Another long lived men's magazine that survived into the eighties by transforming, in the latter half of the sixties, into a 'girlie' mag with more obviously soft-core content. This issue of Man to Man is from April 1961, when it was still a standard men's magazine with the typical cover painting and typical content. While the cover has a strong S&M theme, for once it is a semi-naked guy being whipped by a group of women, a reversal of roles that occurred from time to time in the genre. Unusually though, at least judging by the story it illustrates, 'Vigilantes in Skirts', for once the women aren't a bunch of sadistic Nazi or Commie vixens torturing some muscle bound GI, but a bunch of regular women punishing some kind of male miscreant. Probably a rapist or other variety of sex offender.
Elsewhere in the issue, going by the story titles, it is business as usual with Commie sex traps, marriage brokers and women smugglers. Not to mention 'Shackmate', which implies some kind of Pacific war/sex crossover. All for only thirty five cents. Man to Man would continue with these sorts of cover paintings, (albeit increasingly explicit in terms of nudity), and content until May 1965, when it switched to photo covers, always featuring semi clad young women in explicit poses and increasingly explicit content. In this format it carried on until at least 1982, featuring content along the lines of 'My Kinkiest Act in Porno' and 'The Correct Technique for Kissing Great Tits'. But back in 1961 things were still relatively innocent, all innuendo and titillation, only hinting at the kind of stuff it would deliver in the magazine's final form.
A sort of Baywatch for adults, Lifeguard (1976) actually predated the David Hasselhoff series by more than a decade. While also portraying the life and work of an LA County lifeguard, the film takes a more serious and introspective tone than the TV series. It focuses on one Summer in the life of Sam Elliot's ageing lifeguard, as he assesses his life and his future, attempting to recapture his youth by first starting a relationship with a seventeen year old girl, then rekindling a romance with his High School sweetheart. Although Elliot's position as a lifeguard gains him attention from various attractive women on the beach, just as 'The Hoff' and his colleagues would later, the film, on the whole, paints a far less glamourous picture of life guarding than Baywatch subsequently did. While there are rescues, they are far less spectacular than anything on the TV series: no burning boats, jet ski heroics or crashed planes, just drunks and out-of-their-depth swimmers. Indeed, he and his colleagues seem to spend most of their time time dealing with flashers, voyeurs in the ladies' room, breaking up juvenile fights and ordering surfers out of the water before the beach becomes swimmers only.
The heart of the film, though, is Elliot's crisis of confidence, s he begins to wonder whether those telling him that it is time to get a 'proper', 'grown up' job - who include his father and his old High School love - might be right. After attending his High School reunion, where he finds tat all of his old classmates seem to have well paid jobs and/or families - he tells them that he 'works for the County' - he starts to consider one old school friend's offer of a sales job at his Porsche dealership. His High School girlfriend, now an art dealer, also pushes him toward the idea of more conventional, 'respectable' work, so as to fit in better with her lifestyle and social circle. His rescue of the teenaged girl he slept with when she tries to drown herself on his beach and a job interview with his car dealer friend's business partner, during which the legitimacy and professionalism of his lifeguard position are called into question, prove turning points for him. Rejecting the job offer and buoyed up by the part-time rookie lifeguard he has been mentoring's thanks for teaching him so much that Summer, Elliot decides to continue as a lifeguard for as long as the service allows him to.
There's nothing particularly profound about Lifeguard, but it is well directed by Delbert Mann, maintaining a decent pace with sufficient incident that the film never really flags. Essentially a character study, the film rides on Elliot's performance in the lead role and he provides a typically laconic and likeable performance. While on the surface appearing to conform to most observer's superficial impression of a lifeguard simply being some kind of unambitious beach bum leading a slacker lifestyle, his performance also successfully suggests a deeper, sensitive and often intellectual inner character who has made a conscious decision to reject the materialism and social climbing of conventional employment. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he actually enjoys what he does for a living and recognises that it serves a greater purpose and involves greater responsibility than their jobs: the protection of lives. The supporting cast includes Ann Archer as Elliot's High School girlfriend, Kathleen Quinlain as the teenage girl and Parker Stevenson (who would later co-star in the first series of Baywatch), as the rookie he mentors.
It is interesting to compare life guarding in the seventies, as presented in the movie, with life guarding in the late eighties and nineties, as portrayed by Baywatch. Much seems the same: the red trunks with the county badge, the towers, the red plastic floats and the yellow trucks. Yet there are differences - the film is notable for the complete absence of female lifeguards, while they often seemed to dominate the TV series, (indeed, a notable aspect of Baywatch was that the majority of its viewers were, in fact, female, apparently attracted to the show because it portrayed women as skilled and responsible professionals, on a par with their male colleagues). Moreover, the layers of administration and management - the reports requiring filing after every rescue - are absent from Lifeguard, but an important part of Baywatch. Despite the changes to the job these two portrayals of LA County life guarding present, the fundamentals of the job - saving lives - remains constant.
The Squeeze (1977) has never been accorded the same sort of status as the likes of Get Carter (1971) or The Long Good Friday (1980) in the pantheon of British crime movies. Indeed, you'll rarely find it mentioned in discussions of the genre. In large part this is due to its lack of visibility, it hasn't had a network TV screening in the UK for around twenty years, for instance and, to the best of my knowledge, has never had a DVD or Blu Ray release. Indeed, the version I was able to see recently on a fairly obscure VOD Roku channel appeared to have been ripped from a VHS tape, (doubtless without authorisation). The fact that The Squeeze has fallen into relative obscurity is a real pity, as it is far grittier than the aforementioned titles, capturing a real 'on the streets' feeling and featuring a pretty decent, if eclectic cast, which includes Stacy Keach, Stephen Boyd (in his last film role), David Hemmings, Edward Fox, Carol White and Freddie Starr. Moreover, the film also boasts a script by Leon Griffiths (adapted from a David Craig novel) and direction from Michael Apted. The casting reflects a degree of quirkiness on the part of the film itself, which seemingly starts as a character study of Stacy Keach's alcoholic ex-Scotland Yard man, now reduced to living on benefits in a run down council house in Notting Hill with his two young sons, before he accidentally stumbles into a kidnap plot which itself leads into a blackmail plot and eventually a heist. As the film meanders through the various plot developments, taking in plenty of seediness, violence and sleaze along the way, the character study of Keach;s character isn't forgotten, as he hits rock-bottom, before finally, after stumbling several times, regains a degree of self-respect and earns a redemption of sorts.
It is apt that The Squeeze should have been released in the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, (although it was filmed the previous Autumn), a year now remembered for all the pomp, pageantry and waving flags. But The Squeeze shows another side of the London, indeed the UK as a whole, in the late seventies, taking in the relative squalor that many ordinary people lived in: dirty streets, gloomy pubs, greasy cafes and decidedly unglamourous massage parlours. This is a Britain where colonies of down and outs drink meths under motorway flyovers and 'decent' people live in crumbling rented houses, while criminals live in mansions and the police barely present on the streets. The film, better than most others of the era I've seen, succeeds in capturing something of the actuality of seventies Britain on celluloid, (you can almost smell the rancid piss in the opening sequence at a particularly filthy and tired looking Tube station). Doubtless, Apted's experience as a documentary maker contributed greatly to this air of realism, not to mention the degree of social commentary to be found in the film. This is never overt, instead presented via observation - the down and outs Keach finds himself drinking with, for instance, or the fact that he has fallen so far from grace that he is now reduced to living among the Afro-Caribbean community in Notting Hill, (his neighbours are among the most 'decent' and community-minded people he encounters in the film).
It is these characters, along with Keach's sidekick Teddy, (played by Freddie Starr), a petty crook turned mini-cab driver who still hero-worships Keach, desperately trying to get him back to be being the upstanding cop who once arrested him, who provide a moral compass and sense of integrity for Keach's character. Virtually all of the other main characters are either opportunistic and completely amoral villains, or are prepared to compromise their principles in order to protect themselves: Edward Fox, for instance is prepared to kill Keach at the villains' behest and to betray his employers, while kidnap victim Carol White is willing to sleep with her captors in an obviously futile attempt to protect her daughter. Keach's character also frequently wavers, responding to set-backs and pressure by turning to the bottle and abandoning his responsibilities, being both humiliated by the villains, (being thrown out a car naked, in front of his house, for instance), and humiliating himself along the way. But through the kindness of his neighbours and Teddy's persistence and refusal to give up on him, (not to mention a session in a sleazy massage parlour to sweat the alcohol out of his system), he is eventually able to outmaneuver the villains and derail their heist.
The plot itself is reasonably ingenious, with David Hemmings and his associates kidnapping the wife and young daughter of Edward Fox's security firm chief on behalf of gangster-turned-club-owner Stephen Boyd with a view to blackmailing Fox into diverting one of his security vans into an ambush. Unfortunately, the kidnap victim is also Keach's ex-wife and the mother of his children. This latter point is one of the plot's weaknesses - it seems unlikely that the gang wouldn't know that they were kidnapping the ex-wife of a former top Scotland Yard detective, particularly as it is established that Boyd's character is already acquainted with him. Their decision to force fox to kill him is based solely upon the fact that they fear that Keach has unwittingly stumbled into their business and might uncover their scheme by accident, rather than his connection with the victim and the motivation it would give him to intervene, which might have made their sudden determination to eliminate Keach more convincing, not to mention logical. That aside, for the most part, the plot proceeds in a reasonably logical pattern and, for once, the more-or-less lone hero (apart from Teddy) doesn't irrationally try to foil the heist single handed against overwhelming odds, but rather allows it to take place, instead stopping the gang in its getaway and turning the tables on Boyd having correctly identified his main weakness. This results in the film, in effect, having a double climax - first the heist itself, carried out violently by the gang, with Boyd going full psycho, followed by Keach's intervention which involves a car crash, a shoot out and Keach extracting his revenge on Boyd by humiliating him by giving him a severe beating in front of his cherished daughter, (who Keach had kidnapped to give him some leverage on the family loving Boyd and giving the plot a degree of symmetry).
While the plot might seem to meander at times, resulting in a sometimes uneven pace, the action highlights of The Squeeze, when they come, are well staged and quite exciting. Lacking the polish of films like Get Carter and The Long Good Friday, The Squeeze's rough around the edges feel simply adds to its air of authenticity. Seventies London, in all its seamy glory, is captured magnificently. Despite the high profile cast, it ultimately feels more like a low budget exploitation movie than a studio backed production, (it was produced by Warner Brothers), or even an extended episode of The Sweeney. Apted's direction has an eye for detail that both add to the realistic feel and often help lighten the tone, to stop the film from tumbling completely into depressing sleaze and squalor, Teddy's clapped out Ford Zodiac Mk III and his constant interrupting of his attempts to assist Keach in order to take fares, for instance. Likewise, the masseur at the massage parlour who quotes Keach the rate for 'manual relief', prompting the reply that it would be 'cheaper to do it myself', or his neighbour Mrs Delgado's observation that 'I never imagined you were a private detective, I just thought you were unemployed', help lighten an otherwise dark plot.
Along with Apted's direction and attention to detail, the film is lifted above being an average crime thriller by the performances. Keach, commendably, doesn't try for any kind of 'authentic' English accent, instead moderating his normal American accent. While his performance sometimes comes over as muted, it is entirely in keeping with his character being a man who has reached rock-bottom, seeking anonymity in a bottle in the face of his fall from grace. He communicates well the character's continual battle against the temptations of alcohol and his attempts to regain a degree of self-respect by rediscovering his skills as a detective. Stephen Boyd is a memorably ferocious villain, reveling in violence as a for of power, yet loving his family and seeking public respectability and legitimacy. David Hemmings is suitably smarmy and slippery as the 'brains' behind behind the kidnap scheme, while Freddie Starr is surprisingly effective as Teddy, desperately trying to restore his idol - although a cop who arrested him, also the only person who has ever treated him with any decency and humanity - to his pedestal. Fox and White are also convincing in their roles, while Hemmings' kidnap gang includes top British film and TV villains Roy Marsden and Alan Ford. All-in-all, The Squeeze provides some pretty good gritty entertainment and is a real pity that it isn't better known and remains difficult to see. (Although I've now found a copy uploaded to You Tube - probably the source of the version I recently watched).
(It should be noted that, adding to the confusion when trying to get any information on this film, there are at least two US crime films which have been released or re-released under the title The Squeeze. One is from the seventies and stars Lee Van Cleef, the other from the eighties, starring Michael Keaton. Both are unrelated to the 1977 British film, but are much easier to actually see).
Well, I'm only thankful that Her Majesty, the blessed Queen Elizabeth II, didn't live to see Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng trashing the UK's economy, devaluing the noble pound that still carries her image. It would probably have killed her. If Truss hadn't killed her already, that is. (I'm sorry, but I still find it suspicious that within hours of asking Truss to form a government, Her Majesty took to her bed and karked it. To be fair, it might have been her final audience with Johnson, to accept his resignation, the day before that did it, especially if the fat tosser tried to get one last grope in). It is all an amazingly quick fall from political grace for Truss, with the Tories' poll ratings plummeting faster than the pound's value and already rumours of Tory backbenchers preparing their letters of 'No Confidence' for the 1922 Committee. Could it be, though, that what we're seeing is all part of Johnson's cunning plan to get himself back into Number Ten? Did his supporters in the media engineer Truss' victory in the Tory leadership campaign in the knowledge that her policies would tank the economy within weeks of her taking office? Even if this was so, would it really lead to a clamour amongst Tory MPs and supporters for the return of Boris Johnson to save the day? Because, the fact is, he was unpopular and a vote loser before he resigned. None of the things that caused this - his dishonesty, incompetence, laziness, corruption and mendacity, to name but a few - have changed. Moreover, before he was forced out of office, he demonstrated amply that he had no more idea of how to deal with the cot of living crisis engulfing the UK than Truss.
The reality of the situation is that, thanks to Cameron's fixed term parliament shenanigans, this parliament and, therefore, this government, has around another eighteen months to run before a general election has to be called. Moreover, Tory leaders, under the current party rules, are protected from 'No Confidence' votes by their own MPs for their first year in office. Which means that we could have to endure at least another twelve months of Truss' and her insane economic policies which are driving the country into the ground. Of course, many things could change in that period - a policy U-turn in order to try and stem the Tories' poll slide, a forced resignation because of some kind of impropriety, (although Johnson survived scandal after scandal, let's not forget), or maybe the population of the UK finally shake off their apathy and take to the streets. A bit of civil insurrection can work wonders to effect political change, although I strongly suspect that, outside of Twitter this unlikely to happen - too many would be 'radicals' would rather get 'revolution' trending as a hashtag on Twitter than actually get off their arses and onto the streets. (Before anyone says anything: I'm too old for all that 'storming the Bastille' shit - but I will hold your coats while you do it). All the while, of course, we still have large sections of the right-wing press gaslighting us, declaring loudly on their font pages how these are all only short term problems with 'Trussnomics' and how, in the long term, it will bring us all prosperity snd security. (If we haven't frozen or starved to death in the meantime). Some are also trying to deflect blame, claiming that it is all the fault of bastard traders in the City, shorting the pound, ignoring the fact that these are very people who backed Truss in the first place, knowing that her policies would open the door for them to do this. Ah well, it will all end in tears, just you see...
Although it looks like something turned out by Universal's B-movie unit in the forties, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake was actually one of the low budget horror films released by United Artists in the fifties. These films can trace their origins back to the poverty row studio PRC, whose TV and re-release distributor, Madison, United Artists bought in the fifties. Four Skulls is certainly in the spirit of the old PRC movies, albeit with a somewhat more polished production. For its day it was, as the trailer indicates, surprisingly graphic with various severed heads, decapitated bodies and head shrinking going on. Unfortunately, the trailer not only shows pretty much all of the film's shock highlights, but also gives away the twist ending - that Henry Daniell's character is actually one of the living dead. Not a traditional zombie, but rather his living head has been sewn onto the body of a South American native. (Apparently this is the secret of immortality). The fact that he is a 'white man's head on a brown man's body' seemed to be considered as shocking as the decapitations by the film's makers.
The plot is suitably bizarre, involving a curse placed upon the Drake family by a witch doctor nearly hundred years previously for the then head of the family's massacring of a South American tribe. The massacre was apparently prompted by the tribe's killing of his agent. The curse involves each direct male descendant being decapitated at the time of their death, (they all die at age sixty), their head shrunk and their skull turning up in a cupboard in the family crypt. After his brother dies aged sixty, Jonathan Drake naturally becomes worried about his own head. Mysterious natives with sewn together lips lurk around the grounds of his house, fog swirls in, Henry Daniell's mysterious Dr Zurich turns up and hard nosed investigating police detective Grant Richards dismisses ideas of supernatural involvement in the disappearing head of Drake's brother, but eventually is forced to accept that there is some weird shit going down. Daniell, of course, turns out to be the supposedly dead agent who is ensuring that the curse is carried out.
To be fair, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake is, in places, quite atmospheric in the same pulpy way as the old Universal B-horrors had been. Moreover, its central plot idea is reasonably original for a low budget horror movie and B-veteran director Edward L Cahn manages to conjure up some striking imagery, notably the native henchman with sewn together lips. At seventy minutes it doesn't have time to outstay its welcome and moves through its action smoothly and efficiently. Not a great movie, but by no means a bad one, either.
So, what are the odds that the Queen comes back as a zombie and disrupts the coronation of King Charles III? You could just see the zombie Queen crashing into Westminster Abbey, tear the crown off of Charles' head and knock the orb out of his hand before she tries to tear his throat put with her bare dentures. Doubtless, he'd be flailing around trying to beat her back to death with the sceptre, shouting to his security detail to 'shoot her in the head'. Maybe the whole of the recently deceased Royal Family could crawl out of the tomb at Windsor, in various states of decay and cause mayhem at the coronation. Prince Philip, (who, face it, looked like the living dead in his last days), could lurch toward Liz Truss )if she's still Prime Minister), arms out stretched like Bela Lugosi in Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, and try to tear her head off, while the Queen Mother could try to eat the Archbishop of Canterbury, (so long as her jaw doesn't fall off, mid bite). Doubtless, it would transpire that they'd been resurrected by a Royalist faction unhappy at Charles' 'too woke' reign and his plans to slim down the royal Family by dispensing with the hangers on. See, this stuff just writes itself. Perhaps we need to get this going as a conspiracy theory - that the Queen will rise from the tomb at the coronation in order to save the monarchy.
Well, it would make a great movie, if nothing else. Surely somebody put there must be planning something like this for a direct-to-streaming release? Or are we past peak low budget, shot-on-mobile-phone zombie movies? Even if we weren't, I'm not sure that anyone would have the nerve to try and make something like this - there's just too much deference to the monarchy about in the UK. Besides, you'd never get away with filming it in the UK - the tabloids would be all over it, shouting 'Treason' etc and the production inevitably shut down. It would have to be shot overseas in some unlikely location pretending to be London. Preferably one which gives tax breaks to film productions. I mean, you'd be amazed how much like London Luxembourg looks. At least, that's what the makers of some direct-to-video Jack Higgins adaptations tried to make us think back in the nineties. (There was also, I vaguely recall, one of those cheesy Charles and Diana romance TV movies which tried to convince us that Luxembourg looked like central London). Nowadays they tend to prefer Hungary or Romania as locations for these sorts of things - let's face it, for international audiences who have never been to the UK, as long as there are lots of old buildings and a red double decker bus, then it looks like London.
Anyway, that's my latest low budget movie idea: Zombie Queen, Queen Zombie, Queen of the Zombies, or whatever. I'm putting it out there for potential backers - just the publicity it would generate by getting the right wing press' piss boiling would surely guarantee a hit.
Enter The Devil (1974) was pat of the first wave of Italian Exorcist (1973) cash ins and was re-issued, under several different titles, throughout the seventies in attempts to cash-in on other similarly themed movies. On the face of it, Enter The Devil at least seems to take a slightly more original approach to its source material, eschewing demon possessed little girls for an adult female protagonist and a focus upon sexual deviancy as a form of demonic possession, (sure, Linda Blair's Regan masturbates with a crucifix in The Exorcist, but this is more of a throwaway shock rather than a sustained theme). The devil also manifests himself very physically in this film: no raspy voices from a child here, but rather none other than Ivan Rassimov himself, variously ravishing, groping and even crucifying the heroine. This last sequence is significant to one of the film's central themes: the inherent eroticism of the image of a semi-naked Christ suffering on the cross. Most obviously, Satan first appears as a wooden life-sized Christ-like crucified figure, who comes to life in the heroine's studio, drops his loincloth, tears her clothes off and makes love to her on the floor. (We know that he's Satan as his lovemaking is accompanied by thunder, lightning and a gale blowing through the studio while his cross bursts into flame). Pursuing the theme, people certainly suffer for their sins throughout the film: the heroine's mother engages in some S&M sex with her lover which involves her writhing in agonised pleasure as she is thrashed with thorny rose stems, while the priest conducting the climactic exorcism self-flagellates after being tempted by the possessed girl's devilish charms.
Despite these variances from its model's template, Enter The Devil is actually picking up on a narrative thread from The Exorcist - the question as to whether supposed demonic possession is nothing more than a form of mental illness. While The Exorcist ultimately leaves the audience in no doubt as to the reality of the supernatural evil possessing Regan, Enter The Devil is more ambivalent in its presentation of possession. All of the heroine's encounters with Rassimov's Satan could be dismissed simply as sexual fantasies, triggered by her witnessing her mother's aforementioned kinky bedroom antics. Indeed, her first sexual encounter with the living effigy occurs directly after her surreptitiously seeing the rose-whipping incident and the cutting of the film seems to make clear that her own devilish sexual encounter occurred entirely in her head - we jump from her and Rassimov writhing on the floor to her standing, fully clothed in the studio, the wooden figure still on her work bench and the cross unscathed by fire. Likewise all her subsequent encounters, including her crucifixion in the vault of an abandoned church - at best they might be supernaturally induced 'visions', but are presented more like sadomasochistic sexual fantasies. Equally, her other sexual behaviours - the obsessive masturbation, the attempts to seduce her father and later the priest exorcising her, could also be explained as aberrant behaviour triggered by the trauma of having seen her mother's adulterous sexual liaison.
Enter The Devil, though, like many exploitation movies, wants to have its cake and eat it. So, alongside this apparent psychological explanation for the girl's possession, it also develops a second theme playing on Catholic guilt and the idea that sex is itself a sin, namely that deviant sex, or even just having a sexual appetite, is itself a product of Satanic evil. Contact with it is contagious, inducing a form of possession in the witness, driving them to commit the same sins. The mother's adultery results in the daughter becoming sexually obsessed - first with a Christ-like figure, then later with masturbation and incest. Only sex within marriage, for the purpose of reproduction isn't sinful. According to this element of the film's plot, Satan's ultimate aim, (whether he be real or a figment of the girl's imagination), is to corrupt an especially pious priest by arousing his suppressed sexual desires via the possessed heroine and thereby commit the sin of breaking his vows of chastity. (Interestingly, in order to strengthen his resolve and faith, the priest gives himself a good whipping, which might also be considered deviant behaviour). While the priest expires, he does complete the exorcism, thereby triumphing over evil without having succumbed to it himself. Of course, in true exploitation fashion, all this sinful sex has to be shown to us in detail, just so that we can see for ourselves just how evil and filthy it actually is.
Mario Gariazzo's direction is, for the most part, best described as servicable rather than inspired. That said, however, he does rise to the occasion for the fantasy/vision scenes involving Rassimov's Satan, producing some memorable imagery. More interesting is the script, which he also co-wrote, which, rather than attempt to slavishly copy The Exorcist, instead takes that film's central idea and spins it off on its own tangent, exploring the relationship between eroticism, evil and religious iconography. A few years later Gariazzo would write and direct an equally bizarre and wayward take on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978), in the form of Eyes Behind the Stars (1978). Enter The Devil is, ultimately, an intriguing piece of exploitation, seeking to subvert its source while simultaneously delivering the same sort of shocks and thrills, but more so - it has even more Catholic angst than the original, not to mention even more blasphemous sex and violence! Its biggest weakness is its inherent misogyny in effectively characterising any sexually active woman as being possessed by demonic evil, (although, to be fair, that is pretty much in line with the Catholic doctrine it is exploring).
I'd like to say that I spent today watching video nasties instead of the Queen's funeral, (because, you know, it's what she would have wanted), but I actually ended up going to the beach. I'd hoped that traffic would be light, but it seemed that a significant proportion of the 'grieving nation', (as the media would have you believe), had the same idea. But hey, it was still a lot more enjoyable than watching someone else's funeral. I did have a contingency plan if the weather hadn't been good, which involved a streaming channel I recently found which has some pretty recent movies available without subscription. I'm assuming that none of them are legal but I don't know about anyone else, but I'm afraid that my morals with regard to copyright violations has become very slack of late. Particularly with regard to huge multinational corporations with turnovers in the billions. To be honest, my lack of conscience over this sort of thing is probably in the blood - I watched enough pirate videos back in the good old days of VHS, (it was part of my cinematic education - back then there was often no other way to see these movies). It undoubtedly helped that my father worked at Radio Rentals, so I got to see dupes of the various movies they were renting with their VHS players, but also all manner of other weird and wonderful stuff that had been somehow 'acquired' by staff and consequently copied multiple times and widely shared.
Anyway, it was in this spirit that I watched a number of films from another streaming channel whose library's legal status I am highly suspicious of, although their films are all of older vintage - mainly from the fifties, sixties seventies and eighties. I kicked it all off by revisiting the original 1958 version of The Fly. Shot in colour and Cinemascope, The Fly looks like an A-feature, but plot-wise plays out like the B-movie it really is. It's a curious film which certainly delivers its big shock revelation of David Hedison's fly head and arm, but its flashback structure robs it of impetus and suspense, (we know how it ends from the opening, meaning that we know the search for the fly with Hedison's head and arm will prove futile). It finally topples over into sheer lunacy, (not to mention hilarity), with the human headed fly finally found trapped in a spider's web, pleading 'help me, help me' in a shrill voice to Vincent Price and Herbert Marshall. Not surprisingly, neither actor could keep a straight face. Overall though, it remains a tremendously enjoyable piece of schlock. It's two sequels, by contrast to the original, were most definitely B-movies, shot in black and white. Return of The Fly (1959), does little than repeat the plot line of the original, but on a lower budget. It does retain Vincent Price and features a superior make up for the titular creature, but is far less innovative. The second sequel, Curse of the Fly (1965), is somewhat more inventive, ditching human-fly hybrids and focusing instead on exploring the possibilities of the matter transmission plot device of the earlier films. Shot in the UK, but still pretending to be set in Canada, it has Brian Donlevy rather than Vincent Price as its imported US star and is one of a number of co-productions Robert Lippert developed with British producer Jack Parsons. Despite a low budget, it is a far more satisfying film than the first sequel.
Obviously, The Fly wasn't the only film I took in - I also found time to reacquaint myself with Arthur Penn's beguiling 1975 private eye drama Night Moves, as well as the more mainstream delights of Fast and Furious 9, courtesy of that other dubious streaming channel. (If ever there was a modern equivalent to a B-movie series of old, it is surely the Fast and Furious franchise, which, with every entry gets increasingly divorced from any form of reality - they end up in space in this one). Over the past couple of weeks I've managed to catch up with a number of true schlock classics which I'm hoping to write about here over the next few weeks. I've caught up with them via number of sources: Enter the Devil (1974) is public domain, so anywhere you see it is legal, I caught it on Otherworlds TV on Roku, while the version of sleazy British crime move The Squeeze (1977) I saw on another streaming channel looked like a (probably pirated) VHS rip. Eagles Over London (1969), the notorious Italian war movie, however, turned up recently on Talking Pictures TV, which is fast becoming a significant source for schlocky rarities, (particularly in its weekly 'Cellar Club' thread), which otherwise never seem to get terrestrial TV screenings any more. As I say, these are the movies I'm hoping to look at here in the immediate future.
I caught the end of Hot Stuff (1979) - a comedy crime movie starring and directed by Dom DeLuise - this afternoon, including the sequence where Jerry Reed's car gets blown up. Except that it obviously doesn't. The car in question is, before the explosion, clearly a brand new blue 1979 Pontiac Firebird Formula, (which was basically a Firebird Trans Am mechanically, but with a standard body shell, without all the spoilers and flashy paint job, the main identifier for the Formula being the unique hood with twin air scoops), but when it actually blows up, it has turned into a blue, early seventies, Chevrolet Camaro. The substitution is most obvious when we get a shot of the front of the burning wreck: whereas the 1979 Firebird has a distinctive twin headlight 'shovel nose' design, the wreck has the characteristic flat front and single headlamps of the pre-1974 second generation Camaro. The swap was doubtless due to the fact that the Pontiac was only leased for the film and there is no way the production was going to pay out for a new vehicle just to destroy it. The use of a Camaro as a substitute was perfectly logical - it shared a basic body shell with the Firebird, (the General Motors F-Body) and was produced in greater numbers than the Firebird, making it easier to locate a cheap scrapper suitable for being blown up. Nevertheless, for those of us familiar with seventies US cars, (I used to own a 1978 Camaro Z-28), it feels slightly jarring as there's no mistaking the substitution.
Seeing it set me to thinking about how many other times I've seen similar substitutions. Sometimes, there's no obvious reason, as no stunts or destruction is involved. For instance, I recently caught a showing of the 1971 kids' film Flight of the Doves and, toward the end, when a jarring (to me at least), automotive substitution too k place: an unmarked Garda police car is seen driving down a track, then we cut to seeing it pull up outside a cottage. As it drives down the track, it is clearly a basic model Ford Zephyr Mk IV, but when it pulls up, it is clearly a higher spec model of Zephyr, with front spotlights fitted. It is even a slightly different colour, (the driving car appears to be a very dark grey, the parked car black). Why the change? Most likely, the driving down the lane sequence was filmed as a pick up shot, after main location shooting had finished and the original Zephyr simply wasn't available so a substitute was used, (you can't see the occupants when it is coming down the lane, unlike the later shot, where they are seen exiting the car, reinforcing this suspicion). War films also feature many examples of vehicles being substituted for scenes of their destruction. I remember watching a Yugoslavian war movie which featured some of those impressive looking German 'Tiger tanks' which were mocked up from T-34s, (they most famously featured in Kelly's Heroes (1970)). You could tell when one of them was about to be destroyed as it would, a split second before exploding, transform into a tatty grey-painted Sherman tank. Obviously, the 'Tiger' conversions were too valuable to be damaged, (they appeared in multiple Yugoslav war movies), whereas Shermans were available in greater numbers. Interestingly, in A Bridge Too Far (1977), it was the Sherman tanks that employed stunt doubles - if you look carefully at the burning carcasses of knocked out 'Shermans', you can see that they actually appear to be M-24s, despite having been a Sherman when attacked.
So, does any of this matter, except to a pedant like me? Well, possibly. Arguably, where such substitutions are noticable, it undermines the viewer's 'suspension of disbelief' and makes the artifice of film making too obvious. Of course nowadays, with CGI, such substitutions aren't usually necessary, (although cheap CGI processes often look even less convincing than a substitution). Even back in the day, bigger budgeted productions would use replicas for destruction scenes, some times full size, (a number of full size M-48 tank replicas are destroyed in battle sequences in Patton (1970), for instance), or some times large scale models, (although the use of too small scale miniatures can look ridiculous). Anyway, whichever way you look at it, the fact is that spotting these things is actually one of the many pleasures I get from watching movies, rather than detracting from my viewing pleasure.
As noted last week, when I took a brief look at an issue of Horror Stories, this horror pulp had a companion magazine: Terror Tales. This magazine ran from 1934-1941 and, like Horror Stories, had a brief UK reprint edition, publishing four issues in 1940. In common with its companion, Terror Tales featured very lurid covers, inevitably portraying young women in various states of undress being menaced by monsters, mad scientists and cultists. Terror Tales, though, developed a definite emphasis upon bondage and S&M in its covers, far more obviously than Horror Stories. The above cover, for Sept-Oct 1938, is perhaps the most bondage obsessed of all. Certainly, it contains the most bound women of any cover I could find and they are all being threatened with violence of some kind. The girls chained to the post in the background, being given a severe whipping is an image which became something of a motif in later issues, which frequently featured whip wielding mad monks and the like giving good thrashings to tied up women.
Of course, restrained women were a common theme across many genres of pulp magazine covers in the thirties and forties, but Terror Tales served them up with such relish. The magazine shared its roster of authors with its companion and they cranked out an apparently endless streams of lurid stories. Nowadays, the best remembered of those listed on this particular cover is Ray Cummings, who had had an illustrious career in the twenties writing for respectable pulps like All-Story and Argosy. Indeed, he was considered one of the 'founding fathers' of science fiction, his stories both frequently reprinted in the science fiction pulps of the thirties and highly influential upon later writers. By the late thirties, however, his glory days seemed to be behind him and he found himself writing for pulps like Terror Tales and Horror Stories. By the forties, after these titles had succumbed to wartime paper shortages, he was, anonymously, contributing stories to comics, such as The Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner and Captain America, (his daughter was also a writer for their publisher, Timely Comics).
Are we all tired of the Queen Elizabeth II death cult yet? Because that's what it increasingly feels like, with endless reports on TV and in the papers of exactly where her coffin is at any given time, not to mention who is standing by it, following or polishing it. Not to mention the people queueing to walk past it, first in Edinburgh, now in London - people are spending all night on the pavement to try and make sure that they are at the front of the queue. I don't know about you, but I'm finding it all rather creepy and morbid. Then there's the obsession with the details of the funeral itself. With all the adulation of the late Queen going on in the media, I'm half expecting to hear that, like an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh, she's going to be interred in a gold sarcophagus in a huge pyramid built on the South Bank by slave labour, well, universal credit claimants, it's much the same thing. Of course, they'll all be slaughtered, along with her servants and corgis (and possibly her favourite horses), in order to keep her company through all eternity. Perhaps they'll wall up one of the Royal Daimlers in there as well, its mummified chauffeur behind the wheel, so that she can go for a spin in the afterlife.
As I've said before, I actually have no wish to be disrespectful to Her Majesty, in spite of my personal opinions on the monarchy, but it is this whole media circus surrounding her death which is really pissing me off. Especially all the bloody media parasites who crawl out of the woodwork at this time to try and prove that they are more sycophantic and more of a loyal Royalist than anyone else. Worst of all are all of those Royal 'experts' they wheel out who pretend to have some kind of sources 'inside the palace' in order to justify the poisonous gossip, tittle tattle and fantasies they peddle as supposed truth. We're reaching the point now that all this hysteria - because that's the only one can rationally describe what's going on the UK right now with regard to the Queen's death - is beginning to seriously impinge upon everyday life. Apparently, on the day of the funeral, the entire country is going to shut down. Supermarkets will close, DIY chains will do likewise, as will clothing stores. Today, even Center Parcs tried to tell its customers that its sites were closing on Monday and that anyone staying there would have to leave their accommodation for the day and come back on Tuesday. not surprisingly, by the end of the day they had been forced to do a U-turn on this. But more seriously, operations in hospitals and doctors' appointments are being cancelled on the day of the funeral, which is bloody outrageous. Oh and if you had a wedding or funeral booked for the day of the funeral, tough. It's off and you'll have to reschedule. These are not the actions of a normal society.
Before leaving the subject, obviously, I have to mention the repression of anti-monarchy protests by the police. Apparently, holding a placard saying 'Not My King' can get you arrested, although, last time I checked, republicanism wasn't a crime in the UK. Funnily enough, most of those right-wingers who like to bleat on about 'free speech' when they are prevented from saying anything racist, crying 'cancel culture' at the tops of their voices, have been silent on this issue. As predicted, the Tory bastards' repressive anti-protest legislation is already being put into effect to suppress any dissident opinion using tactics that, when deployed in Moscow by Putin's thugs, we all condemn. While I might agree that making these protests as the Queen's coffin passes by, or outside venues where she is lying in state, is probably ill-advised and possibly inappropriate, nonetheless, people do have a right to protest and express their opinions. Personally, my problem is with the institution of monarchy rather than any individual members of it - directing our anger against them personally will be perceived as peevish and petty, most importantly, it is ineffective. Constitutional change will ultimately come via the ballot box - so if you don't want the monarchy, as a first step, stop voting Tory.
The Face of Darkness (1976) is a real oddity, a British horror short that originally went out as support to Death Weekend, (which was later branded a 'video nasty' when released for home video), then apparently vanished without trace. Until, that is, the BFI resurrected it and included it on a Blu Ray collection of short films. It is one of those films that you have to be a dedicated aficionado of obscure horror films to even know of its existence: I only knew of it from a brief (and fairly dismissive) entry in Alan Frank's Horror Films Handbook that piqued my interest and led me an apparently fruitless quest to see it. Which I finally have, not because of the BFI release, (which I wasn't aware of), but because someone has posted it on YouTube. As I've noted before, when finally caught up with, elusive movies like this sometimes turn out to be disappointing. The Face of Darkness, however, turned out to be even more intriguing than I expected. Not to mention far better made. Falling more into the 'folk horror' tradition of British cinema, rather than the full blooded Gothic of Hammer or the proto slasher and splatter movies of Pete Walker, the film packs a lot of ideas into just under an hour's running time. Which is one of its problems - it often feels too crowded in terms of story elements and unable to properly develop them. A longer running time, taking it to feature length, would not only have allowed these ideas to be more fully explored, but also would perhaps have given it a shot at better distribution and a more lasting legacy.
As it stands, the film uses as its background the politics of crime and punishment, most particularly the debate over capital punishment, and how best to respond to terrorist outrages, in order to develop an examination of the nature of evil. All of which makes it sound very contemporary in its concerns but, of course, the terrorism it had in mind in 1976 were IRA bombings rater than al Queda. Although the storyline of The Face of Darkness seems straightforward - right-wing MP revives a buried alive medieval heretic (billed simply as 'The Undead') and uses him to commit an atrocity which will create the public backlash he needs to pass his repressive private members bill, which includes restoration of the death penalty, through parliament - the narrative shifts constantly between two time periods, with actors doubling up to play roles in both, constantly drawing parallels between the Middle Ages and modern world. The MP's motivation for his 'moral' crusade is the murder of his wife, apparently as part of a black magic ritual, but his vengeful quest for 'justice is contrasted with the more muted reaction of the mother of one of the children killed in the atrocity he stages, ('The Undead' bombs a school playground), her life destroyed by incomprehensible violence, revenge is the furthest thing from her mind. The central hypocrisy of the MP's position - as if using the very thing that killed his wife, 'black magic', to engineer his revenge wasn't hypocritical enough - is underlined by his attempts to have 'The Undead' declared insane so as to spare him the death penalty: an admission that capital punishment can never deter those possessed, either by evil or fantacism, from committing murder. Indeed, the torture and 'execution', by being buried alive, of 'The Undead' in the past doesn't deter him from killing in the present.
The scenes of 'The Undead' under psychoanalysis in the present are contrasted with his inquisition and torture in the Middle Ages, (the psychoanalyst and inquisitor being played by the same actor), emphasising the point that neither science nor religion has a neat solution for existential evil. The final scenes between the MP and 'The Undead', which mirror those earlier in the film, when the MP revived 'The Undead' with a 'kiss of life', bring things full circle, with the MP finally realising that he has become what he purports to despise. The Face of Darkness is permeated by a sense of constant unease rather than attempting to deliver sudden shocks - everything seems slightly off-kilter but is still firmly set in the very real world of 1976. At the centre of the unease, of course, is 'The Undead' himself, whether seducing the mother of one of his victims-to-be in order to establish a connection with the pain he causes, or dance he performs in the school playground to to the school children before setting the bomb. (A reminder that we are in 1976 - nowadays it would be near impossible for a stranger to walk into a school playground directly from the street). The cast is made up of familiar British TV faces, with David Allister, as 'The Undead', gives an effectively understated performance in a role where it would have been all too easy to go over the top, instead opting for a quiet other worldliness. Gwyneth Powell, (best remembered as Mrs McClusky, the head mistress in Grange Hill), is excellent as the victim's mother, a portrait of ordinariness who finds their life suddenly and inexplicably shattered by forces beyond her comprehension. The stand-out performance is Lennard Pearce as Langdon, the MP, a world away from his best known role of Grandad in Only Fools and Horses, he is the epitome of respectable reactionary, facilitating evil under the cloak of reasonableness and moral concern.
The Face of Darkness was written and directed by Ian F H Lloyd, for whom I can find no other cinematic credits. Which would seem surprising, as his handling of the film is very assured,getting over his lack of budget for actually staging things like the explosion in the playground by instead showiig public reaction via faux vox pop style street interviews which punctuate his narrative. The stillness which he imbues the medieval scenes with contrasts effectively with the hustle of modern day London. The main criticism which can be leveled at his direction are the lapses in pace which occur every so often, with some scenes playing on too long. All in all, The Face of Darkness stands as a fascinating curio which, one can't help but suspect, if had been made as a feature rather than a short, might well enjoy a cult following as a fine example of British folk horror.
I should also thank Gav Crimson for alerting me to the film's presence on You Tube, as he has previously with various rare and obscure items.
Horror Stories, which published 41 issues between 1935 and 1941, specialised in sensational and salacious cover paintings. Naked and semi-naked women were forever being menaced and tortured by assorted mad scientists, cultists, vampires and monsters. This cover, from the August-September 1937 issue, is characteristic of the magazine, in that it depicts a naked woman without actually showing anything. It also prefigures a popular trope of post-war men's magazines in that it features a woman being frozen into a solid block of ice by the villain, apparently to add to his collection of frozen nudes seen in the background. I the men's magazines the villains would invariably be Nazis, of course, whereas here it is just a common or garden mad scientist of no particular political affiliation. Similar perils illustrated on the covers of Horror Stories included women being covered in wax and molten metal, (although not gold - that had to wait for the men's magazine Nazis).
All of these perils were, of course, proxies for rape which, in the thirties and forties obviously couldn't be overtly referred to on a cover. By the sixties, men's magazines were more openly implying various forms of sexual assault on their covers, but the likes of Horror Stories had to substitute other forms of female violation both on their covers and in their pages. Horror Stories had a companion magazine, Terror Tales, which ran from 1934 to 1941, featuring similar content and stories and sharing the same pool of authors. The style of lurid pulp horror stories published by both magazines proved to be highly influential post-war, particularly upon the new genre of US horror comics. While wartime paper shortages might have killed both publications in 1941, Horror Stories enjoyed a brief afterlife of sorts, with four British reprint issues appearing in the UK in 1948.
In years to come, when I am inevitably asked, 'Do you remember where you were when you heard that the Queen had died', I'll be able to answer in the affirmative: I was watching Home and Away on 5Star. They didn't interrupt the episode to make an announcement, it just happened that I'd switched on my laptop, glanced down at the newly opened browser to see the headline saying she was dead. Which seemed a bit abrupt as, when I'd alighted on BBC1 a few minutes earlier, she was still merely 'under medical supervision'. Not believing anything that I read on the web, at the next commercial break I flipped back to the BBC for confirmation, then went back to Home and Away - we were reaching a crucial point in a major storyline, after all. Of course, on confirming that Her Majesty was dead, my heart sank. Not because of grief, but rather because it meant that we were about to be plunged into a period of 'official mourning', when the TV will play nothing but endless tributes to the late Queen for days on end, with everything - sport, comedy, etc - cancelled lest we plebs have the audacity to want to enjoy ourselves. The newspapers, likewise, will now be full of Royal fawning for the foreseeable future, (with the Daily Mail and Daily Express doubtless trying to prove that the queen was actually murdered by Meghan Markle).
It's not that I want to seem disrespectful here but, just as when Prince Philip died, much of the media reaction, particularly from the BBC, has been completely over the top. They don't seem to grasp that we are no longer living in the 1950s - people don't still have a hushed reverence for the monarchy, as they did then. Yes, we're all sorry that the Queen has died and sympathise with her family, but life goes on. Stopping people from watching soap operas or the football isn't going to force them into the sort of sack cloth and ashes mourning the establishment seems to think that we should be engaging in, lying prostrate in front of our portraits of the Queen and wailing our grief. What none of them seem to grasp is that nowadays there is a slew of digital and streaming channels which are happily carrying on as normal, even as the BBC and ITV scrap their schedules for the foreseeable future, replacing regular programming with sycophantic 'tributes' to the Queen, repeating the same old platitudes over and over again. I found it extremely depressing earlier today, when it was announced that the Queen was under 'medical supervision' and the news vultures started too gather at Balmoral, scenting blood. You could just see the expectation in Huw Edwards' eyes as he began to think that maybe he was going to crown his career by being the one to announce the death of a monarch on the BBC.
As the circus unfolded, I could hear my late father, an ardent anti-monarchist, complaining that the Queen couldn't at least have had the decency to die before the Platinum Jubilee, thereby saving the taxpayer millions of pounds. "Now we'll have to foot the bill for a State Funeral on top of that, not to mention a bloody coronation," he would have added. Still, we have to ask, was it mere coincidence that Her Majesty was taken ill after seeing Liz Truss in order to formally invite her to form a government? I hold her entirely responsible - the shock of realising that her kingdom was now to be run by a talentless swivel-eyed loon was clearly too much for the Queen. Personally, I think that Keir Starmer needs to stand up in the Commons, point an accusatory finger at Truss and declare: "You killed the Queen. You Cunt! Off with her head!"I'm sure that it would prove a popular move.
Rest in Pieces (1987) comes from the latter part of Jose Larraz's directorial career, which had descended into a welter of slasher movies and TV episodes. On the one hand, it seemed a long way from the string of off-beat, yet fascinating horror films and psychological thrillers he had directed in the UK earlier in his career, which had culminated with probably his two most celebrated films: Symptoms (1974) and Vampyres (1974). On the other hand, his later films which, rather bewilderingly included Gothic dramas, sex comedies and a female Bond knock off, retain a distinctive style and feel that leave you in little doubt that they are Larraz films. Even Rest in Pieces, a low budget supernatural thriller, has a typically 'art house' feel about it that distinguishes it from other contemporary cheap direct-to-video horror films. There's nothing terribly original about Rest in Pieces. Indeed, it mixes together ideas from a number of earlier horror films, including the zombie biker movie Psychomania (1972), (lifting the concept of suicide being some sort of gateway to living dead immortality), The Legacy (1979), with its conceit of diabolical inheritances and a gathering of acolytes of a deceased relative in order to secure their legacy, not to mention a whole slew of films, (not least those produced by Hammer), that involve plots to drive the heroine mad via macabre goings on in an old dark house. But, despite low production values, the film deploys these borrowed elements with a certain degree of tatty panache.
Commendably, Larraz gets the film off to a brisk start, with the heroine and her boyfriend going to her family lawyer to find out about an inheritance left to her by her late aunt, which involves them watching a video will which culminates with the aunt committing suicide by drinking poison. The inheritance turns out to be an estate in Connecticut which consists of several separate properties, most occupied by the aunt's mysterious tenants. All manner of weird stuff starts happening to the heroine, including ghostly visions of her aunt and objects flying around the house, while the tenants hold secret meetings and murder a group of visiting musicians as a sacrifice - part of a ritual to ensure the return of the aunt. The boyfriend, meanwhile, is distracted by stories that the aunt had hidden eight million dollars somewhere on the property. After various twists and turns, it emerges that the tenants are former inmates of the same psychiatric hospital that the aunt had once been treated at and had all died by their own hands some years before. They are not, however, ghosts, but rather the living dead, who believe that the aunt can follow them to resurrection if the heroine can be driven to suicide. What elevates the film somewhat is that none of this is presented in the usual flat manner of too many direct-to-video productions, with Larraz employing all manner of interesting shots and inventive camera angles. Moreover, the whole thing has a sense of dislocation - despite being set in the US, it is clearly filmed in Spain. No attempt is made to disguise this fact - all the cars, for instance, are European models with clearly visible Spanish plates, leaving the viewer feeling wrong footed from the outset.
The film's biggest weakness - apart from a budget that is low even by Larraz's standards - are its lead actors. Lorin Jean Vail as the heroine is simply wooden, while Scott Thompson Baker as her boyfriend is merely bland. The supporting cast, however, is quite impressive in a low budget way, headed up by Dorothy Malone as the aunt and including Euro-horror legend Jack Taylor as a very creepy blind man. It also features several recognisable UK TV faces, notably Jeffrey Segal and, as a crackpot Irish priest, Robert Case, who will be familiar to anyone who watched British TV in the seventies for his sitcom appearances, (particularly Rentaghost). Rest in Pieces is far from being Larraz's best work, but it is still an efficient low budget exploitation film. Unlike many other films of its ilk, Larraz does deliver the goods - he doesn't stint on the blood, the shock sequences, the suspense or even the bared breasts. It might be somewhat shabby looking, with some cheap and obvious effects work, not to mention those weak lead actors, but it is very watchable, never feeling too slow and never taking itself too seriously. Larraz was too good a director to just take the pay cheque and go through the motions, delivering a complete turkey. Rest in Pieces might not be great, but it is a cut above the average eighties direct-to-video shocker and provides a perfectly decent ninety minutes or so of entertainment in its own dog-eared way.
'What Will Boris Do Next?' asked the BBC News website the other day. 'Fuck off and die' or, at the very least, just fuck off somewhere a long way from here, would, I think, be the preferred options if we were to be given a choice. Not that we will be given a choice, with the flabby bounder doubtless fantasising a return to the top job once his successor has fouled up, (as she inevitably will, so clueless does swivel-eyed loon Liz Truss seem when it comes to actually devising and implementing substantive policies rather than just slogans). Such fantasies - shared by his tiny band of acolytes - ignore the reality that, in order to achieve this, he'd need the support of the parliamentary Tory party, who are the very people who forced him out after losing confidence in him. But then again, they've decided to instead place their confidence in Liz Truss, so maybe there is hope for the fat layabout to make a comeback yet. Speaking of Liz Truss, her ascent to the top hasn't been the result of luck, ('falling upwards' as they say of the ascent of the incompetent), or simply being in the right place at the right time. It has clearly been carefully orchestrated. Cast your mind back a few months when Johnson's position within the Tory party first started to look tenuous and remember those articles that started appearing in the right wing press promoting her as a possible replacement. At the time, they seemed to come out of nowhere: ridiculous puff pieces promoting a much ridiculed (with good reason) politician no serious pundit rated as a contender for the Tory leadership.
What's obvious now is that the wealthy backers of the Tory party, as fronted for by the right-wing press, saw her as the perfect replacement for Johnson: easily manipulated into doing their bidding but less of a loose cannon. Lo and behold, once Johnson was ousted and the gates opened on the leadership race, these very same press outlets obliged by building a band wagon for Truss, constantly talking her up while undermining more experienced and qualified candidates, (I say 'experienced' and 'qualified', but still they are all Tory bastards). Why shouldn't these shadowy backers feel entitled to believe that Truss is their perfect puppet PM? After all, she apparently has no actual convictions or ideological commitment, instead saying whatever she thinks the people who can put her into power want to hear. Her political journey has seen her travel from Liberal Democrat to right-wing Tory, from avid remainer to fervent Brexiteer. Opportunism is her only creed. Her allegiances have been made clear with her claims that - in the face of soaring energy bills and concomitant soaring and unearned profits by energy providers - 'profit' isn't a dirty word, rejecting the idea of windfall taxes, not to mention her statement that we shouldn't look at taxation from the perspective of 'redistribution' and that there's nothing wrong with tax cuts that make the rich richer. She's all for the vested interests, the wealthy few, the accumulation of wealth by the 1% - and why shouldn't she be? They're the ones who have propelled her, undeserved though her rise has been, based on her actual record in government, enabled by them. It's payback time.
I actually watched this one again the other week. The fourth entry in Roger Corman's cycle of Poe-based features for AIP it emphasises the problems which lay with attempting to adapt the source material. The previous films in the series, adapting some of Poe's best known titles, had already shown how thinly spread the original material had to be in order to fill out a movie to feature length. All were loose adaptations of the original stories, taking the central ideas and fleshing them out with lots of atmospheric goings on in musty-seeming, fog shrouded sets. It must have seemed natural, at this point in the cycle, to attempt an anthology film, adapting three unrelated stories and packaging them into a feature, with the only link between the episodes being the presence of Vincent Price in each. At shorter length, it might be assumed, the original stories could be adapted more faithfully. But, as Tales of Terror (1962) shows, even with only a short running time to fill, Poe's stories still needed lots of padding.
The first story, 'Morella', for instance, bears only a passing resemblance to the story of the same name, retaining the basic scenario,setting and character names, but substituting a new plot to turn it into a 'revenge from beyond the grave' story. It's undoubtedly atmospheric and contains some striking imagery, but feels too much like a condensed variation on The House of Usher (1960). The third story, 'The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar', in story form was little more than a vignette, so, likewise, required much padding out, making the hypnotist the villain of the piece and inventing a plot involving lust and greed. While less atmospheric than 'Morella', it is, as it stands, an enjoyable, if unsubstantial, episode, the best thing about it being the presence of Basil Rathbone as the hypnotist. It is the middle episode of Tales of Terror that is the most successful, Not only is it based on one of Poe's best known titles, 'The Black Cat', but it features Peter Lorre, who gives a fine comedic performance. Moreover, it sticks more closely to its source, in spirit at least, than many other Poe adaptations, (although parts of another story, 'The Cask of Amontillado' are also incorporated). It also proved influential on the next entry in the Poe series, The Raven (1963), which also teamed Lorre with Price and was played completely for laughs. The Raven also marked the point at which the films moved decisively away from its source material, using only the titles and basic themes of its source stories and inventing original stories, (or, in the case of The Haunted Palace (1964), actually adapting an H P Lovecraft story under a Poe title).
Ultimately, Tales of Terror epitomises what I've always found unsatisfactory about Corman's Poe series: they simply feel too slight, too unsubstantial, reliant upon atmosphere and - in all but one case - the performances of Vincent Price to carry them along. It is notable that the only one that doesn't feature Price, The Premature Burial (1961) which stars Ray Milland instead, is the least successful - even upping the amount of swirling fog, filters and sound effects can't disguise the fact that the lack of Price's presence robs it of much dramatic weight. Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy these films, or dismiss them. They are hugely enjoyable, (and have been hugely influential), but I've never found them entirely satisfying. Ultimately, of course, that reflects the source material: Poe's stories are likewise often slight and insubstantial, little more than a brilliantly macabre idea, making them near-impossible to adapt effectively for the screen. The Corman films, whilst flawed, remain probably the best attempt to translate them to the screen.
'We Found the Slave Trader's Treasure of Madagascar!'
By November 1965 sales wee in decline for men's magazines so, like this issue of Real Men, they had not just to pack more sex, scandal and sensation into every issue, but they had to make sure that potential buyers knew of its content by packing the cover with images and headlines. Here we have not one, but two cover paintings, (both looking like they might have been cropped from larger cover paintings from earlier issues), and five stories highlighted. Five very sensational stories covering the gamut of popular men's magazine concerns. Two of them hold out the promise of salacious sex scandals, with another of those 'true confessions' of young swingers, this time as to their 'wife swapping games' and the promise of some sado-masochism with 'A Night With the Pain Lovers'. (As mentioned before, the illustration for the latter looks suspiciously like it is cropped from a cover illustrating some kind of war story involving the terrible torture and abuse of young women prisoners).
War stories are represented by 'Breakout From a Nazi Death Camp' and, reflecting contemporary realities, 'We Lived Through an Ambush by the Viet Cong'. (Like the Korean war before it, the Vietnam war was a bonus for the publishers of men's magazines as it meant that those cover paintings depicting 'beastly Japs' doing beastly things to western women could be recycled with only a minimum of retouching). Finally, we have another treasure hunt story, promising that 'We Found the Slave Trader's Treasure of Madagascar!' Which, apparently, consisted of '$44,000,000 in Rubies ans Sapphires'. Even in the sixties this sort of treasure hunt story was popular, feeding into male fantasies of stumbling across hidden riches which would propel you into some kind of playboy lifestyle. The treasures involved were usually pirate (or slave traders) lost caches - discovery of which involved travel to exotic tropical locales full of topless women - or sometimes Nazi gold, (usually hidden in less glamourous locations and also being sought by dangerous war criminals wanting it to finance their putative 'Fourth Reich'). Such stories are still with us, but nowadays they are sold, via TV series on things like the Discovery Channel, as true stories of people seeking sunken pirate wrecks for their treasure. In many ways these supposedly 'true life' documentaries and the channels that carry them are the true descendants of the men's magazines.
