On Track Again

And we're back.  For now, at least.  My phone line (and hence my broadband) came back on this afternoon.  So the crisis is over - until the next time BT's equipment fails and I have to go through the tortuous process of trying to get them to fix it.  Even this restoration hasn't been without issues, but I'm tired of talking about BT's inefficiency and ineptitude, so they can wait for another day.  As I wasn't expecting to back online today, I don't actually have any kind of post prepared.  Instead, I'll just give a quick update on some of the model railway stuff I've been doing while off line.  You might recall that I was stripping and repainting that sorry looking pile of old Hornby coach sides I bought off of eBay in order to use them to rebuild some surplus composite coaches into brake coaches.  Well, here are the results so far:

They've only been loosely reassembled, uniting the repainted new sides with the roofs and chassis of the surplus composites.  They are now awaiting numbers and other transfers (which I can order, now that I'm back online) and some retouching of the paintwork on the roofs and chassis.  They've turned out much better than I expected - the main problem turning out to be the removal of the flush glazing sported by three pairs of the sides, which had been cemented in place by a previous owner.  Eventually, however, I was able to prise them loose with a minimum of damage.  In addition to the four brake coaches, I've also repainted a battered Lima restaurant car I picked up for three quid at the local Toy and Train Collector's Fair.  Here's the before and after:

As with the brake coaches, it is still awaiting transfers (of which I have a set, barring the red stripe which Southern Region catering stock started sporting just under the roof line in the sixties - it later became standard for all regions).  This one came out surprisingly well, considering the rather forlorn state of the original.

There you have it - back online and back painting model railway stock.  It's a wild life that I lead!

Getting Sick of This Now...

I’m about as sick of writing about my current problems with BT as anyone foolish enough to read this blog must be hearing about them. But it really does seem never ending. Obviously, as I predicted, the line wasn’t fixed yesterday, so I’m still without a phone or broadband for the foreseeable future. Which meant another wasted morning talking to BT via their chat app (they really don’t want to engage with their customers directly), getting nowhere. Not only did I have to go through the whole sorry saga again with yet another different agent but I also had to raise yet another complaint, This was because the reported fault had, apparently, been ‘dealt’ with. Despite this, I still had no service and was now being told that it wouldn’t be fixed until Friday! At which point I told them that this was unacceptable, as they had had since the 21^st to fix yet, despite assurances only yesterday that it would be fixed by the end of the day, BT had, apparently, done nothing. Which is where things started to turn even more surreal than usual. After being escalated to speaking to a manager, I was told that the original fault had been fixed, but the fix hadn’t worked! So, in other words, it hadn’t been fixed - unless you are BT, in which case a failed fix is considered a success. 

As a result, I’m now on a ‘new’ fault, which will be fixed, allegedly, by Friday. Of course, this makes it look as if they fixed the original problem ‘on schedule’’ –  something they will doubtless use to massage their stats with OFCOM. Interestingly, this time around, I have a text from Openreach telling me that an engineer will be assigned to the fault – something I didn’t get the first time around, reinforcing my suspicion that, in reality, nothing was actually done to rectify the fault. But none of this gets me back online. Indeed, it simply puts me back to square one. Which is par for the course with BT. The long term solution is to ditch BT – but I can’t do that until they repair the line. Going to fibre might help, nut my current ISP (who aren’t the problem here) don’t offer a VOIP option, so that would mean either losing my landline (which I still use) or having the added complication of switching the phone to a third party VOIP provider. So it could well be that I’m going to have to start looking for a new ISP who offers both FTTC (I don’t want more holes drilled in my walls to accommodate FTTP) and VOIP at a reasonable price (and which has decent customer service). Ultimately, though, I’d still be reliant upon Openreach to actually fix any problems – but some service providers, it seems, are more adept than BT at getting them to do their job in a reasonable time scale. In the meantime, I’m reliant on expensive mobile data (not to mention variable reception) to stay online. I’ve got a new story due to be put up on The Sleaze tomorrow and a podcast to post on Onsug before the end of the month. The story will probably be feasible – posting it on the site shouldn’t require much data. But the podcast looks unlikely, due to the amount of data required to upload the MP3 files. Thanks for nothing, BT.

The Interruption Continues

So, am I back online properly? Of course not. British Telecom still haven’t dealt with the fault on my phone line which is, obviously, also blocking my access to my ADSL broadband. It was supposed to be resolved by today, but the line is still dead. Now, BT have claimed that they have only said that it would be fixed by the end of today. I took this to mean the end of the working day, (as most normal people would). They, however, say that it means the literal end of the day at 23:59 and that the line will be repaired by then. Hmmm. I’ve heard all of this before – twenty odd years ago, when I needed my BT line reactivated after I’d had enough of NTL/Virgin Media, I went through the same nonsense of being given times when the line would be live, only for them to pass with no connection. BT’s response would be to pull another arbitrary deadline for activation out of thin air – which, again, would pass without anything happening. After over a week of this, I finally lost my temper with their customer service in a phone call, (the trigger was being told that they couldn’t keep me up to date because they didn’t have a valid contact number – well, obviously, they hadn’t connected it and I was having to use a public pay phone to contact them). 

So, do I really think that my phone and broadband will magically come back before midnight? Of course not. Do I really think that they have people working outside of normal hours to reconnect me? Of course not. They’ve had since just after seven o’clock last Wednesday morning, when the fault was reported and logged, to deal with this, but apparently couldn’t be bothered doing anything until today – when they apparently still haven’t done anything. Odds are that I’m going to be wasting yet more time tomorrow trying to get some sense out of the clown show that is BT’s customer service. I’ve been here before, multiple times – BT simply won’t deal with faults in their equipment where there isn’t any money in it for them. If it is your equipment at fault, fine, they’ll be there like a shot as they can bill you for the engineer’s visit and repairs. Otherwise, you have to continually harass and harry them if you want to have any chance of getting your problem fixed. But they’ll try to fob you off with false promises at every opportunity. Of course, there’s still the matter of the compensation I’m owed under OFCOM regulations – BT have been remarkably silent on this subject, (if a fault isn’t fixed within 48 hours, the customer is entitled to compensation for every day they are without service – which is three, nearly four, days for me, so far). In the meantime, I’m reduced to minimal online activity via very expensive mobile data and no streaming TV services at all.

Baffled! (1973)

Baffled! (1972) is likely to live up to its title on a first viewing. Not so much because the plot or premise is particularly complex, but because it never seems clear as to what it wants to be: occult mystery, light action adventure, thriller with romantic overtones or crime movie with paranormal trappings? It has elements of all of these, jostling with each other for attention as its somewhat meandering story unfolds. In truth, it doesn’t even feel like a film, as such, more like one of those TV movies cobbled together from disparate episodes of a short-lived TV series. Which isn’t really surprising as it was actually shot as a pilot for an unsold TV series. Subsequently released to cinemas in the UK as a theatrical feature and shown in the US (in a lightly shorter version) as a TV movie, Baffled! makes for a curious watch, its ending clearly designed to lead into another adventure that never materialised. Obviously, the film’s biggest draw is Leonard Nimoy in the lead role – most definitely not playing Mr Spock. His presence was doubtless designed to capitalise upon the popularity of his most famous role: although Star Trek had been showing on the BBC since the late sixties, it seemed to hit the heights of its UK popularity in the early seventies, as more viewers were able to see its frequent re-runs in colour. While Nimoy had already been seen in various non-Spock roles – most notably in Mission Impossible – there was still a certain novelty in seeing him playing characters with a full range of emotions.

In Baffled! he plays racing driver Tom Kovack who, in the middle of a race, starts having visions of an English mansion and a threatened woman, causing him to crash. Rare and occult book dealer Michele Brent (Susan Hampshire), sees him interviewed about the visions on TV and immediately deduces that he has ‘the gift’ and meets with him to urge Kovack to travel to the UK and try to save the woman in danger from evil forces. The rest of the film follows the efforts of this unlikely duo to try and make sense of his ongoing visions as they investigate various shady goings on at the mansion, which turns out to be a luxury hotel, where the woman, actually a film star, played by Vera Miles, is staying with her young daughter, at the invitation of her estranged and now missing husband. Shifty characters played by various British TV actors abound, weirdness piles upon weirdness, before everything goes somewhat Scooby Doo for a climax involving masks being ripped off, locked attics and secret passages. In truth, it is all very inconsequential and the supernatural elements feel peripheral, as if they have been tacked onto a regular mystery script as an after thought. The set up is intriguing, but never really develops into anything out of the ordinary, the whole film remaining rather formulaic. While the characters played by Nimoy and Hampshire are likeable enough and form one of those quirkily entertaining crime solving partnerships so beloved of mystery formats, there is ultimately no chemistry beyond the light bantering.

And Anglo/US production – it was co-produced by ITC and Arena (the company behind The Man From Uncle) – Baffled! is very nicely shot on a variety of UK locations, (even the early US sequences are pretty obviously shot in the UK), clearly designed to appeal to tourists. Despite its somewhat awkward narrative structure – it never gets over the fact that it was clearly designed to accommodate commercial breaks, the action feeling episodic rather than free-flowing – director Philip Leacock, whose directorial CV included both big budget Hollywood movies along with a number of other TV pilot movies, keeps the film moving along without too many longueurs. There’s an entertaining and nicely staged car chase involving Nimoy driving a vintage Bentley, although, in truth, it is actually pretty much irrelevant to the main plot and like many of the film’s other trimmings, feels arbitrarily tacked on. While it looks quite slick and glossy, its TV origins are painfully obvious in the obvious back projections in the driving scenes and some cheap-looking and over lit interiors. Baffled! is entertaining enough while it is on, but the resolution of its mystery is ultimately flat and underwhelming, with Nimoy’s newly acquired powers left largely unexplored and unexplained.

Service Still Interrupted

So, I’m still not back online, my landline is still broken. My only web access is via the very expensive data from my mobile provider, (I’m burning through that at quite a rate, so this being typed off line and uploaded later to conserve data). Yesterday, which, incidentally, was my birthday, I spent the entire morning attempting to navigate what passes for customer service at British Telecom. The first thing to note is that you can’t actually speak to anyone on the phone any more – it is all bots and online chat – which is problematic if the fault you are trying to get resolved has robbed you of internet access, a point we’ll come back to later. First up, I tried their ‘diagnostic bot’ again. This is done via text and, once again, it failed to find the fault and made the same vague promises of referring it to the engineers. I was supposed to get a report from it, but when I checked my online BT account (eating up some more of my precious mobile data), it claimed that no fault had been reported. So, I felt I had no choice but to try using their chat function again, which is where things started to really go downhill. After getting past the chat bot I was put in touch with one of their ‘agents’, who went through all the usual tests and nonsense, turning up the same blank as the ‘diagnostic’ bot. He then found that I had already used such bot – something he started to get shirty about, implying that I was wasting his time. I tried pointing out that it had provided mr with no actual reports or fault numbers and that BT’s insistence on doing this exclusively online was problematic as the line fault had also taken out my broadband. 

This was the point where the ‘agent’ started to go off the rails, angrily retorting that my lack of internet access was entirely the responsibility of my ISP and that BT couldn’t be held responsible as the phone line being out shouldn’t affect the broadband! I tried pointing out that my broadband is provide via ADSL< meaning that there has to be a working landline for me to be able to receive the service, so the fault on BT’s landline meant that they were directly responsible for my loss of internet access. Apparently not liking my use of logic, he now went off on another line of attack: that it was my fault for using such an antiquated form of broadband and that if I wanted to avoid such problems I should get my ISP to update me to fibre! I responded that this was irrelevant as changing broadband package wouldn’t resolve the issue I was trying to get resolved: the failure of the BT landline I pay them for. He tried to defend his position, before getting back to his notion that I couldn’t hold BT responsible for my loss of internet access and if I didn’t like it I should complain. I went back over the fact that they were as a fault on their equipment was preventing my access to my broadband, making them directly responsible – a position that has hardly unreasonable. But it was too late, he’d gone. Astounded by his rudeness and lack of professionalism, I posted another message admonishing him for his lack of courtesy and telling him that I would now be raising a complaint.

Making a complaint isn’t as easy as BT like to imply that it is on their site. They’d really prefer you to do it via that bloody chat app – for reasons we’ll come to shortly. Along with the ‘write us a letter’ option, they also claim that you can complain via their phone line – except that if you try to do so, you just get the same options as before, none of which involves speaking to human being or, indeed, actually raising a complaint. After twenty minutes or so of going round and round their phone options, I realised that the chat app was still active on my mobile and that another ‘agent’ had come on and was offering to raise a complaint for me. Great, I thought, maybe I can start getting somewhere – like finding out why there is no fault listed on my account, what the unmentioned fault actually was and – most importantly – what they were going to do to fix it. But it didn’t go that way. The second ‘agent’ picked up on the switching to fibre nonsense and insisted upon giving me the sales pitch for one of BT’s fibre packages – despite the fact that I made it clear that I didn’t want to change ISP (they weren’t the ones causing the current problem). Now, I’ve been in similar situations before, where it is obvious that if you want to get to the information you actually want, you have to let the other party go through their sales spiel and, if necessary, sign up to whatever it is they are trying to sell you, after all, you have the legal right to cancel it immediately afterward without penalty. 

So that’s what I did. After that, I managed to get to the crux of the matter: the fault. Apparently, there was a break in the line, (well, obviously, as it was dead at my end). But what were they doing about it? Well, in reality, very little, Engineers are working on it supposedly (although I’ve seen no physical evidence of this), with the aim of resolving it by Monday. Which, frankly, is unacceptable. If the line has failed, that is entirely BT’s fault and they should fix it immediately. Moreover, past experience of BT suggests that the Monday deadline will come and go with my phone and internet still not having been restored. On the plus side, if it isn’t fixed by tomorrow morning then, as 48 hours will have passed since the fault was reported, BT, under its own rules, will have to start paying me compensation. Which might, at least, allow me to recoup some of the additional costs I’ve incurred as a result of having to buy additional mobile data just to get the most basic of internet access. Let’s just step back to that fibre broadband package I had to sign up to in order to simply get an update on the fault, (my account has also now been updated to show the fault). After spending all morning dealing with this nonsense, (it was past midday when I finally got the information I needed – I’d started just after eight), I was too exhausted to cancel it there and then. Later that day, my ISP sent me an e-mail saying they were sorry to hear that I was leaving them – I rang them back, (you can speak to real people with them – and explained the situation. Consequently, they cancelled the cancellation of my service raised by BT, halting the process.

I’m fascinated by the way in which BT see the their own failure to provide the main service you are paying them to deliver as a sales opportunity. Because the ‘agent’ who pushed the sales agenda was surely not a ‘rogue’ actor here – in my experience such behaviour is the result of official policy. It is acknowledgement that they can’t (or won’t) actually fix the problem at hand without putting themselves out, but instead prefer to try and scalp the customer for more money, despite not delivering what is already being paid for. This also involves a certain degree of misinformation: a switch to fibre broadband actually wouldn’t mean that line faults could no longer affect internet access. Most fibre broad band is actually Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC).meaning that from the cabinet to your home, the existing copper wire is still used to carry both phone and broadband. So if, as in my case, there is a break in it, you will still lose both. The fact is that I live so close to my exchange that, even with ADSL, I get reasonably high internet speeds. Moreover, ADSL isn’t as unusual as the first ‘agent’ tried to make out – a significant number of people still use it (it is simple and convenient).

Back to that BT fibre broadband package – while BT have acknowledged that it is effectively cancelled and can’t proceed, I’ve yet to formally cancel it with them. They texted me early this morning to call them about it – amazing how they want to actually talk to you when they are trying to screw more money out of you, but not when you want them to fix a fault – but, after yesterday, I didn’t have the strength to talk to them. They ruined yesterday for me, they weren’t going to ruin today, as well. I’ll get back to them when it suits me. In the meantime, my complaint is still outstanding (perhaps I should make another one for miss-selling) and I still don’t have a phone line or internet access (including streaming TV via my Roku box), with no prospect of getting them back in the near future. But I’m still being billed for both. Welcome to corporate Britain in 2024!

An Interruption to Normal Service

Well, I was hoping to post something about another film here today, but my phone line and internet were abruptly cut off this evening, without warning.  (I have paid the bills - only a couple of days ago, in fact).  By the time I realised what was happening - I initially thought only the internet was down, the victim of one of Plusnet's DNS outages - the BT customer help lines were down.  Their diagnostic bot sent me some texts saying that it couldn't find a fault and that it was investigating further, then went AWOL.  Their messaging system is meant to be active until 22:30, but they still haven't got back to me and seem unlikely to before they shut down for the night.  Right now, I'm only online thanks to using my mobile phone as a USB tether - it is eating up a lot of data and costing me money on top of what I pay my ISP and landline providers.  Of course, the lack of internet means that my Roku box is also down, depriving me of any streaming TV.  In all, a pretty shitty situation that I won't be able to even start resolving until tomorrow.  God knows how long it will all take to resolve - going on my past experience of BT, I don't see getting any joy any time soon, so I have no idea when I'll be able start posting here regularly again.  Thanks BT, you pile of shit.

Down Under Detective: Scobie Malone on Film

Back in the seventies, when I was a kid, there was a film that turned up on TV, quite a new film by the standards of the time, when it took an age from cinema release to TV screenings for anything other than Low budget movies, called Nobody Runs Forever (1968), that, for some reason stuck in my memory. (It was one of those films that, after a couple of screenings seemed to vanish.  Nowadays, it turns up on Talking Pictures TV every so often).  It concerned an Australian police detective who is sent to London to arrest the Australian High Commissioner on suspicion of murder and take him back to Australia for trial.  Of course, once in London, he gets mixed up in a complex plot to disrupt a peace conference the Commissioner is presiding over.  Rod Taylor was the detective and Christopher Plummer the High Commissioner, with various familiar British and Australian actors (not to mention Dahlia Lavi, popular femme fatale from many a Eurospy movie), filling out the cast.  It's hard to say exactly why this particular movie stuck in my young mind - perhaps it was the inclusion of such details as a gun concealed in a TV camera as part of an assassination plot at a Wimbledon tennis match.  What did seem apparent to me was that the protagonist, Detective Sergeant Scobie Malone, felt like a series character - there was a feeling that he had more of a back story than seen in the film, which involved lots of other high-profile investigations carried out in a maverick manner.  You felt sure that there should be a sequel chronicling at least one of these cases, probably set in Malone's native Australia, but none ever seemed to surface.

But, as it turns out, there was a sequel, of sorts, to Nobody Runs Forever, released eight years later. Scobie Malone (1976) sees Jack Thompson take over the title role from Rod Taylor as he investigates a murder with political connections in Sydney, (the body is found in Sydney Opera House).  As it turns out, the character was a series character, but in a long series of novels by John Cleary.  Interestingly, despite feeling as if it were part of an ongoing series, Nobody Runs Forever was actually based on the very first book in the series - 'The High Commissioner' - written as a one off.  Cleary wasn't to write a first sequel until the seventies, 'Helga's Web', which was adapted into Scobie Malone.  Cleary was unhappy with both adaptations, feeling that the first had pretty much eliminated the book's humour.  The second certainly retains the humour, but changes the title character to the extent that he is unrecognisable either from the first film, or, according to Cleary, the source novels.  Most significantly, he goes from being a happily married man to a single swinger living in an apartment complex for singles full of naked women.  He bonks so many of them that he can't remember their names - a running gag throughout the film.  His sexploits provide the excuse for a truly astounding amount of gratuitous nudity.  The central mystery itself - the death of a prostitute whose clients include a government minister, a film-maker and various criminal figures - has potential, but its exposition ultimately eliminates any proper opportunities for suspense or intrigue, as her story unfolds in flashback parallel to Malone's investigation.  Which means that the audience is effectively always at least one step ahead of Malone, more often than not party to information that he isn't aware of, making for a somewhat frustrating viewing experience, as it effectively sidelines the investigation in narrative terms.

The films main pleasures comes from watching Malone's interactions with various authority figures, ranging from his superiors to the government minister he suspects of murder.  Inevitably, most end in angry conflict, as Malone finds himself resenting the hypocrisy and privilege he encounters.  A sub-plot involves Malone's humourous attempts to train his rookie partner in the art of homicide investigation.  The film's narrative structure insures that it eventually limps to am underwhelming conclusion, with Malone trying to bring charges against his main suspect on the basis of incomplete information, with the audience already knowing the way that events actually played out and that his case is fatally flawed.  The plot structure is, I assume, lifted pretty much intact from the source novel, where its intent would have been to demonstrate how police investigations are always flawed as the investigators, inevitably, are never in full possession of all of the facts, having, instead, to rely upon deduction and educated guesswork.  While this might have worked on the page, in cinematic terms it makes for an unsatisfactory viewing experience, (the Canadian made Ed McBain 87th Precinct adaptation Blood Relatives (1978), suffers from the same problem of adapting the source novel's flashback based narrative structure in its entirety, resulting in a stodgy narrative robbed of any real suspense).  Scobie Malone would have benefitted from having found a more cinematic way of telling its story.  As it stands, in spite of the flashback structure effectively halting the main narrative at regular intervals, depriving it of any pace or rhythm, the film is still reasonably entertaining, with enjoyable performance from many of the cast, particularly Thompson and Shane Porteous as the two cops.  Malone's continued clashes with authority, culminating in his climactic epic rant against what he sees as a cover up and abuse of power, are easily the best parts of the film.

Despite high hopes on the part of its producers, Scobie Malone proved a disappointment at the box office, effectively scuppering the chances of any further adaptations.  The book series, by contrast, eventually clocked up some twenty entries. 

More Real Men

It's 1973 and there's an air of desperation about the cover of this March edition of Real Men - men's magazines were on the wane and attracting newsstand readers required promises of ever more lurid content.  So here we have a number of screaming headlines encompassing sex, violence and international intrigue.  But, in truth, it's the same old mix of content, only slightly updated.  When it comes to Comie-bashing, China seems to have replaced the Soviet Union as the favourite target, (not surprising, as China was very much in the news at the time, thanks to Nixon's visit there).  Otherwise, it is all familiar territory, just presented even more sensationally than before.  'Vice Lotteries - Where You Can Win a Girl for a Week' and 'How Much Do You Really Know About Sex?' fly the flag for that staple of the men's magazine - the sex story. 

 'Inside the Sin House Where the Commies Plotted the Takeover of Peru!' mixes foreign intrigue, Commie-bashing and sex.  Three for the price of one!  This also seems to be the story the cover painting represents, although the Commie soldiers look distinctly Cuban, with their Castro beards and caps, indicating that it has been recycled from an earlier issue where it illustrated a Cuba-based story.  The best headline, though, is the last: 'Murder in Our Hospitals! 1200 Innocent Patients are Electrocuted Every Year'.  Which, obviously, begs the question as to whether this was a means of clearing the wards of the uninsured, a therapy gone wrong or evidence of shoddy wiring in the healthcare system.  Moreover, were the victims' insurance providers billed for these electrocutions?  At least here in the UK you can be sure that if you are electrocuted in hospital it will be free on the NHS...

Disappointment in Dreamland

I was having this dream the other night in which I was with a woman - not one I recognised as being anyone I knew, or even had seen on TV or a film, (indeed, as befits someone of my advancing years she too seemed more mature than the fantasy women of my youth).  Anyway, there came a point in the dream at which she asked me if I wanted to make love to her - my dream self responded that, frankly, I just didn't have the energy for that sort of thing these days.  Jesus, I thought upon wakening, is nothing sacred?  I mean, dreams are meant to be an escape from real life, but mine now seem to have started mirroring my waking life to an uncomfortable degree.  What's happened to the usual parade of car chases, mad giallo-type intrigues, police procedurals and killer bears that fill my dreams?  OK, they also rub shoulders with more mundane stuff involving walking through strange, yet oddly familiar, streets, conversations with strange, yet familiar, people and the like, but even these are clearly fantastical and several steps away from reality.  Perhaps it is all down to the fact that, with my new exercise regime, I'm sleeping better these days and not waking up in the middle of dreams, so that I don't remember so many of them.  

Of course, we always return to the question of whether any of these dreams actually mean anything.  Increasingly, I doubt that they do have any significance.  They merely represent the sub conscious idling while the conscious mind is off-line.  At best, they are a form of entertainment assembled by the sleeping mind from memories - not just of real events, but also things we've seen on TV, or read about in books, or even looked at on the internet - designed to keep the waking part of the mind occupied during its down-time.  As I've noted before, my dreams, (possibly fueled by some of the medication I take these days), are indeed hugely entertaining - all technicolor and widescreen.  Yet no matter how vivid, how realistic or how detailed they are, there is always something about them that marks them out to me, even as I experience them, as being dreams.  It's got to the stage that my dream self is aware of the 'rules' that govern them and is able to use them to manipulate in-dream events.  Which is another reason why that recent dream was so disconcerting - my dream self totally failed to grasp the mettle and take full advantage of the situation...

Tower of Screaming Virgins (1968)

Tower of Screaming Virgins (1968) is one of those films where you are left wondering exactly who it is aimed at.  A West German/Italian/French co-production shot in Hungary, kicks off as if it was one of those Gothic Euro-horror flicks involving crazy aristocrats torturing people in their castles, as masked men chase a man around a tower before killing him and throwing his body into the river below.  But it quickly switches to a swashbuckling tale of derring do, featuring a sub-Errol Flynn swordsman roguishly romancing  a younf woman en route to the court in Paris, flashing his sword around a lot.  Subsequently, at court, we meet the Queen and her bare knockers taking a bath and seducing a young artist.  The film later takes a turn back into the Gothic with more sex and violence at that tower.  With its strange combination of nudity, swordsmanship, court intrigue and horror, (there's also, in a final twist, some incest thrown in), Tower of Screaming Virgins gives the impression that it simply doesn't know its target audience, instead serving up a melange of genre tropes that won't satisfy any of its potential audiences.  Based on am Alexandre Dumas play, (which had filmed, slightly less luridly, several times previously), the story, bizarrely, has some basis in fact.  Not much, but some.

While the film's (and source play's) plot has Queen Margaret, wife of Louis X, getting her naughties with various lovers at the tower, then having them killed so that her infidelity to the King won't be found out, the reality was that her lovers, those who were uncovered at least, were actually tortured to death by the authorities in an attempt to get proof of her adultery.  (Curiously, the Queen and her ladies in waiting (who are complicit in her schemes) wear masks to make love to their paramours which, as they are going to kill the guys regardless, would seem an unnecessary precaution).  Moreover, while the film has these lovers being procured for the Queen by a gang of loyal cronies, in reality they were knights of her husband's court, already known to her, who were well aware of her identity.  Unfortunately, all this unhistorical intrigue bogs the film down, fatally slowing the pace while the various plot complications  leave the viewer confused.  The film isn't just unhistorical in its plot, (which can be forgiven as artistic licence), but also its details.  The events portrayed are meant to be taking place in the Fourteenth Century, yet the sets, costumes and props seem to come from the Seventeenth Century.  It feels as if the director thought that he was making a Three Musketeers film, with everyone fencing each other with rapiers, rather than hacking each other to death with broadswords and the hero coming on like D'Artagnan.

Stylistically, the film is very much on a par with other Euro-historical films of the era - solid but uninspired direction and design combined with lurid plot details.  Also in common with other productions of its era, it teases much in terms of smut, but in reality delivers only some bared boobs and bums, (which, nonetheless, would have been considered fairly 'racy' in similar English-language productions).  Tower of Screaming Virgins isn't a particularly bad film, but isn't particularly good either.  Ultimately, even the mild nudity and lurid details can't distract the viewer from a turgid plot that runs out of steam long before the end.

Stuffing Invisible Bikinis

It has been a good weekend for watching utter schlock - over the past few days I've watched everything from strange continental swashbucklers with added bare breasts, giant ants and Patty Duke in her underwear calling Alex Davion a 'fag'.  But I rounded it all out yesterday with the piece de resistance of a double bill of AIP 'Beach Party' films.  How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965) and Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966) mark the end of that particular cycle, being the final two entries in the main series.  As is often the case with long-running series, (although the seven 'Beach Party' films were incredibly made in just three years), the later entries plainly show the strain as they try to maintain the winning format, while simultaneously varying the elements sufficiently to ward off staleness.  Getting the balance right between the two aspects becomes increasingly difficult: introduce too many new elements and the format becomes unrecognisable, potentially diluting what made it popular in the first place, but if the same old formula is repeated with minimal variation, then audiences will likely become fatigued by the repetitiveness.  Some of the sixth entry's - How to Stuff a Wild Bikini - variations, though, were forced upon it by circumstance: the series' regular male lead, Frankie Avalon, was concurrently filming Sergeant Deadhead  (1965) for AIP, so only appears in a handful scenes, (accounting for around six minutes of screen time).  Consequently, Dwayne Hickman stands in for him, playing an ad exec romancing Annette Funicello's Dee Dee on the beach.  The film also continues the series turn in to the fantastical, started in Pajama Party (1964) - which featured a Martian - and continued in Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), with a mermaid.  

This time around the framing story, which has Frankie doing his naval service on a remote Pacific island, involves Frankie engaging the services of a local witch doctor (Buster Keaton) to ensure that Dee Dee doesn't stray while he is away.  This involves the witch doctor creating a decoy with which to distract the surf dudes from Dee Dee - an empty bikini appears on the beach, parading up and down as if filled by an invisible girl, before it is 'stuffed' by beautiful girl (Cassandra, played by Beverley Adams), who suddenly appears in it.  Cassandra subsequently fails in her mission as decoy when Frankie's main rival, Hickman, rejects her to focus on wooing Dee Dee instead, but becomes the model for a campaign to change the image of bikers, devised by Rooney and Hickman.  Inevitably, Eric Von Zipper and his biker gang, The Rats, turn up and cause trouble for Hickman, who becomes their rival in a motorcycle race.  Zipper himself falls for Cassandra and joins her in the campaign  It all ends with the promotional motorcycle race.  As in earlier films, various fading stars turn up in cameos - as well as the aforementioned Keaton and Rooney, (who did the film to pay off a tax bill), Brian Donlevy turns up as Rooney's boss while Elizabeth Montgomery turns up for a brief cameo referencing her role in Bewitched.  With its claymation title sequence and fantasy elements, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini goes all out for zaniness and generally succeeds, while still retaining the core elements of the series.

Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, the seventh and final entry in the series, however, is less obviously a 'Beach Party' movie.  For one thing, it doesn't even take place on the beach, with a haunted house instead being the venue.  Moreover, both of the regular series leads are missing, replaced by Tommy Kirk (who had previously starred in Pajama Party and would have starred in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini if he hadn't have been arrested for possession) and Deborah Walley (who had previously appeared in Beach Blanket Bingo (1965)). Plot-wise, it is a pretty much standard haunted house comedy, with Basil Rathbone manufacturing various ghostly goings on in order to scare off the other potential heirs to a fortune, (as ever in these sorts of films, they have to stay the night in the haunted house in order to claim their shares), but falling foul of real ghostly apparitions.  The latter are provided by Boris Karloff as the deceased benefactor who has to carry out one good deed in order to get into paradise.  As he can't leave his mausoleum, the ghost of his lost love, played by Susan Hart, clad in an 'invisible bikini' (part of a circus act she performed with Karloff thirty years earlier, meaning that it would have pre-dated the invention of the 'Bikini' style two piece swim suit), actually provides the supernatural mayhem on his behalf, in order to frustrate the plans of Rathbone (Karloff's former lawyer).  What makes it a 'beach party' film are the presences of the nephew of one of the potential heirs surfing buddies and Eric Von Zipper and his biker gang, who stumble into the action by accident.

Ghost in the Invisible Bikini is clearly even more cheaply made than previous films in the series, with various sets recycled from AIP's Edgar Allan Poe films.  Its main points of interest are the presences of veteran horror stars Karloff and Rathbone.  Interestingly, the former's character wasn't part of the original film - shot under the title Bikini Party at a Haunted House - when it was first delivered to AIP, executives were dissatisfied with the final product and ordered cuts and the addition of new footage.  The latter forms a new framing story with Karloff and Hart, all of whose scenes were shot separately and edited into the film later.  Indeed, it is painfully obvious that a blue-tinted Hart has been rather crudely super-imposed on existing scenes.  The film, as released, is an anarchic comedy that is less obviously a 'beach party' movie than its predecessors, (it is far more reminiscent of contemporaneous comedies like Hillbillys in a Haunted House or even the various 'haunted house' entries in the forties 'Bowery Boys' and 'East Side Kids' movie series).  Nevertheless, it is quite good fun while it is on, although not very memorable.  Boris Karloff looks like he's enjoying himself, (not surprisingly, as he was getting paid for sitting around on a single set for a few days), while Rathbone gives a suitably irascible performance as an irascible character.

As previously mentioned, despite the number of movies produced, the 'Beach Party' series were a relatively short-lived phenomena, very much of its time.  It was built on the popularity of the earlier 'Gidget' series of films, (as well as being in the 'Beach Party; series Deborah Walley was also the second actress to play Gidget, succeeding Sandra Dee in the role) and subsequent TV series, (which provided a teenaged Sally Field with her first lead role), but the whole surf culture thing was, by the mid sixties, pretty much played out in pop culture terms.  The focus of AIP's youth orientated exploitation films quickly switched to new fads like biker gangs and drag racing, (usually with the same casts as the 'Beach Party' series).  Still, the 'Beach Party' movies, with their combination of adolescent sexual tension and naive innocence remain surprisingly enjoyable.

Back to Life

I've been doing a lot of walking lately.  It's all in the name of trying to work up some semblance of fitness. The last few years in my former job-from-Hell left me shattered, both physically and mentally, to the extent that I seem to have spent the better part of the last couple of years lying in bed.  My sleep patterns were all over the place - unable to sleep at night I instead ended up sleeping during the day.  During the Winter I never seemed to see daylight.  Anyway, I finally decided that enough was enough and that I had to take back control of my life.  Hence the recent burst of physical activity - I'm finally seeing daylight on a regular basis again.  The walks, so far, have all been local, but Crapchester is full of surprising places to go walking.  The image above comes from a recent walk which took me through a series of ponds, which are sandwiched between a dual carriageway and a housing estate - most of it is invisible from either road.

With my waking hours moving back into daylight, various stalled projects have been reactivated - there's a lot you can't really do in the middle of the night, unless you want to get complaints from the neighbours about the noise.  In particular, I've finally resumed work on refurbishing and repainting a number of old model railway coaches and wagons that I've accumulated - I've a restaurant car, for instance, that has finally been resprayed into Southern Region livery and is now awaiting the application of lettering and number transfers, after sitting idle for the several months since I bought it.  Likewise, there are two locomotives awaiting lining out, which I'm finally aiming to get done.  I might even, in the foreseeable future, get around to that clear out the spare room which is required for me to be able to expand the model railway layout.  Exciting times!  Also tiring times - my lack of fitness is painfully obvious but, every day I'm slightly less tired by my exertions.  The tiredness is also down to the fact that my sleep patterns are still disrupted, but they are improving.  Hopefully, once I've got things back on an even keel, the standard of my posts here might improve - they've been pretty patchy of late, I know.  So, there you have it - my battle to reclaim my life.  I think I'm winning, so far.

Shock Express Winter 1988/89

Another from my own modest collection of old magazines.  Back in the day, Shock Xpress was one of the UK magazines you had to read if you wanted to discuss exploitation films seriously.  By the time I started to get interested in the wider world of exploitation, (having started with an interest in horror movies), however, it was pretty much defunct as a magazine.  My introduction to the pleasures of Shock Xpress came via the continuation series of large format paperbacks, (although the third and final edition of this incarnation was simply titled Shock, for legal reasons).  Eclectic in their choice of subject matter and incredibly informative, these paperbacks certainly expanded my knowledge of exploitation films, setting me off on a quest to learn more, not to mention to start tracking down the films in question.  

I was also able to obtain a handful of old issues of the magazine, including this one.  The cover gives a pretty good idea of the breadth of its coverage: apart from an interview with Ken Russell, his Lair of the White Worm having recently been released, there is an interview with David Cronenberg, an appreciation of the recently deceased John Carradine and interviews with Christopher Wicking and Ray Dennis Steckler.  In addition, there's a feature on biker movies, a piece about Reggero Deodato and his cannibal movies, a look at George Kuchar's films and a plethora of reviews and other regular features.  The writers include Alan Jones and Kim Newman, which should give some idea of the magazine's quality.  In common with many other publications of the period focused on exploitation films, Shock Xpress was, in essence, a semi-professional publication, but of an incredibly high standard.  It was a huge inspiration for my interest in the genre - indeed, it inspired me enough that, for a while, I had an exploitation movie podcast titled 'Schlock Express' in homage.  (A podcast that might yet be revived).

Labyrinth of Sex (1969)

Labyrinth of Sex (1969) aka Sexual Inadequacies, is a pretty typical late sixties 'Mondo'.  In an attempt to maintain the attention of audiences, the format increasingly moved toward focusing on a single topic in a film, rather than the more free-wheeling format of the original entries in the genre, such as Mondo Cane, which simply highlighted general weirdness.  consequently, Labyrinth of Sex tries to pass itself off as a serious documentary about sexual deviation - complete with 'actual footage' (ie, recreated with actors) of various perversions and is presented by a supposed expert in the field.  It is all patently fake, though and while it teases the audience with the prospect of lurid depictions of the sexual deviances under discussion, it actually shows very little.  Even the climactic, so to speak, sequence of a couple actually having sex under laboratory conditions in the name of medical science, is laughably coy.

The film is very much of its era in its characterisation of the various 'sexual deviances' - all are given cod psychological 'explanations'.  Indeed, from the outset, the film makes clear its central thesis that all such sexual perversions have their origins in childhood, infancy even.  Also typically in line with its era, Labyrinth of Sex includes homosexuality, transvestism and transsexuals together as types of sexual deviancy, ignoring the fact that each is a very different condition.  In keeping with its central thesis, the film persists in trying to explain each of them in terms of childhood trauma, (a lack of maternal attention, for instance, results in a girl becoming a lesbian in order to find the female affection she was denied as a child), or, in the case of transsexuals, in terms of physical deformities that can be remedied via surgery.

While back in 1969, particularly in Italy, the film's supposedly frank discussions of sexual deviancy might have seemed daring, by today's standards, its presentation of the subject seems decidedly tame.  As far as I'm aware, Labyrinth of Sex was prolific director Alfonso Brescia's only 'Mondo', although he dabbled in just about every genre of Italian exploitation films, including a long series of science fiction movies cashing in on the Star Wars boom of the late seventies.  While all 'Mondo' movies present themselves as pseudo documentaries, Labyrinth of Sex deploys this format in a very restrictive way, its attempt to pass itself off as a 'legitimate' sexual instruction film straight-jackets its style, resulting in the sense of true outrageousness that permeates the best of the genre. 

The Pusher (1958)

The Pusher (1958) boasts some remarkable credits: a screenplay by Harold Robbins, adapted from an Ed McBain novel and directed by Gene Milford, one of Hollywood's top film editors.  Despite this, the end result struggles to rise above the level of a B-movie.  The low budget is plain to see in the cheap-looking sets, which are made to look even more threadbare when contrasted with the film's exterior locations, shot on the streets of New York.  Indeed, the extensive use of actual New York locations is the film's greatest strength, atmospherically shot in monochrome by cinematographer Arthur J.Ornitz, they add a touch of gritty authenticity to the drama.  The drama too, is gritty for its era, involving drug addiction, with scenes depicting the effects of withdrawal and a cold turkey sequence that predates that of The French Connection  (1972) by more than a decade.  But the pace feels off, with a striking opening involving the discovery of an apparent suicide in a gang club house - situated in an almost subterranean alleyway - giving way to parallel sub-plots, with the domestic affairs of the investigating police detectives continually interrupting the investigation itself.  Despite these two sub-plots being inextricably linked, the whole business of the Lieutenant's daughter, (also the lead detective's girlfriend), unfolds too slowly, to the detriment of the police procedural elements.

The source novel is, of course, part of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series. I've written here before about other attempts to film entries in this series and the difficulties of adapting series novels into individual films.  Should the film makers acknowledge in some way that they are part of a wider 'universe', or should they be adapted as stand alone entities with no regard for the novels' ongoing continuity?  Robbins' script for The Pusher emphatically opts for the latter option, making significant changes to the source novel's plot and pretty much abandoning the series' underlying concept of being an ensemble piece, featuring an entire squad of detectives, with different members taking prominence in different novels.  (In reality, Steve Carella quickly became the readers' favourite character, taking the lead in most novels, but partnered with different characters and with sub-plots featuring other characters).  Only two detectives are even named in the film: Carella and Kling, with the latter barely featuring and in no way resembling his literary equivalent.  Even Carella doesn't bear much relationship to the character of the novels, feeling barely sketched in and playing a distinctly secondary role.  The film instead chooses to focus on the squad's commander, Lt Byrnes - which isn't entirely at odds with the source novel, where it is Byrnes' teenaged son who becomes addicted to drugs supplied by the titular pusher.  In the film, however, the son becomes his daughter and she is engaged to Carella, (in the books he is married to someone entirely different).   Again, Carella's secondary role isn't entirely out of step with the novel, where he is shot and wounded part way through, leaving his colleague's to complete the investigation.  (McBain had actually intended to kill him off, but his publishers intervened as the character was popular with readers).  

But the film switches the emphasis from Carella (or any other squad detective) to Byrnes to a degree that virtually crowds out Carella, making him a secondary character and consequently lessening the impact of his shooting, as he hasn't been sufficiently developed for the audience to invest in him emotionally.   Other changes from the source novel include the fact that the film is set explicitly in New York, whereas the books are set in a fictionalised version of the city, which is never named, plus, we are no longer in the 87th Precinct, with the action instead taking place in NYPD's 26th Precinct.  Although filmed in 1958, The Pusher wasn't released until 1960, for unknown reasons, although the fact that two other 87th Precinct adaptations had already been released that year, (like The Pusher, through United Artists), might have resulted in the distributors fearing that the market might become saturated.  The film is notable for casting Robert Lansing as Steve Carella, a role he would also play in the short-lived (1961-62) 87th Precinct TV series a few years later.  (This was rather more faithful to its source than any of the previous film adaptations).  Although somewhat disappointing as a an adaptation of an 87th Precinct novel, The Pusher is still far better than the previous two adaptations, Cop Hater and The Mugger, which had been produced on even lower budgets by producer/director William Berke.  Its New York exteriors at least give it some authentic atmosphere, even if Robbins' treatment of the source material tends toward the melodramatic, with ambitions of social commentary, rather than police procedural.

Forget The Alamo

I really think that the US needs to start forgetting about The Alamo and just tell Texas to 'fuck off'.  I mean, it's clear that the 'Lone Star State' thinks that it is superior to every other state, ('Everything's bigger in Texas') - just watch any Western if you doubt me, Texans in them are always bragging.  Now, they seem to want to defy Federal law, (those bastards in Washington are apparently telling them that they can't use razor wire on the border).  So we now have nutters with guns doing cosplay on the border, pretending to be military, threatening to defend their razor wire against any attempts by the Feds to remove it.  It could lead to civil war, the Russian Foreign Minister hopefully speculates.  Well, if they don't like US laws, then why not just expel them from the union?  After all, there was a period between Texas gaining independence from Mexico and joining the United States that it was an independent country.  (There is still a plaque on a building in London declaring it as the Texan embassy dating from this period).  Or perhaps they could rejoin Mexico - that would solve their border problems.  They could call it 'Texit', I suppose.  Because 'Brexit' really is something to be copied - we in the UK can thoroughly recommend it.  Not.

I'm thinking that maybe Biden should encourage Texas to leave - hurl a few insults at them, introduce more outrageous legislation. Like limiting gun ownership to only one per household and even then only with a barrel of less than three inches. In a state where manhood is measured by how many and how big your guns are, that should cause an uprising, surely.  Or maybe insist that there has to be a black family and an Hispanic family living on every street.  Because, let's face it, being a place full of gun toting racist braggarts, Texas is bound to vote for Trump next November, so if Biden can get them out of the union, then that's one less state supporting the orange bastard.  Hell, if the loons are going to keep claiming that Biden was only elected because the 2020 election was rigged, he might as well rig the 2024 one for real.  Another benefit of kicking out Texas is that Elon Musk moved Tesla's corporate HQ there a few years ago (and is now trying to re-incorporate the company there instead of in Delaware, where it is currently incorporated, because he thinks the judges in Texas are less likely to strike down his unearned pay increases than they are in Delaware), so, if we're lucky, he'd  be kicked out with it, which could only benefit the US.  So yeah, forget The Alamo and tell Texas where to get off.

Demented Politics

So, at what point do we start talking about Trump's mental incapacity.  I mean, as we enter an election year for the US, the rabid right-wingers are going all out on how Biden is senile because, well, he's old and he sometimes seems to lose the thread when speaking in public.  In fact, it isn't just the right-wing cranks who like to belittle Biden for his supposed senility.  But the fact is that he never was a great public speaker - when he was Vice President (when he was only in his sixties), he always seemed to be putting his foot in his mouth.  Moreover, merely being old isn't, in itself, proof that someone is mentally incapable.  Indeed, Biden's record in office would seem to contradict this idea - contrary to what the right's propaganda would have you believe, employment levels have climbed under his administration and the US' economic performance has improved markedly, (in contrast to Trump's time in office).  Getting back to the point, though: Trump.  If Biden's poor public speaking is proof of senility, then surely Trump's constant slurring of words, increasingly demented rantings and his apparent disconnect from reality, (he seems, for instance, to think that he has 'won' his current civil cases, despite having more than eighty million dollars of damages awarded against him in one of them), is more than ample evidence that he is completely and utterly ga-ga.  Oh yes - let's also not forget that, despite having his Twitter account restored by Elon Musk, the world's village idiot, Trump still hasn't Tweeted anything.  Clearly, he is too senile to remember his login details.

Yet, nobody seems to want to talk about Trump's obvious descent into dementia.  You can understand why his followers don't want to discuss it.  In fact, as long he's spending his time ranting to rallies of his most rabid fans, he can get away with it - they are as demented as he is, so he just seems normal to them.  He could probably drop his pants on stage and take a huge dump and these loons would scream and applaud him.  Even if he followed that up by taking a piss on them, they'd still cheer him.  But his problems come when he starts displaying his mental incapacity away from his comfort zone - his court outbursts, for instance, draw adulation only from his hardcore fans, not the wider audience who see them.  Yet still the media seem to hold back from actually coming out and highlighting his apparent senility - they are happy to repeat all the shit about Biden, but seem reluctant to question his opponent's mental capacity.  How far does he have to go before they do start reporting it more prominently?  Does he have to come into one of his court hearing naked and in an obviously confused state, before masturbating furiously during witness cross-examinations?  Would his making inappropriate sexual comments to female court staff, or even grabbing them 'by the pussy'?  At what point does his behaviour become erratic and scary enough for people to start seriously questioning his fitness for office?  But hey, here in the UK people had to elect a Tory government led by Boris Johnson, then endure a pandemic during which his incompetence contributed to tens of thousands of deaths and his policies resulted in billions of pounds of taxpayers money being paid out to Tory donors and old pals, before they decided that he was unfit for office, despite this having been manifestly obvious for decades.  So who knows when Trump will be publicly outed as a senile old fool?  I mean, he's already had one disastrous term in office, but that apparently wasn't enough for people to make up their minds...