Mainstream Movie Memories of 2022

I see that I've missed out again in the New Year's Honours list.  Still no OBE for services to sleaze.  We're once more at that time of the year where we are all supposed to be doing retrospectives of 2022.  I've never seen the point of that - I mean, we've all just lived through the bloody year, so we know what happened - but this year it seems even more pointless as, from a personal point of view, it has been the most uneventful year I can remember.  Which is a good thing, as I've had far too many eventful years, where 'eventful' has, in reality, meant 'traumatic' or even 'disastrous'.  I like my life to be quiet these days, with the absolute minimum of interaction with the rest of the human race.  So, while Russia invaded Ukraine, Elon Musk bought Twitter and we endured a merry go round of Prime Ministers here in the UK, I've been taking it easy.  I've watched a lot of movies, though.  Many of which I've already written about here, so I won't rake over them again.  As well as all the schlock I chronicle here, I've also caught up with a number of more contemporary mainstream movies, several through a streaming channel of highly dubious veracity - the fact that several of the recent releases they claim to have rights to have Mandarin sub-titles is, I think, a pretty good indicator that they aren't entirely kosher.  But hey, I'm only watching them - no money has exchanged hands, (they are ad-supported), accepting on good faith that they really do have the rights to stream these movies.

Watching these movies has just reinforced the feeling that I'm clearly not the target audience for much modern cinema.  Particularly superhero franchises.  Aquaman might as well have been an animated film, so much of it consisted of CGI fishes, while Black Adam left me shrugging, not just at the fact that it added nothing new to the genre, but also in mystery as to The Rock's continued popularity as a movie star.  (To be honest, I never really liked him as a wrestler, either - I was firmly in the Stone Cold Steve Austin camp).  About the only superhero movie I've seen recently that I particularly liked was Shazam, although I still find it frustrating that, for legal, reasons, he can't be called Captain Marvel any more - although they do make capital out of that fact in the film.  (I'm sorry, but as far as I'm concerned, the Marvel Captain Marvel is an imposter).  Frankly, the most entertaining superhero film I saw this year was that Turkish Batman movie.  Another one I saw on a dubious stream was the most recent Fast and Furious film, number nine, I think - they all start to meld together after a while, I find the best way to tell them apart is by who is in each one.  This one had Vin Diesel, but not The Rock or Jason Statham, who had their spin off around the same time.  Like all of the films in the series, it was reasonably entertaining while it was on, but quickly became indistinguishable from all the others in my memory.  Though I do recall that some of them went into space in this one.  In a car.  I'd say something about the series 'jumping the shark' at this point but, you know, we're talking about the 'Fast and Furious' franchise here...

Lighting Up the Street

When I was speculating about trying to do another film of the various domestic Christmas light displays of Crapchester, I should have revealed that, actually, I am now one of 'those people'.  Yes, I have festive lights visible to the public.  Now, don't misunderstand me, I don't have loads of external lights or lighted decorations - there are no illuminated reindeer on my roof, for instance.  What I have is a modest string of flashing coloured lights inside my front downstairs window.  They cycle through several patterns of flashing, some of them quite spectacular and are visible from quite some distance away.  Lest you worry about my electricity bills, they are battery operated and only come on for six hours a day.  But it is six hours of pure joy for me, as I effectively shove my Christmas joy into the faces of others.  Because that's what all those ostentatious light displays are about every year, aren't they?  Showing the world that you are having a merrier Christmas than they are, based on the size of your displays.  That's why it all gets so competitive, with whole streets of houses vying with each other to try and see who can create the greatest distraction to low flying aircraft.  

At least, it used to be like that until the cost of living crisis, with soaring electricity bills making people wary of plugging in their lights, (that said, there are still a good few large scale displays out there).  Which is why I decided to put my fabulous new lights (£1.50 from Iceland in their pre-Christmas clearance sale), on public display.  You see, I remember all those people who were shoving their seasonal joy down my throat at times when I was feeling low and didn't feel like celebrating.  But they didn't care, they just kept shoving it all in my face with their bloody flashing lights and illuminated giant Santas.  So, this year, while they are all crying 'Oh, we're too poor to light up our houses', I'm taking my lights and shoving back:  'Hey guys, I'm having a Merry Fucking Christmas!  Are you?  Just in case you doubt my merriment, here are my fucking flashing lights right in your fucking faces!'  Or I would be if I was that petty minded.  Which, obviously, I'm not.  But those lights are bloody brilliant and can be seen half way down the street.  So stick that in your pipes and smoke it, last year's seasonal light polluters!

The French Sex Murders (1972)

An Italian/German coproduction, the literal English translation of the film's title is the somewhat prosaic House of Rendezvous, which, while a fair enough description of its scenario,was replaced for its English language release to the far more easily exploitable The French Sex Murders.  Which, to be fair, is also a reasonably accurate description of its content - it is set in France, there are murders, there is sex and it all centres around a high class brothel, (the titular House of Rendezvous).  In terms of genre, the film is clearly aiming to cash in on the then popularity of giallo movies.  Indeed, 1972 was a peak year for giallo productions in Italy and elsewhere, with the box office swamped by movies of varying degrees of quality - a glut that spelt the beginning of the end for the genre, as its popularity began to fade.  The French Sex Murders, it has to be said, doesn't rank among the best of the giallo films released that year.  It's main problem lies with the lethargic direction of Ferdinando Merighi, (this was one of only three movies he directed and the sole giallo among them), which gives the plot no sense of urgency and is badly lacking in the sort of visual style one would usually associate with the genre.  The problems are compounded by a seemingly disjointed script, which, after a spirited opening, takes an age to actually get the main plot moving.  Even once it gets going, it jumps around, confusingly flitting between a too large cast of characters, (most of whose names are easily forgotten), setting up strands which are never pursued, let alone resolved, before ending in a hurried welter of action and explanatory dialogue.

Yet the film remains interesting and worth watching for a number of reasons.  One is the murders themselves which, in contrast to the rest of the film, are very stylishly filmed, incorporating the use of colour filters and fast editing to give them a psychedelic and disturbing feel.  Another point of interest are the special effects - the murders are invariably gory and include a couple of quite realistically staged decapitations, courtesy of Carlo Rambaldi.  Finally and the reason for the film's cult status in some quarters, the detective investigating the murders looks and sounds like Humphrey Bogart, (it was even re-released in the UK under the title The Bogey Man and the French Sex Murders), a point never addressed by anyone in the movie.  Professional Bogart lookalike Robert Saachi portrays Inspector Fontaine, complete with all of Bogart's twitches and sporting a Sam Spade style raincoat, in what was probably his biggest film role outside of The Man With Bogart's Face (1980).  In the English language version, though, his voice is dubbed by the prolific Edward Mannix, doing his best Bogey impersonation.  Indeed, it is quirkiness like this which helps to maintain audience interest in the film, along with such touches as the wrongly convicted murderer sentenced to the guillotine, but escaping, only to be decapitated in a road accident.  At points the film seems set to veer off into other genres, with Howard Vernon acting as though he is in a Jesus Franco movie and his assistant claiming at one point that he has seen the eyes of the alleged killer's severed head move.  (Something never really followed up on).  

That the film feels, overall, somewhat ill-defined, never quite finding its identity as a giallo, instead drawing in elements from other genres, shouldn't be surprising bearing in mind its status as an international co-production.  Not purely Italian in origin, the film was co-produced by the ubiquitous Dick Randall, (who also has both a small acting role and a sleazy writer character named after him in the film), a US producer who could be guaranteed to try and cash in on any exploitation trend.  He had already produced various Mondo movies, sex films and spaghetti Westerns and would go on to produce the likes of Pieces (1982), The Erotic Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1976), Don't Open 'Til Christmas (1984) and The Urge to Kill (1989), amongst many others.  The quality of his productions could be highly variable, depending upon the talents he managed to involve in them.  While, in terms of production values and cast, (Anita Eckberg, Rosalba Neri, Barbara Bouchet all appear alongside the aforementioned Howard Vernon and Robert Saachi), The French Sex Murders is above average, it is badly let down by a lacklustre direction and a weak script, with its set-pieces and bizarre asides carrying it across the line.  You can't help but feel that with a director more experienced in the genre (or just more experienced), The French Sex Murders might have been a minor genre classic. As it stands, the film is an entertaining but ultimately undistinguished genre entry.

Getting Over Christmas TV

There you go - another Christmas Day recedes in the rear view mirror as we accelerate toward the New Year.  Yeah, I know that it's Boxing Day and we've got that whole strange interim period of the festivities sitting between Christmas and New Year, but the excitement is over now and the media are losing interest and employers just want everyone to fuck off back to work.  As ever, it never ceases to amaze me how the very people who spend so much time hyping up the season and raising expectations (the media, retailers etc), can't wait to see the back of the season once the expensive bit they make money off of is over.  Again, as I always point out this time of year, Christmas is meant to be a twelve day festival that doesn't abruptly end on New Year's Day.  But let's get back to Christmas just past - did you enjoy the Christmas Day TV schedules?  I remember a time when the main TV channels actually made an effort.  This year they struck lucky with Christmas falling over a weekend, so they basically just kept most of the usual weekend schedule and stuck bits of tinsel on it, claiming that all the programmes shown were 'Christmas Specials'.  The Morecombe and Wise Christmas Show from 1972 that BBC2 screened again on Christmas Day was a reminder of how it used to be done - something that was more than just a regular edition with a Christmas tree in the background.  

Still, at least EastEnders maintained its festive tradition by bringing a dose of misery and depression to the festivities.  Has Mick Carter really drowned after a series of increasingly unlikely events saw him diving into the English Channel?  The lack, so far, of a body, fuels my suspicion that a few years down the line - when Danny Dyer needs the work - it will be revealed that he was picked up by a dinghy full of migrants heading for the Kent coast.  When they finally land on the beach, his trauma induced amnesia and strange dialect will result in the authorities assuming he's a foreign national and shipping him off to Rwanda.  From where he'll escape and become a mercenary, fighting in various African civil wars before regaining his memory and rushing back to Walford, just in time to rescue ex-wife Linda from Max Branning and his gang of international sex traffickers, with a gunfight in the Queen Vic.  After which he is arrested as a war criminal and dragged off to the Hague for trial, vowing, when released, to return for Linda.  Either that, or he's discovered working in a Salvation Army homeless shelter in Folkestone.  

As ever, in the face of the main networks' seasonal indifference, I came up with my own festive schedule.  Just for once, I thought, let's keep it wholesome and tasteful.  It is bloody Christmas, after all.  Well, I tried.  I did spend a big chunk of Christmas Day watching all three hours of the 1956 Around the World in Eighty Days widescreen epic.  Mainly because I realised that I had never actually sat through the whole movie in one go.  I'd seen it in bits, but never all at once.  Moreover, most TV screenings are shortened, omitting the prologue (which originally included a showing og George Melies' silent short adaptation of From the Earth to the Moon, intermission and exit overture.  The version I was included all three.  I have to say that the whole thing has a certain charm, if one can look past the outdated cultural stereotypes and casual racism which were part and parcel of the era it was made in.  It certainly presents the viewer with a spectacle (the scale of the production is all the more impressive in view of the fact that, back in 1956, the was no CGI so a lot of it had to be stage 'for real').  But the allure of schlock, even at Christmas, is just too great for me to resist.  It certainly was this Christmas, as I also found myself indulging in Jesus Franco's bizarre 1968 private eye/Bond knock off/fantasy movie Kiss Me Monster.  Actually, by Franco standards, this was pretty good - an enjoyably made parody of the many Euro action/adventure movies  being churned out during this period.  Christmas Day, for me, was rounded off with a viewing of The French Sex Murders (1972).  I hope to look at this one in more detail later, but its gleeful mixing of lurid and bloody murders, police investigations, curses, mad scientists and high class hookers managed to carry it through some lacklustre direction and provided a suitable antidote to most Christmas TV.

Christmas Post

For my final post before Christmas this year, I was hoping to put together, for the first time in years, another short film of the various Christmas lights on people's houses around Crapchester.  I even managed to do some filming on the street I live on.  The cold tat has been plaguing me all week has, though, stymied my attempts to shoot any more footage.  I just haven't felt up to driving around the town after dark clandestinely filming strangers' light displays.  That said, I think that the cold is finally receding.  Mind you, I though that earlier this week, but a trip out of town to see my mother left me feeling wiped out.  (Mind you, I suspect that it was less the drive that set me back, than the brief shopping trip I made beforehand, where I found myself, quite literally, fighting my way through crowds.  Anyway, the sneezing and coughing seem finally to have died down, so hopefully they'll be gone completely by Christmas Day.  Still, at least I wasn't having to deal with my shitty ex-job at the same time as a cold this year, which I've had to do in the past.  Believe me, when you have the option of staying home and maybe going back to bed, rather than slog to work with a streaming cold, you recover a lot quicker and feel far less miserable. Mind you, if you don't have a job as crappy as that one then you'll also feel far less miserable, cold or not.

While the cold might be in retreat, it really has hampered my efforts to come up with posts here. I've been so tired a lot of the time that I've barely had the energy to write anything.  Consequently, I feel that I should apologise for the stuttering output, brevity and general thinness of this week's content.  Amazingly, though, I did manage to write a new story for The Sleaze on Wednesday, after driving back from my mother's, despite feeling knackered and decidedly unwell.  I was quite proud of the finished product, especially bearing in mind that I started with only the vaguest idea for a story.  Likewise, I managed to put together a podcast for the Onsug.  I sounded terrible in parts of it but, luckily, I'd recorded the main segments last week, so for most of it I don't sound too bad.  Maybe it was doing all of that resulted in my cold relapsing.  Who knows?  Of course, my attempts to get over the cold have been hampered by the fact that people have been stripping the shelves of any kind of cold or flu medication in Crapchester's shops.  I found a single pack of Lemsip, which I had to pay over the odds for, today, after an exhaustive search.  Surely there can't be that many people out there in Crapchester suffering from colds?  It was like the bad old days of pandemic panic buying, when the shelves were similarly stripped of medication - I also had a cold then and desperately needed to take something for it, but had a Hell of a time finding anything because all those people who didn't have Covid were buying everything.  Bastards. 

Well, unless I get around to filming some more Christmas lights, this will be my last post before Christmas, so it just remains to wish everyone the season's greetings.  Hopefully, post-Christmas, I'll be feeling better and more up to posting here.

Terror in the Wax Museum (1973)

What is the attraction of waxwork movies?  I only ask because I recently sat through Terror in the Wax Museum (1973), a relatively late entry in the genre.  With its cast of b-movie favourites of yesteryear and 'Hollywood Victorian England' setting, it felt as if it had been made at least twenty years earlier.  While not a direct remake of 1932's Mystery at the Wax Museum (or its direct remake, House of Wax (1953), Terror in the Wax Museum makes many nods to those films - the creepy mute assistant to the wax museum's sculptor, the museum's emphasis upon its chamber of horrors and recreating grisly murder scenes and a mysterious cloaked murderer skulking around.  Plot wise, though, it has more in common with an Edgar Wallace thriller, as it resolves itself into a treasure hunt as various parties seek a fortune hidden in the museum.  The horror aspects - the speculation that Jack the Ripper has returned or that perhaps his waxwork has come to life, are merely trimmings to add a little frisson to an otherwise pretty standard mystery.  The constant parade of old time movie stars - Broderick Crawford, John Carradine Elsa Lanchester, Ray Milland, Louis Heyward and Patric Knowles to name but a few - gives the whole affair the air of a celebrity waxwork exhibition, the audience marveling at how much the still, (or no longer) look like they did at the peak of their fame.

But like most of these films - going all the way back to Leni's Waxwork (1924) - Terror in the Wax Museum plays on the fear that these wax effigies are somehow imbued with characters of their models, just waiting to spring into life and create mayhem.  A fear often compounded by the fact that they turn out to be real bodies covered in wax - a situation not just in Mystery at the Wax Museum/House of Wax, but also in low-budget pot-boilers like Nightmare in Wax, where they turn out to still be living and eventually come to life to kill their creator.  While nothing so macabre occurs in Terror in the Wax Museum, we instead have the murderer disguising himself as the Jack the Ripper waxwork to carry out his murders, occasionally even replacing the waxwork in the  museum, so as to evade detection.  This variation on the fear of waxworks coming to life - that they are actually living people pretending to be wax figures (a fear also played upon in the 1970 Doctor Who story Spearhead From Space - is heightened by the film's use of actual actors to portray its waxwork figures.  (As a consequence, one can, every so often, see the actor either move slightly or breath shallowly which can be seen as either slightly ridiculous or creepy, reinforcing the idea that they are waiting to pounce, at any time).  I have to say that Terror in the Wax Museum is a fairly weak example of the waxwork genre, creaky, over long and under resourced, although, while it is on, it is reasonably entertaining.  If nothing else, it is fun spotting all the ageing stars in various supporting roles.

Dreams of Christmases Past

We've reached that point in the run up to Christmas when the BBC's daytime schedules sees the usual cavalcade of soaps,quiz shows and lifestyle programmes give way to kids' films and comedy repeats of previous years' seasonal specials.  When I was working full time, this became a magical time of year as I glimpsed this promised land of out-of-the-ordinary programming if I was able to get home for lunch.  One year, when I was recovering from a cold, I remember being so tired that I started to fall asleep on the sofa as I indulged in the nostalgia of an ancient Christmas episode of Only Fools and Horses.  I always thought that, once I was free of work and, most specifically, that last lousy job from Hell, I'd be able to spend the week before Christmas crashed out on the sofa, enjoying the warm embrace of daytime TV Christmas.  Of course, it hasn't worked out that way, as this week I find myself once again recovering from a cold and consequently feeling exhausted.  So tired, in fact, that I seem to have spent most of the day dozing off on the sofa, or back on my bed.  Which is ironic as, if I were still working at that job, this was the week when I'd feel that I was slogging, exhausted, toward the finishing line represented by the 23 or 24 of December, when I'd finish for the year, praying that nothing 'urgent' came up that would entail me spending my evenings standing on some angry psychopath's doorstep trying to serve them with some legal document.  Even then, I'd usually have to be 'on call' for the days between Christmas and New Year in order to get the time off, meaning that I could never really enjoy those days properly.

I was put in mind of all this as, during one of my dozes today, I actually had a couple of dreams related to that job.  As my dreams always are these days, they were very vivid and somewhat bizarre.  The one I remember best involved my old manager assisting me at a repossession and succeeding in wrecking the building by bringing down several huge heaps of hoarded stuff that filled the property down.  Which is how I knew it was a dream: that particular manager had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the field to assist anybody.  (He eventually succeeded in suing the department for a work related injury - not incurred in the field, but when he tripped over a carelessly placed mail bag in the office, later retiring on health grounds).  Anyway, the dream took another strange turn when one of the contractors who was meant to be securing the property started urging the owner to sue us for damages, which got him into trouble with his manager which, in turn, resulted in me, as a union rep, taking his side.  People then started taking sides in an industrial dispute,  I woke up before we got to picket lines and demos.  All through the dream, I sort of knew it was a dream as I was well aware that I no longer worked in that job and kept trying to tell people that, to no avail.  Which is in contrast to many of my other recent dreams, where I seem to be having ever more complicated conversations and discussions with people in them.  Or rather, with myself, of course, as they all take place in my head.  At least one of my dreams seems to have been prophetic, though.  A few years ago I dreamed that a friend was running a bookshop - it was so vivid that I texted her to ask if she had bought a bookshop.  Not surprisingly, she hadn't.  But, just the other day, in passing, she mentioned in a text that she and her sister had recently opened a bookshop - I'm still trying to get her to elaborate on this, to find out if it is like the one she was running in the dream.  Spooky stuff, eh?

Made in Japan

Still in the throes of a cold that plagued my weekend and prevented me from properly enjoying the rise in temperatures as the Arctic weather finally relinquished its grip on the UK, I foolishly braved the wind and rain today to try and complete my Christmas shopping.  Having been left exhausted by fighting the aforementioned cold, I also left it until very late in the day to go out.  Consequently, a half hour trip to the shops turned into two and a half hours as I grappled with slow drivers, slow shoppers and slow check out operators.  Not to to mention the fact that I still couldn't get everything I wanted.  Oh, and I'm still grappling with Amazon over that cocked up order destined for my great nieces - they've now changed their mind and want the duplicate items returned, having told me the opposite on Friday.  The trouble is, they weren't sent to my address, so it is no good sending me the details for return labels etc.  I swear that I'll never buy from them again - they have turned what should have been a simple transaction into a bloody stressful nightmare.  But despite the cold and all the other nonsense going on, I did manage to catch up with some schlock this past weekend, most notably a double bill of Toho movies as I explored some the batshit crazy world of Japanese pop culture some more.

The two movies I saw - Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975) and The Human Vapour (1960, both directed by Inshiro Honda - provide quite a contrast in the development of Toho's science fiction films.  Terror of Mechagodzilla comes late in the original cycle, indeed it is both Honda's last directorial effort and the last entry in the Showa era of the Godzilla franchise.  Compared to earlier entries, particularly those from the sixties, the whole thing looks cheaply made, with poor miniatures work and a threadbare plot that feels hugely derivative of several earlier entries, with its combination of alien invaders, mad scientists and monsters under alien/evil human control.  Perhaps the only truly novel addition is the mad scientist's cyborg daughter - saved by alien technology after being seriously injured in one of her father's experiments - who has divided loyalties.  Even Godzilla's monstrous adversaries lack originality: Mechagodzilla was a swift returnee from the previous entry, Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974) - to which this was a direct sequel - while the other featured monster, Titanasaurus is simply a generic giant dinosaur with little to differentiate him from countless other such creatures.  As a further sign of a lower than usual budget, Godzilla doesn't even get his usual buddy monster to help him fight his adversaries.  Moreover, Godzilla himself, by this point, just looked too 'cuddly' - a shadow of the force of nature that had terrorised Japan in the earlier films.

The Human Vapour, by contrast, comes early in Toho's science fiction cycle.  Unlike Terror of Mechagodzilla, which Honda seemed to direct on autopilot, The Human Vapour is full of memorable sequences, with virtually every shot interestingly and ingeniously framed and all filmed in vibrant colour.  It is also hugely atmospheric and suspenseful, particularly in the early scenes, the film kicking off with a bank robbery and getaway, before the robber's car crashes off of the road in a remote area.  The subsequent sequences of the police trying to find the driver - who has apparently vanished without a trace - and stumbling across a house where a woman is rehearsing a traditional dance, wearing a devil mask, are particularly atmospheric.  The scene where the detective watches, from some bushes, the woman dancer as she completes her dance at an open window, unaware of his presence, has an almost surreal, dream-like feel to it.  The scenario is also somewhat more original than that of Terror of Mechagodzilla - as a result of an experiment gone wrong, a man has been given the ability to turn himself into a vapor, a power he naturally uses to rob banks and murder people, (by suffocating them with his vapourous form).  While the concept is original, the plot owes a lot to 'The Invisible Man', both book and film, not only in its protagonist's gradual descent into megalomania as he abuses his powers, but it even echoes the structure of both book and film, effectively opening the story in the middle, only revealing the main character's origins part way through.  In addition to its debt to H G Wells, The Human Vapour also borrows from Gaston LaRoux's 'Phantom of the Opera' for some of its plot details, most specifically the protagonist's relationship with the dancer.  But the film uses its borrowings well, using them to develop its initial concept into a fast paced and intriguing story.  Representing something like the peak of Toho's output, the film has excellent production values and special effects, (the slow collapse of the 'Gas Man's' clothes as he turns to vapour, for instance, is hugely entertaining).

Perhaps it is unfair to compare the two films, as one is a Kaiju and the other a more straightforward science fiction thriller it is, arguably, like comparing apples to pears.  But there can be no doubt that, in terms of quality, Terror of Mechagodzilla represents a low point in Toho's productions, a tired formula played out, with nothing new to offer, whereas The Human Vapour, with its police procedural/newsroom backdrop and intriguing 'monster', still comes over as fresh, vibrant and original.  Although the shorter of the two films, Terror of Mechagodzilla, with its repetitive monster fights, threadbare production values and cardboard characters, felt much longer than The Human Vapour, which just breezed by.

Proof of Identity

I'm afraid that this bout of cold weather has put me into full hibernation mode.  Unfortunately, however, events keep conspiring to confound my attempts to stay in bed until the temperatures rise.  Today, for instance, I had to finish untangling the mess that has ensued from Evri's inability to deliver my Amazon order for my great nieces' Christmas presents on time.  After Amazon sent replacements for two of the items and I ordered alternatives for the two that couldn't be replaced in time, the Evri package finally turned up.  On top of this, today Amazon e-mailed to say that they had dispatched a replacement for one of two items I had cancelled and been refunded for!  Trying to sort it out has been a nightmare, with Amazon not seeming to understand that this latter item was most certainly never asked for and had been cancelled from the original order.  As for the original 'lost; Evri delivery, they don't want it back, so we now have unwanted duplicates of two items, (possibly of a third if that phantom cancelled item is delivered, as threatened).  Jesus, what a mess - and all because bloody Evri can't deliver stuff on time, delaying it so much that it is classified as 'lost'.  I had an e-mail from them today, as well, inviting me to rate my courier.  Don't tempt me.

On top of all this, I have the task of trying to convince a teaching agency that, no, I really don't have any photo ID - my passport is long out of date and I still have an old-style driving licence.  They seem incredulous that anyone can exist without such things, despite my pointing out that photo ID is not mandatory in the UK - we're not a police state.  Yet.  We don't have to prove who we are, not even to the police, who have to accept that you are who you say you are, unless they can prove different.  (Yeah, I know that our quasi-fascist government has introduced legislation requiring ID in order to be allowed to vote, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it).  They also seem to expect me to somehow prove my right to work in the UK, despite the fact that have on file a valid National Insurance number for me and a scan of my birth certificate which confirms that I was born a UK citizen, (hence the NI number being issued to me at age sixteen), which is pretty much all the right I need to work here.  Oh, not to forget my entire prior work history that they have on record, most of which was spent working for UK government bodies.  Most bizarrely, despite having told them numerous times that since leaving my last job, I've been on what is termed a 'career break', they want a reference for 2021.  Well, bearing in mind that if I haven't been working, I've been, in effect, my own boss, I can only assume that they want me to tell them how fabulous I've been in tackling various bits of home renovation and writing about obscure films since 2021.  I wouldn't mind, but they've had all of these details for years but are now insisting that I have to re-register.  This is all because I merely expressed an interest in maybe doing some part-time supervision work in the New Year.  If it is going to be this much trouble, I don't think that I'll bother.  I really don't need the money, let alone the grief.  I'm sure that there are plenty of other opportunities out there which don't involve this sort of madness.

More Fun at The Fair

Another visit to the local toy and train collectors fair - the last of the year - yielded some more bargain purchases.  In the middle area trio of extremely cheap cement wagons.  The bottom two of the Presflo type are both Wrenn versions of the Hornby Dublo wagon.  Both are somewhat play worn - but I like that, it gives them 'character'.  Like all Dublo/Wrenn wagons they have a very solid and weighty feel, thanks to their diecast metal chassis, (unlike contemporary Triang wagons, which had lightweight plastic chassis, as do most modern wagon models).   These two 'Blue Circle' Presflos will join a 'Tunnel Cement' version I've had for many years, (although I have some spare 'Blue Circle' decals for these wagons, so it might yet change identity to conform with these new additions).  The third wagon is the Hornby version of the Triang Cemflo design.  Again, it was very cheap, despite appearing to be in pristine condition.  It will join the other two Triang Cemflos, which I acquired in much poorer condition and which I'm currently trying to respray to resemble this one.

Above the cement wagons is a Peco double slip, possibly the most complex piece of point work you'll find on a model railway.  Brand new, they'll cost you upwards of fifty quid, even second hand examples are usually at least twenty quid.  I got this one for a tenner.  It was one of several a trader who I've regularly bought from had in a box, along with a huge array of other point work, which looked like they had been lifted from a dismantled layout.  Everything in the box was in excellent condition and relatively low priced.  This now joins the Fleischmann three way point at the bottom of the photo, which I recently obtained via eBay, also for around a tenner - I'm currently assembling the point work I'm going to need when I finally extend the layout.  Second hand bargains like these are a huge boon, saving me a lot of money.  Sooner or later, of course, I'm actually going to have to finish clearing rubbish out of the spare room so that I can begin construction of the expanded layout - maybe in the New Year...

Blood Thirst (1971)

If Blood Thirst (1971) looks as if it was made a decade earlier than its release date, that's because it pretty much was.  Actually shot in 1965, its black and white photography and short running time, (around seventy five minutes), meant that it was destined to be a B-movie.  Indeed, Blood Thirst finally got a US release in 1971 as supporting feature to Bloodsuckers (1971), the US edit of the never properly completed British movie Incense For the Damned.  It is, in effect, a variation on the Elizabeth Bathory story, with a series of vampire-like murders of young women in Manila turning out to be carried out in order to provide an ancient woman with eternal youth.  Local cop Vic Diaz calls in his buddy from the NYPD to help investigate the killings which seem to centre on a local nightclub.  Of course, Diaz has an adopted Anglo sister to provide a love interest for the American hero and, inevitably, to be put in peril at the film's climax.  

The plot is slight - which is probably why the trailer is so brief, any more and it would have given away all of the plot points - and the film, for much of its length, unfolds as a crime investigation rather than a horror movie.  It even features a first person narration by the protagonist, in true hard boiled private eye fashion.  It finally lurches properly into horror toward the end, with the supernatural elements earlier dismissed by the hero when floated by Diaz, coming to the fore.  The black and white photography gives it a all a moody, noir-like feel, but the resolution seems rushed and the make up for the monster actually doing the killings is a let down - it just looks like a guy with melted wax all over his head.  Pre-dating by a few years the late sixties and early seventies boom in Philippines shot horror movies, Blood Thirst was shot on location in and around Manila by Americans, rather than being a full fledged US-Philippines co-production.  Director Newt Arnold was a noted Assistant Director on a number of big budget studio pictures, with his directorial career being restricted to low budget genre movies.  Blood Thirst's relatively short length means that it is never a particularly taxing watch, but it does seem to take far too long to get moving, with far too much time spent watching dance acts in the shady nightclub.

The Joys of Christmas Shopping...

Oh, the joys of Christmas shopping.  Even doing it online causes stress.  Well, not so much the shopping bit, but rather the delivery bit.  As my two eldest great nieces are living overseas again, I decided to take advantage of the fact that they'll be making a brief stay at my sister's just before Christmas, to order their presents on Amazon and have them sent there for my niece (their mother) to collect and give to them on the day.  Everything was going swimmingly until I got the dreaded notification that delivery of the order had been entrusted to Evri, (formerly Hermes UK).  The problems began immediately, with them stating that the package was now on a van and 'out for delivery'.  This was quickly followed by the message that there 'had been a problem' and that it wouldn't be delivered that day, but would be the next - they'd keep me updated.  Except that they didn't.  Radio silence ensued.  They kept telling Amazon (but not me directly) that it would be delivered in the next 48 hours.  This went on until the package was four days over its target delivery date and Amazon informed me that they now considered it 'lost'.  I mean, how can something be 'lost' when it is supposedly in a delivery van local to the address it is destined for?  At least Amazon will speak to you on the phone, or rather their Indian call centre will, so I was able to re-order and re-send the items.  Except that some now had delivery dates after my niece will have gone back home.  So I had to find substitutes with delivery dates within the next few days.

According to the guy I spoke to at the call centre, couriers are selected at random for deliveries, so he couldn't guarantee that Evri wouldn't be given a second opportunity to lose the items.  Clearly, however, they weren't involved this time, as the dispatch notification came directly from Amazon and they delivered the first two items within 24 hours.  The two substitute items, they say, will arrive tomorrow.  There's still a chance that the original package will turn up - in which case, to my great nieces, I'll be an amazing uncle for giving them even more this Christmas.  This, however, is only a hypothetical outcome, as Evri tracking still claims that it is 'out on delivery', which seems to mean that it has somehow vanished into the ether.  The fact that Amazon even has a procedure for dealing with these 'losses' and seem unsurprised by them, arranging replacements or refunds with no argument, implies that they aren't uncommon.  Indeed, Amazon's own reviews for Evri/Hermes shows that a staggering 81% of their customers give them only a one star rating, with many stating they only give them that because there is no zero star rating.  Losing packages seems to be commonplace for Evri, with those they do manage to deliver often seeming to be damaged in transit.  Which shouldn't be surprising as, for two years running, Evri has been rated the UK's worst performing company and regularly tops the polls of 'worst delivery companies'.  Within the last couple of weeks, it has been reported that a large number of packages they were supposed to be delivering had been found dumped in Kent.  Moreover, earlier this year a consumer affairs TV show found that Evri was regularly auctioning off the contents of packages they deemed 'undeliverable' due to indecipherable addresses, despite the address labels being legible in most cases.

All of which begs the question: why does this firm still get given contracts by major retailers?  Sure, I know that they are cheap, but their frequent failures to actually deliver the goods, (let alone the above incidents), must surely risk trashing the reputations of the companies that employ them?  Surely the point of capitalism, so we are told, is that competition in the market place ensures that only the best firms which deliver (in the wider sense) for customers will survive,  Except, of course, that increasing quality of service has become of secondary importance to costs - 'competition' has become a race to the bottom to see who can offer the cheapest, not the best, products.  In the world of delivery services this means that the customer ultimately ends up risking receiving a sub-standard service.  This wouldn't be so bad if we, as customers, were given a choice as to which carrier is used for delivery of our online purchases.  Amazon appears to do this, but as I discovered, even if you opt to pay for next day delivery, the courier is still randomly assigned, meaning that you could still end up with the likes of Evri, (who, surprise, surprise, also has a poor reputation for actually delivering next day  on next day deliveries).  Personally, I'd be quite happy to pay extra for a guarantee that orders will be sent via Royal Mail, who I've always found more reliable and have a clear cut procedure for dealing with delayed and lost deliveries.  (As someone pointed out on Amazon's reviews of Evri, even when on strike Royal Mail delivers more packages than Evri).  

So, what do I think actually happened to my initial delivery?  Personally, I doubt very much that it ever was 'out on delivery'.  I think it far more likely that something happened to it at Evri's depot - damaged or the contents pilfered and the whole 'on the van', 'there's been a problem', nonsense was nothing more than a subterfuge aimed at stringing myself and Amazon along until it was so late I became eligible for a replacement or refund and the original package would be written off as 'lost' and hopefully forgotten about.  Even as I write this, my great nieces' original presents could be in the process of being wrapped up as some Evri employee's kids' presents, or could be listed on eBay.  I certainly hope that Amazon bill Evri for the costs of the original items.  It won't bankrupt them but, if it happens enough, they might start taking their job more seriously.  As it is, my great nieces will, at least, get their presents (albeit not exactly what I had originally intended) and I have one less thing to worry about, Christmas shopping wise.

All Man: 'I Saved Hitler's Life'

Another men's adventure magazine that, in the late sixties, transmogrified into a more conventional men's magazine, with the focus on naked women.  Not that All Man wasn't mildly obsessed with sex and naked ladies in its original format, as this cover from November 1964 shows.  Presenting a heady mixture of vice, violence, Nazis, sex and nudity, the cover seems to be a generic one, its sensational imagery not necessarily illustrating any particular story.  That said, it could illustrate 'The Nude Nymphos Who Fight for Freedom', although the girls doing the swastika carving on the Nazi's chest aren't naked, (their clothing could just be artistic licence as nudity wouldn't have been allowed on covers at this time), or, at a pinch, it could be illustrating 'The Slashing Killer on Main Street', (although the slashers here are in multiple).  Whatever it is meant to be illustrating, the cover does represent that variation one sometimes encounters on men's adventure magazines, whereby instead of semi-clothed women being bizarrely tortured and menaced by Nazis, (or Commies, Viet-Cong, biker gangs, etc), we have a dude being brutalised by a couple of bad girls.  Except that these 'bad girls' are clearly 'good guys' as they are slashing a Nazi, so are presumably resistance fighters in some part of Nazi-occupied WW2 Europe.

The stand out headline on the cover, though, has to be 'I Saved Hitler's Life', as boasted by an 'unreformed Nazi'.  The latter no doubt having been found hiding in the South American jungle.  Who knows, when he says that he saved the Fuhrer's life, maybe he doesn't mean that he foiled an assassination attempt, but rather that he succeeded in spiriting Adolf away from Berlin at the end of the war and is now living with him in Paraguay.  Purely platonically, of course.  Whatever the story is about, it is undoubtedly as true as that 'true fact story about the mob', telling us of 'How Vice Girls Learn Their Trade'.  Having learned their trade, they then apparently form 'Sex Clubs' and hold unspecified contests.  These latter two items underline the fact that, by the mid-sixties, these magazines were being marketed toward an adolescent male audience to whom sex with a live, breathing, woman was an aspiration, something to be approached with trepidation.  Theses sorts of stories play toward all of those adolescent male fears about sexually active women - that they are all actually involved in vice and/or see the bedding of young men as some kind of game, in which the guy will ultimately be humiliated.  Such women are simultaneously objects both of desire and fear. Something emphasised again by that cover, with its cleavage-flaunting beauty carving a swastika into the chest of a guy she and her friend have lured into vulnerability with the promise of sexual gratification.  Sex is scary, is the message - only the brave and fearless, who can tame these women can ultimately taste its pleasures.

Death at a Discount?

Has there been a horror film themed around 'Black Friday'?  I was idly wondering the other day what festival options were still available for such movies.  After all, there a Christmas themed  slashers and shockers, (Don't Open 'Til Christmas, Silent Night, Deadly Night, for instance), St Valentine's day horrors (My Bloody Valentine), not to mention some set at Easter, featuring murderous Easter bunnies.  Even Independence Day has its own movie, albeit an alien invasion film rather than outright horror.  The only date of note I could come up without a dedicated horror flick was 'Black Friday'.  A completely made  up 'holiday', (but technically, for those of us without religion, so are the others), but nonetheless so far devoid of a supporting movie.  Sure, I know that there was an old Bela Lugosi movie back in the early forties titled Black Friday, but that concerned brain transplants rather than discounted shopping.  But how could we fashion a horror film around 'Black Friday'?  Most of these seasonal movies tend to focus on some seasonal icon going on some kind of homicidal spree during the festive period.  You know the sort.of thing - slasher Santas and killer elves.  A variation sees the festive icons themselves being targeted - a serial killer of Santas, for instance, as in Don't Open 'Til Christmas.  But 'Black Friday' has no such icon, (other, perhaps, than the mighty dollar), associated with it.

I suppose that, instead, you could have a plot involving people being trapped in a shop during 'Black Friday', hunted down by some bargain hunting psycho, hell bent on stopping anyone from getting to the bargains before him.  A sort of capitalist satire spin on Chopping Mall, (which featured people trapped in a shopping mall, being menaced by malfunctioning security robots).  Perhaps a more original approach would be to have a crowd of homicidal shoppers, possessed by the spirit of avarice, running amok in a shopping centre during 'Black Friday'.  Or even take the Wicker Man route and imagine bargain hunting as some sort of capitalist cult, for whom 'Black Friday' is their main festival.  In order to ensure a bounty of bargains on the day, they have to sacrifice a 'Black Friday' virgin - who has never participated in the annual shopping madness - the night before.  Perhaps their plan could be to burn them to death on a pyre of last year's models of TV sets and other electrical appliances.  Then again, maybe the Stepford Wives or Halloween III: Season of the Witch approach might prove more fruitful, with ruthless capitalist store owners plotting to create a population of perfect consumers by replacing shoppers with androids programmed to spend, spend, spend.  'Black Friday' could be the day for their global activation, when they'll stampede flesh and blood shoppers to death in their haste to get to the deals.  So, there you have it - with a bit of imagination, even 'Black Friday' could be the basis for a horror movie franchise.

Another Crappy Crapchester Christmas

I think it safe to say that, once again, Christmas, (or Winterval as we like to call it here, in order to wind up Daily Mail readers and their ilk), has crept up and taken me unawares, as always.  You know, I thought that when I gave up full time work I'd have more time on my  hands to notice things like Christmas in advance.  The trouble is that November and December have, for various reasons, become incredibly busy months for me, leaving me with little time to think about religious festivals.  As well as being busy, this time of year is also increasingly expensive for me, even before the added costs of the Christmas season.  November, of course, was dominated by my attempts to find a plumber who could fix my hot water system without breaking the bank.  While the eventual solution was less expensive than I feared it would be, it was still a significant outgoing and a major distraction.  December is even worse, jusy yoday, for instance, I had to get the car serviced and MoT'd, something I had hoped to do in late November, but had to put off because of the plumbing situation, which itself should have been sorted in October, if the first plumber I tried to get to do it hadn't been such a pillock.  While, again, the service and MoT proved to be less expensive and painful than expected, I still have a parking permit to renew this month, not to mention a quarterly energy bill - which is only lower than expected because I couldn't have mt heating on until it was repaired in November.  It's just spend, spend, spend.  

Still, I have at least managed, in amongst the chaos, to sort out my great nieces' Christmas presents, which are the important ones.  Of course, I should have been alerted as to the close proximity of Christmas by the appearance of Christmas decorations in Crapchester town centre.  But they can always be dismissed with the thought that they 'get earlier every year'.  This year, of course, in keeping with the general feeling of doom and poverty currently enveloping the UK, the decorations have been pretty minimalist, particularly those the local council are responsible for - the Market Square Christmas tree, for instance, looks like it has come out of someone's living room, so scrawny and undernourished it looks.  Still, the erection, the other weekend, of those wooden huts down in the main shopping centre from which, every Christmas, traders sell overpriced seasonal tat, should really have rung alarm bells for me.  Again, in keeping with the national mood of gloom and skintness, these seem to be far less patronised than usual - clearly, the punters have spent all their money paying their energy bills.  The same goes for the shops, which seem less busy, not to mention less full of festive goods, than usual.  Even the Christmas themed TV ads have been pretty muted this year, which is why it has taken so long for them to register on me, plus, having that bloody fake World Cup going on has also made it feel less like the festive season than usual.  But hey, I see the BBC has started using its Christmas idents between programmes, so I suppose that it must be Christmas.  Even if, thanks to government's utter economic incompetence it feels even less like Christmas than it did during the pandemic, when we were all locked down.

Dead and Buried (1981)

Those dodgy Roku streaming channels I follow are allowing me to finally catch up with those obscure and off-beat films I missed the first time around, (often because they were barely released in the first place), which then seemed simply to vanish.  The latest of these has been Dead and Buried (1981), a horror film whose original release I vaguely remember only because it got mixed up in the whole 'video nasties' moral panic of the early eighties.  It was, for awhile, wrongly put on the DPP's list of proscribed titles, but was eventually removed.  At which point it just seemed to disappear from sight in the UK.  I'm assuming that Dead and Buried only ended up on the list in the first place because of its title and subject matter - reviving the dead - which probably resulted in someone who had never bothered watching it labelling it a 'video nastie' on the basis of its synopsis, thinking it was some kind of zombie movie.  Which, strictly speaking, it is, but not in any conventional sense.  Indeed, the presence of Gary Sherman as director, (who had earlier been responsible for the classic, but unconventional, cannibal movie Death Line (1972), should have given a clue as to the fact that it was going to deliver a far more intriguing and original take on the zombie genre.

Utilising the classic horror staple of the isolated small town as its setting, the film is structured as a mystery, centering on the local Sheriff trying to get to the bottom of a series of violent murders of visitors plaguing the New England coastal community of Potters Bluff.  The audience already know that the perpetrators are a mob who photograph and film their murders but, like the Sheriff, are none the wiser as to exactly who they are or their motivation. As the plot progresses, it becomes clear to the viewer that they are all locals, who live otherwise normal and ordinary lives.  While this puts the audience one step ahead of the film's protagonist, the script teasingly leaves us as in the dark as to motivation as the local cop is, tantalisingly offering up clues in the form of eccentric behaviour on the part of characters, bizarre, apparently, unconnected incidents and enigmatic dialogue.  Distracted by his wife's increasingly odd behaviour and the constant contrariness of the local mortician, who seems alternately helpful and curmudgeonly and obstructive, the sheriff finds his investigations increasingly being forced down a strange path.  

This part of the film, covering the investigation, is undoubtedly the movie's strongest aspect, with the intriguing set up, the plot that keeps spiralling back to the town itself and the contrast between the apparent everyday normality of the community and the sudden outbursts of shockingly brutal, out-of-the-blue violence, carrying the audience along.  Sherman's direction is incredibly atmospheric, creating an authentic sense of menace, not to mention an almost Lovecraftian feeling of oppressive isolation.  Indeed, as the sea mists roll in on the tiny town, it is easy to imagine tat it is Lovecraft's fictional coastal town of Innsmouth, where the inbred natives practice ancient occult rites and secretly worship Gods otherwise forgotten in the mists of time.  The gradual build up of details and incident, which leave both the viewer and the Sheriff wondering who they can trust, winds up the tension to the point that the final reveal inevitably feels slightly anti-climactic: most of the town's population are dead, revived by the local mortician, who gets them to kill more people, so that he can use his mortician's arts to restore their battered bodies before reviving them and giving them new identities as new residents of the town.  After all that build up, the audience is expecting something more, perhaps some eldritch evil behind the town, (in true Lovecraftian manner), or a sinister cult maybe.  Instead, we get a disgraced doctor turned mortician who has discovered a technique for raising the dead, but uses it as a means of satisfying his artistic urges - using his reconstructive skills to try and create perfection in the form of a town full of 'people' who never grow any older and never get sick or infirm.

Not only does it feel slightly underwhelming, but the denouement also feels more than a little rushed.  With more than two thirds of the film's ninety three minutes having been taken up setting the scene via the Sheriff's investigation, there is  too little time left, it seems, to give anything more than perfunctory explanations for everything that has occurred.  There does seem to be some evidence of truncated sub-plots - the revival and disappearance of the girl hitchhiker not only appears to imply, in the way that it is shot, that someone other than the mortician is also involved in the process, (also, the fact that the mortician himself is later revived after being shot implies the existence of another party), but it is also never followed up on, her disappearance simply left hanging.   The very nature of the mortician's way of reviving the dead is never specified - is it scientific or supernatural?  Certainly, the fact that he controls his living dead creations by keeping their hearts implies the latter, but other details hint at the former.  

Then again, many horror films ultimately fail because they tell us too much, leaving nothing to the imagination.  So, perhaps wisely, Dead and Buried, leaves various threads hanging, hinting at a larger picture that lies outside of the events we have witnessed.  There is a definite implication in the closing scenes, for instance, that this scenario of the Sheriff investigating a series of murders and eventually confronting the mortician, has played out, with variations, many times before, with the mortician always 'resetting' the Sheriff's memory back to 'zero'.  Several times throughout the film, dialogue between the two also hints that the mortician sees it all as a game that plays out in an endless cycle.  Likewise, much of the Sheriff's wife's behaviour and dialogue imply that at least some of the living dead do, at some subconscious level, know that they are dead and are trying to reveal this fact.  In the end, despite the hurried ending, Dead and Buried reveals just enough to satisfy the audience, but not too much that it leaves no mystery at all for viewers to work out for themselves.

As mentioned earlier, Sherman's direction is excellent, conjuring up exactly the sort of atmosphere needed for such a scenario, while the script, credited to Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon, although O'Bannon later claimed that his contributions didn't appear in the shooting script, while far from perfect, is very literate and features some excellent dialogue.  The performances from the cast are also good, with Melody Anderson memorable as the Sheriff;s wife, James Farentino suitably dogged as the Sheriff while Jack Albertson makes the mortician an intriguing villain: an avuncular and often crotchety old man who puruses his bizarre obsession with a combination of apparent kindness and ruthlessness.   All-in-all,  Dead and Buried is well worth looking at - with its unique take on the zombie genre - eschewing the usual gore and murderous rampages in favour of low-key small town intrigue - it is probably one of the most underrated and off-beat US horror movies of the eighties.

G-8 and His Battle Aces

 

 

G-8 and His Battle Aces (originally simply Battle Aces) was both an air war and a hero pulp, published between 1930 and 1944.  Every issue featured a lead novel centred around the adventures of secret agent and World War One flying ace G-8, as he and his sidekicks battled various nefarious German plots to defeat the Allies in the Great War.  From the outset, these plots were bizarre in the extreme.  The very first issue, for instance, involved the Germans using a newly discovered specious of venomous breathed bats against Allied forces, with the cover featuring G-8 astride an airborne example of said bats.  Other threats offered by the dastardly krauts included zombies, mummys, werewolves and even Martians.  Bearing in mind that one of G-8's regular antagonists was a voodoo priest, another a man with a face so badly scarred it was hidden behind a metal mask and an oriental fiend in the pay of the Germans, none of these threats should come as a surprise.  The above cover, from March 1934, is pretty typical, with its striking cover painting illustrating 'The Skeleton Patrol', which seems to involve G-8 and co menaced by some kind of giant skeleton creature.  

A notable feature of the covers (mostly by Frederick Blackslee) was that, no matter how fantastical the threat illustrated, the aircraft being flown by heroes and villains alike were portrayed extremely accurately.  All of the lead novels were written by Robert J Hogan, with each issue filled out with a number of short stories.  Most of these were written by other writers, (although Hogan usually contributed one short story per issue), and, in contrast to the lead novels, featured no supernatural or science fictional elements.  Instead, they were straightforward flying or air combat stories.  G-8 and His Battle Aces was a number of aerial adventure pulps which appeared in the late twenties and early thirties, which included Flying Aces, Air Stories, Wings and War Birds.  The character of G-8 himself and the reformatting of the magazine to focus on him, was a response to the growing popularity of Street and Smith's The Shadow, a hero pulp which quickly became phenomenally popular, spawning radio and film adaptations.  G-8, however, while popular never really came close to the popularity of The Shadow, or even Doc Savage, whose formats were less restrictive than G-8's, which ultimately tied his adventures to the skies above the Western Front during World War One.

Purging the Racists

I was forced to mute someone I follow on Twitter, (with a decision whether to unfollow them completely), the other day after they started re-tweeting all manner of racist anti-immigration and anti-vaxxer shit into my timeline.  I decided merely to mute their tweets at this juncture in order to see whether this was a temporary aberration, or whether it is something consistent - I check back on their feed every so often.  It's been a while since I've felt forced to take this sort of action, but there are limits as to what I want to be confronted by when I log into Twitter - it's a bit like having someone you sort of know round to your house and having them suddenly, in the middle of an otherwise innocuous conversation - slip on a Nazi armband and start extolling the virtues of the Holocaust.  (Thankfully, I don't know Kanye West, so this sort of scenario is unlikely to come to pass).  You'd be left feeling violated, your personal space having been invaded by such bigotry and would doubtless usher the offender out of the door as quickly as possible.  So, this is the social media equivalent of showing them the door.  At the moment I'm not saying that they can never come back, but they've got a way to go to prove to me that they really are a decent, rational, human being and not some raving racist crackpot.  I can't help but suspect that the miscreant here has harboured these views for a while, but has only become emboldened to express them publicly on Twitter since the company's take over by Elon Musk and his moronic take on 'free speech', which has seen racists and Nazis re-instated and a proliferation of conspiracy theories racist tweets, all happily encouraged by Musk.

It's all part of a wider pattern of the right attempting to normalise racism, bigotry and hate speech as part of the regular political discourse.  Even here in the UK we have a large proportion of the popular press, not to mention a TV 'news' channel, in the form of GB News, apparently dedicated to this project.  Even as I type this, we have them and the usual foaming at the mouth right wing loons on Twitter trying to turn the scandal of a Royal aide being racist toward a black guest at the Palace, into some kind of 'woke' conspiracy against the Royal family.  The victim is painted as the villain - apparently because she chooses to be known by an African name and wear African traditional dress, although being a UK citizen of Afro Caribbean descent, this means that it is perfectly reasonable for someone to repeatedly ask her 'where do you come from?', despite responding several times that she is British.  (These racists, (who I've just had fun blocking en-masse by going through a Twitter trending topic on the subject), really display their ignorance by stating that because the victim in this case has parents from the West Indies, she is practicing 'cultural appropriation' by adopting African dress.  Do they really think that black people are indigenous to the West Indies?  They are the descendants of African slaves taken there by European (mainly British) slave owners to work on their plantations.  The clue is in the 'Afro' part of Afro Caribbean).  Thanks to the ascendancy in recent times of political leaders like Trunp, Johnson and their ilk, not to mention, in the UK at least, Brexit and its drum-beaters like the odious Farage, these bigots have felt embolden to crawl out from under their rocks and to start to try and recruit again.  While, in the real world, the tide seems to have turned against them, the antics of Elon Musk has given them hope of a safe haven on a mainstream platform.  Hence we regularly seem to have 'Enoch Powell' trending on Twitter, with threads full of racists telling us how he was right.  (He wasn't).

Anyway, the moral of all this is that if I follow you on Twitter and start uncritically re-tweeting anti-vaxxer shit, conspiracy bollocks or anti-immigration rhetoric from the likes of GB News, then you are going to be shown the door.  Sure, you can believe what you like, but I don't have to listen.  I'm not expecting anyone doing this to care whether I mute or unfollow them or not, (let alone notice), but you've been warned.  Thankfully, though, there are only a couple of other accounts I currently follow, (who have a penchant for anti-vaxxer and pro-Putin propaganda, it seems), who are presently at risk.  The overwhelming majority of those I follow seem to be perfectly decent, sane and rational human beings who, even if I don't always agree with some of what they tweet, are clearly not raving racist bastards.