Another Friday Rant

Every time I edit together a podcast it seems to take forever - even when the main segments were recorded days ago, so it really is just a case of ordering them and sticking them together.  So, several hours after starting the task, I can finally get around to writing today's post.  Well, there really is only one topic of discussion today, isn't there?  Yep, Donald Trump has finally been found guilty of something and is now a convicted felon.  Now, in any sane, civilised country, this conviction would automatically bar him from standing for elected office.  But not in the good old US of A - the land of opportunity, even for, or maybe especially for, crooks.  I mean, it just seems decidedly bizarre that someone awaiting sentencing after a criminal conviction, (on 34 charges related to election interference, let's not forget), can still campaign to be elected president.  Indeed, even if he receives a custodial sentence, that apparently still won't be enough to disbar him from the ballot or from actually serving as president if elected.  Don't forget, all of this is happening in a country that likes to hold itself up as some kind of exemplar of freedom and democracy and which likes to lecture the rest of the world on such things.  But I guess that their conception of freedom encompasses the notion that even criminals who have demonstrated a remarked disregard for the constitution and just about every civilised democratic value known to man, can legitimately hold office if they can bribe or brainwash enough idiots and lunatics into voting for them.

Not that I expect this conviction to stick - unfortunately, as history has taught us multiple times - in the US, if you have sufficient money and influence, you can worm, bully and bribe your way out of such things.  Doubtless, Trump and his buddies on the Supreme Court will manage to find some way to rig the court that hears his appeal against this conviction.  Sorry to sound so pessimistic about this, but it's just the way things are - the US is a country that worships money, its acquisition is seen as the ultimate measure of success or failure, so it should be no surprise that their institutions are so easily corrupted.  To be fair, this isn't unique to the US - fourteen years of the Tories trying to remould the UK into a similar temple to wealth has resulted in the outrageous levels of corruption we now see here.  Getting back to the US, if Trump's term in office taught us anything, it is that he corrupts and degrades everything he touches, yet there are people there apparently crazy enough to want a re-run of that most shameful episode of recent US history, that saw democracy brought to the brink with his refusal to accept any result unless it showed that he won and the US presidency itself was brought into disrepute.  Is it really any wonder that the US is rapidly becoming the laughing stock of the free world?   But hey, until the fat bastard manages to overturn his convictions, we might as well enjoy the moment and rejoice.  So that's what I'll do and get back to dancing around the room in joyful delirium.

Women in War

 As noted previously, many men's magazines, particularly the war themed ones, would frequently run stories featuring women doing brutal things to male oppressors.  Women in War, which published three issues at irregular intervals (and out of numerical order), between 1959 and 1964, appears to have been an attempt to launch an entire magazine around this theme.  The fact that all of the issues are marked as coming from 'Volume 2' implies that it might actually have been a continuation or spin off from an existing magazine.  This is Volume 2 No 1, from November 1963, which came some four years after Volume 2 No 4, published in January 1959 and was followed by Volume 2 No 2 in February 1964.  What happened to No 3 remains a mystery.  Interestingly, the 1959 issue varies the title slightly, hyphenating it Women-in-War and claims to be 'All True'.  The cover also embraces the woman-as-victim trope of many war pulps, with a prone woman who has clearly been severely thrashed with a riding crop by a Nazi officer, being rescued by a GI bursting through the door, Tommy gun blazing.

The other two covers, by contrast, put the women firmly in the role of aggressor, meting out violent punishment to men.  This cover, for instance, seems to illustrate the Cuban-set 'She Lived For Vengeance',judging from the uniforms, at least, with the women giving the guy a bloody good beating.  Whereas the 1959 issue had the emphasis on World War Two set stories, this one, going by the teasers on the cover, focuses on more contemporary conflicts.  The Korean War is represented by 'The Modest Mata Hari of Inchon', while 'The Suicide Saga of a Killer Doll' takes the Hungarian uprising as its background.  World War Two does get a look in with 'Revolt of the Love Slaves' and 'Blood for the Colonel's Daughter', so fans of Nazis and Japs getting humiliated by women wouldn't be disappointed.  Obviously, despite the title, Women in War was clearly still a male-orientated publication, aimed at titillating its audience with tales of scantily clad but fiery women (just waiting to be tamed by the right man) fighting beastly foreign perverts.  The fact that there were only three, widely spaced, issues published, however, would seem to indicate that there wasn't a big enough audience for this particular fetish.

Zotz! (1962)

Nowadays cinematic wish-fulfilment fantasies mostly take the form of superhero movies, but back in the day they took more prosaic forms, involving genies or magical objects which can give characters seemingly magical powers.  Of course, there were also the science fiction equivalents of such stories, involving aliens or radioactive phenomena giving ordinary people extraordinary powers - a step toward contemporary superhero films.  Zotz! (1962), though, falls into the former category, (although it develops some of the trappings of the latter kind as it progresses).  A bit of a departure for William Castle after a string of popular and gimmicky horror movies, Zotz! is played primarily for laughs, with college professor Tom Poston's sudden acquisition of magical powers via possession of an ancient coin leading to all manner of confusion and chaos and his colleagues questioning his sanity.  Much hilarity ensues.  Actually, to be fair, the movie is still mildly amusing in parts thanks mainly to the playing of experienced comedic character actors like Poston, Jim Backus and Cecil Kellaway.  Nonetheless, the film's script largely abandons the source novel's satirical allegory about the development of nuclear weapons in favour of more straightforward slapstick and comedy.  Only in the film's latter part does it attempt to use the coin as a metaphor for the arms race, as communist agents try to gain control of it and the US militaty belatedly become interested, (having initially dismissed Poston as a crank).

The powers that the coin confers upon Poston are fairly random: if the points at person it causes them intense pain, if he points and says 'Zotz!' then it kills them (or destroys inanimate objects), while just saying 'Zotz!' puts anyone or anything he is observing into slow motion.  Like all good superpowers, there are limitations, namely that he actually has to have the coin on his person for any of these powers to work.  Which, of course, results in the inevitable comic sequence where Poston tries to demonstrate his powers at a faculty function, not realising that he doesn't have the coin on his person.  Shot in black and white like Castle's horror movies, Zotz! is well put together, with decent production values, (not to mention more exterior scenes than most of his mainly studio bound horror films).  Being a William Castle production, Zotz! obviously came with a gimmick.  In this case, it was a plastic replica of the coin in the film, which was handed out to viewers who bought tickets for the film.  There have been claims that the coin was withdrawn after some recipients thought that it really would give them powers and started jumping off of roofs and the like.  Which seems highly unlikely to me - surely they would try pointing their fingers at people and shouting 'Zotz!'.  More likely that such stories were propagated by Castle himself in order to create more publicity for the film after supplies of the plastic coins ran out.

Stick 'Em in the Army....

Another bank holiday.  I spent part of this one on the sofa eating peanuts and watching John Wayne in Chisum (1970).  One of his late period westerns - for which I have a strange affection: I liked the way Wayne embraced his increasing years in these films, playing older, more reflective characters.  Even though I'm no longer part of the rat race of full time employment, so bank holiday weekends don't seem quite as vital to me, I still feel that I should break the routine in some way.  Hence my predilection for spending bank holiday weekends watching old movies.  But not everyone, it seems, was taking it easy this long weekend, as the general election campaign continued unabated.  There's a terrible fascination about watching the Tories' campaign - you'd have thought that Liz Truss' brief reign of madness would have exhausted them of batshit crazy ideas that nobody in their right mind would campaign on.  But no, they just keep coming out with them.  Bringing back conscription for eighteen year olds is the latest.  Because, yeah, that's really what is going to get older voters on side.  I mean, only the other day, as I was shouting 'you can't stand there' and 'get your hair cut' at random teenagers in my local shopping centre, I was thinking, 'yeah, that's what the youth of today need - compulsory military service.  Being shouted at and brutalised by ruddy faced NCOs - that'll give them a much needed dose of discipline.  I'd vote for anyone who suggested that.'  The worst thing about this abomination of a 'policy initiative' was that they immediately had to start walking it back, as it became clear that most people thought it utterly bonkers - 'national service' didn't necessarily mean military service, people could volunteer for weekend public service.  But they wouldn't be paid for it, although they would if they chose military service.  It would be compulsory, but nobody would go to prison or even be prosecuted if they refused to participate.  An utter mess and a stark warning of the perils of coming up with 'policy' off the cuff.

It was gratifying to see that even the right-wing press had reservations about this policy - apparently even younger members of the Royal Family would be subjected to compulsory public service!  God forbid!  Except, of course, they always get stuck in uniform, anyway, rushed through Dartmouth/Cranwell/Sandhurst, given a chest full of medals and promoted to Field Marshall/Admiral of the Feet/Marshall of the RAF by the age of twenty five without ever seeing action before being retired from military service before a war can break out.  Hot on the heels of this embarrassment, the Tories have apparently now taken a leaf out of the Trump playbook and are trying to make the label 'Sleepy Keir' stick to Keir Starmer on account of his advanced age of, um, sixty one.  According to them, that makes him decrepit and means that he won't have the energy and dynamism to carry out the duties of Prime Minister.  Jesus, where do I start with this?  As I now find myself a member of the older generation (although still younger than Starmer), this is incredibly offensive - I probably have more energy and stamina now than I've had in years.  Moreover, let's not forget that some of these idiots are still going into bat for Boris Johnson to return as Tory leader - he's older than Starmer, not to mention grossly overweight.  Speaking of the fat boy, I've noticed various right-wing outlets trumpeting Boris Johnson as some kind of 'secret weapon' to be deployed by the Tories.  Apparently, he's going to inyervene in the campaign with a 'sustained attack' on Starmer which will decisively derail the Labour campaign.  When will these clowns get it through their thick skulls that a) Johnson is utterly incompetent and a buffoon, b) he was consistently bested by Starmer in the Commons and c) is deeply unpopular after his lockdown antics became public - he's one of the main contributing factor's to the government's current unpopularity?  But hey, we've still got a long way to go in this election campaign, so I'm sure there'll be more idiocy along the way.

A Dream of No Significance

I had another of those dreams where the camera of my imagination pulls back to reveal that the action so far has actually been a movie I've been watching on TV.  In this case it turned out to be one of those sixties sub-Hitchcock thrillers that badly wanted to be North By Northwest (1959), but weren't.  This one starred Rock Hudson, (as many of the real ones seemed to), who, at the film's climax penetrates the villains' headquarters, located in a New York office block, by blacking up and wearing an Afro wig.  At which point my dream self asked 'What is it with these sixties Hollywood movies and blackface?'  Upon reflection, I'm not sure what he was talking about - awake, I've thought long and hard about the subject and can't actually come up with a real example of a major Hollywood star blacking up onscreen.  The closest I could get was David Niven blacking up for the 'hilarious' climax of the seventies British movie Vampira.  In terms of sixties mainstream Hollywood product, all I could think of was Keenan Wynne donning blackface in Finian's Rainbow.  To be fair, there is a serious purpose behind this - Wynn plays a white bigot who, thanks to the magical properties of a leprechaun's stolen crock of gold, is forced to experience life as a black person.  (Yeah, I know, they could and should have hired a black actor to play the black version of the characters.  But they could also have hired actual Irish actors to play the Gene Kelly and Petula Clarke roles, but instead we're subjected to 'Oirish accents' far more offensive than the blackface - and don't get me started on Tommy Steele's bizarre performance as a cockney leprechaun).  

Which isn't to say that there wasn't racism in movies in the sixties - it just wasn't as blatant as having white guys put boot polish on their faces and give caricatured performances as supposedly black characters, which had been common even into the fifties.  Even more offensive was when they cast actual black actors who were then directed to give demeaning performances portraying the usual  submissive, lazy and dim black stereotypes.  Getting back to the matter in hand - I'm still trying to figure out just why I was dreaming of Rock Hudson in blackface?  Where did that image come from?  It isn't as if I'd been thinking about either Rock Hudson or blackface in the run up to this dream - so what triggered it?  Was it some kind of analogy for the fact that Hudson was forced to spend his career pretending to be something he wasn't, that my subconscious mind had dredged up?  (In order to protect the box office, studio executives made sure that his homosexuality was kept secret from the public, hidden behind a series of fake girlfriends and wives).  

But of late my dreams have featured a lot of stuff that I hadn't consciously been thinking about of late.  A couple of girls I had known when I was younger, but haven't seen in decades turned up in recent dreams - both still looking incredibly young. I have to say, I liked their dream equivalents more than I liked the real thing - one girl, who I had known as a student, was a lot less flaky than I remember her being.  The other, who I once worked with, was a lot less highly strung than she was for real.  In fact, in the dream I got along with her a lot better than I had for real, (I hasten to add that we were friends, but tended to rub each other up the wrong way a lot of the time), to the extent that she even asked for my email address - I wrote it on a piece of cardboard for her.  I knew was never going to contact me using it, but I appreciated the gesture of her asking for it.  In retrospect, I have to say that when I thought about those two dreams it occurred to me that, while I recognised both of them, their dream versions actually didn't look exactly like the real thing.  The one from work, in particular, I realised, bore a striking resemblance to the actress Nicola Cowper, who I'd recently watched in Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1988).  To be fair, the real girl was of similar build to Cowper and sometimes sported short hair, (although it was curly rather than straight, as it was in the dream).  I still have no idea what significance, if any, their appearances in my dreams had, especially bearing in mind that I hadn't really thought about either of them in an age.  It just reinforces my opinion that dreams, despite what some might want us to believe, have no real significance whatsoever.

Creatures From the Abyss (1994)

Made at a time when Florida was the location of choice for Italian exploitation film makers, (clearly there were tax breaks and/or brown envelopes full of cash changing hands), Creatures From the Abyss (1994) shares with those films a superficial glossiness and slickness that aims to hide both the movie's limited budget and its Italian origins.  The film tries to make the most of its budget but confining most of the action to an apparently abandoned yacht stumbled upon by a group of young people who find themselves adrift in a dinghy during a storm.  While such a confined, potentially claustrophobic environment should be ideal for building tension and suspense, most of the interiors are so brightly lit that they dissipate any hint of a menacing atmosphere.  They certainly don't help the film sell its main plot point - that the characters are being stalked by a fish.  Yeah, a murderous fish that can live out of water and wander around a yacht killing people, (it has already dispatched the crew).  Try as it might, the film just can't get over the utter ludicrousness of this fundamental story idea.  Even keeping the creature unseen for most of the film, instead relying upon fish-point-of-view shots to convey its stalking around the boat, the whole thing still seems ridiculous.  But Creatures From the Abyss piles on the lunacy as, after a slow start, it eventually frantically rushes toward an utterly bonkers finale involving people, infected by fish bites and radioactive plankton, turning into murderous fish creatures, with fish heads, fins and even pincers erupting from their bodies.

Creatures From the Abyss was clearly inspired by the likes of Piranha (1978) and Humanoids From the Deep (1980), with its tale of deep sea fish mutated by contaminated plankton into mutant killers with a penchant for molesting women.  Unfortunately, the film is too bogged down by lengthy scenes devoted to exposition - mainly involving one of the characters reading journals and computer records left by the crew - for the idea to be properly developed.  A lot of this exposition is quite unnecessary - it is surely obvious from the outset that the abandoned yacht was a secret oceanographic lab studying deep sea fish, after all, it has a well equipped lab full of exotic fish pickled in jars.  But it persists in wasting running time on interminable arguments between the two male characters as to whether it is drugs lab or a scientific lab - it creates conflict, but doesn't move the plot forward.  The script also has a tendency to keep introducing elements which turn out to be cul-de-sacs plot wise, most notably the revelation that the chief scientist on the yacht, (the only survivor of the crew, found hiding in a locker), was some kind of fish fetishist!  To be fair, this does result in possibly the most lunatic exchange of dialogue in a film full of bad dialogue:  "Professor, how long have you been fucking fish?", which garners the reply "They were old enough".

So, is there anything good about Creatures From the Abyss?  Well, despite the atrocious dialogue and poor dubbing, it does have some plus points.  The production design is quite striking, specifically with regard to the sets for the yacht's lab and living quarters. They might be over lit, but their gleaming modernity provides a stark contrast with the vessel's hold and engine room.  Their incongruity in the context of a boat at sea also helps, upon their initial appearance, to upend audience expectation and create a feeling of disorientation.  Unfortunately, the film fails to build on this.  The movie also includes some stop motion animation effects which, for a low budget film, are quite impressive.  Not especially convincing, but impressive nonetheless.  That said, one particular effect is laugh out loud bad: a fish being used as an experimental subject in the lab breaks free and attacks various cast members, quite literally swimming in the air, before it is beaten to death.  Utterly insane.  The make up effects which see various cast members transforming into fish creatures are quite well done and the gory mayhem that ensues borders on the surreal.  Particularly memorable is the transformation of a male character into a fish thing while he has sex with one of the girls, resulting in her quite literally being fucked by a fish.  (How envious the fish fetishist professor must have been).  This startling sequence eventually yield another bizarre sequence where the impregnated girl starts to spawn fish eggs.  (Actually, the way the scene is shot, at times it looks as if she is squatting on the deck taking a humongous dump).

There can be no argument that Creatures From the Abyss is a terrible film.  Not surprisingly, in view of the awful script and worse dubbing, the acting performances are uniformly poor, with poorly drawn characters that never rise above the level of stereotypes: the two bikini clad blonde girls are airheads, the dark haired one who keeps her clothes on is the sensible one, while the guy with glasses is an intellectual and the one without glasses a priapic narcissistic  jock.  But, with its insane plot and even more lunatic visuals, Creatures From the Deep is hugely enjoyable in an undemanding sort of way.  It is an excellent late night movie experience combining lots of unintentional laughs with some reasonably effective gore and even a bit of nudity.  I'd urge everyone to watch it if the opportunity arises.

Beware the Black Widow (1968)

An absolute obscurity, Beware the Black Widow (1968) makes for a befuddling watch - while he title might imply that it is some kind of crime or horror movie, the credits immediately roll out to an awful theme song that instead suggests that it is actually a comedy.  But this immediate upending of viewer expectation is the hallmark of this ultra low-budget production - its black and white photography suggests film noir, (not to mention its hard bitten reporter protagonists), yet most of the 'action' takes place in burlesque bars with plenty of topless strippers on hand, suggesting sexploitation.  The latter elements also mean that, every so often, everything stops for another burlesque number - but it isn't a musical either.  It's a weird combination that never really satisfies and certainly never really settles into anything really coherent: the crime elements simply aren't exciting or creepy enough, the nudity is tame and distinctly non-erotic, the musical numbers awful and the overall execution flat and uninvolving, with a wooden cast stumbling through their stilted dialogue against a background of cheap and poorly lit sets.  

It isn't as if the scenario doesn't have potential - two reporters try to get to the bottom of a series of murders in New York which have seen Mafia soldiers stabbed by an assailant dressed in traditional Italian widows' garb - but it is so poorly executed.  The script's structure, involving a lot of flashbacks and a lot of characters recapitulating plot points and lots of repetitive scenes and dialogue, ensure that that film never picks up any pace, let alone is able to build up any atmosphere and tension.  By the time it reaches its anticlimactic finale in an unconvincing Chinatown shop run by an unconvincing Chinaman, it is hard to believe that only seventy two minutes have gone by.  Yet, like many such movies, it exerts a strange, appaled fascination whilst it is playing - it seems to challenge the viewer to believe that it really can be this bad.  In terms of style, it most reminded me of early sixties 'nudie' films like House on Bare Mountain or the Olga series, but a lot less fun than the former and, despite its best efforts, far less sleazy than the latter.  The most surprising thing about Beware the Black Widow is that it was made as late as 1968, when even low budget smut was generally far more explicit and far better staged.  It feels like a relic from at least a decade earlier with its sparse sets and lifeless direction.  Director Larry Crane, (who was also responsible for the awful theme song), put out a number of similar low budget sex movies 1967-69.  Several, like this one, were written by William M Berger.  Neither seems to have any subsequent screen credits.

Alien From LA (1988) and Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1988)

Coincidence, it seems, even plays a part in the schlock movies I watch.  The other week I saw Albert Pyun's Alien From LA (1988) on one of those dodgy Roku channels I frequent.  Not a film I was familiar with, but some research revealed that it had an interesting production history and a quasi-sequel released the same year.  Then, lo and behold, what should turn up on Talking Pictures TV, of all places, a week later, but said sequel: Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1988).  I say 'sequel' but, in reality, the latter film went into production first - in 1986 in fact - and originally had no connection to Alien From LA.  Cannon Films, the producer of both movies, however, were apparently deeply unhappy with the rough cut of Journey delivered to them by director Rusty Lemonrade and approached B-movie veteran Pyun to salvage it with reshoots and re-editing.  For his part, Pyun wanted to get his similarly themed Alien From LA into production and persuaded Cannon to finance it on the basis that once it was completed, he'd attempt the salvage job on Journey to the Centre of the Earth.  The latter subsequently emerged as a direct-to-video sequel of sorts to Alien From LA.  Having seen the two films in quick succession, it has to be said that Alien From LA is, unsurprisingly, the better film, being the product of a single creative force's vision, rather than an awkward mash up of two different directors' differing approaches to similar material.

Alien From LA follows shy, awkward and introverted California girl Wanda Saknussemm (Kathy Ireland) - dumped by her boyfriend pre-credits because he finds her hair, glasses, squeaky voice and he fact that she never wants to go anywhere, irritating - in her quest to find her absentee father who has disappeared while on an expedition in Africa.  He's been exploring ancient tunnels in an attempt to prove his theory that the legendary city of Atlantis was, in fact, an alien spaceship which sank into the centre of the earth.  Overcoming her insecurities about travelling, Wanda inevitably follows in his footsteps and finds herself in Atlantis, portrayed as some kind of cyberpunk-styled subterranean realm, apparently modelled on the look of Blade Runner.  She finds that, as part of a power struggle between different factions in the government, the citizens of Atlantis are in the grip of paranoia about being infiltrated by 'aliens' from the mythical surface world.  Wanda, eventually identified as a real 'alien' finds herself as a pawn in the power struggle before finding her father and trying to escape.  Bearing in mind its low budget (around a million dollars), Alien From LA is a surprisingly decent looking film, with good production design and some nice looking (and well shot) South African locations.  It moves along at a decent pace and has, for a low-budget fantasy movie, a reasonably witty script that actually yields some amusing lines.  As befits the highly stylised look of the Atlantis sets and costumes, the performances of the actors playing the Atlanteans are also somewhat stylised and somewhat stagey.  Of course, a lot of the film's success lies with the character of Wanda who starts out somewhat irritating but, thanks to the character's scripting and first-time actor Ireland's playing, grows into a likeable and sympathetic character as the plot progresses.

There are some intriguing aspects to Alien From LA which suggest that it might, originally, have been intended to present its story in a different light.  Several of the cast double up, playing multiple roles: Wanda's aunt, who runs the diner she works at, also plays a bar owner in Atlantis, while the actor playing Triton, one of the senior Atlanteans is also the mailman who delivers the letter telling Wanda that her father is missing, presumed dead, while her father's colleague in Africa is portrayed by the same actor who plays an Atlantean scientist. This apparent allusion to The Wizard of Oz (1939)  is emphasised after Wanda escapes from Atlantis, with a cut to her waking up, back at her aunt's, and saying 'I had this strange dream..', before her father walks in and the camera cuts to the capsule they returned to the surface in, which had surfaced in her aunt's house.  These details raise the question of whether Wanda's adventure was originally intended to be presented as an Oz-like dream, but the producers subsequently changed their minds to present it all as real, (thereby leaving open the possibility of a sequel).  Then again, it is equally likely that these allusions were simply intended as an homage, or a stylistic flourish.  Of course, the use of actors in multiple roles could simply have been a budgetary decision - it is notable that one actor plays two Atlantean characters, but no surface character.

Obviously, Pyun thought that the subsequent reconstruction job on Journey to the Centre of the Earth presented an opportunity to refashion the film into a sequel to his own film, via extensive re-shoots.  Unfortunately, Cannon were interested only in meeting their contractual obligations to deliver a film of that title to distributors at minimal cost - bearing in mind that one of their issues with the original rough cut was that it would have required extensive and expensive special effects to complete, it is hardly surprising that they wanted to spend as little as possible on the project.  The completed film gives the impression that Pyun was given a few days to shoot some sequences on the Atlantis sets with a minimal cast and whatever performers from the first film were available.  This was then tacked onto a severely re-edited version of the first part of Lemonrade's film.  The collision of styles and tone is, not surprisingly, jarring.  Lemonrade has claimed hat, despite having sole director's credit, only the first eight minutes of the completed film are as he intended - which seems to have been to make a youth-orientated, modern day adventure film loosely based on the Jules Verne novel.  His footage, both the opening and the re-edited sequences, actually succeeds, in the main, in achieving this.  His version of the plot involves an English nanny, Crystina (Nicola Cowper) sent to Hawaii to look after a failing rock star's dog, being drawn into two teenaged brothers' plans to explore some caves near an erupting volcano.  What survives of this in the finished film are a series of sequences of the trio falling into an abyss and wandering around a series of caverns and tunnels as they try to find a way back to the surface.  There are also a pair of dream sequences which appear to use footage from later in his version of the film featuring some man-in-a-suit monsters and a brief appearance by comedian Emo Phillips, playing a character who, presumably, played a significant role in the latter part of the movie, but in the finished version is never seen again.

The switch to Pyun's footage is abrupt, heralded by Crystina and the younger of the brothers, Bryan, falling through the floor of the cavern and finding themselves in Atlantis.  Presumably, they were the only two cast members that could be recalled for the new shoot - the older brother's absence is explained by the insertion of another sequence from later in the original cut, showing him being discovered by a group of rescuers, including his parents and six year old sister (who had earlier been sent back from the caves by her brothers to get help).  Not that the other two seem to notice that he's gone as they never mention him again.  We now lurch into a new narrative whereby the existence of Wanda and the surface world is being officially denied by the authorities, while the villainness of the first film, General Rykov, plans to deceive the ruler of Atlantis into invading the surface world by convincing him that surface dwelling 'aliens' are now arriving in Atlantis in force.  Except, of course, that there are no actual 'alien' invaders - Rykov is instead trying to mould several agents into duplicates of Wanda (as the Atlanteans assume that all surface dwellers are like her).  Consequently, the arrival of Crystina provides her with a real 'alien' to aide her plot.  Bryan, however, comes to the rescue - just as Crystina is beginning to convince some of her captors pf the virtues of the surface world and its people  - utilising the fact that the Atlanteans are susceptible to high-pitched loud noises.  At which point it simply ends - the frame freezes on Rykov covering her ears and grimacing in pain before we cut to a sequence of Bryan apparently back at home on the surface, watching a TV broadcast in which Triton, from the first film, announces the commencement of diplomatic relations between the two worlds, heralding a new era of mutual co-operation.  Wanda briefly appears (in what looks like an out-take from the first film) and we learn that Crystina has married Lt Tola and they are returning to the surface as emissaries of Atlantis.  We then have a song from that rock star with the dog (remember him), which plays over a montage of scenes from the film.  At which point, having presumably reached an acceptable running time, the credits roll.

There is no doubt that Journey to the Centre of the Earth is something of a car crash.  It isn't that either of its two components are particularly bad - on the contrary, both sets of footage are actually very professional-looking, with decent production values.  The cave sets of Lemonrade's film are excellent, while Pyun's Atlantis sets are as interesting and impressively designed as before - the problem is that they just don't both belong in the same film. The change in style - not just of sets and costumes, but also lighting, camerawork, dialogue and overall direction - is just too radical.  To be fair, the remaining cast from the first film manage the transition reasonably well.  Nicola Cowper, while playing a very different character to Ireland's Wanda, is nonetheless a likeable heroine, who carries the film through its radical change in direction part way through.  But so many plot threads are left hanging by the transition from one movie to another - how exactly did the rescuers find the older brother, who made the arrows carved into the rock that the trio follow, for instance.  These things are abruptly forgotten about as we suddenly move into a different storyline.  The frustrating thing is that there are two halfway decent films evident in the released version.  What we see of Lemonrade's film certainly seems to be laying the foundations for an enjoyable fantasy film aimed at younger viewers, while Pyun's footage has the makings of an entertaining sequel to Alien From LA. But neither is allowed to build on its foundations and develop into a proper story in its own right.  Not surprisingly, neither director was happy with the resultant film, with Pyun keeping his name off of the credits and Lemonrade publicly disowning the finished product.  You can't help but feel that Cannon would have been better off letting Lemonrade complete his film as he originally intended and stumping up the cash to allow Pyun to make a proper sequel to his film.  But, as ever, they were too cheap and short-sighted to do either.

Pullman Class on a Budget

Another one of those weeks where I've been all over the place: at model train fairs, in the pub and outside enjoying the weather.  Unfortunately, this has left me completely unfocused as regards to posting here.  To be fair, we got off to a strong start with the piece about the Hamilton film, but it was all downhill from there.  It isn't that I haven't been watching plenty of movies of dubious quality, it is just that I haven't had the energy to write about any of them so far.  So, as I was at that aforementioned local model train fair, I thought I'd take a quick look at a couple of items I bought there:

This is a pair of Pullman coaches I bought very cheaply - the upper one is a Hornby first class parlour.  The design dates back to the seventies and replaced the old Triang version, which was well under scale length.  Judging by the clip in bogies, this particular model comes from the eighties.  The main flaws with it is that the roof has some kind of sticky, dirty deposit on it which will need to be scrubbed off and it is missing its name transfers.  (Luckily, I have some spare Pullman name transfers).  The lower one is a Hornby Dublo first class kitchen car, dating back to the early sixties.  While it is underscale length-wise, it is closer to scale length than the Triang 'shorties' and doesn't look as out of place when coupled up to the newer, scale length, Hornby coaches.  I'm not entirely sure if the bogies are original, but it does have Triang style couplers rather than the Dublo type, which saves me the trouble of having to change them.  

Arguably, I have too many Pullmans now, but the ones I already owned included a preponderance of first class parlour cars and a single second class brake.  These two coaches, along with a Wrenn (ex-Hornby Dublo) second class parlour I bought a couple of months ago (and which needs a bit of attention, including a repaint of the roof), will allow me to create somewhat more representative formations for the 'Bournemouth Belle', while leaving a couple of first class parlours spare for boat train duty.  Which also means that I can finally get rid of my Triang 'shorty' Pullmans.  These two coaches cost me less than a tenner, an extraordinary bargain, but typical of what you can get at this sort of event if you are prepared to put a bit of work into rectifying minor defects or don't mind non-standard features (like the couplings on the kitchen car) that would send a collector shrieking from the room in anguish.  Remarkably though, a lot of people seem happy to pay way over the odds for second hand model railway equipment on eBay or even higher prices at the big online retailers.  For skinflints like me, these model train fairs are an absolute Godsend.

Battle Cry

If it wasn't for that cover painting of some Nazis about to brand some unfortunate half naked woman with the swastika,  you'd be hard-pressed to identify this issue of Battle Cry as a war-story themed men's magazine.  None of the stories featured on the cover appear to have any connection with any war, nor any military theme.  Instead, they read like the contents of the raunchier end of the men's magazine field, with their relentless focus on sex and sensationalism.  It's all there: wife-swapping, small town prostitution, harems and even some cannibalism thrown in for good measure.  Somewhat bizarrely, tacked onto all of this we have 'A Bowling Pro Tells: The Secrets of a 200 Average!'.  Now, unless a '200 Average' is some kind of sexual euphemism, this strange mix of stories tell us something about the fantasies of American men in the early seventies:  sex with exotic women, eating human flesh and racking up a top score at the bowling alley.  Not necessarily all at once.

Battle Cry started life as a comic book, before becoming a war themed men's magazine in the mid fifties.  It stayed focused on war throughout the fifties and into the sixties.  But as World War Two (the main conflict featured in stories) receded into history, other wars began to feature more prominently, notably Korea and Vietnam, not to mention Cold War tales of Soviet/Red Chinese/Cuban depravities, even, eventually, the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland.  Semi clad women featured ever more prominently on the covers as the sixties progressed, to be joined by increasingly sex-orientated content in the late sixties.  By the early seventies, with the magazine, like its contemporaries, increasingly scrabbling to retain readership, the sex and sensationalism started to overshadow the war content.  Sometimes, as with this November 1970 issue, crowding it out completely.  Battle Cry staggered into 1971 for a few more issues before expiring.

Panic in Year Tory

Apparently, the UK is facing a perilous future, with all manner of threats to our security - but don't worry, Rishi Sunak is the safe pair of hands we need to guide us through them.. It's like that old gag isn't it?  'You're at death's door, but don't worry, I'll see you through it'.  The idea that the country's security is safe in Sunak's hands (or those pf any other Tory) is utterly ludicrous - they've trashed the economy, cut defence spending far more than any Labour government ever has and they've accepted huge wads of cash, both individually and collectively as a party, from Russia, the very entity they now identify as the main threat to the UK's future security.  Do they really think that we're that stupid?  (OK, I know, I know, people voted for Boris Johnson, not to mention Brexit, so clearly there are a lot of credulous idiots out there).  If nothing else, Sunak's ridiculous posturing does finally confirm just what all this 'World War Three' scaremongering in the right-wing press has been about.  In recent weeks it has reached ridiculous proportions and with stories speculating about what UK cities might be targeted in a Russian nuclear attack, utterly irresponsible.  Despite all of these scare stories, despite all the 'experts' and 'academics' they keep digging up to tell you otherwise, it is highly unlikely that the war in Ukraine will become some kind of nuclear flashpoint.  Let's not forget that Ukraine sits right next to Russia, so the fallout from any nuclear weapons the Russians might use there would just as likely blow back on them- remember how the fallout from the Chernobyl accident, (Chernobyl now, rather ironically being in Ukraine), drifted far and wide.

As for nuclear strikes on targets outside of Ukraine, well, unless the West gives Putin some kind of pretext by physically attacking Russian forces, or making incursions into Russian territory, this seems even less likely.  All the sabre rattling by Putin and his mouthpieces about using nuclear weapons simply reveals the position of military weakness he is actually in - the Ukraine campaign has revealed serious inadequacies in his military and conventional weapons systems.  Moreover, Russia is likely to come off second best in any hypothetical nuclear exchange.  But that, of course, isn't the point - it provides fodder for the right-wing media in the UK to try and whip up a panic aimed at reinforcing the position of their Tory friends.  'Oooh, it's so scary!  But don't worry, the party that has undermined our security by weakening the economy via Brexit and their corruption, resulting in defence cuts, is here to save us!'  Pathetic!  A fake crisis to try and sustain in power a government that has created a real crisis in the economy and public services.  But it isn't without recent precedent: let's not forget how Boris Johnson desperately wrapped himself in the Ukrainian flag and tried to convince us all that he was a wartime leader and therefore shouldn't be forced out of power, even if the war wasn't actually happening in the UK or even close to the UK and UK forces weren't directly involved.  His handling of one crisis, the pandemic, which did directly involve the UK had backfired on him, so he tried to seize on a distant one instead - one where he is incompetence could have no direct consequences.  But it didn't work for Johnson then and I doubt it will work for Sunak now, despite the press trying to inflate the magnitude of the current non-crisis.  (Of course, having said all that, the nuclear attack alert will now go off and Russian missiles will start falling on Europe...)

Hamilton: In the Interest of the Nation (2011)

What seems like an eternity ago (and let's face it, online anything that happened more than two weeks ago belongs to prehistory), I wrote a piece here about the 'Hamilton' character, sometimes described as the 'Swedish James Bond'.  To briefly recap, the character originally appeared in a series of novels by Jan Guilluo, starting in 1986, many of which were adapted for Swedish TV, others into films which remain relatively unknown in English-speaking markets.  (With the possible exception of 1998's Hamilton, an abortive attempt to launch a big budget English-language film series based on the character, which starred Peter Stormare).  But in 2011 a new film adaptation retooled and reimagined the character for the twenty first century.  Hamilton: In the Interest of the Nation (2011) was a big budget, action-orientated spy movie which proved to be a huge box office hit, both in Sweden and internationally.  Having finally managed to see the film, several things struck me about it - most notably the way in which the producers took a leaf out of the Eon productions play-book when it came to adapting one of the novels.  Basically, as with most of the Bond adaptations, the plot is completely gutted, with the whole Cold War background the books were rooted in ditched in favour of a post-Soviet storyline involving international terrorism and arms smuggling.  The KGB have been replaced as the main villains by a US private security firm, whose mercenaries are busy stirring up unrest in the Horn of Africa, via assassinations they blame on local terrorists, in order that their clients can better pursue their commercial interests and to ramp up arms sales in the region.  

Hamilton himself has become more of a conventional action hero - while the opening titles explain that no Swedish intelligence operative has a 'licence to kill', although under extreme circumstances they might have to use lethal force, Hamilton them spends much of the following film dispatching various characters via stabbings, shooting and, most often, his bare hands.  Moreover, his mission has no underlying moral aspect to his actions - he understands that allegiances and perceptions of who are the 'bad guys' constantly shift, but is instead concerned simply with protecting Sweden's international reputation for neutrality, (a Swedish arms manufacturer is in league with the private security firm to covertly supply arms to the African war zone).  But like many Bond adaptations, it also retains portions of the source material, but suitably altered to meet the requirements of the new plot.  In this case, the original novel involved Hamilton facilitating the defection of a Soviet admiral via the Middle East, the film retains the Middle East location, but now it is a former employee of the private security whose 'defection' to Sweden he facilitates.  Rather like Casino Royale (2005) this return to a version of the original plot only comes after a lengthy opening diversion to set up the new plot elements and new characters.  

While Hamilton: In the Interest of the Nation, is clearly modelling its look and updating of the character on the Daniel Craig Bond movies (leading man Mikael Persbrandt even bears a passing resemblance to Craig), it does do some things you are unlikely to see in any Bond film.  For one thing, it comes from a discernibly left of centre perspective, (albeit not as strongly left-wing as the source novels) - Hamiltopn is aligned with the PLO in the Middle Eastern segments, employing their assistance to get the rogue company man to Sweden.   Most interestingly, it addresses the most troubling aspect of all films about international super-spies - the fact that they are trained killers who, arguably, would find it difficult to handle normal life between missions.  While recent Bond films have paid lip service to this issue, we never see an off-duty Bond get frustrated by queue jumpers at the tills in Sainsburys, or rowdy youths in his local pub and completely lose it, snapping necks and cutting throats with broken bottles on reflex.  But in Hamilton: In the Interest of the Nation, while back in Stockholm, Hamilton does snap, reflexively cutting his girl friend's throat when she startles him while he is sleeping, dreaming about a recent incident in which he was forced to kill an adversary.  His culpability for the killing and his department's covering up of his involvement in the face of an investigation by a determined police detective becomes a major sub-plot in the film.  (As it was in the source novel).  The killing is a shocking moment in the film and serves to completely throw the viewer in their perception of Hamilton - is he really a 'good' guy we can identify with?  Should he face justice over his actions or should he evade it as leaving him free to do his job is 'in the interest of the nation'?

Hamilton: In the Interest of the Nation is a fascinating film, working well as an action thriller, but with an added level of complexity which forces the audience to examine their perceptions of right and wrong and how they are presented in this genre.  Should we really be rooting for such a ruthless and reflexive killer who, even though he clearly has remorse over his reflexive and involuntary killing of his girl friend, can apparently put the act and his feelings about it, aside?  Not something you'll find in the average Bond film.  It's interesting to compare this with the 1998 Hamilton film which, while it went some way to turning the title character into a more action orientated hero, still adhered to the source material's presentation of the character, which had more in common with the characters found in Le Carre and Len Deighton novels - intellectual analysts who, while often out in the field, do much of their most crucial from behind a desk, via careful investigations of files, reports and other documents and interrogations of other characters.  The 2011 film pushes the action angle far more - Hamilton barely sets foot in his office, let alone gets behind a desk, here.  From a UK perspective, the film is of interest because much of the dialogue is in English, with several well-known British actors portraying the villains, (albeit with American accents).  Such was the film's success, that a sequel, Hamilton: But Not if it Concerns Your Daughter, was released in 2012, again with Persbrandt in the lead.  Unfortunately, this was nowhere near as popular as its predecessor, the same critics who praised the first film condemning the second.  (I haven't seen it, so can't comment on its quality).  While there were plans for a third film, with several release dates floated, this never seems to have gone into production, although there was a new Hamilton tv series ran for seventeen episodes in 2020-2022.

Madcap

A US man's magazine of which I know next to nothing - there seems to be very little online about the publication.  Madcap started in 1962, with a single issue.  Its publication schedule remained intermittent until 1966, when it settled into a quarterly schedule, which it maintained until it ceased publication in 1982.  Well, sort of - from 1967 it was retitled 38-26-34 and the fiction content was phased out, with the magazine becoming more of a conventional 'Girlie Magazine', with covers gradually becoming more explicit.  What seems to be clear from the 'Adults Only' on the cover, the suggestive photo covers and story titles, Madcap was intended to appeal to a more 'mature' readership than regular men's magazines, which tantalised their adolescent audiences with the promise of sex and depravity between their pages, but never really delivered.

Interestingly, the 38-26-34 version carried the sub-title 'The Way Out Magazine' until the late seventies, implying that, along with its fixation on big-breasted women, it was continuing the off-beat approach to its material that its original title had indicated.  It was also, doubtless, an attempt to connect with the 'way out' youth culture of the late sixties.  Anyway, this cover from Volume 1, Issue 4, from 1964 is pretty typical of those of the Madcap era. The story and article titles give a pretty good idea of the content and its target audience.  By today's standards it would undoubtedly seem incredibly tame - as I've noted before, even yesterdays smut seems quaint.

That Man Bolt (1973)

Fred Williamson was, undoubtedly, one of Blaxploitation's biggest stars during the seventies, headlining some of the best remembered titles such as Black Caesar (1973) and its sequel and Mean Johnny Barrow (1975), amongst many, many others.  By the eighties he had moved on to Italian exploitation films, starring in post-apocalyptic action movies like 1990: Bronx Warriors (1982) and The New Barbarians (1982) and the Black Cobra rogue cop series. (1987-91).  That Man Bolt (1973) comes from a particularly busy period in his Blaxploitation career and represents an attempt to expand the genre beyond its usual urban settings and gritty crime-driven plots.  As can be seen from the trailer, the film is effectively an attempt to blend a number of popular action genres from the period: Blaxploitation, martial arts and Bond-style super spy adventures.  Indeed, the trailer and poster heavily push the image of Williamson as a black Bond ('He's Bonded!' say the posters), engaged in all manner of action against the backdrop of multiple glamourous international locations.  That it was intended to be the first in a series of 'Bolt' movies is evidenced by the fact that Williamson's contract included an option for two more films.

In the event, That Man Bolt was never followed up, despite being a studio-backed production with a bigger than average budget and better production values than most Blaxploitation films of the era, it just didn't seem to meet audience expectations.  Perhaps the problem lay in the fact that it crossed over too many genres and ended up not entirely pleasing the fans of any of them.  That the producers had problems establishing the film's identity is highlighted by the fact that it was started by TV movie specialist David Lowell Rich, but completed by veteran adventure movie director Henry Levin, who replaced him mid-production.   Or maybe Universal Pictures simply weren't confident that a black Bond-type character would appeal to a wide audience, (despite the popularity of Blaxploitation films with non-black audiences).  Whatever the reason, this was to be international bonded courier Bolt's only outing.  Not that Fred Williamson was overly worried: not only was he an in-demand leading man for Blaxploitation movies, but he was apparently paid for two 'Bolt' films, even though only one was made.  Not bad work if you can get it.

Thrashing the Monkey for Profit

So, people are still being charged in connection with the global monkey torture network uncovered by an extensive BBC investigation.  Terrible though cruelty to animals undoubtedly is, I can't help but feel somewhat underwhelmed that the best the BBC could uncover was a monkey torture network.  I mean, after watching countless exploitation movies and video nasties, I was expecting a global human torture network, run by international sadists, operating on the dark web to have been uncovered.  It's not just movies which have advanced this narrative - the tabloids frequently go through phases when the usual flying saucers, yeti sightings and ghost stories aren't bringing in the readers, of trying to convince their readers of the existence of 'snuff films' and online live murder channels.  While I don't doubt that there have been real-life 'snuff films' in which unwilling participants really are killed, I'd guess that they are pretty rare and confined to a very specialised underground market - let's face it, getting caught in possession of such a thing is going to land you in serious trouble with the authorities: you'd certainly be implicated in the on screen murder.  So, in addition to having a very limited market in the first place - there really aren't that many people who want to see such a thing - even many of those interested would be unlikely to want to take the risks associated with physically being in possession of such an artifact.  Interestingly, while most people would (understandably) have no stomach for watching real violence, torture and murder being practiced against human beings, many have no problem with seeing it being done in fictional form in so called video nasties, precisely because it isn't real and more often than not, it is obviously not real (something the moral campaigners never seem to grasp).

Getting back to the global monkey torture network, I suppose that torturing monkeys is the closest you can get to torturing an actual human being.  To be accurate, of course, these were baby monkeys being tortured for pleasure, which is disturbing on several levels.  Most obviously, it implies that for those involved, theses baby primates were proxies for human children in their fantasies.  It also tells us that the people doing the torturing aren't even capable of taking on adult monkeys - some of which, after all, are pretty small.  Clearly, they wouldn't risk trying to torture gorillas - the tables could too easily be turned and you really would have a global human torture network, but run by gorillas.  Actually, I suspect that the fact that the actual torturing part of the operation is outsourced to Indonesia might be why they stick to smaller primates - importing gorillas might have seemed a bit suspect.  Frankly, I firmly blame the CIA and MI6 for this outsourcing of torture - it's something they both 'pioneered' with respect to terror suspects. It's an absolute disgrace - they're putting home grown sadistic bastards out of business, for God's sake.  Another thing that struck me about this global monkey torture network are the absolutely pitiful sums of money the participants pay for the 'privilege' of seeing monkeys tortured - so far the sums paid by individuals that I've seen mentioned haven't even reached twenty pounds.  Not just sadists, but cheap bastards, too.  The ones so far convicted are also a pretty pathetic bunch of social misfits, a long way from the evil sadistic masterminds the media would have us believe are lurking in every shadow.  I think I'll stick to the video nasties - despite what the moral campaigners would have you believe, nobody ever got hurt for real in them.

Fight Back (2001)

As I've mentioned before, the explosion in streaming services, all desperate for content with which to pad out their schedules and libraries, all manner of obscure and forgotten productions have suddenly found a new lease of life.  Even micro-budgeted shot-on-video productions with no name casts that nobody ever saw when they were first released.  Like Fight Back (2001), for instance, a weird little geriatric vigilante movie that seemed designed to try and cash in on the tail end of the original direct-to-video boom, fuelled by the advent of VHS players.  By 2001, these were giving way to DVD players and higher audience expectations for direct-to video productions.  By any standards, Fight Back is crudely made, fuzzily shot with tinny sound and a cast apparently drawn from a local amateur dramatics group, (look, I'm not knocking amateur dramatic companies and their productions, but the key word here is 'amateur' - none of the performances on display here are remotely at the level of even the weakest professional actors).  It sits not just several steps, but several staircases, below the output of other pioneering British micro-budget direct-to-video film makers like Cliff Twemlow or Michael Murphy.  Despite running well under ninety minutes, the film is so slackly plotted and paced that it feels longer.  Indeed, its tale of mysterious pensioner Bill moving to a run down Devon coastal town and tangling with local juvenile delinquents and corrupt local officials, meanders all over the place at a leisurely pace before pretty much petering out, leaving all sorts of threads unresolved.  To be fair, on the way to its underwhelming conclusion, it does include quite a few amateurishly staged fights, a sort of car chase that ends before it ever gets properly started and other action 'highlights' including Bill avoiding falling slates and a speeding car.

Yet, despite all of its flaws - I say 'flaws', but the truth is that it is pretty crap in its entirety - Fight Back has exerted a certain fascination over me this past week or so. Part of this comes from the fact that I've seen it a few minutes at a time, as I've channel surfed.  It seems to show regularly every evening on one of those live streaming channels that seems to exist purely as a vehicle for the commercials it carries, with the films occasionally interrupting  them.  They only seem to have a handful of films, which show over and over on a looping schedule.  Fight Back has that curious property of simultaneously not being good enough to capture my viewing attention for more than a few minutes at a time, yet compelling enough that I keep going back each day to catch a few more minutes.  I think part of the compulsion comes from the fact that it is so utterly devoid of production resources, let alone artistic merit, it is hard to believe that it actually exists.  It isn't the worst film I've ever seen, but it is just so poorly realised that you are left wondering exactly what the intent and hopes of its makers were.  It does have some points of interest  the run-down Plymouth locations - all run down ex-council houses and industrial estates - make a refreshing change form the way Devon is usually portrayed as all sunny, affluent and tourist friendly, for instance.  The theme of seemingly ordinary people 'fighting back' against local thuggery and crime, while far from original, had potential, especially when placed in setting far from the usual urban jungles that feature in the genre, but here it is very poorly handled, with a script based upon a distinctly middle class, middle aged, not to mention patronising, view of young people.  

Fight Back's main sub-text falls into that ever popular middle England refrain of what the 'youth of today' really need is a 'kick up the arse', both literally and figuratively.  The young thugs of the film are first beaten up by Bill, then forced by him into learning new skills, (he effectively imprisons them in a workshop), which make them both better citizens and compliant and respectful of authority.  (Not all authority, of course, only the 'right' sort of authority).  Something those 'namby pamby' (or as the right would say today, 'woke'), lefty-liberal dominated things like the probation service, state education and social services are incapable of doing.  It's a depressing view of British youth, barely a stone's throw away from that old reactionary favourite of 'put 'em in the Army' or 'Bring back National Service' - coercion is the only way to deal with teenaged rebellion.  Because, after all, they are only rebellious because they are horrible little working class gits who don't know their place - to Hell with all that social and economic deprivation bollocks.  Getting back to the film itself, Fight Back is incredibly obscure - there's barely anything about it to be found on the web, for instance.  Checking on IMDB, it appears that most of the principal participants in the film never did anything else, industry wise.  The director had previously directed a couple of shorts but, after Fight Back, he seems to have disappeared from the scene.  But, for now, his only feature is probably being seen by its widest ever potential audience - this is undoubtedly the most anyone has ever written abut it.  (If you are interested, it is also currently available on Dailymotion).

Unsolicited Alarmism

Ever had one of those week's when you feel that outside entities are getting way too intrusive with regard to your life?  I've just had one such week, which , if I was that kind of person, would have sent my paranoia levels through the roof.  First up, completely out of the blue, I received a letter from some pharmaceutical developer inviting me to apply to join a drug trial.  Sadly, it wasn't for any of the fun hallucinogenic ones, but rather a treatment for type 2 diabetes.  The reason I had been 'selected' was because these days third parties are given free and direct access to our confidential NHS records, rather than having to go through doctors first.  I'm obviously now on their database and meet some of their criteria for this trial - namely that I'm in the right age demographic and have type 2 diabetes.  Reading their letter, however, I'm pretty sure that, even if I filled in and returned the application form, I wouldn't be selected: the nature of the medication implies that they are looking for people with type 2 who are more overweight than me and who don't take regular exercise.  But if I had returned it, I'm pretty sure that I'd end up receiving more of these 'invitations' as that would be taken as an indication that I was interested in taking part in drug trials.  As you've doubtless gathered, the letter went in the bin without a reply.  Quite apart from the fact that I take enough pills everyday as it is and have no desire to spend five years acting as a guinea pig for trialing yet more of them, I just find this sort of approach overly intrusive - my medical records are meant to private and I object to them being accessed by for profit institutions.  Furthermore, I have never given any indication to anyone that I'm remotely interested in participating in any medical trials.

The letter also put my back up with its overly alarmist tone, warning that type 2 diabetes can increase your risk of such things as liver failure, kidney failure, heart disease and even lower limb amputation.  Well, yes, it can, but so can many other common health conditions.  Moreover, such things aren't an inevitability and the risks can be reduced via lifestyle choices (as can most health conditions) - hence my daily exercise regime and monitoring of my sugar intake, rather than relying on pharmaceuticals, (although I do also take the commonest anti-diabetes drug, Metformin).  Just when the feathers ruffled by this unsolicited invite had finally settled, I get one of online banking communications from my bank that they obviously think are somehow 'useful'.  This time it was a communication informing me that last month I'd spent 74% more than the previous month and would I like to opt into their budgeting advice service?  To which the resounding response was 'fuck off'.  I've never actually asked for this kind of rather creepy monitoring of my spending patterns - I only signed up to online banking because my plumber prefers to paid via direct bank transfer.  But my bank keeps on giving me unsolicited advice, as if we are in some kind of relationship more significant than the fact that I allow them to hold my money for me.  I really don't need to be pestered about investment options every time I get payments into my account.  Incidentally, that increase in monthly spending was down to the one off cost of buying a second hand laptop to back up my now nearly nine year old main laptop and, to be frank, if spending less than three hundred quid can put my monthly spend up that much, then I'm not spending enough!  I'm clearly even more of a cheapskate than I thought I was!

Electoral Dysfunction

Unlike Boris Johnson, I remembered to take my voter ID to the polling station today, so I was able to vote to elect both a local councillor and the local Police and Crime Commissioner.  The latter really is a Mickey Mouse position - in reality they have little actual power over the police (let alone crime, unless they are committing them all themselves).  The fact is that until the Tories came up with this nonsensical position, we actually did have democratic oversight of local police forces via Local Police Authorities, which were part of the local councils we elected.  But the Tories just love to keep reinventing the wheel, but square, rather than actually come up with anything new and/or progressive.  I've always thought, though, that I should change my name to 'Gordon' and stand for election as Police and crime Commissioner.  That way, if I was elected, I'd be 'Commissioner Gordon'.  In fact my whole manifesto could be that we abolish those expensive cops and instead set up a Bat Signal to illuminate every time a crime is committed locally, in the hope that Batman or some other superhero might see it.  It's certainly more of an idea than any of the policies put out by actual candidates for the role.

Getting back to that voter ID, as I'm one of those weirdos who still has an old style non-photo driving licence (I've never had need to change it), a passport so expired that the photo doesn't look remotely like me and isn't old enough to have an OAP bus pass, I have to rely on a piece of paper with my photo on it issued by the council.  As the photo is a selfie and the whole application process was online, I'm not sure quite this document proves that I'm who I say I am more than the old system of giving my address at the polling station and confirming my name against the electoral register for that address.  But hey, we seemingly have an obsession with proving our identities these days, in order to access the services that we've already paid for.  Not that it has anything to do with making access any more secure, rather it is to discourage as many people as possible from actually enjoying those services.  Particularly democracy itself - we've got to the stage where the Tories are so unpopular that their only policy now is to prevent as many people as possible from voting in the hope that it will narrow their margin of defeat to being merely slightly embarrassing rather than an utterly humiliating defeat.