"But who would want to know the secret of creating giant bats?" asks the hero of Devil Bat's Daughter (1946). The answer, of course, was Bela Lugosi, in The Devil Bat (1941), to which this film was a sequel of sorts. I say 'of sorts' because it doesn't include any of the cast or characters from the earlier film. While not quite an early example of an 'in name only' sequel, or eve a thematic sequel, Devil Bat's Daughter has only a loose association with the first film and, unlike that movie, is less a horror film than a thriller. As the title indicates, the link between the two films is the titular daughter - although never seen or mentioned in the first film, it seems that mad scientist Lugosi had an estranged wife and a daughter in the UK. She now turns up in the US, years after the events of the first film and finds herself embroiled in a plot by her psychiatrist to murder his wife and frame Lugosi's daughter for it. Which he does by convincing her that she has the same 'bad blood' as her notorious father and inducing her to have nightmares about vampire bats. Her father, Lugosi in the previous film, had developed a strain of giant vampire bats, then sent them against those who had previously ridiculed his work. He achieved this by giving the victims a special shaving lotion laced with pheromones that the bats could home in on. Back in the sequel, the psychiatrist's stepson is suspicious over his mother's death and determines to get to the truth.
This involves him convincing the girl that she isn't responsible and doesn't share her father's 'bad blood'. He does this by effectively rewriting history - according to his investigations everything we saw go on in Devil Bat was a lie. Lugosi was simply a misunderstood researcher who never harmed anyone. Apparently creating giant vampire bats really was a valid scientific experiment which could have benefitted medical science. People only died because some of his bats accidentally escaped and mauled them. Lugosi provided a convenient scapegoat for the authorities when he, too, fell victim to his creations. You really have to admire PRC's nerve here - creating a sequel to one of its biggest hits that actuall repudiates and invalidates that entire film. (The script also deals Lugosi a heinous personal insult by describing his character as having been Romanian, despite Bela having been a proud Hungarian). Devil Bat's Daughter is a typically cheap but efficient PRC programmer,directed with a certain degree of style by German ex pat Frank Wisbar (whose other 1946 PRC film, Strangler of the Swamp, has gained something of a cult classic status). While enjoyable enough in its own right, Devil Bat's Daughter would have come as a bitter disappointment to anyone expecting a conventional sequel to The Devil Bat, with blood sucking giant bats and Bela Lugosi.
I have been feeling decidedly under the weather this week. At first I tried to put my lack of energy and drive down to my usual laziness. But it has been accompanied by other symptoms, including congestion and a sore throat. I suspect that it is a manifestation of my historic hat fever, which these days only ever gives me relatively mild symptoms, (back in the day, especially in my childhood, it could be really debilitating, causing breathing difficulties). For the past few weeks, on and off, I've been trying to beat my back garden into submission. I know, I should have been doing this in the Spring, but the weather was just too horrible. So, I'm toiling away out there in the Summer heat, kicking up dust and pollen as I hack down the jungle it had become. Actually, the amount of hacking was reduced by my liberal use of the closest thing to Agent Orange I can legally buy in my local Tesco Metro. The results were spectacular, with foliage wilting away left, right and centre. Still, the remnants had to be cleared, not to mention the fact that others seem to have decided to use my garden as a tip for their rubbish, which has also had to be cleared.
Anyway, every time I work out there, I end up coughing and sneezing for days afterward. This last Sunday, though, I seem to have gotten a particularly bad dose of whatever I stirred up, leaving me feeling drained and lethargic this week. Judging by the silent treatment I was getting from the neighbours last Sunday, I don't think they approve of my chemical garden clearance methods. As they don't seem to approve of my 're-wilding' of my garden, (or as they might call it - 'neglect'), I'm not sure what else they think I'm going to do. Besides, if anyone should be aggrieved, it's me - quite apart from the rubbish dumped in my garden, on Saturday I had to put up with someone a few doors down firing up their barbecue. It smelt like there was an elephant farting over the fence. I had to retreat indoors and shut the doors and windows it smelt so foul. The bottom line, though, is that I simply don't care what any of them think. Something they don't seem to grasp. I'm clearing the garden, not because of their disapproval, but because I've got fed up of having to do these periodic slash and burn campaigns. My intention is to pave and gravel everything, to make it all low maintenance. There's still a way to go yet, but it's at least not overgrown now - you can see the path again, for instance. Hopefully, by next week I'll be feeling a bit more energetic and be able to get back out there.
I've got to stop watching all those old US TV shows on various dubious streaming channels I can get via Roku. I swear to God that until two weeks ago I'd never seen an episode of Mr Ed in my life, yet now I pretty much know the words to the theme song by heart. Mr Ed, if you didn't know, was a sitcom about a talking horse which was popular in the States in the early sixties. As it turns out, it is surprisingly weird - and not just because its main character is a horse that talks, (but only to his owner Wilbur). Not only is Mr Ed himself a bit of a lech, (he's always telling Wilbur about his latest conquests amongst the local population of fillys), but he's also something of a voyeur, frequently wandering out of his stable to peer through neighbours' windows and eavesdrop on their conversations. I recently caught a particularly bizarre episode from 1962 in which Mr Ed makes threatening phone calls to Clint Eastwood, (who has recently moved into the neighbourhood. (Clint's stallion has been muscling in on Ed's filly action, so he launches a campaign of harassment to try and get the actor to move away - which includes arranging for Eastwood to share a party line with Wilbur, so that Ed can listen in on - and interrupt - his phone calls). As I said, it's all pretty weird for what's generally remembered as a lighthearted fantasy sitcom aimed at family audiences. But that's precisely how the makers got away with some darkly humourous and off-kilter subject matter - they could always shrug off criticisms of its content by pointing out that it was simply a silly sitcom about a talking horse. A talking horse, however, who is a self-confessed snooper and sex pest.
Unlike Mr Ed, I had previously seen episodes of The Ghost and Mrs Muir, which originally ran for two series between 1968 and 1970. I sometimes caught it as a kid, when ITV used to run it late afternoon or early evenings in the early seventies. Seeing episodes, I was surprised by how much about it I had forgotten - that the Captain (the 'Ghost' of the title) had a living relative who featured very prominently in many episodes and that Mrs Muir actually had two young children, not just the one that I remembered. (Somehow, the years had erased her daughter from my memory). Derived from a novel via a 1948 film adaptation, (which had starred Rex Harrison as the Captain), the TV series (which updates the story to then contemporary times), is surprisingly dark in many respects. For one thing, it centres on a male chauvinist mariner who died a century ago having the hots for a young widow and romancing her in spectral form. In the first episode alone, he physically prevents her and the children from leaving his house (which they have rented from his great nephew), by taking control of her car and steering it back to the house. Whichever way you look at it, his attentions, no matter how well intentioned they might be, are more than a little bit creepy. Quite apart from the fact that Mrs Muir has to live with the knowledge that she now lives in a house where she has no privacy, as Captain Gregg's ghost could pop up suddenly any time and any place. Then there's the matter of his campaign of terror against his great nephew, who the Captain despises and feels is unworthy to bear the family name. OK, the great nephew is a venal and deceitful creep, but I'm not sure that justifies his late relative's continuous harassment of him. All pretty disturbing stuff , when you think about it but, like Mr Ed, presented as a family orientated sitcom. You see, those supposedly cosy old TV classics are as dark and edgy as anything produced nowadays.
OK, so my theory is that it is all part of some sort of billionaire euthanasia club. Not voluntary euthanasia. mind you. Rather someone taking it upon themselves to rid the world of these wealthy wastes of space in such a way that doesn't look deliberate, instead making their demise look like an inevitable result of their own hubris and sense of entitlement. Believe me, the loss of multiple billionaires on the Titan submersible supposedly taking them to view the wreck of the Titanic is just the start of it. What's that? It's too soon to be joking about this tragedy? Who's joking? Besides, I'm tired of all the sanctimonious cobblers that have been written already about the loss of that submarine and its occupants. It culminated with that human pile of offal Boris Johnson writing in the Daily Mail about how they were some kind of pioneers, pushing the frontiers of exploration. Or some such bollocks. Let's be clear about this, they were a bunch of very privileged people with more money than sense who were prepared to pay a lot of money to get into what amounted to an uncertificated tin can, in order to dive several miles down into the Atlantic in order to gawp at what amounts to an underwater mass grave. That is not exploration. It's tourism. Worse, it is misery tourism aiming to get some kind of kick from wallowing in the misfortune of others. I mean, if nothing else, it must surely further undermine the myth that billionaires are in any way more intelligent than us mere mortals, or exhibit better judgement - nobody in their right mind would surely ever have set foot on that obvious deathtrap of a submarine?
Not that we really needed any more proof of their fallibility than Elon Musk's stewardship of Twitter, where his utter cluelessness is on display daily. But, I hear you say, if they are all such idiots then how do you explain the fat that they became billionaires in the first place? Surely that indicates a level of saviness above and beyond the ordinary? Well, bearing in mind that most of them came from money in the first place makes their financial rise less remarkable. It is pretty easy to be a success in just about any field when you have the safety net of Daddy's money to fall back on. Very few of these feted billionaires are truly 'self made'. Damn it, I can't stand Sir Alan Sugar - he's an utter knob head - but, while merely a millionaire rather than a billionaire, he did at least really start at the bottom with a market stall. He didn't have any fortunes to inherit or subsidise him, so he had to make money off his own back. Which I can respect. You want more evidence as to why modern billionaires are complete dicks? Just look at that other billionaire 'event' last week: the aforementioned Musk challenging Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to a 'cage fight'. Really? Have these supposed business master minds really have nothing better to do? It just reveals them as the immature juveniles they actually are.
To get back to my original point though: is there some kind of billionaire euthanasia club in operation? Because it seems to me that stroking their egos by offering them the chance to do something nobody else can simply because they are filthy rich, is the perfect way to lure these clowns into a trap. Get them to dive to the Titanic, then make out sure that the submarine implodes before it ever gets there. Tragic accident. No suggestion of foul play. Perhaps they were dead before they ever got on the sub - maybe there was a gas chamber on the support ship. Then they just loaded the bodies into that metal coffin and dropped it into the ocean. Obviously, this method can't be a viable option any more, as the 'tragedy' is likely to get such trips to the Titanic banned for the foreseeable future. So what next? Space travel, perhaps. Could it be that all those private space initiatives are really 'false flag' operations unwittingly financed by the very billionaires who are destined to die in their amateur spaceships? What an irony if the likes of Richard Branson or Elon Musk were to pile into one of their space planes or rockets with a whole bunch of their billionaire buddies, only for the space craft to explode on launch, or re-rentry? The perfect act of involuntary euthanasia - there'd be even less evidence left than in the submarine 'accident'. The kicker would be if the fees that these idiots had paid for these 'experiences' were then being used by those organising the billionaire euthanasia club to do stuff like finance an end to global food poverty or end homelessness?
Big budget World War Two movies, more often than not on an epic scale, became a staple of sixties cinema, kick started, apparently, by the success of The Longest Day (1962). But as the decade closed, returns on such films went into decline, with titles like The Battle of Britain (1969) disappointing at the box office. So it shouldn't have been surprising to the makers of Hornet's Nest (1970) that the film would turn out to be a box-office flop. That said, they did their best to try and tailor the film to the era's changing tastes and audiences: with its supporting cast of juveniles it was clearly aimed at a younger demographic. Moreover, with its story of naive youth being led into violent conflict by an American soldier it was doubtless intended as some kind of commentary on the situation in Vietnam at the time. Perhaps the producers had hoped that the film might tap into anti-Vietnam war sentiment amongst youth audiences. At the same time, the levels of violence on display seemed to be inspired by contemporary Spaghetti Westerns and war movies. Whatever the makers' intent, it apparently failed as Hornet's Nest failed to find an audience at the time of its release (and remains rarely seen today). Condemned at the time for its depictions of violence employed both by and against children, it comes over as a cynical exercise - clearly attempting to elicit sympathy from the audience when some of the juvenile partisans are killed by the Germans, yet still expecting that same audience to cheer the kids on when they ruthlessly mow down Germans by the dozen.
Indeed, the film's biggest problem lies in its failure to provide the viewer with any particularly sympathetic characters to identify with. Rock Hudson is surprisingly uncharismatic as the sole survivor of a US commando unit parachuted behind enemy lines in Italy to blow up a dam, while the child partisans he then uses as substitutes for his soldiers are characterised as practically feral - bloodthirsty and looking for excuses for violence even before Hudson sets them on their mission. While the film tries to provide some justification for their violent nature - the witnessed their parents executed by the SS - it never convinces. The female German doctor (Sylvia Koscina) forced into assisting the injured Hudson by the children is also poorly characterised, never seeming to know which side she is really on, her supposed concern for the welfare of the children and objections to Hudson's militarisation of them ringing hollow in view of the regime that she loyally serves. Likewise, the main German military character (played by Sergio Fantoni) is someone we are clearly supposed to view as a 'good German' - after all, he is regular army rather than SS and even shoots an over zealous SS officer - is still guilty of a fair share of mowings down of unarmed civilians. Further alienating the audience from the main characters is that the doctor finds herself subjected to sexual assault twice, once by the older boys, later by Hudson. While these blurrings of the moral lines that are supposed to separate the 'good' guys from the 'bad' guys is doubtless intentional - part of the film's commentary on war - they ultimately serve to weaken the film's impact: after all, why should we care when any of the boys are killed when they are a bunch of rapists?
Hornet's Nest was a US/Italian co-production which results in another big problem: it was made at a time when the Italian film industry was busily trying to whitewash Italy's war record and disassociate the country from its wartime fascist leadership and alliance with Nazi Germany. This was seen in many indigenously produced Italian war movies of the sixties and seventies, which rarely featured Italian soldiers as protagonists, instead casting their Italian leads as British or American soldiers and presenting the Germans as dyed in the wool villains. While most of these films seemed to focus on the war in North Africa, the absence of Italian forces, (despite Italy's heavy involvement in the earlier stages of the desert conflict), doesn't seem too incongruous. Hornet's Nest, however, goes a stage further, pretty much presenting Italy as an occupied country, under the heel of their brutal German overlords. While it is true that by 1944, (when the film is set), large parts of Italy had surrendered to the allies, much of the north of the country remained under fascist control (and the fact that the allies haven't liberated the area depicted in the film implies that it must lie in the north), with Italian military units loyal to Mussolini actively supporting German forces. But if we are to believe Hornet's Nest, there were never any indigenous fascists in any part of Italy and nobody ever supported those German units. (A similar whitewashing occurs in another US/Italian World War Two epic, Anzio (1968), which fails to depict the Italian SS units that opposed the allied forces after the Anzio landings - once again, only the German army is present).
In hindsight, of course, the casting of Rock Hudson in the lead, gives another perspective to the film. A closeted homosexual at the time, Hudson seemed to specialise in playing extremely masculine heroes in action films. Sporting a moustache and frequently wearing a sleeveless vest to emphasise his many physique, his performance in Hornet's Nest now seems like a parody of such macho characters. Perhaps the film's producers were aware of this at the time - his character's rape of the German doctor seems to be there mainly to emphasis his 'masculine' credentials, the scene otherwise feeling somewhat jarring and out of left field. Most likely, though, Hudson's characterisation was meant as a parody - a parody of the sort of macho heroes usually featured in these sorts of films, whose ultra-masculinity always threatens to teeter on the edge of psychopathy and sadism. The fact that Hudson was, in private, gay was purely coincidental. Nonetheless, the film has become the target of the usual sort of homophobic commentary that highlights the sight of a gay man leading a bunch of young boys in a violent endeavour. More interesting, of course, is the fact that all of the supposed 'masculine' traits such commentators seem to think define a 'real' man can be successfully simulated in film after film by a gay man.
Hornet's Nest is, all of its problems aside, a very good-looking movie, directed with a sure hand by Phil Karlson and featuring excellent location work and cinematography, it at least moves at a decent pace. The action scenes are also well staged and competently executed, no matter that some of them are pretty ludicrous. But the slickness of the film's production simply serves to emphasise the cynicism of its subject matter, as it puts a cast of unlikeable characters through a series of increasingly unbelievable set pieces in service of some very confused messaging. War is Hell, especially for children who end up damaged by the experience, it seems to be saying. Except that we didn't really need to see them variously killed, injured and themselves committing multiple killings, not to mention a sexual assault, in order to know this. The whole presentation comes over as exploitative rather than as genuinely wanting to make any kind of profound statements about the effects of war on children.
In the long ago days of my childhood, back in the seventies, TV networks often used to put on low budget films in early evening weekday time slots. Wednesday, as I recall, was the most popular day for this sort of scheduling - soaps didn't run four or five days a week then, game shows weren't as numerous and tended to be shown at weekends and talent shows fronted by the likes of Hughie Green, so it was difficult to fill airtime, particularly midweek. Anyway, Destination Inner Space (1966) was one of the films I remember first seeing back then, on ITV at around seven or seven thirty on a Wednesday or Thursday evening. Seeing any kind of science fiction on British TV outside of Dr Who and Star Trek back then was incredibly rare, so it stuck in my memory. Moreover, to my juvenile mind, it all seemed pretty amazing. I caught up with it again a few weeks ago - to my adult eyes it seemed what it really was: an incredibly cheap B-movie with poor model work, flimsy sets, a rubber monster. basic special effects and a cast of past-their-prime stars, (including Scott Brady, Sheree North and Gary Merrill).
That said, it was still pretty enjoyable. It at least boasted some originality (for its era) in plot terms, featuring an underwater flying saucer menacing an undersea base, rather than the usual alien invaders threatening the earth's surface. Its scenario is reminiscent of The Thing From Another World (1951), which also featured a an isolated outpost in a hostile environment (an arctic base) manned by both the military and civilian scientists, menaced by a monster (an 'intellectual carrot' from outer space), which the humans unwittingly take into their base. While nowhere near as suspenseful as that film, Destination Inner Space does manage to generate a surprising amount of tension, with director Francis D Lyon utilising the claustrophobic interiors of the submarine base to maximum effect. There are also some decent undersea scenes and some decently staged action. As in The Thing, the various tensions between cautious military and enquiring scientists are played out, along with a sub-plot involving a conflict between the new base commander and one of the crew, relating to an incident in their past, which has to be resolved in the course of the battle with the alien monster. The latter, while being a man in a rubber suit, is actually a pretty good rubber suit as this sort of low budget movie goes.
One of a series of low budget science fiction films produced by United Pictures Corporation, pre sold to TV as a package, Destination Inner Space also enjoyed a US cinema release as part of a double bill in 1966. Like most of the United Pictures movies, it is actually somewhat above average for a cheap B-movie and has several points of interest. It's still a very enjoyable film of its genre and well worth watching.
There really was a battle at Wolmi-Do - it was an island commanding the approaches to Inchon during the Korean War. For the US landings in Inchon to take place, the North Koren heavy artillery on Wolmi-Do had to be silenced. This was done via combination of off shore naval bombardment and an assault by US Marines landed on the other side of the island. They met some stiff resistance from some of the defenders, none of whom, as far as history records it anyway, were semi-naked young women. But hey, this is war history according to a fifties men's magazine, (the December 1959 issue of Man's Life, to be precise). In their unique mythology, every military action seemed to involve contributions from scantily clad, gun toting, girls. Though these particular girls seem to opposing the US invaders, none of them look remotely Korean, leading me to suspect that the story might also include the 'brain washing' of captured US personnel, (a popular theme in Korean War related fiction, most famously in Richard Condon's novel and subsequent film The Manchurian Candidate).
Elsewhere in the magazine, it is business as usual, judging by the other story titles teased on the cover. Which, obviously, means the great American obsession with sex and particularly its effect, (or the effect of the lack of it), on the sort of American men who read these magazines. 'When Jealous Men go Kill Crazy' and 'Why Women Despise The American Male - Because They Ask For It!' are clearly cautionary tales of how those crazy and deceitful women can't be trusted - not only do they give it away to all and sundry, but they hate all men as well. Judging by men's magazine covers of the fifties and sixties, there seemed to be a strong undercurrent of self-loathing amongst American males, manifested in such misogynistic story titles: all women are evil temptresses who will humiliate you, but hey, it doesn't matter because you are too inadequate to satisfy them anyway. Your only hope of 'getting some', apparently, was to go to 'Smog City: Where Starlets and Career Girls Run Wild' or to flag down 'Belle Santee and Her Unique Bordello on Wheels'. The overriding message seems to be that strong, empowered women are the greatest threat facing American manhood - if they aren't trying to kill you on the beaches of Korea, then they are humiliating you on the home front. Isn't it great that we've moved on from such attitudes....?
In a weekend of oppressive heat, poor sleep as the result of aforementioned heat and having to chase up a missing prescription with the pharmacy, (again in said heat), of the numerous films I watched while slumped on my sofa, exhausted from all that heat, this, curiously, is the one that made the greatest impression upon me. Not because The Executioner Part II (1984) could, in any way, be described as a good film, but because ii is one of the most audacious attempts at misleading a potential audience I've seen from an exploitation film. I happened upon the film on a streaming channel I'd flicked to and was too lazy to switch from, although I nearly did,. thinking that as I hadn't seen Part I, then it might be a confusing watch. Except, of course, that there never was an Executioner Part I. Certainly, there have been films called The Executioner, but none are related to this Part II. What the producers were trying to do was to cash in on the success of the similarly titled vigilante film The Exterminator (1980) and even more so its sequel The Exterminator 2 (1984), which The Executioner Part II beat to release, (it was actually filmed in 1982, but sat on the shelf for a couple of years). In effect, it is the ultimate in fake sequels, deliberately designed in plot terms, title and advertising, to confuse fans of The Exterminator into watching Executioner Part II instead of Exterminator 2.
The resulting film is, in essence, a low budget, low rent rip off of The Exterminator, which is quite an achievement considering just how low budget and low rent that film was. The Executioner Part II is a deliriously bad film (so much so that at times I suspected that I was suffering a heat induced hallucination), not so much in that it is ineptly made - the direction from schlock veteran James Bryan is actually halfway competent for this sort of film- but just that its script is ludicrous and its plotting bizarre and circuitous and its budget is too low to match even its modest ambitions. The acting performances are what really let the film down and give it such an amateurish vibe. The closest thing to 'stars' that it can muster are Christopher Mitchum, (proving again that you can only trade on your famous father's name for so long before you find yourself rapidly plummeting from supporting roles in John Wayne pictures to poverty row), who is as wooden here as he was in any of the big budget studio films he appeared in, and Aldo Ray. The latter, by his own admission, was by this point in his career, taking any paying job going in order to cover his medical bills for the treatment of the cancer that was eventually to kill him, and pretty much phones in his brief role as the police commissioner. It is painfully obvious by the way in which she mangles her lines, that English isn't the leading lady's first language, (she was actually German) - incredibly, the actress (Renee Harmon, who was in a number of eighties schlock movies) is also credited as the scriptwriter. which probably explains the sheer clunkiness, not to mention weirdness, of most of the dialogue.
Opening with a superfluous ultra low budget Vietnam flashback, (obligatory in urban vigilante movies of this kind), in which Mike saves the life of his buddy Roger (Mitchum). Flash forward to the present and Roger is now a big city police detective and Mike runs an auto repair shop, (but won't work on foreign cars or automatics - which must severely limit his customer base, bearing in mind that manual transmissions were virtually unknown in US cars of the era). Roger is hunting the vigilante dubbed 'The Executioner' who is terrorising the city's underworld, while Mike, obviously, is the vigilante. Deeply disturbed by his 'Nam experiences, Mike is still fighting the war in his head, substituting local muggers and rapists for the Viet Cong. The paucity of the film's resources, however, mean that not only can't Mike muster a decent vigilante outfit (scruffy Army fatigues with a scarf across his face instead of a mask) but his actual vigilante attacks are all very small scale. While quite a few guns get toted, they don't get fired (even blank rounds cost money), with his confrontations with bad guys quickly degenerating into fistfights, knife fights or just plain old bludgeoning with blunt instruments. It is clear that the makers wanted these fights to look as brutal as possible but the budget obviously placed severe restrictions on what sort of stunt work could be performed, not to mention how much fake blood could be spilled.
Meanwhile, in order to pad the film out, there's a sub-plot involving a criminal referred to as 'The Tattooed Man' who, with his cronies, likes drugging, kidnapping, torturing and raping teenaged girls. Inevitably, he ends up targeting Roger's teenage daughter, who not only looks to be in her mid twenties at least, but has also fallen in with a group of chicks doing booze, drugs, sex and other unspecified wild stuff - all of whom are even worse actors than the girl playing the daughter. Of course, Mike learns what's happened and single handedly storms the bad guys' hideout - cue more beatings, stabbings and bludgeonings. A highlight of this sequence comes when a henchman is impaled on a couch with a samurai sword - and keeps right on fighting the Executioner. But, the sofa impaling by sword aside, the climax ultimately fails to deliver the goods. Not only are 'The Tattooed Man's' ideas of torture pretty tame, (the budget apparently wouldn't run to any torture devices beyond a lit cigarette), but he doesn't even have any much in the way of tattoos to justify his name. I was expecting him to be like Ray Bradbury's 'Illustrated Man', his body entirely covered with the things. But no, it's just a couple of modest tattoos of little artistic note.
The film looks roughly made, with abrupt editing, apparently incomplete sound dubbing, (much of the expected background noise seems absent) and frenzied, yet scrappy looking action scenes. (It was reputedly shot at weekends in order to minimise equipment rental costs on 35mm short ends left over from other productions, in order to keep the budget as low as possible). Indeed, there are times at which you suspect that it might be intended as a parody of low budget vigilante films rather than just a cash in on the success of recent genre releases. But it just doesn't seem to be sufficiently self-aware to be a parody, with most of its strangeness and off kilter feel stemming from a script written by a non-native English speaker trying to approximate normal English dialogue and put together every urban vigilante cliche into one script. The result is a film that lurches from one cliched set-piece to another at breakneck speed, but doesn't actually have the resources to properly realise any of them. All of this fuels the film's fever dream feel and general air of sheer surrealism, both of which, along with its unintentionally hilarious dialogue, make it hugely entertaining. It really is one of those films which just has to be seen to be disbelieved - which you can, as it is currently available in its entirety on You Tube.
(As a footnote, the actual Exterminator sequel, The Exterminator 2, turned out to be almost as ramshackle as The Executioner Part II, with large parts of the film being re-shot, with LA standing in for the New York locations of the original footage. Star Robert Ginty apparently wasn't available for most of the reshoots, with his vigilante persona suddenly taking to wearing a welder's mask while meting out his brutal 'justice').
Do you remember that film where Frank Sinatra and his buddies salvaged a sunken U-Boat and used it to hold up an ocean liner? Assault on a Queen it was called, which these days might be mistaken for a harrowing drama about homophobic violence, but in this case, the 'Queen' of the title was the liner Queen Mary, back before she was moored up in California as a tourist attraction. It came to mind today when I was reading about the capsizing of that boat full of refugees near Greece, resulting in possibly hundreds of deaths. What if it wasn't an accident, I speculated, but what if some bunch of right wing anti-immigration loonies had secretly salvaged a U-Boat and were using it to torpedo such vessels? OK, I know that only yesterday I was railing against right-wing kooks using public tragedies as opportunities to push their anti-immigration agenda, but bear with me - I'm not pushing anything here except a perfectly legitimate hatred of Nazis. Besides, I have satiric intent here. No, really, I do. Because these bastards do, sort of, have form for this, chartering boats to try and disrupt operations to rescue refugees, for instance, or calling for every small boat in North Africa to be sunk by the RAF in order to stop them from being used by refugees and asylum seekers.
Of course, when I say 'right wing anti-immigration loonies', I actually mean,, say, Nigel Farage, but obviously, if I was to mention his name, that might be libellous, so I won't. But if anyone was to make a modern version of Assault on a Queen, it might well feature a villain who looks a bit like Farage captaining a salvaged submarine as it cruises the English Channel attempting to sink small dinghys full of asylum seekers. Actually, to be fair, he and his merry men would probably be targeting the RNLI lifeboats trying to rescue stricken asylum seekers - they'd probably wait until they'd picked up the occupants of several small boats and were heading home before torpedoing them, so as to ensure maximum casualties. Obviously, if such a person were to captain a sub under such circumstances, it would probably run aground off Felixstowe or end up beached at Dover. Plus, if this was a contemporary version of the story, they'd have to change the origin of the salvaged submarine - I doubt very much that there are any U-Boat wrecks left that are even close to salvagable. So, maybe a sunken Russian or North Korean submarine - one of the diesel powered ones rather than a nuclear powered boat. After all, we wouldn't want to make it seem too implausible, so no nukes of any kind. After all, surely even right wing loonies wouldn't be so crazy as to want to use nuclear weapons against unarmed immigrants, would they?
Another week that has left me wearily shaking my head at the state of political discourse in this country. It never ceases to amaze me the number of self-styled political commentators who seem to think that any horrible tragedy involving someone of non-British origin is the perfect opportunity to start spewing their anti-immigration rhetoric and race hate. But that's what we got in the aftermath of those murders in Nottingham in which the perpetrator may or may not have been an asylum seeker, (he was non-white, so that was good enough for these goons). Twitter, in particular, seemed to be full of their shit. (Which shouldn't be surprising, with its continued rightward shift under Musk's ownership). I mean, read the room guys - people are in shock, relatives of the victims in mourning: the last thing they or anyone else needs is more your 'culture wars' shit. But that's where we seem to be at these days - any situation is seized upon as an opportunity to push extremist agendas, regardless of how inappropriate it might be. Then there's the whole circus surrounding Boris Johnson and the parliamentary report into his misconduct during lockdowns and how he lied to parliament in order to cover it up. The confected 'outrage' from his remaining supporters in the press and parliament is more than mildly ridiculous. 'How dare they be saying he's a liar? Don't they know that he's Boris Johnson and therefore very important?" seems to be the gist of it all.
Then there's the matter of his resignation honours list - not only is it full of the absolute scum of the Tory party, the sort of people who have made no discernible contribution to public life other than supporting Johnson and/or donating to the Tories - but there are also some notable names missing. Were they boycotted by Sunak when he forwarded the list, or were they omitted by Johnson, but he kept telling them that they were still on the list? The latter seems to be case with the appalling Nadine Dorries, who seems to think that she was in line for a peerage for services to swooning over Johnson. But she wants the truth, apparently. Which is that the likes of Johnson, in reality, have nothing but contempt for the people who support and vote for him. He'll string them along with all sorts of promises but, in the end, will shit all over them. Yet they continue to think he's wonderful, practically worshiping the tosser. Trump's the same - like Johnson, he'll happily throw his supporters and allies under the bus to save his own skin, secure in the knowledge that most of his brain dead/brainwashed acolytes will continue to practically orgasm over the very mention of his name and contribute money to his dodgy schemes.
To be absolutely fair, this isn't confined to the right: just look at the 'Cult of Corbyn', whereby the utterly useless former Labour leader who took the party to the brink pf electoral extinction, is granted virtual sainthood by his obsessive supporters. In this case, it tends to be the Corbyn entourage, who surrounded and enabled him and continue the cult, who have contempt for their supporters. They clearly don't give a toss about the working classes or they wouldn't have spent so long enabling the Tories to cling to power and continuing to try and undermine any prospect of a Labour victory at the next election. (These are the sort of predominantly middle class 'socialists' who think they know what's best for the working classes and if they don't like it and reject it at the ballot box then they deserve to suffer under yet another Tory government. Presumably they think that if they keep the Tories in power long enough then the ungrateful proles will 'learn their lesson' and do as their 'betters' tell them and embrace the clapped out Marxist-Leninism they peddle). What a bloody state we're in!
One of dozens of similar movies put out in the seventies under the auspices of Roger Corman's New World Pictures - some followed the exploits of nurses, other young female teachers, international fashion models or, as here, air stewardesses - these are sort of the US equivalent to British sex comedies. Fly Me (1973) is typical of thee format, following a trio of stewardesses, one of them new to the job, on a series of adventures in Hong Kong and the Philippines, (in actual fact, virtually all of it was filmed in the Philippines). Each of the main protagonists go off on separate plot threads: one searches for a missing boyfriend, one gets kidnapped by white slavers, (she had been smuggling drugs for the gang, but had 'lost' part of a shipment), while the rookie is romanced by a doctor she meets as a passenger while having to deal with her interfering mother who has gone along for the trip. The wildly differing nature of the three plot threads gives the film a decidedly uneven tone, veering from grim drama with violence and threats of rape in the white slaver storyline, broad comedy in the rookie stewardess' story and some bizarre action sequences feature in the other stewardess' attempts to find her missing boyfriend.
To be fair, the film does finally bring all three plots together for the climax, with the new stewardess getting kidnapped by the white slavers who, of course, are led by the missing boyfriend, with the infatuated doctor and an undercover cop coming to the rescue for with some more King Fu fighting. All in less than seventy five minutes. In reality a Philippine production masquerading as American, Fly Me was directed by the prolific Sirio H.Santiago, who turned out many similar pictures put out by New World. Of note is the fact that the seemingly random Kung Fu fights that punctuate one stewardess' search for her boyfriend, (gangs of Kung Fu killers keep appearing seeming from nowhere to assault her as she wanders around Hong Kong and Manila - luckily, she too is a martial arts expert), were supervised by Johnathan Demme. Ultimately, Fly Me is cinematic fluff, a film of no real consequence. But it goes down so many unexpected byways and includes so much bizarre action in its short running time that it is always entertaining. Pure exploitation - it has all the required elements: captive women, sex, nudity, violence and prostitution - and is none the worse for that.
Arch Oboler's The Bubble (1966) is something of an oddity, a film that feels like an over-extended episode of the director's radio anthology series (and later TV series) Lights Out, or even The Twilight Zone. Despite the fact that it is in colour, it feels almost as if it could have been made a decade earlier - the use of 3-D reinforces the feeling that it has been time warped from the fifties. Which is rather apt for a film which is about a group of people who stumble into a seemingly time warped town. The 'bubble' of the title is a force field which seems to surround a small town and its surrounding area which three people - including a woman about to give birth - somehow penetrate during a storm. The town itself seems to be a mish mash of elements from various geographical eras and even times - the bar, for instance, seems vaguely Old West, while other parts of the area, like the hospital seem to be from the thirties - while its inhabitants seem to be pre-programmed to go through the same routines and conversations over and over, like a stuck record. A taxi driver forever asks 'Cab Mister?', a bar tender responds to every question by asking 'what will it be?', for instance. Nobody eats, nobody drinks. Instead, the population visit a throne-like device in a strange structure at regular intervals, where their energy is apparently recharged and their programming reinforced. Those who 'malfunction', failing to follow their pre-determined routines, find themselves whisked skywards and swallowed by a black shape that periodically looms over the town, blocking out the sun.
All of which sets up an interesting premise which, unfortunately, is never really exploited. The main problem lies with the pacing, which is painfully slow, with the three outsiders labouriously putting together the clues to finally speculate that the town represents some kind of alien experiment, the 'bubble' allowing them to observe humans as if they were in an ant farm. Consequently, the film is at least twenty minutes too long, (a seventies re-release titled Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth was cut to around ninety minutes) and, in its latter stages, begins to sorely try the viewer's patience. It seems to take the trio of interlopers forever to even notice that anything is amiss - even when the people they meet keep repeating the same routines and replying with the same words over and over. Which brings us back to the idea that idea that the script might have originated as a half hour radio show. A feeling that is reinforced by the underwhelming climax- for an anthology show like Lights Out the climax would have been the 'shock' reveal that the town and all its inhabitants are trapped in a bubble, under observation and doomed to repeat the same day over and over. A feature film, of course, requires more than this to bring up its running time to acceptable length, hence the visitors' over-extended investigation into what's going on in the town. The unfortunate result of this is that the three outsiders' actions in the town themselves feel repetitive, as they constantly try to get people to respond beyond their regular 'scripts' or step outside of their fixed routines.
The sheer talkiness of the script, with characters all too often telling us about what is going on rather than the film showing us, is a - characteristic of Oboler's films - his background was in radio and theatre - as is the tendency toward a 'preachiness' of tone. The film really needed a much stronger cast to properly do justice to its ideas, but instead employs second tier performers more familiar from TV and B-movies, like Michael Cole, Deborah Walley and Johnny Desmond. Unfortunately, they never manage to make their characters any more than two dimensional, never giving the audience anybody in the film to really engage with or care about. It also doesn't help that the scenario presented by the script is inconsistent: despite being entrenched in set daily routines, the hospital staff, for instance, seem to be capable of dealing with unplanned events as they successfully deliver the pregnant interloper's baby and consequently care for her and the baby. Indeed, the local doctor does seem to have some awareness of his situation, at one point telling the protagonists that they 'haven't gone to their assigned start points'. Yet other members of the local community simply repeat a single phrase in response to any attempt at interaction, becoming completely passive if forcibly removed from their established location and routine. Moreover, the relative lack of action over the film's overlong running time combines with a generally cheap look to the sets to give the whole movie the feel of a B-movie, rather than the A-feature it was clearly intended to be.
While Arch Oboler might not have been the most visually inspired of film directors, he was an acclaimed writer
noted for his intelligent and thought-provoking scripts and plays, so
it is no surprise that The Bubble should be full of interesting ideas. Unfortunately, in their execution, they never really coalesce into a satisfying whole - while it might be possible to read all sorts of readings into it as pertains to free will, predetermination, government surveillance and social control or even, perhaps, as a an analogy for communism, it is never coherent enough to be definite about any of these things. Nevertheless, despite its deficiencies, though, The Bubble remains an intriguing film, setting up a premise that might seem familiar nowadays, but at the time was reasonably original for a film. (Various parts of its concept would subsequently be reworked by numerous films and TV series - the idea of characters trapped in a time loop turns up in the seventies Dr Who story Carnival of Monsters, for instance, with the film The Forgotten using the image of people being hoisted skywards by aliens, while Under the Dome lifts the whole 'bubble' concept itself). Its main short coming is that it fails to exploit this idea sufficiently and never properly follows up on all of the interesting plot strands it sets up. Adding to the film's curiosity value is the fact that it was filmed in the 'Space-Vision' 3-D process, (Oboler was a 3-D loyalist, having directed the first released 3-D film, Bwana Devil in 1953), which, while still requiring the audience to wear stereoscopic glasses, could shoot the film in 3-D using conventional cameras. Whether 3-D enhanced the film on its original release, I can't say, as I've only seen it on TV in 2-D, but a lot of stuff does get thrown or pointed at the screen. For all its flaws, The Bubble remains worth watching, even if its ambition ultimately outstrips its resources - a common feature of Arch Oboler's productions.
Orca, The Killer Whale (1977), is one of those exploitation films that, inexplicably, I never got around to watching until recently. I actually remember it being released to cinemas, (I was too young to see it back then), it actually had a pretty intensive publicity campaign, with ads for it all over TV at the time. I also recall that it was widely dismissed as being a crude Jaws rip off, (although that didn't put audiences off as it did pretty well at the box office on its initial release). That reputation has persisted, with the film still enjoying little critical support. While it is true that Orca is very much Dino De Laurentis' response to the success of Jaws and follows that film's lead in focusing its story on a Moby Dick - like obsessive battle between man and beast, it actually establishes its own unique plot developments and concerns that mark it out as being more than a mere clone of the Spielberg movie. The most striking difference is that while the shark of Jaws is presented pretty much as a relentless killing machine, acting purely on instinct, the antagonist of Orca is portrayed, (in keeping with the real animal), as an intelligent adversary, capable of rational thought and motivated by a personal vendetta against a specific individual. The killer whale's victims aren't random characters who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but are all connected with the main character and/or associated with the trauma that triggers its campaign of terror.
The film's main character is Nolan, played by Richard Harris, a captain operating out of a small Canadian fishing community who, along with his crew, attempt to capture various marine animals for aquariums and zoos. As the film opens, he and his associates are attempting to capture a great white shark, but their attempts are complicated by a party of marine biologists diving in the area, one of whom is targeted by the shark. The diver is saved by the intervention a killer whale, which kills the shark. After witnessing this incident and speaking to the lead biologist, Rachel Kent (Charlotte Rampling), an expert on the orca, Nolan decides that his next target for capture should be a killer whale. Unfortunately, his attempts to capture one go awry when, instead of a male, he injures and snares a pregnant female - which, as it is hanging on the boat's stern, suffers a miscarriage - all witnessed by its mate. These scenes - partially seen from the male whale's point of view - are incredibly traumatic and have the immediate effect of switching audience loyalties to the orca, whose response is immediate, dragging Nolan's first mate off of the boat to his death, as he leans over the rail. But the film isn't content to let is story play out as a simple black and white struggle between 'good' whale with a justifiable grudge and 'bad' human. Nolan himself is left traumatised by the whole incident, with it bringing back memories of the death of his own child in a road accident, leading to him empathising with the whale.
Despite this empathy, Nolan is obviously keen to avoid a confrontation with the killer whale. But his opponent gives him no choice, chasing off fish leaving the local fishermen with no catches, leading to Nolan being ostracised by the community, but still he won't go back to sea. So the whale first destroys the harbour's fuel pipelines, then succeeds in maiming one of Nolan's crew, (played by Bo Derek in an early role). Nolan eventually bows to the inevitable - that he must put to sea once more and face the whale in a life or death battle. The fact that both protagonists - the whale and Nolan - are portrayed with a surprising degree of sympathy, both shown to be deeply affected by past traumas, lifts Orca above the average, run-of-the-mill eco-horror/sea monster movie. Nolan isn't marked out as villainous because he captures marine specimens for profit - he is simply trying to protect and provide for his crew/family. As played by Harris, he comes over as a three dimensional character, flawed but basically a decent man who doesn't seek to inflict unnecessary cruelty upon the animals he hunts. Indeed, unlike the human characters in Jaws, he isn't hell-bent on killing his adversary, who he recognises as having a justified grievance. Likewise, the orca isn't an unthinking killer - it is motivated by its failure to protect its family (just as Nolan couldn't protect his deceased child) and is methodical in its campaign against Nolan - by the end of the film it has established itself as a distinct individual rather than just a plot device.
The film benefits greatly from some decent performances, not just from Harris and Rampling, but also the supporting cast, which includes the likes of Keenan Wynn, Robert Carradine and the aforementioned Bo Derek. While director Micheal Anderson - a workman-like director always prone to pedestrian pacing - never manages to inject much impetus or visual style to the film, he does at least keep the story moving and allows his cast to do their thing. Moreover, he handles the set-pieces well, not just the climactic battle on the ice floes but also the attempted capture of the orca early on and the whale's attack on Nolan's house, which extends out over the water, on stilts, which results in Derek's maiming. All are well staged and memorable. The effects work is also pretty decent, with the orca represented by a combination of real, trained, killer whales and full size replicas, (which are more convincing than the mechanical shark that rears out of the water in Jaws). While I'm not claiming that Orca is an overlooked classic, with its environmental concerns, sympathetic portrayal of the wildlife and strong characterisations, it does stand out as an above average exploitation film that never lets its ecological message and character dramas get in the way of delivering the goods in schlock movie terms, providing suspense gore and some decent action in a very professionally produced package.
A relatively short lived 'shudder pulp', Mystery Tales put out nine issues to an irregular schedule between 1938 and 1940. Published by Red Circle - that put out a wide range of pulps aimed at the lower end of the market, including Star Detective (to which Mystery Tales was intended as a companion), Uncanny Tales and Marvel Stories - it was clearly designed as a rival to the likes of Horror Stories and Terror Tales. Like those publications, it employed lurid covers and equally lurid story titles which undoubtedly promised more than they could ever deliver. I have to say, judging by the covers on 'Shudder pulps', there must have been quite a market for bondage sex fantasies in the thirties and forties - Mystery Tales alone, featured variously semi naked young women tied to torture devices or being menaced with branding irons, being whipped by midgets, etc, on every one of its covers. Clearly, readers had some pretty wild and violent fantasies back then and, of course, no internet to cater to them, having to rely on these pulps instead.
I'll hazard a guess that this cover painting illustrates 'The Devil's University' by Donald Dale. I have to say that if this illustration is an accurate representation of the sort of stuff on its curriculum, then these days it would be highly unlikely to get accreditation. Indeed, if anything like that had been offered at any of the academic institutions I attended, then there would have been student protests and sit ins. (Although I strongly suspect that the Devil's University would have resolved these by pouring boiling oil on the protesters). The other title cited on the cover, 'Daughters of Lusting Torment' by Russell Gray, also sounds like the sort of thing that wouldn't be approved of nowadays, clearly implying a link between sex and violence. (as Hammer films were told by the Chairman of the BBFC in the late sixties, 'you can have the sex and you can have the violence, but not together'). Mystery Tales entered the 'shudder pulp' game relatively late in the day, just as sales for this sort of magazine started to tail off significantly in the forties.- perhaps the increasing real life horrors being reported in the news as World War Two got underway quelled the public appetite for fantasy horrors. While they lasted, though, the 'shudder pulps' produced some highly memorable cover art, (of which I'm very fond), if nothing else.
When I was very young, (we're talking primary school, or even pre-primary school, age here), I vaguely remember having seen a TV programme that looked, I think, at ancient explorers, maps and the like. The thing about it that I clearly remember, though, were the various fabulous beasts that these ancients had chronicled, illustrated with the depictions of them found on old maps. The 'headless men', who had their faces on their chests, in particular captured my young imagination. The sea serpents, manticores, dog headed men, monopods etc, were all great, but those headless guys, who apparently lived in Libya, just seemed, somehow, more credible to the young me. Credible to the extent that I recall believing, for a few of those early years, that they might actually have existed. Obviously, I outgrew this belief, recognising that the 'headless men' were simply creatures of myth which, like many travellers' tales, gained traction in a time when huge tracts of the world lay unexplored by western civilisations. A natural human desire to believe that the weird and exotic exists in those places that we haven't yet brought into the 'normality' of our civilisation, imposing our ideas of order and rationality upon them, led to their persistence. Indeed, reports of 'headless men' persisted well into the middle ages, their location shifting in accordance to the expanding boundaries of western European exploration - Ethiopia became their new home, then India and Myanmar, before later explorers placed them in South America.
Eventually, like the younger me, the majority of rational people out grew their belief in the 'headless men', recognising that there simply was no evidence of their existence, that were simply creatures of myth, the product of explorers' and writers' imaginations. Yet there are those who seem very resistant to giving up on belief in unproven phenomena, most of the evidence for which is dubious and anecdotal at best. The past few days, for instance, have seen the latest spate of UFO related reports all over social media and even in some mainstream media. While aliens might well exist, the fact that there has never been any credible evidence of their presence here on earth, doesn't deter the UFO enthusiasts. After all, if aliens had been coming here as frequently and for as long as they claim, you'd think there would be clear physical evidence, or that they would have made contact with the human race in ways other than kidnapping neurotics and enabling their sexual fantasies. But, of course, like all conspiracists, the UFO lobby avoid proper explanation by resorting to the 'government cover up' stand by. Which is the crux of the latest 'revelations': that numerous governments have recovered crashed alien spacecraft and have tried to exploit their technology. This time around, the 'whistleblower' is some guy claimed to have worked on various US government projects and who supposedly has all sorts of high level security clearances. Maybe he does, but the possession of such clearances doesn't guarantee that someone isn't mentally ill, a pathological liar, a fantasist, a grifter, an attention seeker or just a plain old crackpot making stuff up. Hell, a long time ago I worked in a government post that required me to have all sorts of security clearances, (all the way to Top Secret and including all sorts of handling caveats), but I make shit up and put it on the web all the time, (I have a whole website dedicated to it).
It's important to note here that those 'headless men' I believed in as a small child were also chronicled by what, at the time, were considered credible sources. Damn it, even Sir Walter Raleigh, one of the most renowned explorer's of his day, reported on their existence in South America -and he wasn't the only respected explorer who claimed evidence for their existence. But like much of the UFO reporting we see, they and other explorers and writers, were, as it turned out, relying upon the anecdotal evidence of others, repeating oft told stories which became ever more elaborate with each retelling. To be fair, their origins most likely lay in misidentification by Europeans, either of apes or monkeys that moved with their heads held low, or even local peoples who moved with similar stances. Which, of course, is relevant to the whole UFO phenomena - nobody denies that there are sometimes stuff in the sky that can't easily be identified, but ot is worth bearing in mind that the last 'invasion' of such objects shot down by the USAF, turned out to be balloons...
It was almost back to normal this past weekend. In schlock watching terms, at least. After a double bill of Arch Oboler's intriguing, if flawed, The Bubble (1966) and Ossorio's Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972) on Friday night, Saturday brought a delirious triple bill of John Boorman's Excalibur (1981), Renfield (2023) and Toho's The H-Man (1958). A pretty eclectic mix by any standards, (for good measure, I also caught part of Robbe-Grillet's Trans Europ Express), which left me too exhausted for any serious schlock watching on Sunday. Now, I know what you are thinking - isn't Renfield a bit contemporary and mainstream for me? Well, ordinarily I'd agree, but the opportunity to watch it came via one of those dodgy streaming services available via Roku and any film featuring Nicholas Cage is generally pretty off kilter - one featuring him playing Dracula, (or, more accurately, playing Bela Lugosi's version of Dracula), even more so. I might well write about this one at greater length in a future post, but suffice to say, I was pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable it was, providing not just a decent horror comedy, but also an affectionate homage to Universal's 1930 Dracula, (to which, technically, it is a sequel of sorts), not to mention making some references to the lost 1925 Lon Chaney Sr vampire film, London After Midnight. Its the sort of cinematic erudition on the part of its makers that warms the heart of a classic horror movie obsessive like me.
But to get back to the subject of streaming services on Roku, apart from the well dodgy ones which I always expect to get shut down at any minute, (which some of them frequently do, but within days have usually mysteriously reappeared, sometimes with a new identity or amended content, but generally not), I recently discovered that I could access the Kino Cult livestream via a legit streaming app. The last time I had access to this it was via the F2V TV apps, which were shut down after it was 'exposed' by a low rent media blogger that most of the livestreams they carried were being accessed without specific permission. Anyway, I recently realised that it is possible to toggle the Distro TV app (which bundles together a vast array of livestreams, most of which don't have their own Roku apps), between its English language and Spanish language versions. It turns out that there is considerable variance between the content of the two versions and that a significant number of the channels on the Spanish version are in English. Kino Cult is one of the streams only available on the Spanish version and it is in English. It shows a huge variety of films, with arthouse pictures or black and white cult movies rubbing shoulders with exploitation classics and sub-title foreign language movies. I've caught all manner of stuff there since regaining access: Pete Walker films, the aforementioned The Bubble and Trans Europ Express and even the 1966 Fantomas movie.
The other movies I caught courtesy of other (apparently) legit streaming services, either on demand, or, in the case of Excalibur, in a one off showing as part of the schedule of another livestreaming channel. I have to say that I find Excalibur one of the best cinematic interpretations of Arthurian legend and simultaneously one of the most frustrating. Not only does it look magnificent, but it grasps the mythos underlying the stories better than most and boasts a magnificent and suitably other worldly performance from Nicol Williamson as Merlin. On the other hand, its script's compression of Malory's narrative to fit a feature film, compounded by nearly forty minutes of footage being cut from it before release, leaves its narrative uneven, jumpy and ultimately unsatisying. Too many characters significant to the cycle are either omitted altogether, combined with other characters or reduced to mere walk on parts, denied their own narratives. Likewise, plot lines are truncated or combined with others, rather than properly developed in their own right. Nonetheless, the film still succeeds in conveying the sheer power of the Arthurian myth. H-Man, by contrast, is a relatively straightforward piece of science fiction horror from Toho. Much like The Human Vapour, which it resembles in many respects, it starts as a police procedural which gradually segues into a horror movie. Its main weakness is that, unlike the title character of the Human Vapour, the title monsters - a liquid organism created from humans melted by nuclear fall out - lack any individual character or coherent intent. Nonetheless, it is very well made and features some excellent special effects, especially when people melt and are reduced to what looks like soapy gloop.
So there you have it, another mis-spent weekend watching schlock. I have a strong feeling that this is going to turn out to be another Summer of Schlock for me...
Sometimes watching nostalgia channels on Roku is like being trapped in some kind of time warp. Lately I've been spending a fair amount of time watching a collection of channels, all under the same umbrella ownership, each one nominally themed, (ie action, mystery, fantasy science fiction etc), but all drawing upon the same pool of old (mainly) public domain TV shows and movies. The overlap in content is considerable, to the extent that you can switch between channels and catch different episodes of the same TV show, but from different seasons. Which can be quite disconcerting when there have been cast changes between series - you know that you are watching the same thing, but are left wondering where half the familiar characters have gone, (or even why the fashions have changed and characters who were kids just now have suddenly turned into teenagers). Catching episodes of the Doris Day Show across multiple channels is something that I've found particularly disturbing, as I'd forgotten that, over its five season run, it underwent some quite radical format and cast changes. Especially as one channel seems to be showing episodes from close to the show's start, while the next is showing them from the last two series, usually within minutes of each other. When the Doris Day Show starts, she's playing a widow living on her father's California ranch with her two young sons and commuting into San Francisco to her job as a secretary at a magazine publisher. By season three, she's moved to San Francisco, still with her sons, but with season four, the sons have vanished (and are never mentioned again) as has any memory of her late husband, (she's now styled 'Miss' rather than 'Mrs'). The rest of the staff at the publishers have changed and, most radically of all, she's changed from secretary to staff writer. It can all be very confusing.
Sometimes, though, old and new episodes from a series get jumbled together on a single channel. On the mystery themed channel, for instance, you sometimes get episodes from the 1966-70 colour revival of Dragnet, followed by black and white episodes from the original. (I think I prefer the later version, with Jack Webb's Joe Friday looking more than slightly bemused to find himself in the middle of the 'swinging sixties' and having to deal with hippies and other long haired 'degenerates'). Perhaps even more confusingly, another channel shows episodes from not one, but two, completely different, nineties Tarzan TV series: one minute you are watching long haired eco warrior Wolf Larsen swinging through the modern day jungle, the next you are confronted by Joe Lara, back in thirties period, fighting various fantastical threats in Tarzan: The Epic Adventures. Both versions have their merits. The Wolf Larsen version is a French-Canadian-Mexican attempt to update the concept, with Tarzan trying protect his jungle environment from those trying to exploit it and Jane as a French environmentalist. It seems to be modelled, to some extent, on the old Ron Ely TV series and employs a fairly light tone. The Joe Lara series which succeeded it was an attempt to return Tarzan to his more fantastical literary roots and reconnect the whole Burroughs' universe. Indeed, in this series he even crosses over with a couple of other Burroughs properties: not only does he journey to the earth's core in one episode, but in another he travels to Venus to help out Carson Napier. Although innovative, the Lara series was relatively short lived. Anyway, to get back to the point, while these nostalgia fests can get confusing, with the jumping around between series and variants, they can also be quite mesmerising. I can't deny that it has taken quite an effort to prise my eyes away from this collection of channels, as I obsessively hop between them in search of new episodes and series. But I think that I've kicked the addiction. For now, that is...
The Blob is one of those instances where I think I prefer the remake to the original. While I know that for many this is heresy - thanks to Steve McQueen in an early leading role, the 1958 film has almost sacred status for fans - the fact is that the 1988 is simply a better film. To be sure, I don't dislike the original, but it is very much a generic, cheap and cheerful low budget monster movie of its era, featuring the then menace du jour, a threat from outer space. The remake is somewhat more sophisticated: while title creature once again makes its entrance falling from space, this time it is a satellite borne artificially created experimental biological weapon that has been further mutated by space radiation. In keeping with the eighties, the film's authority figures here are opposed to the young heroes not because, well, their the establishment and naturally disapproving of young people, but because some of them really are involved in a high level conspiracy they want to cover up. Nobody in authority can be trusted: if they aren't involved in a conspiracy, then, like the local preacher, they're stark staring mad.
Obviously, the 1988 version of The Blob benefits from a bigger budget and better special effects than the original. Indeed, the effects work are very impressive, with the titular monster messily and graphically dissolving and consuming its victims, often pulling them down sinks or through drain covers. As is appropriate for a modern day conspiracy thriller, it is all very gloomily filmed with low lighting levels. The cast are pretty good too - Kevin Dillon might not be Steve McQueen, but he still makes for a decent hero. While never going down the would be full on comedy route of the 1971 sequel, Beware, The Blob! (aka Son of Blob), the 1988 film, for all of its gloominess and paranoia, never takes itself too seriously. Best of all, unlike many latter day remakes, the 1988 film doesn't try to completely 'reinvent' the original: the small town setting, the basic plot, most of the main characters, even the denouement remain more or less faithful to the original. Modernisation and improvement seem to have been the makers guiding principles when making the film.
Curiously, I've only ever seen The Blob (1988) the once, on its late night TV debut on ITV somewhen in the early nineties. I don't recall it resurfacing on TV after that and it doesn't seem to be prominent on any of the streaming services. It has had a couple of home video releases, the most recent being a 2019 Blu-Ray release. That said, I'm not sure that any of these ever reached the UK. The film seems to have pretty much been forgotten by the wider film watching public, its financial failure on its initial release doubtless meaning that its production company and distributors don't see it as a marketable asset. Which is a pity, as, from what I recall, a pretty decent and enjoyable latter day monster movie.
