Seasonal Musings

'Does Covid make the office Christmas party too risky?' asks the media.  Please God, yes, I reply.  Or, at least, I would if I was still working full time in the sort of environment where such things were held.  As I've said before, I actually don't have anything against people holding such things if they want to, I just object to the way in which it seems to become mandatory.  The way in which it fees as if you are going to have your 'cards marked' if you decline to attend.  People tend to take that refusal so personally, no matter how politely it is put and how much you try to make clear that your decision isn't personal - it is based on a matter of principle.  Well, I say principle - it's the principle that the one and only office Christmas party I ever went to was so horrendous that I just assumed that every other one would be at as bad, if not worse.  I have to say, though, that some of the worst difficulties I had in avoiding Christmas parties was when I worked in London.  They were one of a series of social 'events' that, whilst not mandatory, as they fell outside of working hours, you seemed to be expected to attend.  The fact that I had absolutely no interest in them seemed to be a constant source of bafflement to management.  What they couldn't seem to grasp was that not only did I have little in common with most of my colleagues and therefore had no desire to prolong my interactions with them beyond working hours, as I lived outside of London, these extracurricular activities presented all sorts of logistical problems for me involving public transport.  

The only Christmas party that I was invited to that I've even slightly regretted not attending, it was one at the US Embassy.  Its date, however, coincided with an evening when I'd already arranged to meet friends for a drink in my local.  Plus, I knew damn well that I and my other male colleagues from my office had only been invited because we also had a couple of attractive women in the office and they couldn't invite them without asking us as well.  So, why am I back on the subject of office Christmas parties?  Well, for one thing, the season is now truly upon us, (and I haven't done a thing to prepare for it), and we are now in the grip of the UK's latest Christmas obsession: will it be derailed by Covid?  The idea of government anti-Covid measures 'cancelling' Christmas, now seems to have replaced the old  Christmas 'cancelled' by PC lefiies trope which used to obsess the right-wing media.  For those of us for whom Christmas is a quiet, small scale affair, an oasis of tranquility and self-indulgence in the midst of Winter, it is all academic.  As long as I can get my hands on a plentiful supply of sausage rolls, I'll be happy.  The other reason I'm wittering on about Christmas parties is that I spent so long editing together and posting a new podcast this evening left me with neither the time nor inclination to write my planned post.  The podcast (derived from earlier posts on this blog) can be found here, if you are interested.

Capialism in Cartoon Form

So, there I was the other day, innocently watching some old cartoons on a streaming channel, when I suddenly found myself being subjected to a lecture on the virtues of capitalism.  Actually, short cartoons, clearly aimed at children, explicitly extolling capitalist values aren't that uncommon - you have to remember that we're talking about animated films from the fifties, here.  Deep in the Cold War, it was felt necessary to reinforce 'Western' values, which were equated to freedom in the form of the unbridled pursuit of profit, in the face of what was seen as creeping communism.  Ironically, seen today, these cartoons come over as being nothing more than slicker versions of the sort of propaganda used by the Soviet Union to indoctrinate its own youth to the merits of Marxist-Leninism.  But to get back to this specific example, it starts with a young guy who makes soap with his mother, but wants nothing more than to go fishing.  But instead of going fishing, he spends his time devising more efficient ways to make soap, mechanising the process so as to achieve mass production and thereby establish a profitable business.

The cartoon follows his efforts to build his business, taking the audience through many of the precepts of capitalism and the free market.  According to the cartoon, the success of the soap business benefits the entire community - the factory providing jobs, which allow people to afford mortgages, cars and so on,  Which, in turn stimulates other areas of the economy.  All well and good, but it is when we get onto the bit about his attempts to rig the market and ensure profits by fixing prices with his main competitor, that the narrative began to go awry.  For me, at least.  These efforts don't work because, the narrator tells us, the invisible hand of the market ensures that other competitors outside the arrangement will produce soap cheaper and, because consumers always act rationally, their choice is based upon securing value through buying the cheapest brand.  Except that this isn't true.  For one thing,as critics of classical economic theory point out, it assumes that consumers have perfect knowledge of the market for particular goods.  More importantly, it assumes that price is the only criteria used by consumers to make decisions.  As we all know, it is all too easy to persuade consumers to buy a more expensive version of a product if you can convince them that its quality is also higher.  Often, all this takes is a familiar brand name, (Neurofen, for instance, is no different from the cheap, generic Ibuprofen available from supermarket pharmacies, yet many are prepared to pay the premium for that superior brand name and its advertising campaign).

Aside from its theoretical flaws, what struck me most about the cartoon was the pessimistic picture it painted of entrepreneurship.  In order to build up his business, the unfortunate protagonist seems to have to spend his every waking moment thinking about soap, to the exclusion of all else.  While he does find time to get married and have kids, he is middle ages by then and seems to spend vary little time with his family.  As I recall, he passes up the opportunity to romance the girl of his dreams in his youth in order to pursue his soap dreams, instead eventually marrying someone 'more suitable' as a consort for a successful businessman.  Oh, and he never does get to go fishing.  Like I said, all pretty depressing.

'I Was Chosen as a Human Sacrifice'

The trouble with a story title like 'I Was Chosen as a Human Sacrifice' is that it effectively gives away the ending. The use of first person immediately tells us that while 'they' might have been chosen, they weren't actually sacrificed, thereby removing any sense of peril.   Which is pretty ironic, as it is in a magazine called Peril.  Started back in 1956, it was mainly published on a bi-monthly schedule until it finally folded in 1967.  From June 1963 it became Man's Peril and lost the 'All Man's Magazine' strap line.  This October 1960 cover is pretty typical of the publication's original incarnation, which often featured young women in various states of undress being menaced by wild animals.  (To be fair, quite a few guys were similarly imperiled on early covers).  After acquiring the Man's prefix, the covers tended toward more stereotypical men's magazine subjects - often war themed, with girls in their underwear being menaced by Nazis/Communists.

Back in October 1960, we have the usual mixture of sex and vice scandals and exoticism.  There's the usual warning about the perils of the mysterious East in 'Hong Kong's Dope Victims' - you just can't trust those Orientals.  If they aren't selling Western women into white slavery, they are hooking unsuspecting occidentals on drugs!  'Artists and Models Run Wild' sounds like the usual sort of fake true account of sex and debauchery amongst those damned intellectual artistic types - they're al so decadent!  A favourite theme of these publications (which were squarely aimed at a working class, blue collar readership).  I'm most intrigued by 'The Poor Man's Aphrodisiac' - just what are those ten cent pills creating a sex menace?  Are they available over the counter in Boots or Superdrug?  Because I could really do with some.  The cover story, 'White Queen of the Lost Island', sounds like a throwback to a type of story popular a couple of decades earlier, featuring imperious white women ruling over lost tribes and civilisations, H. Rider Haggard's She being the prototype.  But, even if outdated in concept, it does at least provide an excuse for another of those 'wild animal menacing woman' covers.

Identified! Curse of Bigfoot (1975)

Remember that film I came into part way through on a streaming channel and couldn't identify? No, you probably don't, (unless you are an obsessive reader of this blog and, apart from me, I refuse to believe that such people exist).  It was a while ago now and I haven't referred to it since.  To recap, it was of bloody awful quality featuring what looked like a semi-professional (at best) cast and seemed to involve a bunch of students in the US finding a mummy which, when dug up, transforms into some kind of furry faced monster that goes on a rampage.  Anyway, I've finally been able to identify it and guess what?  All of my suppositions about it turned out to be wrong.  I had speculated that had been made in the sixties, (based on the fact that it was in colour - ultra low budget B-movies were only routinely shot in colour from the mid to late sixties onward) and that it had been shot in Florida, (the presence of swamps and the fact that there was a thriving low budget film industry in this State during the sixties and seventies).  In reality, it turns out that most of it was filmed in 1958, in California (the orange tree orchards should have been a giveaway).  But what threw me most was the film's title, when I finally identified it: Curse of Bigfoot.  I'd been busy searching for movies with the word 'mummy' in the title, as this seemed more logical.  I mean, who'd have thought that the hairy thing was meant to be Bigfoot?

Not the original makers, that's for sure.  The bulk of the footage comes from a 59 minute 1958 film called Teenagers Battle the Thing, which, apparently, was only ever shown in the makers' home town.  Fast forward nearly twenty years to 1975, when, in order to sell it to TV, it was decided to bring it up to feature length, by adding nearly thirty minutes of new footage as a framing story.  This actually featured two of the teenagers from the original footage as adults, telling a class of modern teenagers about their encounter with Bigfoot - with the original film presented as a flashback.  Now, in the original, the creature was just some kind of unidentified prehistoric beast, the 'Bigfoot' angle in the new footage presumably being added to cash in on a slew of Bigfoot-related titles which had appeared in the seventies.  Regardless of the monster's identity, the film is pretty awful, its most notable feature being the use of colour in a fifties low-budget feature.  The fact that it was originally shown only locally reinforces the impression one gets while viewing the film that it is, in essence, a home movie.  The graininess of the original footage presumably the result of it having been shot on 8mm and subsequently blown up. The original footage, without the framing story, was released on VHS in the nineties, under the original title. Regardless of the poor quality and misleading title, I'm glad to have finally identified this movie - I can be very obsessive about this sort of thing and it is like scratching a persistent itch: very satisfying.  Just in case you are interested, here's a DVD trailer:

Pumaman (1980)

Much has been written already about the inadequacies of Pumaman (1980), the Italian Superman cash in from director Alberto De Martino.  The fact that it is a bad movie is attested to by the fact that both its director and one of its stars have admitted as such.  Indeed, Donald PLeasance went so far as to say that he considered it the worst film he had ever appeared in - which is quite something considering some of the stuff Pleasance did in the name of paying multiple alimony to various ex-wives.  That Pumaman is manifestly bad hasn't, of course, stopped the bad movie cultists spending inordinate amounts of time telling us why it is bad, in detail.  Look, just watch the film, or even the trailer, the problems are obvious, from poor flying sequences and scrappy production values to a spectacularly inept musical score.  Nevertheless, that hasn't stopped versions with 'hilarious' commentaries by 'comedians' laboriously ridiculing every aspect of the film from being released.  (I'm sorry, but this is one of my pet hates: I'm perfectly capable of discerning whether a film is good or bad, without a bunch of ignorant morons telling me how bad it is and how clever they are for realising this).  

Pumaman was one of a number of attempts by Italian producers to exploit the success of Superman (1978), others included 1979's Supersonic Man (starring serial Terence Hill impersonator Antonio Cantafora) and Supersnooper (starring the real Terence Hill).  All of these films, in common with other Italian exploitation productions, weren't content simply to ape their progenitors, but also sought to cross them with other genres - Close Encounters-type alien contact films in the case of Pumaman (although its super-villain bad guy also gives it Bondian overtones), buddy cop action comedies in the case of Supersnooper and mad scientist movies in Supersonic Man.  None of these attempts really succeed in part because these cross genre elements detract, rather than enhance their main comic book superhero themes.  Unlike previous Italian cash ins on popular Hollywood hits and genres, they don't really bring anything new to the table, certainly nothing that can transform the genre and make it distinctively Italian, (like the Spaghetti Western genre, or the Italian zombie genre).  It is notable that the only particularly satisfying Italian comic book adaptations have been based on indigenous Fumetti titles (Diabolik, for instance), rather than movies, like Pumaman, which derive from US prototypes.

Ultimately, Pumaman underlines the problems faced by the Italian exploitation film industry in the face of the wave of effects-heavy big budget science fiction and fantasy epics from US studios that started appearing from the late seventies onward.  Their budgets were simply inadequate to replicate the sort of effects work seen in the Hollywood movies - the best they could serve up here (and in Star Wars rip-offs like Starcrash and The Humanoid) were quaint efforts on a par with thirties Flash Gordon serials or mid-seventies Dr Who.  Still, Pumaman isn't entirely bad - unlike many Italian movies set in the UK, this one actually was shot on location in the UK, featuring some very nice footage of early eighties London.  Donald Pleasance, as the villain, is as enjoyably hammy as you'd expect in this sort of film, while lead actor Walter George Alton - whose only film credit this is - subsequently became a lawyer.  Personally, I find it quite entertaining in its quaint and clunky way, as it hopelessly tries to emulate a mega-budgeted US hit.  So, if you enjoy superheroes whose costumes seem to consist of a cloak and fancy belt worn with a regular T-shirt and trousers, whose mentor looks like Antonio Conte and whose girlfriend inexplicably wears a leather flying helmet while driving a regular hard-top saloon, then this is the film for you.  (Incidentally, the reasons for his superhero name are never made clear - he doesn't transform into a puma or have any cat-like abilities).

Man of Inaction

So, it seems that my prevaricating, procrastination and general idleness can sometimes pay dividends.  For the past few years I've kept thinking that I should change my energy supplier and a couple of times I came close to switching to Bulb, but never quite got around to it.  Which, as it turns out, was no bad thing, as today Bulb went into administration, the largest energy supplier so far to go down in the face of rising gas prices.  Meanwhile, as this news was breaking, our pathetic excuse for a Prime Minister, looking disheveled and shambolic, was telling the CBI about his trip to 'Peppa Pig World'.  Actually, the most shocking aspect of this was that it meant that he had been geographically fairly close to me and I hadn't known, therefore missing a chance to shout abuse at him in person.  (The UK 'Peppa Pig World' technically isn't, as Johnson claimed, in the New Forest.  It is situated in Ower, which sits between Romsey and Cadnam, just outside of the Forest proper.  But hey, when has Johnson ever let facts get in the way of his delusional mumblings?).  

But to get back to my original point, all these years I've been told that my prevaricating has cost me valuable opportunities and held me back.  I've been criticised for being overly cautious, (particularly in potentially dangerous work-related situations), for taking too long to make decisions which, others seem to think, should always be done in a split second.  Yet now, it seems, it is all these critics who are wrong.  My inaction, it seems, has saved e a fair amount of potential hassle.  So clearly I'm right to be a man of inaction, who prefers his bed to running around like a headless chicken in the hope that I can convince people (not to mention myself), that I'm actually achieving something worthwhile.  That's the problem with the modern world - people spend far too much time trying to look as if they are doing something, rather than actually doing stuff.  Not that I actually seem to do much these days - but I do spend a lot of time thinking about doing things.  Which at least means that when I do actually get around to doing things, I've at least thought them through, meaning I've more chance of doing them properly than those who just rush into action because, hey, that's being decisive.

'I Rescued Brigitte From Harem Torture'

You see, this is why I once seriously considered going to sea.  The youthful me really wanted to believe all the promises made on the covers of magazines like South Sea Stories.  I mean, what guy wouldn't want to believe that they could be traveling to such places as 'The Island of Violent Virgins' or visit 'The Island Where Sex Was Compulsory', (perhaps they were adjacent to each other in the same archipelago)?   Or even being able to boast 'I Saw the Forbidden Somali Sex Dance'?  Of course, all of this begs the question as to where, exactly, are the South Seas?  Historically, it is an amorphous term, sometimes used to describe the entire Pacific Ocean, although usually it is taken to mean the Southern part of the Pacific, where you can find islands like Tahiti, packed full, in popular, literature of attractive and willing, (not to mention, usually topless) native girls.

Which, for a pedant like me, brings us to the issue of some of those other story titles on the cover of the October 1960 issue.  'My Gem Jackpot in Honduras', for instance, is problematical.  I mean, is Honduras in the South Seas, however they are defined?  In popular culture it tends to be lumped in with the Caribbean, in tales of buccaneers and pirate treasures.  Then we have 'I Rescued Brigitte From Harem Torture' and 'Human Studs in Arabia'.  Anything involving harems is usually part of the popular pulp culture that concerns the mythical 'Arabia' or even the equally mythical 'Orient', neither of which can be said to fall within the usual idea of the 'South Seas'.  But the presence of such stories in this magazine emphasises the fact that 'South Seas' is used as shorthand for a particular type of male fantasy involving hot climates, palm trees and exotic women.  Certainly, in idle moments, I sometimes fantasise about living in some sunny South Seas idyll, spending my days wandering along palm tree fringed beaches and drinking in beach side bars. (I'm too old and knackered to deal with all those topless girls, so obviously in my fantasies I avoid 'The Island Where Sex Was Compulsory').  Perhaps I should have gone to sea, although I strongly suspect that, rather than sailing on a tramp steamer, trading around the South Pacific, I would have ended up working on a car ferry plying between Dover and Cherbourg.

Listless in Crapchester

It's been one of those weeks, hasn't it?  I seem to have spent most of mine trying to get an appointment for my Covid vaccine booster shot.  Which should have been simple, except that every time I tried, the NHS booking service directed me to vaccination centres in different towns, anywhere up to thirty miles away, despite the fact that my local centre is less then two miles from me.  Finally, about an hour ago, it let me book an appointment at said vaccination centre.  Apparently, I'm not the only one here in Crapchester experiencing this problem - the NHS web site is referring locals everywhere except to their local centre.  Not to worry, I'm sure that the site was set up by some Tory donor who has received millions of taxpayers money for coming up with this non-functioning app.  But it was just another distraction in what has been a listless week for me as, once more, I get very little done.  As reflected by this week's posts.  Don't worry, I'll get back to posting pop culture related stuff soon I just need to watch some more schlock.

Speaking of which, I have been watching quite a bit of low grade streaming TV of late.  None of it is exactly schlock, but it is pretty low rent.  For one thing, I've found myself watching a channel that shows nothing but old cartoons.  And I mean old.  While the odd forties or fifties Bugs Bunny cartoon sometimes turns up, most of those featured date back to the thirties, often in black and white, taken from very scratchy prints with crackly sound.  They're packaged into programmes which are presented by various young girls, whose presenting styles can be, to put it mildly, fascinating.  There's a blonde one who I'm sure must be on something, she always seems so unnaturally exuberant and perky, by contrast, there's another one with dark hair who gives the impression that she's being forced at gun point to present these cartoons, so reluctant does she seem.  Some of the cartoons are completely unknown to me, (obviously, they were never shown in the UK):  'Clutch Cargo', for instance, which is basically a series of still drawings with some very limited animation and the superimposed lips of the voice artist providing the speech.  Having seen several episodes, I'm still no clearer as to why he is called 'Clutch'.  

Then there's this streaming TV service I'm fascinated by - it has an ever fluid line-up of' channels' which, presumably for copyright reasons, all show the same couple of dozen or so films and TV episodes, just on different schedules and in different orders.  I'm assuming that the majority of this content is public domain.  Apparently, in the past, the service's channels showed lots of old TV and films, presumably without permission, as it all vanished, virtually overnight, leaving the current limited service.  Still, limited or not, some of it is stuff I either haven't seen in decades, or have never seen at all.

Web Non-Influencer

So, now I'm an 'influencer', apparently.  At least, according to the latest spam e-mail I've received.  'Influencers' like me can make money from our posts, so it claims.  I've no idea who I might be influencing with my posts here, the stories over on The Sleaze or even the podcasts I do for the Overnightscape Underground, but I can allegedly get paid for them.  'Influencer' is just one of those terms I hate.  as far as I can see, it is simply synonymous with someone who has a You Tube channel and delusions of grandeur.  Believe me, just because you can get people to look at it doesn't actually mean that you are some kind of celebrity, talented or even influence people.  Certainly no more than I am just because I run a couple of web sites.  The most hilarious part of this spam e-mail is where it talks about 'growing your traffic' - this at a time where traffic seems in terminal decline for most of the web, (thanks mainly to Google's blatant abuse of its near-monopoly in web searches).  Which, of course, it what the e-mail is all about - clearly the 'service' behind it is finding that monetisation of their existing customers is yielding lower returns due to this decline in traffic and they are now desperate to expand their client list in the hope of increasing returns.  Desperate to the extent that they are even contacting small-fry like me.

Obviously, this presupposes that the e-mail is genuine and not some kind of phishing scam, although the e-mail address isn't spoofed and the links it contains seem to genuinely point toward the site in question.  Maybe they know something about the reach and 'influence' of my posts and stories that I don't.  Maybe I'm more influential than I think.  After all, I'm now listed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).  For some reason, a podcast that I participated in currently has an entry there, listing 'Doc Sleaze' as part of the 'cast'.  Actually, it isn't the first time that I've been on there: one of my film reviews from here was once linked to on the relevant movie's page as an 'external review'.  (It might still be, I can't say that I've bothered checking).  It was a Cliff Twemlow movie, which are pretty obscure as far as mainstream audiences are concerned and for which there tend to be very few reviews.  So maybe that's it - I'm very influential with people who listen to underground podcasts and watch ultra low budget British regional cinema.  Which must be a pretty limited audience, meaning the chances of generating an income stream from it is pretty much nil.  Which is fine by me - I've never had any desire to make money from the web.  The truth is that very few people do - unless they are a multinational like Amazon or Google - even when they do at best all they do is generate enough to cover things like hosting costs.  The only people likely to make money from schemes like the one the spam e-mail originated from are those running the schemes.  Because that's what these people really mean when they say that they can show you how to make money from the web - that they are going to make money from you on the pretext of doing this.

Secrets of Isis

You never can tell, can you?  What seemed perfectly innocent as a title for a kids' TV show in the seventies, forty odd years later now seems to have sinister implications.  I don't think that Secrets of Isis was ever shown in the UK.  At least, not on terrestrial TV in the seventies or early eighties, when I might have noticed it.  In the US it apparently formed a double bill with Shazam on Saturday mornings during 1975-77.   Lately, episodes have been turning up on a couple of streaming services that I watch.  Nowadays, of course, with a title like Secrets of Isis, you might be expecting some kind of drama or documentary about Islamic fundamentalist terrorists - every week their dastardly plans to commit an atrocity in small town America are foiled by heroic FBI agents.  (In which format, it would stand alongside the Chuck Norris movie Delta Force as an attempt to cathartically rewrite history in a more reassuring form, so that the good guys won, in the film's case it was the TWA hijacking that was re-imagined, in this case it would have been the FBI's failure to stop 9/11 that was being 'corrected').  

Instead, though, what we get in the real Secrets of Isis is a female superhero, (who just predated Wonder Woman on TV), in this case a High School science teacher (and descendant of an ancient Egyptian queen), who comes across an amulet bearing the symbol of the goddess Isis.  This allows her to transform into an avatar of Isis, complete with various powers, in order to fight crime.  Pretty low level crime, it has to be said (it was aimed at kids, after all).  Rather than crazy Islamic terrorists, the usual villains were car thieves, crooked property developers (perpetrating UFO hoaxes to drive property prices down) and robbers.  In addition to these, Isis also found herself dealing with escaped gorillas, bears and school cheats, (every episode had a moral).  All dealt with in less than thirty minutes.  The biggest mystery, (as ever with superheroes), was why none of her friends could see that the teacher and Isis were one and the same person.  Apart from the change of costume, her only 'disguise' was to wear glasses and have her hair styled differently when she was the teacher.  Moreover, like Clarke Kent and Superman, they were never in the same place at the same time, surely a dead giveaway?  Compared to present day Superhero TV series (which now seem to be primarily aimed at adults), Secrets of Isis seems quaintly innocent and unsophisticated, (despite the title implying, for contemporary audiences, all manner of bloody terror-related mayhem).  I shudder to think what a modern remake might be like...

'Fantastic Escape of Hitler's Lover Boy!'

 

OK, I know that this cover is illustrating the story 'The Last Battle of the Joy Girl Brigade', (which I'm guessing is about indefeasibly glamourous and attractive female resistance fighters in occupied France - they undoubtedly use their womanly wiles to lure Nazis to their doom), the most intriguing story alluded to in this October 1966 issue of New Man is 'Fantastic Escape of Hitler's Lover Boy'.   Which, on the face of it, would seem to be implying that the Fuhrer was gay and that his lover escaped the fall of the Third Reich, (presumably via U-Boat to that secret base in the 'hollow earth' accessed from the Antarctic).  Although, I suspect that it is really about some Nazi war criminal who was considered some kind of 'ladies man', seducing women left, right and centre with the aid of  the Gestapo.  But the ambiguity was undoubtedly deliberate.

As for the rest of the stories teased on the cover, 'I'm anybody's girl - the terrifying saga of a tramp' is, without doubt, the sort of story that while promising all sorts of salacious sexual revelations, turns out to be quite tame.  It no doubt presents itself as one of those cautionary moral tales about the awful consequences of female promiscuity while simultaneously playing into adolescent male fantasies about women.  'What your secret dreams tell about you' looks to be another of the pieces of pseudo-psychology so beloved of these types of magazine.  The great thing about 'dream analysis' is that you can write just about any kind of bollocks you like - the reality is that nobody has a clue what the significance of dreams are or, indeed, if they have any significance at all.  Judging by my own dreams, I strongly suspect that there is no deep meaning to them.  They are probably merely the subconscious equivalent to these men's magazine covers - a concoction of various lurid and usually suppressed fantasies.

Magic Boys (2012)

It's amazing the things you run into on the various streaming services.  Last night, for instance, after bumping into a couple of Japanese monster movies, (Death Kappa and Destroy All Monsters), I stumbled into a film that, allegedly, wasn't made.  Now, clearly Magic Boys (2012) was made as I sat through the whole thing although, from the off, it seemed somewhat odd.  Despite starring Michael Madsen, Vinnie Jones and, er, Jamelia and being mainly set in London, as the opening titles unfold, the names on the technical credits make it clear that the movie is, in fact, a Hungarian production.  The stars, the setting and the fact that much of it is in English, might have contributed to the suspicions of the Hungarian authorities that this was a film which, although claiming Hungarian tax breaks and other assistance, didn't really exist as a Hungarian film.  Indeed, the producer was arrested on the grounds that this and a number of other unreleased (in 2011) films he had been involved with didn't actually exist and were a huge financial scam.  As it was, all of the films in question, including Magic Boys, were released during 2012-13.  Nevertheless, the producer seems to have been prevented from producing or financing any other films since.  

Watching Magic Boys, if you didn't pay attention to those opening titles, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was one of those lottery funded low-budget British gangster movies - it has the token down on their luck US star, a UK pop star trying to act, a plot involving diamond smuggling, sleazy London strip joints and, of course, Vinnie Jones.  It's the sort of thing you'd expect to see in the direct-to-DVD racks at Tesco, (in fact, it was released direct-to-DVD in the UK, under the generic title of Diamond Heist).  But as you watch the film, the Hungarian connection becomes ever more obvious - not only is Jones' villain based in Hungary, but the main part of the plot involves a pair of hapless Hungarian guys who witness a murder committed by Jones and go on the run.  In a series of unlikely twists, they end up on a private plane piloted by Jamelia, mistaken for a pair of male strippers that Jones was sending to his former partner Madsen in London, as replacements for two vanished strippers he had  previously been managing.  The replacement strippers, however, were also unknowingly smuggling a package of diamonds to Madsen.  Jamelia, though, is herself acting to try and find which of Madsen and Jones killed her diamond broker father in a heist.  The two original replacement strippers make their own way to London and have various misadventures in fetish clubs and the like.

It's a strange mixing of genres, with the crime elements often rubbing shoulders uneasily with the comedic antics of the two guys mistaken for strippers (who, in truth, are the stars of the film as far Hungarian audiences are concerned - the actors are, apparently, pretty well known in Hungary) and the trials and tribulations of the real strippers.  It is all complicated by the fact that the Hungarian actors spend most of the film speaking Hungarian, without subtitles, leaving English-speaking audiences mystified as to what is going on, (not to mention missing what I assume is the humour of their exchanges).  It really is a very strange concoction.  That said, I have to say that it is very professionally made.  The cinematography is excellent, with the London night time scenes catching a lot of the fell of the city after dark.  The production values are slick, while some of the performances are actually OK.  Madsen's performance doesn't feel as phoned in as it might have been, while Jones plays, well, that Vinnie Jones character, but he does it very well.  Jamelia, sadly, proves that she should stick to singing.  The language barrier makes the Hungarian cast's performances difficult to judge but, it has too be said that Robert Koltai, (who also co-directs, co-wrote the film and is the producer's father) is very good as Madsen's agent associate, performing his entire role in English.  (again, he is apparently a very well known actor and director in Hungary).

So there you are: Magic Boys - the film that the Hungarian authorities claimed never existed.  A somewhat unsatisfactory film which, to English speaking audiences at  least, seems to fall between two genres, being neither violent nor suspenseful enough to be a crime thriller, nor funny enough to be a comedy thriller.  Nevertheless, it has its entertaining moments and is, at least, better made than most direct-to-DVD movies, particularly indigenous lottery funded gangster pictures.  If nothing else, it has introduced me to modern Hungarian cinema which, apparently, is thriving, with quite a few films, like this one, shot on overseas locations.  Sadly, they seem to be largely unknown outside of the Hungarian-speaking world, (which, basically, consists of Hungary), with even international co-productions like Magic Boys being unceremoniously dumped on the direct-to-DVD market overseas. 

Untrue Crime

So, those true crime podcasts, are they still a thing?  You know the ones I mean, the ones where a bunch of amateurs decide to reopen either an unsolved case or one where they think there has been a miscarriage of justice and re-investigate it.  The main conclusion I take away from the phenomenon is that these people have clearly seen too many TV shows about amateur sleuths outwitting the police - the likes of Father Brown and Miss Marple have a lot to answer for.  But, to get back to the point, they seem to be much less prominent these days, which is why I was wondering whether they are still a thing.  Obviously, it could just be that the novelty of them has worn off as far as the wider media are concerned, so they just don't  discuss them as much, reducing their 'visibility' with the public.  Alternatively, I thought that maybe they were running out of cases to re-investigate.  Surely, by now, they must have done all the really 'glamourous' murder cases where they might hope to get a result and the public, as it turned out, just weren't interested in a ten part reassessment of the theft of Mrs Jones' push bike in Banbury in 1996 - was Jimmy from Number Thirty really the guilty culprit?  Was he unjustly fined £200 and given a police warning?  

The solution would seem to be obvious - theses podcasters need to start committing crimes themselves in order to provide subject matter for their shows.  Clearly, they'd have to be incredibly ingenious crimes so well planned and executed that the police could never solve them.  Either that, or they deliberately frame someone for them, ensuring there was sufficient manufactured evidence against them to ensure a conviction.  Then they could spend twenty six episodes unraveling the case to show that the conviction was unsafe.  If they were really good, then they would have a second fall guy lined up to be unmasked as the real culprit.  This second culprit should, ideally, be already dead, so that there is no chance of them pleading innocence and encouraging other true crime podcasters that they were the subject of a miscarriage of justice, thereby triggering yet another amateur investigation threatening the first bunch of podcasters.  Then again, rather than actually committing crimes, they could just make up sensational cases and 'solve' them.  I mean, as far as most listeners are concerned, they'd have no idea whether any of the shit on these podcasts is real.  Most probably wouldn't care, either.  Actually, it could be a whole new genre of podcasts: untrue crime.

Unknown Island (1948)

Being something of a sucker for dinosaur and lost world movies, I finally caught up with Unknown Island (1948) in its entirety the other day.  Interestingly, for what amounted to an independently made low budget programmer, the film was shot in colour - all the better to show off those monsters.  What's clear from early on is that Unknown Island badly wants to be King Kong (1933) - well, at least the Skull Island portions of King Kong that is.  Obviously, with its limited budget and special effects, there is no way that it could hope to emulate the New York climax of the latter.  But we do have the expedition to an uncharted island, teeming with prehistoric species, with the aim of capturing at least one example and returning it to civilisation. To this end, the hero and heroine (the former of whom had, as a wartime Navy pilot, spotted the island and its inhabitants), hire a shady sea captain who specialises in capturing and transporting exotic wild animals for zoos and whose ship is conveniently equipped for such purposes.  There are also a bunch of superstitious and murderous natives, (although these are part of the crew rather than being inhabitants of the island).  

But what makes or breaks any such movie is the quality of its monsters.  Interestingly, at a time when there were two established methods of representing dinosaurs on screen - the expensive use of stop motion models or the cheaper expedient of photographically enlarged lizards - Unknown Island instead opted to use a combination of puppets and men in monster suits.  While lacking the relative realism and anatomical correctness of stop motion, this method does mean that the creatures shown st least look like dinosaurs, rather than big lizards with latex fins and horns stuck on them.  The man-in-a-suit variety shown are the bipedal predatory dinosaur Ceratosaurus, which, obviously, lends itself to this method of depiction.  While they look rubbery and the costumes severely restrict the movements of the actors wearing them, they really aren't too bad.  Unlike stop motion models or lizards, they didn't have to be shot against miniature sets - the use of real landscapes and back projection when interacting with actors to give a sense of scale, helps give them an air of quasi-realism.

As with many such films, extinct species from several different geological periods are happily mixed together, with little regard for evolution.  While Ceratosaurs and Sauropods might have been Jurassic contemporaries, the Dimetrodon was from the Permain and not actually a dinosaur.  (In reality, it really was a big lizard with a fin - Unknown Island does get their size about right, though, unlike many other cinematic depictions).  Most bizarrely, the main rival to the Ceratosaurs on the island turn out to be giant ground sloths, a a type of prehistoric mammal from the Pliocene period, long after the extinction of the dinosaurs.  Not only were these, in reality, herbivourous, but, if their contemporary relatives are anything to go by, were hardly dynamic.  Yet the version depicted in the film leap around fighting dinosaurs, tearing great chunks of them out with their teeth.   In fact, the film version look far more like giant red-haired apes.  Which isn't surprising as, inside the suit, was Ray 'Crash' Corrigan, one of Hollywood's premier ape suit performers.  

Unusually for the genre, Unknown Island doesn't end with some cataclysmic volcanic eruption destroying its lost world, instead seeing the surviving expedition members escape back to the ship on a raft, (their boat having been stolen and wrecked by those mutinous native crewmen), after having witnessed a fight between two of the giant monsters, another genre staple.  In this case, an ape, sorry, sloth, goes hammer and tongs with a Ceratosaurus, before they both fall over a cliff to their deaths, (not only referencing Kong's fight with a Tyrannosaur, but also echoing a similar scene in The Lost World).  The closest thing to stars the film can muster are B-movie science fiction specialist Richard Denning as the heroic Navy veteran who had once been stranded on the island and veteran heavy Barton MacLane as the leery captain with designs on the heroine.  All of the regular B-movie jungle adventure tropes are present, including mutinous natives, love triangle, scuzzy dockside dive where dubious sea dogs can be hired and drunken sea captain/big game hunter and, in the final analysis, the dinosaurs and other prehistoric monsters are really only window dressing for an otherwise pretty standard adventure film.  The whole thing is moved through its seventy five minutes at a reasonable pace by specialist B-movie director Jack Bernhard.  Ultimately, it is a pretty standard B-movie adventure, lifted above the average by the use of colour and its superior dinosaurs.  It might not be King Kong, but it does provide some decent small scale entertainment.

Christmas Come Early (Again)

It's that time of year again, when I complain about how Christmas gets earlier every year.  Well, today I spotted my first Christmas trees - Marks and Spencer had them up, albeit undecorated so far, on every floor of their Crapchester store.  I'm assuming that this was to coincide with the launch of their 2021 Christmas TV ad campaign, which has been running for a couple of days so far - I notice that Asda have now followed suit with their first seasonal TV ad.  Apparently, John Lewis have launched their TV ad as well - but as I never shop there, I never pay attention to theirs.  Crapchester town centre has yet to put up any festive decorations, although we had a portent of the imminent arrival of Christmas the other week when the German sausage stall appeared outside Superdrug to replace the Summer's ice cream van.  (Thankfully, no Brexit protesors turned up to shout 'No to German sausages - British bangers only!').  Today, though, we did have the 'Procession of Light' to mark the start of Diwali, which seemed to consist mainly of little girls in spangly dresses carrying lanterns.  The cynic in me an't help but think that holding this on the fifth of November was a shameless attempt on the council's part to divert attention from the fact that they are too tight fisted to finance a municipal fireworks display for Bonfire Night.

For their part, the council would probably say that this was all part of their drive to embrace diversity by celebrating festivals from other cultures.  If nothing else, it provides us with another barrier between Halloween and the inevitable onslaught of Christmas and the High streets full of relentless entreaties to 'spend, spend, spend!'.  It remains to be seen if the two parts of our shopping centre (the newer part is under different ownership to the older) engage in another battle of rival lighting up ceremonies, as in previous years or whether we end up with the two rival Christmas trees that we've seen in recent years.  The trouble is that, despite this rivalry, in recent times both sets of decorations have been pretty poor, with the municipal ones outside the main malls no better.  Lat year this made for a pretty desultory feel for Christmas shoppers.  Everybody seems to have better decorations than Crapchester.  Damn it, some years ago, I had to go on a training course in Eastliegh in December and had to walk past their town centre and even they had a better display than us!  No wonder so many people around here seem to spend so much time and effort on putting up elaborate external decorations on their houses every December!  Anyway, there you have it, my annual seasonal moan about Christmas starting too early.  Some things never change.

Blue Energy

One of the more bizarre sights from the COP26 meetings in Glasgow has been the sight of the police 'arresting' and taking into custody a giant inflatable Loch Ness Monster, lest its presence frighten or upset delegates.  This came hard on the heels of the self same police preventing people from returning to their homes in order to 'secure' a nearby dinner for delegates.  Carers couldn't get to their clients and some people were denied medication which they had in their houses as they were effectively locked out.  It left me thinking that if only we could somehow harness the energy exerted by the police in making fools of themselves and abusing their authority, we could go some way to solving the climate crisis.  Just imagine the electricity we could generate if only we could attach some sort of generator to the arms of police officers as they beat protestors and the like with their batons - and it would all be green as no fossil fuels would be involved.  I mean, it must be possible - they're developing devices that can generate power from the movements of waves at sea, after all.  Something similar, surely, could be adapted for the human body?

Not just for policemen, either.  Tory MPs would surely be another good source of green, or in their case, blue, electricity.  On the one hand, all the adulterous behaviour they get up to, not to mention the alleged rapes and sexual assaults, could be a valuable source of power.  Just hook them up to all that shagging motion is converted into energy - damn it Johnson's fat buttocks alone must look like the Atlantic Ocean in a storm when the fat shagger gets at it.  If They don't even have to generate electricity directly - just hook up the arms of their dominatrices so that when they whip them they are keeping the lights on in Camden.  (Actually, you could also use the MPs' quivering buttocks as they are struck with whips, riding crops, canes and the like to simultaneously generate wave energy).  On the other hand, of course, we might also try harnessing their corruption - that motion with the right arm as they stuff the brown envelopes stuffed full of used banknotes into their inside pockets as they take their regular backhanders from Russian oligarchs and multimationals, could be a powerful source of energy generation.  (No doubt this method could also be used on the police).  So there you have it - a perfect solution to the climate crisis which also gives the Tories an excuse not to clean up their act, instead justifying their sexual misconduct and corruption on the grounds that it is saving the planet.

The Halloween That Passed Me By

You know, I don't think that I mentioned Halloween here this year.  I did review a couple of horror films during October and I did put out a Satanic-cinema themed podcast on The Overnightscape Underground based around those (and some earlier) posts.  But, by and large, I'm afraid that I just couldn't whip up any enthusiasm for it this year, so I'm afraid that the season barely registered on me. I didn't even watch any horror movies on the day itself, (if you don't include the first episode of the new Dr Who series, that is, which was quite horrific in all the wrong ways).  The bad weather on Sunday also meant that any lingering threat of trick or treating kids was snuffed out.  Part of my disinterest stems, I think, from the fact that I'm part of a generation for whom Halloween wasn't a big deal when we were kids - all those supposed 'traditions' hadn't yet been imported from the States back then.  Of course, they were mainly imported to provide manufacturers and retailers of tat another pre-Christmas marketing opportunity.  I have a theory that Halloween as some kind of celebration only gained ground here in the UK as Guy Fawkes Night started to fall out of favour as sales of fireworks became ever more restricted on safety grounds.  (I miss the days when, even as a kid, you could go into shops and legally buy explosive devices for home use.  Even better, you could also legally set them off in public - well, your back garden, at least).

Another reason, I think, for my general lack of interest in Halloween lies in the fact that I watch horror movies all year round,  I don't see why I should be confined to just one particular time of year to indulge.  Which is why I'm rarely tempted to look at those seasonal Halloween collections on the streaming channels - not only are they the same horror films they have available all year round, but I've invariably seen them, anyway.  This year, though, Halloween also fell victim to a general wave of apathy that has overwhelmed me of late.  Perhaps I should make more of an effort to get back into the workplace, just to give my life a bit more structure and motivation, but I just don't feel ready yet.  My experiences in my previous job have, in retrospect, turned out to have been far more traumatic than I realised - increasingly, I've been having troubling dreams about it, which I resent, as I usually dream about stuff I enjoy.  I just don't want to get involved in anything too stressful or complicated.  I recently turned down a part-time educational opportunity when I realised that I was only being offered it because nobody else was willing to take it on due to the difficulties involved.  I'm afraid the days when I'd do the stuff nobody else would or could do are behind me - doing so might have kept me work, but it dangerously undermined my health, both physically and mentally.  All of which has taken us a long way from the Halloween that passed me by - maybe I'll focus on Bonfire Night this year and obtain some illegal fireworks with which to terrorise my neighbours, instead...

(For purely legal purposes, I feel the need to point out that the last sentence is intended for purely satirical purposes and shouldn't be taken literally - I have no intention of obtaining or setting off explosives of any kind, for any reason).

'He's the Baldy, Beardy Pound Shop Mourinho'

"Nuno!  Nuno! He's the baldy, beardy pound shop Mourinho! Nuno-no-no-no!."  Which is as far as my attempts to come up with a suitable 'Nuno' terrace chant got before Spurs sacked him. Which means, of course, that despite losing three nil, we actually won the 'El Sackico' against Manchester United as they are still saddled with Ole as their manager.  I hate to celebrate someone losing their job but, really, it was a mercy killing.  It was better to put Nuno (not to mention Spurs fans) out of their misery at this early stage - he was clearly floundering and his standard tactics of boring the opposition to the stage where they'd make a  mistake then try to snatch a late goal for a one nil victory, just weren't going to cut it. But is Antonio Conte the answer?  I have no idea, but I like the thought of him and Daniel Levy trying to co-exist - that inevitable clash of egos promises to, eventually, explode into a shit show of epic proportions.  But it could well be a fun ride until we get there. To get back to Nuno, his appointment and rapid dismissal once again raises questions in my mind as to the actual competence of footballing professionals.  He was apparently appointed after our 'genius' Managing Director of Football, Fabio Paratici, apparently convinced Chairman Daniel Levy that, in spite of the evidence of four years of his managing Wolves, Nuno was the manager capable of delivering on Levy's post-Mourinho promise of 'attacking football'.  I mean, anybody who had watched Match of the Day could have told them Nuno's specialty was boring, defensive football.  So, even I could have advised Levy better (and less expensively) than the 'expert' Paratici.

But what has most interested me about this sorry saga has been the way in which certain sections of the Spurs fandom - you know, the ones who don't actually seem to like their club of choice, let alone football as a whole - have used it as a bandwagon for their eternal complaints about the club's ownership.  'Enic out!'  Levy out!' they keep crying, laying the blame for decades of underachievement at the feet of the  owners and chairman.  Yet who do they want to replace them?  Who, nowadays, could possibly afford to buy a Premier league club, (particularly one with assets like the new stadium)?  The answer, of course, is only a multi-national corporation like Amazon or, more likely, some billionaire or cartel of billionaires.  Worse still, it could be a front organisation for one of those oil rich Arab states.  Does anybody honestly think that any of them would be any better owners than Enic?  The club would be merely a subsidiary to a corporation, or a plaything or a cash cow for the billionaires or oil states.  Then there's the moral aspect - the way in which these corporations or billionaires make their money or treat their workers are often highly dubious.  The oil states are even worse with their appalling human rights records.  Sure, Joe Lewis, the power behind Enic might well have obtained his fortune by means some find questionable, but I don't think that playing the markets or (allegedly) shorting the pound, ranks on a par with the oppression of workers rights, the denial of women's, not to mention LGBQT rights, let alone state sanctioned murder of dissident journalists.  Not even Chelsea's Roman Abramovitch registers on that scale.  So these 'Enic out' types should be careful of what they wish for - they clearly don't recall the pre-Enic ownership days, of Alan Sugar and, before him, the Scholar family, who consistently failed to spend on the club and were happy to let it languish in mid-table mediocrity. (Or even relegation, in the seventies).  Still, they'll soon have a new chant, I'm sure: 'Conte out!', no matter how well or badly he does, but just because, if he comes, he'll be an Enic signing.