Well, I had my first Covid jab this afternoon, (it was the Pfizer vaccine if you are interested). It is about the only time that being diabetic has worked in my favour, as it has meant that I got bumped up the vaccination schedule by a couple of groups. I haven't so far suffered any side effects, nor have I so far come under the influence that microchip the anti-vaxxers claim Bill Gates has put in the vaccine - I haven't had the urge to buy a Microsoft Surface (although I did used to have a Windows phone, but that was pre-vaccine and long before anyone had heard of Covid-19). Nor have I turned all bestial and hairy, like people in low-budget horror films do whenever they get injected with something. (Or worse, grow a second head before splitting in half, like in The Manster). Perhaps that's all to come, but right now, I have to say that getting vaccinated has proven pretty anti-climactic. So, I'm none the wiser as to exactly what it is that the anti-vaxxers have a problem with.
Speaking of anti-vaxxers, I see that one of the celebriy anti-vaxxer cretins was talking shite again today. You know, what I really don't understand about celebrity anti-vaxxers like Ian Brown is why they are so worried about being injected with a vaccine when they probably spent several years of their lives injecting all manner of toxic substances into themselves. They really are utter twats. As is anyone refusing the vaccine. I mean, these are pretty much the same people who have opposed all the anti-Covid measures that governments have been forced to introduce, yet when they are offered a way out of theses restrictions, they refuse that. Thankfully, though, they seem to be very much in the minority, judging by the take up of the vaccine so far. Anyway, I'd urge everyone to get the vaccination when the opportunity arises. It really isn't anything to fear. It doesn't even hurt - just a small prick, (insert your own joke here).
Look, I'll just come out and say it: I don't get those TV programmes full of drag queens. I'm sorry, but I really don't see the point - I don't find them remotely entertaining and I'm pretty sure that I'm not in a minority here. But they seem to have become a 'thing', with various 'celebrities' seemingly wearing it as a badge of honour that they've appeared on them as a guest. Don't misunderstand me, I don't have a problem with trans people (which sounds like a dance group from 1970s Top of the Pops) - I'm not going to be so crass as to go down that 'some of my best friends are trans' route, but I am acquainted with a number of trans people locally and have no problem with them. I'm very happy for them to express themselves through their exploration of their cross-gender identities. The question is whether these shows represent entertainment. To be fair, if the same sort of format was employed with non-trans people dressing outrageously and 'performing', I still wouldn't find it entertaining. It all reminds me too much of those drag acts you used to get in pubs and clubs - they could be mildly entertaining but ultimately repetitive and tiresome.
Damn it, I never saw the point of Danny La Rue, to be honest and he was the biggest drag act around when I was young. (OK, I know that he wasn't trans and that sort of drag act isn't really the same as the stuff we get nowadays, but at the end of the day, the kind of shows both end up producing are pretty much the same - blokes in dresses singing badly). I'm not denying that there was real skill involved in a bloke impersonating a woman as well as Danny La Rue did, but I just never understood, why? (To be honest, I quite admire blokes who can pull this sort of thing off - I remember that at the only work Christmas party I ever attended, when I worked for the MoD, this Army captain I knew turned up in drag (although it wasn't a fancy dress part) and he made an amazingly convincing woman. Indeed, as both myself and another male colleague observed, if we hadn't known that he was a bloke we might have tried our luck. I've never seen a man walk so well in high heels. As a postscript, said captain was later cashiered after he was caught stealing ladies' underwear from Woolworths).
I suppose that it's a bit like Marty Feldman's remark about the 'Black and White Minstrels': surely they could have found half a dozen real black men who couldn't sing and couldn't dance? (I never understood the point, let alone the entertainment value, of them, either). At least with stuff like Drag Race, the participants have a perfectly legitimate and understandable reason for dressing in drag: they identify as women. I never got the impression that Danny La Rue, or any other old time drag artist, identified as a woman any more than any of the Black and White Minstrels identified as a person of colour. (That said, while there are obvious reasons as to why it is wrong for white people to black up, I don't think there is anything wrong with men wearing women's clothes, if that's their thing. They don't have to identify as a woman to justify it. I mean, Hermann Goering allegedly dressed in women's clothes in private and he identified as a Nazi. Oh, and Cary Grant wore women's underwear). Anyway, to get back to the original point, I just don't find this sort of TV show entertaining, any more than I ever found those old time variety shows or Jack Hargeaves in Out of Town entertaining and I don't really understand why anyone does. I just wanted to get that off my chest without appearing to be transphobic, (because any suspicion of the latter would nowadays be incitement for a mob to descend on me, calling me a bastard, amongst other things and throwing bricks through my windows).
So, Stonehenge was originally erected in Wales, some archeologists claim. Bloody typical - the Welsh just won't let us have anything, will they? Next thing, they'll be trying to get it repatriated. Even now, Welsh Nationalists are probably poring over ancient tomes, looking for evidence that the stone circle was stolen by the English and whisked away across the border under cover of darkness. It will probably become the Welsh 'Elgin Marbles', with them continuously and tediously calling for the stones to be returned. Personally, I suspect the truth is that Stonehenge was actually the derelict ruins of some ancient structure, which the Welsh wanted to replace with some new development, so they sold it to some millionaire Ancient Briton king and transported to Salisbury Plain, in much the same way that London Bridge was bought by that American and taken to the US to be re-erected in Arizona, or wherever it is. Actually, if Stonehenge was originally sited in Wales, how does that affect the theory that it is some kind of device for calculating astronomical phenomena? They all seem to be predicated upon the idea that it was built in its current location specifically for this purpose, orientated so that the rays of the sun hit parts of it at precise times. If it was built elsewhere, surely this would be thrown into disarray? Not that anyone knows for sure what it was for, of course. For all we know, it could be the remains of some ancient toilet for visiting aliens - those stones with cross pieces could be 'straining bars' for giant, multi-tentacled ancient aliens.
Of course, I remember the 'good old days' when there was full public access to the stones and those bloody 'druids' turned up every Summer solstice to do whatever the Hell it is that those weirdos do. Mind you, in view of all this business about Stonehenge being originally built in Wales, I strongly suspect that those 'druids' were actually part of some Welsh plot to steal it back. Back then, in the seventies, there was also the 'Stonehenge Free Festival' every year, an entirely unofficial and unauthorised gathering which saw hundreds of grimy looking long haired, mainly drunk and spaced out, freaks descend on the stones to listen to whichever bands could be bothered to turn up and perform for free. (Actually, some of the acts, like Hawkwind, Doctor and the Medics and Dexy's Midnight Runners, were pretty impressive). Anyway, every year it was on, the local newspapers in Salisbury, (we had two back then), would be full of pictures of these hairy hippie types lounging all over the stones, to the accompaniment of outraged letters from readers wanting to know why the police hadn't arrested them all and given them bloody good thrashings. Eventually the stones were fenced off to prevent access to them during the event.
Finally, in 1985, after ten years, things all came to a head with Wiltshire Constabulary violently breaking it all up in the so called 'Battle of the Beanfield' during which they smashed up vehicles driven by travellers heading for the festival, after forcing them into a field. If I remember rightly, then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd was moved to describe the travellers as 'a bunch of medieval brigands'. Which seemed a bit harsh, as the violence seemed to entirely from the police. It was after this that they also started restricting access to the stones for the 'druids'. Nowadays, of course, nobody can get near the stones themselves. No doubt the Welsh would tell you that if only Stonehenge was still in its alleged rightful place in Wales, then they'd still be accessible to all, with wild revelry and male voice choirs performing every Summer solstice.
Too many would be UK horror films these day seem to minuscule budgeted student projects shot on somebody's phone, featuring poor performances from amateur (or, at best, semi-professional) casts and try desperately to stretch half an hour's worth of material out to feature length. By default, they tend to be either zombie or slasher movies - the perception on the part of their makers, doubtless, that these are 'easy' types of film to make. Actually, they aren't - if nothing else, finding original spins or treatments of these subjects is extremely difficult. Now, as anybody foolish enough to have read this blog over the past few years will know, I'm not opposed to ultra-low budgeted British productions - I've enjoyed films by the likes of Michael Murphy and I'm always happy to champion the output of the late, great Cliff Twemlow. But that's because such movies are actually entertaining, making up for their inadequacies with sheer verve, ambition, energy and a clear understanding of cinematic technique. I'm sure that there are currently low budget genre films out there of similar ilk - it's just that I don't seem to see them. So I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon K-Shop the other day on a streaming service I sometimes watch.
Now, when it comes to the originality of its basic concept, K-Shop isn't going to win any prizes: it is basically a modern day Sweeney Todd variation, set in a Bournemouth kebab shop. Where it scores is in its treatment of the subject. Rather than a demented barber out for personal gain, its protagonist is a reluctant kebab shop owner who inherited the shop following his father's death in an altercation with drunken club-goers. Consequently, the son, who gives up his university studies to run the shop, gripped with grief, starts doing in various late-night customers who annoy or offend him and turning them into kebabs. What's impressive about K-Shop is that where most other treatments of this subject matter would (and, indeed, have) turned it into some kind of 'whacky' black comedy or a gore-fest, writer/director Dan Pringle instead chooses to use it as the background for social commentary on modern Britain, with its binge-drinking and drug fueled sub-culture of racism, violence and extreme anti-social behaviour. Salah, the shop owner's, victims range from small time rug dealers, to obnoxious drunks to racists, mainly emanating from a nearby nightclub, (run by a slimy reality TV star who is the real villain of the piece, exploiting women and encouraging the substance abuse that drives the victims to their fates). All are unappealing characters who behave appallingly before their demise, yet, before their demise, we are generally given sufficient insights into their everyday lives to remind us that they are also human beings, with friends and families.
Best of all, K-Shop actually looks like a professional film. Despite an obviously tiny budget, with the majority of the action confined to the shop (a real kebab shop in Bournemouth), the moodily lit, dark cinematography is excellent, the editing smooth and effective. Overall, it achieves a fantastic grimy, late night look. Much of the footage of drunken revellers is actually real, shot mondo-style on the street and integrates smoothly with the rest of the film. The gore, while featured sparingly, is extremely well done, with some uncomfortably realistic looking dismemberments. The cast, mostly familiar faces from British TV, are all pretty good, with Ziad Abaza outstanding as Salah. Indeed, one of the film's strengths is that resists the temptation to turn Salah into some kind of vigilante-type hero, ridding the mean streets of Bournemouth of human vermin. For one thing, his victims are allowed just enough humanity to make the audience feel that they aren't entirely deserving of their fates, for another, Salah himself isn't drawn as an entirely sympathetic character - his condescending attitude to most of his customers and his assumption of his own superiority to just about everyone he meets are less than endearing. Nonetheless, Abaza does a good job in portraying Salah's gradual mental disintegration, wracked with grief over his father;s death, resentment at the failure of his academic career and disgust at the degeneracy he sees around him, eventually combining to overwhelm him.
The film isn't without problems, though. For one thing, at two hours it is as least half an hour too long. Also, the portrayal of the various club goers and revellers is problematic, giving the impression that they are a homogeneous group - every one of them a racist, drug dealer and/or psychopath. By extension, it is implying that everyone under the age of twenty five who goes to a club or likes a drink is automatically a scumbag, which is the sort of sweeping stereotype that would be condemned if applied a specific ethnic or social group. But, overall, K-Shop represents a welcome attempt to do something a bit different with an established exploitation format. Certainly, Salah, with his background as a refugee whose family came to the UK to escape the violence of a war, makes a change from your average movie psycho. K-Shop deserves to be more widely seen, although those expecting a more conventional gore or slasher film might be disappointed. It is, however, a very atmospheric and intense film, which captures that late-night club-throwing out time feel perfectly. It is, though, relentlessly down-beat, right through to the end. A bit like traditional British night-life, really.
US pop culture, particularly that connected with crime, has long been a source of fascination in France, probably as a result of World War Two and the role played by US troops in liberating the country from Nazi occupation. So, it is no surprise that during the fifties there were French pulp magazines reprinting translations of crime stories from US pulps. This is the cover of the February 1954 edition of Super Policier Magazine, which ran for six issues, drawings its stories and cover paintings from Popular Publications' crime magazines. 'Policier', of course, is the general term used in France to describe crime fiction in any media, whether it involves the police or not. The influence of US crime fiction on French popular culture was long lived, with much of the look of many classic French crime movies (or 'Policiers') adhering to the tropes established in their US antecedents, with criminals inevitably sporting fedoras and raincoats and driving American cars.
In addition to the genuine US article, UK imitations of American hard-boiled crime literature were also hugely popular in France, the works of James Hadley Chase and Peter Cheyney being particularly popular in translation. Indeed, numerous film adaptations of such novels were made in France, with Eddie Constantine becoming an international star playing Cheyney's Lemmy Caution character in a long series of movies (including being co-opted into Jean-Luc Goddard's Alphaville). (The character, to date, has never featured in an English language film). There have also been French film adaptations of one of Cheyney's other series characters, Slim Callahan. So, there you have it - lurid pulps weren't entirely the province of the English-speaking world - sleaze can cut across all cultural barriers.
Not a Blaxploitation film (although I did see Al Adamson's Black Heat (1976) the other evening), but rather a type of steam locomotive. Probably the UK's most ubiquitous steam locomotive, a 'Black Five' was so called because it was motive power class five, (the larger 'West Country' seen behind it is classed seven for passenger work and six for freight, as a comparison), and they were always painted black, whether in LMS or British Railways livery. That said, this particular model - an early eighties Hornby product - was originally red. I say red, it was actually meant to be LMS crimson lake, but back in those days, rather than paint the whole body, Hornby preferred to produce the moulded plastic bodies in the closest approximation to the required colour and paint things like the smokebox, cab roof and buffer beams. Quite why Hornby chose to produce the model in an incorrect livery (it had previously always been black) is a good question. But, for a while, these could be obtained quite cheaply by those prepared to respray them (as I did). (Nowadays, those still in the red livery seem to have become quite collectable).
Anyway, the reason I'm posting a picture of this old model of mine is, having not had a railway-related article, I fortuitously got it running again today. While it is always good to have another locomotive returned to the roster, the 'Black Five', of course, isn't a Southern locomotive, being an LMS design, dating back to the thirties and still being built by BR until 1951. (They subsequently built their own version, the BR Standard Class Five, a significant number of which were allocated to the Southern Region and is represented on my layout by the sixties Trix model). The model dated back to an earlier, long defunct, layout which was based on the old Somerset and Dorset line (long defunct in real life), where Southern and LMS locomotives and stock happily mixed. Indeed, thanks to the Somerset and Dorset, it was possible to see examples of the 'Black Five' as far South as Bournemouth, (my old model carries the number of one once allocated to Bath Green Park shed, which would have worked the line regularly in the fifties). Consequently, 'Black Fives' could sometimes be found running trains to Waterloo on the Southern's Bournemouth mainline, when they were occasionally co-opted by the Southern Region. So there is precedent for the continued presence of the 'Black Five' on my current set-up.
Interestingly, despite being one of the UK's most numerous and widely deployed steam locomotives, there has only ever been the one ready-to-run OO gauge model available, this Hornby design dating from the early seventies. Equipped with tender drive, it originally shared its valve gear (incorrectly) with the contemporaneous tender-drive Britannia. Mine is a slightly later version, sporting somewhat more accurate valve gear based upon that of the Hornby 'Duchess'. The body moulding was later revised to give daylight under the boiler. This version is still available, with a new loco drive chassis, as part of the 'Railroad' range, alongside a more expensive and more detailed version in the main Hornby range. Its longevity is surprising as it isn't a particularly good model. What's more surprising is that no other manufacturer has produced their own version, (Mainline and then Bachmann produced just about every other type of LMS 4-6-0, including the very similar 'Jubilee', but never a 'Black Five'). As far as my model is concerned, it might yet get another, better, repaint. Certainly the tender lining needs replacing and the BR totem updating to the later type more commonly seen during the sixties. But, as I said earlier, it is always good to see another loco returned to service, especially a useful mixed traffic type like the 'Black Five'.
I've watched enough low rent, dubbed, off beat and sometimes downright scuzzy movies that I've started to recognise certain recurring features of them. Not just the actors who turn up again and again in these sorts of films,(not to mention the voice artists who dub them in the English language versions of the foreign ones), nor the locations, which also turn up multiple times, but now I even recognise the stock music which plays in the background during action or suspense sequences. The use of library music of this sort has always been a Godsend for low budget film makers, saving them the expense of actually hiring a composer, then having them record their score with real musicians. (Which is why, of course, those low budget movies which do employ a composer more often than not have an electronic score, performed by the composer on their synthesiser in order to keep costs down). But the use of library music has never been confined to low budget film making. Back in the day, studios would do much the same thing, recycling scores from bigger budget movies for use on their B-movies and serials. Universal, for instance, reused the score from Son of Frankenstein on another Rathbone/Karloff pairing, Tower of London, with parts of it also turning up in the serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.
In more recent times, television has been a great user of library music. Many TV themes we think iconic are in fact, library music. ITV sitcoms from the seventies, in particular, made extensive use of library music - Man About the House, the Doctor series and In Loving Memory, for instance, all used library pieces for their theme music. The practice also extended to drama, with long-running ITV daytime legal drama Crown Court using a piece of library music originally composed, I believe, by one-man Mancunian film industry Cliff Twemlow. Actually, Twemlow was a prolific contributor to music libraries, apparently finding it a useful source of extra income. So it can sometimes feel disorientating when you suddenly hear a piece of library music you have always strongly identified with one particular programme, being used, often incongruously, in a different context. I found it quite disconcerting, for example, when the traditional ITN News at Ten theme was used over an underwater fight sequence in Beyond Atlantis (1974). I had even more of a jolt the other day when I caught the last twenty minutes or so of another John Ashley film, Twilight People (1972) on Fright Flix the other evening and heard the ominous tones of the Mastermind theme playing over a chase through the jungle. It was all very disconcerting. Thankfully, though, the theme from Van Der Valk didn't play as Ashley tirned hairy and bestial in Beast of the Yellow Night, which they were also showing.
I'm sorry to keep harping on about this Amazon Prime business, but after being effectively tricked into this thirty day trial that I never wanted, (and which you can't really cancel, only opt out of having it become a paid contract after thirty days), I thought that I should at least look a little more closely at the 'benefits' it supposedly offers. Now, I know that I'm biased and that, in truth, I'm still mad that I fell for their shenanigans at the check out stage of an order, which dupes the unwary into signing up for Prime whether they want it or not, (I've succeeded in avoiding it up to now, so I'm equally angry at myself for getting caught out this time), but I have to say that what Amazon is offering seems pretty thin to me. I mean, just look at the whole concept: you pay them, up front, for the privilege of buying stuff from them that might or might not be cheaper than for a non-member and which might, or might not, be eligible for 'fast' free shipping. That's quite an audacious move to make - after all, I don't pay Tesco or Sainsbury's in advance for shopping there: I expect them to tempt me in and get my custom by offering me lower prices or higher quality than their competitors. Obviously, though, the selling point for Amazon Prime is that much vaunted fast free delivery, usually within two days. Except that it isn't really free - on the one hand you've already paid them £7.99 a month (or £79 a year) in advance for it, on the other, it is factored into the prices of whatever you are ordering, (you can often find the same thing for less from on Amazon Marketplace, but without the fast delivery). So, you'd have to order a fair amount of stuff to cover those fees.
But even if you do normally order enough stuff from Amazon every month/year to justify the cost of Prime on 'free' deliveries alone, how often do you really need things delivered that fast? Let's not forget that if your order is over £20 you can get free delivery without Prime, if you are prepared to wait 5-8 days for delivery, (in my experience, it is usually less than this). If I need anything that urgently, it is, frankly, quicker and easier to find an actual shop which can supply it - and let's face it, if something really is that urgent, price is unlikely to be a primary consideration. Indeed, using real shops is frequently more cost effective than buying online, (I generally confine my online purchases to stuff I can't get easily locally), especially groceries - with fast delivery of grocery shopping being something else used by Amazon to try and sell Prime. Look, just why would you buy groceries from Amazon? Just go to your local supermarket - you can actually see what you are buying! They'll even deliver it to your door! In fact, if you really love shopping online, then you can do so with most supermarkets and cut out the Amazon middleman!
Of course, fast free delivery of online purchases isn't the only selling point of Prime - access to other services, such as Prime Video are also heavily pushed. I've had a look at Prime Video and have to say that if I were in the market to pay for a streaming service, this certainly wouldn't be it. Its offerings are actually pretty thin, with the stuff included with Prime and therefore free to watch for members, consisting mainly of those vapid and largely derivative 'originals' and movies of the direct-to-DVD variety that I ordinarily cross the street to avoid. That and lots of other stuff of considerable vintage readily available elsewhere (usually free-to-air). It seems that anything decent, you have to pay extra to watch! (Most are, in fact, available to watch, for the same price, for non-members). Indeed, I've been told that even some of the TV shows which they carry only have a certain number of episodes included in Prime, forcing you to pay in order to see the whole series! I don't know about you, but when I pay a subscription to a streaming service, I expect everything to be included under that fee. The music streaming service offered as part of Prime is similarly limited, while, despite being offered two audio books free, the Audible service is extra. If you have a Kindle (which I don't) there is also a limited ebook lending library service included.
There are, however, plenty of people who seem to disagree with me. In fact, the web is full of glowing positive reviews of Amazon Prime, extolling its virtues. I would caution, though, that most of the blogs and sites carrying such puff pieces are themselves Amazon affiliates, carrying links to that Prime free trial and that they receive a commission for every click on they get on those links. So they are hardly unbiased. (To be absolutely fair, Amazon are not the only company who use these sorts of affiliates - it is a widespread practice). Look, I'm not trying to start an anti-Amazon crusade here, encouraging people to cancel their Prime subscriptions or boycott the service - if you have it and it works for you: great. If you don't have it but think it might be of benefit, again, great, but before signing up, be cautious and look into it very carefully. My biggest concern with Amazon Prime is the hard sell involved and the frankly underhand ways in which Amazon try to ensnare new customers - if it really is that good, then it can surely attract new members on its own merits, without the need for subterfuge. While I'm sure that there are people who use Amazon enough to offset the expense of Prime on delivery costs alone, the risk is that others might find themselves feeling the need to buy more and more stuff, whether necessary or not, in order to justify the fees to themselves, (which, undoubtedly, is one of Amazon's aims). From a personal perspective, I find Amazon Prime a bizarre concept that, whichever way I look at it, makes absolutely no sense and offers very little in the way of value. But hey, that's just my opinion. Anyway, as I have no intention of turning this into a consumer advice blog, we'll hopefully be back to normal ranting and off beat old pop culture soon.
Are we in the midst of a new age of stupidity? I'm prompted to ask by the plethora of media articles I see now with headlines assuring readers that they'll 'explain' the endings of various films or recent TV episodes. I mean, what? Are modern films and TV series so complicated that they are incomprehensible without someone who is apparently very clever to explain them to viewers? The fact that it is journalists providing these 'explanations' seems to rule this out, though. Or maybe that is the problem, that the journalists writing about modern media have trouble understanding it that they have to come up with these articles as a means of trying to unravel it al to their own satisfaction. Alternatively, audiences have grown so stupid that they no longer understand such things as plotting or character development, or even dramatic devices like foreshadowing, irony, flashbacks etc. Either that, or we are back to the problem lying with the shows themselves - are they so poorly conceived and written that they are incomprehensible to the average viewer? Personally, I suspect that it is the journalists with the problem, who assume that if someone as clever as them can't understand this stuff, then the average thicko viewer certainly won't be able to.
Certainly, this low estimation of the intelligence of readers is manifested elsewhere in the media - just look at the way much of the press relentlessly push crude right-wing propaganda in an attempt to frame debates, whether they be about Brexit, Black Lives Matter or the pandemic. But to get back to the point with regard to the way in which the media reports on TV and films, look no further than TV reschedulings for a prime example of their assuming stupidity on the part of their readers. Just about every time an episode of a soap opera is rescheduled to make way for live football or some other event, you get the papers pushing out online articles with headlines along the lines of '(insert soap opera title here) CANCELLED! FANS OUTRAGED!' Except that everyone knows that it hasn't been cancelled, an episode has merely been moved to a different date or time to accommodate schedule changes. Fans most certainly aren't outraged as, unlike these journalists apparently, they've read the schedules or listened to the announcements made after the previous episode. The headlines, obviously, are click bait, but click bait predicated upon the idea that their readers are stupid. All of which begs the question of just why those readers keep reading these media sources which are clearly so dismissive of them?
This has turned into a week for ranting. If it isn't the global shortage of Greek-style yoghurt with honey, (in Crapchester, at least, you can't get such a thing for love or money, unless you are willing to pay for the over-priced Yeo Valley version), then it is yet another round of nonsense with Amazon. You know, I have never wanted to join Amazon Prime, never been a member, never been tempted to join, never wanted their free trial and never foresee a time when I would want this over-priced service. Yet, in attempting to order a couple of items yesterday, I've ended up on their free trial. I consequently wasted what felt like hours trying to cancel it. In the past, I've been pretty good at avoiding their attempts to trick you into signing up for that trial (which turns into a full subscription if you don't cancel it), at the checkout stage. But this time, they obviously succeeded in getting me to click on the wrong button. From which there is no way back. Going back in your browser doesn't cancel it. Cancelling the entire order doesn't get rid of it. You have no choice. You are signed up for thirty days whether you like it or not. As it turns out, there is a tortuous online process by which you can cancel (at every step Amazon tries to mislead you into keeping the trial), except that it doesn't really cancel the trial. Sure, it stops it from turning into a paid subscription, but you are forced to retain the 'benefits' of membership for he full trial period.
Now, many will say, 'what's the problem? Thirty days of free delivery, access to Prime Video etc.' - but the point is that I don't want any of that. I never wanted it, in a free trial or otherwise. I get free delivery if I order over twenty quid anyway (sure it isn't delivered within two days, but I don't care). I don't want their expensive streaming service. I don't want any of the other supposed 'benefits' - I detest Audible, I don't have a Kindle and I'm simply not interested in any of their other shit. I don't order enough from Amazon to make that £7.99 a month (£79.00 yearly, but they put you on the hifger rate by default) worthwhile. But I'm apparently stuck with these unwanted and - most importantly - unasked for, 'benefits' for the next thirty days. Damn it, if I cancel something, I expect it to end there and then. I'm funny like that - I've never liked receiving unsolicited 'gifts' (birthdays and Christmas involving reciprocal arrangements with people I know excepted, obviously), 'awards', 'bonuses' or 'trials'. I always feel that they, in some way, make obligated toward the other party. (I've turned down work-related 'awards' for such reasons - you wouldn't believe the amount of trouble it causes, no matter how subtly and politely you try to do it). Perhaps more importantly in this case, I feel that I've been tricked into this 'obligation' by Amazon's chicanery.
The end result of all this is that I ended up ordering my items, but chose the delivery option closest to the normal, non-Prime, free delivery. In retrospect, I should simply have found the items elsewhere and ordered them, (even if it meant paying more and having to deal with multiple suppliers), as I still feel as if I've incurred an 'obligation' by being forced to order via this 'free trial' I never asked for or wanted. The positive side of this is that I've made a start in finding some more Amazon alternatives. None can offer the sort of one stop shopping that Amazon does, but I don't care. The reality is that using Amazon has been making me uneasy for a long time now, with their tax-dodging and poor treatment of staff. Indeed, until the pandemic, I had brought my buying down to a minimum, but, like everyone else, I found myself using them to get stuff I couldn't get on the High Street during lockdowns. Christmas was especially crucial as they delivered the stuff to recipients as well. But this Amazon Prime nonsense has finally pushed me into seeking alternatives. The fact that this 'trial' still continues despite having cancelled it continues to irk me - if I had the stamina I'd contact their customer services and insist that they stop it right now. Experience, however, has taught me that even the simplest requests to Amazon's customer service can turn into a tortuous nightmare.
Another late sixties sleazy Euro horror pot-boiler - a sub-genre I have a particular affection for. It has to be said that Castle of the Creeping Flesh really isn't a very good film, but its fevered mix of disparate elements - gory surgery, Gothic castles, reincarnation, doppelgangers, rape, bare breasts, jazz music, bears and mad scientists - makes it a bizarrely entertaining diversion. Indeed, there are times while watching it that these elements seem to be a random assemblage, as it rapidly lurches from one scenario to another, not to mention one historical era to another, but a plot, of sorts, gradually emerges from the madness. Opening with one of those 'swinging' parties that the decadent but beautiful rich always seem to be attending in sixties Euro-schlock movies, dancing on tables and carrying on with wild abandon, we quickly learn that the host, Baron Brack, is a pretty sleazy character. While most of his guests go out riding in the forest - the part is taking place at Brack's hunting lodge - the Baron takes the opportunity to rape the girl who has stayed behind. When the others return, she remains silent, but after hearing that the daughter of a local landowner has been attacked and brutally raped in the forest, she rides off, eventually coming to grief near the castle of Earl Saxon, where she is taken by one of the Earl's servants. Her friends go searching for her and all, eventually, end up at Saxon's castle, which Brack is wary of entering as Saxon is, apparently, a very strange man. As indeed he would be, as he is played by Jesus Franco regular Howard Vernon, who made a career out of playing these sorts of roles in Eurotrash movies.
It transpires that it is Saxon's daughter who has been attacked and has now died. It also becomes obvious, from his reactions, that the Baron was responsible. To compound matters, her ordeal and death mirrors that of one of the Earl's ancestor's daughters during the thirty years war. Of course, not only did that girl look just like the present day victim, but the culprit was one of the Baron's ancestors. Oh, and Vera, one of the Baron's guests (whose sister he raped earlier on) is the spitting image of the Earl's ancestor's mistress, who arranged the girl's rape and murder, motivated by jealously. In fact, it turns out that all of the guests resemble those involved in the historic atrocity. (Somewhat bizarrely, the Earl has a waxwork tableau - complete with sound effects - of the incident, which his bearded, burly and cackling manservant delights in showing the guests). The group is invited to stay the night - it is dangerous to go into the woods at night because of a killer bear roaming about - on the proviso that they don costumes appropriate to the era when the original rape and murder took place. All the while, the Earl, with the aid of a doctor associate, is trying to revive his dead daughter down in his underground lab, with little success. But wait, one of the female guests is her doppelganger! So, after everyone retires for the night - except the Baron, who insists on going for help - the doppelganger girl is abducted.
We are then treated to footage of an apparently real operation, intercut with goings on in the bedrooms. Vera, slips into a dream where she sees the historical events re-enacted, which seems to sexually arouse her, the daughter's double's boyfriend finds she is missing and starts searching for her, while the other male guest, hearing Vera cry out as she wakes from her dream, runs to her room. There follows an utterly bizarre sequence where Vera and her male friend go hammer and tongs at it in her bed, inter cut with gory operation scenes, all underscored by a jazz piano track. At one point the boyfriend bursts in, trying to enlist their help in his search, but they are too absorbed in testing the bed springs that they ignore him. One can't help but feel that the director might have been trying to make some point here, probably connected to the Earl's assertion at dinner that 'there is nothing as interesting as death', which receives the riposte of 'yes there is - life'. Hence the contrasts between the bloody surgery in the basement and the wild shagging in the bedroom. Things then career toward a hurried climax (the cut English language version runs just over seventy five minutes), with the Baron stumbling back in after an encounter with the bear, the missing girl turning up and then revealed to be the Earl's revived daughter, the Baron's sex crimes revealed followed by tragedy and bloody retribution. In the final shot, we see the doctor who assisted Saxon riding across the drawbridge, his face revealed as the skull-like visage of death.
The thing about Castle of the Creeping Flesh is that its central conceit, that this group of souls are condemned to forever repeat this cycle of depravity, violence and death, with the characters' current incarnations drawn into re-enacting ancient events, isn't a bad one. Unfortunately, it is poorly executed, with the film feeling more like a random series of events than a preordained tragedy unfolding with grim inevitability. The script is confused, the narrative tangled, with many of the elements never properly gelling together and dialogue (in the English version, at least, atrocious). So poor is the dubbing that it is difficult to judge the quality of the performances. But even in their original German, one suspects that they were variable, to say the least. Howard Vernon, of course, could play this sort of role in his sleep and gives a pretty standard, by his measure, performance as Saxon. Michel Lemoine as the Baron, playing his part wild eyed, comes over as an obvious sex offender from the start, rather than the smoothly seductive bastard I suspect that we're meant to see him as. Vladimir Medar as the manservant overacts like crazy and the female characters are all very beautiful and bare their breasts a lot, while the other two male characters are entirely forgettable. Actually, it has to be said that Janine Reynaud as Vera gives a very 'spirited' performance in her bedroom scenes. Not to forget the bear - or rather man in a tatty looking bear suit - not the least convincing movie bear I've ever seen, (that accolade goes to the 'Cave Bear' in Creatures the World Forgot), but pretty risible nonetheless.
The casual viewer might suspect that, hiding behind the obviously pseudonymous director's credit of 'Percy G Parker' was none other than Jesus Franco himself. After all, it has many of his hallmarks - Howard Vernon, a rickety plot that veers all over the place, a heady mix of sex and horror and plenty of female nudity. In reality, however, the film is the work of German actor-turned-director Adrian Hoven, who, a few years later, would gain a certain notoriety with his two Euro sex and torture witchfinder films, Mark of the Devil and Mark of the Devil Part Two. While Castle of the Creeping Flesh is somewhat lighter affair than the two later films, Hoven's apparent preoccupation with sexual violence against women (although largely off screen here) is still evident. But despite all of its shortcomings in terms of script, narrative and characters, the film is, physically, very well produced. The sets. lighting and photography are all excellent and the whole thing surprisingly atmospheric. Furthermore, there is just something about its deluded mix and matching of various horror and sleaze tropes in freewheeling 'plot' which makes the film incredibly entertaining. Sleazy entertainment, to be sure, but nevertheless entertaining in that 'what the fuck' way which characterises the best Euro sleaze-horror movies.
Despite not reading the right-wing tabloids as a matter of principle, I can't help but see their front pages when I'm in the newsagents. Consequently, I am not spared their 'War on Woke', (although, to be honest, as with 'Political Correctness', I'm still not sure exactly what 'Woke' is, other than it apparently being anything to the left of Hitler), which, in the case of the 'Daily Star' seems to consist of playground level name-calling. As the term 'snowflake' no longer seems to suffice for conveying their entirely synthetic rage, anyone who disagrees with neo-Nazism in general or Specific things like Brexit, racism, bigotry and the like, is now a 'Bed-wetter'. Now, leaving aside the fact that bed-wetting can actually be a symptom of deep seated anxieties and fears in children and therefore shouldn't be stigmatised, is this really the level our press has sunk to? What next? Are they going to start calling people who express emotion over the deaths of, say, illegal Vietnamese immigrants who die in the backs of lorries in people smuggling rackets gone wrong, 'Cry Babies'?
Why not just get straight to the point: intellectuals are 'four eyed gits', women who object to stuff like Page Three Girls are jealous 'Fat Arses', for instance. I wouldn't mind, but epithets like 'Snowflake' and 'Bed Wetter' aren't even properly applicable to their, inevitably left-wing, targets. They aren't the ones strutting around telling people how hard they are, before dissolving into hysterics when their actions catch up with them. That's the right. I mean, just look at those dicks who tried to stage a coup in the US by storming the Capitol Building. That self-styled 'QAnon Shaman', for example - there he is, strutting around the Capitol with his freaky pals, his fucking stupid hat, face paint and Nazi tattoos, all 'Billy Big Bollocks', but as soon as he's in prison, it's a different tune, all whining about how he can't get his organic breakfast cereals and how he's willing to testify against Donald Trump at his impeachment. Because, you know, Trump made him do it. No, you chose to support Trump and commit insurrection. Own it, you fucking bed-wetting snowflake.
Because that's the thing - these right-wing snowflakes, bed-wetters and crybabies (to use their own nomenclature) are the ones who are always getting outraged by something (usually facts) and whingeing on about it endlessly - and not just on social media. Thanks to the fact that most of the print media in this country (not to mention 'talk radio' stations like Nazi FM, sorry, LBC), are owned by right-wing millionaires, they get to dominate the newspapers and airwaves with their whining. They just never shut up. Especially the ones who claim to have been 'cancelled', (what they really mean is that others have had the audacity to call out their bigotry and general idiocy). The problem is, of course, that all their hypocritical ill-informed bellowing will drown out any real, informed debate on the issues that matter. So, reactionary neo-Nazi bed-wetters, shut the the fuck up, can't you?
First Man into Space (1959) just about managed to get into cinemas before there really was a first man into space - a Russian, as it turned out, rather than the American featured here. It was one of a pair of low budget science fiction films starring Marshall Thompson produced by Richard Gordon for Anglo Amalgamated, (the other being 1958's Fiend Without a Face). Both films, despite being filmed in the UK, purported to be set in North America. While Fiend's Canadian setting was carried of reasonably convincingly, First Man into Space never really convinces us that it is set in New Mexico, Surrey proving to be a poor substitute for the desert state. Despite turning a profit at the box office, First Man into Space is, artistically, far inferior to Fiend, thanks largely to its overly derivative story.
Actually, it isn't so much derivative as it is a complete rip-off of Nigel Kneale's 1953 BBC TV serial The Quatermass Experiment. Indeed, while the titles might credit the story to Wyatt Ordung (the man who gave us Robot Monster), but, in truth, the film's execution owes far more to Kneale's creation (and its subsequent, hugely successful, film adaptation by Hammer). As in Quatermass Experiment, the first space traveller returns to earth horribly mutated after an encounter with an alien force. In this case, her comes back encrusted in some form of cosmic dust, which turns him into a blood drinking monster. The film's climax even echoes that of Kneale's original TV script, with the creature briefly regaining its humanity before expiring. To be fair, despite its derivative nature, First Man into Space is a reasonably effective B-movie, with atmospheric black and white direction from Robert Day and a memorable and well realised monster in Bill Edwards' space suited and dust encrusted killer astronaut. The make-up for the lumbering creature is excellent, but, thanks to Bill Edwards' unsympathetic character, it is difficult to feel much sympathy for it, even during what is clearly intended to be a tragic climax. Ultimately, First Man into Space isn't a bad film, but it lacks the originality of concept and fevered nightmarish atmosphere that makes its companion piece, Fiend Without a Face, so compelling.
Speaking, as we were last post, about toys of yesteryear, I was put in mind of Triang's 'Big Big Train'. As can be seen from the video above, this was a large scale model railway system, built to O gauge, which is around twice the size of Triang's regular OO gauge model railway range. Unlike the OO gauge range, 'Big Big Train' was far more toy-orientated, with plastic track and battery operated locomotives. These features meant that it was entirely suitable for outdoor use and the lack of any track wiring and electric controllers made it suitable even for quite young children. The lack of external power was also he range's biggest weakness - it meant that the user had only very limited control of the trains. Their speed was fixed and hey couldn't be reversed or stopped without physical intervention. The latter was simplified somewhat by the provision of track-mounted devices which could either flip the locos' side mounted control switches from forward to reverse, or to stop. This system, while it worked surprisingly well, did result in incredibly abrupt changes of direction and equally dramatic halts, with no deceleration. The motors used also chewed up batteries at quite a rate.
The other problem that the 'Big Big Train' had was a limited range of locomotives and rolling stock. That said, the best known loco in the range, the 'Blue Flyer' diesel, was actually a surprisingly accurate model of a British Railways 'Hymek' diesel-hydraulic locomotive. There was also an 0-6-0 tank loco which was apparently based on the US-built tank engines used at Southampton docks (albeit without the real thing's complex valve gear). These were later joined by a pair of locos sharing the same 0-4-0 chassis: a diesel shunter and a steam shunter. The coaches were pretty decent replicas of the prototype BR Mk 2 coaches, (they were also available as 'continental' coaches with corrugated sides). There was also a small selection of goods stock. The limited stock was balanced by the availability of a number of operating accessories, most notably the automatic barrel loader. The range was originally available between 1966 and 1972, when Lines Brothers, the owners of Triang and many other brands, collapsed. It re-emerged in the mid-seventies, this time under the 'Novo' brand and was produced in this form for a few more years. Quite a lot of the various components were manufactured under both incarnations and, until a few years, ago were available second hand at relatively low prices. The 'Blue Flyer' diesel and coaches were popular with O gauge modellers as they could be converted relatively easily for use with conventional model railway systems. In recent years, however, prices have risen significantly.
My personal experience with the 'Big Big Train' system is limited. I certainly recall the adverts for the original Triang version when I was young and I have a vague recollection of one of my older brothers having the 'barrel loading set'. This must have been early in the product's production run, on the very edge of my memories and we certainly didn't have it when we moved house in 1968, (the other brother's OO trains had also vanished by this time, as had the Scalectrix set). My main encounters with it came at model railway and toy train exhibitions, such as the Alresford Toy Train Fair, although I wasn't at the 2012 event at which the above video was apparently made. I did, however, see the same exhibitor at the 2019 event. He has a pretty extensive collection of both the Triang and Novo versions. His collection also includes an example of the notorious Far Eastern knock off version, the 'Red Rocket', (the red version of the diesel seen in the video is from this set). While the concept was licensed to both Lima in Italy and AMF in the US, it was apparently never particularly profitable. Looking back, it was another of those toys I wished that I'd had back in the day, (I had to make do with a clockwork Triang-Hornby OO set that I got for Christmas in the early seventies - the loco was even less controllable than the battery operated 'Big Big Train' locos and it was small enough for the cat to deliberately derail every time I had it set up on the living room floor). Still, it is fun to look back on and ponder might-have-beens.
Lately I've found myself looking at some old toys that, when I was a kid I wanted (or thought that I wanted), but never had. Thanks to You Tube, I can now enjoy videos of some of these and get a clearer idea of what I was missing out on. Like most small boys, I was an avid collector of Matchbox toy cars and lorries - there was a shop in Salisbury, primarily a newsagents but, like many small shops in the sixties and seventies carried a wide range of goods - from which most of mine were bought. They had a fantastic window display, showcasing the range in stock and highlighting the new releases. It became a ritual for me that, every few weeks, I stood at that window with my parents and chose my next acquisition. While I had great fum with those little vehicles, playing with them to destruction, it didn't escape my notice that Matchbox also started producing a range of accessories, including a 'motorway' system on which you could see your favourite vehicles moving, apparently under their own power. I knew very little about it - it never appeared in that shop window and none of my friends had one, but I did see TV ads for it and I had seen some of the cars adapted for use on it in the shop window. This adaptation involved the fixing of a spike to the bottom of the car (at the time I assumed it was metal, but they were actually plastic and fixed in place with an adhesive pad), which fitted into a slot in the miniature roadway.
While I realised that such small models wouldn't be motorised, like the Scalectrix slot cars my older brothers had, I still had no idea how they were made to move. As I grew older, still thinking that spike was metal, I assumed it involved some kind of electromagnetic system in the slots themselves. As it turns out, it was actually far cruder than that. As each layout was assembled, you had to feed a long, continuous spring into each slot. When the layout was complete, a an electric motor in a 'road house' on each side of one of the track sections drove a train of gears, with the teeth of the final cog meshing with each spring and moving it along. The spikes on the undersides of the cars then slotted into the coils of the spring as they were dropped into the slot, the spring pulling them along the roadway as it circulated inside the slot. Hence, you could have multiple vehicles running in each direction, just like real traffic queues. A hand throttle for each lane allowed the speed of each queue of vehicles to be varied. Alternatively, you could have both springs running in the same direction and have only one vehicle in each lane, turning the circuit into a race track. The drawbacks of the system are clear - threading those springs through the trackpieces every time you set it up and then removing them when you packed it away was laborious. Moreover, the springs inevitably became tangled when stored, meaning more time wasted untangling them before each set up. Consequently, I'm rather glad that I never had this particular toy - it would inevitably have caused the young me much frustration as adult help would have been needed to set it all up.
Matchbox produced another toy which allowed you to use your cars more realistically: the 'Steer and Go'. This was a good deal more sophisticated than the motorway system and allowed you actually to take control of one of your cars and drive it on a roadway system. For many years this was available through the Marshall Ward catalogue my parents subscribed to and, although at the time it wasn't entirely clear exactly how it worked, I knew that I wanted one. But, for some reason, I never had the nerve to ask for it for either a birthday or Christmas present. It was a deceptively simple system - you placed a magnet under one of your Matchbox cars and placed it on a rotating circular road system. In effect, the car stayed stationary while the road moved. The car was steered via a steering wheel mounted in a dashboard - this controlled the movement of an arm with a magnet on the end which ran under the rotating road system and which, in turn, controlled the movement of the magnetised car on the top of the road. Turning the wheel in the appropriate direction allowed you to navigate the vehicle around the rotating roads. The dashboard also had a gear shifter, with the forward gears varying the speed at which the road rotated, giving the illusion of acceleration and deceleration, a reverse gear allowed you back the car up, by changing the direction of the road's rotation. Having now seen one in action in a You Tube video, I really wish that I'd had one of these - I'm sure that I would be a much better driver now if I'd had all that practice!
Finally, I also watched some videos about something I actually did have - Airfix's 'Flight Deck'. This involved landing a Phantom jet on the flight deck of a Royal navy aircraft carrier. Which sounds impressive. In reality, it involved a plastic Phantom model on a length of nylon line, which stretched between a 'control stick' and a clamp which you had to situate as far away and as elevated as possible. Both clamp and stick had wheel on them over which the nylon cord looped, to form what, in effect, was a pulley system. You used the pulley to get the plane to the highest point, near the clamp, keeping the line taught, then released it by dipping the control stick slightly and guiding it in its descent to try and land on a cardboard flight deck. You knew if you had been successful as the plane's arrestor hook would catch on a line the deck, pulling up a pair of flags. The problem was finding somewhere with enough room to set up a decent length of cord - the only place inside where I could really do that was the hallway, using the kitchen door to fix the clamp on. Of course, whenever the kitchen door was opened, the line went slack and the plane crashed, while I was effectively blocking the front door as I sat at the controls. The whole set up made it difficult for anybody to get past me to use the stairs. In the better weather, though, I was able to set it up in the garden, allowing a long flight path and natural hazards like cross winds. With a long run like this, it was possible to put the plane through some manouevres before landing. There was a later version of the toy called 'Super Flight Deck', whereby a catapult on the deck was used to launch the plane up the wire, with it turning around when it reached the top, ready for its descent and landing. I never had this version, but I had a lot of fun with my original version on those days it was fine enough to set it up outside.
I know that 'Flight Deck' and the other things I've described here nowadays seem incredibly crude, but back in the seventies they were the height of sophistication. I miss their simplicity, which had a certain elegance, not to mention making them child proof. (For the same reason, I retain a huge affection for the older Triang, Hornby Dublo and Trix model railway locomotives of the same era, which still form the basis of my model railway activities. Their relative simplicity and robust construction makes them incredibly reliable and easy to maintain - which is why they still run forty or fifty years after leaving the factory).
If you've ever wondered what a low-budget science fiction horror film, featuring slimy aliens raping earth women, directed by a noted director of gay porn movies would look like, then Breeders (1986) could be your answer. Actually, that brief summary doesn't come close to doing the film justice. It is all too easy to simply dismiss something like Breeders as cheap jack semi-pornographic exploitation, but, in realty, it succeeds, to some extent, in rising above this. To be sure, it is cheap and it is exploitative - it certainly does nothing to disguise the fact that its premise is an excuse for plentiful female nudity - but it certainly doesn't come over as fundamentally misogynistic as many such movies and, particularly toward the end, comes up with some inventive imagery unlikely to be forgotten in a hurry. Most of all, despite its obvious limitations, it is actually very professionally made- good sound quality, good editing and well composed shots. Sure, it is unlikely ever to win any awards, but it is very watchable and, at seventy seven minutes, never outstays its welcome.
The scenario is straightforward - women in New York are being attacked and raped by something inhuman, (although it disguises itself as various people in the course of the film, resulting in each victim describing their attacker differently). A lady doctor and a police detective, (apparently the NYPD can spare only a single cop to investigate a wave of violent sex crimes), investigate and find that all of the victims were virgins and that their bodies now contain traces of what turns out to be dust from a type of brick used in the city's foundations. Coupled with the fact that at least one of the attackers - now missing - had recently been exploring the abandoned tunnels under the city leads our protagonists to conclude that something nasty is coming out of the tunnels and molesting women. Meanwhile, the victims themselves are vanishing from the hospital, (they wander off stark naked without anybody noticing). The doctor and the detective pursue the attacker, after it is foiled in its latest rape attempt, into the tunnels, eventually finding themselves in an abandoned subway spur line, (I must admit that I at first thought that the doctor had said that it was an abandoned sperm line, which, actually, would have been quite appropriate, as things turn out). There they learn, via a possessed colleague of the doctor's, that an alien force has landed in the city and sought refuge beneath the streets, where it is now trying to reproduce, for which it requires the purity of the virginal victims in order to avoid mutations in the off-spring.
As it turns out, the victims' impregnation doesn't result from their rape - this just put them under the alien's influence - but rather from the bathing in, well, alien jism which they are now indulging in. The sight of a bevy of naked women slathering themselves in other worldly ejaculations in what appears to be a giant clam shell, (believe me, you'll never look at Botticelli's 'Venus on the Half Shell' in the same way again), is striking, to say the least. The film moves to a somewhat underwhelming climax, whereby our heroes conveniently find, discarded in the tunnel, exactly what they need to destroy the aliens: a tin of flammable liquid with which to burn the adult alien to death and a reel of cable to connect to the subway conductor rail and electrocute the girls in the bath. (On a point of fact, the cable is far too lightweight to carry that sort of current and just throwing one end in the bath wouldn't work - you'd need to complete a circuit, but the Hell, this is just a cheap exploitation film, so why am I worrying about such details?). All of which gives the clear impression that Breeders is, in effect, the sort of science fiction B-movie which used to fill the bottom half of double bills throughout the fifties and sixties, albeit with added sex and nudity. Which is exactly what it is - a homage/parody of films like Mars Needs Women, Night Caller From Out of Space or even The Body Stealers, all of which feature not dissimilar plots about aliens procreating with earth people. If you accept that, then it is an enjoyable film.
The film's weak points lie with some pretty lame acting performances which, bearing in mind the director's pedigree, seem to come straight from a porn film. To be absolutely fair, in part, at least, they can also been seen as part of the parodying of old low budget science fiction B-movies, which more often than not featured similarly flat performances. The inadequacy of the performances is particularly painful at the film's climax, with the two leads offering absolutely no reaction at all to either the burning of the alien or the electrocution of a bath full of naked women, (who are, after all, innocent and unwilling victims of a force beyond their control). Some of the plot points beggar belief (perhaps intentionally), most significantly the idea that the victims are all virgins. Without wishing to indulge in sexist stereotypes, the idea that women working on New York fashion shoots might not be sexually active, (particularly as one spends her lunch break snorting coke and dancing naked) strains credulity. On the other hand, as alluded to previously, the film does avoid falling into misogynistic stereotypes itself: none of the victims are portrayed (as they all too often are in exploitation films) as being 'slutty', 'provacative' or 'asking for it'. Rape (even by a slimy alien) is also portrayed as being an act of violation which severely traumatises the victim.
Not surprisingly for a low budget production, the special effects are pretty variable, with the alien, basically a guy in a black rubber suit, is wisely confined to glimpses for most of the film. Some of its slimy attacks are quite effective, as is the scene where the photographer begins to transform, while the bit near the end where a character explodes to reveal the alien beneath is pretty neat. Overall, the film looks surprisingly decent, with director Tim Kincaid (who usually directed his gay porn under the name of Joe Gage), putting together a remarkably slick package, bearing in mind the production's obvious limitations. Production values are solid rather than inspired, but certainly don't look threadbare. Kincaid's direction is effective, managing a modicum of suspense in the attack sequences. The opening, for instance, employs some decent misdirection, before the elderly dog walker is revealed as the alien attacker, likewise, a subsequent victim is saved from one would be rapist by the alien, only to be raped it instead. Obviously, every time a young woman is alone and starts undressing, we know that she's going to be attacked, but it is the 'by who' and 'how' which provides the suspense. In the final analysis, Breeders is never going to be hailed as a masterpiece and there is no getting away from the fact that it is a piece of cheap sexploitation. But it also clear that it isn't really taking itself too seriously - it is well aware of its own shortcomings - and consequently provides a lot of sleazy fun if you watch it in the right mood.
(Interestingly, Breeders must have made some impact, as it was remade in 1997, this time on the Isle of Man pretending to be Boston and with a cast of Brits - including Eastenders' Samantha Womack nee Janus - pretending to be American).
