to the the history of SF it hasn't stood the test of time well.

So when I bumped into the newly released trailer on Youtube I had to have a peek. Just a little one. I mean I already know the story.

One of the central characters of the Martian Books and some would say one of SF's most important early characters is Tars Tarkas, Jeddack of the Tharks. He is (unsurprisingly) a Martian. One of the Green, Plains Martians. Here's part of Burroughs' description of them from chapter 3 of a Princess of Mars:

...long necks and six legs, or, as I afterward learned, two legs and two arms, with an intermediary pair of limbs which could be used at will either as arms or legs. Their eyes were set at the extreme sides of their heads a trifle above the center and protruded in such a manner that they could be directed either forward or back and also independently of each other, thus permitting this queer animal to look in any direction, or in two directions at once, without the necessity of turning the head.

The ears, which were slightly above the eyes and closer together, were small, cup-shaped antennae, protruding not more than an inch on these young specimens. Their noses were but longitudinal slits in the center of their faces, midway between their mouths and ears.

There was no hair on their bodies, which were of a very light yellowish-green color. In the adults, as I was to learn quite soon, this color deepens to an olive green and is darker in the male than in the female. Further, the heads of the adults are not so out of proportion to their bodies as in the case of the young.

The iris of the eyes is blood red, as in Albinos, while the pupil is dark. The eyeball itself is very white, as are the teeth. These latter add a most ferocious appearance to an otherwise fearsome and terrible countenance, as the lower tusks curve upward to sharp points which end about where the eyes of earthly human beings are located. The whiteness of the teeth is not that of ivory, but of the snowiest and most gleaming of china. Against the dark background of their olive skins their tusks stand out in a most striking manner, making these weapons present a singularly formidable appearance.

Tars Tarkas, on his first appearance in the book, is described thus:

...huge and terrific incarnation of hate, of vengeance and of death. The man himself, for such I may call him, was fully fifteen feet in height and, on Earth, would have weighed some four hundred pounds. He sat his mount as we sit a horse, grasping the animal's barrel with his lower limbs, while the hands of his two right arms held his immense spear low at the side of his mount; his two left arms were outstretched laterally to help preserve his balance, the thing he rode having neither bridle or reins of any description for guidance.

I know what Tars Tarkas looks like, always have: big, green, six arms tusks. Lots of other people know what the big, green, six arms tusky bugger looks like too. Just go look up some of the weird wonderful (and occasionally disturbing) artwork that Google throws at you when you do a picture search for him.

How then given the description in the books and the obvious idea that the character is big and got huge fucking fangs and is one mean son of a bitch do the makers of the new film with a brazzillion dollars worth of GCI experience and the ability to create ANYTHING THEY WANT on screen come up with this as their CGI creation for the part:

Clickify for bignocity

Jar-Jar Shrek? Jesus fucking wept. Please tell me it isn't true. But this is a Disney film so maybe it is. I bet they've made Woola a cute kitten too. A wisecracking cute kitten.

I may have to go hide.

(On the other hand if this is not supposed to be Tars Tarkas, I take it all back.)

* This sentence contains a lie.

Recently I blethered on about the stunning Top of the News story about a lost dog on Nevis Radio. Since then I have managed to avoid Radio Nevis entirely. (It's not hard.) Yesterday I had to go into the Fort to drop off a cheque at the Council Service Point. As I was waiting in the queue I realised that in the background Radio Nevis was being piped though speakers at us. I'd managed to hit the news. I listened for three minutes as the local news announcer for local news wittered on about a possibly lost dog. Someone has seen a Jack Russell terrier with a brown collar wandering around and wondered if it might be lost.

"Hold the front page, Furgus! There's a possible lost dog in Corpach!"

After his appeals for anyone to come forward if they thought they might know whose dog it was, the announcer signed off with the promise of an 'update in an hour'.

I can hardly wait.

Radio Nevis' Dog Squad hard at work.

The URL http://www.the-junk-monkey.com/ is up for renewal.  I can't afford to keep it up - I have better things to do with $100.  And, truth be told, I really wasn't using the space, or the domain name, so I'll just save my money and not renew it. When they finally get round to noticing I haven't paid them, pull the plug, and wipe all my stuff, expect sudden big holes in this blog.  I have saved everything off and will put it all back from some free hosting site somewhere.

Go make a cuppa and have a pee: it's Every Bad Film (plus a couple of good ones) I watched this month in glorious black and white! There's only 24 of them and one I dismiss in one (very short) word.

(For those of you with short attention spans (or weak bladders) here's a link to Every Film I Have Watched in the Last Month: The Short Form which you have probably read already but have almost certainly forgotten.)

1. A Bay of Blood (1971) - Let's start another new month with another Mario Bava! - Just like I did last month. It's not a plan, it's just that A Bay of Blood arrived in the post this morning and was therefore on top of the Crap to Watch pile this evening (and I was too knackered to make any decisions about what to shove in the DVD player). The fact that it is now on top of my Back to eBay pile shows I haven't totally lost my critical faculties.
   So, A Bay of Blood, a proto-splatter/slasher movie, deemed by many to be ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL MOVIES EVER. Yeah... Right... 84 minutes of watching Italians aimlessly wandering to gruesome deaths as the camera zooms, pans, and racks focus trying to find them. Hmmmm. I wasn't impressed. Every character with a speaking part in this show ended up dead: impaled, garrotted, whacked with machetes, or blasted by their six year old kids with a shot gun for reasons which were not very obvious. Something to do with a prime bit of real estate and a will. I think it was supposed to be a very dark comedy. Whatever it was, it was released in the USA as Last House On The Left 2 - despite having nothing to do with the original Last House On The Left and even having been shot the year before. Another Mario Bava non-sequel. No pick axes in this one.
   
   
2. Rocketship X-M (1950) - for the umpteenth time. Another in the vast number of films in which the First Manned Mission to Mars Goes Horribly Wrong. (It's almost a sub-genre in it's own right.) This time though, the first manned mission is only supposed to be going to the moon, the fact that it misses and ends up on Mars is possibly due, the crew suspect, to divine intervention. God is also responsible for all the astronauts dying by the end of the show (almost unheard of in Space movies - before and since) But, as a reward for delivering the dire warnings against people blowing themselves back to the radioactive stone age like the Martians did, God makes the last few members of the crew feel uplifted and noble just before they plunge to a horrible fiery doom. Nice one, God. Some really bad space science on show here too: apparently in the 1950s rockets went 300 turbo miles due up, before turning at 90° to parallel the surface of the Earth, then gradually accelerated, somehow gaining extra momentum from the Earth's rotation, till they achieved escape velocity. The average Road Runner cartoon demonstrates a better grasp of physics. In space small things are, apparently, prone to become weightless far sooner than large things.
   
   
3. Shrek 4 - meh. (Told you.)
   
   
4. All the Kind Strangers (1974) - creepy little made for TV movie about a family of orphan children kidnapping adults to become their new parents. Our heroes are not the first to fall into their hands and there are more than a few cars drowned in the creek. It sort of held together, despite its obvious made for TV structure and some godawful 70s country music, right up to the pat 'give me the gun, kid, and we can just work this out' ending - at which point the end credits rolled so I didn't have to suffer a long disappointing let-down. If there was a film demanding a downbeat or ambiguous ending this was it. I bet the original script had the heroes die - or at least implied they did.
   
   
5. The Last Horror Film (1982) - continuing my totally unconscious habit of watching films released as sequels to films they have no connection with, The Last Horror Film (aka Fanatic and Fanatical Extreme was, apparently, released in Germany as Maniac 2: Love to Kill). It's an odd mix this one. Half giallo, half guerilla travelogue (the film is set in, and was filmed at, the 1981 Cannes Film Festival - cue lots of hand-held shots of real stars attending openings, and topless women on the beach). The pay-off of the framing device is genuinely funny, one of the best, comes out of nowhere, well-timed jokes I've seen for ages. It also has more film within a film end credit cards than any other film ever made AND it's got Caroline 'Starcrash' Munro in the bath. What more do you want?
   
   
   
   A 'The End'.
   
   
   
6. Dead Awake (2001) - Ding! the sound of the crapshovel hitting a small gem amid all the dross. The other side of the same disc as The Last Horror Film - one of those Hollywood DVD two films on one DVD that look like pirate copies but aren't - Dead Awake is a nicely paced and very odd little thriller. And it's genuinely odd, not faux, 'let's be wacky and culty here' odd. Very dreamlike in places which is as it should be because the story is that of an insomniac yuppie, who hasn't slept for 10 months, witnessing a murder and getting charged with it. Genuinely and very weirdly funny too. I haven't had so much fun for ages.
   
   
   
   
   
   
7. Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - Hitchcock. And not, sadly, as good as I remember it. There were a couple of nice moments, famous moments, like the shot of Uncle Charlie bounding up the stairs and suddenly realising that, though the police no longer thought he was the murderer, he would have to kill his niece who knew he was. I really like the way Hitchcock lets the audience participate in the film like that. Letting you get inside a character's head by having the actor turn away from the camera at a crucial moment and making you supply the acting. But it seemed very talky and long, yet very hurried. I was also slightly annoyed by the fact that a sequence I remember being in the film was missing. It was missing because it was never there. My memory had seamlessly transplanted a moment from Strangers on a Train into Shadow of a Doubt and then got pissed off when it didn't arrive as expected.
   
   
8. X-Men:The Last Stand (2006) - I was bored rigid. Apart from Halle Berry's bum in those leather trousers, I can't think of a single moment of the film that wouldn't have been improved by less CGI, more acting (though, given the crapness of the script, there was bugger all for anyone to work with), and no Vinnie Jones; gods, than man can kill a movie dead in its tracks. I spent most of my time feeling sorry for the actors (apart from Vinnie Jones) who must have had aching noses at the end of each day from the amount of nostril flaring they were doing. Every shot someone was flaring their nostrils to suggest rage, or impotent rage, or suspicion, or shock, or long suppressed lerve, or hunger, or tireness. Any emotion in a Marvel movie can be shown by a tightening of the jaw and a flaring of the nostrils. Apart from grief. Grief is done by kneeling down, clenching everything from the buttocks upwards, tilting your head back, and screaming NOOOOOOOO! at a camera somewhere above your head. Hugh Jackman did that falling on his knees and shouting NOOOOOOOO! thing twice in this film, which I thought was a little excessive but it made a change from all the nostril flaring, and all the constipated Kung-Fu they were doing under all the CGI superpower stuff.
   Quote:

   Okay, Shawn, in this shot you're shooting your freeze ray at the 'flames shooting out of his hands' guy, so I want you to lean forward a bit... that's good. Grab a couple of imaginary melons... no, a bit lower. Good. Now imagine you are trying to squeeze one out - a real log. That's it! Great! First shit you've had all week... Really grit those teeth.... NNNNNNNNNNN. Looking good. Still needs something though. I know! Could you flare your nostrils too? That's it! Hold it... Cut! Print it! Thank you, and moving on...

   The film also had two (count 'em two!) 'The end... or is it?' endings. But at least it was better than the second Fantastic 4 film - but that's not saying a lot, so was Confessions of a Window Cleaner.
   
   
9. Shaft (1971) - The music is great. The rest of it looks very dated and pedestrian. I know it was a revelation at the time. A Black PI hero? Unheard of, and its runaway success ushered in the whole Blaxploitation boom but looked at objectively 40 years later it's just not that good a film. Apart from the music. The music is just fucking genius.
   
   
   
   I bet this bit went down well in Mississipi
   
   
   
   
10. Il Divo (2008) - visually appealing but, to me, incomprehensible retelling of a slice of recent Italian political history. I'm no wiser at the end of it about anything but the pictures were nice.
    
    
11. Saboteur (1942) - less than overwhelming Hitchcock - this is the one that ends with Dr. Auschlander from St Elsewhere falling off the Statue of Liberty.
    
    
12. The Opposite of Sex ( 1998 ) - A total delight.
    
    
13. Shoot or Be Shot (aka Shooting Stars 2002) - nothing much to add to my IMDb review after my first watching (6 years ago?! Holy Cow!) apart from noting it was a lot funnier than I remembered.
    
    
14. Clash of the Titans (1981) - one of those films I have been wanting to share with the kids for a while now and they loved it. Number two daughter was cuddled into me and had her hands over her eyes for the whole of the scary Medusa sequence. When it was over I said to her "It's okay, you can look now." and she replied "I am." She had watched the whole thing through a crack in her fingers. Job done.
    
    
15. Cyborg (1989) - written by someone with a real guitar fetish (the major characters are called Gibson Rickenbacker, Fender Tremelo, Pearl, Marshall Stratt, Furman, etc.) Cyborg is your usual post-apocalyptic bollocks but because it is a Jean-Claude Van Damme post-apocalyptic bollocks there's more than the usual amount of kicking people in the face and sweaty grimacing. There are also more than the usual amount of post-apocalyptic bollocks stupidities on show too - including an unusually large number of randomly placed rusty oil drums with something burning in them. Not that they were used for anything - apart from one particularly hilarious moment when Van Damme kicks one of the endless supply of stunt-goon villains into one. On being kicked back onto one of the drums the villain immediately bursts into flames, staggers forward a few yards and falls onto the burnt-out shell of a wrecked car - which EXPLODES! (This whole scene taking place in the pouring rain.) The plot was assembled from bits of old westerns found lying around. Bits of The Searchers bolted on to Two Mules for Sister Sarah with chunks of Once Upon a Time in the West nailed on for good measure. Made cheaply, every shot is stretched out far beyond any logical sense; people run around in slow motion a lot because it takes longer for them to get where they are going and you don't have to write dialogue for slow motion scenes - but there is one glass painting of a post-apoc Atlanta Ga. that they had obviously spent a few quid on. We know they spent a few quid on it because it was on screen for 20 seconds - that's a hell of a long time for a static establishing shot in which nothing happens. "We paid for that fucker - keep it on the screen for as long as you can!" As a painting it was pretty crap, as an establishing shot it was pointless because it was immediately preceded one set of characters walking past a sign saying 'Atlanta Ga. Welcomes Careful Bands of Marauding Psychopaths' (or something) and it was immediately followed by a shot of another sign saying ATLANTA. Well, I get the message; I don't think we're in Kansas any more.... I'm glad to say I didn't pay any money for this movie; I found it on the street next to a recycling centre. I'm taking it back.
    
    
16. Deep Star Six (1989) - Alien underwater! Not bad to start with, a cast of (to me) unknowns (and Miguel Ferrer) putting in solid workaday performances as your standard mixed bag of a mixed sex crew who have just spent the last 6 months in an deep sea installation. Someday someone is going to make a film about a bunch of working Joes (and Jos) stuck together in a big tin can in a hostile environment without throwing a monster into the mix. Maybe it's just me but often I find the bits before our crew encounter the rapacious carnivorous THING much more interesting than all the running around screaming and doing stupid things just so they can get eaten that happens afterwards. After watching enough crap like this even the game of guessing which of our crew are going to get eaten and the order in which they get ate gets pretty boring too. You're black, you're the hero's best friend, and you got kids who send you cute drawings? You're fucking doomed, you are. And don't ever say "When we get out of this I want you to come visit me on my farm...." Speeches like that act as some sort of aperitif for rampaging rapacious carnivorous THINGs. It's like rubbing barbecue sauce all over yourself and shoving a sprig of rosemary up your bum - don't do it!
    
    In Deep Star Six the THING is a rapacious giant carnivorous crustacean of some kind. The crew do all the usual stupid things they have to do to get eaten - and get very wet while they do it. As usual the two crew members voted most likely to survive in the first three minutes survive. And, as usual, the laws of physics don't make it past the first act.
    
    
17. Beast from Haunted Cave (1959) - The word 'The' was out of favour in 1959. Cheap mercifully short reworking of Key Largo, on skis, with a monster. Not as bad as it sounds.
    
    
18. The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972) - Italian crime / slasher nonsense with a really bad case of the zooms. Just about every shot. Zoom Zoom Zoomity Zoom. I was getting motion sick by the end of it. Luckily there were no whip pans or I might have thrown up.
    
    
19. The Borrowers (1997) - another one of those films I have been boycotting for years as a needless American bastardization of a childhood treasure, but I was snookered into watching it with the kids as our Friday Night Pizza Night movie and .... I really enjoyed it. Once I had got over the hump of realising that the makers had jettisoned just about everything in the books apart from the names and heights of some of the characters I settled back and enjoyed the ride which, though not exactly ground-breaking in originality, was fun family fare and made me laugh aloud several times. The design elements were interesting too. The film appeared to be set in England but in a strange never-never time that was sort of the fifties and sort of the nineties - most of the cars for instance were Morris Minors and milk was delivered to the doorstep in glass bottles but houses had huge Americn Freezers with built in ice-dispensers and magnets stuck all over the doors. The same director went on to make the vastly underrated Thunderpants set in a similar not quite identifiable time. All the Morris Minors in that one were green.
    
    
20. Stone (1974) - another to me unknown film bought in a charity shop for pennies purely because I had A: never heard of it and B: it had an airbrushed chrome effect in the title:
    

    
    

    
    

    
    

    ...and a skull wearing a hat.
    
    Not enough movie posters have skulls wearing hats.
    
    Stone turns out to be a pretty terrific little low budget Australian biker film with some real drop dead moments. The opening titles are brilliant. And so simple.
    
    
21. Dead of Night (aka Mirror of Death 1988 ) - a screamingly bad piece of no budget crap about a (rather cute) woman conjuring up a evil spirit that enters her body through her dressing table mirror, lures men back to her home, kills them, then stashes them (standing up) in closets around the house. Really, really bad. Bad with a capital B. Screeds of badly written dialogue delivered by bad actors who (all credit to them) go for it with hopeless gusto. Some scenes look like a first read through. Lots of penguin flapping (those vague armflap gestures that bad actors do when they don't know what to do with their hands) and plenty of time to do it in. There's some fantastically long-winded dialogue in this film; e.g. (and trust me on this one, it's worth it. Suck it in and plough on through):
    
    Quote:

    INT. BATHROOM. DAY. SARA (our sometime possessed heroine) is washing her face. She looks in the mirror and the face of SULA THE DEMON looking out at her. Sara screams in terror. RICHARD, Sara's sister's boyfriend and a seriously crap actor, appears, sees the demon, and pulls Sara away. CUT TO: INT. LIVING ROOM. DAY Richard hurriedly picks up the phone and dials. APRIL (SARA'S SISTER): What're you going to do, Richard? RICHARD: Calling the police! I've heard and seen enough! APRIL: What're they gonna do but arrest Sarah so they can close their books and everything'll look good on their records. RICHARD: Got a better idea!? Let's hear it! SARA: How about calling the police so they can see this Sura first hand? APRIL: Oh, Sara, If Sura gets back in your body again we'll never get control of her. What we need right now is someone who knows how to deal with these things. RICHARD: (Shouting and giving a real master-class in Penguinflapping frustration.) Who knows how to deal with evil spirits floating out of mirrors!? SARA: I know it's going to sound stupid... but why don't we just look in the Yellow Pages?

    So they do; they all rush to a table and pore over the Yellow Pages. This was not a comedy. This was serious. God, I hope it wasn't supposed to be a comedy. Because if it was I didn't notice. Whatever it was it was, it was a painful experience to watch. I spent a lot of the running time trying to work out how they got a trailer out of the thing. You know those times you go see a film and realise it was pretty crap and you had seen all the best bits in the trailer that had suckered you in in the first place? This film didn't have any best bits.
    
    Someone in the editorial team knew it was a piece of shit too because right at the end, after all the credits have rolled and the screen has gone black, there is a repeated line of dialogue on the soundtrack. Just as you are about to hit the eject button, someone has edited in Richard the crap actor boyfriend's voice screaming:
    
    "Oh my God! What was THAT!?"
    
    
22. Tripwire (1990) - another big box VHS that I bought for 10p solely because I had never heard of it and (also solely) because it had a picture of David Warner on the cover. In fact that's just about all it had on the front cover: David Warner holding a big gun. Now I like David Warner. I like him a lot. He's a jobbing actor who delivers what he's asked to deliver with a credibility that the material often doesn't deserve (Quest of the Delta Knights being a very good example) and he does a great line in villains (Tron, Time After Time, The Man With Two Brains, Time Bandits etc. etc.) but he's never been a big name box office draw and I did have to ask myself, "Just how badly underpowered does a film have to be that it has David Warner on the cover as the main selling point?"
    
    
    I found out.
    
    
    It was shit.
    
    
    
    
    
    
23. Prison Heat (1993) - All you really need to make a Women in Prison movie is four actresses (and I use the term loosely) willing to get naked, a shower block, and a wall. Bought to you by Global Pictures, the brains behind American Cyborg: Steel Warrior and Delta Force 3: The Killing Game, Prison Heat pushed the boat out and had a staircase as well. Even by the usually low WiP movie standards, it was pretty awful. Highlights include (some of the heroines' astounding knockers aside) our sadistic and corrupt cardboard villain pointing at the lead heroine and instructing one of his minions to "take her to solitary...." followed by a shot of the lead heroine being chained to a wall in a cell next to someone else - and an amazing moment when our feisty lead heroine hauls herself up into a skylight with another feisty heroine (Feisty Heroine 2) hanging onto her leg. Our feisty lead heroine lifts at least twice her own bodyweight up by her fingertips. In the next shot, from another angle, the lead feisty heroine has managed to get herself into a position which, from the establishing shot we have just seen, would be impossible to achieve (even without someone hanging off your legs). She then kicks out part of the window, before climbing out onto the roof, turning round and helping out Feisty Heroine 2 who has, presumably, been hovering in mid air all this time. Another 10p well wasted.
    
    
24. Wild Force (1986) - Wooo-Hoooo! Recently I have come to suspect that I have watched too many crappy films. So many that I have become totally inured to the things. I was starting to wonder if I was finally starting to get bored with my search for whatever it is I'm searching for (I'm still not sure). It has been a while since I really wholeheartedly enjoyed a really crappy movie. Sometimes these days they're feeling like a bit of a chore. Tonight I remembered why I do it. I've struck 10p big box VHS paydirt. Wild Force is a Philippine film. I know very little about the film industry of the Philippines but if Wild Force a good one (it got sold abroad so I guess it must be) I hate to think what the crap they couldn't export is like. It is a film of STAGGERING incompetence. I really don't know where to begin because once I start I suspect I'll still be ranting about its deficiencies and joys for days. But the moment where a minor villain swims across a swimming pool is a joy and will have to stand in for the whole.
    
    The villain has information that the 'Team' of heroes need. He is sat by the side of an outdoor swimming pool, being attended by two bikini clad bimbos. The only female member of 'The Team' sits at a table on the other side of the large pool and, in a series of medium closeup shots alternating between the two of them, she makes goo goo eyes at him. It is sunny (but very windy) on her side of the swimming pool. It is raining heavily on his side. He likes the look of her (I prefer the two birds he has in his hands but there's no accounting for taste or the requirements of plot development). In a wider angle that lets us see both sides of the pool, he gets up from his chair (it's stopped raining on his side by the way) and dives into the pool leaving the bimbos wondering what to do. An assistant director tells them. The one on the left of the screen doesn't quite get it... "Step back, love... no back... further back.. stop looking at the camera...! No... BACK!" By the time she finally gets out of the frame the villain is across the pool and clambering out the other side in such an ungainly manner that he has his trunk-clad arse and dangly bits waving in our faces (thankfully from a long way away). Cut to a ridiculously low angle of him sucking in most of his substantial paunch and pointing his still dripping crotch at the attractive 'team' member. Two lines of dialogue later and there's a real WTF!? jump-cut to him coming out of the shower, wrapping a towel around himself and her (still fully and demurely clothed) sat on a bed. What the hell is going on?
    
    The dialogue is terrific. And dubbed I suspect, in the producer's kitchen by three actors doing 'different voices' for different characters. A bit like you do when reading kids a bedtime story. I also suspect the actor playing the Maguffin, the kidnapped Doctor Johnston, did his own dubbing but as he is a terrible actor, and has (or effects) a southern drawl, and puts the emphasis on all the wrong syllables, he manages to sound like Slim Pickins on a trampoline. An image I will try to get out of my head as soon as I can.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    And quite who all these blonde white people on the cover are I have no idea. The film was full of sweaty Filipinos. And all those helicopters? There was one in the film. One. Which they obviously only managed to blag for an hour or so for the filming, because whenever it landed or took off it always landed and took off from the same field - wherever it supposed to be, base camp, or somewhere several days march into the jungle - same field, same trees in the background, same hills in the distance.
    
    This one is going to get rewatched many times. I haven't laughed so much in ages.
    

I know my monthly 'Every Movie I Have Watched' posts don't exactly fill people with joy so here is the Readers' Digest version of just about every film I have watched over the last couple of years. Instead of, once a month, wading through my arse-numbingly tedious rants about thirty or so films I destroyed my brain with - just come here and read this instead. It'll save you hours.

Every Film I Have Watched in the Last Month:
The Short Form

A one-eyed cyborg bounty hunter, driven by the memory of his dead wife, stalks the post-apocalyptic wastelands known, as usual, as the 'Forbidden Zone'. He hunts down 'renegades' who are jailed, then forcibly recruited into taking part in Man's first (and therefore doomed) manned mission to Mars. Tricked into accompanying them by the Evil Corporation that runs everything, the cyborg meets a comely young female crew member with a penchant for wearing thin T-shirts and getting wet. On the way to Mars they encounter a derelict spaceship of unknown origin, board it and unwittingly bring back on-board a biologically unlikely (all teeth and penises), shape-changing, ravening creature which eats the crew one by one in order of ethnicity. The one-eyed cyborg and the girl with big knockers survive after outrageously breaking the fundamental laws of physics*. The end.

This film was almost certainly watched on a VHS tape that came in a big box with a picture on the front of a vaguely symmetrical (but unshaven) hero wearing a bandanna wrapped round his mullet, and holding some form of giant futuristic pump-action machine gun. The cover will also sport a woman almost not wearing a bikini while holding a very big sword with both hands. There will also be three cars, stripped of their roofs and gussied up with the sort of pointy, overly showy armour Renaissance knights used to pimp their horses with.

Above all this wish-fulfilling art work, that usually bears very little relation to what actually appears on the screen, the film's title is in block capitals and filled with a metallic gradient.

The film will almost certainly be preceded by trailers for films no one has ever heard of - many of them starring Emily Lloyd.

I love it.

*The Evil Corporation has really good lawyers and will get them off on appeal.

I've been avoiding the news for months now.  I used to be an avid consumer of news.  (BBC news mostly - I trust the BBC. Deep down most Brits do.  We pay for it.  It's our news.)  But somewhere over the last couple of years, finally pissed off with getting depressing crap shoved in my ear on an hourly basis, I stopped listening to the radio.  No more infofacts about this week's killer 'flu, aircraft disaster, signs of global ecological collapse, penny-pinching, cost-cutting measures imposed on the poorest by sanctimonious millionaire bean-counters, and all the rest of the gloom, doom, and painful to listen to bilge. I just stopped.  I don't even look at the headlines of the newspapers in the shops any more.  I'm a reformed infojunkmonkey.

I'm not totally out of touch.  I do get one of the Scottish Sundays - once a week (dur!) but it usually lies around the house unread (apart from the arts section) for a couple of months before I'll finally get round to looking at the news bits. The Business, and Sports bits are in the recycling before they've been in the house five minutes.   Three month old news is fascinating when you're using it to line a bin or lay it under the cat litter tray.  (Or at least more fascinating than lining a bin or shoving stuff under a cat litter tray.) After a couple of months it's amazing how very irrelevant (or wrong) it all is.  We obviously didn't all die from pandemic Goose flu, the world wasn't hit by any giant asteroids (that I remember - mind you maybe it has been and I just haven't read that paper yet), and who the hell really cares who Ryan Giggs was shagging? (Who IS Ryan Giggs by the way?)  I have got to like not knowing or caring what's going on.  It's very liberating.  I no longer spend time worrying about things that become irrelevant a few days later.  Now I spend my time worrying about really important things that I actually have some control over like: 'What are we having for tea?', and 'Do those windows need cleaning or can I leave them for another year?', and 'Can I sneak another custard cream out of the tin without the kids noticing me at it and demanding their share?'  You know, important stuff.

The other day I was in a local charity shop, raking through the books when the too loud radio playing in the corner - why is it  always near the books? - broke off from playing crap hits from the 80s and announced the news.  As this was Nevis Radio - a service that makes The Outer Hebrides Broadcasting Corporation look like CNN, I didn't run screaming from the building but I tried to ignore it.  I actually managed it for a few seconds and if the news had been of the usual 'Politicians call each other stinky poo names,' or British Holiday makers upset by mass genocide in random third world country.'  I might have succeeded.   But I was blindsided.  The big, breaking news,  headline story in the Radio Nevis news for that day was....

Someone had found their lost dog.

Seriously that was it.  Someone had found their lost dog.  This dog.  I don't know how long I stood there listening to the presenter (who I had probably passed in the street earlier in the day) shambolically stuttering on, about a dog, lost by its owners on the West Highland way a couple of weeks before, and then finally lured into a garage by a trail of dog food in Kinlochleven, but it felt like hours.  It was probably only two or three minutes but it felt like an agonizingly long time.  It was the sort of  heart-warming, upbeat "... and finally..." story that anchormen squeeze into the last moments of a show to stop you slashing your wrists in despair after all the death, destruction, and celebrity shagging that they have just pummelled you with for the past half hour.  (Oh! Christ! We're all going to die from leftie council sponsored suicide bombers letting off cancer bombs in Tescos pass the Stanley knife -  Aaaahhh! Look at the ikkle doggie....) But stretched out to fill a whole news slot because, in the last 24 hours, bugger-all had happened in the whole of Lochaber (population 20,000 or thereabouts) worth mentioning.  Or at least nothing anyone had bothered to bring to the attention of the stations crack team of news-hounds - aka Kirsty the switchboard operator.

Except it had. 

The second item on the local news was that Fort William had been confirmed as the venue for the  UCI Mountain Bike World Cup  for at least the next two years.  A decision that will pump tens of thousands of pounds into the local economy and help keep many local businesses afloat.  But as the story combined both business and sport - I stopped listening.  Maybe that's why it wasn't the lead.

I have finally become invisible. This is an ambition I have had since I was about 16 when, in the school changing rooms one afternoon after PE, I realised that all the girls I secretly lusted after were, at that very moment, all probably naked in a shower the other side of the wall against which I was leaning (trying manfully to hide and not expose my own naked flesh to all the other bigger, louder, hairier boys in the room).

Today (35 years too late) I finally achieved it.

For weeks Merriol and the kids have been nagging me to shave: "Please shave, Daddy; you're prickly.","Any chance that..." "Go have a shave and I'll think about it...", etc.

I don't shave often. About three of four times a year. I hate it. But there comes a point when I get so fed up with the scratchiness of it, the constant nagging from the kids, and the lack of nookie that I give in and off it comes.

Last night I shaved. After everyone else was asleep and I had succumbed to another couple of episode of Battlestar Galactica I shaved. Took me three disposable razors, but it's off.

This morning no one noticed. It's now about half past ten in the morning I have been up for a couple of hours (give or take an hour) cooked breakfast, loaded the washing machine, etc., etc. etc.. and no one has noticed that I am now clean-shaven.

I have become invisible. All my family see of me is this disembodied beard floating around.

I'm off to the High School.

A Brief Snippet From the Screenplay of Somebody Else's Life

Today Daisy, Eben and I are having a picnic in the quarry. Nearby a young lad and his parents are feeding the ducks and any other opportunistic birds that pass by.

Child:
Mum!

Child:
MUM!

Child:
MUM!

Mother:
(Giving in.)
What!?

Child:
(Pointing)
That seagull did a poo.

Nice to know it's not just my kids.

Another Brief Snippet From the Screenplay of my Life

EXT: DAY: A CAR BOOT SALE IN THE HIGHLANDS OF SCOTLAND.

IT IS SLIGHTLY DRIZZLY AND VERY MIDGEY. I AM RAKING THROUGH A STACKING-BOX FILLED WITH DVDS AND VHS TAPES. THERE IS NO PRICE LABEL TO BE SEEN.

Me:
(To vendor) How much are the DVDs?

Vendor:
Give me a quid. I don't want to take them
back with me. Give me a quid for the box.

Me:
The whole box?


Vendor:
Yeah. I just want to get rid of them.

Me:
Do I get the box as well?


Vendor:
No I need that. Hang on,
I'll get you a bag...

I won't bore you with all the contents but some are on their way to the nearest charity shop; the first one I watched had a chainsaw decapitation, Caroline Munro in the shower, and was as funny as hell; and a couple are on eBay. I'm a happy camper.

May. In which I almost watched a few decent films:

1. Shock (1977 aka Beyond the Door II) - Mario Bava's last film which I bought for a quid at a charity shop (I sometimes wonder if all those nice old ladies know what they are selling). I was sold on this DVD by the tag line, 'Beyond the door the ever continuing cycle of evil is about to occur... again!'. I loved that 'again!'. The other thing that sold me on it was the fact that on the back of the sleeve they seemed to think the film was called 'The Grim Reaper'.
   
   What we get on screen is the usual Italian OTT Grand Guignol full of nightmares that might be real, possibly possessed creepy children, pick-ax murder, walking wardrobes, and people slashing their own throats with Stanley knives. All good clean family fun. It would have been a lot more fun if we had actually been made to care about why any of this bloody nonsense was going on. As it was the film was just a series of set pieces of 'horror' with brief interludes of people explaining plot points to each other. Beyond the Door II has, as far as I can tell, nothing at all to do with any other film called Beyond the Door. It's a non-sequel.


2. Sleepwalker/s (1997) - that slash is there in the title because what I watched was called one thing on the disc, and another on the sleeve - and I wrote 'what I watched' because 'what I watched' turns out to have been nailed together from two episodes of a short-lived TV series (called Sleepwalkers). The show, which starred Naomi Watts in a vest (hubba hubba!), dealt with a team of investigators able to dive into other people's dreams. The show looks like it wasn't bad but was cancelled by the powers that be after 9 episodes.


3. The Last Producer (2000 aka Final Hit) - Burt Reynolds plays an over the hill movie producer desperate to raise $50,000 to option a hot script before a deadline. Almost a remake of The Independent but incredibly unfunny. I think it was supposed to be a comedy - and possibly a satire too. Desperately over-wordy, dull, confused, and self-indulgent. Turd of the year so far.


4. Witchboard III: The Possession (1995) - another one of my recent haul of four movies on two discs sets - featuring people you've never heard of (but vaguely recognise) in films no one wants to pay more than 50p to watch. This one was another of them directed by Peter Svatek ( - who? He also directed last month's Hemoglobin.) Possibly the only film ever made in which a character is attacked and killed by a butterfly collection. The evil fat banker collapsing behind his desk screaming in pain with dead butterflies stuck all over him has to be one of the most ludicrous things I have seen on screen for a while. Curiously enough it was my second film in a row where the central character has to raise 50,000 dollars and gets charged 25% interest by an overweight money lender.
   
   IMDb's Plot keywords for the film are:
   

   Ouija, Stockbroker, Landlord, Freak Accident, Ouija Board, Roman Numeral In Title, Numbered Sequel, Third In Trilogy, Spirit, Demon, Suicide, Sex, Sequel, Part Of Trilogy, Supernatural, Third Part, Djinn, Evil Spirit, Independent Film, Number In Title.

   Which just about says it all.


5. Blade Runner (1982) - Thought it was about time I watched something worth watching. And what better to watch on Star Wars Day (May the 4th) but Blade Runner. Makes sense. (113)


6. Back to the Future: Part II - Pizza night with the kids. Part III next week.


7. Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979) - low budget, better than average independent SF. Not great but not bad, intriguing ideas let down by obvious cash limitations and uninspired direction. The director later sued the makers of The Island for plagiarism.


8. One Eyed Jacks (1961) - A western that was originally slated to be directed by Kubrick but ended up being directed by the film's star, Marlon Brando. It's been on my list for a while since I read somewhere (I wish I could remember where) that Brando was totally out of control during production and would sit around for days with a full crew just waiting for the right kind of wave to appear on the beach before he would shoot. The implication of the article was that the film was a self-indulgent product of a towering ego gone mad with power. The director's cut came in at 300 minutes - that's 5 hours! The released version ran to 141 minutes and, although over-long and sedate in some places still manages to look hurried in others, often the film jumps into scenes far too late for comfort and leaves the viewer too far behind. There is some good stuff here though; some cracking acting in minor parts and Karl Malden in particular was great as the villain. These days, for whatever reason, the film is in the public domain and the quality of the commercial DVD I watched was not good, the aspect ratio was cropped to 4:3 and god knows how many generations old the transferred tape was. It was not good at all, very faded. Even the version available here, at Archive.org looks better than my disc (and isn't badly cropped either). Which is a pity, because some of the cinematography was obviously very good even in the debased form I got to see it. The French, unsurprisingly, have restored it:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   The above cap comes from the French restored version.
   
   The commercial bare bones copy I watched last night looked like this:
   
   
   
   
   
   And the copy on Archive.org looks like this:
   
   
   
   
   
9. The Day The Sky Exploded ( 1958 ) - I'm going to have to stop buying DVDs. The version of The Day The Sky Exploded available for free on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/movie?v=Cb7zoNyXmMA) is far better quality than the disc I paid money for (albeit very little money). My home copy, which came as part of a boxset of crap, is very jumpy and transferred from a very battered print. I'm tempted to watch the whole movie again, on-line, just to find the moment where one of the female characters walks through a door and approaches two scientists hunched over a console. They are staring at a radar scope image of the impending, rapidly approaching, doom from space. They look up as she walks over to them and as she opens her mouth to speak, the film jumps and she vanishes - leaving the two scientists pondering deeply and concernedly about what she just said. We have no idea what they are thinking about because many feet of film are missing. I wonder if it's in the YouTube version? because I do wonder what she said; it was obviously very important to the two characters who heard her. I hope it was more interesting than the rest of the dialogue. A very dull film.


10. Smash and Grab (1937 aka Larceny Street) - Mildly diverting, very thin, British Thin Man knock off, with the leading man (scenarist, and producer) Jack Buchanan getting more Vaseline on the lens for his close-ups than the heroine. The heroine meanwhile spent most of her time trying to avoid turning her profile to the camera - it might just have been a coincidence but she did appear to have the sort of nose that would fill the screen. You can tell I was gripped can't you?


11. Flushed Away (2006) - a rewatch with the kids and funnier than I remember.


12. Wedlock (1991) - Just how many Rutger Hauer movies have I seen this year? (Enough for me to know how to spell his name at least. Hang on. I'll look... Armageddon, Flesh+Blood, Hemoglobin, Blade Runner... and this one. Five? Is that all? it feels like a lot more.) Wedlock almost sank my 'All films set in a future prison are automatically shite' rule. The future prison here has an almost good SF idea at its heart. All the prisoners are fitted with collars. Under certain circumstances the collars will explode taking the prisoner's head off with a spectacular and messy bang. The collars are electronically paired with another inmate's collar. Nobody knows who they are paired with. If paired collars get more than a fixed distance apart, or are tampered with, BOTH collars explode. The outer prison wall is just a line painted on the ground. Step over the line and there is no guarantee that your unknown partner is near enough to stop your head being blown off. This has the effect of turning the inmates into their own warders as it's in all of their individual interests to make sure that no one escapes in case they are linked with the escapee. It's a pretty nice idea to play SF games with. Our hero goes on the lam with a female prisoner who has found out that he is her partner and the script soon descends into a long chase as the ill matched pair (who have to stay within a hundred yards of each other) have to elude the law, the hero's former partners in crime, and it all gets very tedious. So (hurrah!) rule is intact though slightly modified: 'All films set in a future prison are automatically shite; no matter how well thought out the prison is.'
    
    On the plus side it did have a brief appearance by the yummy O-Lan Jones who I last saw painted green and being the best thing in the otherwise fucking awful Martians Go Home
    
    
    
    
    
    She looks good flesh coloured too.


13. Koyaanisqatsi (1982) - Number three child wouldn't go to sleep; I needed my nightly film fix. Solution? Turn off the lights and watch a 96 minute abstract documentary montage with a hypnotic score by Philip Glass and no dialogue*. 5 minutes later he was asleep in my arms. 90 minutes after that I managed to tear my eyes away from the screen... I love Koyaanisqatsi.
    
    * Though my DVD copy does have subtitles. (I'm afraid to look.)


14. Gamer (2009) - Another piece of evidence to support my thesis that ''All films set in a future prison are automatically shite; no matter how well thought out the prison is.'' I have no idea how I manage to end up watching so many bad SF films set in futuristic penal systems; I certainly don't go looking for the things. They just turn up. My normal selection procedure for buying crappy second hand DVDs runs like this: Does it have Rutger Hauer in it? Yes. Have I ever heard of it? No. Does it have any combination of scantily clad women / explosions / men with rayguns and / or supposedly horrifying monsters on the front of the box? Is it less than a quid? If it scores more than three of the above it's an automatic purchase. This one failed most of those tests (all save the less than a quid one) but I bought it anyway - and it still turned out to be a totally shite SF movie.
    
    Gameris a frenetic yet boring (an extremely difficult trick to pull off) mess that makes the Deathrace 2000 remake look sedate and interesting. (And, it turns out, a fucking bootleg too so I won't get my less than a quid back by selling it on eBay. Grrrrr.)


15. Back to the Future: Part III (1990) - My least favourite of the three (part 2 is the best) completing the Pizza Night run of the trilogy. Number one daughter was gripped by all of them.


16. Hell Comes to Frogtown ( 1988 ) - I was very disappointed. Mind you I don't suppose anything could live up to that title. Pretty meh Post-Apoc tale of a Keith Chegwin lookalike sent on a dangerous mission into a mutant reservation to rescue then impregnate six women being held captive by giant mutant frogs. The best joke comes in the first 10 seconds and after that it goes downhill rapidly but never makes it to the 'so bad it's good' depths - and was never going to be as funny as it thought it was.


17. The Time Travelers (1964) - a rewatch. It has its clunky moments - the 'comedic' moments were particularly heavy handed - but it still stands up head and shoulders above most of the SF dross of the period. And I was reminded of a thought I had the first time I saw it. I may have mentioned it somewhere before but I can't find it. This film was made in 1964, and in it various stage magic tricks are used to simulate incomprehensible future technology.
    
    Clarke's oft-quoted third law, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' dates from 1973.
    
    Beating Arthur C Clarke to the draw by 10 years? I'd be proud of that.


18. The Horror of Party Beach (1964) - even with the help of the MST3K crew this is a pretty unwatchable flick that promised WEIRD ATOMIC BEASTS THAT LIVE OFF HUMAN BLOOD!!! but then most cheapo SF/horror films of the day did the same.


19. Antropophagus (1980 aka The Grim Reaper) - So I find out why Shock (1977 aka Beyond the Door II) was mistakenly labelled The Grim Reaper on the back of the box. Just how many Italian horror movies are there that end with the villain being killed with a pick-axe? Not that many I would guess. Gods! this was a boring piece of crap. It's reckoned by many to be a seminal Italian horror masterpiece - though reading the forums those that do so all seem to have first seen it when they were about 12 - coming to it as an aged 50 year old it had me yawning from the start, checking the elapsed time after about 30 minutes and the rest of the show wondering why Italians seemed to think long silent shots of people walking around slowly is in any way scary. Maybe it's an Italian thing.
    
    "Mama mia! I can't look! She's wandering aimlessly again!"
    
    The version I saw was shorn of the two notorious shots that got it labelled as a 'Video Nasty' back in the days. I don't think I missed anything. Now to turn the disc over and watch...


20. The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek, Part II (1985) - a Charles B. Pierce pictures inc. production written by Charles B. Pierce, produced by Charles B. Pierce, directed by Charles B. Pierce and starring Charles B. Pierce - and his son Chuck. Filmed in Fouke, Arkansas (which is the way I felt when I had finished watching it) The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek, Part II (aka Boggy Creek ll: and the Legend Continues) treads a fine line between boredom and tedium. Nothing happens. And then it happens again. Sometimes nothing happens in flashback with a stocking tied over the lens to make it all misty and, you know, flashbacky. In short we spend 90 minutes watching Charles B. Pierce being a pompous prick telling people to 'be quiet' and 'get back' a lot - as nothing happens. And then it ends. Highlights include his co-star son (who plays one of his students) calling him 'Pop' on screen. And Charles B. Pierce running around in too short shorts and a tight moob-hugging shirt holding a handgun - jumping over a small bush! Charles B. Pierce also provided the endless soporific voice-over. Fans of Charles B. Pierce may like it.


21. Katalin Varga (2009) - slow, beautifully shot (and even more beautifully soundscaped) tale of revenge. Completed for £28,000 by a first time director with a stunning central performance by Hilda Peter.


22. Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (2010) - which I enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting to and, I suspect, a lot more than the first one (which I can hardly remember).


23. Amateur (1994) - to my shame I only know one Hal Harltley film. This is it.


24. Alien Trespass (2009) - Hoooo boy! Another incredibly long 90 minutes in which trashy SF B-pictures from the 1950s are mercilessly and relentlessly homaged to death before your very eyes. The film climaxes with the alien monster attacking our heroes in a cinema showing The Blob (the climax of which has the alien blob of the title attacking the local cinema). Oh the recursive fun. This 'aliens attacking people in a cinema watching The Blob attack a cinema' is turning into the stock cliché ending for 'affectionate spoof' films relentlessly homaging trashy SF B-pictures of the period. Given the rich pickings in the cliché-ridden field which it's spoofing, Alien Trespass manages to miss or fumble every one of them it picked up. The pace is leaden. The story is an unfocused mess and the script is just a tedious bore. I wanted to like it. I really did. I love the originals but I sat there for the whole show waiting for a joke to arrive. Any joke. Didn't even have to be a good one.I was still waiting as the end credits rolled. The originals were funnier.


25. Mulholland Drive (2001) - second veiwing and I'm still bewildered. It took me four viewing before I 'got' Eraserhead. I think Mulholland Drive is about lesbians - but I'm not sure.

Another Brief snippet from the screenplay of my life:

INT: KIDS' BEDROOM: DAY

It is time to get dressed for school.

HOLLY:

I've got a headache.

ME:

No you haven't, Holly, you're just

like me and mum. We're just not

good in the mornings. We're not

morning people.

HOLLY:

No, I like mornings; I just wish they

were later in the day.

.

When I'm not staring at Lidl's packaging on the breakfast table trying to wake up in the morning, I occasionally find myself staring at Morrison's products with the same sense of bemusement. This milk carton for instance has been occupying my brain for some time now. (Or those portions of it functioning before the first coffee of the morning kicks in.)

The gate puzzled me for a long time, I spent ages trying to work out how you could make it in reality without the need for two dimensional planks - and why isn't it symmetrical? the joints where the diagonal meet the uprights are different top and bottom.

Then, for a while, I fretted over the typography.Why does 'From' get a capital letter when 'long life whole milk' doesn't? and, for that matter, why does the 'Fat' in '4% Fat' get one? Maybe capital F's were cheap that week.

Finally the other day I cracked what it was that was really annoying me. It's so obvious. It's the cows. The one on the in the distance left is the same cow as the larger, nearer one. It's just been cloned, flipped and shrinked a bit.

It probably goes "Oom!".

For reasons to boring to go into we didn't watch Back to The Future III, as we were planning to, tonight. So I drew this instead.

Crashing bore post time again. Every film I watched in April.

1. Despicable Me (2010) - Enjoyable, with the kids, movie . I suspect I would have found it funnier if I hadn't seen Megamind recently.


2. Spirited Away (2001) - A Pizza night re-watch with the kids. Number One Daughter wanted to watch it in Japanese with subtitles but was overruled (strange child).


3. Dead Fire (1997) - Over-long, dull, made-for-TV piece of shit that, as a plot twist, had twin brothers sharing the same first name (huh?) and had more than its usual share of clichéd shit, 'Sci-Fi', shit clichés. The name C Thomas Howell, and the words 'Ruthless space terrorists' appeared on the DVD case; and that's about all you need to know really. Oh, and there was a futuristic prison sequence too - always a sign of grade A crap.


4. Pandorum (2009) - By gum! I just watched a movie with Paul W.S. Anderson's name in the credits without wanting to throw things at the screen at any point. SF horror nonsense that made sense - almost - and made me jump frequently.


5. Cat Women of the Moon (1953) - finally! After falling asleep more times than I want to think about, I finally get to the end ofCat Women of the Moon. I've seen it before but this time I couldn't sit down to watch it without falling asleep. I've been trying for days to get to the end of it but ZZzzzzzzzz every time. Was it worth it?Almost certainly not.


6. Franklyn ( 2008 ) - now if Neil Gaiman had really written this and Terry Gilliam had really directed it this might have had the makings of a crackingly weird little film. As it is, it looks like a bad pastiche mashup of Brazil, Neverwhere, and The Fisher King with an undercooked script that started of enigmatically, became tedious, and then obvious. Sort of like a Radio 4 afternoon play with a shitload of SFX. The design elements were great; the story bored the pants off me
   
   Lottery funding was involved. My heart is starting to sink every time I see that National Lottery logo in the opening credits.


7. Tooth (2004) - A tooth fairy, leaves a gazzillion dollars under a little girl's pillow instead of the usual quarter, thus bankrupting Fairytopia and putting Christmas in danger. As a cynical old fart I thought it was a real bollocks of a film with a rotten, erratic, nonsensical story line and not enough of anything (humour, adventure, pathos, romance etc.) to make it at all interesting. My kids, on the other hand, laughed like drains all the way through. I guess I wasn't the target audience. I love hearing my kids laugh - even that weird snorting one that Daughter Number One does from time to time - so I enjoyed it despite myself.


8. Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) - 'British Sex comedies of the Seventies', words that should strike heart into the terror of everyone. If anyone asks me, "So what was so amazing about punk?" I'll show them this film and say, "Because this is what it was like before." On every level of everything this film is shite; the writing makes the average Carry-on film look like Oscar Wilde.
   
   It's boggling to think, in these days of wall to wall internet porn, that the British were so uptight about nudity in 1974 that this un-erotic, flaccid parading of boobs, bums and the occasional flash of pubes got an 18 certificate. Even more boggling is the fact that enough people rushed to their local flea pits, macs on their laps, to make three sequels possible. Another 25p well spent in the Save the Children shop; I hope all those kids in Africa appreciate the pain I go through to keep them supplied with clean water, pencils, and rudimentary health care.
   
   
   
   
   Best Bit of the Whole Film.
   
   
   
9. The Entity (1982) - a movie with it's own built-in sequel. The first half is terrific and builds up a nice frisson as Barbara Hershey puts a damn good performance as a single mum terrorised by an unseen supernatural force; and director Sidney J. Furie crams more Dutch angles into a movie than is humanly possible. Is all this supernatural stuff real? Is she really being repeatedly raped by a creature from another dimension? Or could the earnest, young psychologist be right and it's all in her head? It's gripping stuff. I really didn't know which way it would go and was made to jump several times. Great stuff. I was loving it.
   
   I was loving it right up until the moment, almost exactly half way through the film, when someone else sees a manifestation. Suddenly the whole film collapses into a really stinky mess of para-psychological balderdash and ropey special effects with our heroine ending up in a giant laboratory, running around a mock-up of her own house, being chased by a vast, ceiling-mounted, liquid helium spraying 'entity' freezing machine that, with the inevitability of crap movie logic, 'the entity' has taken over.
   
   If you get a chance watch this, do so. The first half is great. Stay with it till the moment when she's sobbing "You saw it! You saw it!" onto her friend's shoulder; that's the end of the movie. The sequel is crap.
   
   (It occurred to me a day later that the second half does contain one piece of genius film-making. Whether it's terrible one sided telephone conversations (with actors repeating what the unseen participant in the conversation is telling them), or the frantic redressing of the same short corridor for endless Doctor Who type running around, it's always interesting to see the ways film makers manage to cut corners and save money. In The Entity the climax takes place in a vast laboratory in which there is a stark white mock-up of the house that has featured so prominently in the first half of the film. I feel really dumb but it took me 24 hours to realise the 'vast laboratory' was in fact the studio in which the film was shot and the 'mock-up of the house' was the half-finished, unpainted set. Clever. It's still crap though.)


10. V for Vendetta (2006) - That was fun.


11. Best Worst Movie (2009) - I was really in two minds about watching this. As someone who watches and enjoys deriding low budget hopeless movies I wasn't sure if a documentary film about the cast and crew of the execrable Troll 2 was something I could comfortably watch. For years I've enjoyed laughing at hapless and inept film makers. Presented with the opportunity to see a film made by the star of one of those films ,as he interviews the other members of the cast, left me nervous. What if they came over as genuine nice people who were bewildered and upset by the odium heaped on them. What if I felt sorry for them and started to question the strange enjoyment I got from watching ineptly made movies. I had a real fear that I would end up finding I was guilty of laughing at those who were to be pitied rather than scorned. I needn't have worried. Most of the people who were interviewed were in on the bad movie joke too and enjoyed it just as much as the audience. Best Worst Movie is not the greatest documentary feature (just as Troll 2 is not the best worst movie ever made) but it is a well made piece of work and gives some nice insights into the fleeting fame that comes with being in a cheap, badly made horror movie.
    


12. Innocent Blood (1992) - incredibly dull John Landis 'comedy horror' featuring vampire gangsters. In itself an amusing enough idea but I don't think I have looked at my watch so often during a film for ages. It seemed endless; a 30 minute's worth of story plot padded out with another 80 minutes of... well, padding. I am formulating a new rule, any film that has a cameo from Forrest J Ackerman in it is automatically shit. (Damn! I just went through his IMDb list and he was in Queen of Blood and The Time Travelers both of which were oddly good but all the other films on his list that I have seen Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Equinox, The Kentucky Fried Movie, Amazon Women on the Moon, Future War - oh God! I'd forgotten that one - are crap. Especially Future War; that WAS shit.) Okay, a new rule, How about this? Any film with cameos from three or more directors in it is automatically shit. (Frank Oz, Sam Raimi, and Dario Argento all popped up in this one - so did Alfred Hitchcock via the medium of a clip from Strangers on a Train appearing on a TV a character was watching.)


13. Intrigue (1988 ) - a not very intriguing low-key, made for TV, spy movie with an American agent getting a former colleague back across the Iron Curtain. The emphasis is on character rather than plot (no explosions or car chases but lots of sitting on trains talking about 'the old days' - at one point a Russian agent complains about having to pay for his own dry cleaning). The emphasis on character does leave a couple of the plot points to just appear out of nowhere. Coincidentally the second film in a row to feature Robert Loggia.


14. Steel Frontier (1995) - a perfect 'widget movie'. A 'widget movie' (a term I have, as far as I know, just invented) is a film made by a competent crew who turn up on time in the mornings, do what they do till the end of the day, and then go back to their homes or hotels, then don't think about work until they clock on again the next day. It's just a job. What they do to pay the bills. They might as well be making widgets on a production line. Watching a widget movie feels like work too. .
    
    In this one the usual Post-Apoc grunge costumes and scrapyard setbuilding is slapped onto a by-the-numbers spaghetti western plot. It's a post apoc America, populated by well fed, clean haired Americans with nice teeth, a lone drifter comes into a peaceful town taken over by rampaging psychotics (I wonder sometimes if the actors playing these parts ever get fed up of laughing all the time?) he kills all the bad guys. The End. There's lots of guns, lots of explosions, an attractive widow with a son, a few half-hearted attempts at making the central hero a Christ figure (albeit hip-firing a 50mm machine gun), lots of vehicles crashing into one another (after sometimes passing the same abandoned cars on the side of the road several time first. Maybe the drivers were getting dizzy from driving around in circles and lost control) and it's all very boring.
    
    It's one of those films where you know the trailer started with deep trailer voice man saying, "In a world where....", and, a few words later, continued with, "Only one man..."


15. Hemoglobin (1997 aka Bleeders and The Decendent) - For some inexplicable reason the authorities decide to dig up all the graves on a remote Canadian island and relocate the bodies to the mainland. (Did our helpful, exposition dropping, boatman really tell the protagonists it was because the funeral director had been caught using 'substandard wood' in the coffins? or did I just dream it? - anyway, the upshot of this sudden removal of bodies is that the local population of inbred troglodytes, the descendants of that well-known source of all evil, the Dutch aristocracy, is deprived of their sole source of nutrition. Rutger Hauer gets to dissect a hermaphrodite that fell into a boat's propeller; and another character eats a pickled foetus; two sets of twins have sex (one set of twins is played by one woman donning a fake moustache and licking her own body-double's chest) and the audience wonders how 94 minutes can pass so sodding slowly. The pace was leaden. I think they were going for -- actually I have no idea what they were going for but I don't think dullness is what they intended. Plod plod plod. The trailer does the whole movie in two minutes - chest licking included.
    
    
    
    
    
    
16. Back to the Future - Pizza night with the kids and on a second viewing I was struck by what an incredibly well-constructed script this film had. Really well done all round, the kids loved it but were a bit worried by all the 'swearing'.


17. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) - What a pile of arse! I loathe Star Trek - Why I seek out Star Trek movies and subject myself to them is a mystery that I have spent a lot of time thinking about over the years - and I am no nearer to an answer than when I started. I think this is the last of them I had to watch. I hope so. Most Star Trek movies are bollocks from beginning to end. This one didn't even manage to be bollocks. It was just undescended testicles.