Sex, Violence and Bulldozers

What a week - Dominic Scummings is out of Downing Street and I've managed to avoid watching any more programmes about UFOs or the paranormal on digital TV.  I did manage to sit through The Best of Sex and Violence on America Horrors twice, though.  I'm not sure why, but it exerts a certain fascination. The Best of Sex and Violence is a seventy five minute compilation of trailers from various seventies and eighties exploitation films (with the emphasis, strangely enough, upon sex and violence), linked together by three hundred year old John Carradine and his pipe.  By this point, Carradine would do pretty much anything for money - even read from a totally lame script, as he does here.  The segment which made the most impression on me was the one dealing with porn movies based on children's stories, including adult versions of Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella and, of course Charles Band's Fairytales, which subverts everything from Little Bo Peep to Old King Cole.  There is something mildly disturbing about seeing these beloved children's fables debased but, of course, tat is the whole point: to take something ostensibly innocent and utterly corrupt it via sex.  It is the whole basis of most sexual fantasies.  Nonetheless, I can't help but admire the ingenious ways in which they turn these stories into smut - Cinderella, for instance, becomes a tale of a prince who can't orgasm - until he has sex with the titular character, of course.  The rest of the film concerns his search for the blessed vagina, which means that he has to shag every maiden in the Kingdom in order to find the right 'fit'.

I also managed to catch up with Killdozer (1974), a TV movie I hadn't seen in decades.  I remember that when I saw it as a kid it impressed me greatly, mainly because it involves lots of heavy plant, like steam shovels, graders and, of course, bulldozers.  Like most kids, such things greatly interested me - not only was there a lot of construction work going on back then, so I saw lots of similar heavy plant, but I also had the Tonka Toys versions.  The film was based on a 1944 Theodore Strugeon novella, which involved a group of construction workers building an airstrip on a Pacific island finding one of their bulldozers being possessed by an alien presence and running amok.  In the story, the alien force is released when an ancient temple is demolished by the bulldozer - we learn that it is itself a weapon left over from an aeons ago interstellar war between alien races, designed to take over enemy war machines and turn them against their users.  For the film, made thirty years after the story, the setting moves to an island off of Africa, which a small crew is preparing for an oil exploration team.  Unfortunately, the whole explanation for the alien force is absent: here, it falls to earth in a meteor, which the bulldozer's blade hits.  Without the original story's background explanation, the film simply becomes a monster-on-the-rampage movie, with the possessed bulldozer having no apparent motivation for killing the construction crew one-by-one.  That said, by the standards of seventies TV movies, it is quite effectively done - the driverless bulldozer is extremely menacing, snorting and growling like some primeval beast.   Best of all, at just under seventy five minutes, it moves along at a decent pace and doesn't have time to outstay its welcome.