State Funerals, Fly-Headed Men and Pirate Videos

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.