Gods! this piece of shit graphics is annoying me. It's from eBay's current sign-in page. 'Look,' it's supposed to say. 'You can trust us. We've got a scary woman with muscley arms standing behind a hatch half way up a wall. Nothing can get past her. You're safe.'

That's what it's supposed to imply.

What it say to me is: 'Walk right in and help yourself.' Look at those doors. Just look at them. There's no way they are going to meet. Just look at them. Push them to and there'd be a two foot gap between them. And what are those keys for? The key on the right is in a keyhole that isn't attached to a lock of any kind. There is a lock on the other door - you can tell it's a lock because the bolt is out - though what the bolt is supposed to go into isn't apparent because there's no where for it to fit into on the other door - not that they meet anyway.

Once inside, assuming you can get past scary, but reassuring, folded arms woman (arms crossed, a classic 'guarded' posture but with a calmly confident smile) - maybe by waiting she goes for a pee, she can't stand there all day - you're into the hub of eBay's crack team of cyber crime fighters. CSI:eBay. Who seem to be happily standing around chatting, looking out of the window, and generally goofing off rather than pummelling account-jackers to bloody pulps with blunt instruments or water-boarding those idiots who pointlessly list shit that no one in their right minds is going to buy (because a there are 30,000 identical items, without any bids on, already listed at a lower price.) That's what I want the people in charge of making sure my account isn't ripped off by some Russian scammers to be doing. I want eBay to be patrolled by Judge Dredd and rabid Rotweillers, not some extras from the Ikea catalogue.

Rant over.

I'm going to jump the gun here and give you a wee chunk of this month's movie list 20 days early: Over the past few days I've climbed off my Crap Italian SF Tits and Arse Zombie Horror Movie treadmill and watched some real films. With subtitles and proper acting. No zombies. No spaceships. People. (Okay, sometimes they're naked people but it's ART naked, not Tits and Arse naked; there's a difference.) Two nights ago:

Le Mépris (1963) - Jean-Luc Godard is another one. I mean he's another 'great' French film director I just don't get. In Le Mépris we get to watch Bridgette Bardot and Michel Piccoli walk about a lot, climb in and out of the bath and wander about some more as they spend 70 minutes trying to work out whether to go Jack Palance's villa in Capri (or not), eventually they decide to go then spend 20 minutes being unhappy when they get there, "Why do you hate me?" - and then one of them dies in an off-screen road accident.

Okay...

Because the copy I watched was a VHS on the BFI Connoisseur label (50p inc. postage on eBay) I slipped out the insert to read the extensive notes printed therein:

'Following the gleeful iconoclasm of his early features, Godard achieved maturity in a string of masterworks interrupted, post 1968, by a decade of Laocoon-like struggles with Marxism and cinematic deconstruction.'

Laocoon it turns out (I looked him up) was a Trojan priest who got smitten by the gods for fucking in church. First blinded, and then strangled by a snake. (And I hereby repent of the quickie I had in that baptist church in Cardiff all those years ago with a Swedish girl whose name I forget.)

As you may have gathered I had never come across this Laocoon feller before in my puff.

This Laocoon Feller mid-smite.

Arty T&A (and willies)

Tonight, in the bath reading the final entry in the Dilys Powell Film Reader (which has been my bathroom book for the past couple of months), I read:

'Suddenly, as I recall whole days spent with eyes trained on a Laocoön-complex of heaving pectoral muscles and shoulder blades...'

Spooky.

Or not. Maybe it's some sort of badge of honour for film critics to mention him. Maybe it's part of some elaborate arty in-joke. The Laocoön Complicity, isn't that a Robert Ludlum? Now that I've cracked it I expect Alexander Walker to turn up on my doorstep with a bucketful of money and the key to the Sight and Sound executive bathroom.

Or not.

Just to get the tediousnocity out of the way for the month, it's my monthly record of eyeball abuse. This week with tits! and Brian Blessed! (I almost had you interested there.)

August

1. Dragonslayer (1981) - which for my sins I have never seen before. Daughter number one chose it for a family film night - she's got a thing about dragons at the moment and was reassured that, because it was a Disney film, 'it wouldn't be (too) scary'. That's that rule of thumb gone down the drain then. We were both snuggled together on the sofa but I don't know who was reassuring whom. A Disney film with nudity and where the feisty princess gets eaten! What a eye-opener. I loved it. Fucking brilliant dragon too, but Ralph Richardson as usual, and without breaking sweat, stole the show away from everyone. Damn, that man had great timing. (H)


2. The Elevator (1996) - A successful Hollywood writer/producer gets trapped in a lift and he has to endure hearing four semi-demented short scripts of a wanabee writer trapped in there with him. An incredibly long 92 minutes. Starring the writer, and the producer (who were, at the time, married) the shorts we get to 'enjoy' are dull predictable talking-head two handers with occasionally some very abrupt lurches into stagy theatre lighting thrown in. Currently not flying off the shelves in Poundlands everywhere.


3. Highlander II: The Quickening (1991) - What an unholy mess of a film. To help the audience cope with the previously unsuspected fact that fictional Scottish icon Connor MacCleod 'The Highlander' (played by Frenchman Christopher Lambert) and his Spanish oppo Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez (played by real life Scottish icon, Sean Connery) are in fact really aliens from the planet Zogfart the script has to have characters recap the story so far:
   
   
   Heroine:
   Okay, now let me just see if I can get this straight... You're mortal there but you're immortal here, until you kill all the guys who're from there who've come here... and then you're mortal here. Unless you go back there, or some more guys from there come here, in which case you become immortal here - again.
   
   MacCleod:
   Something like that.
   
   
   

   When they got round to making Highlander 3 they pretended this one hadn't happened.


4. The Lawnmower Man (1992) - One of those films that has been on my radar for a while - ie it keeps turning up in car boot sales but I have never actually got round to buying it. It usually manifests itself on one of those Hollywood four films on two DVD disc sets along with three other films no one wants to watch. Today I found it in one of my local charity shop haunts where they give away VHS tapes, they're so unsaleable these days. So, finally, I get to watch The Lawnmower Man for free! - well, for the price of the electricity used to power the TV and VHS player (+ 35 or so p for the popcorn) - and as it was originally intended. On a big box, ex-rental VHS with 20 minutes of trailers for films no one wanted to watch (then or since) and adverts for the Commodore Amiga 600 home computer.
   
   
   The Lawnmower Man (when I finally got to it after all the hard sell) turns out to be your usual Hollywood mashup on the Frankenstein theme. This time thrown into the mix are great chunks of classic heartbreaker SF story Flowers for Algernon and slabs of Tron, other randomly tossed in ingredients included the Evil Corporation (whose evil minions handily keep boxes of easy to operate, push button demolition charges in their standard evil henchmen black vans), a cute kid, an evil priest, and an hilariously inept set piece in which an abusive father is chased round his own home by a telepathically controlled killer lawnmower. As shite as it sounds. There was a sequel - for which I am now actively searching.


5. Sphere ( 1988 ) - Ditto radar, ditto car boot sales, same charity shop. Sphere is Solaris underwater with explosions, mutilations, death and oodles of dodgy make-it-up-as-we-go-along Hollywood 'science'.
   
   
   The trailers were less interesting on this tape. Couldn't tell you what they were for but I do remember noticing that more of them were adverts for things than for other films. This VHS copy was released a few years later than The Lawnmower Man one and for sale rather than rental. I guess the marketing guys have it all worked out that repeat viewers are more likely to be sold Mars Bars than being reminded of the awfulness of Project Shadowchaser. One thing that hadn't changed though was that both tapes started with British Voice-over Man loudly booming, "Beware of Illegal Video Cassettes!" at me. Makes them sound dead scary and dangerous. Like little cuboid gremlins that'll slide out from underneath the furniture and bite your ankles*. I watch my films with all the lights off and a bag of popcorn to hand in as close an approximation to a cinema experience as I can manage in my own living room (I even change seats twice before I'm happy and yesterday outdid myself by spilling a fizzy drink so the floor ended up all sticky). Before I sit down to a film these days I've taken to looking behind the sofa in case there are illegal video cassettes lurking down there, waiting to attack me during 'a scary bit'. God, I wish the films I watched were more interesting.
   
   
   * The film rights to this stupid idea are still available, talk to my agent.


6. Alien Resurrection (1997) - Another set of dittos. Loathed and castigated by many die hard Alien fans (there are some weird people in the world; they're MOVIES, you saddos!). This is the fourth in the series, and looked at in isolation (it's many years since I saw 1, 2, and I'm not sure if I've ever seen 3 all the way through), is not that bad a film for a 'Oh crap we're trapped in an enclosed environment with KILLER THINGIES and the only way out takes us via an infeasibly complex route' type film. Okay, it goes a bit tits up at the end but so do a lot of other films loved by cadres of devoted hardcore fans. There were some nice touches here, a few genuine scares, and a couple of laugh out loud moments - the best surely being the moment when Rod Perlman's character freaks out after an Alien attack and uses a HUGE gun to shoot a normal sized spider on its web.
   
   
   The script is credited to Joss Whedon and I was struck by the similarities between the ragtag crew of opportunists and smugglers from 'The Betty' and the ragtag crew of smugglers and opportunists from Firefly, a series Whedon brought to the screen 5 years later.


7. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) - I wanted to like this so much. It started well but I was fed up and irritable by the end of it. So much so that I was in full on nitpicking mode. For example, when Edmund gets mortally wounded near the end, and then gets dosed with Susan's 'Get Out Of Jail' magic 'One Drop Will Cure Anything' juice that Father Christmas gave her - he recovers. One second Argh Ugh Snotty little twerp dying from having a sword thrust into his belly, the next, sitting up big hugs loves and kissy kissy. By Jingo that's some good stuff!. Why didn't it immediately heal the split lip the make-up department had been diligently keeping continuity with on his bottom lip? You can see I was really involved with the action can't you? And was the wicked Jadis's chariot pulled by polar bears as some kind of dig by the overtly Christian producers at well known atheist Philip Pullman's polar bear-like panserbjørne? The kids, needless to say, LOVED it. (L)


8. Cosmos War of the Planets (1977) Prompted by a post on another forum I rewatched this - and so can you! It's available free via http://www.archive.org/details/Cosmo...of_the_Planets. I thoroughly recommend it to all. It is a very unintentionally funny and very surreal film. I defies all known conventions of film logic (even Italian ones). For most of it's running time it Just. Makes. No. Sense. I imagine it would be even surrealier* and funnier stoned but even dead cold sober (9 years and counting) it's still laugh out loud stupid. And contains moments of SF genius that will live with you for years - no matter how hard you try to forget them. I especially recommend the 'sex' scene at the 23 minute mark. Now THAT's foreplay.
   
   

   
   
   AND it has well-endowed Astro-crumpet to try and distract.
   from the plot deficiencies. What more could a man ask for?
   
   

   * there is now.


9. Ghostwatcher (2002) - Zero budget, underachieving 'horror' that almost had a couple of nice moments but was so plodding tedious that I ended up watching the last third with my thumb on the FF button of my remote. Another £1 wasted at Poundland. Laughing all the way to the bank those buggers.


10. Space Cowboys (2000) - I loved it. A real joy of a film - right until the moment they actually got into space and it suddenly went from being a gentle, amusing, and well presented tale about friendship and regret, redemption and ambition finally being achieved - and turned into Moonraker...
    
    
    Holy crap what just happened?
    
    
    It was like the last reel was from a different film, like The Dish suddenly turning into Mad Max for the last twenty minutes, or Gregory's Girl turning into Highlander II. The only saving grace was that it looked like nobody involved - apart from the special effects guys - gave a fart about this bolted on, 'we got to do this shit to sell it to the studios', 'action' sequence and it is an utter shambles.


11. Tropic Thunder ( 2008 ) - Started off funnily enough but by the end had descended into a slice of the usual America wish-fulfilment crap in which any bunch of American Male amateurs, no matter how stupid, armed with with automatic weapons - even loaded with blank ammunition - can beat the crap out of any army of non-Americans with automatic weapons, no mater how well-trained, profession, or desperate they are. The only thing that really kept me watching till the end was Robert Downey Jr.'s show-stealing turn as the Australian actor who 'blacked up' for his role and always stayed in character until he'd recorded the DVD commentary.


12. Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) - Some really shoddy science (simultaneous nuclear bomb tests knock the world out of orbit and towards the sun) but some great film making. A smart script that has our protagonists acting like real people in the face of possible catastrophic end of the world. They carry on doing their jobs and hope for the best. Nothing they can do, no false heroics, no Hollywood bullshit and even after studio interference the film has a wonderfully unresolved ending. (The world is basically fucked - or it isn't. We don't find out.)
    
    
    I'd never seen it with the coloured bookend sections before, they were a nice surprise. The opening is tinted a hot bright orange and the film is told in a nice cool black and white flashback. And I don't remember it being so damn sweatily sexy either:
    
    

    
    Curiously she didn't ever work for Disney again after this... )
    
    

    Apparently I have been remembering a slightly less fleshy, American version in which the same scenes were played out with Janet Munro showing less boobage. We used to make damn fine films in this country.


13. The Bruce (1996) - and we also made some right old shit too. Starring Brian Blessed, Oliver Reed, and 'Wolf' from the Gladiators*...
    
    
    
    
    
    ...The Bruce, tells the story of Robert the Bruce, Earl of Carrick, as he unites the 13th Century Scots in a rebellion against the hated English, led by Edward I - not to be confused with the film Braveheart (which came out the year before) in which William Wallace, a commoner, unites the 13th Century Scots in their battle to overthrow English rule. Not that anyone would confuse the two. For starters Braveheart had a budget that extended beyond getting the local battle re-enactment societies to amble past the camera in their Sunday best and unenthusiastically cheer from time to time. I presume they could also afford some professionals. It must be hard trying to recreate the Battle of Bannockburn with a hundred amateurs and the one stunt man mentioned in the credits. Dreadful music too. It just maundered around trying to be endlessly stirring and ended up underlining the deficiencies in the direction and a script which flopped all over the place and pissed away all the hard work put in by the actors. One particularly dreadful moment came when Robert the Bruce encounters the treacherous Comyn in church. Comyn points out they cannot fight on hallowed ground, this sentiment, expressed by one Hairy Scot Wig (tm) bewigged actor to another can only mean one thing to a true red-blooded Scot (or bad movie fan)... HIGHLANDER! As the entire audience cry; "There can only be one!" the two have a badly arranged fight and Comyn is killed, but, sadly, not beheaded in an orgy of special effects. The Bruce flees and the body is discovered. "Murder! ... Sacrilege!" the discoverer cries. And continues to cry, over and over again, "Murder! ... Sacrilege! Sacrilege! ... Murder! ... Sacrilege!" as the directors leisurely pans down the victim's outstretched arm to eventually arrive at The Bruce's cross clutched in his hand. I guess the intention was to have this damning piece of evidence used later in the film to prove The Bruce as the killer - except it isn't. It's never mentioned again. Either the sequence it was placed there for was edited out, never shot, or, more likely than not, never scripted. So why have the extended shot in there at all? And why have the off-camera voice of the poor sod actor endlessly shouting "Murder! ... Sacrilege! ... Sacrilege! Murder! ... Sacrilege!" as it played? Well, there had to be something on the soundtrack I suppose but it's really down to bad editing and shitty direction. Add, rubbish lighting, minimal set dressing (everyone in the 13th Century lived in huge castles with no furniture, or small hovels with no crops in the surrounding fields), occasional adequate acting (did I mention Brian Blessed was in it?), and you have a seriously dull film on your hands.
    
    
    *The trailer for production company Crowell Pictures' previous film, Chasing the Deer, contained the immortal line "...and introducing fish..." which sent my mind off in 34 different directions (including a hilarious 'Haddock meet Cod, Cod, Haddock' routine) before I was vastly disappointed to realise they meant Fish, the singer from Genesis-lite prog rockers Marrilion, making his feature film début.


14. Toy Story (1985?) - Eben, aged 2, gets to chose this week's Weekly Family Pizza Night film. He likes Buzz.


15. American Scary (2006) - A slight, cheaply made, documentary - ie lots of talking heads sat in front of wrinkled fabric draped across the background - giving a whistlestop history of the TV Horror Movie Host. A peculiar minor art in which people dress up in Halloween costumes and and introduce crappy films on local TV stations late at night. No Cassandra Peterson (Vampira) boo! but they managed to get Maila Nurmi (Vampira), and Neil Gaiman (Neil Gaiman) to talk to them. What could have been an interesting little project was spoiled by obvious TV slot editing and some dreadful music. As a way of gluing the rapid machine gun cutting of talking heads together someone had the bright idea of running music underneath everything like musak in a lift. It got very irritating.


16. Zombie Strippers ( 2008 ) - There were actually a couple of nice gags buried in this piece of shit. Small ones. Not worth digging for. Why do American males in films turn into howler monkeys at the sight of a pair of plastic tits? I spent half the film bemusedly fascinated by the rigid immobility of Jenna Jameson's boobs. I wasn't punching the air with mock hysteria like the extras in the club, I was trying to work out what they were. They were fascinating, looked like like pink soup bowls stuck on the front of her chest - with nipples on top.
    
    
    The IMDB tells me that the film came in under budget, by which I can only assume the director didn't have a second cup of coffee.


17. Catch Me If You Can (2002) - Well that was an amiable bit of fun.

Dear Blog. It's been months since I bored the world with an Every Book I have read list. In fact I don't seem to have done it at all this year. So here goes:

January

1. The Dancers of Noyo - Margaret St.Clair. 'How long would men dance beneath the whips of the androids?' Dull 1973 SF novel in which our heroes get captured and escaped with relentless monotony (sometimes between chapters) and a lot of unexplained spooky action at a distance stuff goes on, groovy cover though.
2. The City Dwellers - Charles Platt (1970) A collection of linked short stories, snaphots from a loose future history that charts the decline of the human population which clings stubbornly to a decaying city. Reminded me that I haven't read Bradbury's Martian Chronicles for a few years. I like books that are collections of short stories that form a larger narrative. Keith Roberts Pavane is very good example. The City Dwellers is a pale shadow of both those books.
3. The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling Bedtime reading with the girls.
4. Projections 10 - ed. Mike Figgis
5. The Food of the Gods - HG Wells. 40 odd years since I read this. I must have been a tenacious reader as a kid or skipped a lot. I don't remember it being anything like a preachy as it is. People sermonise at each other at great length.
6. Diary of a Nobody - G & W Grossmith

February

1. Gentlemen of the Road - Michael Chabon. Rollicking old-fashioned historical adventure yarn full of hairsbreadth escapes and convenient coincidences which only stopped me dead in its tracks once. The word 'teamster' seemed wildly out of place in the world of the Byzantine Empire.
2. The Syndic - C M Kornbluth. A 1953 SF novel set in a future where the Syndicate and the Mob rule. Surprisingly funny.
3. The Priests of PSI - Frank Herbert. More proof, if proof be needed, that had he not written Dune, Herbert would be long forgotten by now.
4. Solaris - Stanislaw Lem. I have meant to read this for a long long time. The 1972 film version has been a favourite of mine since I first saw it in the mid 70s. After repeated watchings I'm still no clearer what it's all about. Reading the book hasn't really helped me to a deeper understanding of it. The film is much more layered and mysterious, with the book (which in parts I found ponderously dull) acting as a central core from which much more interesting ideas and images have been spun.
5. Vortex: New Soviet SF - Ed. C G Bearne. More Soviet era SF. Short stories this time, a couple of them interesting, A couple just dull and a couple of them so hackneyed they wouldn't have been out place in a copy of Tales to Astonish:
   
   
   

   
   
6. Run to the Stars - Michael Scott Rohan. Modern(ish) but 'good old-fashioned', 'only one man can save the Earth', crash and bash SF. (Except that, in the end, he doesn't manage it and the implication is that he also fails to stop a planet full of aliens getting destroyed too.)

March

1. Toyman- E C Tubb. The third (of the 33) adventures of lone rent-a-hero, Earl Dumarest as he wanders the galaxy looking for his lost home planet, Earth. I read several of these as a kid and remember them as not being that interesting. I was right. Page turning pulp from an author credited with writing over 140 novels and 230 short stories and novellas, many of which I must have read but none that I can bring to mind. Curiously, re-reading Toyman 35 or so years after I first read it bought back none of the memories of time or place that re-reading half remembered books often invoke. Utterly forgettable - I probably didn't even notice I was reading it.
2. Tales of Wonder - H G Wells. Not quite as wonderful as they probably once were but interesting as precursors of modern SF. One story 'The Star' is an interesting precursor of Wells' own War of the Worlds.
3. Mission to the Stars - A E Van Vogt. More weirdness from Van Vogt - though not as weird and badly written as his later stuff. Starts out as a rip roaring full blown space opera (one spaceship has a crew of 30,000!) and ends as a cheesy romance. The odd shape of the book may be due to the fact it is a 'fix-up' of previously published stories.
4. Into the Labyrinth - Francoise Mallet-Joris. 'A tender and Brutal Story of Forbidden Love' no less.
   
   
   

   
   
   A French teenager is seduced by her father's mistress and swans around wallowing in self-inflicted teenage misery for 150 pages before deciding to stop.
   
   

   I adored her for saying that. She was holding in her lap a long sheaf of flowers and she looked, in her yellow blouse, like a dazzling idol a Mexican or Incan godess in a temple lost in the jungle full of precious stones and serpents. And on my shoulder she laid her hand, that brown, hard, lined hand of a haymaker, not at all the hand of a sexual pervert but rather a hand made to lie on the neck of a horse or the hip of a woman, with its fingers a little too flat, a little too supple, evoking the hands of Chinese torturers.

   The author was only 19.


5. Veruchia - E C Tubb. More instantly forgettable adventure (5 of 33) with lone rent-a-hero, Earl Dumarest. This time the book contained a fantastic amount of blank paper. Most publishers seem to like to start chapters on the recto (right hand) page so if a chapter ends somewhere on a right hand page it will be immediately followed by a blank verso (left hand) page. Here chapters are headed by a chapter number that takes up a whole page. The numbers aren't very big and are surrounded by a lot of white paper (well yellowish and slightly foxed paper, this book is 40 years old), this is followed by a blank verso page and the text of the next chapter starts about a third the way down the following recto. This book is 191 pages long. By the time you have taken away all the blurbs, printing history, 'other books by this author', title page, and advertising at the back, you are left with 181 pages. 18 pages of that (10%) are totally blank apart from the chapter numbers (that's whole pages, I haven't included all the bits, the blanks thirds at the start of every chapter and the half empty pages at their ends which must add up to another four or five pages in total). No wonder it didn't take long to read.

April

1. Of Time and Stars - Arthur C Clarke. More quaint, old-time SF shorts.
2. Kaleidoscope Century - John Barnes.
3. Raven 2: A Time of Ghosts - Richard Kirk the pen name for Robert Holdstock who was writing with his tongue firmly stuck in his cheek. Well, I hope he was taking the piss; it made me laugh so much.
   

   
   
4. Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Jack Finney. A crackingly well paced little chiller which copped out at the end - the films' endings are a vast improvement.
5. Sea-horse in the Sky - Edmund Cooper. Read in one sitting, in one eyeball out the other, 'so what' SF.
6. The World Grabbers - Paul W Fairman. Mercifully short novel of indeterminate genre in which our hero goes from one pointless circular conversation to another without learning anything about his nemesis or why a mysterious group of mystics won't stop him from taking over the world. Right at the end of the book the mysterious group of mystics do decide to stop him taking over the world for no apparent reason (other than the author had hit his contracted number of words) and the book just stops. Groovy cover though..
   
   
   

   
   

   by Jim Barker, on Flickr

   
   
7. Earth Abides - George R Stewart. Early (1949) post-apocalyptic SF.
8. A Rage in Harlem - Chester Himes
   
   
   

   
   
   Another book bought for 25p just because I liked the cover. What a discovery. It's great. I'm on the lookout for more Himes.
9. Duel - Ed. William Patrick, a collection of "Horror stories of the road" that varied from ancient and creaky stories that just didn't bear resurrecting to a couple of interesting, more modern pieces. The best is the title story by Richard Matheson.
10. Charisma - Michael Coney. Mid 70s British SF novel which swithers between being a traditional crime novel (who did murder the obnoxious hotel owner businessman Mellors?) and a parallel world love story. The only people who can travel to a parallel world have to be dead in the world they are going to; if the person in the destination world was still alive and the two met they would cancel each other out and vanish. The hero loves a girl who is dead in this world and conversely he is dead in hers. Lots of to-ing and fro-ing between worlds as the hero becomes the main suspect in the murder case (probably because he did it - or rather his doppelgänger from another world did.) Lots of the same characters dying in different ways and it's all getting wonderfully confusing and mind-boggling before it all gets resolved in a cop-out ending that appears from nowhere. (But with a final twistette to sweeten the disappointment.) Christopher Nolan should make a film version.

May

1. Wildeblood's Empire - Brian M Stableford. Innocuous mid 70s SF.
2. The Anarchistic Colossus - A E van Vogt. Late, and therefore almost incoherent, van Vogt. Van Vogt is one of those rare writers who actually seemed to get worse over the years. SF writer and critic Damon Knight said that

   van Vogt "is no giant; he is a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter." Knight described The World of Null-A as "one of the worst allegedly-adult science fiction stories ever published." About van Vogt's writing in general, Knight said: In general van Vogt seems to me to fail consistently as a writer in these elementary ways: 1. His plots do not bear examination. 2. His choice of words and his sentence-structure are fumbling and insensitive. 3. He is unable either to visualize a scene or to make a character seem real. Wikipedia

   And though I agree with just about every word of that I find his books compulsive reading. They are so odd I just can't put them down and while his contemporaries from the Golden Age went on to write longer and longer more complex tomes (I'm thinking particularly of Robert Heinlein's later doorstops of novels) van Vogt continued write fairly short books. This one clocks in at 176 pages and I had no idea what was going on for most of them.
3. The Wages of Fear - Georges Arnaud. Another book picked up because I liked the groovy cover - then remembered the film was pretty terrific.
   
   
   
   
   
   The book is pretty good too. From time to time it looks like it's suffering from translator trouble and it takes a long time to get to the meat of the story but when we get there the almost suicidal attempt to drive two trucks loaded with Nitroglycerine along a rough and unmade South American road is gripping stuff.
4. Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905) - Edwin Lester Arnold. Limp 'I go to Mars by some magical means (flying carpet!?) and almost have some incredible coincidence-laden adventures, including rescuing and falling in love with a Martian princess, before being mysteriously returned to Earth'. Six years later Edgar Rice Burroughs used almost exactly the same storyline in his A Princess of Mars, Burroughs made his hero more vigorous and proactive, made the coincidences even more outrageous, and cleaned up. Princess of Mars still sells by the shitloads and is getting a film adaptation as we speak, Gullivar Jones is an obscure bit of SF that is almost totally forgotten; though the character Gullivar Jones does geekily turn up from time to time in more modern works. He is the first character to appear (magic carpet and all) in Vol 2 of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen adventures.
5. Simon Rack: Earth Lies Dreaming - Laurence James. The first book by the incredibly prolific Laurence James (he wrote at least 150 books under various pseudonyms). The first of a short lived series, five books were published, featuring an interstellar James Bond type and his pun prone sidekick. All sex and violence. Being published in the seventies the violence is bone-crunching, eyeball-poppingly graphic and, being British, the sex never quite happens on the page. It's total shite.
6. The Monitors - Keith Laumer. Funny (in places)1960's SF.

June

1. The Undercover Aliens - AE van Vogt aka The House That Stood Still which is my second favourite pointless book title. (The first is The Man With Only One Head). More bewilderingly plotted nonsense from a master of the genre. This time the bewilderingly plotted nonsense concerns a bunch of immortal Aztec cultists and their radioactive marble house and one of their number's overly complex shenanigans to destroy the others and take over the world. When I tell you that the plot involves secret tunnels (as does every other van Vogt book I have read. I suspect he wrote secret passages into his spaceships when he could), immortal Aztecs pretending to be Martians and destroying nuclear bomb factories in hostile countries, secret spaceships that launched from (and returned to - without anyone noticing) downtown office blocks, lifelike masks which could be applied in seconds and make the wearer indistinguishable from whoever they were modelled upon, a three thousand year old mind-reading alien robot, a private investigator, phials of three thousand year old plus transuranic elements 'unknown on Earth', and a hero who manages to fall in love with the daughter of an ancient Roman official in Britain (shipwrecked in California (sic) on her way home to Rome) - and get slugged unconscious several times during the course of the 172 pages, you will have some idea of why, even having just finished the damn thing, I have no idea who did what to whom or why in the end. Imagine Enid Blyton deciding to write an SF novel while on acid. That's the flavour.
2. Screen Burn - Charlie Brooker. I laughed. A lot. I have no idea who half the people he was talking about were but his spleen is so well vented I don't think I missed much. Most wannabee celebulites are pretty interchangeable anyway (from what I gather from my brief glances at the covers of Hello!, Chat! Take a Break! and Twat! and the other celeb mags up on display at the checkouts in Morrisons - in true Charlie Brooker style I just made that last one up though, to continue in Brooker mode, it would make make a great magazine - Celebs naked from the waist down. I'd buy it.) More!
3. The Status Civilization - Robert Sheckley.
4. Dawn of the Dumb - Charlie Brooker. I laughed. A lot. Again.
5. The Saint Closes the Case - Leslie Charteris. I've never read a Saint book before which I thought was an oversight. I doubt if I will read another.

July

1. Body Politic - Paul Johnston. A serial killer novel set in an ill thought out Orwellian future. Another of those books set in a hypothesised future written by someone who don't like (or understand) SF. The author even disclaims any SFness on his webpage, "the novels are not sci-fi" he says. Which raises the question why bother coming up with a (not very) complex society different from our own in which to set the story? Sorry, kiddo, you do that and you've stuck a bloody big SF label on yourself no matter how hard you deny it's there and, unfortunately for you, it's going to get measured, judged, whatever by the rules of that particular genre. As a crime novel, I've read worse, as an SF novel, it's shit.
2. Adam, One Afternoon - Italio Calvino.
3. Wetworld - Mark Michalowski. A dire Dr Who novel only because daughter number one had just read it and I wanted to see what she what she was enjoying - she's young.
4. I am Legend - Richard Matheson. First time I had ever read it. Another Must read classic of the genre ticked off. Not bad.
5. The Underground Man - Ross MacDonald (a Lew Archer Mystery). Dreadfully dull. I will not be going back for more.
6. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson. Many years since I read this. I had forgotten how funny it was.
7. Michael Tolliver Lives - Armistead Maupin. Many years since I read the Tales in the City books (end to end, in one go) and this was a wistfully sad little coda.
8. Foundation - Isaac Asimov. Another of those Great Novels of SF which, when you actually look at them objectively don't look that good all these years later. In this one we get to see the fall and rise of Galactic Empires via the medium of people in offices describing the political situation to each other in one to one meetings.
9. Bad Science - Ben Goldacre. One of those books which I am going to lend to people and loose.

August

1. The Eye in the Pyramid - Robert Shea and Anton Wilson. The first of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Not as weirdly compelling as when I read it back in the early 80s. But I was stoned half the time back then.
2. The Survivalist No. 6: The Savage Horde - Jerry Ahern. Jesus, Mary and all the Saints! This has to be THE single most fuckingly awful book I have ever read. 59 chapters spread over 208 pages (that's 3.5 pages per chapter - though some are actually less than a page long) of porny gun-wanking in which our 'hero', John Thomas Rourke, shoots people. Lots of people. He must kill at least hundred people in this book. He doesn't ask many questions before shooting them either, but it's all right really, this is Post Apoc America and the people he kills with relentless and boring frequency are all 'brigands' or 'wildmen', hairy ill-shaven (and therefore amoral) targets for clean shaven and God fearing him to gun down page after page after page after page.

   “He already had the target-a man about six-foot four, unshaven, his black leather jacket mud-stained, a riot shotgun in his hands, the pump tromboning* as the twelve-gauge, roughly .70 caliber muzzle swung on line.”

   To break the monotony reading about John Thomas shooting people in the head page after page we are often treated to fetishistic descriptions of guns being reloaded; the hero's weaponry: a pair of chromed Detonics Combat Master .45 pistols in Alessi shoulder holsters, Colt Python and Colt Lawman revolvers, an A.G. Russell Sting 1A knife, and a shoulder sling with a CAR-15 assault rifle; and, occasionally, a parallel story in which John Thomas' wife shoots hairy amoral, would be rapists in the head with either an M-16 assault rifle or .45 automatic - even their 8 year old son gets in the act and shoots the occasional hairy ill-shaven biker in the head - though he has to make do with an antique lever action .30-30 Winchester rifle. There are twenty-nine books in the series. Four books after this one (according to Wikipedia) the united Rourke family get themselves cryonically frozen and wake up 500 years later - by which time the human race will have presumably bred enough targets for them to bother getting up again.
   
   
   *'Tromboning' is, apparently, a genuine shooting term and nothing to do with the male gay sexual act of the same name.
3. The Disaster Zone - J G Ballard.
4. Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex - Mary Roach. Mildly entertaining, but sometimes irritatingly smug, book about the science of sex. Very reassuring too, every time I read about another interestingly horrible sexual dysfunction it was like ticking off another 'No' box in some extensive medical check-list in my head. I came out the other end of the book reassured by my (relative) sexual non weirdness, but above all glad I don't spend my days doing any of this research for a living - or even masturbating pigs to orgasm to increase their fertility, as employees on Danish farms are encouraged to do (there is an illustration showing how to do this). Not one to read anywhere near kids who are likely to over your shoulder and ask, "What's that man doing?"

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.