A Rattling Good Experience

Another Bank Holiday! Not that it made much difference to me - right now every day feels like a Bank Holiday.  But the sun was out and, well, I wasn't much.  I was mainly recovering from the past two days of toiling in the sun in my back garden - it now looks less like a jungle and more like, maybe, an untended thicket.  But hey, it's a start.  So, I was going to do all manner of non-gardening things today but ended up spending a lot of it putting together a podcast.  It's amazing how something which runs just under thirty minutes (and had the main audio segments recorded yesterday) can take so much time to put together.  Mind you, a mildly upset stomach (possibly a result of spending too much time out in the heat over the weekend) didn't help, interrupting progress several times.  But it hasn't all been gardening and podcast editing this weekend - I also took in a goodly quota of schlock, including a minor entry in the seventies 'revenge of nature' cycle, Rattlers, Lucio Fulci's supernatural giallo Seven Black Notes and the truly dreadful The Lucifer Complex, another bottom-of-the barrel poverty row production cobbled together by David L Hewitt.  The latter really lived down to its reputation as one of the worst movies ever made, while Seven Black Notes was a very stylish and intriguingly plotted exercise in giallo and far superior to Fulci's other well known entry in the genre, Lizard in a Woman's Skin.

The stand out, though was, surprisingly, Rattlers.  Although the version i saw was from a typically scratchy looking source with an annoying buzz on the soundtrack, it turned out to be a solidly made 'animal attacks' type of movie popular in the seventies.  Decently directed and with a better than average script for this sort of film, it proved to be an entertaining eighty minutes or so of mad rattlesnake action.  This one threw in military-industrial complex and establishment cover up paranoia for good measure, with the reason for the local rattlesnakes going kill crazy in a small California desert community turning out to be leaking military chemical warfare canisters secretly buried by a rogue Army colonel.  It all ends with a shootout between him and the local Sheriff's department.  The movie is notable for having some well developed and sympathetc characters, who are well played by a less than stellar, but more than competent cast.  Even the villainous colonel isn't played as quite the usual reactionary psychopath.  The whole academic milieu of the herpetologist hero featured early in the film is also nicely and reasonably realistically handled.  All in all, Rattlers, which I went into with few expectations, turned out to be a surprisingly pleasant experience.