Undisciplined Viewing

This lockdown has turned us all into a nation of passive TV viewers.  All creative activity to produce anything new has ground to a halt, leaving us picking over the vast carcass of pop culture past for our entertainment.  Which is fine - I was already spending a lot of my time doing that anyway - but the funny thing is that with all this time on my hands, I still can't seem to find any motivation to use it to do anything creative myself.  I've managed to crank out a few more write ups of schlock movies, but in comparison to the number of such films I've actually watched, the number of write ups are tiny. Perhaps we need a constant flow of new stuff in order to stimulate ourselves to be creative ourselves.  I know that a lot of the stuff I've been watching is effectively 'new' to me, in that I either hadn't seen it before or hadn't seen it years, decades even, but I was nonetheless well aware of its existence and had read lots about it already.  Which gives it all a certain sense of familiarity.  The shock of the new is lacking.

Anyway, to get back to what I've actually been watching of late, I keep thinking that perhaps I should stick to some sort of theme to my viewing.  You know: catching up with giallo movies, completing my viewing of Italian zombie movies or pursuing those often elusive Spanish horrors featuring Paul Naschy.  But, in reality, my viewing habits have been very undisciplined, bouncing between old black and white US fifties and sixties B-movies, spaghetti westerns like My Name is Nobody, that bizarre Italian Zorro film from the mid seventies with Alain Delon and Stanley Baker, (although, sadly, the available version turned out to be the butchered English dubbed version, rather than a subtitled version of the much longer original), all manner of martial arts films and even the Libyan epic Lion of the Desert.  There's been no rhyme or reason to it - my only guide has been what's available on the free streaming services I get through the Roku box I fortuitously bought before the pandemic hit.  I have to say that B-Movie TV has constantly come up trumps, providing me with such delights as a couple of Spamish horrors on consecutive evenings, (The Ghost Galleon - a 'blind dead' movie - and Horror Rises From the Tomb - with Paul Naschy in a dual role), the bizarre Japanese effort Matango - Fungus of Terror and a barely comprehensible Hong Kong action movie, Golden Queens Commandos, which featured a soundtrack mainly pirated from Ennio Morricone scores. 

The arrival of a UK version of the Roku Channel has also provided a rich source of free movies, including the aforementioned Zorro, My Name is Nobody and Lion of the Desert.  Not to mention late seventies science fiction horror The Dark.  Clearly, I need to be more disciplined in my viewing habits and start focusing more on the really bizarre stuff.  That said, the bizarre turns up in unexpected places - Richard Burton's wandering accent and generally off kilter performance in The Klansman, for instance, or the pure cringe worthiness of seeing David Niven humiliate himself by playing Dracula in would be seventies horror comedy Vampira (aka Old Dracula).  He even gets called a 'Jive ass turkey' in a film which, unbelievably, was even worse that 1970 sex comedy The Statue, which I had previously thought to be the low point of Niven's career.  Some of these films I'll eventually get around to writing about at greater length.  Others, I'd just like to forget.  I don't regret watching them, but it's not an experience I'd want to repeat, let alone inflict on anyone else.