Friday, October 30, 2020

Requiem for a Vampire (1971)


Requiem For a Vampire (1971) is pretty much representative of the vampire films of Jean Rollin.  It is also the only one that I've seen recently enough to feel confident talking about here.  Granted, the version I saw was the US edit entitled Caged Virgins, which runs a scant seventy minutes, or so, compared to the original French running time of ninety five minutes.  Nevertheless, even this severely truncated version gives a decent representation of what Rollin's films are about - less interested in the conventional horror aspects of their subject matter than they are in using the tropes of the genre to create dream-like erotic fables.  Rollin's films were always notable for their eccentric plot development - more often than not the result of him commencing filming without a completed script, instead simply seeing how the initial scenarios developed - something which the severe editing of this version of Requiem accentuates.  The film opens with two girls dressed as clowns in a car driven by a male associate, apparently being chased down country lanes, exchanging gunfire with their pursuers.  When the driver is shot and the car subsequently crashes, they set both alight and escape into the woods, divesting themselves of their costumes.  After hiding out in a graveyard, (during which one of them, Michelle, falls into an open grave and is nearly buried alive), they stumble across an apparently abandoned, but bat-infested, castle.  

After making love in a convenient bed, they encounter a mysterious organ playing woman who follows them around the castle and proves impervious to their bullets, before being attacked by a group of men intent on raping them.  A vampire woman mysterious woman intervenes to prevent this and the mysterious women they previously encountered tries to bite them, before they get away again.  It eventually transpires that they have stumbled into the castle of an ancient vampire, the last of his kind, who wants to vampirise the girls as part of an attempt to perpetuate his kind.  The catch is that they must be virgins.  Come daylight, the girl try to escape, but find that every route they take leads them back to the castle.  While Michelle becomes attracted to the idea of immortality and perpetual youth as a vampire, her friend, Marie, is less than enthusiastic.  While both of them are bitten by the vampire as the first part of his plan, Marie succeeds in losing her virginity to one of the grave diggers from the cemetery, who she lures to the castle.  Michelle, meanwhile, as agreed to lure another man to the castle, but to provide blood for her new friends rather than for sex.  These developments severely strain Michelle and Marie's relationship, culminating in Michelle whipping a chained and naked Marie in the dungeons.  Eventually, however, their love prevails and the vampire releases them and, accepting his fate seals himself into his tomb.  

Of course, this slim and meandering plot is of secondary importance to Rollin, who is clearly more interested in creating a dream like atmosphere and some striking imagery.  Indeed, the visual aspect of the film is clearly of primary importance to Rollin - no dialogue, for instance, is spoken for at least half an hour.  His characteristic static style is on display throughout the film, with long scenes in which nothing much seems to happen, yet still feel hugely significant.  The vampires themselves are hardly innovative, resembling sub-Hammer stereotypes, but, of course, they aren't the real focus of the film.  That lies with the two girls, Michelle and Marie, and with Rollin's exploration of the concept of innocence.  Most importantly, the way in which innocence is ordinarily interpreted in sexual terms, the popular idea that virginity equates to some kind of purity - the vampire seeks virgins as he assumes that their 'innocence' and lack of wordliness will make them more susceptible to the temptations of vampirism. Certainly, they won't be distracted from a lust for blood by the temptations of the flesh.  But with Michelle and Maria, he is mistaken in making such an equation: from the film's outset, we, the audience, can see that they certainly aren't 'innocent'.  Despite their innocent looks, (the actresses portraying them are suitably child-like enough to convey am impression of naivety and purity), they are clearly involved in violent crime and have no conventional sense of morality.

Moreover, he is equally mistaken in his belief that simply because they are sexually untouched by men, that they are not sexual creatures.  Ironically, this supernatural being, a representative of evil, is seemingly hidebound by conventional ideas of morality and sexuality.  Which is part of the film's other overarching theme, that of contrasts, be that the contrast between the two girls, (one is dark and brunette, the other fair and blonde) or between the static world of the vampire's castle and the modern, far more dynamic, modern world outside.  It quickly becomes clear that the world of the vampires is firmly rooted in the past - quite literally risen from a tomb - and cannot exist without the castle's boundaries, in the present day, with its different sexual mores and concepts of morality.  Their world is one of simple dualities: good and evil; light and dark; innocence and wickedness.  They simply can't comprehend the world in which Michelle and Marie have come from, which, ultimately, is their downfall.

Requiem for a Vampire is a beautiful film to look at but not, in any conventional sense, a horror film.  (Rollin was capable of making more conventional genre films, such as The Grapes of Death, but his vampire films are always more concerned with using the trappings of the horror film to explore ideas of eroticism and sexuality).  Certainly, its content proved problematic in 1971 for distributors and censors in both the US and UK, (even with the provision of some alternative versions of the scenes involving nudity, in which the actors involved keep their underwear on), hence the severe editing on the US version I saw.  In the UK, it was refused certification outright, (allegedly the whipping scene was just too much for the BBFC), finally appearing on video in 1993, with nearly seven minutes of cuts.  But even in the cut down version I saw, Requiem is, if you are in the right mood, a fascinating and enjoyable experience, entrancing the viewer with its dream like progression through a series of hallucinatory vignettes. 

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Thursday, October 29, 2020

Evil Town (1987)


The web is full of people declaring that this or that movie is the 'worst film they've ever seen' - you can pretty much guarantee that they are talking about an Ed Wood movie or some other impoverished fifties or sixties B-movie.  Their cinematic experience of dross is clearly very limited.  Sure, the more adventurous among them might have seen an Andy Milligan film or two but, as I've noted before, these poverty row exercises by film-makers with limited or (in the case of Ed Wood) no talent whatsoever, were never going to be anything other than bad.  If only these bad movie cultists would venture a little bit further into the exploitation jungle, they'd find some tragically bad movies.  Tragically, because they could have been quite decent.  Indeed, the traces of their potential that are still visible make their overall badness all the more tragic.  Perhaps the worst example of such a film that I've seen recently is Evil Town (1987).  Eventually released in 1987 direct-to-video, Evil Town represents the culmination of no less than three attempts to complete a film originally started in 1973, under the title God Bless Grandma and Grandpa.  The fact that the finished product boasts no less than three credited directors, at least one of them pseudonymous, is a clear indication that the film has serious problems.  Lurking behind the directorial pseudonym 'Edward Collins', is none other than Curtis Hanson, later to direct the likes of The River Wild and LA Confidential, and it is Hanson who was responsible for the original, and best, footage in the film.

As will be obvious from the above, Evil Town had a complex, not to mention somewhat obscure, production history.  A very good account of what probably happened to create the final film can be found here.  In short, in 1973 Hanson started shooting God Bless Grandma and Grandma, in which two young couples find themselves stranded in a small coastal town apparently inhabited exclusively by elderly people, after their camper van breaks down. It eventually becomes clear that their superficially genial hosts - all played as the sort of small town caricatures found in classic Hollywood movies - are hiding a secret and have no intention of letting them leave.  It transpires that the town's inhabitants, led by the local doctor, are somehow using young people (presumably by harvesting their organs) in order to extend their own lives - having depleted their local resources by preying upon their own children, they now kidnap unwary young travelers.  By all accounts, the film was almost completed but, for reasons unknown, production was halted.  In 1974, it resumed, but with additions to cast and script that altered the story line somewhat.  Exactly who directed this new footage is unclear - it certainly doesn't look or feel quite like Hanson's original footage.  In the new segments, it is revealed that the real force behind the town's activities is a scientist - Dr Shagetz - working at his nearby clinic to extract secretions from the pituitary glands of the young victims with which to rejuvenate his elderly patients.  This process reduces the donors to a mindless, zombie-like, state.

These changes alter the film from being a slow-burning creepy small town horror thriller, into a more standard mad-scientist movie.  These new sequences star veteran actor Dean Jagger as Dr Shagetz, however, he barely interacts with the existing characters.  it seems that, due to the break in filming, most of the previous cast were unavailable for these scenes.  Indeed, only two of the film's original leads appear - James Keach and Michele Marsh - the other two - Robert Walker and Doria Cook - are perfunctorily killed off, their demises curtly reported in a single line of dialogue.   Shagetz tries to enlist Keach's help (his character is a doctor), but the latter turns the tables, killing Shagetz and escaping with Marsh, pursued by hordes of old age pensioners.  This new version of the film went through several titles: God Bless Dr Shagetz, God Damn Dr Shagetz and just plain Dr Shagetz.  It wasn't released under any of them, possibly due to the financial difficulties of its production company.  Whatever the reason, it sat on the shelf until the 1980s, when the footage was acquired by Mardi Rustam's Mars Productions.  Clearly feeling that the existing film was too tame for eighties audiences, Rustam shot yet more new scenes.  

Rustam's new scenes consist of two distinct blocks.  The first of these are a series of scenes at the hospital, featuring Jillian Kesnar as the head nurse - some of these are quite well integrated with the existing footage.  At one point, for instance, the camera seems to cut from Dr Schaeffer (as Shagetz has been redubbed) to Kesner reacting to his speech.  But they are never in the same shot and, the quality of the Kesner footage is clearly lit differently and shot on different stock to the earlier footage.  The other new scenes form a complete new sub-plot, featuring a pair of dim-witted garage mechanics who are doing the actual kidnapping of young travelers.  Not satisfied with just abducting them for experimentation, they also rape the girls they capture before handing them over to the hospital.  One of the women they kidnap is former Playboy Playmate Linda Wiesmeier and we are 'treated' to scenes of her running topless through the woods pursued by the two hicks, her undoubtedly impressive assets bouncing all over the place.  She is subsequently tied to a chair topless and pawed by the two idiot-rapists.  (These scenes clearly identify the intended audience as adolescent males, probably of an age when tying a woman up half clothed was the only way they could imagine ever getting their hands on a real pair of breasts).  They later abduct two other girls who, with Wiesmeier, succeed in escaping and running their captors over with their van.  There are crossovers between these two sets of scenes, with a couple of characters popping up in both.  The resulting film was finally edited together in 1985 and titled Evil Town, before spending another couple of years on the shelf, (presumably because of its many similarities to Rustam's other 1985 film, Evils of the Night), prior to its VHS release.  

The finished film is a mess.  While Rustam's late additions are easily the crassest part of the production, adding little to the overall plot and lacking any style whatsoever, it is the 1974 sequences with Dean Jagger which truly scupper the film.  The biggest problem lies with Jagger's performance, which is truly terrible.  While it is always sad to an actor of Jagger's stature, (a former winner of the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, no less), reduced to appearing in poverty row productions, they do, at least, usually bring a degree of class to the proceedings.  If that's what the producer's were hoping for here, it seems clear that Jagger had other ideas.  His line readings are perversely eccentric, (his pronunciation of the word 'pituitary' for example, is utterly bizarre), spitting out his dialogue with a staccato rhythm which frequently makes him sound like a New York gangster rather than a brilliant scientist.  He exaggerates his natural speech impediment to the point that it sounds like a parody and is clearly contemptuous of proceedings - and who could blame him?  The result, of course, is to completely undermine these sections of the film, completely undermining the tension and suspense built up in the earlier, Curtis Hanson-directed sections which preceded them.  The situation isn't helped by co-star James Keach appearing completely uninterested in the film by this point, in complete contrast to his earlier (1973) scenes.

But isn't the later 1974 and 1985 sequences which make Evil Town truly bad.  Rather, it is the fact that a far better film can still glimpsed through them.  Watching the earlier footage is frustrating, as it indicates that God Bless Grandma and Grandpa could have been a disturbing and suspensful low key shocker.  Hanson's original footage seems to show a slow-burning thriller, with the town's dark secrets being gradually revealed.  Sadly, in the finished product that is Evil Town, this footage is chopped up, interrupted at various points by new and inferior sequences, destroying its rhythm and throwing away any idea of suspense.  The crudeness of the sub-plot with the mechanics and their topless captives contrasts unfavourably with the far subtler build up of the original story.  Bizarre and disturbing original scenes involving Keach and friends having to physically fight off their elderly antagonists, or murderous pensioners bashing people's heads in with hammers, which should have been highlights, are pretty much thrown away in favour of the cruder 'shocks' of the new plot elements.  Creepy dialogue, such as one elderly couple reminiscing about the loss of their son, with the father reassuring his wife that 'he had died for a greater cause', ultimately lead nowhere in the finished film.  Likewise, the avuncular town doctor, clearly being built up to be revealed as the main villain, abruptly vanishes from the plot, with Keach simply being told that he is 'busy'.  While I doubt very much that God Bless Grandma and Grandpa would ever have set the box office alight, from what remains of it, it does look as if it could have been the sort of low key, small scale horror film that could easily have built a cult following and become a minor classic of the genre.  Sadly, we are instead left with Evil Town.

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Tuesday, October 27, 2020

I Drink Your Blood/I Eat Your Skin (1970)


I Drink Your Blood/I Eat Your Skin is probably one of the most infamous exploitation double bills of the early seventies.  I recently watched the two movies back-to-back, recreating the experience of 1970 -71 grindhouse audiences.  To state the obvious first, nobody actually drinks anybody's blood, let alone eats any skin, in either of the films.  Both were retitled by producer and distributor Jerry Gross to provide a memorably titled double bill - director David E Durston had originally wanted to title I Drink Your Blood Phobia, or Hydro-Phobia, while I Eat Your Skin had originally been titled Zombies, but was rechristened with its new title after Gross bought it to form the lower half of his double bill.  The films present a startling contrast - most obviously I Drink Your Blood is in glorious colour, whereas I Eat Your Skin (which had been sitting on the shelf, unreleased, since 1965) is in monochrome.  But the two are also a stark contrast in style and quality.  It has to be said that I Drink Your Blood is a surprisingly well made film for its era and genre.  It has excellent colour cinematography and sound quality, a far cry from the usual cheap colour processes, grainy film quality and tinny sound encountered in many seventies exploitation pieces. The editing is also far more professional looking than the usual choppy cutting of low budget schlock.  Indeed, the whole thing is very neatly cut into a surprisingly slick looking package.  While the cast might be unknowns and amateurs they are, on the whole, not at all bad.  In particular, Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury impresses as Horace Bones, the film's Manson-like main villain.

While by current standards the film's content might seem relatively tame, back in 1970 it was pretty strong said.  The action is pretty brutal, with decapitations, shootings, stabbings, pitchforkings amongst the various ways in which characters are dispatched.  The violence is graphic with plenty of gore flying about.  It seems clear that the main influences on the film were George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, released a couple of years earlier, and the crimes of the Charles Manson family.  The plot is kept simple - a group of hippie satanists led by Horace Bones rock up in a small town, which is near deserted and scheduled to be demolished as part of a nearby dam-building project.  A young local boy, whose sister and grandfather have been victimised and abused by the gang, (the sister was drugged and raped, the old man beaten and fed LSD), injects blood from a rabid dog he has killed and injects it into some meat pies that he sells to the hippies.  (Luckily, they weren't vegetarians).  The rabid hippies go on a violent rampage, clashing with some of the construction crew, who they also infect - the remaining uninfected local residents find themselves under siege as the construction crew's manager tries to find help.  There are some unintentionally amusing moments, such as when some of the locals fend a band of rabid hippies by splashing water from a lake at them, (one of the symptoms of rabies, of course, being hydrophobia), but, on the whole it is pretty intense and harrowing stuff, with the hippies turning on each other and sympathetic characters ruthlessly dispatched.  It all culminates in a siege at the bakery (the origin of the infected pies) before the police finally turn up and gun down the remaining rabid hippies and construction workers.

I Drink Your Blood's true significance lies in the fact that it is one of a number of films of its era which marked a turning point in horror and exploitation film development.  Whereas the genre had, up to this point, focused either on Gothic tales featuring supernatural menaces, or cheap monster flicks aimed at adolescents, with Night of the Living Dead (1968), the emphasis switched to contemporary set stories featuring very human monsters, clearly aimed at more adult audiences.  The supernatural was banished in favour of more mundane explanations for their horrors - psychological disorders, infections, or sexual depravity, for instance.  Even the zombies of Night of the Living Dead were explained away in pseudo-scientific as being the result of radiation rather than traditional Voodoo.  Plots became subservient to serving up a spectacle of brutality and realistic violence.  In the case of I Drink Your Blood, events aren't even set in motion by some malign external influence, like shady government experiments, but instead by an angry child's desire for some kind of justice against those who have harmed his family, with events quickly spiraling out of control and, thanks to his actions, even more harm is visited upon his community.  These were horrors which, it seemed, really could intrude into the audience's real lives.  I Drink Your Blood was one of the first films to follow Night of the Living Dead's lead, ramping up the blood and violence, presenting them in colour and providing a plausible threat that recalled the still recent events of the Sharon Tate murders.

By contrast, while I Eat Your Skin might date back to 1965, it could just have easily have been made twenty years earlier.  A tepid tale of Voodoo in the Caribbean, it breaks absolutely no new ground.  With its grainy black and white photography, poor sound quality and cheap make up, it encompasses all of the usual faults of B-movie production that its companion piece avoids.  It is old fashioned in every department, featuring a plot by a local official - aided and abetted by the local mad scientist - to create an army of zombies with which he hopes to achieve global domination.  Featuring little in the way of action or suspense, it creaks its way through ninety or so minutes of tedium.  Believe me, after watching I Drink Your Blood, which sprints through a similar running time, I Eat Your Skin comes as a real downer.  You can see why it was the lower half of the double bill - even in 1970 few drive in audiences would have been prepared to sit through it to get to the main feature.   So, although it was fun to recreate this classic double bill in the comfort of my own home, I have to say that I wouldn't have been disappointed if I hadn't seen I Eat Your SkinI Drink Your Blood, by contrast, remains essential viewing for aficionados of seventies exploitation and remains a highly entertaining piece of B-movie action.

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Monday, October 26, 2020

Orloff Against the Invisible Man (1970)


You know, it's easy to become jaded when you watch as many schlocky films as I do - you begin to think that you've seen it all, that this stuff can no longer surprise you.  Then, out of the blue, you'll come across something that leaves you asking "What the Hell was that?"  Twice this past weekend I've experienced this reaction, both in reaction to films that I've stumbled across unexpectedly.  In one case, Tragic Ceremony (1972), I came in part way through a showing on American Horrors, which left me perplexed, intrigued and scratching my head as to what I had just seen.  My final verdict will have to wait until I've managed to see it all the way through (knowing American Horrors, it will turn up several more times this week).  I did, however, manage to see in its entirety 1970's Orloff Against the Invisible Man, (also known variously as Orloff's Invisible Man, The Invisible Dead, Orloff's Invisible Monster and Orloff Against the Invisible Dead - the original French title translates, literally, as Love Life of the Invisible Man).  As can be judged by the title, the film is attempting to pass itself off as some kind of continuation of Jess Franco's Dr Orloff character, who had featured in a number of sixties Euro horror films.  Indeed, the whole film seems to go out of its way to convince the viewer that it is a Jesus Franco film, sharing a look and style with many of his sixties Gothic schockers - it even stars Franco regular Howard Vernon as Orloff.  But, in reality, it is French production directed by Pierre Chevalier, who had been turning out B-movies since the fifties.

Rather than being Dr Orloff, this Orloff styles himself 'Professor' and lives, with his daughter and a couple of surly servants, in a castle shunned by the locals.  Something the local doctor discovers when he is summoned there - the coachman drops him off miles away in the rain, refusing to go any further.  It turns out that the maid has summoned the doctor on behalf of Orloff's daughter, who has been having some strange experiences with an unseen force.  Orloff then appears, to tell the doctor that his daughter is mad, but that he has created an invisible man, a superior being, destined to be first of its race which will eventually rule the earth - in the meantime, it just acts as his servant, carrying lamps and books around.  As it turns out, what Orloff has actually created is an invisible rapist.  Something which becomes obvious when the Professor tells the invisible entity to 'punish' the maid for calling the doctor - all her clothes are torn off as she is dragged into a cellar and assaulted by the creature.  Now, the sight of a woman being violently raped by an invisible assailant isn't something one sees, (or necessarily wants to see), everyday and you have to feel for the poor actress who had to simulate being sexually assaulted b by an unseen attacker.  When challenged by the doctor, the Professor calmly states that he wanted to see what his creation would do with a human woman.  Well, as far as the creature is concerned, the cork is now truly out of the bottle and his sexual cravings are unleashed - so he goes after the only other available woman, Orloff's daughter.  Chasing her into her bedroom, her nightdress is ripped off (naturally) before the beast starts feeling her up.  'Beast' turns out to be the appropriate description for, after throwing flour over it, the invisible assailant is revealed to be a man in an ape suit.

A revelation which means that director Chevalier hasn't just given us what is possibly the first invisible raping of a woman on celluloid, but has also got away with depicting bestiality.  Which is pretty astounding (as, indeed, are the scenes of women being molested by this invisible ape creature).  Having whacked the monster over the head with a heavy object, the doctor and the girl try and make their escape as the castle catches fire.  They run into Orloff, who tells them the monster has run amok and will no longer obey him, urging the couple to escape while he tries to deal with the creature.  Which he clearly doesn't as, having escaped, the doctor and the girl see the beast's footprints appear in the mud of the moat as it tries to get away into the forest.  The beast, however, falls foul of the (presumably) late Professor's pack of hounds, which corner it and tear it into invisible pieces.  Now, all of this only takes up the last twenty minutes or so of a seventy five minute film, (this is the DVD running time - it had an original release running time of ninety one minutes).  The bulk of the preceding hour or so mainly consists of the doctor taking ten minutes to even get to the castle, a lot of talking in drawing rooms and labs, some wandering around dark passageways and cellars and a series of rambling flash backs as the Professor tells the doctor how he came to create the invisible creature. Watching, you get the distinct impression that somebody had what they thought was a great idea for a Gothic sexploitation horror film involving an invisible rapist - unfortunately, they couldn't spin this idea out for more than fifteen minutes or so of script, so had to come up with an hour or so of padding.

Indeed, so rambling are the flash backs that you are frequently left wondering what on earth they have  to do with the rest of the plot.  They start with Orloff recalling how, several years earlier, his daughter had been declared dead and buried, only to have the house keeper and game keeper break into the family mausoleum in order to grave rob her of the jewels she was buried with.  (This includes an aside of the two servants plotting, with the house keeper displaying some nudity to tempt the bovine game keeper into doing her bidding).  An attempt to cut off the daughter's finger to free a ring shocks the girl from her catatonic state.  Despite having been stabbed by a panicking game keeper as he fled the tomb, the girl manages to return home and tell her father what happened.  He gives the game keeper a good thrashing and locks him in the dungeon, before going after the house keeper who is busy making her getaway.  After his dogs catch up with her, the Professor gives her a bloody good whipping, (which, inevitably, results in her top falling off, revealing her breasts - Chevalier is definitely developing his theme here), before dragging her back to the castle and an unspecified fate, (this might well have been dealt with in the missing fifteen minutes of footage).  With this having taken up a huge chunk of the film's running time, we're still none the wiser as to how and why Orloff created his invisible creature.  He makes some vague comments about having experimented on the game keeper (although he isn't the invisible creature - it is later revealed that he is still alive in the dungeons) and that the creature lives on fresh human blood (procured by the now degenerate and deranged gamekeeper by kidnapping villagers).  While we are given to understand that the invisible beast was originally a normal human, we never learn who he was or exactly how he was created by Orloff.

The truth is that it isn't just Orloff's explanation of his monster that is perfunctory, but the entire film.  It effectively tells two stories - the grave robbing servants and the rapist invisible monster - which are barely related and, worse, not terribly well developed.  To be fair, those fifteen minutes missing from the DVD print might fill in many of the plot's gaps, (indeed, the French language trailer seems to show an encounter in the dungeons between the gamekeeper and the invisible creature, which was absent from the English language version I saw).  The actors all seem on auto-pilot for most of the film - even the maid seems more than slightly bored at times during the monster's assault upon her, simply going through the motions.  Howard Vernon had played this sort of mad scientist so many times he could do it in his sleep by this point in his career - which is precisely what he proceeds to do.  For her part, Brigit Carva, playing Orloff's daughter, is frequently so subdued that she might have been hit over the head with a sandbag prior to each scene. The film also has serious pacing issues: to describe it as proceeding at walking pace would be unfair - it is more of a meandering stroll, that abruptly breaks into a sprint for the last fifteen minutes.  Yet, despite all of this, it is a perversely entertaining film - as if the meandering flashbacks weren't disorienting enough, the sudden lurch from mock-Franco Gothic titillation into full blown bizarre sexual violence in the last twenty minutes leaves the viewer utterly perplexed.  This climax is not only utterly insane, not to say surreal, but comes completely out of left field, with no warning whatsoever, providing a true 'What the fuck?' experience for the viewer.

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Friday, October 23, 2020

Evils of the Night (1985)


Here's a trailer which, from the very first moment, leaves you in no doubt as to the film's focus and intended audience: jiggling bums and boobs for the adolescent male.  Evils of the Night is one of those horror films from the eighties whose main selling point - beyond all the female flesh on display - was the array of past-their-best stars of yesteryear that they featured in their casts.  This one includes the ubiquitous John Carradine (who would gleefully appear in any old tat for money), Julie Newmar, Neville Brand and Aldo Ray.  Plot-wise, it is something of a throwback to fifties mad scientist movies - but with the twist that this time they are alien mad scientists from outer space - with added eighties gore, sex and a disturbing emphasis upon the brutalisation of young women.  Young people are being abducted from a camp ground by a pair of degenerate sadist-rapist mechanics (Brand and Ray), who variously feel up and molest the women, before passing then onto the local hospital.  Here, they are the subject of experiments by John Carradine and his associates, who are decrepit aliens aiming to drain them of their youthful energies in order to revitalise themselves.

Around the same time that producer/director Mardi Rustam was making Evils of the Night, he was also cobbling together another film, Evil Town, from footage shot in the seventies for an uncompleted and unreleased horror film with a similar plot.  The main difference between the two being that the main mad scientist in Evil Town isn't an alien, just a very human mad man experimenting on passing young people in order to rejuvenate the elderly residents of the titular town.  Evil Town had a complex production history, with some of the existing footage having been part of a previous attempt to complete the original film.  Rustam shot further new footage to be edited into the existing film in order to bring it up to feature length and add some sex and nudity.  This footage was remarkably similar to some of Evils of the Night, forming a sub plot in which a pair of degenerate sadist-rapist mechanics kidnap camping young people and, after brutalising the women, hand them over to the local hospital.  This time around, the mechanics are played by Greg Finlay and Keith Hefner (Hugh's brother).  Evil Town was eventually released in 1987, a couple of years after Evils of the Night.  The fact that the original Evil Town footage and plot pre-dated Evils of the Night by several years suggests that the latter film was inspired by the earlier film, with the latter, in turn, providing Rustam with the inspiration of how to complete the earlier film by, in essence, lifting one of its sub-plots, just as he had lifted Evil Town's main plot for Evils of the Night.  Regardless of the chronology, the end result was the release of two utter clunkers for the price of one.

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Thursday, October 22, 2020

Nazi Numerology

Apparently, that's how you recognise the Nazis these days: by the numbers they have tattooed on their faces.  At least, that's what I've gleaned from the recent saga of the (allegedly) neo-Nazi woodcutter featured in a trailer for a new TV show about wood carving.  Actually, the premise for the show sounds bizarre enough in itself - a sort of wood working version of the Great British Bake Off with carpenters and joiners whittling wood every week until a winner is declared, all fronted by Lee Mack - without the attached Nazi controversy.  Anyway, pretty much as soon as the trailer as released, Twitter was swamped with amateur Nazi-hunters (personally, I blame The Boys from Brazil for encouraging people to think that they can hunt down Nazi war criminals as a hobby), claiming that this guy's facial tattoos include all sorts of extreme right wing and white supremacist shit, including several Nazi numbers.  The '88' he has on one cheek is apparently neo-Nazi code for 'Heil Hitler' (H being the eighth letter of the alphabet).  Similarly, the numbers he has on his temples stand for 'White Supremacy'.  There are also claims of SS-style runic symbols and all sorts of other stuff being featured in his tattoos.  All of which might be true - I have no idea as I'm not and expert on these obscure aspects of neo-Nazi imagery.  It's all been a revelation to me - there are entire web sites devoted to decoding this sort of shit.

Perhaps there is an innocent explanation - Sky TV, the producers of the show - initially claimed that they had vetted all the participants beforehand and that the '88' was actually the year of the tattooed guy's father's death.  Until, that is, it emerged that his father was still alive.  I can't help but feel that if he is a Nazi, he must be a fucking thick one - I mean, surely not even a Hitler groupie would be stupid enough to advertise their affiliations by having them tattooed on their face?  Mind you, as far as I'm concerned, just the fact that he has facial tattoos is enough to condemn him. I've never understood why people want to disfigure themselves by covering their bodies with ink - it's bad enough when they have tattoos they can hide, but when they put them on full display, well, Jesus fuck!  Then they complain about the prejudice they encounter - well, what the fuck do they think the reaction of normal people is going to be?  You've chosen to disfigure yourself!  You're a freak!  OK, rant over, (yeah, I know, I'm no better than a racist, but just think on this: you don't get a choice on your racial characteristics, so racial prejudice is irrational, but people choose to be tattooed, so it is perfectly reasonable to disagree with this choice, or make judgements about their character - especially if they have Nazi tattoos).  You know, I miss the days when you could tell who the Nazis were by the fact that they wore swastika arm band, jackboots and shouted 'Heil Hitler'.  That and the fact that they practiced genocide and voted Tory (or Trump).  It was all so much simpler.  Now we have to decipher bloody hieroglyphics and codes they tattoo on their fucking faces.

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Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Let's Scare Old Man Trump to Death!

Come on Americans, you don't have to wait until polling day next month to rid yourselves of that ambulatory tub of lard currently shaming the office of President - you have the perfect opportunity to get rid of him at the end of this month.  Yes indeed, that great US Hallowe'en tradition of ;trick or treat' could be the answer to your problems - you just need to keep knocking on the White House front door, dressed appropriately and shout 'trick or treat' at Old Man Trump when he answers the door. With luck, he'll eventually get so mad that he'll suffer a fatal coronary.  Actually, to be sure, you should get gangs of kids to ring the door bell, then hide, only leaping out to shout 'trick or treat' once he's on the doorstep.  Even if he isn't scared into a heart attack the first time, by the fourth or fifth, he'll be so mad that he'll come flying out, shaking his fist or waving his walking stick, before suddenly clutching at his chest, falling to the ground clutching his chest and going blue faced as he gasps for breath.  Remember, while he's lying there twitching, don't call an ambulance immediately.  Wait ten minutes at least, just to make sure that he's a goner.  

Now, I know that objections will be raised to this scheme - like the fact that with all that heavy security Trump has had installed at the White House it is unlikely that one group of kids in masks are likely to get to the front door, let alone multiple trick or treating parties.  But hey, surely on that most American of nights, the guards would have no problem in letting groups of kiddies in to see their beloved president?  The key, I think, is to have them all wear MAGA hats.  One word of caution, don't expect to get any candy on the non-fatal runs - Trump is such a mean bastard that he is more likely to shout 'trick!' and fire live rounds at you.  While this plan of mine might seem somewhat radical, particularly when one bears in mind that  - according to the pols - there is an election in a couple of weeks which Trump is likely to lose, it has certain advantages.  Even if Trump is defeated in November, don't forget that he won't leave office immediately.  He'll hang on in the White House, like a lingering fart,  until January, undoubtedly doing as much damage to the US and international community as he can, out of sheer spite, because he'll have nothing to lose.  If you can scare him to death on Hallowe'en, it will all be over once and for all.  Best of all, it won't look like an assassination -it will go down as an accident, with Trump simply another elderly victim of Hallowe'en pranking!

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Monday, October 19, 2020

Schlock of the Old

Jesus, I watched some junk this past weekend.  Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy it, but it was still cinematic trash.  As ever, the trashiest film I saw was also the most expensive and mainstream: Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline (1979) - yes, that is the film's full on screen title - another movie which proves that a top line cast and name director aren't enough to guarantee success.  Actually, the fact that it is based upon a Sidney Sheldon novel should be warning enough as to its nature: a glossy looking soap opera, this time set against the background of a pharmaceutical giant and with a snuff movie sub-plot thrown in for good measure.  The various parts of the plot don't really fit together especially well and there is far too much plot being crammed in to a two hour feature film for any of it to be coherent, (there is, reportedly, a longer version incorporating forty minutes of cut footage which has only ever been shown on US TV - apparently it makes more sense plot-wise).  

Indeed, the most interesting sub-plot, the snuff movie murders, is introduced late and is dealt with quite perfunctorily, despite the fact that it turns out to be highly significant to the film's denouement.  (Stare Audery Hepburn apparently didn't like the sub-plot, which might well be why it was so heavily cut). Director Terence Young (Of James Bond fame), gives it all a superficial slickness and moves the various big name actors (including Audrey Hepburn, Omar Sharif, Jame Mason and Gert Frobe amongst many others) around the glamourous locations like so many chess pieces on a board.  The game, however, ends up bogged down in a stalemate, with unresolved sub-plots left, right and centre and murky character motivations all over the place. Not surprisingly, it was a box office bomb.  That said, Bloodline is, like many of these big screen super soaps (a genre I have a sneaking liking for) curiously enjoyable.  But it was very much out of its time - late seventies audiences could save their money by staying at home and watching the same sort of plots unfolding in the likes of Dallas and Dynasty.

Far less slick were the four-pack of exploitation films I watched on Saturday: Nightmare in Wax (1969), the double bill of I Drink Your Blood and I Eat Your Skin from 1971 and Psychic Killer (1975).  The double bill I'll probably come back to at some point with a proper write up, but the other two films have some points of interest, worthy of a brief mention.  Both are revenge stories, with a wronged protagonist going to the dark side in order to exact revenge upon their perceived enemies.  Both feature police detectives played by past it B-movie stars and use the police investigations to provide some structure to their plots.  (Psychic Killer tends to get bogged down in the investigation, while Nightmare in Wax's cops - Scott Brady and sometime B-movie director John 'Bud' Cardos take more of a back seat).  The casting of the leads are notable in both films, while Nightmare in Wax (essentially a reworking of House of Wax) features schlock favourite Cameron Mitchell (going well over the top, even by his standards), Psychic Killer stars Jim Hutton cast against type - he could usually be found playing sympathetic, often comedic, characters.  Neither of these films were ever going to win any awards, being typically hastily produced B-movies, shot with very limited resources.  Nonetheless, they are enjoyable enough in their own right.  I have to admit that I saw Nightmare in Wax twice in a twenty four hour period.  

The first time I tried to watch it, I found that the version I had chosen to stream was heavily cut - it jumped all over the place - and had its opening titles in Spanish.  I figured that it couldn't be that bad and found a complete version (with original English titles) on another streaming service.  While still not a great movie, it was, in this version, at least coherent.  So, be careful which source you stream from - it can often give a misleading impression of a film if you get an inferior version.  (This doesn't just apply to B-movies and dodgy streaming services - the version of the Alain Delon Zorro I saw on the Roku Channel, for instance, turned out to be the barely coherent English language re-release, cut to less than ninety minutes.  Thankfully, the full two hour English language version eventually turned up on Plex - a far better and coherent viewing experience which did the film justice).  Anyway, I'm sure that I should be doing something more constructive with my weekends than endlessly watching old schlock films, but it just seems to be the natural thing to do on these increasingly grey Autumnal days.

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Friday, October 16, 2020

Path to Nowhere


Seeing as we're more or less in the middle of Autumn, I thought that I'd include an Autumnal picture.  This one was taken yesterday, while I was out on a walk.  Despite appearances, that is not a path stretching ahead between the trees - as I found out.  Although a clearly defined and obviously humanly  made path leads to this point, if you proceed from its end, between the trees, you eventually find yourself in the middle of thick undergrowth, with no obvious trail leading out the other way.  Which meant I had to retrace  my steps.  I'm still mystified as to why there was a path leading to this point - there was no evidence that it lead any where else.  Perhaps I should take it as symbolic of where we seem to be going right now: nowhere.  Still, it was a pleasant walk, a chance to enjoy the season at a point while there are still quite a lot of green leaves on the trees, while others are now turning.  

I thought that I'd better take the opportunity to get outside and make the most of the season before the government brings in that second lockdown they say that they aren't going to implement.  Because if there is one thing we've surely learned about this government is that they will U-turn on anything.  In fact, it is pretty much inevitable that they will renege on deals and turn through a hundred and eighty degrees on any given policy.  Remember that 'oven ready' Brexit withdrawal agreement that Johnson boasted about having negotiated, the one he campaigned on at the last election, promising that it would all but rule out the possibility of a 'No Deal' Brexit?  Well, that's out of the window now - apparently the deal that he negotiated and signed is unacceptable and that it is somehow all the EU's fault.  (Just like the upsurge in coronavirus cases is all the fault of the public, not the government for mishandling the easing of lockdown).    Oh, not to forget, it is also the EU's fault (because they wouldn't back down on key issues and disadvantage their member states) that we are now heading for the 'No  Deal' Brexit that the likes of Rees-Mogg and Farage have been slavering for.  You know, I really do despair, we a have a government fighting on two fronts - the pandemic and Brexit - and losing on both of them due to its incompetence and corruption.  

Anyway, I was surprised to see Christmas decorations on display in a shop window today - I thought that Christmas had been cancelled this year, due to coronavirus.  Actually, postponing Christmas 2020 until, say, next July, is probably the only hope Johnson has of fulfilling his earlier promises that it 'would all be over by Christmas'.  Unless he wants to adhere to his earlier idea of suspending anti-Covid measures temporarily so that people can have a 'normal' Christmas, that is.  Which would turn it into the season of super spreading, I suppose: 'give your loved ones the gift of coronavirus this Christmas'.  Still, if nothing else, the effective cancellation of Christmas would give Crapchester council an opportunity to provide us with an even more pathetic display of festive decorations than usual.  Mind you, it would, at least, mean that I could save money on Christmas presents..

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Thursday, October 15, 2020

The Queen's Last Orgy

So, the Queen has finally emerged  from her Covid-proof bunker under Windsor Castle, doubtless surprised to find that her realm isn't now a grim wasteland populated only by bands of roaming zombies, to perform her first Royal visit since the start of lockdown.  And where does she go for this visit?  Porton Down.  That's right, she visited the secret government chemical and biological lab in Wiltshire.  No doubt to be given the latest secret Covid treatment which is handed out only to the super-rich and Tory donors (usually the same thing), to ensure that they don't perish during the pandemic.  Because, you know, these secret Covid treatments really exist and are being withheld from the public.  I know, because every conspiracy nut and Trump supporter I encounter online tells me that it is true.  But getting back to Her Majesty, I do wonder how she has spent all those months locked down in that Royal bunker?  One can't help but have visions of some kind of geriatric version of the last days of Sodom, with Her Majesty sat on her throne in full regalia, presiding over wild bacchanalian orgies, with the nobility of England shagging each other on the banqueting tables without inhibition, in between the silver platters of roast swan.

Then again, maybe it all ended up like the last days of Hitler, with an increasingly deluded monarch barking orders into phones to armies and navies that no longer exist thanks to Tory defence spending cuts, when she wasn't ranting at her assembled entourage.  The main difference between Windsor Castle 2020 and Berlin 1945 was that it didn't all culminate with Her Majesty poisoning her corgis and Prince Philip before shooting herself.  Sadly, the truth is probably far more mundane - she and Philip probably spent lockdown catching up with the TV soaps.  Mind you, bearing in mind that she's the Queen, they probably shipped in the casts of the soaps to perform new episodes live for her.  That's obviously what the likes of Danny Dyer were doing during the lockdown TV production hiatus - Royal Command Performances at gunpoint.  Still, if nothing else, being locked up in that bunker did at least mean that the Queen was spared the ordeal of having to have personal audiences with the Prime Minister.  They probably had them on Zoom instead, meaning that she could just mute Boris Johnson for the duration.  Which must have been a blessed relief for her.  Long live the Queen (and she doubtless will, thanks to the super secret anti-Covid serum she received at Porton Down).

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Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Carnage (1984)


You know, Andy Milligan's films are never quite as bad you think that they are going to be.  Which isn't to say that they are, in any cinematic sense, good.  They are bad movies - how could they be anything else with their minuscule budgets and largely non-professional casts?  Then there is the static direction - long scenes filmed as a single shot, without cutaways - and the overly stagey dialogue, not to mention the plodding pace.  The historical productions at least boast some elaborate costumes, courtesy of Milligan himself.  But the fact is that his films never seem to hit the delirious heights of badness as, say, Ed Wood Jr - you know the sort of film, where its lack of production values and general ineptness combine with bizarre scripting and direction to tumble the whole project over the edge into total insanity.  You never quite get the feel with Milligan that you've stumbled into the middle of somebody else's fever dream.  Two things are key to understanding Milligan's films: his background in theatre, (which goes some way to explaining the stagey direction and performances, not to mention the use of the sort of actors you'd usually find in amateur dramatics productions), and his mother issues, (he apparently had a tumultuous and violent relationship with his mother - she supposedly once chased him with a pair of scissors - and was himself violent toward his sister, which probably explains why matriarchal figures often get such a rough ride in his productions).  The amateur psychologist in me would like to believe that his unhappy childhood explains the interest in historical costumes and settings - they were perhaps an escape from harsh reality.  But who really knows?

Anyway, the Milligan film I most recently saw was atypical, coming from his later period of film-making, in the eighties and represents an attempt to make a more mainstream horror film.  Eschewing period settings, Carnage (1984) is clearly an attempt to cash in on the popularity of haunted house movies like The Amityville Horror.  Unfortunately, it is a pretty poor attempt at a cash in, a clearly poverty stricken production filmed on location in someone's house and performed by what appears to be, at best, a semi-professional cast.  Unusually for an Andy Milligan film, it does include special effects.  Sub bargaining basement effects, but effects nonetheless.  There is some pretty basic stop motion to create some blood spots appearing spontaneously in the kitchen, lots of flying knives, axes and other sharp instruments and some truly dreadful gore effects.  The latter culminates with an evisceration, with the disemboweled innards looking like spaghetti.  Perhaps they were.  Spaghetti Bolognese to provide the blood.  It is an effect so poor that the actor involved can't seem to keep a straight face.  The scene in which it occurs is one of a number of such sequences in which something horrible happens to someone (in this case a pair of burglars), which are never referenced again.  As if, perhaps, they had been inserted later to add some gore and increase the running time.  Consequently, the film becomes hugely frustrating.  Toward the end, the couple who have bought the haunted house finally call in a priest, who asks them what form the ghostly manifestations have taken.  They immediately tell him about the various flying objects, while you, as a viewer, are left screaming at the screen' What about that fucking decapitation on the porch - which only happened in the previous scene!'  Likewise, why don't they mention the guest electrocuted in the bath (which had no water in it, which was just as well as he was still wearing his underpants when he climbed into it), or the maid's suicide, or the two burglars (if they've even found the bodies - no mention of it is ever made)?

Not that it would have mattered if they had told the priest, as he is quickly felled by a flying meat cleaver (and never mentioned again), which, despite being seen to hit him in the shoulder, somehow ends up embedded in his head.  Carnage is a story that isn't so much badly told as ineptly told.  To be sure, it does have some interesting features: despite the obvious Amityville influence, the film adds in a pair of husband and wife ghosts, (who died in the house as the result of a suicide pact and are now violently haunting it), who could almost have come from a thirties Hollywood comedy.  Moreover, surprisingly for an Andy Milligan film, Carnage features a sympathetic mother character.  Maybe he'd mellowed since the seventies.  Nevertheless, in spite of its ineptitude, Carnage, like Milligan's other films, never really gets beyond simply being bad - it just lacks that strand of inspired lunacy that would turn it into some kind of bad movie cult classic.  Whilst certainly bizarre and fitfully amusing (for all the wrong reasons), it long outstays its welcome.

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Monday, October 12, 2020

Following the Science

I can't help but feel that Boris 'The Lazy Bastard' Johnson's dashboard analogy - with regard to the rapidly rising number of Covid-19 cases - is unfortunate.  To be precise, he said that the rising number of cases was 'flashing at us like dashboard warnings in a passenger jet'.  (Quite why he thinks that only passenger jets have dashboards with warning lights is beyond me - I can assure him that private planes, cargo planes and military planes have them too.  They aren't exclusive to jets either - piston engined aircraft also feature them.  I know, I know.  I'm being a pedant, but what the Hell, the likes of Johnson really need to be more precise with their language).  Now, I've never flown a passenger jet, or any other aircraft, for that matter, but I do drive a car and I know that when warning lights flash up there, it is usually the result of previous neglect: missed services and oil changes, for instance.  Moreover, ignoring the warnings can lead to serious damage being done to the engine or other vital systems, (unless it is a late model Saab, where certain warning lights are the result of an over complex electronic system and seem to come on and off at random).  So, bearing in mind that the infection rate has been steadily rising for weeks now, following the dashboard analogy can only lead one to the conclusion that the government has been neglecting the 'maintenance' of the pandemic for some time now.  Neglecting it to the extent that, to extend the car analogy, serious damage might already have been done.

But Johnson isn't using a car dashboard analogy, he's using an aircraft dashboard analogy.  Which makes it worse: when those lights start flashing on an airliner, it is a sign that there is a good possibility that it might fall out of the sky at any moment, (listen, I've seen all of the Airport movies, I know about this stuff).  So, if his analogy was meant to reassure people, it is more likely to alarm them, giving the impression that he believes the country is about to crash and burn.  (Which is ridiculous, obviously - we did that ages ago, thanks to Tory austerity policies).  But not to worry - the government has now come up with its 'tier system' of local lockdowns, whereby every part of the country will be placed under one of the tiers: medium, high, very high.  (Note that there is no 'low' or 'normal' tier, giving the impression that we are to be forever locked in this crisis).  I'm not sure what the criteria for each tier actually is - probably the government doesn't either, judging by their past performance with regard to the pandemic.  According to the Crapchester Chronicle, the town is likely to become a Covid 'hotspot' within a few weeks - what that actually means in terms of lockdown tiers, I have no idea.  Is it sufficient criteria for the guys in hazmat suits to start appearing, burning the bodies of victims in the street?  I don't know and neither, I strongly suspect, do the authorities.  The tier system seems designed only to deal with pre-existing conditions rather than the possibility of escalation.  But hey, we shouldn't worry, Boris Johnson is on the case and he's 'following the science'.  What 'science' I'm not sure, (the sort expounded by second string character actors in lab coats and glasses in B-movies, I suspect), but apparently it doesn't matter, just so long as it is labelled 'science'.

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Friday, October 09, 2020

Lessons from Cinema Past

I found myself watching Flight of the Phoenix again this afternoon, (one of the advantages of being a man of leisure is the ability to watch daytime TV), the 1965 original of course, not the inferior 2004 remake.  It occurred to me that this is one of the earliest films I have clear memory of watching on TV as a child.  Then, I was entranced by the way they built a new aircraft from the wreckage of the crashed plane, rather than the various character conflicts.  Nevertheless, I still remembered the essence of the conflicts - the alcoholic navigator, the cowardly army sergeant, the by-the-book army captain and, most crucially, the rivalry between stubborn and egotistical pilot Jame Stewart and Hardy Kruger's arrogant aeronautical engineer - so it must have made quite an impression.  Indeed, it is still a film I enjoy to this day, despite knowing every twist of the plot - it still gives me a kick when they finally get their makeshift plane airborne and escape the crash site and get to safety.  Anyway, it occurred to me while watching it again today that it was probably down to my early viewing of this film that I've always maintained this streak of insane optimism in my character that believes that, no matter how badly the odds seem stacked against you, no matter how many obstacles are thrown into your path, there is always some way of surmounting it all through one's ingenuity.  

A form of insanity which has undoubtedly been reinforced by other films I saw at relatively young age. (My Darling Clementine, when Wyatt and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday unhistorically take on hordes of the Clantons at the OK Corral - in reality, the odds were more even, four on four, although Ike Clanton wasn't actually armed - for instance, or The Magnificent Seven, when those seven gunfighters take on fifty odd bandits.  Sure, I know that only three of them survived, but they still inspired the farmers to defend themselves against superior odds - and all for only twenty dollars apiece).  All of which explains why I keep getting into conflicts where I really can't win, but I just won't back down.  But rather than head on conflict, I instead spend time finding some ingenious way to outmaneuver my opponent.  (I'm embroiled in such a conflict right now, albeit one that is essentially trivial - yet it has become both a matter of principle and a challenge to me).  The funny thing is that every so often I win. More often than I should, really.  It might just be luck, but I'd like to think it is because of those lessons that Flight of the Phoenix taught me - that from the wreckage of a complete disaster, a triumphant escape can be engineered.  Like I say, sometimes it works.  Sometimes quite spectacularly.  Like that time I took on a whole army and won - but that's another story for another time.  (It wasn't an actual army, obviously, but it did, at the time, feel like I was taking on a metaphorical army.  But, in the end, I came out on top).  Of course, some might say that this has nothing to do with the films I watched and that I'm simply bloody minded by nature.  Which is also true.  But those old films showed me a way to channel this bloody mindedness.  For which I'm grateful.

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Thursday, October 08, 2020

Expressly Unbalanced

I was reading an online version of a Daily Express story the other day (I was bored, OK) which left me despairing as to the current state of British journalism.  I should have known better, but I clicked on the clickbait title along the lines of 'Biden sent ahock warning that Trump will still win' and a story synopsis along the limes of 'latest polls show Biden ahead in Presidential race, but top pollster says he will end up disappointed'.  It all seemed so contradictory that I assumed there must be some kind of typo involved, so I looked at the story itself.  Which turned out to be just as confusing and contradictory as the headline and teaser.  The only factual part of it was that another poll, carried out by an Italian polling organisation, (presumably on behalf of Italian news media), confirmed Biden's lead over Trump.  It then went on to quote someone involved with the polling organisation, who seemed to contradict this, saying that Trump was still likely to win. His evidence for this?  Well, he didn't offer any.  It just seemed that he was some kind of far right Italian Trump fan, disgruntled that his organisation's polling had delivered a result he didn't like. A non-story, in fact.  But one which is becoming all too typical for Britain's right-wing press: a sensationalist headline backed up only by quotes from some random they've found.  There's no qualification of the reliability of the source, what their credentials or authority are, of course. It doesn't matter to these papers, they just want that headline.  But it is poor 'journalism' - where are the facts?  - designed solely to play to the prejudices of their own readers.

When it comes to Trump, though, papers like the Express and the Mail find themselves in a quandary.  They are well aware that Trump is incredibly unpopular in the UK, but at the same time, he represents the kind of far right authoritarian political movement that they actually admire and, indeed, that a lot of their readership admires and wants.  Moreover, their websites generally get a lot of traffic from the US, from the sort of readers who do support Trump.  So, what are they to do?  They can't actually endorse Trump, for fear of alienating domestic readers who, while right-wing, don't like the man, but don't want to appear too anti-Trump for fear of offending those US crackpots.  So, instead, they run 'stories' like the one I read, which, while reporting the (to them) unpalatable facts about the current polls, tries to negate and bury them through the focus on a completely random 'source' spouting uninformed opinion in the guise of expert comment.  I suppose that the Express would defend it as representing 'balance'.  Except, of course, that when you are presenting facts, they don't need to be balanced by opinion.  But, to be fair to the likes of the Express, it seems to be widespread in the British media that this should be the case.  Even the BBC seems to think this by wheeling on the climate change denying cranks and crackpots to provide 'balance' whenever they report facts on the subject - facts representing the consensus of the scientific community.  You see it with the pandemic, as well: every ill-informed past it 'celebrity' is allowed to spout their idiotic opinions on the subject of Covid-19, as if they have equal validity as the overwhelming scientific consensus on how to deal with the virus.  It really is a sorry state of affairs - the continual subverting of facts in order to churn out misinformation to the public could, ultimately, have serious consequences.

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Tuesday, October 06, 2020

Busy Doing Nothing Much

Today is another of those days where I'm sure that I had an idea for a post, but it is somehow eluded me.  So, I'm left struggling to come up with something.  But I'm stumped.  I'm all out of inspiration today.  I'm tired of writing about the pandemic - it's been handled abominably by the government and all the progress made in controlling it during the lockdown has been thrown away and now we have every crackpot in creation spouting their half-witted conspiracy theories and defying social distancing measures.  Likewise, the government - they are useless fuckwits, led by a moral degenerate and are undoubtedly corrupt to boot, (just look at the way Covid-related contracts are being awarded).  Ditto Trump - fat, orange, stupid and a Nazi.  What can I add to that?  There are films I could be talking about, but having posted that marathon of a piece about Eyes Behind the Stars yesterday, I'm not in the frame of mind to repeat that experience so soon.  It would help, of course, if I was actually doing anything right now to give me something to write about.  But I'm not.  Thanks to the pandemic, my supply teaching career is in limbo before it has even started and the weather has turned sufficiently unpleasant to put me off of outdoor activities. I spent quite a bit of today reading, which is nice, but not anything to post about.  I've also done a bit of work on the model railway, but nothing significant.  I've also spent too much time involved in a depressing and frustrating dispute with the council and now have to decide whether to pursue it to the next level or just settle it now and get it out of my life - for people that are meant to be public servants, they really are a bunch of arseholes.

It isn't that there aren't things I could be doing: wiring up the model railway, for instance.  Or actually getting going on renovating my kitchen.  Then there are model railway locomotives waiting to be resprayed and lined.  Not to mention that general clear out that I never seem to quite get into.  The trouble is that I rather like doing nothing.  Moreover, I'm enjoying the fact that I'm no longer in constant fear of my work phone ringing at all hours to tell me to go and do something potentially dangerous and encroaching upon my non-work hours outrageously.  It means that I can actually relax without fear of my chain of thought being interrupted, let alone my meals or shopping.  The trouble is,though, with unlimited time at my disposal, I tend to get too busy doing nothing.  I really do need a new focus - something to motivate me to get out of bed at a reasonable hour, instead of waking up and realising that I've slept half the day away, not leaving myself enough time to get properly started on anything.  In fact, as a first step, I really need to readjust my sleeping patterns, so that I wake earlier (and don't just switch off the alarm, turn over and go back to sleep).  So, that's where I am right now - in a kind of limbo.  Not the unpleasant limbo I was in before I decided to take a break from my job, nor when I was ill a couple of years ago.  This is, in its own way, quite pleasant.  Which is the problem really - my contentment levels are actually quite high and the bank account glowingly healthy, giving me little incentive to do anything decisive.  Not only that, but the current situation with the pandemic makes doing anything else pretty difficult: travel is complicated, socialising is complicated.  Sitting tight is pretty much the only option right now - it is a case now of finding something purposeful for myself which can be done while sitting tight.  I'll give it some more thought.

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Monday, October 05, 2020

Eyes Behind the Stars (1978)



Released in 1978, Eyes Behind the Stars would, at first glance, appear to be an Italian rip off of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The Italian film, though, is ultimately far more interested in the paranoid conspiracies and alleged government cover ups which surround the whole UFO phenomena, than it is with the alien visitors themselves.  Indeed, there are are times when the aliens seem almost incidental to film's main plot, with the main threat to the protagonists coming from the secret international organisation seeking to suppress knowledge of the aliens from the public.  That the film runs through just about every trope of UFO conspiracies - alien abductions, government cover ups, men in black, secret medical institutions treating victims of abduction, suppression of physical evidence, such as photos, by the authorities - should hardly be surprising, as director Mario Gariazzio, (credited as Roy Garrett), was something of a UFO enthusiast himself.  In fact,the film's opening credits claim that 'Garrett' is some kind of internationally renowned expert in the field, an obvious ploy to try and lend the film an air of credibility.

The film starts intriguingly enough, a photographer and his model on a photoshoot in the countryside notice a mysterious lack of birdsong or animal life in the area they have chosen as a location and get the feeling that they are being watched.  Upon developing the film the photographer finds that, in the background can be seen several alien figures.  Returning alone to the location, after dark, he starts to take more photos but ends up fleeing from the aliens, eventually taking refuge in a remote house.  The aliens, nonetheless abduct him, and leave the householder and his dog for dead.  The model, investigating the photographer's disappearance, returns to the original location, only to vanish herself.  These disappearances bring the photographer's friend, a journalist played by Robert Hoffmann into the investigation.  Along with his assistant (Nathalie Delon) and a UFO expert (Victor Valente), he finds that the occupant of the house that the photographer had tried to shelter in had suffered a massive (and fatal) dose of radiation, as have several soldiers left to guard the landing site of the flying saucer (it left a scorched circle behind it in the grass).  After finding the photographer's negatives (the photos had vanished, taken by the aliens), he finds himself warned off by his police inspector friend (Martin Balsam), who explains that the investigation is now in the hands of 'The Silencers', a secret international organisation whose mission is to cover up evidence of UFOs, by suppressing evidence and, where necessary, eliminating witnesses.

Needless to say, 'The Silencers' are the archetypal 'men in black' - the mission the result of global governments' fears that not only would there be mass panic if the public knew the truth about alien visitations, but also that such knowledge might provoke conflict with the much more advanced aliens.  Consequently, Hoffman, Delon and Valente find themselves under threat from both aliens and 'The Silencers', both of whom want their evidence suppressed.  To complicate matters, someone close to them is clearly collaborating with 'The Silencers' and the abducted model suddenly reappears, only to be whisked off to a secret medical installation guarded by 'The Silencers'.  The film then dissolves into a welter of shoot outs and chases, before shuddering to an abrupt ending which leaves many questions and plot points unanswered.  It isn't, however, surprising, as the film's relentless focus on an increasingly paranoid conspiracy plot, rather than unravelling the enigma of the alien's themselves, to move the story along ultimately leaves it with nowhere to go other than a perfunctory and down beat climax.  (In doing so, it also rather undermines its central conceit that UFO visitations are real and should be investigated, as it has just spent ninety minutes showing us that such investigations are doomed to failure).

While Eyes Behind the Stars is by no means a bad movie, it is beset by multiple problems, most notably its lack of pace and a lack of clarity in its story-telling.  The latter isn't helped by a poorly structured script, which, at the beginning, provides too many false starts (the various disappeared characters, the police investigation, for example, none of which lead us far into the plot, frustrating the viewer and destroying any sense of a story-telling rhythm).  Many scenes seem too brightly lit, robbing them of atmosphere, while the aliens themselves are unimpressively realised - they are just guys in one piece suits, with darkened full-face visors who fly spaceships with plain white interiors and control panels with toggle switches.  That said, it does have its good points - the model work for the saucers is, for its era, pretty well done.  Moreover, while the aliens, when we see them, might look impressive, their intrusions into characters' homes and workplaces are filmed first-person, almost like the killer in a giallo movie when they stalk a victim.  These sequences, with their accompaniment of discordant electronic music, do manage to create tension and a strange, dislocated, atmosphere.  The opening photoshoot and the photographer's return to the site are also well handled, conjuring a feeling of first unease, then outright terror, while the subsequent siege at the house is also well filmed, with something of the feel of similar sequences in Italian zombie films, as an unseen menace lurks outside before trying to force entry.

The weirdest aspect of the film (and the one most dislocating to English-speaking audiences) isn't immediately apparent.  I must have been a good twenty minutes into the film before I realised that it was meant to be set in the UK.  I suppose that I should have been tipped off by the fact that the photographer bears more than a passing resemblance to David Hemmings in Blow Up and by some of the character names, but there is absolutely no attempt to make its settings look British, they are clearly  Italian.  Most of the vehicles seen are left hand drive (even the UK manufactured ones). none have anything that remotely resemble UK registration plates and it seems that, in 1978, lots of people in the UK drove large American cars.  The architecture of the buildings seen is predominantly of an obviously Mediterranean style, while are simply no visual cues (newspapers, road signs or the like which indicate that we are in the UK).  To be fair, they get the RAF uniforms more or less right, but there is no rank of 'General' in the RAF (the equivalent is 'Air Marshal') as indicated on a desktop nameplate and the soldiers wear generic-looking uniforms and carry Beretta sub machine guns, (in reality,a t this time, they would have had L1A1 Self Loading Rifles).  Bizarrely, well known US character actor Martin Balsam finds himself dubbed with a North of England accent - also, if he is a police inspector, then why is the building he has his office in marked 'Security Service' (the official name of MI5, which doesn't advertise its presence on the buildings it occupies)?  If nothing else, the clearly fake setting rather undermines the film's earlier attempts to establish its credibility.

Which begs the question, of course, as to why the makers didn't simply set it in Italy, as it is so obviously filmed there?   The obvious answer it that, as the film wasn't primarily intended for UK audiences, it really didn't matter that the setting had been obviously faked.  Most of those watching it would never have visited the UK and would have no idea what it looked like. The fact that the version I saw had an English dub is irrelevant - such versions were often not intended for UK or US release, they were 'international' versions destined for markets too small to justify a dub in their own language but where English was spoken enough that, with the aid of locally applied sub-titles, audiences would be able to understand them.  (Where non-English language films are bought for UK or US distribution, the distributors will often prepare their own dubbed version).  The use of a UK setting would also allow the film to be marketed in such territories as a British or US production, which might make it more attractive than an Italian production.  Moreover, like many Italian exploitation films of the era, Eyes Behind the Stars would also seek to disguise its local origins for the domestic audience - there was traditionally a prejudice against locally made genre movies, with Italian audiences preferring the US or British product.  Consequently, such films would Anglicise the names of its stars and directors, feature imported British and American actors, or even film outside of Italy (by the eighties, the Philippines had become a popular location, along with Sri Lanka, Indonesia and even Florida), to disguise their true origins.  Of course, by the time audiences sat down to watch them and realised that they were Italian films, it was too late, they had already fallen for these ploys and paid their money at the box-office. 

What I do find curious about Eyes Behind the Stars is that, unlike just about any other seventies continental film with a British setting that I've seen, it doesn't even include any stock establishing shots of things like the Houses of Parliament to indicate its supposed location.  (In Spanish exploitation films, such shots are often, strangely, accompanied by Scottish bagpipes).  Whatever the reason for this omission, it does add to the film's overall sense of dislocation and strangeness - you can't help but feel that you've fallen into some parallel universe which is almost, but not quite, the same as ours.  Or, that you are watching a construct of late seventies earth, created by aliens with only a limited knowledge of actual earth cultures and geography.  This is undoubtedly the film's greatest strength, giving the whole thing a disconcerting feel - as if the 'reality' you are watching is, at any moment, liable to collapse and reveal something terrible and unfathomable.  While for UK audiences, at least, it provides a truly bizarre experience, in more general terms, the film does provide a neat counterpoint to the Spielbergian optimism of its inspiration, Close Encounters, where both the aliens and the government conspiracy to hide them are essentially benign.  Eyes Behind the Stars presents a far darker vision, drawing the audience, quite effectively it has to be said, into the paranoid and off-kilter perspective of UFO conspiracy theorists.

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Friday, October 02, 2020

Hail to the Virus!

I'm sure that. like me, your thoughts and prayers are with the coronavirus currently bravely battling Donald Trump. Sometimes things like this happen which make you start to believe in Karma.  Because, generally speaking, I don't believe in this idea of some great cosmic balance which ensures that, eventually, one's actions eventually rebound on you for good or ill.  In my experience, the bad usually do profit from their misdeeds and rarely get punished for them, whereas those who follow the rules and try to avoid hurting others still get dumped on from a great height.  The problem is that the bad are, more often than not, insulated from justice by power, wealth and privilege.  But just occasionally, something like this happens, whereby the bad guys encounter something that all their wealth and power can't protect them from.  That's one of the few things one can say in favour of viruses: they are indiscriminate in who they infect.  Wealth and power do not impress them.  In the end, all of Trump's bluster and mocking of coronavirus protection measures, such as mask wearing, couldn't stop the virus from catching up with him.  It's a bit like the Martians in War of the Worlds, I suppose - all their advanced technologies couldn't protect them from earth viruses.  (Although, if they were that advanced, surely they would have taken the possibility of infection from terrestrial viruses into consideration when invading the earth?)

If we're lucky, perhaps this virus will stop Trump the same way the fictional one did the Martians.  Certainly Trump is responsible for similar levels of chaos and destruction as a Martian invasion.  But, to get back to the point, apart from rare instances like this, the universe doesn't balance itself.  The scumbags always have an advantage because they don't care about rules, they don't fight fair and experience teaches them that they'll rarely, if ever, get caught.  Even when they are caught out, they'll just brazen it all out, just like Trump or Boris Johnson do - piling more lies upon lies, muddying the waters until the truth is forgotten about or at least obfuscated so much that it becomes near impossible to see anymore.  Institutions - into which the scumbags worm their way, as they are unscrupulous and utterly ruthless when it comes to climbing the career ladder - will usually protect these bastards if you try to complain against them, closing ranks as they all fear that if one of them falls, then the rest become vulnerable.  Ways are found not to apply standards to behaviour and avoid sanctions.  Rules are bent and reinterpreted to suit.  Complaint procedures are designed to deflect the aggrieved parties rather than offer them genuine redress.  Basically, the world is a shitty place where the odds are stacked against us, unless we are prepared to be utter bastards.  So, enjoy Trump's comeuppance while you can, for it is a rare victory in the constant cosmic struggle between scumbaggery and moderately decent behaviour.

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Thursday, October 01, 2020

Vote Mid-Life Crisis

When it comes to mid-life crises, most of us go down well-trodden paths: taking up with unsuitably young partners, buying a Harley-Davidson and going on a coast-to-coast road trip in the US, growing a beard and 'dropping out' to live in a commune, becoming a naturist - you know the sort of thing.  Speaking personally, I started buying seventies American sports cars and imagining that the A303 was Route 66.  But if you are a celebrity, even a minor one, you have to do something more spectacular, more public, more noteworthy.  Like starting a political party.  Laurence Fox's recent announcement that he was going to do just this smacks of the mid-life crisis, or even breakdown. Indeed, his preceding ill-informed pronouncements on racism and Black Lives Matter, not to mention that failed music 'career', have the definite feel of a man spiraling toward a breakdown in the wake of a divorce.  Hell, maybe if Billie Piper had divorced me, I'd be founding a political party.  Or recording bad records.  The problem with trying to create new political parties (in the UK, at least) is that is extremely difficult to define exactly what it is you are standing for: what ideological ground are you staking out?  Which demographics are you targeting?  Most fundamentally, what are you offering voters that no existing party or movement offers them?  These are the issues upon which all recent attempts to start new parties have foundered on, the SDP, UKIP, Brexit Party, the Independent Group of MPs (or whatever it was they were called), all failed because, ultimately, they were unable to define themselves in terms of unique ideologies or policies.

Whenever any of them demonstrated any degree of popularity at the polls, the existing parties moved to take those voters back by shifting their own ideological bases.  The SDP, for instance, was born out of a perceived leftward shift in the Labour party and, for a while, enjoyed some success in attracting moderate voters of the centre left.  But Labour changed tack under first Neil Kinnock, then Tony Blair, shifting back toward the centre, leaving the SDP nowhere to go.  Similarly, once Vote Leave had prevailed in the EU referendum, not only was UKIP left without an issue to campaign on ('leave the EU', 'We are, so why else should we vote for you?'), but the Tories lurched to the right and the Brexit Ultras took over, ensuring that eurosceptic vote shifted back to them.  A similar fate befell The Brexit Party, with the Tories seeing offtheir electoral threat by moving even further to the right.  Of course, the thing which usually kills new political parties stone cold dead is the UK's 'first-past-the-post' electoral system, which makes it near impossible for smaller parties to win parliamentary seats no matter how many votes they garner nationally.  With a system of proportional representation, obviously, they might stand a chance.  The only exceptions to all these rules lies in nationalist parties, like the SNP or Plaid Cymru, that are able to build strong regional support based upon cultural identities.

But getting back to Laurence fox's mid-life crisis.  What does his proposed political party stand for?  Who is trying to represent?  Well, on the basis of his vague ramblings, people like him, it would seen.  Not sad middle aged actors whose careers have stalled and are down to airing their breakdowns in the media in order to generate the publicity and attention they crave, but rather those people who apparently feel 'unrepresented' by modern politics.  Those people, like him, who think that it is 'political correctness gone mad' that non-white people are portrayed in historical dramas, or that seem unable to grasp why 'Black Lives Matter' isn't incompatible with 'All Lives Matter'.  In other words, the sort of people who are already well catered for by the Tory Party and a whole cabal of far-right and neo-fascist organisations.  People who think that their voices are being censored by the media because they can't say really offensive things that might contravene equality laws.  The fact is, though, that the likes of Fox are being heard: they are all over social media, not to mention exploiting their showbiz connections to get on TV and in the papers, to spread their ignorance.  What they don't like is that those who disagree with them are allowed to publicly criticise them.  But that's the other side of free speech - the freedom of others to say that you are a dick.  But hey, nothing is ever really going to come from Fox's political party - it's just another vanity project, like that 'music career' of his.  It will all fizzle out once it comes into contact with reality.

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