What Have You Done to Solange? (1972)

An archetypal giallo, (also the first part of Daliamanno's 'Girls in Peril' trilogy), What Have You Done to Solange (1972), tells a sordid tale of past sins catching up with the present, but presented in a glossy, artistically filmed format.An Italian-German co-production filmed on location in the UK, it was marketed in Germany as an Edgar Wallace derived 'Krimi', with co-producer Rialto attempting to cash in on the popularity of its sixties Wallace adaptations, despite the film, in reality, having nothing to do with anything written by the author, particularly not his story 'The Clue of the New Pin', which was cited as a source.  It does have some elements one might expect from a Wallace based thriller: most notably that the killer disguises themself as a priest (complete with false beard), villainous fake monks having been commonplace in the 'Krimi' adaptations.  The private girls' school background of the story, (that school really should vet its staff better, counting a peeping tom a murderer and a gym teacher, played by Fabio Testi, who is having an affair with a sixteen year old student), the terrorising and murder of young girls, (not to mention the frequent nudity of said girls) and a plot hinging on a backstreet abortion, ensure that the sleaze and exploitation factors are ramped up to the maximum.  Yet, despite this, the film still comes over as, well, tasteful in the way in which it presents this subject matter, making the viewer feel as if it is all OK because they are watching a sophisticated looking thriller rather than an exploitation film.

Technically speaking, as mentioned, the film actually looks beautiful, making excellent use of its London locations with Daliamanno employing all manner of interesting angles to frame his shots.  While it moves at a langourous pace, adding to the dream like feel the director is striving to create, it always holds the attention - there is always something happening, always an unexpected twist to the tale as it unfolds.  Chief among these is the sudden murder of what we had assumed to be the heroine, played by Christina Galbo, part way through the film. The multi-national cast are generally good, with Fabio Testi in the lead managing not to be completely dislikeable and sleazy as the hero, despite having a relationship with a student in his care.  The dubbing on the English language version is, for once, excellent, the result, apparently, of the cast, regardless of nationality, performing their lines in English, so that the lip movements synched up with the dubbing artists.  It is so good that I began to believe that Joachim Fukesberger, playing the police inspector, really does sound like Edmond Purdom, despite having heard his real voice in German language films.  

Problematic areas of the story include the very late introduction of the titular Solange, so that, despite her having a crucial role to play in the drama, we never really know her as a character, limiting our sympathy with her with regard to her treatment.  Moreover, by 1972, in the mainland UK at least, terminating a pregnancy, (a key fulcrum of the plot), wouldn't necessarily have been such an issue, even for a sixteen year old girl, as it was, by then, legal, (although I'm sure that there were all sorts of administrative hoops that women were forced to go through and for a girl of that age parents would undoubtedly have had been involved).  Certainly, it seems less likely that a girl with an unwanted pregnancy would subject themselves to the risk of an illicit termination in non-clinical conditions.  Then again, the film wasn't primarily aimed at UK audiences, but rather those in countries where the Catholic church still held sway and terminations still weren't legal, even in 1972, so featuring them in a film might still be seen as taboo breaking.  These criticisms aside, What Have You Done to Solange? remains a stylish and effective thriller, helped along no end by a typical Ennio Morricone score, (which, in places, is reminiscent of parts of his recent score for Fisful of Dynamite (1971)).

Fake World Cup

I've been waiting for someone to ask me if I'm enjoying the World Cup so that I can tell them that I'm boycotting it.  But nobody has, so I'm going to tell you instead.  I'll be honest here, my boycott started accidentally - I completely forgot that England were playing their first match last week, so missed it completely.  Not only did I find that I was completely unbothered by this, but it brought home to me my complete disinterest in the charade tat is the 2022 World Cup.  I had already barely noticed that the opening match was taking place the day before the England match, so muted has the UK media been in the build up to this event.  Which, to be honest, is as it should be - the decision to award the 2022 World cup to Qatar was a travesty from the outset.  A nation with no footballing tradition, (not to mention only one stadium when the event was awarded), a highly dubious human rights record, unable to stage the event in the summer, (despite this being a criteria when it was awarded), but lots and lots of oil money.  This is the ultimate in 'sportswashng, using a sporting event to rehabilitate and legitimise a repressive regime in the hope of bringing it international respectability, with FIFA fully complicit in the exercise.  Qatar has no business staging this, or any other major international event.  But, of course, such decisions aren't guided by things like morality, but rather by money and politics.  Hence the fact that we've had the Olympics, (both summer and winter), held in such paragons of human rights and democracy as the Soviet Union/Russia and China.  Not to mention a recent World Cup in Russia.  One might also point at the chequered histories of several South American hosts of the World Cup with regard to democracy and human rights.

So here we are in Qatar in 2022, with local officials trying to tell us that people wanting to wave rainbow flags, wear rainbow hats and armbands in support of the LGBQT community that is severely repressed in his country as 'divisive' and how everyone should be respecting local 'customs and traditions'.  Not to forget FIFA happily coercing participating teams into suppressing even the mildest and most peaceful protests.  But getting back to those 'local traditions': let's not forget that these include locking up LGBQT people simply for being 'different' and working poorly paid migrant workers with no health and safety protections to death.  Yeah, we all should be respecting those, shouldn't we?  You know, I've surprised myself as to just how strongly I feel about these issues. On top of all that, we've also had FIFA bending over backwards to accommodate their oil rich buddies by disrupting football leagues the world over in order to stage the event in the winter, despite Qatar having won it on the basis that they could stage it, as normal, in the summer.  Consequently, it simply doesn't even feel like a proper World Cup.  Indeed, I've come to think of it as a fake World Cup, like how they sometimes used to have fake Popes who would set up shop somewhere other than Rome and claim to be the 'real' Pope.  Or those pretenders to the throne you used to get - fake Kings desperately trying to establish their legitimacy.  Like those, all of Qatar and FIFA's attempts to convince us that this World cup is the real thing and actually legitimate are ultimately unconvincing.  For FIFA, especially, this has been a PR disaster, with their apparent propping up of a repressive regime by lending them the 'prestige' of staging their premier event completely undermining all their attempts that, since the corruption scandals that swept away Sepp Blatter and his cronies, they are a reformed, corruption free, organisation.  Personally, I think that the best thing they can do is simply expunge this World Cup from the records altogether and hope that people forget about their pandering to Qatar's Sheiks and their oil billions.  Because it really is easy to ignore right now, as I've found.

A Last Slice of Turkey

Having spent the week talking about various Turkish films, it's probably best to wrap it all up by briefly look at the background to their production.  It's easy to laugh at the crudeness of their production, but it is important to remember that many of them were made when the indigenous Turkish film industry was still in its infancy.  As mentioned earlier, most of these Turkish action and superhero movies don't feature optical effects as the technology and experience simply didn't exist in Turkey at the time.  In view of the restrictions and lack of resources the film makers had to work with, it is frankly amazing that any of these movies got made at all.  Rather like Ed Wood, who was so in love with the idea of film-making that, even though he had no discernible talent for it, that he was prepared to make them with no money or resources, I find the Turkish dedication to trying to replicate the sort of foreign film product they loved, in the face of impossible odds, admirable.  Although I'm no expert on the history of Turkish cinema, these types of film seemed to start appearing in significant numbers in the mid sixties, indicating that they might have been a response to the start of national TV broadcasting in the country.  In common with film industries everywhere, the Turkish producers and exhibitors had to fight back against this new rival by offering audiences something they couldn't see on TV: Turkish versions of their favourite film characters.

Which brings us to another important point about these films which co-opt Hollywood and European characters and tropes into a uniquely Turkisk cinematic vision - they represent an important milestone in Turkey's cultural development.  The fact is that we all like to see people who look and sound like us doing heroic stuff on screen.  Hence the appetite in Turkey for indigenous versions of Republic serials, superhero films, TV series like Star Trek etc, relocated to Turkey and featuring familiar Turkish stars.  Modern Turkey is still a relatively young nation, existing in its present form only since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War One, so these films represent part of the process of establishing their national identity.  The Turks have always been in an odd position geographically and culturally, seemingly never really accepted by Europe, which tended to refer to them as belonging to 'Asia Minor' rather than Europe.  Yet, at the same time, they weren't really part of Asia, geographically or culturally, nor were they part of the Arab Middle East.  By taking these various iconic characters from Europe and the US and making them their own, the Turks were  effectively asserting themselves as being the equals of their originators.  .Anyway, I've only scratched the surface of Turkish exploitation films this week.  There are many, many more, replicating just about any English language hit you can think of - there are at least two Turkish Rambo knock offs, a Turkish Rocky, the notorious Star Wars and Superman imitations, even a version of the Italian giallo movie The Strange Perversion of Mrs Warhd (1971).  While some are straightforward remakes, many work ingenious twists on their originals.  They are of variable quality, by the early eighties colour was the norm, (a response, perhaps, to Turkish TV going into colour in 1981), and production values, (while still incredibly cheap), improved.  I have to say that watching these films has left me with a deep and profound love for Turkish movie schlock.  All credit to 'The B-Zone' on Roku for showing them this past week - it was quite an experience!

Turkey Time in Space

The other day I speculated that the 1973 Turkish Batman film might actually have been intended as a parody, but that this aspect might have been 'lost in translation' when the film was seen by English speaking audiences, who just assumed it was a bad movie, pure and simple.  The 'badness' might actually have been intentional, (although the physical 'badness' of the film - the over exposure, for instance - was most certainly not intentional).  Another Turkish film which has definitely been misinterpreted and misrepresented in the English speaking world is the so called 'Turkish Star Trek'.  I've seen speculation that it was some kind of Turkish fan film, but the reality is that Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda (1973), (Omer the Tourist in Star Trek), is the last of eight feature films based around the character of 'Omer the Tourist', an itinerant Turkish layabout who finds himself in a variety of unexpected locations and situations.  Played by Sadri Ailsik, the character was hugely popular in Turkey, but virtually unknown outside the country.  With the Star Trek TV series also popular in Turkey, it was inevitable that there should be a crossover, (entirely unauthorised on the part of Trek's copyright owners, Paramount, of course).  Meaning that the film is the Turkish equivalent to, say, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), in trying to squeeze more mileage out of two existing properties by combining them.  The thing about this film, though, (and what has undoubtedly confused some commentators as to its nature), is that for its opening twenty minutes or so it seems to be a straight Star Trek knock off, with bargain basement recreations of the original's sets and costumes.  Indeed, the script itself is taken, pretty much faithfully, from the first season episode 'Man Trap', (actually the first broadcast episode).  The set-up is the same, the characters the same, the dialogue pretty much identical.  Where it departs from the actual episode is when the professor decides to provide Kirk and co with a scapegoat for the killings perpetrated by the shape shifting alien currently pretending to be his dead wife, by bringing a man from the past (who won't be missed) to the planet.  Enter Omer the Tourist.

The rest of the film is basically the Omer character disrupting the work of the Enterprise crew, particularly Mr Spock, with his antics and interpolating himself into various scenes from the original episode, to 'comic effect'.  The film eventually departs from the TV episode when everyone beams back down to the planet, becoming almost a Star Trek 'greatest hits' homage as elements from other episodes, including 'What Are Little Girls Made of?', 'Arena' and 'Amok Time' are dragged in.  Eventually, the monster is killed and Omer is beamed back to his own time, but finds that he has imbued with some of Spock's attributes - including the pointed ears and nerve grip - to 'hilarious' effect.  If nothing else, the Omer-centric parts of the film just go to show how localised humour can be and how it often fails to travel.  The nearest equivalent to Omer in English language films would be either Jerry Lewis or Norman Wisdom, but without the child like aspect.  While he shares their physical humour, he combines it with a degree of aggression reminiscent of Arthur Haines' stage persona - he represents the 'common man' and 'common sense', supposedly cutting through the pretensions of the educated.  Consequently, he spends a lot of time trying to upend Spock's logic and driving the computer to a nervous breakdown.  Unfortunately, like the aforementioned Lewis and Wisdom, I find this sort of character simply irritating.  Subsequently, for me, the film moves from mildly amusing to utterly painful as soon as Omer arrives.  The amusement in the earlier parts derives from seeing something you know well being recreated on a budget even lower than the original.  That said, despite being made the same year as the Batman film, Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda is, on a technical, if not budgetary, level far more advanced.  For one thing, it is in colour, for another, it actually usual uses some optical effects for the phaser beams and transporters.  In true Turkish fashion, however, all the shots of the USS Enterprise in space are pirated from the TV series.  Possibly because, for the most part, the makers were working from a professionally written script, (a lot of the Omer scenes were, apparently, partially improvised), the direction and editing also look far more professional than on other Turkish films of this ilk.

The approximations of the original's sets are pretty basic looking, indeed, like something an amateur fan production might have come up with.  The costumes are, up to a point, quite accurate looking - except that instead of the original's gold, blue and red uniforms, the film adds green and fawn coloured ones, (this might have been due to the fact that Turkish TV didn't go into colour until 1981, meaning the makers might not have seen the actual colours used, or had based their costumes on the less than accurate comic strip versions of Star Trek available at the time).  It's clear that the colour coding of the uniforms was lost on the makers: Science Officer Spock wears a gold 'command' shirt rather than the correct 'life sciences' blue, for instance.  There is no attempt to cast actors who look like the original cast, (a non-Asian Sulu, for example, although their 'Yoeman Janice' (Rand) is quite a good likeness for the original and Uhura is at least black and a woman), nor do any of them attempt to imitate the acting styles of the original.  As a consequence, without William Shatner's often over dramatic playing of the character, Kirk comes over as a bland and often distant figure, while Dr McCoy lacks any of DeForest Kelley's warmth or cantankerousness.  Spock, (or 'Spak' as the sub-titles call him) comes off best, played straight for the most part but, in the film's latter section, reduced to be being a straight-man foil to Omer's tiresome antics.  On the plus side, while the interiors might betray a threadbare budget, the exterior scenes on the planet are quite magnificent.  Apparently shot in the ruins of the Ancient Greek Anatolian city of Ephesus, (now in modern Turkey), they make quite the contrast with the usually studio-bound planetary surfaces of the original TV series.

Ultimately, your enjoyment of Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda is largely going to be dependent upon your tolerance levels for the comedy of Omer the Tourist.  If, like me, you quickly find him tiresome, then it could turn into a bit of a slog.  On the other hand, it does have much better production values than other Turkish exploitation films of its era, (doubtless, the fact that it was an Omer the Tourist film meant that it had a bigger budget than them).  Conversely, the better quality of the production and the grounding of the script in an actual episode of the original, prevent it from fully taking off into the realms of lunacy one usually expects from these Turkish knock offs.  The joys of the films featuring Batman or Captain America, or even indigenous superheroes like 'Iron Claw', is the way in which they reinterpret and reinvent their source materials to meet local audience expectations, becoming uniquely Turkish in the process.  That's the problem with 'Turkish Star Trek' - despite the presence of a legendary (in Turkey, at least) local comedy character, it never really feels like a local product in the way that, say, the Batman film does.  Still, at sround only seventy minutes long, it isn't too taxing to sit through, even if you feel like strangling Omer for fifty of those minutes.

More Turkish Delight (Part Two)

Yarasa adam - Bedmen (1973) is a Turkish movie which reimagines Batman and Robin as a pair of gun-toting insurance investigators who attend strip clubs and drive an Austin 1100.  As usual in the wild, wild world of sixties and seventies Turkish films the production is entirely unauthorised by the characters' copyright holders and the whole thing is made on a shoe-string budget.  While the film's date of production might imply that it was inspired by the camp sixties Batman TV series, in truth it has little in common with that production, instead owing more to old cinema serials and James Bond movies and their imitators.  Indeed, identifying the two heroes as Batman and Robin often seems like an afterthought for the sake of marketing.  The fact that they work for an insurance company and for some reason don masks and costumes to carry out their two-fisted investigations could well be a reference back to The Masked Marvel (1943), an old Republic serial where the title character is eventually revealed as one of a group of insurance investigators.  Then again, it could have been inspired by the two late sixties Richard Johnson starring Bulldog Drummond movies which reimagined the character as a swinging sixties insurance investigator.  The plot is pure pulp, involving ten people - mainly women - who have won some kind of award from a magazine being murdered.  They've all been insured by the magazine's owner (who is himself on the list), making him the prime suspect, until he turns up dead himself.  Of course, it is Batman and Robin's company that has insured them all and so sends the caped loss adjusters out to resolve the situation.  The James Bond influence is evident in the fact that the villain is a bald guy whose face we don't see (until the end), who is forever stroking a cat as he sends his cohorts out to kill people and/or stop Batman and Robin.  In keeping with the low-rent nature of the production, rather than a pedigree cat like Blofeld's, this villain's cat is a common or garden tabby moggy.  (It is somewhat reassuring to find that Turkish cats are as bad actors as other feline thespians - this one seems fascinated by the camera and keeps staring directly into it).

In common with many Turkish costumed superheros of the era, Batman and Robin frequently take their masks off and sometimes don't even bother with their costumes.  Their fighting style is so gymnastic that they nearly always ditch their capes before getting to grips with the bad guys.  This, of course, seems to mean that their identities are anything but secret from either friend or foe.  Imdeed, despite the fact that Batman receives his orders via a tape recording, (clearly Mission Impossible was also popular in Turkey, although the tape doesn't self-destruct, Batman has to destroy it himself, in keeping with the film's low budget ethos), implying that his identity is secret even from his employers, this isn't the case - a senior executive turns up at the end to thank an unmasked Batman for saving the company so much money.  So non-secret is his real identity that this Batman even has a girlfriend who knows who he is, not that this stops him from using the notoriety of his Batman identity to pull and sleep with other women as well, working his way through most of the female characters.  Compared with Adam West's portrayal on TV, this is a decidedly sleazy Batman, who happily visits strip clubs as part of his 'investigations' and has no qualms about gunning down villains when a fist fight isn't going hos way.  His lack of compassion for any of the victims of the insurance plot is noteworthy - when he and Robin find the stripper they went to protect dead in her dressing room, he merely shrugs.  Even when he hears that another female victim, who he had been bonking, has been murdered, his grief is short-lived, (he's in bed banging another random naked chick he's picked up at the time).  By making Batman and Robin employees of an insurance company, the film, of course, completely changes the dynamic of the characters - they aren't interested in keeping the citizens of Gotham City, or Istanbul, safe from villains, but rather in preventing fraudulent insurances claims.  If the people they are supposedly protecting die, well, just so long as they can prevent an insurance payout, it's no biggie.  (I also assume that their employment status is the reason for their 'Batmobile' being an Austin 1100 - clearly, it's a company car).

Which is just as well, as this dynamic duo are actually pretty crap - they eventually only prevent one murder.  Even then, it is only because the main villain has decided to kidnap and rape the last insured girl before he kills her, giving Batman and Robin time to crash his headquarters and save her virtue - Batman breaks the villain's neck as he's about to get down to it - but not her modesty, as she's already topless by then.  Their investigation gets nowhere for most of the film due to their inability to ever capture any of the henchman alive - if they don't shoot them then they give them enough time to take cyanide pills or smoke poisoned cigarettes.  They really are amongst the most incompetent superheros committed to film.  Perhaps this is intentional.  Maybe this was intended as a parody of superheros, debunking their heroic image by showing them as flawed and human.  These things are all too easily lost in translation, (especially when relying upon English sub-titles which seem to be auto-generated, so bizarre does some of the dialogue seem).  The levels of sex and female nudity also imply that the film was aimed at an older, perhaps more sophisticated audience, than most of these films.  Regardless of the target audience, the plot is as perfunctory as ever, (the villain's real identity is painfully obvious, despite an attempt at misdirection), existing only to provide a way of stringing together a series of furious fights and car chases, most of which are well-staged and choreographed in the Republic serials manner.  The aspect of the film that seems to attract the most comment in the English speaking world is the apparent underlying homoeroticism in the relationship between Batman and Robin.  There's no doubt that it sometimes comes over that way - Robin's look of disappointment every time Batman dismisses him so that he can get it on with a chick implies an unrequited love, for instance, let alone their fighting style which involves lots of lifts as one throws the other at the bad guys - but I very much doubt that it is intentional.

On a technical level, the film, or at least the publicly available prints, looks awful.  Shot in black and white, it is grainy and scratchy and, worse, has clearly been overexposed in places, bleaching out the picture.  Moreover, as with most Turkish films of the era, there is a total absence of optical effects.  Continuity is also often absent - one moment Batman and Robin are driving in their car in street clothes, the next minute they are leaping out in full costume, for example, while the musical score, as ever, is pirated, (mainly from On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), just t ram home the Bond influence, although Edwin Astley's theme from The Saint TV series and some Led Zeppelin, amongst others, are also present).  That said, the direction is, in fits and starts, superior to many of its contemporaries.  Early on, for instance, there is a very impressively staged point-of-view tracking shot as Batman enters the building where he is to receive his tape recorded mission instructions.  There is also a well staged car chase along winding roads, shot in a series of long, unedited takes, while some interesting angles and framing shots are used - the stripper in club is shot from a very low angle, (affording an unusual view from below pf her breasts as she strips - I'd like to think this was an artistic choice, but I strongly suspect it was merely audience titillation. But, running at just over an hour, Yarasa adam - Bedmen isn't a taxing watch. Indeed, of the Turkish movies I've so far seen, I have to say that it is the most entertaining and I have to say that its radical reworking of the subject matter makes a refreshing change from most Hollywood treatments of the superhero genre.  Let's face it, this is the movie that Joel Schumacer should have made instead of Batman and Robin - George Clooney's Batman as sleazy company man, more interested in bedding the ladies and undoubtedly falsifying his expenses claims on a big studio budget is something I'd happily have paid to see.

More Turkish Delight

I've been watching more of those Turkish films, courtesy of the B-Zone on Roku.  I sat 'those Turkish films' as if my viewing experience encompasses the whole of Turkish cinema.  In reality, what I've been watching are more examples of Turkish knock offs of Hollywood properties with no regard for copyright.  Actually, the first one I saw this weekend was interesting because it wasn't a direct rip off of a specific US character or movie.  Iron Claw The Pirate (as its title is usually given in English), is an early example of a Turkish-made action film, dating from the late sixties and shot in black and white, it seems to take its inspiration in part from old forties Republic serials and in equal part from more recent European crime movies.  The frenetic action - the non-action scenes are perfunctory and hurried through as quickly as possible in order to get to the next fight sequence - two fisted hero and frequent capture and escape of various characters, makes it feel like one of the condensed, feature length, versions of those old serials.  The Euro-crime influence is seen in the presence of international super villain Fantomas, hiding behind a mask and commanding an army of minions in pursuit of some complex (and largely incomprehensible) plot.  The levels of sheer viciousness also owe something to the Euro-thrillers: Fantomas gleefully murders (or has murdered) anyone who has crossed him or suspected of crossing him.  A foreign contact is personally machine gunned to death by the villain, a professor is similarly mown down by henchmen, while Fantomas personally stabs the professor's daughter to death while she is tied to a table, (one of several women he murders in the course of the film).  Not that the good guys don't inflict plenty of carnage, with hero 'Iron Claw' and his sidekicks gunning down bad guys on sight - no due process, reading of rights or rule of law here.  Indeed, at film's end, he and his cop buddy have to be dissuaded from executing the captured Fantomas - only at this point are they swayed by the notion of justice.

Some observations on Iron Claw The Pirate - just why the protagonist is called 'Iron Claw' is never explained , he certainly doesn't wield such a thing, preferring fists, gun and whip to beat up the bad guts.  Oh yeah, he isn't a pirate, either.  Moreover, we get no real explanation as to who he is - we get a brief scene where we see him handed his gun and gun belt by an unseen character, after which he roars off on his motorbike vowing vengeance.  Against whom and for what, we never know.  We also never quite get to know his status with regard to the authorities - he wears a mask, sometimes, works closely with the police and government agents, but also seems to operate independently.  His main contact with other agencies is 'The Uncle', a mustachioed old dude who likes to snooze in a chair a lot, yet, despite the secrecy that having such a 'cut off' implies, everybody seems to recognise 'Iron Claw', even when he isn't wearing a mask and he even has business cards and an office at police headquarters.  Perhaps the character appeared in Turkish comics or pulp novels, so all this would make sense to the local audiences the film was aimed at.  Who knows?  Certainly nobody in the English speaking world.  The treatment of women has to addressed - female characters are always getting tied up in their lingerie, physically abused and often horribly murdered.  This does seem to be something of a trope in Turkish action films and, while not unique to Turkish films, does seem to be taken to extremes in these movies.  Special effects and optical effects are non-existent.  Even the titles are printed on cards rather than appearing on-screen.  This, apparently, reflected the situation i n the Turkish film industry at the time, where the technology and facilities to produce such effects simply didn't exist.  Consequently, the only effects you see are practical and created 'in camera'.  There's also the usual pirated musical score, (perhaps 'Iron Claw' is a pirate in that sense), in this case mainly from Goldfinger.  Finally, the direction consists mainly of simply ensuring the camera is in the right place to catch the action - there are no panning shots or tricky angles and the editing is purely functional. 

While not an actual unauthorised 'knock off'' of a specific copyrighted character or film, Iron Claw certainly captures the feel of Republic superhero serials like Spy Smasher or Captain America.  Judging by the depiction of 'Captain America' in Three Giant Men (aka Turkish Spiderman), these serials must have been shown and had a considerable influence in Turkey, making it natural that local versions would eventually be produced.  For all its cinematic deficiencies, Iron Claw is a pretty good imitation of those serials and if, like me, you have a soft spot for them, it is actually pretty entertaining, even if much of the plot is nonsensical.  its popularity in Turkey is witnessed by the fact that it spawned a sequel a few years later.  Unfortunately, I haven't seen that, so I don't know whether it reveals more about its titular hero's origins, or whether these remain forever shrouded in mystery.

Still Tanked Up

I've made a start on those tatty looking tankers I bought off of eBay for my model railway.  I've so far focused on the four worst painted wagons, with interesting results:

The oven cleaner I use as a paint stripper is generally very effective at taking anything it is used on back down to the bare plastic, (or metal), ready for repainting.  In the case of these four wagons, instead of having a paint finish, they were made using coloured plastic, so the paint stripping has taken them back to their original finish. (I'm not sure exactly what the previous owner of these wagons used to paint them with, but even the oven cleaner had a job removing all of it).  My original intent was to repaint the three TTA tankers in either black or grey, (the authentic liveries for heavy or light oil products respectively), but I've found myself somewhat enamoured by my yellow Shell wagon and my two Texaco red wagons.  I know that these were never real life tanker liveries, but they have a certain nostalgia for me, as I remember seeing them in Triang Hornby and Hornby catalogues when I was a kid.  

Obviously, as can be seen, while the tankers have been returned to their original factory covers, some of the decals have suffered damage in the paint stripping.  While I could have passed that off as 'weathering', I've instead purchased some reproduction decals for them.  The 'Texaco' decals are actually for the later 100 ton bogie tanker that Hornby produced and are slightly larger than those originally used on the TTAs, but they'll do the job just as well.  The fourth wagon seen here isn't, of course, a tanker wagon, but rather a cement wagon.  Or, at least, what Triang originally produced as cement wagon.  This one has been revealed, after stripping, as the later grey version, which was marketed as an ICI fertiliser wagon.  (I've since established that there was also a grey version of the Blue Circle Cement wagon).  Coincidentally, another badly repainted cement wagon I purchased separately has also been revealed as having originally been this grey type.  I've decided, however, to refinish both of them as the more common yellow cement wagons, as these are more appropriate for a layout based on BR Southern Region, (bulk cement trains carrying Portland cement for various suppliers were a common sight.on the region).  As can be seen, among the reproduction decals are some for the yellow Blue Circle Cement version of this wagon.  Consequently, the two cement wagons will be resprayed bright yellow before applying these.  

So, there you are - I've surprised myself by actually making a flying start on this project.  There's still work to be done, obviously.  Not only do new decals have to be applied to these and some of the other wagons in this batch, but a couple of them also need new couplings.  But, hey, I'm getting there.

Small Talk

So, how's it going?  Been enjoying the relatively mild temperatures for this time of year?  Looking forward to the World Cup?  Yeah, I'm making small talk, (or trying to as I'm hopeless at small talk) because this is another of those days when I could have sworn that I had an idea for a great post, but when it came to write it, I found that the idea, whatever it had been, had gone clear out of my head. It probably doesn't help that I've spent a lot of the day distracted by practical matters - like replacing the ceiling light switch in my bathroom without electrocuting myself.  (I pulled the right fuse this time and isolated the lighting circuit from the mains - many, many years ago I pulled the wrong one, didn't bother checking whether the lights were off and got quite a shock as I tried to replace that same switch.  My scream of pain and the crash as I fell off the chair I was standing on alarmed the neighbours so much that they came knocking on my door to check that I was OK).  So, until I think of something profound to post, we're left with small talk.  As I noted before, I'm terrible at small talk - I'm sure that's one of the reasons I had so much trouble in my former workplace.  My lack of interest in talking about soap operas, reality TV and the latest celebrity gossip, meant that I tended just to sit at my desk and get on with my paperwork when I was in the office, resulting in other people assuming I was aloof or anti-social.  (OK, I am anti-social, but this behaviour is never intended as some kind of personal slight - which it seemed to be taken as at work.  Just like my lack of interest in attending office Christmas - its nothing personal, I just don't like office parties of any kind).

Undoubtedly, my lack of facility for small talk is why I've never really engaged properly with social media.  My Facebook account is minimalist and exists only so that I can get communications from a couple of groups I belong to and to maintain the page for The Sleaze.  Likewise, my engagement with Twitter has slackened off completely - I follow a few interesting people, but rarely Tweet myself.  Mind you, if Elon Musk carries on with his mismanagement of Twitter, it could well die a death pretty soon.  (Apparently, he's now locked everyone out of Twitter HQ after most of the employees he hadn't already fired declined to accept new terms of employment).  There's no doubt that there's been a noticeable decline in activity in my Twitter timeline since Musk bought Twitter - and I don't follow that many people in the first place.  I have actually set up a Mastodon account, just in case Twitter goes down.  The trouble is that, lacking small talk skills, I find myself with nothing to Toot about.  Plus, nobody I follow on Twitter seems be on Mastodon.  All in all, a pointless exercise, not helped by the fact that Mastodon just doesn't feel as easy to use as Twitter.  Maybe another, easy to use, social media platform will rise to replace Twitter and everyone will migrate there, so I can lurk in the shadows there instead.  It's funny, but my lack of small talk even affects the way I use things like You Tube: despite informally following quite a few channels, I never comment, not even when they are running livestreams.  I'm content just to be an observer.  (Although, the other day I found myself talking back again to a guy in a video making a hash of trying to refurbish an old Triang locomotive.  I really must stop doing that).  Anyway, I think that I've exhausted my small talk - maybe I'll have remembered what Imeant to post about by tomorrow.

Yesterday's Tomorrow

It's always interesting to look back at yesterday's future.  Watching, as I do, lots of creaky old science fiction films, (not to mention old science fiction stories), I frequently get to see yesterday's interpretation of what the future would look like.  It is, more often than not, quaint.  More often than not it is simply the 'today' of when the movie was shot, with a few added bits of technology.  The other day, for instance, I caught part of an episode of the old Republic serial Radar Men From the Moon (1951). - its future looked remarkably like early fifties USA, except that people were building their own rocket ships and jet packs.  There was no real attempt to imagine how else society might have to change to utilise these things - people fly rockets to the moon wearing their regular street clothes (the latest fifties fashions, of course) and trilby hats.  One only has to wear a leather jacket to safely use a jet pack (and, to be fair, a clunky looking helmet with a full face visor).  While it isn't surprising that a low budget cinema serial might well not be keeping up with the way technology was portrayed in contemporary science fiction magazines, (Radar Men From the Moon was essentially a standard Republic action serial with a few science fiction trappings in order to cash in on the genre's growing post-war popularity), it is interesting that the experiences of high altitude flying during World War Two don't seem to have been taken into account, with nobody wearing a pressure suit, let alone a space suit.  Mind you, this isn't a production which adheres to any aspect of scientific fidelity: the moon's surface looks remarkably like those bits of California where Republic shot their western serials and has an atmosphere, meaning that nobody needs a spacesuit.  Not even the lunar inhabitants, who wander round in medieval-looking gear, (probably costumes adapted from an historical serial).

But, of course, it wasn't just low budget serials that portrayed versions of the future that would quickly look antiquated.  Most of the studio productions of the fifties and sixties that presented visions of the future gave us bland-looking colour schemes - lots of whitewashed walls - flashing lights and collar-less unisex fashions with bright colour palettes.  These futures had little or no connection, visually, to our present, as if, at some point in history, everything - fashions, architecture, interior design etc - had just been abandoned and replaced overnight by this new future.  In reality, the future evolves from the present and things change at different rates - fashion tends to change slowly, for example, while technology can leap ahead in great bounds.  Past and modernity live side by side in the present - my house is Victorian, but has central heating, a much later innovation, electric lighting and is full of technology like the TV, washing machine, microwave, laptops, tablets and the internet.  Those latter things would have been unimaginable to the original occupants, just a hundred and twenty years ago, but now we take them for granted, yet the house itself remains essentially the same.  Even compared to the house I grew up in during the seventies, everything is the same but different - back then central heating was still a novelty to proles like us and the most advanced technology in the living room was the TV - a huge thing with a tube and valves - but it was, in essence, not that different from my current living room, even though it was a sixties-built house.  The point I'm stumbling toward is that the future tends to creep up on us, in small increments, so that we only noticed that it has happened in retrospect.  Which is why, in a curious way, Radar Men From the Moon, with its trilby-wearing rocket ship pilots, got the future right.

Giant Moths and the Rejection of Capitalist Values

I'm afraid that I've been amiss of late, failing to catch up with the really what the fuck, bat shit crazy bottom of the barrel schlock.  But there have been other temptations - this past weekend, for instance, one of those dubious streaming channels I get, which I strongly suspect doesn't actually have the rights to any of the films it has on offer, has just added a whole slew of sixties and seventies titles which haven't seen the light of day, on terrestrial TV anyway, in an age.  So I was able to catch up with the violent and explicit for its time Dark of the Sun (1968), set during the Congo Crisis, and White Lightning (1972), a more serious than usual Burt Reynolds vehicle involving moonshine, fast cars and corrupt cops in the Deep South.  It was good to see both of these again after many years but, just in case I was going too mainstream in my viewing habits, (I've also watched a couple of Brad Pitt movies lately), I tried to balance it all out by watching the English-language version of Mothra (1961).  I mean, movies and pop culture generally, don't get much more bizarre, (to western eyes), than Japanese productions.  Mothra occupies a curious place in Toho's initial cycle of giant monster films, unlike previous monsters such as Godzilla and Rodan, which are unstoppable forces of nature, the titular giant moth is more of a spiritual force.  Moreover, whereas those earlier monsters seem to exist primarily to trash cities, fight each other and generally cause mayhem, Mothra has a distinct mission. Rather than being awakened by nuclear tests or simply found living on some remote island, her incursion into the modern world is a response to modern civilisation's, (most specifically western civilisation's), attempts to exploit a hitherto unspoiled island and its natives.

Prior to these rapacious capitalists murdering peaceful natives and abducting the twin telepathic midget girls who act as priestesses of a sort, putting them on display as an act in a Tokyo nightclub, Mothra manifests only as a dormant giant egg, the object of the islanders' worship.  Inevitably, these events result in the egg hatching and Mothra, first as a giant larva, then a giant moth, heading off to Tokyo on a rescue mission, leaving a trail of destruction n her wake.  It is significant that the true villains of the film as the 'Rosilicans' - while the name of their country, 'Rosilica' might appear to be a combination of 'Russia' and 'America', it is clearly patterned after the US, being a capitalist superpower whose larges city is called 'New Kirk City'.  It is Rosilica that, years before, had used Mothra's island chain as a target for nuclear tests and its dark side is embodied in the character of Clark Nelson, a ruthless entrepreneur behind the killings of the natives and the kidnap of the tiny girls.  Ultimately, his actions bring disaster and destruction to Rosilica.  When Mothra attacks Tokyo, Nelson takes the girls and flees to New Kirk City, which is subsequently devastated by the moth's attacks.  It is notable that, throughout the film, the Japanese characters are portrayed as generally virtuous, seeking to frustrate Nelson's plans and acting only in self defence to repel Mothra's attacks on Tokyo.

Perhaps most significantly, it is one of the main Japanese characters- an anthropologist - who saves New Kirk City because he recognises the spiritual significance of the islanders' symbology and Mothra's spiritual relationship with the tiny girls.  The materialistic Rosilicans, it is clearly implied, are incapable of making such a connection, so far have they distanced themselves from their spiritual and cultural roots.  Consequently, it is possible to interpret Mothra as representing a rejection of western values and, by extension, the post-war enforced 'westernisation' of Japan.  Whereas the earlier monsters had targeted Japan with their attacks, doubtless representing the nuclear destruction visited on two of Japan's cities in 1945 by the west, Mothra's wrath is ultimately directed against a western power, a surrogate USA.  Indeed, the only part of Japan subjected to the destructive force of the down draft produced by the great moth's beating wings is Tokyo, a thoroughly westernised city by the early sixties, its skyline dominated by western-style tower blocks.  

Of course, I might be reading far too much into all of this - I really don't know enough about Japanese culture - but it seems to me that much Japanese popular culture since the sixties has represented a questioning, if not outright rejection, of western culture and values.  Yakuza films, for instance, could be seen as an assertion of more traditional Japanese values in the face of western-style capitalism, even if they are criminal values, they do encompass traditional notions of honour and obligation.  Much Manga and Anime likewise is an assertion of indigenous artistic and story-telling styles over western counterparts.  Even eighties TV dramas aimed at the youth audience, like Sukeban Deka, might, arguably, be seen as part of this movement.  The second series, for instance, puts great emphasis upon traditional codes of conduct and the importance of adhering to them, whether it be the code of the Yakuza or the discipline of the martial arts.  Notably, the series puts its heroine through a spiritual journey whereby she must prove herself worthy to face her ultimate opponent, showing that she embodies the spiritual value of selflessness and that she is motivate not solely by personal revenge, but also because she believes that it is the right thing to do.  Like I said, I could be reading far too much into this.  Maybe Mothra is simply - as it seems to be to the casual English-speaking viewer - a crazy Japanese film about a giant city destroying moth out to rescue a pair of midget nightclub singers.

Cyborg 2087 (1966)

While the seventies might have represented the Golden Age of US TV movies, the latter part of the sixties saw the rise of their precursors, hybrid low budget movies designed primarily to be released direct to TV but which, nonetheless, often enjoyed theatrical releases prior to their TV debuts.  American International, of course, had a whole division - AIP-TV- devoted to making such movies, although they tended to specialise in putting together packages of specially made low budget films and re-dubbed and re-edited foreign films, for TV stations.  Most notably, they had self-styled 'King of Schlock' Larry Buchanan film a series of ultra low budget films, mostly remakes of existing AIP properties, for direct release to TV.  Another company specifically formed to exploit this new market was United Pictures Corporation which, between 1966 and 1970, turned out nine low budget films in various genres intended for direct-to-TV distribution, although, in the event, all had theatrical releases.  Probably the best known of these was Dimension Five (1966), a spy thriller with science fiction elements and starring Jeffrey Hunter.  I remember back in the seventies that it used to regularly turn up on the BBC.  While this was more of straightforward Bond knock off, the film which preceded it in United Pictures Corporation's production schedule, Cyborg 2087 (1966), was a somewhat more ambitious, in plot terms, full on science fiction picture.  Thanks to the marvels of a certain online video site, I was finally able to catch the film the other day, (while I recall it also having British TV showings in the seventies, I never managed to see it then, as it was always on too late, after which it just seemed to vanish).  

Cyborg 2087 is essentially a time paradox story, with a cyborg (played by Michael Rennie) being sent back in time from the repressive society of 2087, to 1966, where he is to try and prevent a scientist from making public his latest research which will pave the way for the mind control technology used in the dystopiain future.  He is followed back in time by two other cyborgs programmed to try and stop him.  Eventually, the good cyborg is able to defeat the evil cyborgs and persuade the scientist to accompany him back to the future to see the kind of society that will result from his work.  Upon his return to 1966, the scientist decides to repress his work, thereby ensuring that the future he saw will never come about, meaning that the cyborg never existed and nobody who helped him has any memory of him, or the events that unfolded during the film.  (Paradoxically meaning that he couldn't have come back i time in the first place to create this new timeline as he never existed in it).  While the plot is surprisingly well thought out for a low budget film, (you can't help but suspect that James Cameron must have seen it on TV as a kid, influencing his similarly themed Terminator films), its realisation on screen is, well, threadbare, to say the least.  The production values are on a par with poverty row productions of twenty years earlier, with flatly lit, generic and featureless interior sets and obvious back lots used for the exteriors.  In this latter respect, it is lucky that the scientist has his lab in a small desert city which easily be represented by some over-familiar town sets.  Moreover, much of the action takes place in a nearby ghost town - a familiar looking western town set - as a further cost-cutting measure.

The direction by Franklin Adreon is curiously lifeless for a man who had served his apprenticeship working on all action Republic's serials.  The pace is far too slow to generate any real excitement, although there are a couple of decent fight scenes involving the evil cyborgs, (both played by veteran Republic stuntmen).  The lack of action was, perhaps, dictated by star Michael Rennie, (doubtless cast to evoke memories of his performance as Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)), being, by then, in his mid-fifties.  Indeed, Rennie seems less than animated in his role, in part due to the nature of the character he plays - cyborgs, apparently, are programmed to repress their emotions - but also partly due to the fact that he simply looks uninterested in the part and is just going through the emotions.  In the event, a lot of the action is carried by Warren Stevens, (of Forbidden Planet (1956) fame), playing a doctor who helps the cyborg, who gives a somewhat more animated performance.  All of that said, Cyborg 2087 remains an interesting film - Arthur C Pierce's script is extraordinary ambitious for such a low budget production, which, of course, is its downfall.  The repressive future is barely glimpsed - just an interior set right at the beginning - so the script has to resort to Rennie describing it to 1966 characters in a series of talky scenes which just slow the film down.  (Script writer Pierce was involved in a large number of these low budget productions in a variety of capacities, not just for United Pictures, but also for other independent producers, turning director for Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1965) for Realart).  Cyborg 2087 is another of those films where you are left wondering  how much better it might have been if just a bit more money had been lavished on its production. well, in a way I suppose we do know - it would have been Terminator.

Tanked Up Again

In the unlikely event that anyone is interested, I finally got my central heating fixed last week.  I eventually found a plumber who didn't have parking issues and who actually approached the problems analytically.  The result was that what I had feared was a leaking coil in the hot water cylinder wasn't, but instead a defective valve in the heating header tank.  Consequently, I was saved a lot of money as only the pump had to be replaced, not the cylinder.  So, I'm warm and happy.  So happy that I found myself buying a collection of dilapidated and badly repainted tank wagons for my model railway.  

 

Hey, they were cheap and they are basically sound.  That said, there are some obvious issues, most obviously that the top 'tank wagon' is nothing of the sort - it is actually a cement wagon.  Of the others, the two black wagons are actually continental tankers - I'm pretty sure that they are Joueff models - and have continental-style couplings, which will have to be replaced.  Of the wagons on the front row, the Triang-Hornby Esso tanker on the left and the Mainline BP tanker on the right are pretty much ready to roll, while the one in the middle is missing its ladder, (repro ladders are available) and could do with new decals, (again, repro versions are available). The three TTA wagons are Triang-Hornby and atrociously repainted.  Like the cement wagon they'll have to be completely stripped and repainted.  On the plus side, most of them seem to have been re-wheeled with some decent quality running gear.

These were all bought as a job lot on eBay.  Nobody else bid on them, perhaps not surprisingly in view of their general scruffiness.  But that's the key to getting model railway related bargains these days: taking a chance on unpromising looking items.  Speaking of which, I was at the monthly local Toy and Train Collectors Fair earlier this week, where I picked up five sets of used Hornby points, bought as seen, for a fiver.  One was in perfect working order, as it turned out, while three more only needed minor adjustments to get them working properly.  The fifth set has more serious problems, but I might yet be able to effect a repair.  Contemporary Hornby points are, I find flimsier, than their Peco equivalents, so I tend to avoid them, preferring the earlier Austrian made versions, (or Peco), but these were a bargain I couldn't pass up, so took a gamble on them.  So far, I'm happy with it - I still won't use them on the main lines, instead using them to swap out better quality points currently being used in sidings so that they can be used on the main lines when I expand the layout.  Speaking of trackwork, another way to save a few pennies is to look at second hand continental track - a lot of people ignore it because they think it is incompatible with British track being HO gauge rather than 00, whereas the fact is that HO and 00 use exactly the same gauge track.  The continental stuff, particularly the German made items, are very high quality and often very reasonably priced, (particularly the more complex types of pointwork, like slips and three-way turnouts).

So, there you are, yet another project to add to the ever going queue.  I have actually made a start on some of my long-stalled projects - I recently got around to repairing one of my brake vans that had suffered some damage.  I even bought some paint today to finish the restoration, (not to mention repainting a couple of tatty open wagons I bought at the Train Fair for use as tanker train barrier wagons).  So, you never know, I might actually get these latest tanker wagons sorted out in the foreseeable future.

The Uncanny (1977)

A curious film, The Uncanny (1977) represents an attempt by Milton Subotsky to continue making anthology horror films post-Amicus, (The Monster Club (1980) was another attempt).  While the trailer makes a big deal of the film presenting audiences with a new 'monster' more terrifying than the likes of the 'Creature From the Black Lagoon', or the giant killer bear of the contemporaneous Grizzly, the fact is that it is always going to disappoint when it reveals this menace to be the domestic cat.  Another in a long line of horror films that tries to present cats as evil and scary, Anglo-Canadian production The Uncanny, like the others, fails miserably in this respect.  Maybe I'm biased because I'm very much a 'cat person', but they simply aren't frightening, either individually or en masse.  They are also, as I've noted elsewhere, in general terrible actors, needing to be bribed to perform any kind of stunt, even then, their inherent idleness generally kicks in, making it look incredibly perfunctory.  The cats in The Uncanny are perfect examples - all too often they are clearly falling asleep under the heat of the studio lights, or 'attacking' with their tails up - a signal that they have friendly intent.  It is difficult to feel intimidated by these marauding cats when you know that their onslaught could be immediately halted with the offer of a saucer of milk.

Nonetheless, The Uncanny spends eighty eight minutes trying to convince us of the evil of cats via three stories.  The framing narrative involves writer Peter Cushing trying to persuade publisher Ray Milland to publish his manuscript chronicling the evil of cats, relating three tales of murderous felines in order to argue his case.  Unfortunately, while boasting an impressive (for a low budget horror movie) cast, none of these episodes is particularly suspenseful or scary.  The first, set in 1912, is a pretty mundane tale of a nephew and a maid plotting to murder his aunt for her money - she's planning to change her will to leave it all to her cats.  Of course, they reckon without the felines avenging their mistress.  There are no twists to the tale, with everything unfolding in predictable fashion.  The middle story, set in 1976 has a young orphaned girl and her pet cat being sent to live with her cat-hating aunt and cousin.  The twist here is that the girl's late mother was a witch and the cat her familiar, so when the cat vanishes, she is able to use her own magical powers to take revenge on her cousin, aided by the magically returned feline.  Far more macabre than the first story, this one is, nonetheless, still predictable and is let down by poor production values and special effects.  The third story takes place on and around the set of a horror movie.  It features Donald Pleasance as a horror star murdering his co-star wife by rigging the props in the torture chamber set and installing his aspiring actress mistress in her place.  Guess what?  That's right, the wife has a cat that avenges her death.  While Donald Pleasance is, as ever, fun to watch in this sort of thing and the production values not too bad, this episode is, once again, far too predictable.

Part of the success of the anthology films that Subotsky had produced for Amicus lay with their scripts, which were taken from strong source material - usually either classic horror comics or the work of Robert Bloch, (who often adapted his own stories for them).  By contrast, the writing on The Uncanny was weak, based around the slimmest of ideas and offering neither cast nor director much to work with.  A further weakness is that, while headlining three recognisable horror stars in Cushing, Milland and Pleasance, only the latter is really given anything to do - the first two are only in the framing story, doing nothing but talk.  The film represented a curious choice of project by independent Canadian director Denis Heroux, whose previous movie had been the harrowing and downbeat Born for Hell (1976), (aka Naked Massacre), a fictionalised account of a real-life US mass-killing, transposed to Belfast and played out against an uncomfortably realistic background.  In the event, The Uncanny was his last film as director, with him subsequently focusing instead upon producing.  Based on his previous output, Heroux would have seemed to be ill fitted to direct the sort of horror film that Subotsky specialised in producing and, not surprisingly, he is unable to bring the edge of realism characterising his earlier work, to the material on hand for The Uncanny.A box office failure, The Uncanny, feels like a film out of its time, an afterthought in Amicus' line of early seventies anthologies.  Moreover, with its spotty production values and rough around the edges feel, it lacks even the viewing pleasures brought by the earlier films' smoothly polished look and feel.

Small Scale Mayhem

One of the biggest problems faced by low budget films, especially those with ambitions beyond their budgets, is their inability to provide a satisfying climax to their dramas.  This is particularly true for science fiction pictures which set us up for some kind of world shattering conflagration, but instead provide the audience with a damp squib.  The Man Without a Body, for instance, sets us up for a climactic monster rampage, as the creature consisting of the revived head of Nostradamus sewn onto a new body breaks out of the lab.  What we get is a guy running around a couple of studio back lot streets before climbing a fake church tower, where his head falls off.  Konga (1960), Herman Cohen's small scale King Kong rip off does slightly better, with the use of some actual location shooting allowing the back projected titular man in a monkey suit at least appear to menace some London streets.  (One of these is the row of shops that stood near Merton Park Studios - unlike the studios, they are still there - while the Central London footage was shot illicitly, without permission, with the blanks fired by the 'soldiers' allegedly resulting in the police being called out).  It was still completely underwhelming.  I was put in mind of these films when I recently caught The Colossus of New York (1958) on a streaming channel the other day.  It is a film clearly building toward a cataclysmic monster rampage which it knows it can never properly realise.

Which is the problem with the entire film - it sets up an intriguing idea, but simply doesn't have the resources to properly execute it.  The frustration of the film makers seems palpable, as the movie resolves into a series of largely static, studio bound laboratory schemes, punctuated by domestic dramas.  The story is well worn, but nonetheless interesting: when a brilliant scientist dies in a road accident, his father saves his brain and transplants it into an outsize and somewhat grotesque looking android body.  Horrified by his new appearance, the resulting cyborg refuses to leave the lab and demands his wife and child are never told of  his mechanical after life, in the meantime, he agrees to continue his experiments with his father and his colleague.  Both the questions of self-identity and morality which surround the situation are touched upon, but in a seventy minute running time can never really be properly addressed.  The film instead keeps cutting to the dead scientist's family, his brother's relationship with his widow, the son's attempts to come to terms with the loss of his father and his reactions to the cyborg when it turns up, having given into its urge to see its family.  While these elements could, in their own right, have provided a fascinating story, again the running time and the demands of the B-movie format, dictate that they end up feeling like filler until the cyborg inevitably turns evil and starts killing people.

The transition of the cyborg from good to bad is the best handled part of the film, with the scientist's situation - a brain trapped in a mechanical body - taking its psychological toll.  The unemotional logic of the machine inevitably superimposes itself on the living brain's rationality, his compassion losing out to simplistic, black and white judgements, resulting in his killing of his brother who has fallen in love with the widow and his eventual rejection of his work to relieve world hunger as those it would help are 'worthless'.  This last is the pretext for the climatic bout of small scale mayhem, as the cyborg goes on a very modest rampage in the lobby of the United Nations building in New York, disintegrating a few members of a very sparse crowd with beams firing out of his eyes.  While his demise, the living brain finally asserting itself and getting his son to press his deactivation button, is a logical development of what went before, one can't help but harbour a sneaking suspicion that it took place that way because the production couldn't afford the usual destruction by the massed military of the United States.  The film is actually well made, particularly bearing in mind its budget, but this was only to be expected bearing in mind the talent involved - Eugene Lourie, art director turned director and something of a specialist in monster movies directs, while former Orson Welles associate William Alland produced and John P. Fulton, formerly of Universal's golden age of monster movies, provides the special effects.  With regard to the latter, the cyborg itself is quite impressive, the flexibility of its face combined with its bulk and huge hands effectively suggesting a melding of man and machine.

It's worth pointing out, of course, that not only low budget movies sometimes conclude with a less than spectacular climax.  There are all manner of bigger budgeted productions that, despite spectacles and action sequences during their running time, just seem to peter out, leaving the viewer feeling short-changed.  Sometimes this is due to the budget running out or, in the case of Avalanche Express (1978), both director and star dying before production was completed.  In other cases, though, it is because the film's scenario is based on real life events, which don't lend themselves to providing a spectacular ending.  Such a case that springs to mind is the US-Italian World War two epic Anzio (1968), which features a star studded cast and a large scale battle sequence part way through in its chronicling of the titular Allied marine assault in 1944.  The film's climax, however, is decidedly small scale, with its surviving characters having to run a gauntlet of German snipers in order to return to the beaches.  Which reflects the fact that the Anzio operation was characterised by the commanding general's refusal to advance once he had landed his forces, minimising contacts with the enemy and meaning that, in reality, there was no climactic battle.  (His caution allowed the Germans to reinforce their defences).  Consequently, the film's makers had no choice but to come up with this small scale action to provide some semblance of the sort of action finale viewers tended to expect of war movies.

"I Fought Australia's Savage Death Men"

The December 1969 issue of Man's World was the last in its traditional men's pulp format before it became a more straightforward adult magazine with photo covers depicting semi naked young women.  This last cover painting is hardly the most inspired and, in style, harks back to the late fifties and early sixties, but is a fitting send off for this version of the title.  As are the various story titles.  The story being illustrated, 'I Fought Australia's Savage Death Men' promises more of the genre's traditional racial stereotyping, this time in the relatively unusual venue of Australia.  Despite this more exotic than usual locale, those aborigines are obviously just as savage and white-woman rape crazy as those African native, South Sea Islanders and Arabs depicted in similar stories elsewhere.  But if treasure hunts resulting in having to flee homicidal natives isn't you thing, don't worry, because 'Man's World Takes You to the Wildest Sex Swap Convention'.  The mind boggles as to just how they define a 'Sex Swap Convention.  Is it some kind of conference where people have public displays of gender reassignment surgery?  Or merely a meeting of cross dressers?  

This, along with items like '5 Girls Reveal How to Play Their Favorite Passion Games' and 'Brenda's Love Room', look forward to the kind of sex-orientated content that would dominate the magazine from 1970.  'London - After Dark Sex Capital of Europe' is undoubtedly a play on the whole myth of 'Swinging London' and is part of another long tradition in men's magazines: the sex travelogue that tries to convince its readers in small town USA that sex is somehow more available and more exotic overseas, (especially in decadent Europe).  The other cover stories seem to cover a couple of the other regular topics of the genre - survival in the wilderness ('My Plane is Down...I'm Surrounded by Wolves') and war and possibly crime ('The Nuclear Mob' - the title implying the idea of nuclear armed organised crime).  While these sorts of stories would continue into the magazine's new incarnation, they would increasingly be crowded out by the more obviously sex-orientated stories, pretty much vanishing by the mid-seventies, as Man's World (or  The New Man's World as it styled itself) increasingly aspired to be a poor man's Playboy.  In this guise, it survived until at least the late seventies.  (While a magazine of this title still exists, it is an Indian publication with no connection to the US men's magazine).

Fear and Loathing in OO Gauge

Now, you might well imagine the world of model railways to be a genteel sort of place, full of people admiring each others' layouts and swapping notes on the correct operating procedures for stopping goods trains.  But trust me, if you were to dig into any of the various online model railway forums, you'd find that the hobby is a hotbed of rivalries and acrimony.  This past week, the YouTube model railway community went into meltdown for a few days after one established and respected YouTube model railway personality posted a new video in which, instead of confining himself to talking about his layout, showing us some of his locomotives and rolling stock and offering modelling tips instead chose to take aim at various other members of the community, criticising their layouts and, worse, making personal comments about them.  Not that I've seen this video - it was apparently taken down after being met with a barrage of criticism in the form of video responses by other members of the YouTube model railway community.  Some of them were pretty forthright, even vicious and, not having been able to see the offending video myself, I have no idea whether any of it was at all justified.  Personally, I found it all a bit disturbing - the, perhaps justified, criticism looked as if it was quickly turning into a campaign of bullying.  An impression reinforced by the fact that the original offender subsequently took his entire YouTube channel down and has pretty much vanished from the site.

All of which illustrates one of the aspects of the web that I deeply dislike - the mob mentality.  Or, to be more accurate, the lynch mob mentality, whereby any perceived infraction by an individual leads to a mass pile-on with the aim not of getting an apology for the aggrieved parties, but instead to hound the alleged perpetrator off of the web altogether.  Bully, abuse and public vilification are the favoured weapons in these campaigns, where the 'punishments' being meted out are far out of proportion to the original 'crime'.  That it even happens in a community as niche as model railways, where most established practitioners are at least middle aged, many older, simply underlines just how prevalent these behviours have become.  The better strategy in this case, in my opinion, would have simply been to unsubscribe from the alleged miscreant's channels, (many of those posting those video responses admitted to having been long-term followers), and making appropriate comments on their videos, in measured terms.  The message would soon have got through and a lot of energy could have been saved.  Of course, then all the critics wouldn't have been able to make those attention-grabbing videos - or am I just being a tad cynical in suspecting that some of them were simply jumping on a band wagon to increase their viewer counts?  Anyway, all of this nonsense is the reason why I don't have a YouTube channel with videos of my layout - I can do without running the risk of getting involved with this sort of nonsense.

Burn, Tories, Burn!

As if we needed further proof of this country's dangerous slide into right wing extremist at the highest levels, we've just had the spectacle of the Home Secretary, (you know, the one who was sacked by one Prime Minister for security breaches then, the next week, brought back by another Prime Minister, apparently having done sufficient penance for the original sacking offence), doubling down on her anti-migrant rhetoric after, just the day before, a right-wing extremist had fire bombed an immigration centre.  As usual, we have the pretence from the media, the minister and her Tory colleagues, that her increasingly intolerant language with regard to immigrants crossing the Channel in small boats, had nothing to do with this attack and that her latest words - some of which were reminiscent of the National Front at its worst - won't encourage more of these nutters.  It's at times like these that you can't help but feel that the government these days is full of neo-Nazis, regardless of who is Prime Minister.  Most depressingly, some of the worst culprits are themselves the descendants of relatively recent immigrants.  I'm left wondering if it might finally be time to fight fire with fire.  Now, I have to be careful here, because if I appear to start advocating firebombing the constituency offices of these bastards, then I'll be labelled the extremist and accused of terrorism, racism and God knows what else, even though I'm not the one perpetrating extremist and repressive political policies.

So, let's take a step back and substitute the word 'witches' for 'Nazis' and 'Witchcraft' for 'fascism' - if we thought that we were being overrun by evil witches Hell bent on blasphemy and perversion, what would the appropriate response be?  That's right, we'd be calling for them to be burned at the stake.  (A point of information here: despite what films with Vincent Price wearing various funny hats might tell you, in England withes were hanged, not burned.  Burning was reserved for heretics).  With parliament apparently now host to a coven of them, our response should be clear.  Let's face it, if this was a Hammer film then, by now, Peter Cushing in a puritan hat would have been leading a mob waving flaming torches in storming the Commons.  Therese Coffey would undoubtedly have been set alight by one of the puritan band, but I suspect that her evil runs so deep that, despite being ablaze from head to foot, she would run toward her assailant and embrace them in her fiery arms so as to take them with her.  Suella Braverman would probably try to escape her attackers by using her witch powers to rise into the air and spit venom and bolts of lightning at the puritans - until Cushing succeeded in hitting her with a well thrown crucifix, causing her to explode.  Sadly, I suspect that Priti Patel would escape by flying off on her broomstick.  

There you go - I'm not actually advocating burning Tory ministers at the stake, but merely speculating as to how our current political situation might be resolved if it were a horror film.  Mind you, even this is fraught with problems - I could still be accused of misogyny for implying that the Tory Nazis, sorry, witches, are all female.  Throwing in a few male MPs would resolve that problem - I mean, who wouldn't want to see Peter Cushing burn Jacob Rees-Mogg at the stake as a warlock, or decapitate Boris Johnson with an axe.  Perhaps we should throw Matt Hancock in there - the man who has taken a bullet by trying to deflect attention from Braverman's incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric by jetting off to Australia to participate in I'm a Celebrity. If we're lucky, though, he'll be eaten by cannibals in the jungle.  (What's that?  It isn't a real jungle?  OK, well maybe Chris Moyles will eat him instead and save us the expense of some fire lighters...)