Musings From the Sofa

So, its one of those days when I find myself sat on the sofa, contemplating the state of my life.  I have a lot of those these days.  Since I jacked in my job from Hell the one thing I have plenty of is time.  The problem, as I've mentioned before, is that when you have lots of time on your hands, your motivation suddenly ebbs away - there is no sense of urgency to do anything as everything can be put off infinitely.  I keep thinking that I should do something about finding a new job, not just to generate some more cash, but to get me out of the house for a couple of days a week.  But then again, I tell myself, I'm still good financially with no worries there for the foreseeable future, plus, it is Summer and, despite the variable weather, I'm enjoying myself.  Despite a lack of motivation, I have a tremendous sense of freedom now that I'm no longer at anyone's beck and call.  Actually, I'm apparently up for a temporary teaching job, via an agency, at the moment.  I hate to say it, but it isn't filling me with enthusiasm.  The prospect of spending a couple of weeks teaching secondary school kids for a couple of weeks right at the end of the school year just doesn't appeal.  Plus, it is at least forty minutes drive away.  The trouble is that I feel that if I was to reject the chance to even be considered for it, then the agency wouldn't think I was serious about finding work and might not put me forward for stuff I might be interested in.  I'm confident, however, that there will be far better qualified, experienced and local candidates for this particular job.

I have to confess, though, that this situation has left me questioning whether I really do want to finally use my teaching qualification and pursue jobs in education.  I mean, looked at rationally, it seems the logical and obvious thing to do.  But I just don't know.  Having had so much time to think about stuff since I walked away from the previous situation, I'm increasingly asking myself whether teaching is the right move to make, whether it will actually give me any more satisfaction than what has gone before.  In truth, there's a large part of me that yearns to do something more creative - if I could only find a way to make proper money from any of my online activities, then I'd be blissfully happy.  This situation is clearly going to require a lot more thought.  But getting back to my evening on the sofa, I found myself not watching the England match on the grounds that not only is international football frequently boring as everyone tries to play safe defensive tactics, hoping to score on the counter, but that every time I do watch a crucial match, they lose.  So I did that thing of watching something else, but frequently flicking back to the match to check how many England were losing by.  It worked, as they beat Germany two nil.  But, we can never be allowed to enjoy anything for long, as I then saw online reports that Spurs were imminently going to sign Nuno Espirito Santo as their new manager.  For fuck's sake!  After the recent radio silence, I thought that was dead and buried.  Perhaps the 'No to Nuno' hashtage didn't make it clear enough, maybe we should have tweeted 'Fuck off Nuno, we don't want you here'.

To be perfectly clear, I have nothing against the man personally, but appointing him head coach would scream, not just desperation, but a total lack of ambition.  I know tat he's supposedly a nice guy, but that doesn't make him the right manager for Spurs, let alone a good manager.  Not only does he specialise in the same kind of defensive game that Mourinho failed to make work at Spurs, but, in truth, he is, at best, an average manager.  There's a reason he's available: despite considerable levels of investment in players, he still couldn't place Wolves any higher than seventh.  His previous managerial stints, outside of England, have yielded similarly mediocre results.  He simply isn't good enough if the club's ambitions truly are to get back in the Champions' League.  Moreover, just why would we want to employ someone who has already been passed on both by Everton and Crystal Palace (who both finished below us) for their managerial vacancies?  They've instead opted for Rafa Benitez and Patrick Viera, respectively, which speaks volumes.  I was really hoping that those reports that Nuno was about to sign with Fenerbache were true - the Turkish league is probably about his level and he'd thrive there.  But no, the Spurs stories have suddenly resurfaced.  God help us all!  I mean, what is Levy playing at?  He promises us an offensively minded manager, then signs Nuno?  

I know that many Spurs fans, beaten down by the long managerial search, are now resigned to Nuno as being the best we're likely to get and that at least we'll finally have a manager.  But that's just ridiculous - I'd rather the search be prolonged than appoint the wrong man (again).  'But at least he's not Martinez!' many of them cry. Well, Belgium boss Roberto Martinez, with his dodgy defensive record, would be far from my first choice, but at least he plays attacking football and, at both club and international record, proven himself a more successful manager than Nuno.  I'd take him over Nuno any day.  I hate to say this as a Spurs fan, but if Nuno is appointed then, frankly, the best thing that could happen would be to lose the first half dozen matches badly, forcing the board to sack him and appoint the 2021 equivalent of Harry Redknapp (who rescued us from the disaster of Juande Ramos).  It's a sad state of affairs when I find myself thinking along such lines.

Another Weekend of Smut

Another weekend smut fest.  Actually, this time around it wasn't pure smut - a double bill comprising some action smut in the form of Angel of Destruction (1994) and arty smut in the form of Black Emmanulle, White Emmanuelle (1976).  I have to say that the former was the more entertaining of the two - a pretty decent fusion of violent martial arts thriller with lots of sex and nudity.  It's interesting to compare it to the vaguely similar Ginger (1971), which I watched the other week and the changes in attitudes toward the tough girl heroine in the twenty odd years that separate the two pictures.  Most notably, while Cheri Caffero's Ginger is presented as a strong, independent woman who can kick any man's ass, by the end of the film she has been forced to endure the humiliation of being beaten, tied up, raped and drugged by the main villain and has to be rescued by her male partner, Maria Ford in Angel of Destruction, while meeting her match with the villainous psycho at the film's climax, taking a beating, is able to triumph on her own account.  She also doesn't suffer Caffero's humiliations.  It seems that, by the nineties, sexploitation film makers had come to the conclusion that not only was there a female audience for these films, who undoubtedly wanted to see strong women capable of succeeding without male assistance on screen, but that male audiences could also accept such characters without feeling threatened.

Because that's the message that comes through from Ginger's treatment of its titular heroine - that while it is OK for women to be strong and independent up to a point, ultimately they still need a man to 'put them in their place' and ultimately rescue them.  Indeed, the relative ease with which Caffero - who has previously humiliated, castrated and shot her way through the subsidiary bad guys - is subdued by the top villain implies that it isn't so much that she is 'strong' than that her previous male opponents were 'weak' and that it just needed a 'real' man to 'sort her out'.  Clearly, this was also designed to feed into the rape and domination fantasies the makers assumed its male audiences indulged in.  Angel of Destruction, by contrast, seems to want to feed into a whole other category of male fantasies - namely those that involve being dominated by a kick-ass woman.  The fact is that Angel of Destruction is simply a better made film than Ginger.  Despite being a low budget action flick, it boasts some half decent production values, well choreographed and efficiently shot action scenes and lent an air of exoticism by its Hawaiian locations.  It integrates its smut well with the action - the central plot of Ford's undercover cop taking over from her murdered sister to protect a female singer specialising in S&M themed videos from a psycho stalker-cum-serial killer affords plenty of opportunities for nudity.  It achieves a pretty much perfect synthesis of action and smut when Ford is forced to fight off a horde of bad guys while topless.  It is far superior to a similar sequence in TNT Jackson, with better staging and more convincing martial arts moves.  Most of all, Maria Ford is a far better actress than Cheri Caffero.  While both appear, at least initially, to be the icy blonde type, by the end of Angel, Ford has developed her character into a likeable heroine you can root for, whereas Caffero remains cool and distant and, despite being forced to endure a terrible climactic ordeal, difficult to really like. 

I'm not claiming that Angel of Destruction is any kind of lost classic, but it is a highly enjoyable piece of exploitation which delivers on its promises of action and smut.  Certainly, it offered more in the way of instant audience gratification than Black Emmanulle, White Emmanuelle, whichis not only overly pretentious and talky, but isn't even a real 'Emmanuelle' film, being a retitling of Smooth Velvet, Raw Silk.  But it does have the 'other' Emmanuelle, Laura Gemser, (who played the role in a long series of unofficial Italian made sequels to the original trilogy), and the equally lovely Annie Belle.  It also features many bizarre scenarios involving Gemser's (here playing a submissive model) whacked out photographer husband's increasing bat shit crazy and sadistic photo shoots.  There's also a whole sub-plot involving a pseudo-religious guru which frequently tumbles over into the surreal as he hypnotises characters into doing all kinds of weird shit.  There's also a lot of al fresco sex - much of it involving Belle's sister, who appears to be some kind of nymphomaniac, shagging every man in sight in search of an elusive orgasm.  It's all very nicely staged and shot against Egyptian backdrops, but is overlong and moves far too slowly.  It doesn't help that there are too many characters, many of whom vanish from the plot for long stretches, as attention moves to someone else, leaving the whole thing feeling unfocused.  Perhaps it would have benefited from a couple of topless martial arts fights....

'Girls of the U-Boat Fleet'

I do so love these old men's magazine covers - they promise so much in the way of exotic thrills.  Inevitably, in my experience at least, they never actually deliver on these promises.  The stories are generally pulp-style hack work - often written pseudonymously by authors, like Mario Puzo, who would later find more legitimate literary fame - entertaining but rarely original or inspiring and certainly never erotic.  The 'true; stories they traded in are, of course, completely fictional, as are the 'factual' articles.  Nevertheless, in their day they exerted a powerful pull upon their target audience of young men who didn't want to be seen buying pornography (even if it was available) yet nonetheless wanted to sample some illicit thrills.  

Adventure was one of the longest lived of these magazines, offering a mix of genres on a monthly basis. This issue, from August 1960, was published at a time when war stories were still popular, judging by the cover story: 'Girls of the U-Boat Fleet'.  As illustrated, this seems to an everyday 'true' account of sex starved German submariners taking time out between sinking allied ships to ravage what look like some South Seas island women.  Another featured story - 'We Fought the Green Hell', with its tag line of "Two Men and a WAC - Against Jungle Death", looks as if it combines a war story with another ever popular genre, the jungle story.  The main 'factual' feature, inevitably, concerns sex: '9 Ways a Man Can Go Wrong Sexually'. All for just 25 Cents.  You just can't get bargains like that these days.

The Lucifer Complex (1979)

The sad truth is that most so-called 'bad' movies aren't the fun that bad movie cultists make them out to be, rather, they are excruciatingly dull.  Indeed, that surely is one of the criteria which makes a 'bad' film 'bad' - te fact that it fails to entertain on any level, that it is boring.  But, of course, the cultists like to cherry pick their examples, focusing on no-budget movies that are ineptly made, with Ed Wood Jr's Plan Nine From Outer Space as their poster boy.  You rarely, if ever, see The Lucifer Complex (1979) on any of their bad film lists, mainly because it is so stultifyingly dull that I doubt that their limited attention spans could endure it.  David L Hewitt, a contemporary of the likes of Al Adamson and Larry Buchanan in the latter day poverty row of the sixties and seventies, has a co-director credit on Lucifer Complex.  I have something of a love-hate relationship with Hewitt's films: while Lucifer Complex is dull as ditchwater, his anthology film Dr Terror's Gallery of Horrors frequently borders on the surreal with its anachronistic props and sets against black backgrounds, combined with John Carradine's hung-over looking narrator sitting in front of a bad back projection, makes for an agreeably bizarre viewing experience.  The film of his I most enjoyed - a neo-Nazi biker flick called The Tormentors - is one that Hewitt himself disliked and directed under a pseudonym.  

All of which brings us back to The Lucifer Complex which, on paper, looks to have the basis of an entertaining B-movie: Nazis in the jungle, a camp full of kidnapped women, a plot to clone Hitler and Robert Vaughn in the lead.  Unfortunately its execution is confused, to put it mildly, the script is terrible, the cast's performances flat as the direction and the whole thing is clearly cheaply made with some truly awful colour processing.  On top of all that, it quickly becomes obvious that the film has been pieced together from an incomplete original, with additional material added in order to pad it out.  Indeed, it is this padding which kills the film stone cold dead before it has even started, as the viewer is subjected to what seems like interminable footage of some guy wandering around a rocky landscape while a portentous but dull voice over rattles on and on, trying desperately to sound profound.  Finally, the wandering dude goes into a cave complex full of computer equipment where he starts watching a laser disc (remember those?) of the 'old times'.  What he watches, of course, is the main part of the film proper, which features Robert Vaughn as some kind of intelligence agent, although who he works for is never clear, although he is occasionally growled at by his boss, played by Keenan Wynn - but we're not really clear who he is, either.  Every so often we cut back to the dude in the cave for some more voice over in order to carry us over missing pieces of footage.

I suspect, though, that even with those pieces of apparently unfilmed footage, Lucifer Complex would still make little sense.  The whole business of the Fourth Reich guys plotting to clone Hitler is hopelessly confused.  Mainly because the script never makes absolutely clear who is being cloned, at points it is heavily implied it is Hitler, but why would you want a whole army of Hitlers?  For one thing, the real Hitler was no great shakes as a soldier, (his main achievements in his World War One military service were to be promoted to corporal and to be shot in the testicles), for another, which one of them would lead this army?  Surely they'd all want to be Fuhrer?  But then Hitler himself turns up, or is he a clone?  If not, how come he's still alive?  Why can he apparently teleport around his underground complex?  Leaving Hitler aside, how were the Nazis able to clone an adult Robert Vaughn so quickly when, judging by the fact that they've been kidnapping women to act as surrogates to bear the cloned Hitler foetuses, it takes nine months to gestate one, implying they age and develop at a normal rate?  Oh yes, Keenan Wynn pops up again, to tell Vaughn that he is the evil genius behind it all.  Not that we're any wiser as to exactly who he is or why he's doing this.  As the plot seems to reach a climax, we cut back to the guy in the cave and his voice over, which tells us that, ultimately, Vaughn's efforts were in vain and this is a post-apocalyptic world.  He then goes back to wandering around those hill sides.

The Lucifer Complex just goes to show that, in truth, bad movies are usually more fun to read about than they are to watch.  Despite only running around ninety minutes, Lucifer Complex is something of an endurance test to sit through.  While the framing footage prevents the main footage from building up any momentum and disrupts any narrative rhythm it might have had, that main footage is itself poorly paced and structured.  The biggest problem is that none of it has the occasional flashes of flair or touches of inspired lunacy that make the best films of, say, Jesus Franco, joyously demented entertainments.  In truth, the main interest Lucifer Complex presents lies in its journey to the screen - the way in which such films are cut and pasted together from various sources has always fascinated me.  According to Hewitt, the movie had its origins in another picture he shot in the early seventies, The Women of Stalag 13, which was never completed.  While the completed footage was eventually sold to someone else, (to eventually emerge as Hitler's Wild Women), Hewitt's contract meant that he retained the rights to use that footage that didn't include the main cast, (including mob scenes, camp exteriors, extras dressed as soldiers and tanks).  Around the same time, he acquired a number of German military uniforms from a theatrical costumier which was going out of business and a number of props and sets that had been used in Hogan's Heroes.  Around these components, he constructed the script for The Lucifer Complex.

Unfortunately, even before filming started, the budget was cut by producer James Flocker and thirty five pages of script had to be cut.  The original director, Ken Hartford, left after a few days, to be replaced by Hewitt, who claimed that shooting was then cut short when the producer ran out of money, with the opening and ending never filmed.  He put the blame for the new opening and closing footage firmly on whoever was brought in to salvage the footage.  Although, to be fair, Hewitt himself had form for this sort of thing: his 1969 lost world effort The Mighty Gorga (notorious for its glove puppet dinosaur and possibly the worst ape suit ever committed to celluloid), includes a significant amount of footage of Anthony Eisely getting on and off of planes and wandering around San Diego Zoo, shot by Hewitt to pad out the running time. Whoever was responsible, it didn't help Lucifer Complex, which never received a cinema release, being sold direct to television instead, after spending several years on the shelf.  Perhaps the saddest aspect of the film is seeing Robert Vaughn in what must represent a career nadir.  While, post Man From Uncle he found himself appearing a fair number of films of dubious quality, none were as bad, or as boring, as The Lucifer Complex.  Not surprisingly, he spends the film looking dispirited and disinterested.

Sex Monster and the Ape

Is it just me, or is Boris Johnson getting more bestial and ape-like in appearance with every passing day?  You know what I mean - the increasingly hunched posture, the unintelligible grunting when he tries to speak, that ever thickening neck and protruding lower lip.  Every time he appears on TV now, I expect him to be dragging his knuckles on the ground.  Or eating bananas.  I strongly suspect that his 'mating ritual', by which he attracts unfortunate women to impregnate, involves him beating his chest and bellowing.  I know I'm not imagining these things.  They are actually happening.  Perhaps he's the victim of some African curse of the type one finds in fifties B-movies, whereby some witch doctor has put a spell on him - possibly as revenge for those cuts in the aid budget.  Then again, could it be a Covid side-effect?  Should we expect to see more people who have contracted the virus going hairy and savage?  I suppose that he could be suffering some sort of genetic throwback in reaction to the vaccine or something.  Personally, though, I think that it is all down to some sort of diabolic pact that Johnson has entered into, in order to keep his libido ever potent.  You know the sort of thing - he stays virile while he has a painying in the attic that gets ever more wanked-out looking and ravaged.

Except that it isn't a painting, but an ape that he has in that hypothetical attic.  As Johnson gets ever more hairy and bestial, yet incredibly virile, impregnating women left right and centre, that ape is getting ever more refined and human, but under-sexed.  So, while Boris finds himself swinging from chandeliers and having to shave his entire hairy body twice a day to keep up the facade of humanity, there's this increasingly intellectual ape, working his way through the classics in their original Greek and Latin and writing a dissertation on the works of Baudelaire, while drinking tea with his little finger cocked.   In fact, perhaps the ape is Dominic Cummings and his split from Johnson is down to the latter wanting to stop the deal and take back his human faculties?  The question, of course, is whether Boris is aware of his rapidly diminishing mental capacity?  Indeed, does he even care, as he now has a dong the size of King Kong's?  But just how long can Downing Street keep up the pretence that the Prime Minister is still a human being?  Sooner or later he's bound to go berserk, grab the BBC's Laura Keunsberg and climb up the tower of Big Ben with her clutched in his hairy hand.  What will they do then?  Call out the RAF which, thanks to Tory defence cuts now consists of two Spitfires and a Hurricane, to shoot him off of the tower?  These things perplex me.

Smut Fest

I spent part of the weekend watching smut.  I was in the mood for some seventies smut - an era when it far less constrained and far grittier than the sort of stuff we started getting in the eighties.  First up, I finally got around to watching Ginger (1971), the first of Don Schain's trio of action-orientated smut-fests centreing on Cheri Caffero's titular society girl-turned-private-eye.  Not as crudely made as many contemporaneous low-budget action flicks, it does suffer from poor dialogue, a largely wooden cast and some fairly perfunctory action scenes.  But let's face it - nobody was watching it for any of those.  Luckily, its scenario of having Caffaro's rookie PI go undercover in an upmarket resort town to break up a drugs, sex and blackmail ring, affords plenty of opportunities for sex and nudity.  I have to say, that I admire director Schain's restraint in holding off on both for quite some time, building up plenty of audience expectation - which isn't disappointed. This being the early seventies, we get the full gamut of kinkiness, from girl-on-girl action to some pretty serious bondage.  There is also a lot of rape and, equally disconcertingly for modern audiences, a fair amount of racist invective.  

This latter is 'justified' by one of the heroine's various flashbacks, (which explain her motivation for her various violent actions against the villains - including castration and shooting dead at point blank range), in which we learn that, as a teenager, she was gang-raped by three black men.  Employing Liam Neeson's logic that murdering any black man in revenge would be appropriate, she entraps the film's only black character.  Now, to be fair, he , as characterised, a particularly nasty member of the blackmail gang, but unfortunately, his portrayal also plays into typical racist stereotyping of black guys obsessed with raping 'white ass' as some kind of cultural revenge for slavery.  The film follows the strict formula for tough heroines: before the end she has to endure beatings, bondage, rape and drugging at the hands of the main bad guy, but endures it all to emerge with her various psychological hang-ups resolved.  That's some therapy.

While Ginger epitomises the more brutal end of seventies smut, the other main piece of smut I watched approached its subject matter from a very different perspective.  The Schoolgirl Report (1970) is the first in a very long series of movies which focused on the supposed sexual activities of Germany's liberated youth.  Interestingly deriving its title and central concept from a serious book by a respected psychologist, these films are closely related to the 'Mondo' format, in that they present themselves as being serious explorations of anthropological issues, thereby justifying (both for the filmmakers and the audience) all the sex and nudity.  It isn't titillating smut, you see, it's a serious study of modern sexual moralities.  Also, like a true 'Mondo', the Schoolgirl Report series present a series of 'dramatic recreations' of various of the experiences related by its participants.  What is somewhat more than mildly disconcerting for modern audiences is that each of the vignettes presented opens with subtitles telling us not just the names of the female characters, but also their ages, some of which are supposedly only fourteen and fifteen.  OK, in reality they are all played by actresses with what appears to be an average age of twenty five, but nonetheless, the fact that we are meant to be watching under age sex and naked under age girls is, undoubtedly, somewhat uncomfortable.

In common with the rest of the series, the first Schoolgirl Report has an overarching story which links together the various vignettes.  In this case, the film opens with eighteen year old Renata, who is caught on the backseat shagging the coach driver during a school trip to a power station.  Naturally, the prissy teacher who caught her wants to see Renata expelled for her 'immoral' behaviour, before her moral turpitude corrupts the other girls.  At a meeting of the school governors to decide her fate, however, the father of one of her friends - a psychologist who has, conveniently, conducted a study into teenage mating habits - intervenes on her behalf, arguing that her behaviour is perfectly normal for her generation.  In order to make his case, he relates a series of 'case studies' (the vignettes) which illustrate the way in which the German girls of 1970 deal with such things as masturbation, losing their virginity, underage sex and so on and, just as importantly, how they their parents' more conservative attitudes are, more often than not, actually harmful to their development.  This is interspersed with a reporter conducting street interviews with various young women, asking them about various aspects of their sex lives.  The whole thing is shot in the sort of faux 'realistic' fashion typical of the 'Mondo', with mainly amateur performers in real, rather mundane looking, locations. 

 All of which actually makes it curiously likeable - for much of the time, the sheer ordinariness of the girl-next-door types and their usually decidedly average looking male partners take the exploitative edge off of the copious amounts of sex and nudity on display.  Rather like the British sex comedies which were appearing around the same time, the ordinariness of settings and performers doesn't leave the audience feeling inadequate.  That said, the supposed age of some of the 'schoolgirls' involved still makes much of it feel dubious.  Rather like Ginger and its rape and bondage fueled plot, The Schoolgirl Report with its voyeuristic and salacious obsession with the sex lives of kids, it is difficult to imagine a film like this getting made today, let alone being given a widespread cinema release, (the Schoolgirl series were hugely popular in Germany in the seventies, raking in a lot of money for the producers).

Blood Tide (1982)

Blood Tide (1982) is a monster movie that seems afraid of actually showing us its monster.  Which is always a bit of a problem, as monster movies stand or fall by their monsters - even if they turn out to be ropey men in bad rubber suits-type creatures, they can at least raise a laugh.  But if you barely see it at all, you can't help but feel cheated.  Blood Tide's aquatic monster is only briefly glimpsed in a couple of scenes - even then, we only see it in its entirety for a few seconds through some very murky underwater photography.  Other than that, we just get quick flashes of teeth and claws.  Most of the 'horror' is evidently meant to come from the aftermath of its visits, in the form of the dismembered and bloody bodies it leaves behind, (there are quite a lot of these - it even slaughters an entire convent full of nuns at one point).  We know what it is meant to look like from a series of paintings art the aforementioned convent, which show something akin to a cross between a dragon and a prehistoric aquatic reptile.  From the glimpses we get of the actual beast, one gets the impression that the producers have tried to translate that into a monster that is part mechanical prop, part man-in-a-suit, which actually, from what be seen, doesn't look that bad.  But the producers obviously got cold feet, fearing that it looked unconvincing, so instead decided to rely upon some mild gore, some attractive women in swimsuits and its pair of heavyweight headliners - James Earle Jones and Jose Ferrer - to sell the film. 

Unfortunately, they just aren't enough.  To be fair, Jones and Ferrer give it their best shots, turning in decent performances, in spite of a weak script, but they just can't save Blood Tide from its utter lack of suspense and atmosphere, let alone the languorous pace of Richard Jeffries' direction.  Despite their top billing, in reality, it is the somewhat less talented Martin Kove (of Karate Kid and Cagney and Lacey fame) who actually fills the most screen time and whose character has to carry the story.  His character, Neil Grice arrives, with his wife, on an isolated Greek island in search of his sister Madelaine.  There they encounter a grizzled and hostile old man (Ferrer) who leaves them in no doubt that this is one of those islands that doesn't like visitors, as it has, you know, secrets.  The old guy also denies that Madelaine has ever been there, although they encounter her immediately afterward, in the company of Shakespeare-quoting diver and treasure hunter Frye (Jones).  While the latter has been exploring some underwater ruins, Madelaine has been working at the convent, uncovering those pictures of the monster.  After several locals and Frye's female friend have been killed and mutilated in the sea, it transpires that the locals believe that the legendary sea creature has returned (possibly awakened by Frye's activities) and that it cannot be assuaged until a virgin has sacrificed herself to it.  Needless to say, that virgin is destined to be Madelaine.  While the scenario is overly familiar, it could still have provided the basis for a decent enough B-movie, it is all handled in such a lacklustre fashion that it never stands a chance.  There is simply no sense of urgency about it all, let alone originality.  Actually, that isn't quite true - there is one neat flourish toward the end, when Ferrer tells Grice and Frye that the prospective virgin sacrifice will know what she must do when the time is right.  We then cut to Madelaine at the convent uncovering a picture of the creature, sporting an erection, menacing a young girl.  We can tell from her expression - she knows. (Maybe that's why they were reluctant to show their monster - his mechanical bonk on wasn't convincing enough).  Still, the Greek scenery is very nicely photographed.

Recycling the News Cycle

Well, I'm waiting to be offered the Spurs head coach job - they've apparently approached everyone else.  I thought I was in luck earlier, when I came home to see that I had a message on my answerphone - I thought that it just had to be Daniel Levy.  But no, it was just someone trying to sell me something.  This business has finally turned into the farce that the media wanted it to be - we've gone from considering the likes of Erik Ten Hag and Graham Potter, through talking to Pochettino about a return, almost getting Antonio Conte before, it seemed, having settled on Paulo Fonseco.  But now, despite seeming a done deal, even that has fallen through and we're instead apparently offering the job to - judging by his own words - racist, sexist, homophobic nutter Gennaro Gattuso, the man who has just walked out on his last club after less than a month in charge.  I well remember him, as a player, trying to throttle Spurs assistant coach Joe Jordan during a Champions League match, a pretty stupid thing to do as, even at sixty, Jordan was well hard).  Sure, I know that Fonseca was hardly the most exciting choice of coach, but he at least seemed a decent sort of guy, advocates attacking football and has an OK managerial record - much better than the car crash that is Gattuso's managerial CV.  Along with the rest of Spurs' fandom, I'm left bewildered as to what the fuck is going on.

Hell, I've got to stop following those football news aggregators, where all this has played out.  They get your hopes up one minute, then dash them the next as a new cycle of reporting starts, telling us the opposite of what had been said before.  Because that's how these thing s work - all it takes is one story, usually reporting what is, at best, a rumour, then every other 'source' jumps on it and starts spinning it, until starts being reported as 'fact'.  Then somebody posts something else, another vaguely credible sounding rumour, and the cycle starts all over again.  All of which is a microcosm of how the wider news cycle works in this age of twenty four hour rolling news channels and online reporting.  Because these things create a demand for 'news' which simply can't be met by actual events in the real world: most of the time, thankfully, events move at a relatively sedate pace, with stories unfolding slowly.  But our 'always on, always now' contemporary news culture demands that something should be happening all the time - right now, in fact.  So we get this endless recycling of a few 'stories' to give the impression that stuff is happening.  Which is the reason why - despite, ironically, still fixating on Spurs news aggregators online - I tend to avoid twenty four hour news channels these days.  They are just too repetitive, all too often trying to drive news stories which ultimately come to nothing for the sake of filling air time.  I haven't even bothered retuning my Freeview TV to get GBNews as I just don't need any more 'news' being vomited out over my TV set,(although its ridiculous right-wing anti-'woke' agenda and the presence of Andrew Neil would be big turn offs for me regardless).  Oh yeah, and fuck Gattuso.

Hell and High Water (1954)

The first time I encountered this film, many years ago, when I was probably in my late teens, I only caught the last few minutes of a Sunday afternoon screening on BBC1.  All I saw was the crew of what looked like a World War Two era submarine shooting down what looked like a B-29 bomber as it flew low over them.  The plane caught fire and crashed into a small island, a nuclear explosion following.  A quick cut back to the sub revealed the captain to be Richard Widmark, before Alfred Newman's typically stirring score swelled up over the end credits.  To say I was confused would be to put it mildly.  If Richard Widmark was in command of the sub, did that mean it was a US sub?  If so, why were they shooting down a US bomber?  Why weren't the crew in uniform?  Who were the good guys in all this?  This last turned out to be a pertinent question when I finally caught up with the film - which turned out to be Sam Fuller's Hell and High Water (1954) - in its entirety.

On the surface, Hell and High Water might seem to be just another typical Cold War era flag waving Commie-basher of an adventure movie, (albeit with better production values, Cinemascope and De Luxe colour).  The trailer does nothing to dispel this impression, with its emphasis upon the action elements and the sexual tension aspect of one woman among twenty nine men on board a submarine.  But this is a Sam Fuller directed film, which means that things just aren't that simple.  From the outset, it becomes clear that the film is presenting us with an interrogation of the very notions of patriotism and loyalty which the trailer implies underpin the scenario.  Although ostensibly our hero, Richard Widmark's World War Two veteran ex-USN sub commander turns out to be a mercenary - motivated to join a secret mission funded and set up by an unofficial organisation of scientists purely by money.  Throughout the film, this motivation never changes, even when at the climax, he stumbles across a Red Chinese plot to drop a nuclear bomb on Korea from a Soviet-built Tu-4 disguised as a USAF B-29, his motivation is self-preservation rather than patriotism.  The goes for his motley international crew. (which includes a fine roster of character actors, including the incomparable Cameron Mitchell, a good actor who made so many bad movies that, by his own admission, he lost count and couldn't even remember some of them).

Motivation is also key to the scientific group that organises the expedition to a remote island in the arctic circle where they suspect the Chinese of testing nuclear weapons.  These men have foresaken their nationalities, (they have all disappeared and are suspected by the authorities of the 'free world' to have defected behind the Iron Curtain), in order to pursue the 'greater good'.  Only outside of the confines of simple patriotism, they believe, can they begin to addressthe threat posed to the world by nuclear weapons, whose proliferation has been driven on all sides in the name of 'patriotism'.  But far from the airy fairy intellectuals usually portrayed in such films, these are practical men - they have no illusions that the kind of men they need to crew their salvaged World War Two Japanese submarine will be interested only in material rewards for risking their lives, rather than being motivated by idealism.

While the counterpointing of idealism and materialism might be one of the film's main themes, it is equally interested in the tension between the intellectualism of the scientists and the practicality of the mercenaries.  Widmark plays a typically bone-headed anti-intellectual action man of the kind to be found in many fifties action movies, his opinions, not just on science and idealism, but also women, coming straight out of the stone age. ("What makes a woman who looks like that get mixed up with science?" he asks Professor Montel of the latter's female assistant - later revealed to be his daughter).  Much of the film is a dialectic Widmark and the Professor as to the means and motivations behind the mission.  All of which, of course, reflects the ambiguous relationship between science and the general population during this era: on the one hand scientists are treated with suspicion, as it is their intellectualism and idealism which has unleashed and helped propagate the nuclear threat, but on the other, they are also saviours for having provided the 'free world' with the ultimate weapon against its enemies in the first place.

Interestingly, Hell and High Water was a film that fuller was reluctant to direct, only agreeing after being allowed to rewrite the script.  It sits uneasily in his canon of usually slightly off-beat, non-conformist cinema, but as we've seen, it is really quite subversive beneath its apparently flag waving Cold War surface.  In part, Fuller made the movie as a favour to Twentieth Century Fox studio chief Darryl F Zanuck in return for the latter's defence of him after FBI Director's attacks on his previous film, Pick Up on South Street (which had also questioned the true motivations of those performing 'patriotic' services). For the studio, the film was an opportunity to showcase its Cinemascope widescreen process, demonstrating that it wasn't just for shooting historical epics, but could also be deployed to advantage in a film where much of the action takes place in the claustrophobic interior of a submarine.  Despite the studio production values. (the miniatures work, in particular, is magnificent by the standards of its day), Hell and High Water remains, distinctively, a Sam Fuller film, with that characteristic scrappy B-movie look, muscular masculinity and pulpy feel.  Indeed, its sensationalist scenario could easily have been ripped from the pages of a contemporary men's adventure magazine and the garish colour palette of the Technicolor-De Luxe processing lends the production the look and feel of a pulp magazine cover painting.

All-in-all, Hell and High Water, (which has recently turned up as part of the Talking Pictures TV schedule), is well worth a viewing.  If you can get past the superficial Cold War posturings, it turns out to be a rewarding experience, peddling a surprisingly subversive message for its era - that excessive patriotism and allegiances to narrow national identities is the true threat to peace.  The Red Chinese villains, for instance, pose a threat due to their blind adherence not to Communism, but rather to a patriotic fervour which drives them to pursue the use of nuclear weapons in order to gain advantage over their enemies.  The world, the film seems to argue, is safest when guided by those who eschew nationalism, refusing to serve the flag of a single nation.  Even mercenaries like Widmark's captain are, it seems, preferable to patriots - at least their motivation is transparent.  Culminating with a nuclear explosion, the film leaves the last word to the Professor, (who had sacrificed himself in order to give the sub advance warning of the bomber's take-off), whose earlier observation, now feeling even more pertinent is repeated: "Each man has his own reason for living and his own price for dying".  With that, Alfred Newman's magisterial score (recycled from The Fighting Lady) sweeps in, almost as a reproach to the often grubby goings on which have unfolded over the past hundred and three minutes.

Imaginary Feuds

Never has it been so easy to indulge in celebrity feuds.  I don't necessarily mean the sort enabled by social media, where you can Tweet abuse at a celebrity until they, (or more likely their management team that actually runs their Twitter account), finally get so bored with you that they block you.  Although they are symptomatic of the sort of pseudo-feuds I'm thinking about. Because the whole point of the non-celebrity/celebrity social media feud is all about the illusion of empowerment.  By hurling abuse on what appears to be a level playing field, it enables someone who is, in essence, a nobody, to feel that they are as important as the celebrity they are shouting insults at.  Except that it isn't a level playing field.  The celebrity has far more followers, a legal team and much more 'clout' with the service provider.  So once you've been blocked, suspended or banned, then you are back to being a nobody. If you are really unlucky, you might just find yourself on the end of a defamation action and facing financial ruin.  But hey, you'll have had your fleeting five minutes of fun - which will be quickly forgotten about by everyone else.

The sort celebrity 'feuds' I'm thinking about, though, are those one-sided affairs where a celebrity of, let's say, lower magnitude, very publicly berates a celebrity of higher magnitude, in the hope of generating some attention for themselves.  Attention that will, they hope, help boost their own celebrity magnitude. Of course, their subject doesn't respond or acknowledge them in any way - they probably aren't even aware of this 'feud'.  But, if you have the right contacts, you can get it picked up by the media and it can play well, for a while.  The obvious current example is Piers Morgan's 'feud' with Meghan Markle - whereby he keeps making very public statements about her, warning her, for instance, that while she 'might have won this round, it isn't over yet'.  Except that she hasn't won anything, or even engaged in any discussion, let alone argument, with him.  He is currently unemployed due to the fact that he chose to walk out of his TV presenting gig, live on air, when challenged by a colleague as to his attacks on Markle.  I doubt very much that his 'opponent' is even aware of Morgan's existence, let alone this 'feud'.  But it keeps him in the papers and the public eye while he is, at least for now, deprived of his usual media platform.

So, I was thinking, maybe I should get in on this racket.  Generate some completely undeserved attention for my completely insignificant and unnoticed web empire by starting a non-existent feud with somebody famous that I don't like, but don't know and who has definitely never heard of me.  How about thug, sorry player, turned football pundit Roy Keane?  I mean, I can't stand the prick - he's still stuck in the glory days of Manchester United when Alex Ferguson was at the helm.  Every other club or current player is shit in comparison to that 'golden' era.  At least, that's what I take way from his bullying punditry.  So Roy, you Irish prick, if you hate us English so much (something else that seems apparent from his 'punditry'), why don't you fuck off back to Ireland and blight their football TV coverage instead?  Yeah, that's right, I called you a prick - so what?  If you think you are hard enough, come round and have a go!  There, that's a good start - I can guarantee that he'll never know I said any of this, but it doesn't matter as I've started an honest-to-goodness one-sided feud with a celebrity!  Fame and fortune must be just around the corner!

Football Madness

Jesus fuck!  I've just seen Uri bloody Gellar on live TV spouting some bollocks about how he was once employed to use his 'psychic' powers to help England beat Scotland in a football match.  But now, to even things up, he's vowing to help Scotland beat England at the euros next Friday.  He was followed by a 'psychic' pig predicting the outcome of the same match, (an England win, if you are interested).  This is one of the things I hate about international football tournament - the endless parade of charlatans and animals supposedly gifted with second sight predicting the outcomes of matches.  It happens every time.  Remember Paul the Octopus?  Please can we stop giving these cranks air time?  Really, we're supposed to be living in an age of reason, yet keep expecting invertebrates to predict football scores and some stage magician whose best trick is bending a spoon  to decide their outcomes.  Mind you, I'm left wondering where those idiots who put up YouTube videos pretending that they are from the future are in all this.  I mean, surely they should be busy telling us the scores of every match in advance, or maybe even posting video clips of said matches before they have been played.  After all, that, surely, would be pretty good proof that they really are from the future.  But they won't, because they aren't.

But getting back to Uri Gellar - they really shouldn't encourage this guy in his seriously deluded (not to mention profitable) beliefs.  Well, I say 'beliefs', but it seems clear to me that he's just some shyster.  But, like I say, there's money in peddling this sort of crazy bullshit.  Just look at David Icke, who has gone from the reserve goal keeper at Scunthorpe, through a stint as the sports correspondent on my local BBC TV news programme, to being some kind of crackpot Messiah with a string of best-selling books to his name.  All through the (quite brilliant) expedient of reinventing the conspiracy theory - by replacing Jews with shape-shifting lizards as the villains - so that it could be enjoyed by everybody.  Really, I'm serious, it was an act of genius to snatch the conspiracy theory away from the anti-Semites so as to broaden its potential fan base.  Clearly, this is what I should be doing - reinventing myself as a 'psychic; coming up with some whacked out conspiracy theory or maybe just following L Ron Hubbard's example and inventing a religion.  The trouble is though that the field has become so much more crowded since Icke invented his lizards, Uri bent his cutlery and Ron came up with Scientology.  Plus, I'm lazy.

Sex, Violence and Soap

I was reading one of those salacious stories about a sexual abuse trial that British newspapers so love to print - with the excuse that they are providing a public service by giving us all the horrible details for people to salivate over - when it struck me how deeply flawed its central premise was.  In order to act as clickbait (Hell, it got me reading), the story's title and opening paragraph highlighted how the guilty party had been inspired by an old EastEnders episode to shag his underage step-daughter.  Now, I naturally assumed that the soap story line in question was the one from some years ago when it was revealed that Bianca's ex-husband had been sexually exploiting and abusing their then teenaged step-daughter, Witney.  I mean, you can see that a causal link might be postulated, no matter how spurious. But no, it turned out that they were referring to an even older plot where Grant Mitchell shagged his mother-in-law, (she was, as I recall, pretty hot and he was quite a bit older than his wife, Tiffany).  Call me naive, but I'm not quite sure how watching a soap episode where someone has an affair with his wife's older (obviously) mother could really be argued to have been inspiration for a perv shagging his younger step-daughter.  I strongly suspect that he had always wanted to shag her and probably had a thing for underage girls and suddenly saw an opportunity.

It highlights the problems in trying to establish causal links between what people see on screen and their actual behaviour in real life.  Establishing that viewers really are influenced, to the point of copying behaviours, by what they see is extremely difficult.  As seen in the story I referred to, getting a near match between the screen activity and the real activity is pretty much impossible.  While  don't doubt that there are those who will use having watched something on TV or online as a justification for their misdemeanours, in most cases, I can't help but suspect that they were going to do it anyway and that, at worst, watching something similar merely helped reinforce their determination to do it.  If the footage they had seen hadn't existed, they still would have acted on their urges sooner or later.  Not that the lack of any actual link has ever stopped the media from trying to create one.  I recall many, many years ago, when Halloween had its first TV outing in the UK, there was a murder in Southampton, where a knife was used - the press immediately jumped on the fact that it apparently happened at the same time the film was showing on ITV.  Except, if the lazy journalists involved had bothered checking the local TV listings, they would have known that Southampton was in the Southern TV area and they had opted out of debuting the film that night, instead showing it a few days later.  But why let the facts stand in the way of a bit of sensationalism, eh?

Of course, one of the arguments made by those behind the whole 'video nasties' moral panic was that they were motivated by a desire to protect children from seeing graphic depictions of sex and violence on then unrated videos.  While there is some merit in this argument - children are vulnerable and susceptible to suggestion - the subsequent rating by the BBFC of videos effectively addressed the problem by putting the ball firmly back where it belonged - with parents whose responsibility it surely always had been to protect their children from such material by restricting their viewing of it.  By rating videos, they no longer had the excuse of ignorance - "Honestly officer, I didn't know it was that kind of video".  The other argument with regard to exposure to sex and violence on screen is that it can serve to norrmalise it and desensitise some viewers.  Which is a perfectly legitimate argument.  There is no denying that depictions of violence have become not just more graphic, but more realistic.  (Back in the day, the gore you got in most of those so called 'video nasties' - especially the Italian zombie and cannibal pictures - might well have been graphic, but it was in no way realistic, more likely to elicit laughs than repulsion).  Likewise, the boundaries of the sort of sex you see on screen have been pushed back, very possibly creating highly unrealistic expectations in viewers.  (Again, back in the day, the sort of smut I used to see as a young guy was invariably of the 'sex comedy' variety, which, correctly, depicted most participants as gormless, fumbling amateurs and gave the distinct impression that the height of sexual ecstasy involved grappling with a girl-next-door type in the back bedroom of a suburban semi on a wet weekday afternoon).  To get back to the original point, I really don't think that the average soap opera episode can be put on a par with a 'video nasty' (although some of them can be pretty nasty in other ways) for influencing viewers into committing acts of extreme sexual abuse and violence.

Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959)

An independently and cheaply made monster movie, Monster of Piedras Blancas has several notable features.  For one thing, it was produced by Jack Kevan, previously a make-up artist at Univeral, who had worked, uncredited, on such monster movies as Creature From the Black Lagoon and The Mole People. Indeed, director Irvin Berwick was also a former Universal employee, having been an uncredited dialogue director at the studio,  The monster suit itself was partly constructed from parts of costumes Kevan had worked on for Universal - the feet, for instance, were originally designed for the Metaluna Mutant in This Island Earth, while the hands are borrowed from The Mole People.  In fact, the studio co-operated a great deal with Vanwick Productions during the making of Monster, providing production equipment and vehicles, apparently as a sort of unofficial compensation to the various laid off studio employees working on the picture. The picture was also notable for what constituted, at the time, some graphic gore effects - the monster is seen carrying a severed head, which also turns up later on the beach, with crabs crawling over it.  Strong stuff for a late fifties Hollywood B-movie.

It has to be said that, despite such shock effects, the movie remains cheap-looking with a decidedly tatty looking monster.  In its favour, however, its cast of B-movie supporting players do a decent enough job with the script, which itself offers some interesting plot details.  The creature, it seems, has been kept placid for many years due to the cranky old local light house keeper feeding it meat off cuts and offal from the local store.  Well, he actually isn't sure what he's been feeding - he leaves the meat in a dog bowl and it is gone by the morning - until the store owner fails to keep the meat for him.  Naturally, a hungry monster starts wandering into town in search of a substitute meal.  From there, it all unfolds pretty much as you'd expect.  It is nicely shot, mainly on location, (but not in the real Piedras Blancas, but rather in a town a few miles down the coast), creating an effective small town atmosphere.  Ultimately, Monster of Piedras Blancas provides an undemanding seventy minutes or so of monster mayhem, but just isn't quite up to the standard of the classic Universal monster movies it tries to emulate.

Drive Ins of Death

If there is one US cinematic experience completely alien to the UK viewer, it is the 'Drive In'.  Which, probably, is why I find films set against the background of this uniquely American experience quite fascinating. While we in Europe might have films about ghostly presences (Phantom of the Opera or Argento's Opera) or mad killers lurking around theatres (Theatre of Death), giving an excuse for interpolations of 'high culture' in order to 'legitimise' the horror, making it safe for discerning 'highbrow' audiences, US exploitation film makers have tended to prefer the Drive In cinema as a background for such shenanigans, with some B-movie happily playing out as the atrocities unspool.  All it all feels so much more, well, cinematic, not to mention egalitarian: no pretensions of 'art' or 'culture' here.  I watched two such films over this past weekend, both from the seventies.  While Curtis Harrington's Ruby (1977), with its semi-name cast,  draws clear inspiration from a slew of seventies 'possession' films such as The Exorcist, not to mention drawing on the gangster milieu popularised by the Godfather films, Drive In Massacre (1976) is unashamed schlock played out by a no-name cast, with its tale of psychopath chopping up patrons of a shabby drive in drawing inspiration from just about every shabby psycho-on-the-loose picture ever made.

Both, in their own ways, are enjoyable pictures, although springing little in the way of surprises in plot or characters and neither exhibiting much originality, they each bring a certain style to their subjects.  Although a Dimension Pictures release, Ruby has the feel of a latter days AIP production about it, when they were trying to move 'upmarket' with slightly better casts and production values, but still not able to disguise the fact that they were producing exploitation films.  With Curtis Harrington in the director's chair, Ruby moves along briskly enough, with its various set-pieces - strangulation with film stock, impaled on trees, blood pouring from the soft drinks dispenser, some Exorcist-style possessed teen antics and so on - effectively staged and a real sense of atmosphere and menace being built up around the run down Drive In and adjacent swamp. Nevertheless, the whole production has a certain rough-around-the-edges feel, which ultimately works in its favour, making it feel akin to the B-movie (in this case Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman), which is constantly playing out on the tatty big screen.  Although this firmly dates the film's setting to the fifties, it could just as easily have been set twenty years earlier,  Indeed, for Piper Laurie's titular gangster's moll turned backwoods Drive In proprietor, time has stood still since her mobster squeeze Nicky was gunned down in the nearby swamp by his associates.  Unfortunately, his vengeful spirit, believing that Ruby betrayed him, returns to torment her, manifesting himself via their now sixteen year old mute daughter (born as he died) with a series of violent poltergeist phenomena, which results in the deaths of several of her ex-mobster staff.  Laurie receives decent support from the ever stalwart Stuart Whitman and Roger Davis (who earlier had the thankless task of replacing Pete Duel in Alias Smith and Jones), who both help sell the script's more bizarre digressions.

While the titular venue of Drive In Massacre is every bit as shabby and moth eaten as that in Ruby, it is located firmly in the then present day and the middle of a city.  The film itself is precisely the sort of grainily shot, poorly poverty row production the title might suggest.  While it has its fair share of gore, as patrons of the Drive In have limbs and heads hacked off with a sword, it quickly settles down to be a blackly comic police procedural, as a pair of middle aged, overweight wise cracking police detectives chase down various leads.  All of which lead to dead ends.  This, however, is where the film frustrates, as a large part of its seventy four minute running time is taken up with them following and questioning various weirdos, (not to mention shooting a psycho with a machete menacing a little girl), none of whom is the culprit, rather than actually following the activities of the killer.  It is, after all, called Drive In Massacre, leading the casual viewer to expect some kind of cheap ass slasher movie.  But the biggest sin committed by the film is that we never actually have the killer revealed to us, the makers instead opting to climax it in 'meta' fashion, with an announcement that the Drive In killer is on the loose, targeting Drive Ins all over the US.  In fact, he is suspected to be in this Drive In right now.  (Obviously designed to echo the sequence in William Castle's The Tingler, where Vincent Price warns the audience that the Tingler is loose in the theatre and that they need to scream in order to save themselves).   Despite this let down, Drive In Massacre maintains its interest with some good performances, a sleazy atmosphere and some decent dialogue from the detectives.  One can't help but suspect that some of its inspiration might have come from Peter Bogdanovich's Targets (1968), in which a sniper menaces a Drive In showing a retrospective of the movies of an old-time horror star (Boris Karloff).  But whereas Targets smartly tried to explore the relationship between real and make believe violence on screen, while never losing sight of itself being a B-movie exploiting screen violence and horror, Drive In Massacre, knowing its limitations, settles for being just an exploitation quickie.  Not that it is any the worse for that.

Juicy Tales

 

I can't say that I know a whole lot about Juicy Tales, of which this the first issue, from November 1929, other than that it was a 'girlie' pulp, promising sex and naughtiness but, of course, not really delivering.  That said, the cover painting does serve up some actual female nudity, marking this out as a 'pre code' publication.  While the 'Hays Code' might well have been intended for the censorship of US cinema, its effects were felt across US popular media, with even the sleazier end of the pulp market having to 'cover up' their covers.  I do know that Juicy Tales was part of a stable of such magazines published by Harry Donenfeld, which included Hot Stories and Joy Stories.  These were a precursor to Donenfeld's better remembered line of 'Spicy' genre pulps, published from the thirties onward, which included Spicy Detective Stories, Spicy Western Stories and so on.  As ever, they were more suggestive than 'spicy', featuring covers depicting imperiled young women in various states of undress, threatening to burst out of their underwear.  

They were, however, considered 'spicy' enough by the authorities of the era to threaten Donenfeld's publishing company with obscenity charges.  Eventually, in the mid forties, he changed the name of the line from 'Spicy' to 'Speedy', with the renamed Speedy Western Stories lasting until 1948.  As for Juicy Tales, it lasted for only five issues, which isn't really surprising - as a 'top shelf' pulp it would have had a relatively limited audience, particularly as it was being launched in the midst of the 'Great Crash', with potential buyers' spending power severely curtailed.  By combining the ;girlie' aspect with other popular genres a few years later in the subsequent 'Spicy' series, the magazines had a far greater appeal, (particularly to young men who could claim that they were only buying it for the western/detective/mystery stories). 

Thunder of Gigantic Serpent (1988)

Sometimes we see something that takes our understanding of exactly what constitutes cinematic badness to new level.  In  the case of Thunder of Gigantic Serpent (1988) it is witnessing an exercise in 'cut and paste' film making which, instead of using the half-decent footage from one film to cut the costs of a new, cheaper, movie, (usually this involves splicing expensive action or special effects sequences from a relatively expensive film into a cheap B picture), takes one cheap, poorly made movie, virtually in its entirety, and splices in even cheaper, poorly made action sequences.  The film in question is one of the many dubious film 'creations' of the notorious Godfrey Ho.  A word of explanation about Ho is undoubtedly required here for the uninitiated.  Ho was a prolific Hong Kong based directtor/producer in the eighties whose specialty was to buy Far Eastern movies, often from Thailand, which either hadn't been completed or hadn't had English language versions widely distributed and re-edit them to incorporate twenty minutes or so of new footage, with a different cast.  The whole thing would then be re-dubbed into English.  The new footage, usually featuring American or European actors, would constitute some kind of sub-plot loosely linked to the original film by having characters in the old footage re-dubbed so they appeared to be speaking on the phone to characters from the new stuff and vice versa.  Occasionally, characters from the two separate films would appear to interact having, for instance, a conversation in an office - but they never appear in shot together.  The results were virtually incomprehensible and often unintentionally surreal.

Thunder of Gigantic Serpent is essentially a re-cut version of the 1984 Taiwanese film King of Snakes and for the most part follows that film's plot.  This involves a little girl in Taiwan who finds a snake an adopts it as a pet.  It is no ordinary snake, it seems, as it appears to understand her, nodding in agreement when spoken to and so on.  Meanwhile, the government's secret labs are pursuing 'Project Thunder' - a process which ca induce extraordinary growth in any living thins, in the hope of solving world hunger by producing giant chickens, giant vegetables, etc.  Terrorists try to seize the process, but it all goes wrong and the process falls int the hands of that little girl, (you can see where this is going, can't you?).  The snake (called Mosler) is inadvertently enlarged to python size, (becoming a rubber puppet in the process), while outside playing with the girl, he is struck by lightning and becomes an even bigger rubber snake, frightening the child's parents who want him destroyed.  Just as they are arguing with the distraught girl, the terrorists turn up, believing that the kid has the missing formula and kidnap her.  Mosler goes to the rescue, being electrocuted by the gang for his troubles - but he just turns into a massive rubber snake. Although he rescues the girl and returns her to her parents, the terrorists succeed in kidnapping her again, (look, if you knew that this kid's best friend was a giant angry snake, would you really risk snatching her again?).  This time they get her into their car and head for the city, with Mosler in hot pursuit.  The rest of the film follows the monster movie play book, with the inevitable model trains falling off of model bridges destroyed by the snake, the military mobilising, the giant snake ending up coiled around the skyscraper the terrorist leader is holding the girl in.  The military launch an armada of model jet planes at Mosler, threatening to destroy the skyscraper with him.  Luckily, the heroic police inspector who has been tracking the terrorists kills their leader and gets the girl out of the building before it and Mosler are destroyed.

Now, to be fair, the Taiwanese footage, with its giant rubber snake, model cities and sky scrapers has a certain charm.  It isn't subtle - you know that the terrorists are bad guys because they like slapping women and children around and the inspector and his sidekicks are good guys because they are always arguing with and berating the overly secretive and slightly sinister soldiers and scientists - but, as cheap King Kong/Godzilla type knock offs go, it actually isn't that bad.  But, of course, here we're talking about Godfrey Ho's re-edit rather than the original.  While retaining the original plot, Ho's new footage inserts Ted Fast, some kind of international special forces dude hired by the government to sort out the terrorist who, it turns out, are actually led by another new character, super-villain Solomon and his rapidly receding hairline.  Luckily, Fast seems to be good buddies with the police inspector in the original film - they are often on the phone to each other and both have a penchant for mowing bad guys down with machine guns, while those terrorist guys are always talking to Solomon on their phones, (even getting him to send a plane to attack Mosler during their getaway).  Fast's mission seems to consist mainly of chasing terrorists driving around in mini vans and mowing them down with a sub-machine gun, punctuated by the odd Kung Fu fight.

Puzzlingly, despite being isolated from the main action, Fast seems to have preternatural knowledge of what's going on elsewhere - he phones the inspector, for instance, in order to warn him that the military needs to be mobilised because the snake is heading for the city.  I mean, how would he know?  He's in a different film, for God's sake.  Fast - who spends his scenes wandering around in full camouflage gear and a beret - is played by the elusive 'Pierre Kirby' a Ho regular who vanished from the movie scene as quickly and mysteriously as he appeared.  Allegedly a British martial arts expert who made a living delivering yachts around the Far East, the story goes that his disappearance was the result of his being murdered by pirates who seized one of the yachts he was delivering.  In truth, nothing is really known about 'Kirby', not even if he was British, as in his film appearances he is dubbed by an American voice artist.  The truth about him seems to have been lost in the mists of time.

These new scenes add nothing to the original footage other than slowing it down and confusing the casual viewer.  Ho even undercuts the original ending by inserting a new final scene to wrap up his sub-plot.  In the original, having seen her beloved pet snake (albeit grown to gigantic city destroying proportions) blasted to death by the air force, the little girl is more than a little traumatised, blaming everyone, from her parents to the Project Thunder scientists, (I must admit, my main thought at this point was the years of therapy that poor kid had ahead of her having seen her pet turn into a giant, being kidnapped by terrorists and then witnessing the shooting of the terrorist leader and the death of Mosler, all in a twenty four hour period).  The inspector, though, knows who is really to blame - the army general who directed the anti-snake operation and Project Thunder and punches him out.  Cue closing moral about man meddling with stuff he doesn't understand.  At which point you expect the credits to roll.  But wait!  There's more - we abruptly cut to Solomon, who is trying to make his getaway in his MkIV Ford Cortina (or is it a Ford Taunus?  I think it was right hand drive, which would make it a Cortina - the left hand drive versions were labelled as a Taunus).  Glancing in his rear view mirror, who does he see?  Yes, it's Ted Fast.  There's just time for a quick martial arts battle between the two before Ted gets a pistol and guns down Solomon - and that's it as 'The End' flashes up on the screen.

OK, to be absolutely fair, Thunder of Gigantic Serpent must count as one of Ho's more comprehensible creations, mainly because the main source material was stronger than usual.  Then again, maybe I only think that because it was one of two Godfrey Ho films I saw in one evening. I have to make clear here that it wasn't my intent to do so - I'm not a masochist and generally run a mile from Ho's messes.  But he often hid behind fake names - in the case of Serpent, the credited director was 'Charles Lee' - so it wasn't until Ted Fast started popping up that I realised what I was watching.  But it was still better than the other Ho film I saw, the utterly bat-shit crazy US Catman in Lethal Track, in which a Thai action film is spliced together with something to do with a bargain-basement Batman wannabe (he was scratched by a radioactive cat which gave him superpowers which weren't clear as to their nature), running around with a sidekick, beating people up in a quest to stop some crazy preacher and his cult from doing something bad (I was never sure what, though).  The two plots never really come together, but people in different films keep talking to each other on the phone and lots of things get blown up in Thailand, (in what seemed to be a pilot project for a terrorist global takeover).  After that, anything would have seemed like Eisenstein.

In the final analysis, Godfrey Ho is one of those hack film-makers who probably would have been forgotten had it not been for the advent of the internet.  Unfortunately, the bad film cultists there raised him to the level of a bad movie auteur, ensuring the continued survival of his films.  Personally, I find it difficult to find any merit in his seemingly random assemblages of footage, with frequently barely constitute an actual film.  The fact that they are bad is hardly surprising - with Ho's approach to film-making, how could they be anything else?  They exist on the level of those deliberately bad movies which think that they are being 'ironic' or 'camp' by knowingly winking at their audiences over their slipshod construction.  True 'bad' movies were never intended to be bad and were usually made by people actually trying to make a proper film.  Any merit Ho's films do have comes from the original donor films, to which his only 'artistic' input was the re-dubbing, and which were made by film makers thinking they were making something good.  

Terror From Above

I've been re-reading an old paperback about the German Zeppelin bombing campaign against the UK during World War One.  Nowadays, if remembered at all, it is remembered as being something of a failure, with airships being at the mercy of the weather, which often prevented them from reaching their targets, the accuracy of their bombing was also poor and the damage inflicted minimal.  But at the time, they certainly weren't viewed in such terms.  Much of their significance lay in the fact that these raids represented the first time that the UK had suffered attack from the skies - and it was the whole UK under threat.  Despite the modern perception that the raids were only on London, the Zeppelins targeted cities and installations across the whole country.  Adding to public anxiety was the fact that, at the outset of the war, there was no credible defence against these raids -armed heavier-than-air craft were in their infancy and specialised anti-aircraft artillery didn't exist. Indeed, the whole concept of providing the UK with a co-ordinated air defence system stemmed from the Zeppelin threat.  Of course, Zeppelins weren't just deployed against the UK.  Germany built up significant numbers of these airships, in two separate forces, that of the Navy and that of the Army, with the former often being employed for long-range naval reconnaissance and the latter frequently used on the Eastern Front, against targets in Poland.  Belgian and Dutch cities also found themselves under attack from Zeppelins at various times.  At least one Zeppelin was even deployed to Africa in an attempt to re-supply German forces in East Africa.

All of which makes it surprising how little the Zeppelin campaign against the UK has featured on film.  In fact, the only feature film I can think of on the subject is the 1971 Micheal York starring Zeppelin. Although even here, the portrayal of the raids is peripheral to the main plot, which features a new zeppelin being sent to the UK on a secret mission, with York's double agent among the crew.  Unfortunately, while the special effects depicting the airship are quite impressive, the film offers a poor portrayal of Zeppelin operations.  The Julie Andrews/Rock Hudson semi-musical Darling Lili, as I recall, includes an air raid, but without any portrayal of Zeppelins.  One of the World War One episodes of Upstairs Downstairs does feature a Zeppelin raid and the destruction of one of the airships over London, (in reality, while several Zeppelins were shot down over the UK, I don't think any were brought down over London itself - one came down in the Thames Estuary, several in Essex and another near Cheshunt).  Portrayals of Zeppelins often turn up in films (the awful Gunbus, for instance), but never in the context of the raids against the UK (or anywhere else, for that matter).  Which is curious, as the Zeppelin bombing campaign represented a crucial turning point in the history of military aviation, proving the potential vulnerability from the air of civilian targets and creating the concept of 'terror raids' designed primarily to destroy the morale of enemy civilian populations. (A doctrine expanded upon by both sides in World War Two).  The exploits of the crews involved, on both sides, were also quite remarkable and full of dramatic potential, making their absence from cinema screens all the more mysterious.