Proud to Love Debauchery

'Proud to love animals' says the masthead of the Daily Star, which I think is a pretty bold move - coming out in favour of bestiality.  I don't know how long they've had that masthead - I've only just noticed it - maybe it is just for 'Pride Month', in which case I feel that they might well have misunderstood the whole concept of 'Pride'.  Someone needs to tell them that the 'B' in LGBQT doesn't stand for bestiality.  Still, a national newspaper coming out in support of legalising sexual relations with animals is only to be expected in today's 'anything goes' Britain, which is increasingly resembling the last days of the Roman Empire.  Who'd have thought that it would be under a right-wing Tory government that we'd see such rampant public sexual debauchery that a government whip would allegedly openly grope young men in clubs, MPs would watch porn on their phones in the Commons, wank off to it in their offices and that the then Foreign Secretary, now Prime Minister, could receive oral sex from his then mistress in his office, without the press deeming it worthy to report?  Quite extraordinary.  One does wonder what will be next - Rishi Sunak explaining quantitative easing while taking it 'up the chutney' from Nadine Dorries wearing a strap on during the next Tory party political broadcast?  Or maybe Attorney General Suella Braverman performing an obscene act with a donkey at PMQs?  One certainly hopes not.  

Perhaps it is all part of the government's strategy to distract us from all the fascistic policies it is enacting.  What better way to distract from police using the new restrictions on the right to peacefully protest to intimidate some bloke with a megaphone, than by conjuring up images of a woman on her knees, desperately trying to find the shriveled todger of a grossly overweight Old Etonian, then putting her lips around it?  I don't know about you, but just thinking about such a thing has me retching and puking so violently that I can't think about the suppression of anti-government protests, let alone those flights exporting asylum seekers to Rwanda.  But so what if Boris Johnson had fellatio in the Foreign Office or held a few law breaking parties at Number Ten during lockdown?  I mean, it's just Boris, isn't it?  That certainly seems to be the standard excuse given by the tame Tory press.  Mind you, it was the same thing that was said to excuse Jimmy Saville groping young girls when presenting Top of the Pops when any of them complained: 'Oh, it's just Jimmy'.  While we're on the subject of distraction tactics - how convenient was it that story about Prince Charles and the charity donations consisting of suitcases full of cash?  Now, I've no idea whether any wrong doing was involved here, but the story breaking just after Prince Charles had reportedly criticised the government's policy of shipping refugees to Rwanda is too convenient to be mere coincidence,  It was obviously broken when it was to try and discredit a prominent government critic.  Still, I suppose that, as distractions go, it is less objectionable that BJ's BJ.

Man's True Danger

The second issue of Man's True Danger's ten year run pretty much typifies the approach of this particular men's magazine: bound and semi-naked women being tortured, threatened with torture and/or rape.  'The Tortuous Ordeal of Two Girls at the... Orgiastic Gates of Hell!' is the story being illustrated - note that the unfortunate women aren't just at the 'Gates of Hell' but the 'Orgiastic Gates of Hell', just in case the casual newsstand browser didn't get the suggestion of sexual violence being inflicted on them from the cover painting alone.  All the usual elements are present in the contents, going by the story teaser titles on the cover - the main story has the war angle covered with those 'beastly Japs' in addition to the violence to women aspect, while 'The Bloodbath of the Bootleg Barons' would seem to account for the usual gangster violence angle.

'Blonde Queen of the Naked Zambus' suggests one of those fantasies about naked (or at least topless) nubile white girls lost in the jungle as children who grow up to be 'White Queens of the Savages'.  It was a popular male fantasy perpetuated into the seventies and beyond by a significant body of Italian exploitation films.  Also apparently exposed in this issue is 'The Truth About Part-Time Joy Girls' - very possibly another of those stories supposedly uncovering rings of suburban housewives turned amateur prostitutes.  The magazine was pretty consistent in terms of its content and presentation throughout its history.  Every so often, just for a change, it would be would be gangs of wild women tying the guys up and threatening them with all sorts of unspecified depravities.  But generally, bound and imperiled women were preferred.  For a while, in the late sixties, the magazine, which by then had dropped the Man's part of its title, experimented with photo covers, featuring young women threatening to fall out of their clothes.  But, for the last few issues it reverted to more traditional cover paintings, (sometimes recycled from earlier issues).

Devil's Express (1976)

An undeservedly obscure Blaxploitation/Kung Fu/horror crossover, Devil's Express (1976) - also known by the more mundane title of Gang War - stars the magnificently named, (not to mention coiffured) War Hawk Tanzania as a Harlem martial arts guru who finds himself involved not just in gang warfare, but also tangling with an honest-to-goodness demon into the bargain.  In spite of a low budget, Devil's Express is a surprisingly slick looking production, shot on location in New York, giving it plenty of local atmosphere and a realistic sheen.  The effects are cheap,as to be expected, but reasonably effective - even the demon, when it is finally revealed, isn't too badly realised, looking a lot better than many other low budget movie monsters of the era.  The film's main problem is its lack of narrative focus as it meanders between the sub-plots, with the gang war aspect taking centre stage for large stretches of the narrative, with the police investigation into a series of gory murders on the subway pushed into the background until the latter stages of the film and star War Hawk Tanzania virtually vanishing for long stretches of the film.  

This meandering is characteristic of the film as a whole.  We kick off in ancient China with a group of monks sealing something into a well before killing themselves, before jumping forward to present day, (well, 1976), New York, where Tanzania's Luke Curtis is taking local cop Chris (Larry Fleischmann) through a martial arts lesson, vehemently resisting the latter's attempts to recruit his assistance in dealing with local gang violence.  Next thing, we're back in China, where Luke and another of his pupils, Rodan (Wilfredo Roldan), is attending some kind of martial arts training retreat.  Before you know it, Rodan has stumbled on the well and stolen an amulet buried there - inevitably, this reawakens the demon sealed in there, who follows them back to New York by taking over the body of a passenger about to board a US-bound ship.  Back in the Big Apple, Rodan and his gang get involved in a drug deal gone bad with some local Chinese guys, which erupts into full fledged gang warfare between black and Chinese gangs.  With the amulet in his possession, Rodan suddenly finds himself possessed of a new, murderous, power that allows him to brutally and bloodily dispatch opponents.  The demon, meanwhile, has decamped to the New York subway, gorily shedding his human host, where he starts tearing apart unwary victims as he searches for his amulet.  The police investigation, led by Chris, runs into a brick wall and Rodan, inevitably, ends up in the subway, facing the demon.  Luke, having learned from a Chinese priest that the demon needs the amulet in order to regain its full powers - without it, the demon couldn't stand daylight, hence the lurking in the subway - and goes into the tunnels to avenge Rodan and get the amulet back.

Incredibly, for such a crowded plot, the film clocks in at only eighty three minutes - at times it feels as if there are several different films playing out simultaneously, until it finally all comes together in the last act. Yet, despite all of the competing plot elements, Devil's Express could never really be described as 'fast paced'.  While it never really feels slow, the film is punctuated by sequences that feel like asides from its main thrust - a scene in a bar that culminates in a brawl  unrelated to the plot, or Chris' new partner's various ruminations on the nature of whatever is killing people on the subway, or even Luke's hook up with his woman, for instance - but they do add lots of pleasing local colour and character to the film.  Watching the film, one can't help but be struck by a persistent feeling that its loose structure is the result of the makers being unable, or unwilling, to properly flesh out its one original aspect: the demon on the subway.  As it stands its a slim idea that often feels at odds with the greater realism of the gang war sub-plot, the police investigation and the whole on-the-streets feel.  It might well be that the only way the film could be financed was by emphasising these aspects of the film, (indeed, the alternative title of Gang War and the associated trailer that doesn't even feature the demon, suggests the distributors had no faith in the supernatural aspect as a selling point), or it could be that the supernatural element was added in almost as an afterthought in order to try and distinguish what would otherwise have been a routine plot from countless similar low-budget pictures.

Barry Rosen's direction , if not inspired, is efficient, making excellent use of the New York locations and keeps things moving in the right direction, (he later found success as a TV producer).  Performances are highly variable, with the supporting players generally faring best: Wilfredo Roldan, for instance, is superbly scuzzy as Rodan, (to the point that you are left wondering just why Luke chose him, of all his pupils, to take to China), while Stephen DeFazio is memorable as Chris' sidekick, forever weaving bizarre theories about the subway killings.  Star War Hawk Tanzania is, it has to be said, fairly wooden in many scenes, (which is, perhaps, why his screen time is limited, despite his top billing).  What he does have, however, is an undeniable screen presence, cutting an imposing figure in every scene in which he appears.  Damn it, he even gets away with Kung Fu fighting while wearing the most amazing pair of gold flares.  Interestingly, although having screen presence and obvious martial arts prowess, I can find only one other screen credit for Tanzania, for 1975's Force Five.  He seems to have vanished from the scene after Devil's Express, perhaps a victim of the fact that his only two films came late in both the Blaxploitation and Kung Fu cycles, restricting further opportunities.

The film does have some negatives when seen from a modern perspective, principally the stereotypical portrayals of the Chinese characters.  But this aside, Devil's Express is actually a lot of fun to watch.  It might well meander all over the place at times, but often wanders into some pleasingly surprising developments.  The climactic confrontation between Luke and the demon, for instance, isn't simply the physical Kung Fu fight one might expect, instead encompassing the demon's use of illusion to give it a spiritual aspect as well.  If nothing else, the film captures something of the ambience of seventies New York, presenting the viewer with a satisfying time capsule of the era.  An eccentric piece that never quite settles into being truly Blaxploitation, martial arts or horror and never really completely combining these elements in an entirely satisfactory manner, Devil's Express is nonetheless well worth seeking out.  Its attempts to effectively juxtapose its main elements is ultimately what makes it so fascinating and enjoyable.  As a final thought, I was left wondering whether War Hawk Tanzania had originally been called War Hawk Tanganiyka-Zanzibar...

Felicity (1978)

Another piece of disgusting filth I recently saw, more or less, in full on one of those dodgy streaming channels I watch, (they're experiencing server problems, so it jumped around and buffered a lot).  I really must stop habituating such cess pools of sin.  Actually, Felicity (1978) is pretty harmless by anyone's standards.  An Australian cash in on Emanuelle, it is shot in the same glossy style, looking as if someone has smeared vaseline all over the camera lens.  It also takes the same sort of 'arty' and 'tasteful' approach to its subject matter, with all the sex, (and there's a lot of it packed into ninety odd minutes), portrayed very decorously, with lots of silk sheets and discreet moaning.  I'd challenge anybody to find this aspect of the film remotely offensive.  What some modern viewers might find offensive, however, are the stereotypical portrayal of Asians as variously inscrutable and/or devious, not to mention all the usual stuff about the mysterious erotic practices of the East, known only to enigmatic, high class, prostitutes.  But hey, it was the late seventies and that sort of stuff was still current then.

The plot concerns the titular character - one of those late twenties schoolgirls so prevalent in seventies and eighties porn movies - experiencing her sexual awakening while staying with her father's friends in Hong Kong during the school holidays.  After being deflowered on the bonnet of an MGB by the regulation seventies moustachioed older cad, (it could have been worse, it could have been the back seat of a Volkswagen), she is introduced to the secrets of oriental sexual pleasures by the obligatory high class working girl.  After various sexual escapades (all very tastefully filmed), she eventually finds happiness with an Australian guy (payed by the original Philip Martin in Neighbours), who saves her from being mugged by one of those devious Asian guys.  As already noted, the film packs a lot into its running time, moving from the obligatory school changing room and shower scenes for the schoolgirl fetishes to the exotic eroticism of the Far East, taking in some voyeurism and underwear fetishism along the way, (there's even a flash back to a very mild lesbian encounter with her school friend).  It really does have something for everyone, but presented in the most inoffensive style possible.

The film was sufficiently successful that a sequel was mooted, but this never materialised.  As it stands, Felicity is actually a very enjoyable artefact of seventies erotica - a throwback to that time when cinematic porn became semi-respectable and started showing in mainstream cinemas to middle class audiences.  Indeed, the trailer for Felicity goes out of its way to emphasise the film's 'classiness', avoiding any nudity or actual sex scenes - it was clearly designed to play during showings of mainstream movies and appeal to a more 'upmarket' audience than the usual 'dirty raincoat brigade'.  It is helped immeasurably by an enormously likeable performance from Glory Annen in the title role, who is a genuinely engaging heroine.

Vanishing Content

It's been something of a holocaust on Roku this week, with no less than three multi-channel apps vanishing from the platform in a matter of days.  Unfortunately, they were amongst my most watched apps, so my viewing experience has been left very much the poorer.  The first to go was Airy TV.  Now, I'm not sure whether this gone from Roku entirely, or just the UK market.  Moreover, it was always marked as a 'Beta' version, so its disappearance might only be temporary.  Besides, I can still access the Android version on my tablet, plus.I've found that some of its more watchable channels are available via another Roku app.  It has to be said that the Roku version, while lacking the more intrusive ads of the Android version, (these are on top of the ads within the programming), did buffer a lot, often making viewing impossible.  The content it carried was mainly old TV shows and movies, (many, I suspect, without permission), but every so often it turned up something worthwhile.  The bigger blow to me has been the loss of the two F2V TV apps, which carried a huge variety of apparently legal, free-to-air streams, ranging from US nostalgia channels to specialist movie channels like Shout Cult, Kino Cult and Scream.  Now, I say 'apparently' because I'd always wondered if the app's creator had gotten specific permission from the stream owners to deliver them via his app, or whether he was simply relying on the fact that they were non-encrypted, non-subscription and ad supported.  Inevitably, it turned out to be the latter.

The problem came from a group of US channels whose streams the app started carrying, claiming that it had an exclusive deal to do so, which turned out not to be the case, with the owners objecting, resulting in their withdrawal.  Which would have been OK - a lot of their programming was available elsewhere - but then a 'journalist', (actually a blogger with pretensions and contacts), got wind of this development and saw an opportunity for a story.  After being bombarded with questions from said blogger, the app owner finally admitted that he didn't have specific permission to re-broadcast the streams, but simply relied on the fact that they were free-to-air anyway.  His apps were consequently shut down.  Leaving the blogger smug and those of us who had been happily using the apps missing a chunk of our daily viewing enjoyment.  I must admit that this whole business raises some tricky issues - I certainly wouldn't endorse copyright infringement as such, but the fact that the streams were free-to-air means that their originators at least weren't losing any revenue.  Probably the bigger issue is that of international rights - several of these streams weren't usually available in the UK as the material they carried was licensed to someone else for UK distribution.  Which means that, arguably, someone was losing potential revenues.  

Not that that stopped me from watching these streams - I managed to catch up with quite a few otherwise hard to see movies on the Cult channels, for instance.  Despite my lingering reservations about the rights issues, I comforted myself with the thought that plenty of people around the world are using VPNs to watch streams and services not licensed for their geographical locations.  Which is what I keep thinking is what I should do and access things like Shout Cult and Kino Cult directly via their US Roku apps, although Roku boxes aren't quite as straightforward as other streaming devices to bring within a VPN.  There are still a few other of these aggregator apps on Roku and available in the UK, which provide access to otherwise unavailable channels and I'm now worried that someone might start targeting them in the wake of the cancellation of F2V TV.  Everyday I anxiously check my Roku home page to see if any of the other apps I have installed have vanished, (quite a few have gone this year, albeit mainly low quality ones).  Worrying times for us cheapskate seekers of obscure cinema.

An addendum: it does indeed seem as if the Airy TV app has only been removed from Roku's UK Channel Store.  A quick check via a VPN-enabled browser revealed that it is still available in the US Channel Store.  Which suggests that there might be rights issues over some of its content.  (Although, as noted, the Android version is still available in the UK, albeit with some non-loading content).

Cannibal Terror (1981)

The cannibal movie has always been primarily an Italian phenomena.  Indeed, it is arguably the only genre of Italian exploitation that doesn't appear to be directly derivative of English language cinematic successes.  Instead, it seemingly takes its inspiration from Italy's own Mondo genre, with its frequent, documentary-style depictions of supposedly real 'primitive' tribal rituals, usually involving animal and human sacrifice, even cannibalism.  Cannibal Terror (1981), however, is a Franco-Spanish production, a last gasp attempt to wring some more mileage from what was, by then, a pretty much played out genre.  An exploitation movie out to exploit a near defunct exploitation genre, if you will.  Often thought to be a pseudonymous effort by Jesus Franco - it shares some cast, settings and even footage with Franco's contemporaneous Mondo Cannibale (1980), not to mention impoverished and shoddy production values - it is actually the work of French director Alain Deruelle, (although some sources credit two additional, uncredited, directors.  Franco, though, apparently made at least some uncredited contributions to the script.  It has to be said that Cannibal Terror does credit to nobody involved in its production, being poorly made, poorly scripted and poorly acted.  It adds nothing new to the genre nor does it use any of the existing tropes with any flair or originality.

The Italian cannibal film generally fell into two main camps - earlier films, like Deep River Savages (1972), tend to focus on western protagonists captured by primitive cannibal tribes and put through horrendous physical ordeals before being accepted, eaten or escaping.  Later films, mainly taking their cue from Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980), tend to focus on juxtaposing the supposedly 'civilised' behaviour of westerners with the 'savage' behaviour of the natives they encounter in remote locations.  (There are plenty of exceptions to these two formats, though, such as Antonio Margheriti's Cannibal Apocalypse (1980), which relocates its action to an urban setting, with 'civilised' westerners reverting to cannibalism and being hunted down through a concrete jungle).  Cannibal Terror seems to be trying to emulate the second format, with its trio of criminals trying to hide out in the jungle being the ones who behave abominably and getting their just desserts at the hands of the local cannibals. Unfortunately, this scenario plays out with no sincerity or subtlety whatsoever, lacking the impact of Lenzi's similarly themed Cannibal Ferox (1981), where we learn that the natives had previously been peaceable, until encountering unscrupulous western criminals who had originally used the various brutal tortures on them.  By making its cannibals, from the outset, a bunch of rampaging, flesh hungry, savages, Cannibal Terror is unable to explore such ironies, instead simply pitting one set of brutal bastards against another.

Perhaps the film's biggest problem is its complete lack of pace - it crawls past, feeling far longer than its ninety three minutes.  It takes an age for the cannibal action to actually start, with the first part of the film involving a gang of small time crooks, two guys and a girl, kidnapping the small daughter of a wealthy couple.  Being inept, they quickly realise that they have to find somewhere to lie low until they can get any ransom, so decamp to the house of a 'friend of a friend' who, for reasons unexplained, lives on the edge of a cannibal infested jungle.  To get there they have to cross a land border.  Which brings us to one of the film's fundamental problems - we have no idea where it is meant to be taking place.  While it is clearly filmed in Spain, within the film's scenario, the coastal city where the action starts is meant to be close to a border with another country with dense jungles and cannibals.  Are we meant to assume that it is taking place somewhere in South America (like most cannibal films), or that Portugal is has a cannibalism problem?  The lack of any sense of place undermines any pretensions of realism the film might have had.  These are further undermined by the depiction of the 'jungle', which looks more like the shrubbery of a local park and the casting of the cannibals.  These latter look like a bunch of guys recruited from a local supermarket car park - they all appear Caucasian , out of condition and sport some very late seventies/early eighties hair cuts.  Moreover, their village is so remote that you can glimpse cars driving along a nearby road between the trees.

On top of all this, the film's plot makes next to no sense- not only do people behave in the most illogical way possible, (like getting out of a car in 'cannibal country' having just told other characters not to do this very thing), simply so as to give us another 'cannibal kill', but there seems to be a thriving community happily living on the edge of what's supposed to be the most dangerous jungle in wherever it is meant to be set.  Why would anyone live there, other than to provide a plot scenario?  Characterisation is next to non-existent - the criminals are simply nasty, the law inefficient and the kidnapped girl's parents rich and neglectful while the cannibals exist solely to present an existential threat to everyone else.  In fact, the cannibals could have been just about any ubiquitous movie monster - zombies, apemen created by a mad scientist, crazy cultists - they're just there to chase people around and gorily murder them.  To this end, the film does provide the usual quota of bloody dismemberments - lots of offal from the local butcher's shop gets pulled out of victims' abdomens and the odd rubber breast has chunks bitten out of it.  But it all feels as if it has been gratuitously grafted into the film, so incidental to the actual plot are the cannibals.

The film does have some curious aspects.  There are, for instance, a lot of older, much older in fact, guys married to attractive young women.  Both the kidnapped girl's father and the 'fried of a friend' who lives by the jungle sport what seem to be 'trophy wives'.  (It is the rape of the 'friend of a friend's' wife by one of the criminals which provides the catalyst for them to go on the run in the jungle, pursued by the cuckolded husband).  Also, the posse that the father eventually puts together to follow the criminals into the jungle appears distinctly geriatric, to the point that I started to get worried they might run out of breath before they even found their quarry.  Luckily, the sexually assaulted wife arrives with her own, much younger, posse of gun-toting guys in the nick of time.  Of course, it turns out that those cannibals aren't so bad after all - they might have eaten the criminals, but they apparently don't eat kids, returning the little girl to her parents.  Which is the closest Cannibal Terror gets to trying to present some kind of moral judgement - they only eat people who deserve it, (except those innocent ones eaten earlier in the movie, of course).  The criminals are bastards purely for gain, whereas the cannibals do it in pursuit of a meal.  The film ends with the criminals' pursuers making some sort of peace with the cannibals, (despite having mown down several of their number only minutes earlier).  A shoddy and ramshackle end to a shoddy and ramshackle film.

Which isn't to say that Cannibal Terror doesn't have some incidental pleasures - spotting the various bit players and extras who double up, playing both cannibals and border guards, for instance.  Indeed, just its general ineptitude provides a fair amount of viewing pleasure, but in the end it becomes something of an endurance test.  The whole kidnapping plot goes on far too long and when the action finally moves to the jungle, all the running around the jungle quickly becomes tiresome.  What Cannibal Terror illustrates is how quickly a genre can deteriorate - one minute it is producing interesting and inventive entries like Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox, the next it is being flooded with cheap knock offs like Mondo Cannibale and Cannibal Terror.  In truth, it is rather apt that the one original Italian exploitation genre of the seventies should so quickly find itself ripped off by cheap continental imitators. 

Travelling in Style

Back, briefly, to model railway matters. I was at the Alresford Toy Train Festival over the weekend - it was the first one since 2019. having not been held for two years due to Covid.  As ever, one of my main motivations for going along, apart from all the fascinating layouts, was for the opportunity to peruse the stock of various traders.  You can generally buy decent second hand stuff at prices much lower than you can on eBay at exhibitions and toy fairs. Particularly if, like me, you aren't a collector and don't care if they aren't boxed or in perfect condition.  While, on the day, I was tempted by a number of locomotives, including a Triang Hornby L1, a Hornby M7 and a Trix Standard Class 5, (three rail, but Trix three rail isn't that difficult to convert to two rail), the fact was that I wasn't really in the market for another locomotive this year.  Instead, I was on the hunt for spares/repairs items and rolling stock.  In the end, my purchases were modest, confined, in fact, to a single coach:

This a Hornby Pullman Brake Parlour Third, something I've been trying to get for a reasonable price for some time - which this certainly was.  It supplements the three Hornby Pullman Parlour First coaches I bought in a bargain deal the last time I was at the Festival, in 2019.  These four Pullmans will replace the four older Triang Hornby Pullmans I already own, to form a model equivalent to the 'Bournemouth Belle'.  The older Pullmans weren't made to scale length, (in common with many model railway coaches of the late fifties and early sixties, they were shortened so as to get them around the tight curves of the track of the era), as can be seen when one of the brakes is compared to the new brake:

Being a Pullman Third Class Parlour, the new coach has a number rather than a name: Car Number 65.  Fortuitously, the real Car Number 65 made regular appearances as part of the 'Bournemouth Belle' during the sixties.  Which shouldn't be surprising really, as it was a 1928 pattern Pullman, a design which formed the backbone of the train during this period, (with some having been transferred from the Eastern Region when displaced by new Pullman coaches in the early sixties).  Here it is coupled to the other three Pullmans:

Like Car Number 65, the First Class Parlours are modelled on the 1928 pattern of Pullman car.  You might be able to discern the fact that the front two Parlour Firsts sport a slightly darker shade of cream on their upper panels to the other Parlour first and the Brake Third.  This is down to changes in Hornby's manufacturing processes and revised paint matching.  Hornby first introduced this, scale length, version of the Parlour First in 1975, with the brake following in 1981.  The earlier versions used the darker cream.  Indeed, an examination of the two coaches with this shade confirms that they also still use rivets to secure the bogies to the chassis, with the boxes they came in indicating that they were eighties, perhaps early nineties issues, manufactured in the UK, at Margate. The other Parlour First has the later clip in type bogies, but is still made in the UK, indicating that it is probably from the early 2000s re-issue of these coaches.  The Brake shares the clip-in bogies and lighter cream panelling of the third Parlour First, but is marked as being made in China, indicating that it is a post-2011 item, dating from when these Pullmans were re-issued as part of the 'Railroad' range.

The Parlour Firsts came with a selection of name transfers, (which I still haven't applied), three of which I know are appropriate for the sixties 'Bournemouth Belle': 'Lucille'. 'Sheila' and 'Ursula'.  Another available name, 'Agatha', I'm not so sure of, although I do know that it sometimes ran as part of the Western Region's 'South Wales Pullman' in the sixties and that there was a fair amount of interchange of coaches between the two services.  In point of fact, Hornby based this version of the Pullman Parlour First on the real 'Lucille', which still exists in preservation.  (In fact, it was originally the only name available for the model).  Anyway, here's another look at the front part of my version of the 'Bournemouth Belle':

As was typical for the prototype train in the sixties, a non-Pullman full passenger brake is coupled up at the London end, (in this case a BR Mk1 BG) - at some points toward the end of the 'Bournemouth Belle's' existence in the mid to late sixties, it ran without any Pullman Brake Coaches, instead sporting a full brake at either end.  Heading up the train is my Wrenn Rebuilt Merchant Navy 'Clan Line', (the real locomotive having been a regular performer on this duty).  Obviously, the real 'Bournemouth Belle' was considerably longer and included Parlour Thirds and both First and Third Class Parlour Kitchen cars, even once I've expanded it, realistically five to six coaches is the maximum passenger train length my layout can accommodate. Hornby do produce versions of all these cars and, if I can find a reasonably priced example, I might consider adding a Third Parlour Kitchen.  But, in the meantime, my current formation gives a reasonable impression of the real thing, which is really about the best you can hope for on a spare room based layout.

While my old, under length, Pullmans might have been displaced from the 'Bournemouth Belle', it won't be the end for them.  Instead, they'll be used on boat train duty - some boat trains were all Pullman, while others included one or two Pullmans amongst standard coaching stock.

Cold Shouldering Cold Callers

Clearly, I'm going to have to put a notice up on my front door saying something along the lines of 'No Charity Cold Callers'.  I had another one today, ambushing me on my doorstep and attempting to inveigle me into making some kind of financial commitment to their cause.  It's always the same: the spiel about those poor orphan kittens from Romania, or whatever, whose lives would be improved if you could just pledge a modest two hundred quid a week to their charity, obviously designed to tug on your heartstrings and shame you into contributing as, apparently, all your neighbours have already signed up.  I mean, you wouldn't want to be that mean bastard who said no to such a deserving cause, would you?  Well, I have no qualms about saying no - from a purely practical perspective I simply can't afford to support all of these causes.  (After all, I'm not actually working these days - I'm coasting along, courtesy of my disgustingly healthy finances, courtesy of years of being a skinflint, until a couple of work pensions kick in, or I'm offered some kind of employment I like the look of).  More than that, though, I just don't like he emotional manipulation, let alone all that fake friendliness as they try to establish a 'connection' with you.  (I make the latter as difficult as possible with a series of monosyllabic negative answers to such enquiries as to whether I have children, a wife, a dog or whatever.  I'd do this even if I did have any of those things - it denies them an opening).  I try not to be outright rude - I spent far too many years knocking on doors trying to enforce civil orders, receiving a fair amount of abuse, hostility and threats.  I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Still, I guess it was my fault for answering the door - I really should know by now that no legitimate callers ever knock on the door at half past three in the afternoon.  Most people are at work or getting the kids from school at that time.  I suppose it is one of the perils of being a man of leisure - I'm often at home during the day to fall prey to the cold callers.  But it comes to something when a man can't lounge on his sofa, half watching William Shatner making clear that he thinks all the paranormal explanations in Weird or What are utter bollocks and the people advocating them 'nut jobs' (his words, not mine), while idly contemplating going out and putting some over priced diesel in his car, without having someone try to shame him into giving to charity.  I suppose that it could have been worse, it could have been one of those fast food couriers who has got the wrong address.  This happens frequently to me.  Despite telling them that not only haven't I ordered anything, but I never use the likes of Deliveroo, I inevitably have to waste time arguing with them as they insist that they have the correct address.  Often the problem lies with the fact that there is a similarly named road a few streets away and the address has been taken down wrongly.  Often, the problem is that there are several properties divided into flats on my street and the delivery is actually for 'Flat 1' of one of these.  Because I live at number 1 on my road, they come here, despite the fact that this is clearly a terraced house, not a flat.  Actually, even worse than those guys are the parcel delivery guys trying to deliver stuff to people who have never lived at this address (again, somebody has taken it down incorrectly).  I've known some of them to get quite aggressive about my refusal to take stuff I've not ordered.  Even worse is when they've left it with one of the neighbours and I refuse to accept the delivery.  I'd like to say that these sorts of things enliven my day, except that they don't.  It's got to the stage that I'm seriously contemplating not answering the door at all if not expecting someone.  That'll show them...

Getting 'Real'

Real was a relatively long-running men's magazine, first appearing in 1952 and finally folding in 1967. Despite going through several changes of ownership, Real always seemed to have aspirations of sophistication - its story titles never seemed to be quite as wild or sex obsessed as those of its main competitors and its cover art usually relatively restrained.  Of course, as its publishers changed, so the magazine varied in appearance.  This, the February 1960 issue, comes from early in the era of its second owner, Excellent Publications, Inc, who took over, after a hiatus of several months, from Literary Enterprises, Inc.  Under this ownership, the magazine was at its most elegant, featuring some striking covers that tended to allow the image to speak for itself, with the strap lines and story teaser titles muted.  Clearly, this cover painting is illustrating 'Most Incredible Frogman Attack of WWII', with the underwater war theme continued in the second string title 'The Last Three Seconds!'.  Even the obligatory sex-related title - 'The Fraulein Who Invented Sex' hints at a war theme and is remarkably restrained for the genre.

How effective this style of cover was in selling magazines is questionable - it is notable that, as Excellent's ownership continued, the covers gradually became more garish, more like standard men's pulp covers, the text became larger and bolder, not to mention less subtle.  Real went through two more owners before its demise, during which time it is clear that the magazine was seeking a new angle to appeal to readers.  Photo covers, for instance, were experimented with and, toward the end of its life, the magazine had several flirtations with UFOs, devoting several covers to the subject, no doubt in the hope of attracting a new segment of readership from the weird/occult/flying saucer genre of 'true' story magazines.  The last couple of issues moved to a more standard 'girly mag' format, with photo covers featuring attractive (but clothed) women, (Racquel Welch in the case of the final issue) and more obviously sex and titillation oriented story teasers.  The fact that the magazine folded after these issues implies that this approach still didn't attract significant numbers of readers, so the owners pulled the plug.  A somewhat muted end for a men's pulp that once boasted some of the most elegant and distinctive covers in the genre.

The Mad Monster (1942)

Producer's Releasing Corporation (PRC) was a poverty row studio even cheaper than Monogram, its films shot on schedules of less than a week on recycled sets.  In contrast to Monogram, it produced surprisingly few horror films, (preferring to concentrate on B-westerns and crime dramas), with several of those it did make seemingly patterned after its first and most celebrated title in this genre, The Devil Bat (1940).  This is certainly the case with The Mad Monster (1942), which substituted George Zucco for Bela Lugosi as the mad scientist seeking revenge on former colleagues.  Instead of employing giant vampire bats that could home in on the scent of the special shaving lotion that Lugosi gave his victims, Zucco injects his gardener, (played by future Frankenstein's monster Glenn Strange), with his wolf blood serum, turning him into a faux werewolf that dispatches Zucco's enemies.  For Zucco is another of those scientists turned mad by the ridicule heaped upon his theories, (namely that injecting people with wolf's blood will give them wolf-like attributes), by his colleagues.  So they have to die.  You might be wondering why anyone would want to give people wolf-like attributes, but while Zucco is clearly certifiable, his motives are entirely pure: he's simply trying to aid the war effort by creating an army of wolf-like super soldiers.

Shot in five days, The Mad Monster creaks along, showing its low budget and threadbare production values at every turn.  Director Sam Newfield, (who directed a large proportion of PRC's output), does his best to disguise the cheap sets by wreathing the exteriors in fog and the interiors in shadow.  What it does have is an enjoyable central performance from Zucco.  A prolific character actor in horror films, Zucco was a far subtler performer than Lugosi - his character's is quietly mad, his rantings sounding like reasonable arguments if only they weren't so barmy.  The film is an entertaining enough seventy minutes or so, springing absolutely no surprises, but moving at a reasonable pace so as not to outstay its welcome.  That said, back in 1945, when it was finally submitted for a UK release, (horror films having been banned in Britain during the war), it found itself being banned by the BBFC.  It finally secured a UK release in 1951, but even then it had be accompanied by a disclaimer explaining that blood transfusions wouldn't turn you into a wolf man.  (Well, obviously - unless it was wolf blood you were transfused with).  Clearly, the BBFC saw something deeply disturbing in what, to everyone else, is simply a quietly barmy cheap programmer.

Movie Psychedelia Out of Time

I was back in the sixties again over the weekend.  Most specifically, that bit near the end of the decade when, in the wake of the Beatles releasing 'Sgt Pepper', everything went weird and psychedelic and Hollywood started green lighting films that most certainly wouldn't have been made at any other time.  Actually, I say the sixties, but the film that set off this train of thought, Roger Corman's Gasss, or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970), arrived just too late for the party, finally getting a full release in 1971.  Knowing this makes its channeling of the essence of sixties counter culture, from its animated titles to its meandering road trip format to its 'anything goes' freaked out finale, seem even more jarring than such things normally do when viewed at a distance of half a century or so.  Because it is so psychedelic sixties that it feels as if it has come from another reality, let alone a different decade.  Corman throws in every late sixties stereotype imaginable - hippies, peaceniks, bikers, youth culture, free love, the breakdown of capitalist society, (he even adds in some of his own stereotypes: Edgar Allan Poe roars around on a motorbike, raven on his shoulder and Lenore on the pillion, commenting on the action) - making the film not just disjointed, but also very hit and miss.  The basic idea of an escape of gas from a military base, which results in everyone over twenty five dying, seems a promising start for a satire on youth culture, but the film never pursues this in a coherent plot, (unlike the thematically similar Wild in the Streets (1968)), instead opting for an episodic structure centered on a road trip.  The episodes focus on the main characters' encounters with the various new social groups that have sprung up in the aftermath of the gas leak.  While some of these, like the bikers-turned-golf-club episode, more or less succeed in their satire, others, particularly the college football team-turned-brigands episode, quickly become tiresome. 

It has to be said that, on a technical level, Gasss looks great for a low budget movie, with superb photography and inventive use of locations.  Even the performances from a largely unfamiliar cast, (although it does feature an early performance from Ben Vereen), aren't distractingly flat, as is often te case in such situations.  But it just doesn't hold together either as film, satire or political statement, (as most films of this type and era invariably were).  According to Corman, the problem lay with the cuts made to the film by distributors AIP, (it was to be his last collaboration with the company), which robbed the film of coherence.  This, of course, was denied by AIP, which pointed out that the editors they used had been approved by Corman and had worked with him in the past, but had trouble putting the footage together in any coherent way.  Whatever the case, the film's sub ninety minute running time certainly suggests that cuts were made.  Corman's complaints mainly focused on the way in which the film's climax had been edited, with his original final shot, which, he claimed, would have given the film a better sense of conclusion, cut completely.  To be fair, the film as released does feel as if it simply runs out of ideas, culminating with a weird sequence in which just about everyone the main characters have met in the course of the movie climbing out of a hole in the ground, before a truck drives up and various dead counter culture icons - including Martin Luther King, JFK and Che - climb out.  Actually, it isn't so much that these icons emerge, but rather people wearing (not very good) papier mache heads in their likeness.  Apparently it is some kind of divine intervention by God Himself (his voice is heard here and at previous points in the film).

As I say, all typically sixties and, one can't help but feel, if Gasss had actually been released in the sixties, it might have been a box office success, with its freewheeling plot and surreal incident.  Indeed, I couldn't help but compare it to another quintessentially sixties film, Roger Marquand's Candy (1968), which had enjoyed some success on its release, (helped, no doubt, by being based on the best selling novel of the same name).   By sheer coincidence, I caught Candy on the Shout Cult streaming service the day after watching Gasss and it struck me how similar the films were.  It isn't just that both are structured as picaresque movies, with their main protagonists on a journey through a psychedelic landscape they struggle to understand, encountering various eccentric characters along the way.  The climaxes of both films bear a striking resemblance to each other as well, with Candy ending with the titular heroine climbing out of a hole and encountering all of the characters she has previously interacted with throughout the film.  This might also be taken as divine intervention, as her emergence from the hole was the result of the collapse of an underground temple, (where she has just unwittingly had an implied sexual encounter with her own father).  Not that I think that Gasss was a conscious imitation or parody of Candy, just that both films were typical of that era, embodying the same ideas and sensibilities so, naturally, tended toward similar formats.  It is just that one had the good fortune to actually be released while the sixties were still swinging, while the other missed the mark and found itself beached and stranded in a very different era, unsympathetic to its ideas.

Still Not a Web Influencer

Before getting back to the usual stuff we do here, another quick delve into the mysteries of the internet.  So, yesterday it was Google I was moaning about, today it is Facebook.  Just lately I've had Facebook threatening to lock me out my account unless I enable something called Facebook Protect, which would allegedly make my account more secure.  (I'm always suspicious if such security 'innovations' - they are usually nothing more than data harvesting exercises on the part of online service providers so that they can spam and spy on you even more).  My suspicions were immediately aroused by the fact that they contrived to make their email appear as much like a phishing scam email as they possibly could.  Further doubts were raised by their raison d'etre for wanting me to switch on Protect as they had identified my accounts as being particularly at risk.  'Accounts like yours' were their actual words.  Which didn't enlighten me at all. I mean, accounts like what?  Those belonging to people whose use of the platform is minimal and purely functional?  Some further investigation established not only that the email was genuine, but that Protect id designed to, well, protect accounts 'that have the potential to reach and influence wider audiences', like those of journalists and media organisations.

Now, I'm neither of those things.  I'm only on Facebook to enable my membership of a couple of Groups connected to my online activities, (Humorfeed for the satire site and Onsug for the podcasts) and to maintain The Sleaze's Facebook page.  The number of Facebook friends I have are minimal and connected to those groups.  I can only assume that this Protect nonsense is because Facebook somehow thinks that The Sleaze is some kind of influential online news source.  I mean, really?  Have they seen my traffic levels lately?  Even its Facebook page doesn't get many views (and generates no traffic - people simply seem to read the stories on the page and not click through to the site itself).  We're back to that strange notion that I'm some kind of 'web influencer' simply because I run a web site, (I still get unsolicited emails from those marketing firms desperate for business as Google squeezes organic traffic ever more tightly, offering to hook me, as a 'web influencer' up with advertisers).  Absolute bollocks, obviously.  I mean, if only I did have the ability to reach and influence large audiences then, damn it, I'd have advertising all over The Sleaze and be employing somebody else to run it for me while I raked in the revenues!  I'd probably also have a blue tick after my name on Twitter and be one of those bores there who have huge followings hanging on my every tedious, not very witty and unoriginal Tweet.  But, thankfully, that isn't the case.  Quite obviously so.  Which leaves me still mystified as to what Facebook is trying to do with this Protect nonsense with regard to my account.

Back to Square One...

So, here we are, back to square one again.  The latest Google update seems to have completely wiped out any remaining organic traffic I was getting from them, both at The Sleaze and here, even though this is a Blogger blog and therefore a Google property. Not that I'm alone in this situation. Not remotely.  A huge number of sites have seen their traffic vanish over the past couple of weeks of this update.  This time, it is particularly frustrating, as over the past couple of days, traffic was building back up - nothing spectacular, but definitely on an upward trajectory.  Then, today: literally nothing.  The fact is that before this latest update, traffic levels were back on the up - which is possibly why I've been hit so badly by the update: from experience, I know that no good fortune online goes unpunished by Google, who seem to feel that they should be the sole arbiters of online popularity.  The thing is that other search engines, (yes, there are search engines other than Google out there), seem to love my sites.  Duck Duck Go, Bing, even Yahoo drive a fair amount of traffic my way.  The trouble is that so few people use them for searches compared to Google - which dominates search and seems determined to abuse its near monopoly.  All of which makes the situation all the more frustrating: clearly there is an audience out there for what I do, but thanks to Google's domination, they just can't find it via searches on the web's dominant search engine.  

All of which leaves me contemplating, once more, as to where do we go from here?  Is there any point in continuing to create content that Google makes sure nobody can see?  Of course, I'm not in the position of relying upon my online witterings for income, unlike many who have been hit time and again by Google's traffic-killing updates.  My sites are there mainly to satisfy my creative urges.  Not that that makes this situation any less tolerable - creative output without access to an audience feels like banging your head against a brick wall.  There is part of me that wants to see this as an opportunity - I've been thinking about winding down The Sleaze for some time now, there have been times of late when creating content for it feels a chore.  But, on the other hand, it has been online for twenty two years now and is one of the last survivors of that turn of the millennium wave of satire sites, when us amateurs and small fry still dominated the web and traffic was freely available.  I still have a sentimental attachment to the old site, although there will have to come a point where I'll have to decide if it is worthwhile me still paying hosting fees to keep it up when nobody is visiting it thanks to Google.  This blog, on the other hand, costs me nothing to maintain, so I have no problems in keeping this going for the foreseeable future.  There's always the chance, of course, that traffic could pick up again, either from Google or other sources.  It has happened before between Google updates, or maybe people will start realising just how poor Google's search results are, in terms of actually turning up relevant sites, and instead start turning to other, better, search engines.  Perhaps there will be a new entrant to online search, that delivers better results.  Who knows?  I certainly don't, which is why I'll be waiting a little longer before making any hard and fast decisions about my sites.

Apologies for serving up another of these introspective posts, (but hey, it's surely better than the political rants), but I sometimes feel the need to work through issues like this by putting them down on paper, so to speak.  Not to worry, though, I've recently been indulging in a fair amount of obscure pop culture stuff from some new sources so, hopefully, normal service will soon be resumed.

More British Seventies Sleaze

We live in an age where the strangest things, in TV terms, seem to happen.  One of the streaming channels I get via my Roku box, for instance, just showed a double bill of Alison Elliot movies, Pete Walker's Home Before Midnight (1979) and the notorious proto-slasher Killer's Moon (1978), directed by Alan Birkinshaw.  At least, I assume it was a double bill of her movies as she was the only common cast member between the two as far as I could see. Then again, it could have been a double bill of seventies low budget exploitation movies, or even a double bill of British movies highlighting a more than slightly disturbing attitude to rape, (which lingers in the UK to this day).  Or perhaps it was just coincidence that she was in both films.  To get the obvious out of the way, if you aren't familiar with Alison Elliot, (and there's no reason you should be), she was one of those young British actresses of the seventies and eighties who gained a certain cult fame from appearing in a few low budget sexploitation titles before seemingly vanishing.  Elliot is interesting because, apart from her starring roles in the two aforementioned titles in her late teens, she subsequently had a number of prominent roles on TV before falling off the radar in the mid-eighties.  My best guess would be that she took a career break to start a family and never got back into the business, (or simply tired of it all and decided to do something more sensible than acting for a living).  

Home Before Midnight represented something of a return to his sexploitation roots for Pete Walker, after his long series of horror films.  It tries to have its cake and eat it by presenting itself as a serious exploration of the issues and moral questions surrounding statutory rape and underage sex, while also providing the viewer with plenty of sex and nudity.  The plot involves a popular and successful song writer who picks up a girl in a rainstorm with the best of intentions, but proceeds to have a sexual relationship with her, before finding out that she's fourteen.  Despite this, he continues with the relationship until it is uncovered and finds himself facing rape charges.  Much is then made of the fact that, initially, he thought she was older, (which he might be forgiven for as Alison Elliot was eighteen or nineteen when she played the role of the girl and looked it), which, it is implied makes it OK.  The problem with the film is that, as far as I'm aware, unlike some US States, the UK doesn't have an offence of statutory rape.  As it was always clear that the girl consented to sex , the issue would be whether that consent was legal as she was underage, meaning that the main charge he would be facing would be sex with a minor, (of which he is eventually convicted).  While bringing in the rape charge places the main character in greater jeopardy, for the sake of drama, it is simply unrealistic.  Regardless, the film still seems to think that he has been unfairly treated for being sent down and having his life ruined for having sex with a schoolgirl.

These days, of course, as someone prominent in the entertainment industry, he'd probably find himself facing a major investigation and accused of 'grooming' and peadophilia.  With good cause.  Despite the underlying attitudes of the film, it actually isn't normal for adult males to want to have sex with children, even if they do look older and to continue to do so when you've established that they are underage is indefensible.  (Sorry to sound so moralistic, but as somebody trained as a teacher, this is an issue I've had to consider very carefully.  I know that teenaged girls under sixteen can sometimes look much older, but the onus is still on any adult encountering them to establish their true age before getting intimate with them).  Another problematic aspect of the film is that, although they are played by young adult actresses, it presents Elliot and her friend (played by ill-fated former page three girl Debbie Linden), as fourteen year olds, making their multiple full frontal nude scenes uncomfortable, to say the least.  Of course, that's partly the point - to make the viewer complicit with the underlying theme of the sexualisation of underage girls by contemporary society, but it also feels cynical and exploitative - the proverbial having its cake and eating it I referred to earlier.  Whatever one might think of its implicit attitudes to rape and underage sex, like all Pete Walker films, Home Before Midnight is actually very well made, with the director eliciting good performances from his cast and making excellent use of his limited resources, with lots of well shot location work. Walker might have been an exploitation director, but he was also a professional film-maker and it always shows.

The Walker film at least accepts that rape and underage sex are considered serious issues by both the law and society, which is more than can be said for Killer's Moon.  The film, which features a number of schoolgirls being raped by a gang of maniacs at least shows it as a horrific trauma for the victim, but then undermines with a bizarre piece of dialogue which seemingly dismisses rape as being relatively trivial.  "Look, you were only raped, as long as you don't tell anyone about it you'll be alright. You pretend it never happened, I pretend I never saw it and if we ever get out of this alive, well, maybe we'll both live to be wives and mothers", a girl tells her friend who has been raped. Perhaps most astoundingly, novelist Fay Weldon, half-sister of the director, later claimed to have rewritten the dialogue for the film, (uncredited), so presumably must take responsibility for this line.  Even more incredibly, she professed being proud of her work on the script, which she thought was too good for the film!  To be absolutely fair, that dialogue and the whole rape business are only part of the problems afflicting Killer's Moon.

A lot of people have written reams about Killer's Moon, so I'll try to brief, but its fundamental problem is its lack of style and purpose.  A brief synopsis of the scenario - a quartet of psychos escape from a secure psychiatric cottage hospital (!), who, as a result of drug therapy believe they are in a dream where their actions have no consequences, at the same time that a coach carrying a group of schoolgirl choristers has broken down nearby, a night of terror ensues - makes it sound as if it was conceived as some sort of parody.  Except that it isn't - it is apparently intended as a serious shocker.  But even there it fails - the killings are decidedly short on blood and gore and the suspense non-existent.  The dialogue is, for the most part, repetitious, with the whole 'We're in a dream' business seemingly repeated in every other line.  The acting is highly variable and the plot consists of far too much running around in either the woods with murky day-for-night shooting, or the hotel where the girls have taken refuge.  Add some animal cruelty, (a dog has its leg chopped off - off-screen - and a cat has its tail cut off), to the multiple schoolgirl rapes and the somewhat offensive depictions of mental health and you have what critic Matthew Sweet once referred to as the most tasteless movie in British cinema history.  (To be fair, I 'm sure I've seen worse and, personally, I found the film less offensive than simply inept).  The whole thing is flatly directed and drags badly in the middle.  Still, the Lake District locations look good.  Frustratingly, like a lot of low budget movies, you can't help but feel that Killer's Moon had the germ of a decent idea in the experimental drug therapy angle, but threw it away as a plot device rather than exploring it.  Ultimately, it falls into that category of a bad movie that isn't even bad enough to be really funny.  Sure, it is full of ludicrous dialogue and scenarios that seem as if they should be laughable, but they are handled so poorly that even unintentional humour is drained from them.

I feel I should add that, despite the depictions of animal abuse, no animals actually were harmed in the making of Killer's Moon.  The cat already had no tail and the three legged dog had actually lost its leg while heroically tackling armed robbers in its home - it won the animal equivalent of a VC for its valour.  The dog also gets its revenge in possibly the only scene that made me laugh, (so ineptly is it staged), when it attacks its mutilator, tearing his throat out.

The Day I Didn't Meet the Queen

Well, I pretty much avoided all of it - the Platinum Jubilee, obviously.  It was pretty easy really - I just avoided the main TV channels and any public places, like parks or the local shopping centre, for four days and was able to pretend nothing was going on.  There were no street parties in my area, (at least, none that I was invited to - I didn't wake up on Sunday to find the road outside my house closed and trestle tables set up, anyway), no bunting and only a few houses with flags or balloons outside.  The plus side of it all was that the roads were pretty much empty, so, on Friday, I was able to drive out to the country for a pleasant walk.  I also took the opportunity to watch an eclectic mix of films with no Jubilee connection whatsoever.  So, you might say that I successfully returned the favour to Her Majesty by completely ignoring her big event the same way that she once ignored me.  Now, I know that I've told the story before but, as we've just had a weekend full of people telling their stories about how they met the Queen, I'm going to retell my story about how I didn't meet her.  We're going back more years than I care to remember, when I was working in London, it was during President Mandela's state visit and I was walking down Whitehall one lunchtime when the Queen's limo, complete with police escort, drove past.  Now, I was the only person on that side of the street as they came past - I could clearly see Her Maj and Nelson Mandela on the back seat and they saw me.  Indeed, Nelson Mandela waved at and I waved back.  But do you know what?  Not only did the Queen not acknowledge me - at the time one of her civil servants - but she actually turned and looked the other way.  I've never forgotten that slight.  Fucking outrageous.

So, instead of getting involved in protests or attempting to disrupt protests, I decided simply to ignore the Platinum Jubilee as retaliation.  Just as I did the Golden and Diamond Jubilees.  Which brings me to a more serious point: how many of these bloody events are we, the public, expected to finance.  Because, make no mistake about it, it's the taxpayer who has footed the bill for four of these Jubilees in the past forty five years.  I'm not going to say that it is 'obscene' that public money is being spent on celebrating an over privileged hereditary elite - 'obscene' is a word both over used and misused these days - but it is perplexing that our governments are willing to sanction such expenditures while we have increasing levels of poverty in this country.  Especially right now, when we are in a cost of living crisis with increasing prices making it increasingly difficult for even those employed in relatively well paid jobs to afford basics like food and fuel.  But, of course, the spectacle of the last four days, (the press tell me it was a spectacle - I didn't see it so I'll have to take their word for it), was undoubtedly meant to divert our attention from the various crises engulfing the country.  In particular, the crises engulfing Boris Johnson.  Sadly, with the vote of no confidence against him having failed this evening, I'll just have to sustain myself with my fantasies of seeing him bludgeoned to death by a mob on the steps of Parliament.  Until his inevitable fall in reality.  The silver lining of him surviving this vote is that he stays in charge and drags the Tories further into the mire, effectively destroying their chances at the next election.  Sadly, a lot of people will have to suffer in the meantime. Getting back to the Platinum Jubilee, if anybody asks me, I can honestly say that I enjoyed the Jubilee weekend.  I didn't see any of the event itself, but I enjoyed not seeing it and doing other stuff instead.

Man's Conquest

 

In its early days Man's Conquest specialised in covers that depicted rugged men in conflict with wildlife, ranging from poisonous spiders to wild dogs.  This, the July 1957 issue, has a cover painting illustrating the story 'Man Against Man Eaters', which, I'm assuming, is a retelling of the true story of the 'Tsavo maneaters'.  This story, which has inspired several films, including Bwana Devil (1952), Killers of Kilimanjaro (1959) and The Ghost and The Darkness (1996), concerned the activities of a pair of man eating lions, that severely delayed the construction of the Kenya-Uganda railway in 1898.  Eventually, a specialist big game hunter was called in by the railway company to kill the animals.  So, for once, a seemingly incredible man's adventure story actually has some basis in truth.  The rest of the stories featured on the cover are strictly business as usual: 'Strange Cults of California', 'Night of the 30 Virgins' (a 'weird jungle ordeal' apparently) and the inevitable sex expose: 'Sex and Marriage: The Trouble With the "Ideal" Woman'.

The 'man against nature' style of covers lasted until the end of 1958, when the emphasis switched to war-themed covers.  These gradually shifted from 'men in action' type covers, featuring rugged looking servicemen enduring explosions and enemy gun fire, to covers featuring women in their under wear either being imperiled by Nazis/Japs/Commies, or wielding guns themselves as they mow down Nazis/Japs/Commies.  The contents of the magazine also shifted, becoming more orientated to, first, war stories, then sex-based stories and articles.  Toward the end of the magazine's run, in the early seventies, the covers more frequently featured those semi-naked girls being menaced by Hell's Angels or knife gangs, as war stories started to fall out of favour.  Indeed, the very last issue in April 1972 featured two gang-bangers knife fighting in the background, while, in the foreground, a third molests a blonde who is in danger of falling out of her torn clothes. 

Prophecy (1979)

John Frankenheimer made his name as a film director in the sixties, with a string of intense monochrome movies highlighting strong male characters facing various moral and ethical dilemmas, they ranged from prison drama The Birdman of Alcatraz through conspiracy thrillers like The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May, to science fiction with Seconds.  With the seenties he turned to colour, producing muscular action dramas like Grand Prix and literary adaptations like The Fixer and The Iceman Cometh.  Then his career seemed to go off the rails somewhat, to the extent that, by 1979, he was to be found directing the eco-horror movie Prophecy.  This is another of those films which seemed to become difficult to see, with no TV outings or home media releases for many years.  This, despite the fact that, not only did it have a 'name' director, but it was also a studio backed picture, (a Paramount production), which, by the look of it, had a reasonable budget.  Having recently had the opportunity to see a decent copy of the film, it is easy to see why it isn't well remembered, or particularly loved by either its studio or director.  Made in the wake of Jaws (1976), Prophecy is fashioned as a 'revenge of nature' type film, with visitors and residents to a mountain community falling prey to 'something' big and nasty in the woods.  These events are framed by a dispute between a ruthless logging company busily deforesting the area to provide trees for its paper mill and the local Native Americans and an investigation into possible pollution of the local river by a a doctor sent by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Being a John Frankenheimer film, there are plenty of alpha males on hand, but here they seem to be full of insane levels of testosterone fuelled aggression.  The main male characters are always angrily butting heads.  Be it the doctor and the logging company exec clashing over whether or not the paper mill responsible for the local pollution and consequent mutation of the local flora and fauna, the exec and the leader of the Native Americans arguing over access to the mountain roads, (one confrontation results in an insane axe v chainsaw fight), or the doctor and the Native American leader trying to establish just who has seen the most poverty and deprivation.  These constant confrontations quickly become wearisome and do little to advance the plot, which progesses jerkily enough as it is.  Only the underlying conflict between by science and spirituality does anything to help move the story along: the Native Americans believe that the force doing the killing is a spirit sent to defend the forest against its destruction by the loggers and all the other phenomena observed there - giant salmon and tadpoles, for instance - are similarly the result of divine intervention.  The doctor believes that it is all down to dangerous levels of mercury (used by the loggers as a fungicide), in the water that is causing not just mutations to the local wildlife, but also the sickness afflicting many of the Native Americans.

Of course, the doctor is proven right and the avenging forest spirit turns out to be a giant mutated bear, which eventually chews and claws its way through most of the cast before meeting its doom.  Which might sound exciting, but the film takes too long getting there.  There's far too much talk and earnest discussions about the environment, which simply serve to slow down the action.  Moreover, the script is far too clunky to allow any suspense to be built up around the monster attacks, which are always abrupt, coming out of nowhere with little or no build up.  On the plus side, however, the film looks great, making effective use of some beautiful Canadian locations.  Also, the monster itself is surprisingly well realised, based around a reasonably realistic looking mutant bear costume that, to be fair, rarely looks like a man-in-a-suit monster.  Frankenheimer, wisely, very rarely allows it to be shown in full, instead giving us close ups of its snarling visage, or glimpses of slashing claws.  The final battle between survivors and mutant is, as one would expect from Frankenheimer, very effectively staged and filmed.  The cast are basically B-level, certainly lacking the presence of the likes of Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster or James Garner, with whom he had worked previously, but do as best they can with the material at hand.  Robert Foxworth as the doctor tends to underplay too much, while Armand Assante as the Native American leader overplays most of his scenes.  Richard Dysart as the logging company exec is probably the most effective performance, refusing to play the character as a stereotyped corporate villain, instead giving the character some depth and nuance, while Talia Shire gives a restrained and dignified performance as the doctor's wife.  

In the end, Prophecy is hamstrung by the way in which the script constantly pushes it's 'messages' at the expense of storytelling.  The end result is a movie that isn't horrific enough to be a horror film, nor thrilling or suspenseful enough to be a thriller.  More emphasis upon telling a clear story, simply allowing the eco-messages to speak for themselves, and better character development, (rather than just presenting the audience with constant conflict), might have yielded a more enjoyable, not to mention commercially viable, film.  In his defence, Frankenheimer later claimed that he made Prophecy at the height of his battle with alcoholism, which probably explains a lot about the film's directorial problems.  Sadly, his career never really seemed to properly get back on track, with a series of not entirely satisfactory films  Of his post-Prophecy film projects, (he had a number of far more successful TV projects in this period), only Ronin really stands out for me, with his last film, Reindeer Games, being particularly dismal.