Normal Service Still Not Resumed

I'm afraid that normal service here still hasn't been resumed.  To be sure the stomach problems which plagued me last week seemed to finally end early this morning, (believe me, you don't want the details).  However, I'm still preoccupied with trying to establish if my AWOL friend is OK.  On top of that there are all manner of other dramas developing at work.  All of which has left me with little time to prepare posts for this blog (I had hoped to draft something over the weekend, but other stuff intervened there - mainly sorting out the cooling system on my car, which had been playing up).  All that aside, courtesy of Talking Pictures TV, I was able to enjoy an especially seedy early seventies British sex movie on Saturday night: Not Tonight, Darling.  I had no expectations whatsoever of this movie, but found myself enjoying its tatty suburban ambience immensely. It's another one of those films vilified by the amateur critics on IMDB - which is usually a good sign, I find.  Their understanding of cinema is frequently non-existent and I'm often left wondering if they've actually seen the film they are lambasting.  As an example, one of the would be critics trashing Not Tonight Darling complains that it doesn't even feature any decent nudity - I can only assume there's another print in circulation which doesn't have Luan Peters baring all a few minutes in, or the orgy sequence, or the dancing strippers in the sex club sequence.    Hopefully, I'll find the time to discuss the film in more detail in a later post, when everything else in my life has settled down. 

I also finished reading a fascinating movie-related book over the weekend: The Lost World of Cliff Twemlow.  If you don't know who Cliff Twemlow was, don't worry.  He's someone else I'm hoping to cover in a future post.  Suffice to say that if you are a lover of low budget direct to video exploitation movies, then you really need to look Twemlow up.  Largely forgotten nowadays, back in eighties and early nineties, he and his associates succeeded in completing a number of such movies, running the gamut from crime dramas to science fiction.  As ever with the bottom end of the film making scale, distribution (or lack of it) was their Achilles heel, with several of the films barely released.  But that's no reflection on their quality.  On the basis of the one complete Twemlow movie I've seen and excerpts and trailers from most of the others, I have to say that, bearing in mind their miniscule budgets, largely non-professional casts and crews, they are not at all bad and actually pretty entertaining.  But, like I said, I'll be looking at Twemlow's Manchester based mini-Hollywood in detail later on.  For now, I'd just like to apologise again for the continued lack of proper posting here.