Friday, July 31, 2020

Mr Majestyk (1974)


Another film that, back in the day, was a regular in the TV schedules, but which seems to have vanished from view.  Which is a pity, as I always felt it an above average Charles Bronson vehicle.  Directed by Richard Fleischer and written by Elmore Leonard, it was certainly streets ahead of any of the cannon-produced vehicles Bronson spent the eighties making.  It is actually somewhat more sophisticated than the trailer makes it out to be, trying to give the impression it is somehow in the mould of the then recently released violent revenge hit Walking Tall.  Whereas that film left a large degree of moral ambiguity surrounding the actions of its hero, Mr Majestyk is incontrovertibly a good guy forced into action by organised crime.   It is his opponents who escalate the violence, he merely acts in defence of the interests of himself and his employees.

A briskly paced film which feels much shorter than its 103 minutes, Mr Majestyk provides the audience with a constant stream of action sequences that play to Bronson's strengths.  It also provides him with a worthy adversary in the form of Al Lettieri, one of the truly great players of violent scum bags during the seventies, as a mob hitman.  There's also good support from the likes of Lee Purcell and Linda Cristal, (whose character, a union organiser, is, perhaps surprisingly for this sort of film, presented sympathetically).   At the end of the day, what's not to like about a film that presents Charles Bronson as a two-fisted melon farmer and gives us a sequence where mobsters machine gun a crop of melons?  A big hit on its release. Mr Majestyk really deserves a revival - it is certainly a lot better than most of the eighties Bronson movies which continually turn up on TV these days, providing a far better tribute to an iconic action star.

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Thursday, July 30, 2020

Wrong By Being Right

It's a question I like to revisit, aimed at all those people who voted for those so called 'anti politics' candidates who were going to transform the political process and hand power back to the people: just how is that all going?   I mean, that Bolsnaro in Brazil - he's just knocking it out of the park isn't he?  Just look at the way he has the pandemic in hand, not to mention that great job he's doing with the environment.  The Amazon rain forest is safe in his hands, eh?  Then there's Boris Johnson.  I remember people who voted for him telling me that they didn't care that he was a fornicating, incompetent morally degenerate serial liar, racist and homophobe, because he'd 'get things dome'.  Well, he certainly has.  Unfortunately, adequately dealing with a pandemic isn't one of them.  Of course, when they said 'get things done', what they meant was 'get Brexit done'.  Which, sadly, he is, by driving the UK to a 'no deal' Brexit, (just what an economy already severely weakened by the pandemic needs), despite not having any worthwhile trade deals with anyone else signed up. 

The elephant in the room here is obviously Trump.  You know, I remember four years ago various Americans boasting of how they were going to vote for Trump as they considered Hilary Clinton too much of a corporate shyster and an 'insider' who wouldn't act in the best interests of ordinary people.  So, again, how's that worked out?  Still happy with your choice of supposed 'outsider'?  Thousands dead as a result of Trump's shambolic response to the pandemic, race war, class war, pretty much real war, being raging on the streets of many US cities as Trump deploys his thugs against the American people.  Not only are protesters being snatched from the streets by shadowy and apparently unaccountable secret policemen, but now we have the Fat Boy calling for November's election to be postponed because he's so far behind in the polls, sorry, because of the non-existent threat of electoral fraud if the pandemic forces states to use postal ballots.  Yet there are still people out there who support him, who act as apologists for his every atrocity, even as the US slides toward totalitarianism on his watch.  What's wrong with them?  OK, I know that some of them are those tiresome professional contrarians who will automatically say 'black' if you say 'white', but what of the rest?  Some, I have to assume, are themselves budding fascists, who approve of Trump's increasingly extreme reactions against the very concept of opposition and protest.  Others, one has to assume, are just plain stupid.  But least he isn't Hilary Clinton, eh?  Let's all thank God for that.

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Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Statue Shaggers

Are all those Black Lives Matter protestors really the main threat facing our statues and monuments these days?  I only ask because the sort of outrage summoned up by their opponents in condemnation of the tearing down of statues just seems to be out of all proportion.  They're inanimate objects, for God's sake - why get so worked up about it?  All that anger over violence to chunks of stone and/or metal - these people act as if a real, flesh and blood, individual had been molested.  Then there's the way they rally to protect these statues - it all feels very proprietorial, as if they feel some kind of ownership over them.  Like a possessive husband, perhaps?  Because I really can't help but feel that there is something unhealthy about this statue obsession.  Could it be that that their interest in these statues isn't driven by civic duty, or a passion for the ideals they represent or even respect for the historical figures they depict, but rather by sexual desire?  I mean, it isn't unheard of for people to develop sexual fixations on inanimate objects - every so often you hear of someone 'marrying' a building or a bridge.  Feeling sexual desire for a statue in the image of human being would actually seem more understandable.

I'm beginning to suspect that the toppling of statues by supposed protestors is actually a cover for the nefarious activities of theses statue shaggers.  I mean, what happens to those statues after they are toppled?  I know that we're told that they get taken to museums for 'safe keeping', but I wouldn't be at all surprised if some, at least, were to turn up in the beds of these right-wing statue fetishists.  It all makes sense - a bunch of them could black up and pretend to be BLM activists, topple a statue, then spirit away, leaving the real BLM to take the blame.  Perhaps they whisk them away for 'stone orgies', where, in a sexual frenzy, they grope, lick and caress the purloined statue. Maybe they have  fetish parties, where they dress the statue up in women's underwear.  But perhaps they really do just take them to bed in order to shag them.  One could speculate that the thrill comes from imagining that they are having sex with the real subject of the statue, or could it be the firmness and coldness of the stone effigy that creates the turn on, (rather akin to necrophilia)?  Then again, it could be the allure of having a compliant lover that never resists or complains.  Who knows what goes through the minds of these depraved statue shaggers?  All I know is that they must be stopped - we need to start the anti-statue shagger campaign now: Stone Lives Matter!

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Monday, July 27, 2020

Boys' Own Parody

Rewatching some things at a distance in time from their first showings sometimes leaves me wondering whether I misread them first time around.  Take Hannay, for instance, a 1988-89 UK TV series based on the John Buchan character. Seeing it again now, I'm left convinced that it could only have been conceived as a parody of these sorts of Boys' Own adventure stories recalling the glories of the Empire.  Rather like an episode of Ripping Yarns.  It seems inconceivable that it could have been intended as a serious piece of drama.  Yet, looking back to when I saw some of the episodes on their first transmission, there was no hint in the publicity surrounding them or their presentation that they were intended as parody.  The title sequence itself, seen now, seems to scream 'parody', with a stoic looking and tweed clad Robert Powell in the title role, lighting up his pipe as he pauses on a stone bridge to admire the rugged British countryside he is walking through, is startled by an Eagle and drops his box of 'Britannia' matches into the stream below.  As Imperialistic music plays, (the sort of composition you'd usually hear in one of those fifties movies set in the days of the Raj, where British officers in pith helmets make short work of revolting natives), the camera follows the matchbox as it is washed down the stream, credits rolling over the top, before it finally washes up again at the feet of Hannay, who has followed it down from the river bank.  The symbolism is obvious and surely couldn't be intended seriously.

Most people will be familiar with Richard Hannay as the lead character in the novel The Thirty Nine Steps (and its many film adaptations, the 1979 version, of course, starring Robert Powell).  The character, however, appears in a whole series of novels, of which Thirty Nine Steps is the first, in which, over a period of years, he becomes embroiled in all manner of international intrigue before and during World War One.  The Hannay TV series tries to tap into the international intrigue idea of the later novels, but is entirely set in the pre-World War One era, but with the lead character having no official status, more often than not he simply unwittingly stumbles into situations, (much as he did in Thirty Nine Steps), or occasionally becomes involved thanks to his friend in Special Branch.  The Hannay of the TV series seems to have no visible means of support and spends his time wandering between various stately homes (where he has been invited as a guest), shooting, fishing and wandering around the countryside.  All of which gives him ample opportunity to rescue imperiled young women, (often the victims of fiendish blackmail plots) and foil the nefarious plans of the Empire's enemies, (which all seem to revolve around blackmailing the young wives or daughters of leading Statesmen).  He even has a German arch-enemy, called Graf von Bonkers, or some sort, (played by Gavin Richards who, around this time, was also playing Captain Berterelli, the amusing Italian stereotype in 'Allo 'Allo), whose plans Hannay thwarts every week.  Such is Hannay's propensity for stumbling into plots to destabilise the Empire that he can't even visit an art gallery without being accosted by a young girl afraid she is being followed by undesirables. Of course, it turns out that she is the daughter of a Russian Prince and Hannay finds himself embroiled in one of Von Bonkers' plots, this time to assassinate the Foreign Secretary.  Just for a change, Hannay would sometimes stumble into a criminal plot unconnected with espionage - and foil that as well.

This whole format sounds like a parody, yet the whole thing is played seriously.  The problem with this is that, seen today, all those straight faces, stoic British types and stiff dialogue delivered without a trace of irony, just reinforces the idea that Hannay is intended as parody.  But the late eighties, ehen these episodes were made, was a different time.  Thatcher, still riding the tide of the Falklands war, had recently won a third consecutive general election and flag waving and patriotism was the order of the day.  It was all about making Britain 'Great' again. Even after she fell from grace, we found ourselves subjected to John Major's 'vision' of a mythical 'merrie olde Englande', all warm beer, village greens and warm beer.  Programmes like Hannay reflected this nostalgia for an idealised version of Britain's Imperial past.  Now, of course, we live in a more cynical age, (although that hasn't stopped the Tories and the Brexiteers from invoking constantly that Imperial 'Golden Age' to their advantage).  Things like Hannay simply can't be taken at face value any longer, (it is notable that Talking Pictures TV prefaces episodes with a disclaimer stating that attitudes have changed since they were made).  There's no doubt though, that seeing these episodes as parody actually makes them far more entertaining, turning what I had recalled as a stodgy period piece, into an amusing pastiche of Imperialist 'derring do' type adventure stories.

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Friday, July 24, 2020

Masked Desperadoes, Unmasked Contrarians

I spent most of yesterday feeling vaguely unwell.  Not anything I could put my finger on, but definitely out of sorts.  It eventually resolved itself yesterday evening with a spectacularly upset stomach, which left me exhausted.  Hence yesterday's rather brief post here.  I still didn't feel too great today, but I had a lot to get done.  Not least making my first masked foray to my local shops.  There is no doubt that wearing the bloody things is inconvenient and uncomfortable, but, if we must, we must.  It really isn't an issue to get upset about if you are a normal, rational, human being.  If, on the other hand, you are a contrarian crackpot, then it is a gross infringement of your civil rights and something to die in a ditch over.  Thankfully, none of them seemed to be in evidence in Crapchester's shops today because, really, I've had enough of contrarians.  There's a time to challenge the status quo and received wisdom and a time when we need to go along with the flow.  Most of the time, the majority of us can discern the difference.  But contrarians, they just can't.  They always have to be different.  Whatever it is, they're against it.  If it is popular, of course.  Which is why you see so many of them suddenly becoming apologists for Trump. for instance, because he's now on the backfoot.  Suddenly, the very liberal causes they were supporting last year become the enemy because they've now gained traction and popularity.  Really, in this respect contrarians are the ultimate reactionaries.

Luckily, though, I'm not a contrarian, so I wore a mask when I was in the shops today.  In the end I opted for a standard, cheap, disposable type for this first foray.  Although, I do have the option of sporting a bandana as a face covering.  It is just that I'm afraid that some retailers might mistake me for a Western desperado attempting to hold them up.  Which is ridiculous, of course - If I really was a Western desperado, I'd be wearing a stetson as well.  That and the fact that we don't have many instances of hold-ups by lone cowboys here in Crapchester.  We do, however, have a few contrarians of our own.  At the height of the lockdown we had a group of anti-lockdown protestors holding 'rallies' in my local park.  I seem to recall that the second and last of these quite literally consisted of just two people and a dog.  I encountered some of them after their first meeting, after they had been moved on to the town centre, as I came out of Tesco.  (Those were the days when it was utterly deserted - how I miss those days).  As far as I could make out, their 'argument' was that the lockdown was an infringement on their rights to do stuff.  To which the obvious counter-argument is that, surely, the majority of us have the right to not to have our right to life and health threatened by behaviour that might spread a highly virulent and potentially fatal virus.  Doe protecting the trghts of the majority outweigh the 'rights' of the few?  None of which they wanted to debate, instead falling back on the defence that the threat of Covid-19 had been exaggerated by false reporting of the fatality rate in order for the government to - well, you can fill the rest in for yourselves.  Standard conspiracy theory stuff.  So there you are - I was going to write about how I was still feeling too ill to come up with a proper post for today.  But somehow, I have. 

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Thursday, July 23, 2020

'Only Big Women for Commissar Grigori'


I'm not sure there's anything I can add to a tagline like that.  For whatever reason, it appealed to me, the reference to 'big women' putting me in mind of the Benny Hill character in The Italian Job:  'Big, I like 'em big!'.  That said, this cover illustration for the July 1959 True Action and its various captions, is relatively restrained by the standards  of men's magazines of the era.  No Nazis doing horrendous things to captive blondes in their underwear, for instance.  Instead we have a bit of 'Commie-baiting', with those Reds using American women as sex slaves.  Although, judging by that motor vehicle, the story looks to be set in the early years of the Russian revolution.  'Shipwrecked Nude on Papeete Pat's Island' sounds more like the usual fare of these publications and, a couple of years down the line, probably would have been the salaciously illustrated cover story.  The men's magazines seemed to have a thing about scantily clad women trapped on islands with a single bloke.  Clearly, it was a popular male adolescent fantasy - the stock in trade of these so called 'armpit slicks'.

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Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Aimless Days

Ever had one of those days where you just can't get down to actually doing anything?  I've just had two in a row - my aimlessness the result of my employer telling me to work from home two days a week but not actually providing me with any work.  For my two upcoming days in the office, there is some work allocated this week.  Unlike last week, when I ended up having to do the stuff I was planning for today and yesterday, in order to stave off boredom.  Simultaneously, management are trying to force us back out onto the streets, despite it not being remotely safe to be doing so yet.  Despite my objections - I've pointed out the fact that I have to have my temperature taken before I can enter the building for a routine dental appointment is pretty definitive proof that things are not back to normal - they are ploughing ahead.  It will be to no avail in my case, as the whole situation is about to be overtaken by events.  Events instigated by me.  I know that I keep hinting at some imminent development in my working life, without ever going into specifics, but I just don't want to jinx it by discussing my plans too widely at this juncture.  Those closest to me are aware of what's going on and, in due course, I'll undoubtedly be writing about it here.  You'll just have to bear with me.

These past few weeks, since my employer arbitrarily decided to recall all those of us considered vulnerable to Covid-19 because of underlying health conditions from special leave, have emphasised the total lack of proper management the organisation suffers from.  There are just too many people promoted way beyond their abilities - a result, in part, of mistaking ambition for ability, more often than not, they aren't the same thing.  Consequently, decision-making rarely seems to be based on facts or logic, let alone practicality.  As the current situation demonstrates, with people being brought back without any clear idea of what it is they are expected to do in the workplace.  This isn't helped by the fact that it is clear that many managers at more senior levels haven't a clue what our jobs actually entail and the risks we are exposed at normal times, let alone during a pandemic.  Indeed, the lack of concern for the health and safety of the workforce continues unabated, despite the fact that we are still living through a pandemic.  But hey, I'm tired of hearing myself moan about all of this - which is why I've finally decided to something about it.  All those weeks of lockdown convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm better off without all the shit this job brings into my life and the sensible thing to do is walk away.  Even without anything else to go to immediately, my finances are sound enough to keep me afloat for several years if necessary, while I find some other source of income.  But, as it turns out, that might not be necessary...

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Monday, July 20, 2020

The Swinging Barmaids (1975)

You go into a double bill of films entitled The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974) and The Swinging Barmaids (1975) without any real expectations.  Certainly, when I settled down to watch them back-to-back on Saturday, I was expecting nothing more than a mildly sleazy few hours entertainment.  As it turned out they were both surprisingly decent pieces of exploitation.  Which, in the case of The Swinging Cheerleaders, shouldn't have been much of a surprise, as it was directed by Jack Hill, a Roger Corman alumni with a solid track record in producing this type of film.  Despite an obviously low budget, it is a very slick looking film with good production values and decent performances from a strong cast.  The Swinging Barmaids is far rougher around the edges and, despite its title, is certainly not a cheerful sex comedy like Cheerleaders.  Instead it is what would now be called a serial killer drama, centered around an LA bar, where the barmaids are being stalked and murdered by psychopath.  There is no mystery as to the killer's identity - he's known to the audience pretty much from the outset.  Indeed, he is even glimpsed by his potential victims when they stumble upon the first murder, but the blonde and hirsute killer disguises himself by shaving off his beard, cutting his hair and dying it dark.  In this guise, he succeeds in getting a job as a barman at the same bar as the barmaids before proceeding to knock off these witnesses one-by-one.

A notable aspect of the film is way in which the murders are portrayed - far more brutally than was the norm even for exploitation films of the era.  The brutality is expressed less through blood and gore and more through the sheer violence of the assaults on the victims, which variously involve stabbings, drownings and strangulation.  These are quite long drawn out and pretty harrowing. But it doesn't end with the killing of the victim - the killer then poses the partially naked bodies and photographs them.  There is also a strong implication of necrophilia, not just in the photography, but also in the police statement that first victim was also raped - this is certainly not depicted while she is alive and struggling with the murderer, implying that it occurs between the murder and the murderer being disturbed by her flatmates.  Strong stuff for the seventies, which only adds to the film's sleazy feel, already accentuated by the scuzzy bar the victims work in.  The killer himself is never glamourised, as often happens in this sort of scenario.  He doesn't have any quirks, any 'signature' bizarre method of murder, he doesn't keep momentos (beyond the photos, that is) or send taunting messages to the authorities.  Nor is he portrayed as an obviously crazed psycho with some complex backstory and/or childhood trauma to 'justify' his actions.  He is simply a violent misogynist. For most of the film he is, on the surface, simply an ordinary guy.  It is only toward the end of the film, when he realises that the police are on to him, that he begins to unravel along the more familiar movie psycho lines.

All of which isn't to say that Swinging Barmaids is a great film, or even necessarily a good film, but it is surprisingly enjoyable in its own sleazy way. The pace is uneven, although it does get off to a flying start, the plot rather gets bogged down until the next murder, and it never manages to build up much suspense - we know who the killer is and who his victims will be, it is even pretty obvious which order they'll be killed in.  Some viewers might object that it is implausible that the waitresses wouldn't recognise the killer when he comes to work at the bar incognito, but to be fair, he does look very different without the beard and with shorter, darker hair.  Nonetheless,in spite of all this, the film is directed by Gus Trikonis with a gritty intensity,  creating a suitably downbeat milieu for its scenario, particularly the dingy 'Swing-a-Ling' bar, full of sweaty and drunken male punters leering over the girls.  While there are plenty of bared breasts on display, the fact that they invariably accompany the murder scenes means that any titillation is effectively neutralised by the amount of brutal violence also on display.  As far as the cast are concerned, Bruce Watson gives an effective turn as Tom, the murderer, while William Smith is somewhat underused as the cop on the case until the film's climax.  Dyanne Thorne, the future Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, features as one of the titular barmaids.  All in all, The Swinging Barmaids provides audiences with a suitably sleazy seventies sexploitation experience, while carying the formula sufficiently to make it stand out from the crowd and deliver surprisingly memorable B-movie.


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Friday, July 17, 2020

All Over by Christmas?

Don't worry, it will all be over by Christmas.  At least, that's what Boris Johnson seems to think,  Except that it won't.  Let's not forget that, right now, we still don't have the tools necessary to successfully contain the Covid-19 coronavirus - an effective test and trace system or a viable vaccine - yet the government is already running down the lockdown while the first wave of the virus is still ongoing.  Judging by the breakdown of any concept of social distancing amongst much of the population, (judging by what I daily experience in my local shopping centre), the authorities are setting the UK up not just for a second spike, but a new upturn in the first wave of the virus.  It isn't as if we don't have examples of the consequences of a hasty relaxation of lockdowns without other measures in place - just look at much of the US, or even Greece, where they've started opening up to foreign tourists and, guess what? That's right, an upsurge in reported cases of Covid-19.  But the UK government want you to think that it is all over - notice how they don't publicise the infection or death rates like they used to?  Yet daily deaths in England are often still in double figures.  Which isn't good.

But it is typical of the short-termism of this government's approach.  Tory donors are losing money, so the economy has to be opened up whether it is safe to do so, or not and we'll worry about the consequences later.  After all, we might have a vaccine by the Autumn.  Except that even if we do, a mass vaccination programme won't happen overnight, even if the hypothetical vaccine could be mass produced at short notice.  Plus, it still isn't clear whether any vaccine currently under development would give long-term immunity - the immunity gained by actually catching the virus only seems to last for a few months.  But facts don't seem to bother our dilettante Prime Minister.  It's all about the short term and the headlines he can generate here and now.  Which is a dangerous strategy which will, eventually, come unstuck.  Not that he would be unduly bothered - he's survived so many public disgraces that another one won't bother either him or the idiots who support him - but it would inevitably have serious consequences for the rest of us.  Yeah, I know that I'm sounding extremely pessimistic, but based on the government's record in managing the pandemic so far, I just don't see anything to be positive about.  On top of that, I've had a working week so dull that a visit to the dentist counted as an exciting diversion.  That, combined with hearing some extremely bad news about a couple of former colleagues, has left me feeling that this has been a week to forget.

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Thursday, July 16, 2020

SOS Concorde (1979)


Not to be confused with The Concorde: Airport '79  (or The Concorde: Airport '80 if you saw it in Europe), the film it is intended to cash in on, SOS Concorde (aka  Concorde Affair '79) is a typical Italian potboiler of its era.  Directed by Ruggero Deodato it features the usual line-up of US actors whose careers were on the slide, looking for a payday in Italy, including James Franciscus, Joseph Cotten and Van Johnson.  As can be seen from the French trailer, it throws all manner of elements into the plot, from underwater sequences, shark attacks and shoot-outs to boat chases and imperilled airliners.  The plot itself has something to do with a Concorde test flight crashing into the sea near Martinique, the result of sabotage by business cartel (led by the inevitable Edmund Purdom) which is involved in selling non-Concorde airliners to South American countries.  

Judging by the trailer, the model work looks surprisingly good in the crash sequences and overall it all has the sort of slickness characteristic of Deodato's films.  The mix and match approach of the various elements and genres is reminiscent of the director's The Atlantis Interceptors, which likewise threw in elements culled from various other recent films.  Never less than versatile, Deodato's next film would be Cannibal Holocaust, probably his best known picture, which became notorious after being labelled a 'video nasty' in the UK.  I'm not sure if SOS Concorde ever had an English language version, although it was dubbed into multiple European languages (under multiple title variations).  So, if you don't like the French trailer, here it is in German, instead (as Das Concorde Inferno):



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Tuesday, July 14, 2020

A Plague of Idiocy

No more troubling dreams to report - just a troubling reality.  Well, possible reality, but I'm taking evasive action - not that I'm able to talk about that yet.  Talking of reality, though, I am getting increasingly frustrated with all the idiots, naysayers, contrarians and just plain irresponsible twats that the coronavirus pandemic has flushed out from under their rocks.  The litany of ignorance I see in the comments following just about any online article about the pandemic are depressing.  These are people seemingly incapable of grasping the most basic of facts, unable to accept evidence which conflicts with their own narrow view.  They decided, you see, that Covid-19 is no worse than the flu and that the only people who die from it are 'already at death's door', and nothing is going to convince the otherwise.  Those scientists who say otherwise, they don't know what they're talking about - it is just common sense isn't it?  And they definitely won't be wearing a mask - a diabolical liberty, that is, an infringement of some rights or other.  In fact, this whole pandemic has been a sham, an excuse for the government to exert more control over people's lives.  Well, these guys aren't sheep like everyone else, they aren't going to go along with the conspiracy, they aren't going to be inoculated with any of these so-called vaccines being developed by Bill Gates - you'll just end up with mind-controlling microchips in your blood stream.

I've reached the stage of just wishing that all these cranks and morons would piss off to their own island somewhere - they could all not wear masks, not take vaccines or observe social distancing to their hearts' content, without endangering anyone else.  If we're really lucky, they'll all infect each other and fucking die.  At which point, we can expect the chorus of hand-wringing conservatives admonishing me for advocating violence.  The self same idiots who spend their time accusing people on the left of being over-sensitive snowflakes.  Fucking hypocrites.  You see how wound up these people have made me?  I can do without the stress, but I just can't help it - it is like watching the march of the morons.  Increasingly, it feels as if everything is running backwards, as science and reason are rejected in favour of ignorance and bigotry.  So, how do we lure these cretins to that island?  Actually, even better than an island, some kind of sealed environment, a ship perhaps?  We could tell them that is a sort of 'Ark', designed to preserve the cream of humanity and that they've all been selected.  Because if there is one thing one can be sure of about these people, it is their sense of self-importance, that they are clearly superior because they can see through all the mundane 'nonsense' peddled by those scientists and other intellectuals.  So, there would be no problem in luring them aboard our hypothetical ship.  Then we can just keep them sailing around until they all die.  If worst comes to worst, we can always scuttle it and send them into the ocean depths.  I know, I know, I'm advocating mass murder again - tough shit, right wing snowflakes.

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Monday, July 13, 2020

A Troubling Dream

I had a troubling dream last night.  Not a nightmare, or anything like that, but just one of those dreams which lingered after I awoke, making me feel uneasy.  A lot of what I remember of it - like all dreams, many of the finer details faded quickly upon awakening - was quite mundane.  It wasn't one of those dreams where I'm on the bridge of a ship, or travelling somewhere exotic or even facing some kind of peril.  Instead, I was working in an office, exactly what this office did, I couldn't tell you.  I don't think that even while I was dreaming it, the nature of the work involved was clear - it was just an office with old-fashioned desks and furniture, possibly on an upper floor.  Judging by the light levels and the way people were dressed, I'd guess that it was all happening during late Autumn, or early Winter, possibly in the run in to Christmas.  I was sharing the office with a female colleague, who was also  friend.  Now, at first, when I was trying to recall the details of the dream, I thought that this woman was an actual person I know, someone I used to work with and remain friends with, but, as is often the case with dreams, people never quite look as they should. let alone behave as they should and, after further thought, I rejected this identity for the apparently unnamed dream friend.

So far, so normal.  Just a regular dream.  But it started to get interesting when the working day ended in the dream office  - it seemed that it was closing down for a couple of weeks, (reinforcing my impression that it was approaching Christmas), and the prospect of not seeing my friend/colleague for that period distressed me.  As we prepared to leave and I tried to speak to her, it became apparent that she was depressed about something.  Out on the street, I offered my support and tried to intimate my feelings toward her, the response being that she had to collect her child from school, (this, at the time added to my impression that this was my actual, real-life, friend, who also has a young child).  Every response had to be dragged from her.  For some reason, at this point I realised that I didn't  know whether she was still with the child's father, or not.  I agreed to accompany her to the school, the route being, apparently, cross country, (startlingly, I recognised the path we were taking, not from real life, but from another dream).  Along the way, my friend/colleague began an embittered tirade about the state of her life, including how useless the child's father was,hjow horribly the child wa turning out (for which she blamed its teachers), culminating with the revelation that the father - whose name was Richard - was dying.  All of this, the subject matter and the revelations, but particularly the vehemence, left me stunned and confused, realising that she wasn't the person I'd thought her to be.  I found myself thinking that I'd wasted a large part of my life trying to pursue a relationship with her.

At which point, the whole dream unravelled, and I awoke, still feeling that sense of despair at having wasted my life chasing an illusion.  That someone I had cared about had turned out to be an embittered and apparently uncaring individual.  The latter part of the dream remained so clear that ended up sat on the edge of my bed for some time, contemplating whether it had some significance.  Had I, in reality, wasted years of my life on the unrequited passions for various women?  If nothing else, thinking about the dream in this way resulted in me rejecting the idea that the dream fried was in any representative of the real-life friend I had at first thought her to be - my actual friend has never, to my knowledge, expressed such bitterness.  Moreover, she would never speak of her child in the terms in which the dream friend spoke of hers.  As for the mysterious 'Richard', the dying father of the child (whose actual relationship to the dream friend remained unclear at the dream's end), I am t a loss as to where he came from: as far as I can recall, I've never had a female friend with a partner, past or present, called Richard.  Anyway, as I said at the outset, there was something about this dream that troubled me greatly.  Perhaps it was the doubts about my relationships in the real world that it raised in me.  Or maybe it was the way in which it confused me, temporarily, about a real life friend. Whatever it was, it has caused it to linger in my memory all day.  Hopefully, by writing about ut here, I can finally, so to speak, put this dream to bed.

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Friday, July 10, 2020

Selling Stuff


More TV ads from the seventies, when Bruce Forsythe could be found selling Stork margarine.  He wasn't young even then, with his soliciting of young women's phone numbers just making him seem like a dirty old man.   See, it wasn't just Jimmy Savile being creepy back then - they were all at it.  Blatantly at it.  But that was a woman's role back then, particularly in adverts - to be a sex object.  That is, when they weren't cleaning the kitchen floor (just why is 'Vigor' spelt the US way, ehere has the 'u' gone?), or remembering to buy their husband his non-prescription drugs, (albeit the inferior ones: Beecham's Hot Lemon Drink was no match for the rival Lemsip).  Then again, they might be prancing around in their underwear to advertise marmalade, (complete with Robinson's golliwog logo - didn't you know that racism didn't exist in the seventies - it's all leftist revisionism?). 

Advertising tissues - man sized ones, of course - now, that's mans work, as Tom Baker's manly voice over proves.  Just one of many he provided for anyone who'd meet his fees back in those days, (playing the Doctor didn't pay that well).  Which Sun Pat peanut butter clearly wouldn't, preferring a catchy jingle instead of Sir Tom of Baker's mellifluous tones.  I don't ever remember it giving off a radioactive glow, though.  Avon, meanwhile, was going for a more glamourous and upmarket image, it's reps now smart professional women (for selling cosmetics door-to-door was still women's work - men sharpened knives or sold vacuum cleaners), rather than being a part-time job for cash strpped housewives.  Another jingle announces that the seventies had discovered the joys of regular bowel movements courtesy of roughage.  What a picture it paints of British society at the time - all those friendly people saying 'Hi' and policemen not taking bribes or beating up ethnic minorities.  It was such a friendly society that women regularly thrust their breasts at you to demonstrate their non-slip underwear.  That's something you just don't see anymore - TV commercials for women's underwear. They were quite an education for my younger self, as I found myself regularly exposed to 'cross your heart' bras, girdles, non-laddering tights and the like, all modelled by attractive young women.  Dad's Army must have finished by 1977 - it's the only reason I can think of as to why John Laurie was advertising cook books.  Apparently, your milkman could give you one. Having kicked this commercial break off with an old fossil like Brucie, it seems only apt that it wraps up with an ad extolling the virtues of fossil fuels.  How times change - nowadays multinationals like Esso are seen as planet-raping environment polluting bastards.  Back then, they could get away with using an endangered species as a mascot. Ah, the seventies...

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Thursday, July 09, 2020

Eaten Alive! (1980)


You know how it is: it's a blustery Sunday afternoon and you decide that what you need in your life right now is a dose of Italian cannibal action.  Next thing you know, you find yourself watching Umberto Lenzi's Eaten Alive! (1980).  Whilst not up there in the first rank of the sub-genre, with the likes of Cannibal Holocaust or Cannibal Ferox, Lenzi's film is, nonetheless, an enjoyable pot-boiler which mixes a Jim Jones style cult into the plot for good measure.  Films of this type generally use one of two formats: in the first, they adopt a Mondo style, presenting themselves as 'found footage', in the second, they are presented as jungle adventure stories, much in vein of Indiana Jones, but with lots of gore, nudity and sex. Eaten Alive! very much falls into the latter category, following the pretty much standard plot device of a party of white westerners forced into a cannibal infested jungle in search of someone, or something.  In this instance we have US heiress Sheila (Janet Agren) travelling from New York to the jungles of New Guinea in search of her sister, Diana (Paola Senatore), who has joined a cult led by Jonas Melvin (Ivan Rassimov), which has ensconced itself deep in cannibal territory in the jungle.  To guide her, Sheila engages the services of Vietnam deserter turned soldier of fortune Mark (Robert Kerman). 

Like many Italian exploitation films of the era, (Zombie Flesh Eaters, Contamination and Zombie Holocaust, for instance), Eaten Alive! features a New York shot prologue, before moving its action to New Guinea, (actually Sri Lanka, which also stood in for New Guinea in Sergio Martino's Mountain of the Cannibal God).  It actually gets off to a cracking start in New York, with a series of murders-by-blowpipe, the assassin being New Guinea native eliminating some of Jonas' enemies.  Which segues us into the plot proper, as the police investigation intersects with Sheila's search for her sister, as she learns from Mel Ferrer's anthroplogist, that Jonas and his group have decamped to New Guinea.  Most of the film's main narrative focuses on Sheila, Mark and Diana's attempts to escape the clutches of Jonas' 'purification cult', with the cannibals being a peripheral presence until the film's climactic escape sequences, when the protagonists swap the perils of the cult for the dangers of running the gauntlet of the cannibals.  Inevitably, some of them get eaten alive in some extremely gory sequences, before the authorities turn up to rescue the others.  Jonas, meanwhile, gets the rest of the cult members to commit mass suicide, before vanishing.

In common with several other Italian exploitation films, Eaten Alive! tries, rather half heartedly, to weld a sub-text about exploitation to its narrative.  In this case, it attempts to create an historical thread linking Jonas' exploitation of his acolytes for profit with Sheila's family's historical exploitation of slaves, (she and her sister being the heirs to the family fortune accrued from cotton plantations).  All the while, of course, (and with no apparent sense of irony), the film exploits the 'primitive' natives of New Guinea for the entertainment of a western audience, depicting them as blood thirsty cannibals.  Not to mention its exploitation of the female cast, with nudity, ritual rapes and their ultimate objectification as various of them have their breasts and buttocks sliced off and eaten, (sometimes after being raped - the ultimate sexual consumption of women by men).  On top of all this, the audience is also subjected to the usual parade of animal cruelty, as various jungle animals are gorily slaughtered on screen.  This latter aspect is 'justified' as it demonstrates the savagery of nature, which Jonas' cult is mirroring in its 'purification' rituals.  In order to be 'purified' of the contamination of civilisation, its acolytes must endure various painful primitive rites which supposedly bring them closer to nature.

It has to be said that Eaten Alive! packs a lot of incident into ninety or so minutes.  Despite its token attempts at a sub text, it is pure exploitation, but, under veteran Lenzi's direction, technically well made and well paced exploitation.  While its shocks are crude and obvious, they aren't overplayed, with the most extensive cannibal sequences being confined to the last ten to fifteen minutes, (although we have beheadings, rapes and various tortures prior to this).  Moreover, like most Italian films from the eighties, while the gore is extensive, it is never really that realistic, eliciting, for the most part, disbelieving laughs rather than nausea.  The cast, in the main, are adequate for this sort of thing, with Rassimov making an imposing and suitably sinister cult leader, in turns charismatic and cruel, his performance never quite topples over into parody.  The film's biggest weaknesses are those common to this entire sub genre: the reduction of native peoples to crude, racist, stereotypes of the sort popularised during the age of imperialism and the objectification of women.  The locations, both in New York and Sri Lanka are well used, the the dense jungle of the latter echoing the concrete canyons of the former.  The biggest problem with the location work being that Sri Lanka isn't New Guinea and the local extras simply don't look like New Guinea natives.  But what the heck, it was tropical and exotic and the people dark skinned which, in exploitation film terms, was close enough.  After all, Sri Lanka also stood in for Africa in Sergio Martino's The Great Crocodile, despite being part of an entirely different continent.  As I said, Eaten Alive! isn't top rank Italian cannibal mayhem, being an obvious cash in on the success of Cannibal Holocaust, but it neatly encapsulates all of the main tropes of the genre in a mindlessly entertaining package.

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Tuesday, July 07, 2020

The Pure Hell of Tuesdays

Tuesday is rapidly turning into a 'hump' day for me - I spend most of it feeling tired and listless, unable to focus on anything and plagued by vague feelings of dissatisfaction.  Perhaps it is because I only work a four day week: Tuesday becomes the equivalent to Wednesday, that awkward midweek day which always feels as if it is neither one thing nor the other.  Except, of course, that these days, Wednesday, in my four day week, is close enough to the end of the working week for me that it doesn't feel like a drag.  But I suspect the real reason that this time of the week  drags so much for me has more to do with the sheer boredom of work than anything else.  Since being recalled to work, I've spent the first two days of each week mainly working from home.  Except that there is actually no work to do.  The other two days are spent in the office, doing the most tedious admin work that management can find for me.  Really, it requires no intellectual input, no skill, has no variation and is just dull.  So, by Tuesday, not only have I endured a couple of days desperately trying to find work to do from home, but I'm facing the prospect of two further days of utter, soul destroying boredom. 

If work really doesn't have any suitable work for me to do, (my regular work is all but impossible thanks to lockdown restrictions and the stuff I do in the office has the whiff of desperation about it, just something someone has come up with to occupy me, with no actual value to it), then why don't they just offer me redundancy?   The answer, presumably, is that would cost them money, (under current rules they'd have to offer me 21 months worth of wages).  Although, surely, not as much as paying me to, essentially, do nothing.  Perhaps they are hoping that by subjecting me to this mind numbing boredom, I'll just up and leave.  Well, in point of fact, I do have plans in that direction, but nothing on that front is likely to occur before September.  In the meantime, I just don't know how much longer I can endure this mind crushing dullness.  It really is appalling, there are times during my office days when I, quite literally, want to scream.  There are times when it feels physically painful.  I can feel my life draining away as I sit there, doing this meaningless task, by rote.  The prospect of spending another two days doing this shit fills me with dread.

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Monday, July 06, 2020

Racist Fish

Some people are still getting very worked up about statues being pulled down.   As I've noted before, statues are inanimate objects, attacking them is not equivalent to attacking the actual person. I’d much rather that people vented their anger against these symbols than against flesh and blood people. Because, like it or not, they are symbols, often very powerful ones, representing not just the individuals whose likeness they carry, but of the ideas and ideology they represented.  It is important to remember that, more often than not, monuments of this sort are erected without recourse to any democratic process: more often than not they are the result of lobbying on the part of political groups, institutions or corporate bodies, all with an interest in perpetuating the ideas represented by said monuments.  Conversely, surely if people en masse decide to remove them, this is an clear expression of the ‘will of the people’.  Or some of the people, at least, which was got them erected in the first place.  Moreover, statues are as subject to the process of history as any thing else – when statues of Hitler, Lenin and Saddam, for instance, were erected, it was because they had some kind of populist support. But times move on and what we know of them changes and consequently so does our perception of them. Should we wait for some civic committee to decide whether we should tear them down, or not?  Or is it better to let them be swept away by the tide of history?

Not that any of the above should be taken as a blanket endorsement on my part for the indiscriminate destruction or defacement of public monuments.  Indeed, I have some serious reservations about the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol - they really shouldn't have thrown it into the harbour.  That's just wanton pollution.  The same applies to the toppling of the statue of Christopher Columbus in Boston the other day - don't put the bloody thing in the harbour.  Actually, I have another problem with the latter case - namely that I can't really see the political significance of it.  While I'm sure that it is possible to argue that Columbus is responsible for all of the inequalities in the contemporary US by virtue of having discovered the Americas for Europe which, in turn, led to its colonisation by white Europeans, their importation of black slaves and the eventual founding of the US itself, it is a bit tortuous.  This, surely, is one of those cases where the statue is clearly celebrating the historical event - the discovery of the Americas by Europeans - rather than simply the individual it portrays.  Interestingly, this particular statue isn't of any great antiquity - it dates only to the 1980s.  Which is another often overlooked point about many of the statues being targeted by protestors: they are, more often than not, relatively modern, rather than having been erected by contemporaries of their subject in innocent celebration of them, before everything was known about them.

But the bit of monumental vandalism which has most amused me of late has been the graffiti sprayed on the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen: 'Racist Fish'.  I mean, this is magnificently surreal.  What does it even mean?  It raises so many questions, not least of which is, as she is only half fish, is it only her lower half which is racist?  More than that, even, just how can a fish, let alone a half fish, be racist?  Does it discriminate against molluscs?  I do so love it when 'protest' topples over into the nonsensical.  It is as if somebody was so wound up, so determined to protest at something, anything, they just daubed the first two words that came into their head on the statue.  Wonderful stuff.   But to return to the original point, it occurs to me that many of those now decrying the toppling of statues of slave traders and Confederate war generals (who wants to celebrate those losers, anyway?), are the self same people who were cheering and whooping when those statues of Lenin and Saddam came down. Just saying.

'Racist Fish', indeed!

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Friday, July 03, 2020

Two Complete Detective Books


Time for another pulp cover.  This is from a 1955 edition of Two Complete Detective Books.  It was a very accurate title, as each quarterly edition featured two crime novels, which had usually already been published as books.  Sometimes they managed to acquire the magazine rights to a novel prior to its book publication, though.  Occasionally, they would have to cheat a bit and one of the featured 'novels' would actually be a novella, either an original or a reprint from another magazine.  During the fifties it was a popular concept, allowing readers without the finances to buy hardbacks the opportunity to read novels in a cheap pulp format.  For authors, it meant an additional fee on top of those they received for the book publication.  The two novels featured here are interesting as they are by reasonably well known authors.  The Bride Wore Black is actually one of Cornell Woolrich's most celebrated works, filmed by Francois Truffaut in 1968.  By the time it was reprinted here, it was already fifteen years old

The second novel, a retitling of Operation Pax, is part of Micheal Innes' long-running 'Inspector Appleby' series and was of more recent vintage, dating only from 1951.  It is a somewhat unusual choice, being more of a traditional British crime mystery rather than a true pulp novel.  Two Complete Detective Novels was one of a series of such titles from the same publisher.  These included Two Western Books and Two Complete Science Adventure Novels, both following the same format.  The latter is notable for featuring  Isaac Asimov's first novel, Pebble in the Sky in its first issue.  The publisher, Fiction House, were prolific publishers of pulp magazines, most notably the notorious science fiction pulp Planet Stories, famed for its covers featuring women in brass brassieres being menaced by tentacled aliens.  Sadly, by the late fifties, the pulp market was in severe decline and Fiction House, like many of its contemporaries, went out of business.

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Thursday, July 02, 2020

The Amorous Milkman (1973)



Being a glutton for punishment, I decided to sit through another seventies sex comedy the other weekend.  This time it was The Amorous Milkman (1973), a non-series sex comedy that nonetheless followed the established template of using a tradesman of some sort as the focus of a series of sexploits linked to their job.  Now, on paper, a milkman, with his early morning rounds, delivering his creamy bottled white stuff to young housewives, (see how easy it is to start whipping up the innuendo?), would provide ideal fodder for this sort of thing.  Well, perhaps on paper it did, the film being an adaptation of a novel of the same name.  A novel by actor Derren Nesbitt, who also acts as director, producer and writer of the film.  That's right, the same Derren Nesbitt who played the Gestapo officer in Where Eagles Dare.  While Nesbitt was an effective portrayer of crooks, hardmen and occasional policemen, The Amorous Milkman indicates that he was no auteur when it came to film making.  The pace is badly off, the gags ill-timed and their delivery frequently stilted.  Curiously, the whole thing has the feel of being something from the fag end of an era: peddling tired tropes that had long been played out while the cast joylessly go through the motions.  Yet, in reality, it comes from relatively early in the sex comedy cycle, slightly pre-dating Confessions of a Window Cleaner, the picture that was to firmly establish sex films as both popular entertainment and box office earners.

Despite adhering to pretty much the same formula as the Confessions series - the parade of familiar British acting and comedy faces, including Diana Dors, Bill Fraser, Alan Lake, Fred Emney and even Ray Barrett, the inevitable sex romps gone awry, the various slapstick sight gaga - in The Amorous Milkman none of it hits the mark.  The key differences between Confessions of a Window Cleaner and Amorous Milkman lies in the fact that the former boasts both an experienced director, in the form off Val Guest and a charismatic star in Robin Askwith.  Guest moves things along at a decent pace and maintains an even tone of broad and bawdy comedy throughout the film.  Nesbitt, in Amorous Milkman, seems unable to do this, with a violent turn toward the film's end, with the titular protagonist getting beaten up by a local gangster's thugs, jarring badly with the previous attempts at levity.  His lead actor, Brendan Price, is also problematic.  Price had already starred in one sex comedy - Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman - prior to this role.  In neither film did he convince as a would be lothario.  It isn't that Price is a bad actor - he subsequently enjoyed a successful career on stage and TV - but he simply unsuited to this sort of role, lacking the charisma and comic timing required to pull it off.  Askwith, by comparison, seemed born to play these roles, with his gawky personality, adeptness and physical comedy and comic timing.  Whereas Price constantly underplays his character, thereby undermining potentially comic scenes and allowing gags to fall flat, Askwith always seems to know when to overplay for full comic effect.

Like many films of its era, some plot developments in The Amorous Milkman seem disconcerting to contemporary audiences, most particularly when Price is (falsely) accused of sexual assault.  It isn't just that, from a modern perspective, this seems a very dark route to go down, but also the fact that it is treated as a joke and accompanied by various rape 'gags'.  Perhaps with a  defter touch, this could have been played for black comedy, but Nesbitt as both writer and director simply seems o lack the skill and experience to achieve this.  But not everything about the film is bad.  Its depiction of early seventies Britain is unflinching in its eye for the details of just how dreary it could be, particularly for young single men in low paid jobs.  The utter squalour of Price's bedsit (actually a very accurate depiction of such dwellings) contrasts sharply with the bright and shining middle class kitchens of the likes of Diana Dors.  Sadly, though, The Amorous Milkman is, overall, a something of a depressing watch, with none of the individual scenes or performances especially memorable.  The whole thing feels a missed opportunity.

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