Spring Days

'Monthly Movie' number four.  Amazingly, we're four months into this project and I'm still on schedule!  As it's April, I thought we'd have a vague springtime theme to this month's film.  So, we mark the season of renewal with a slideshow (to suitable music) of some spring scenes: well, sheep, bluebells, rape seed flowering, greenery returning - that's all spring-like, isn't it?  Most of it was shot this month - the sheep and hill fort scenes have already been glimpsed in another post - the exception being the bluebells.  I had intended to shoot some woodland bluebell scenes today and had planned my route back from work accordingly. However, a thunderstorm, (which was rumbling while I shot the rapeseed and other fields), erupted into a torrential downpour, so I had to abandon these plans.  Luckily, I recalled having photographed some spring bluebells at another location a few years ago and was able to locate and retrieve the pictures from the hard drive of an old laptop.

So there you have it - another 'Monthly Movie'.  Who knows what next month's will be?  I certainly don't!

UK Ignorance Party

So we all throw our hands up in the air and wail over the fact that yet another UKIP candidate turns out to have a social media history full of racist comments.  I really don't know why the media express horror and surprise over these incidents - surely they aren't naïve enough to believe that UKIP is really a proper political party devoted to the democratic process which just happens to attract the odd bigot and nutter. It's always been the BNP for the middle classes.  A home for Daily Mail reading bigots who'd be terribly offended if you called them racists - it's got nothing to do with ethnicity, they hate all foreigners.  The whole anti-EU schtick provides them with a pseudo-rationale for their xenophobia and blinkered Little Englander outlook.  The party also allows these privileged beige supremacists to cast themselves as political 'outsiders', oppressed and ignored by the mainstream parties, despite the fact that UKIP itself is led by a wealthy public-school educated former City-type.  How does that make them 'different' to, say, the Tories, or more representative of the interests of the under-privileged than, say, the Labour Party?

Ultimately, UKIP appeals to people's ignorance: ignorance of the facts about immigration, ignorance about any culture beyond that of their narrow circle of family, friends and acquaintances and ignorance of any issues which extend beyond getting the pot holes in their street filled and those off-white neighbours deported.  The worst thing about them is their contemptuous attitude toward actually doing their jobs: representing the electorate.  Let's not forget that the likes of Nigel Farage are happy to get themselves elected to the European Parliament and pocket every Euro they can possibly claim from the very organisation they profess to hate, yet fail to actually represent their constituents.  But it isn't just as MEPs that they have no respect for the democratic system - just look back at the last round of local elections, when many UKIP candidates couldn't be bothered to turn up for the counts, often having gone on holiday, even when they'd won.  What a bunch of bastards.  Yet, incredibly, there are apparently significant numbers of idiots out there still prepared to waste their votes on them.  Roll on the revolution, brothers and sisters, I can see that it's going to be only way to restore some measure of sanity to this country...

Received Wisdom

Delving into the world of Italian war movies as I've been over the past few weeks, I've fond that one of the most consistent criticisms of them is that of the anachronistic and incorrect equipment and props which often feature prominently in these films.  Now, I can be pretty obsessive on the subject of the wrong tanks, etc featuring in World War Two movies, but the fact is that there is often no alternative: the only genuine German World War Two era tanks still in working order, for instance, tend to be museum pieces.  Personally, I find the way the same tanks and armoured vehicles in Italian war movies turn up fighting for both sides, often in the same movie.  Some of the films also adopt a 'mix and match' approach to the small arms used by all sides, with German soldiers frequently wielding post-war Italian-made Beretta sub-machine guns instead of the correct MP40s, for example.  (That said, I've seen the same sort of approach in 1950s British war films, with the Wehrmacht using British Bren and Sten guns).  Both German officers and British commandos also have tendency to wave around American Colt .45 automatics.  Except that this isn't necessarily a mistake.  British commandos, for instance, were often issued with the Canadian made version of the Browning 9mm automatic, which looked very similar to the Colt, (which is hardly surprising as they had the same designer).  Moreover, the Germans copied the Colt automatic (and the Browning) and small numbers were issued to their armed forces.  Which all goes to show that the 'received wisdom' of armchair critics and experts is sometimes wrong.

Amongst the most notorious anachronisms in war movies is the helicopter the German general arrives at the mountain base in part way through Where Eagles Dare.  According to received wisdom, helicopters only appeared in 1945, just too late for the war and were exclusively American.  Except that isn't true.  In reality, both Germany and the US were operating small numbers of helicopters from 1943 onwards, more often than not in the search and rescue role.  Indeed, the Germans actually operated two different types of helicopter, some in the Mediterranean theatre, others in Europe.  In fact, some were even used in combat: during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944/January 1945, five German helicopters were used to attack American tanks, destroying two Shermans.  However, most of the European-based German helicopters were used as mountain search and rescue aircraft, meaning that the general's use of a helicopter to reach a mountain lair in Where Eagles Dare, far from being anachronistic, is actually quite credible.  Granted, the helicopter used in the film is an American Bell model, first produced in 1946, but in principle, its appearance isn't as ridiculous as received wisdom would have us all believe.  Which leaves me wondering how many other pieces of 'received wisdom' - not necessarily film related, either - are just as wrong.

Culturally Deprived?

I was watching that Sky advert for the umpteenth time the other day - you know, the one where Idris Elba tells you how you can keep up with all those great TV series everyone else is talking about just by taking out a subscription to Sky and taking advantage of their 'catch-up' services - when it occurred to me that I've never seen any of these 'must see' TV events, they've all passed me by.  Far from making me rush out to get a Sky TV subscription, this realisation just made me shrug resignedly.  Maybe it has to do with getting older, but I'm afraid that these days I don't feel somehow culturally deprived because I haven't seen, say, Mad Men (even when it was available free-to-air on BBC4, I didn't bother watching it).  The reality is that most of this so-called 'must see' TV is, these days, on pay channels which severely restrict their potential audience.  Whilst I'm aware that Sky TV has become ever more prevalent in Britain's homes over the past decade. the fact is that its entertainment channels like Sky One still draw relatively small audiences.  Sky Atlantic and Sky  Arts draw even smaller audiences.  Most people, it seems, subscribe to the likes of Sky for the sports channels or movie channels.

The upshot of all this is that the people telling us that all these things that the rest of us have never seen and are never likely to see, are a very small elite, mainly working in the London-based media, who, as ever, believe that should be arbiters of cultural good taste for the entire nation.  Now, I'm not saying that the programmes they cheer lead for aren't any good, I'm sure they all have their merits, but I can't help but feel that a major reason for their liking the shows is the fact that only they have seen them.  There's nothing like a bit of exclusivity to make something seem better than it is - it reinforces the 'elite' status of those talking about them: "You really must see this TV series - oh, but you can't because you don't have Sky Porno..."  As soon as it becomes more readily available, its critical stock starts to fall.  It's like those Dr Who fans who spend all their time on Twitter telling you how shit the new series is because it's so popular.  Once everyone is a Who fan, then it's no longer a cosy exclusive club whose members can congratulate each other for being culturally superior enough to recognise its worth.  If you need further proof, just look at the way The Wire has stopped being 'must see' amongst these cognoscenti since it had an airing on the BBC a few years ago, (it was very good).  Indeed, they've spent their time ever since trying to convince us that Mad Men, Breaking Bad, True Detective or whatever are the 'new' Wire.  Anyway, to return to the original point, without wishing to seem disrespectful toward Idris Elba, the reality is that your life won't be made more complete by signing up to Sky so as to watch a whole load of TV programmes you think your friends are watching, but probably aren't.

The Illuminated Cog Wheel With an Exclamation Mark

So, there I am, in my car, the one I spent an arm and a leg on last week having its brakes and tyres replaced, thinking how that money was well spent as the ride quality is so improved and braking so much smoother, when I look down at the instruments and see a bloody warning light has come on.  It's not one of the usual ones which I recognise and can make a reasonable guess at what is causing them.  No, this is like a red cog wheel with an exclamation mark in it - that can't be good, can it?  As I didn't have the owner's manual with me and the car was still running without misfiring and all the gears were engaged, I decided that diagnostics would have to wait until I got home from my shopping trip.  During the two legs of the journey the only thing amiss I noticed was a lack of acceleration, particularly uphill, as if the turbocharger wasn't engaging.  Which wasn't very promising as I know from experience that turbocharger troubles can be very expensive to rectify.  Back at home, the owner's manual was typically vague on the warning light - the cog with the exclamation mark is apparently the power train warning light, but the term 'power train' seems to encompass everything from gearbox and clutch to differentials and wheel bearings.

Anyway, after some searching on the web, to try and find other people who have had the problem, I found that one of the commonest causes for this particular warning light to come on was a problem with the glow plugs, a component I wouldn't classify as being part of the 'power train', but which, for some reason show as this kind of fault rather than igniting the expected 'check engine' light, (they are an engine component, after all).  Luckily, this is relatively easy to remedy - by replacing the glow plugs - and isn't too expensive.  Which means, inevitably, that it won't be the case with my car.  Things are never that simple for me.  The long and the short of all this is that I'll have to waste another chunk of my Easter time off traipsing down to the garage tomorrow to try and arrange to book the bloody thing in for a diagnostic test and remedial action.  This will inevitably mean wasting another day off dropping the thing off, sitting by the bloody phone all day, before (hopefully) collecting it and paying an exorbitant bill.  The trouble is that I have no choice other than to get it sorted out this week, as I'm back at work next week and a car in full working order is essential to my job. I'm left exasperated and wondering why, just once, I can't own a car that just works and doesn't keep wasting my precious time off with bloody warning lights. 

The Twelve Films of Easter

I am exhausted and badly in need of some sleep.  This elongated Easter weekend has been one long orgy of over-indulgence in movies, many of dubious quality.  Yesterday was a triple bill of late sixties/early seventies Italian war movies, at least one of which still makes no sense to me whatsoever, no matter how often I try to work the plot details out in my head.  I followed that up with pseudo Spaghetti western Captain Apache starring Lee Van Cleef, before rounding off Easter Day with a Harry Allan Towers produced obscurity from 2001 called High Explosive. I'm afraid I just couldn't make it to the end of the latter, which was just too painful to watch.  (It was made during Towers' sojourn in South Africa and starred Patrick Bergin, who looked terrible, although, to be fair, he looked even worse until I realised I had the TV screen in the wrong ratio, he must have 'lost' at least three stone after I corrected it).  I'd already kicked the weekend off with a serious Italian war movie about El Alamein and a late night viewing of my DVD of The Longest Day on Thursday into Good Friday.  Obscure British horror comedy What a Carve Up! followed on Friday, whilst on Saturday I took in another Italian war movie, Churchill's Leopards, and a faux Terence Hill/Bud Spencer  Spaghetti western, (the producer evidently couldn't secure the services of the real thing, so found two actors who looked like the popular duo and, in the English language version at least, appeared to have them dubbed by the real deal's regular voice artists).  Today I confined myself to more Italian war action with Suicide Commandos.

By now, you are probably wondering why on earth I'd put myself through the ordeal of watching so many 'bad' films over such a short space of time, (most courtesy of Movies4Men, by the way)?  Well, the answer to that lies somewhere in the wider questions of what constitutes a 'bad' film and why we watch films at all.  Obviously, the simple answer to the latter question is: entertainment.  The question of why 'bad' films are often so perversely entertaining is more complex. Do we watch them 'ironically', aware of their badness but deriving pleasure from sneering at so as to assert our critical superiority in being able to see them as 'bad' films?  Or do we watch them uncritically, aware of their flaws but not caring?  Watching the Italian war movies and comparing them with Hollywood epic The Longest Day, was interesting.  The latter laid great emphasis on 'authenticity' and historical accuracy in its portrayal of the events of D-Day, taking care not to sensationalise the action or misrepresent the historical figures it portrayed.  Indeed, by 1962 standards, it was reasonably accurate and authentic, but still carefully tailored its narrative to show the allies as uniformly heroic, the Germans (except Hitler, the SS and Gestapo) as reasonable and honourable, even if they were fighting for a misguided cause.  The sixties and seventies Italian war movies make no claims for authenticity or historical accuracy, by contrast.  They are unashamed 'blood and thunder' adventures full of blazing machine guns and exploding grenades.  As such, they are, perversely, far more easily accessible and entertaining than The Longest Day.  Sure, the latter is a film I admire for its virtuous attempts at accuracy and authenticity, but it fails to really convey either the exhilaration many men feel when they fight in wars, or the other side of the coin, the sheer terror others feel at the horror of it all.  Moreover, one longs for it all to erupt into a no-holds barred tank battle, just to keep it all moving!

The Italian films are often derided for their lack of budget, lack of authenticity with regard to the equipment and uniforms used and their, often, haphazard use of stock footage.  Yet the truth is that both the US and UK put out plenty of low-budget war movies in the fifties and sixties which exhibited all of the same traits.  I've lost count of the number of times I've seen post-war US tanks pretending to be Panzers or Bf 108s and Harvard trainers masquerading as Bf 109s and Focke Wolfe 190s, respectively.  When it comes to poor use of stock footage, I caught part of a fifties Korean War cheapie called Dragonfly Squadron the other day whose climax featured stock footage of US M46 tanks representing North Korean T34s, which were then attacked by a montage of aircraft footage, in which the attacking South Korean jets changed type several times, during a strafing run they turned into Mustangs, a piston engine, prop driven aircraft.  But the Italian movies remain far more entertaining than their English-language counterparts which, regardless of their low budgets, feel it necessary to burden themselves with tedious 'character development' and lots of turgid dialogue about the horrors/glories of war (depending upon the makers' stance).  Italian war movies, generally speaking, simply sketch in the briefest of character details necessary to set up the consequent character conflicts and launch straight into the action.

To be fair, it isn't just low budget English war movies which lack authenticity and historical accuracy: Battle of the Bulge, for instance, a big budget mid-sixties box office hit, not only features both sides using entirely inaccurate tanks and equipment, but the story it tells is a travesty of real events.  It's poorly acted, with unspeakable dialogue and features unconvincing and poorly co-ordinated action sequences, to boot. Yet the average UK or US war movie fan will hold it up as a classic whilst simultaneously slating, say, Desert Commandos. for exhibiting many of the same faults.  One area where the Italian films are often slated are their poor special effects.  I'll be the first to admit that the exploding dam in Churchill's Leopards and the blazing plastic model fighter planes at the climax of Suicide Commandos represent some of the worst miniatures work I've ever seen, but I've also seen some big budget US and UK films with almost as dodgy miniatures work: just watch the climax of You Only Live Twice, for instance, when the interior of Blofeld's volcano HQ explodes and all those miniature figures and vehicles dance across the floor.   All of which, in a roundabout sort of way, brings us back to the question of why I spent the better part of a four day weekend watching these movies.  I suppose it all comes down to the fact that, for one thing, in the case of the war movies, they bring an unfamiliar perspective to a hackneyed subject, free from many of the preconceptions and conventions of English-language war films and, ultimately, they simply aren't self-conscious, they don't feel the need to 'justify' the fact that they are entertainment by burdening themselves down with claims of historical fidelity or pretentious 'messages'.

I'll be looking at some of these films in more detail in due course, along with some more cinematic treats promised by Movies4Men over the next few weeks, including a spaghetti pirate movie with Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, some classic British B movies and a smattering of Peplums...

A Pretty Good, Good Friday

Not being of a religious bent, I don't spend my Good Fridays watching Crapchester's 'Walk of Witness', where they re-enact Christ's last hours with some bloke with a beard carrying a huge wooden cross through the town centre.  I have no idea how realistic it is - whether someone else dressed as a Roman soldier whips him as he walks, or whether it culminates with him being nailed to the cross in the local park, just in front of the kiddies' swings - but, to be frank, I've seen the film and read the book, so I know how it all turns out. (Spoiler alert: even though it seems to end in tragedy, come the Easter Monday Bank Holiday, he rises from the tomb to give us an upbeat ending to the holiday).  Instead, as you can see from the picture, I decided to go and get stared at by a sheep.

To be fair, that wasn't actually my intent, it just happened - and it wasn't just the one sheep that stared at me: there were several who took it in turns.  I decided to enjoy the good weather by going out to my favourite Iron Age hill fort for a walk.  I forgot that during the Spring they let sheep graze there.  I also forgot that, as it was a Bank Holiday and wasn't raining, the place would be crawling with people.  Worse still, crawling with people with dogs and children.  It's amazing, bearing in mind the number of signs up telling people to keep their dogs on a lead there are on the site, how many of the bloody shitting machines, sorry, dogs, were running around free, annoying people.  The children weren't much better.  It really is about time they banned dogs and children from historical monuments.  Not to mention the bloody cyclists who treat bridleways as cycle paths and come careering down them at high speed, nearly colliding with walkers like myself.  However, despite these irritations, it was another pretty good day off of work.  And I stared those sheep out. 

I'll leave you with a picture of part of the vistas I enjoyed today:

The Testament According to Dave

What a difference a day off makes.  I find myself transformed from an exhausted and disaffected wreck into a relaxed and content human being after a day of doing very little other than lying in bed, watching an Italian war movie and getting my car's brakes and tyres replaced, (this last cost me a small fortune, but I'm so mellowed out that I don't care).  I'm so relaxed, in fact, that David Cameron's latest attempts to cast himself as some kind of spiritual leader didn't have me foaming at the mouth.  Instead, it just had me sadly shaking my head at this pathetic excuse for a human being's hubris in presuming to be able to lecture non-believers on the subject of Christian values.  As an atheist, I feel that I have a sounder grasp of the Christian faith Cameron claims he wants to  evangelise.  For one thing, I'm pretty sure Jesus said that the meek would inherit the earth, not smug privately educated bankers claiming huge bonuses and oozing privilege. Not to mention the fact that he threw the money lenders out of the temple rather than giving them the keys to it.

Then there's the matter of the government's treatment of the poor and disadvantaged, which seems completely add odds with the teachings of Jesus, as I understand them.  But that's the point, of course - the right's 'understanding' of Christianity has nothing to do with the original scriptures.  Rather, it is the organised religion built upon them which attracts the right-wingers as it seems to legitimise a strict hierarchical social system, where wealth can buy you a better pew, not to mention a better place in the hereafter.    All the pomp and ceremony, the robes and the stained glass windows appears to them to legitimise material values, even though, if they ever bothered to look into it, the original basis of the faith teaches the complete opposite.  But that shouldn't surprise us, as 'Jesus' Cameron seems to have everything back to front: Christ supposedly died for our sins, whereas Cameron and his cronies apparently want all of us plebs to die for their sins.

Running Down for Easter

I'm finding it extremely difficult to motivate myself to actually post anything today.  For one thing, whilst I'm sure I had some vague idea for today's post this morning, over the course of the day it has completely faded away.  On top of that, I only have one more working day to go before I take my Easter break.  Not surprisingly, my motivation generally has been pretty poor these past few days.  Work-wise, I've just been going through the motions, doing the bare minimum until I can go home.  My mind is entirely focused on my time off.  Not that I'm doing anything exciting, just resuming the work in the garden and the external paintwork that was interrupted by the Winter, but it isn't work.  Right now, I desperately need a break from that increasingly depressing treadmill.  But it isn't just me that seems to be running down in advance of the long Bank Holiday weekend: even the news seems to have run out of steam, now that the 'excitement' of Maria Miller, the Culture Secretary, having finally resigned in the wake of her non-apology for fiddling her expenses.  (Of course, the departure of the chief cheerleader for Dave's war on internet porn does raise the question of whether these attempts to censor the web will end.  After all, her replacement looks like the sort of bloke - bald and middle aged - who might like a quick look at online bare boobs and bums now and again.  Not that I'm saying he does, obviously.  Just that he looks the type who might).

Indeed, last week there seemed to be a rush to 'tie up' loose plot lines in advance of the holiday getaway: Nigel Evans was found not guilty of sexually molesting young men, Miller resigned, Lord Myners resigned from the Co Op, the search for flight MH370 seems to have, for now, hit a brick wall and so on.  About the only on-going story line we have left is the growing tension between Russia and Ukraine.  Even that seems to be playing out in the news bulletins with a strange lack of urgency.  The two sides seem to be stumbling toward an armed conflict and yet nobody outside of the region really seems to care any more.  Certainly, all the bellicosity from the West which followed the Russian annexation of Crimea seems to have faded away as it becomes apparent that President Putin just doesn't care and that US simply isn't prepared to risk World War Three over the issue.  It's one thing using military force against third world states because they've supposedly got Weapons of Mass Destruction, invading their neighbours or are oppressing their own people, but it's a different story when the invading and oppressing is being done by a superpower that indisputably does have WMD.   On that note, I'll just go back to anticipating my time off.

Circus of Fear

I hadn't seen this film in at least fifteen years when it turned up on Movies4Men last week.  I remember the first time that I saw it was after I'd recorded it from Channel Four's late schedule, having confused it with 1960's Circus of Horrors.  However, instead of a warped horror movie involving a deranged plastic surgeon populating the travelling circus he uses as a front with facelifted criminals, I found myself watching this 1966 crime drama starring horror icons Christopher Lee and Klaus Kinski.  I say 'starring', but both are effectively 'red herrings', neither being the main villain.  Moreover, Lee's lion tamer spends most of the film with his face hidden behind a mask, (allegedly to hide the horrendous disfigurement resulting from a past big cat mauling but, in reality, to disguise the fact that he's really the lion tamer's brother - also a lion tamer - an escaped murderer on the run).  Kinski, by contrast, gets more screen time, but spends most of it lurking in dark corners and looking menacing until suffering an untimely demise.

Any worries I had that I was going to miss out on some schlocky low budget fun by watching the wrong circus movie were quickly allayed by the opening titles informing me that the film was produced by none other than the prolific Harry Allan Towers, (not to mention written by him under his 'Peter Welbeck' pseudonym), whose personal life was allegedly as colourful as his films, (he had to flee the US in the mid-sixties after being accused of running a vice ring, for instance - the charges were eventually dropped in 1985).  The globe-trotting Towers put together low-budget international co-productions, often directed by the notorious Jesus Franco, (he also employed low-budget legend Lindsay Shonteff to direct at least one picture), featuring international casts and colourful foreign locations.  Subject matter didn't seem to bother him: his output in the sixties and early seventies included horror, thrillers, erotica and women in prison pics.  Perhaps his highest-profile films of the period were his five Fu Manchu films starring Christopher Lee in the lead role.

In the case of Circus of Fear, Towers was clearly trying to tap into the 'Krimi' genre - dark German-made crime films, usually with a London-setting and often based on Edgar Wallace stories (the DVD release of Circus of Fear actually claims that it was based on a Wallace novel; it wasn't)  - which was quite popular at the time.  Set in a stylised fog-wreathed London - usually looking like Victorian London, but with modern fashions and motor cars - and owing as much to Doctor Mabuse as they did to Wallace, most genuine German 'Krimi' films were shot, expressionistically, in black and white.  Circus of Fear, by contrast, is in garish colour and features location shooting on very real London locations.  That said, as directed by John Moxey, (who, as John Llewelyn Moxey, later became a successful director of TV episodes in the US), Circus of Fear is a well paced crime thriller, featuring a well-staged security van robbery on Tower Bridge, a car chase involving a Commer van and a couple of old Wolseley police cars and some knife-throwing murders.

It's undoubtedly a film of two halves, with the first section involving the robbery, a falling out amongst the gang and establishing the shadowy presence of an unseen 'Mr Big' behind it all who is somehow involved with the circus.  The second part is a more conventional 'whodunnit' as stoic Scotland Yard inspector Leo Genn tries to ascertain the identity of 'Mr Big' and investigates a series of murders at the circus (which is at its out-of-season base near Windsor, (the film was shot at a post-Hammer Bray Studios, possibly one of the first non-Hammer productions to utilise the facilities following the gothic horror outfit's departure in 1966).  Moxey makes good use of the bizarre circus background and Welbeck's script provides a plethora of suspects and sub-plots, (including Skip Martin's blackmailing dwarf clown, Lee's escaped convict, the jealous knife thrower and shifty ringmaster).  Essentially a B-movie, Circus of Fear is nonetheless an entertaining crime thriller, made at a time when Harry Allan Towers' productions seemed to have more money and production values lavished on them than in later years.  Sure, not all of the plotting makes sense, there's too much padding in the form of the sub-plots, it wastes its main star and the final reveal of the villain is somewhat perfunctory, but Circus of Fear remains highly watchable, full of fascinating incidental detail and performances and suffused with an air of understated madness.  I'm very glad I was able to watch it again.

False Claims (Part Three)

I really hoped that I wouldn't have to address this issue again, but, despite having lost their last attempt to claim some kind of rights over a piece of public domain music I used on a video posted on You Tube, 'The Orchard' are at it again.  This time it isn't one film they're making fake claims on, but two!  Clearly, their audacity knows no bounds as they are now claiming that two completely different pieces of public domain music are actually the same as a single track by one of their fictional artists.  Even more bizarrely, in both cases they claim that their made up client's non-existent track starts part way through a continuous piece of music.  The details of their fraudulent claims are the same as before: an artist that nobody has ever heard of with unreleased albums (all consisting of tracks with single word titles) on a non-existent label.  As before, there is no way of hearing the track they claim is being infringed to make a comparison for oneself. 

This time around I've dropped any pretence at politeness in my response to these claims as they are beyond contempt.  Quite apart from the quite obvious use of fake details, they have picked on two films which have been posted on You Tube for months (eighteen months in one case), begging the question of why wait until now to make this sort of claim?  But these people are utterly shameless, presenting themselves as the injured party as they opportunistically attempt to defraud innocent web-users.  I really don't want this to turn into some kind of long-running saga here, but I feel that it is important to try and highlight the activities of parasites like 'The Orchard' and name and shame them in the hope that maybe, eventually, Google, owners of You Tube, might actually do something to stop them trying to exploit users of the site.  As I've said before, they and their ilk are rapidly making it next to impossible to upload videos with background music to You Tube for fear of having to waste inordinate amounts of time dealing with these kinds of spurious claims.  If you even know about them, that is: Google never sees fit to e-mail or message you in any way.  Unless you regularly check your uploads page, you'll never see the claims.  So, come on Google, clean up your act and start protecting your users from sharks like 'The Orchard'.

Cry of the Banshee

Notable only for being Vincent Price's last appearance in a costume Gothic horror movie, this overcooked collection of clichés used to be a late night TV favourite.  Clearly made to try and capitalise on the success of Price's appearance as Matthew Hopkins in Witchfinder General, this potboiler finds Price as a local squire in some indeterminate historical period, (the costumes suggest Elizabethan England, but it could be later), having trouble with the local witches, who seem to be a bunch of hippies.  However, as Price finds out to his cost, they're bloody dangerous hippies when pissed off, bringing down a curse on his family.  The curse takes the very literal form of Patrick Mower in a bad werewolf suit, who then rampages through the cast.

Whereas Witchfinder General was a relatively subtle film, beautifully shot on location, contrasting the natural beauty of the East Anglian landscapes with the violence of the witch hunts, Cry of the Banshee piles violent incident upon violent incident in a mixture of nondescript locations and studio sets.  Everyone overacts like crazy, especially Price who, instead of repeating his subtle characterisation of Matthew Hopkins, lays on the ham.  Disturbingly, most of the set-pieces seem devised merely as excuses to portray brutal violence against women.  Generally topless women - this is the 1970s, after all and bared breasts were now in (or out, to be accurate).   The evocation of Edgar Allan Poe's name in the trailer is mystifying as, beyond the fact that film stars Vincent Price and is produced by AIP (who, respectively, starred in and distributed most of Roger Corman's series of Poe adaptations).  But it made for good box office to try and link this film to the earlier highly profitable Poe movies, (not to mention making it easier to sell to TV as part of a 'Poe' package).  Crude and misogynistic, this isn't a patch on either Witchfinder General (also given a spurious Poe connection by AIP for its US release as Conquerer  Worm) or the Poe series.  That said, it's still a reasonably entertaining late night movie after a few pints...

Unhappy Ending

Have you ever watched something which, quite unexpectedly, results in you feeling deeply disturbed and upset?  I had such an experience at the weekend and those feelings have haunted me ever since.  Going back to Saturday night, I thought I was settling down to watch just another Italian exploitation film I'd found on YouTube.  Sure, it was in Italian, which I don't speak, without any English subtitles but as it appeared to be some kind of 1970s sex comedy, I didn't think that would really matter.  Indeed, as To Be Twenty (as the title translates into English), unfolded it became obvious that this tale of two liberated young women hitch hiking through Italy wasn't too different from the kind of sex comedies and soft porn turned out in the UK during the seventies.  They regularly took their clothes off and had sex with various characters they met, (and each other, for that matter), every so often everything would stop as they danced to some pop tune or other.  A large part of the action seemed to be about their involvement with a commune, amongst whose members was none other seventies Italian exploitation idol Ray Lovelock, (his real name - his father was English apparently - rather than an Anglicised version of it). 

So far, so good.  It was all pretty much as I expected.  However, in the film's last ten to fifteen minutes, things take an unexpected and unpleasant turn.  The two girls find themselves in a dubious roadside café full of small town hicks and make the mistake of spurning the advances of what appears to be the local crime boss (unlike the other hicks, he wears a suit).  After leaving the café and hitting the road again, they quickly find themselves being pursued by the hicks from the café.  Chased into some woods, they are caught by the mob, gang-raped and brutally murdered.  Yes, that's right, what started as a light sex comedy and remained in that vein for most of its running time, culminates in our heroines being sexually assaulted and killed.  So unexpected was this development that it left me deeply shocked.  It was the equivalent of Confessions of a Window Cleaner culminating with Robin Askwith being dragged into a back alley by the husband or father of one of the women he'd bonked, bum raped relentlessly, beaten to death with a lump hammer, then having his body dumped in a skip as the end titles rolled with jaunty music playing over them. 

Clearly, it left a bad taste in the mouths of its original Italian audience, as the film didn't do too well at the domestic box office.  Not surprisingly, for its English language release, the film was severely re-edited, with the original beach opening cut, replaced with part of the closing sequence - the girls are seen being chased into the woods, before freeze-framing with the sounds of police sirens super-imposed, implying their rescue.  The film then picks up with them hitch-hiking (the second scene in the original cut) and ends with them similarly back on the road, hitching.  Quite what the intent of the film's makers was, with regard to the original cut, isn't clear.  I suspect they were trying to make a point about the continued patriarchal nature of Italian society, even in the supposedly liberated seventies, demonstrating that whilst young women might be able to get away with exercising their sexual liberation and freedom from outmoded social mores in the big city, the reality in more rural areas would be quite different.  There are those, of course, who will assume that the film is about women being put back in their 'proper' place for having the audacity to exercise their rights to freedom and equality, (judging by some of the comments I've seen online whilst researching the film, there are a disturbing number of such individuals out there).  But I don't think the point of the film was that they were 'asking for it'.  If it was, it failed miserably, as the appalling violence perpetrated against two innocent women at the end, just because they refused to acquiesce to male sexual domination, just left me sickened and disturbed.  I just wish I could get them out of my head.

B Movies For Men

So, here we are again.  I didn't think we would be, actually.  I've been in the process of changing Internet Service Provider (ISP), which resulted in my old ISP prematurely cutting off my broadband service yesterday.  As the new ISP's service wasn't scheduled to go live until tomorrow afternoon, I wasn't too happy.  However, a call to the new ISP this lunchtime sorted things out and I by the time I got home from work this evening, I once more had broadband.  Which means I can tell everyone about a truly magnificent development in terms of my personal entertainment.  On Friday I found that Movies4Men was finally available nationally on Freeview.  Why is this such momentous news?  Well, Movies4Men is one of several digital film channels which has its content provided by the Sony film library which, it seems includes some amazing low-budget fare, much of which forms the backbone of the Movies4Men schedule.  As the channel's title implies, it has a heavy emphasis on action-orientated movies - war films, westerns, thrillers, the odd science fiction film - most of which are either ancient and/or B-movies.

That, in itself, is great as far as I'm concerned but, even better, I've found that they also show the English-language versions of several Italian-made war movies from the late sixties.  I caught the last half hour of one on Saturday: it was magnificently bad!  Definitely my kind of entertainment!  These movies aren't always that easy to obtain so it's an Italian exploitation sub-genre I've never managed to get into.  Thanks to Movies4Men, I can now see at least three of them in a week!  But it isn't just these Italian war pictures which are exciting me - I've already set my digital recorder for Circus of Fear, a favourite barking mad sixties crime thriller I haven't seen in at least fifteen years.  I've also already had the pleasure of all three hours of the lurid early eighties French-US TV movie The Bunker, chronicling Hitler's last hundred days - apparently the upper echelons of the Third Reich consisted, primarily, of well-known British character actors, (including Anthony Hopkins as Hitler and, inevitably, Michael Sheard as Himmler).  Even Pat from EastEnders turns up in the kitchens of the eponymous bunker - was it any wonder Hitler went mad with her doing the cooking?  To be fair to Movies4Men, they also show some pretty decent movies of a more recent vintage: they had the 2002 Michael Caine boxing/crime thriller Shiner on last night, for instance.  Anyway, the arrival of Movies4Men has left me in seventh heaven, movie-wise!

A Bit Weird?

I know that the media in this country have a right-wing bias, skewing their reporting. opinion polls and editorial content to paint the right in as favourable a light as possible, but are they really so scared that Labour might actually win next year's general election that they have to resort to these latest pathetic attempts to discredit Ed Miliband?  What purpose can there be in opinion polls which ask respondents whether they think the Labour leader is 'a bit weird'?  Since when has there been an official scale of weirdness?  How do they define it?   Who gets to decide what constitutes 'weird' and what constitutes 'normal'.  It is purely subjective - I think it weird that anyone would vote Tory, for instance. This is such a crude attempt to manipulate public perceptions of the leader of the opposition in the run-up to an election it is barely believable.  The whole thing is clearly predicated on the 'fact' that Miliband looks like the Daily Mail's idea of what a 'geek' is and, hey, 'geeks' are weird, aren't they?  And being weird is bad.  So bad that weird people are obviously unfit to be a potential Prime Minister.

This poll might have had more credibility if it had asked respondents similar questions about the perceived characteristics of the other party leaders.  I mean, in the interest of balance, did the opinion poll ask potential voters 'do you think David Cameron is, well, a bit of a cunt?' (I think he'd score quite highly on that measure).  After all, that's surely just as relevant to the issue of who should govern Britain as how weird Ed Miliband allegedly is.  Obviously, as ever, this poll and how it 'proves' that voters think Miliband is weird has been gleefully (and uncritically) seized upon by the media and repeated ad nauseum.  Nowhere, of course, is the really importnant question asked: even if Miliband is weird, so what?  Do people actually care?  After all, we currently have a cabinet full of weird bastards - bonkers Gove, gross wobble-bottom Pickles to name but a few - yet the likes of the Daily Mail don't seem to think that they are unfit to govern.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

A Smoggy Day in Crapchester

How was the smog for you?  Did it reach level ten where you were? (It occurred to me that if it is, apparently, this easy for air pollution to reach the maximum of the scale used to measure it, perhaps it  is time to come up with a new scale?  Or at least revise the current one to go to level eleven).  I must admit that I was a trifle disappointed. When they announced that we were going to have these smog drifting across the country, I was expecting something like the London smog of the fifties - so thick that you wouldn't be able to see your hand in front of your face and other people reduced to vague shapes looming through the rolling vapours.  I think that I watched too many old films when I was a kid.  You know the sort I mean: those black and white melodramas, crime thrillers and horror flicks set in studio-bound versions of Victorian London or San Francisco, the streets smothered in artificial fog.  Anything could be lurking in that fog (and frequently was) - Jack the Ripper and other assorted murderers, bootleggers, body snatchers, even Egyptian mummys on murderous rampages. 

Consequently, the sight of thick fog has always given me a thrill.  Anything could happen when it descends.  Once familiar streets suddenly become dangerous thoroughfares full of mystery.  Sadly, all this latest smog brought was a hazy day, wheezing chests and stinging eyes.  Well, for some people.  Personally, I felt unaffected.  Indeed, I was so disappointed with the whole business that I did my best to worsen the smog - in the hope that it would thicken up and add some mystery to my boring day - by driving around aimlessly in my (diesel) car.  Sadly, it didn't work.  I could still drive around without my headlamps on and didn't find myself having to avoid Yeti or Sasquatches looming out of the fog into the middle of the road.  No mummys showed up, either.  So, next time they forecast smog, perhaps the authorities could do something to thicken it up, like getting those fossil-fuelled power stations to belch out some extra thick black smoke to add to the mix.  It would make my day.

Bottoms Up

It's an outrage, I tell you.  A bloody outrage - Tory MPs being forced to resign as ministerial aides because they've been caught paying Brazilian male prostitutes to buy drugs for them.  Allegedly.  Let's not forget that the MP in question has said that the newspaper story exposing him contained many inaccuracies.  Like the fact that the rent-boy was Venezuelan, not Brazilian.  Regardless of where in South America he came from, it is totally outrageous that a Tory MP should be employing foreign male prostitutes.  I mean, he wasn't even from another European Union country!  How unpatriotic are these Tory bastards, eh?  Really, how are young Brits meant to get on if even our MPs persist in using foreign prostitutes?  Whatever happened to buying British?  It seems this government only wants to bugger the lower orders metaphorically, not literally.

Obviously, working class bottoms aren't good enough for these toffs - the only indigenous rent-boys they'd consider would be those who had, at the very least, attended a public school.  Once again, it seems that privilege pays dividends in Cameron's Britain.   But, getting back to the point, for a party which has so many backbenchers opposed to gay marriage, the Tories do seem to have a lot of prominent MPs who also enjoy a bit of man-on-man action, (even when it is unconsenting, if we are to believe some of the evidence from the ongoing trial of Deputy Speaker and Tory MP Nigel Evans).  But then again, perhaps the two positions aren't mutually exclusive.  It does seem that these bastards just want to 'fool around' a bit with blokes (the younger the better, it seems) - marriage and steady relationships aren't on the cards for these 'sons of fun', so why should they support it?  Besides, legalised gay marriage might encourage some of these rent-boys to get ideas, especially if they are illegal immigrants from South America...