Musings on a Summer's Day

I'm afraid that we're at that time of year when my posting here becomes ever more erratic as the result of my being on holiday.  I know what you are thinking - that since I'm sort of semi-retired these days and pretty much a man of leisure most of the time, every day must be a holiday for me.  Well, not quite.  It's surprising how much time mundane things like home maintenance, household chores, paying bills and the like can take up.  Moreover, late summer is always the time of year when I have the urge to get in the car and go on trips to the coast, the New Forest, the South Downs and the like.  Today, for instance, I eventually found myself on the beach.  I say eventually, as, due to starting out later than I had intended and not realising that the New Forest Show was on this week and was causing traffic congestion on my route, (most bizarrely because, in Lyndhurst, a notorious bottle neck at the best of time, the regular traffic lights were replaced by 'event signalling' to 'ease the flow of traffic' - which turned out to be a man with a 'stop/go' sign, which actually made things worse), it took me hours to travel the sixty miles there.  Still, it was all very pleasant once I got there and my delayed arrival simply meant that got home this evening much later than I had planned.

But enough of my travel stories, what about those Olympics in Paris, eh?  I had to remind myself the other day that they've so far only been on for a few days - it already feels like an eternity.  God alone knows how much more of them we'll be forced to endure.  I've tried to avoid the TV coverage - which means watching BBC1 even less than I normally do - so was bemused to find the term 'Satanic' trending on social media with relation to the opening ceremony.  As usual, it turned out t be the usual right-wing crackpots getting their knickers in a twist over something they didn't understand so assumed must be offensive to them.  Apparently it all came down to what they claimed was some kind of LGBTQ 'parody' of the last supper.  According to the organisers, it was actually meant to be an interpretation of the feast of Dionysus - which is also blasphemous to those cry baby righties as it constitutes a celebration of a pagan god!  As I didn't see the ceremony, the first I actually saw of any of it were photos of some fat blue guy on what looked like a banqueting table.  Naively, before I became aware of all the 'satanic' furore, I assumed this to be some kind of tribute to those icons of French pop culture, the Smurfs.  For a moment, I thought that all the fuss might have been over some sort of representation of the last supper using French comic strip characters - perhaps, I thought, Asterix and Obelix, along with Lucky Luke, were amongst the apostles, with Papa Smurf as Jesus.  Maybe TinTin as Judas - he was Belgian, after all. But, of course, I was wrong.  I really don't understand why all those, mainly American, loonies got so het up about that ceremony - it was organised by the French, for God's sake.  I mean they're like that - have these weirdoes on social media never seen a French film?

Tender Loving Care (1974)

Not actually a part of New World's cycle of sex comedies centered around nurses (and later student teachers and air hostesses) which was kicked off by 1970's The Student Nurses, Tender Loving Care (1974) was, nonetheless, distributed by New World.  An independent production, the film was obviously originally intended as a cash in on the success of the official series, even though it eventually ended up serving as addendum to those films.  Certainly, it sticks closely to the established formula, focusing on a group of young professional women and their various adventures, both work-related and romantic, in a busy hospital.  But Tender Loving Care has a somewhat grittier feel and darker tone than the New World produced pictures, with the plot taking some surprisingly violent turns, including several of the main characters being mowed down in a hail of bullets at the climax.  Which is hardly surprising, as director and writer Don Edmonds tended to specialise in directing and producing violent, low budget action-orientated exploitation films, (although he later had a co-producer credit on Tony Scott's True Romance (1993)).  In common with his other movies, Tender Loving Care clearly has a tiny budget, probably even lower than that of the New World films it was imitating, reflected in the mainly no name cast and low production values.

Despite this, the film makes a good stab at imitating the official series.  The makeup of the main trio of nurses, for instance, is, like those in the New World pictures, carefully calculated to appeal to the widest possible audience: one is blonde, one brunette, the other black.  Like the originals, it is structured around a number of sub-plots, with each individual nurse getting their own story strands, with them all coming together at the film's climax.  Again, it imitates the New World films with these plot strands seeing the nurses involved both romantically and dramatically with various hospital staff members and patients.  One become involved with an injured boxer, who turns pimp when he believes his career is over, another gets involved with a biker, until she finds he is into group sex, then sets her sights on the hospital's top surgeon, while the third has a doctor boyfriend who is also an addict, who gets her to steal drugs for him.  It is this latter story line which draws the film into darker territory, with the nurse being blackmailed by the hospital's resident sex pervert porter into having sex with him in return for his silence over her thefts, with the boyfriend retaliating by beating him to death.  There's also another sub-plot involving a mobster having treatment at the hospital, guarded by a couple of his heavies, which only come to fruition at the film's climax.

While Tender Loving Care provides a fair imitation of the official 'Nurses' series of films, it lacks their finesse, being very crudely made in comparison, (which is saying something, as these were hardly the slickest of productions), most crucially lacking their humour, good natured feel and awareness of their absurdities.  Instead, Edmonds substitutes violent sub-plots and far more explicit sex and nudity than seen in the originals.  Ultimately, there is no real distinction in his workmanlike, rather plodding, direction, which never manages to bring the film to life, let alone establish any pace, (it runs under seventy five minutes, but feels longer).   Unlike the likes of Stephanie Rothman and Jonathan Kaplan, who directed the best of the New World films, Edmonds is unable to lift his material above the level of mere exploitation.  While Tender Loving Care is mildly entertaining while its on and fulfils its functions as an exploitation piece, it is simply no substitute for the official new World produced series of 'Nurse' films.

Wonder Woman (1974)

As I recall it, when Wonder Woman made its UK TV debut on the BBC on early Saturday evenings in the late seventies, it was with the first episode of its second season, which marked the point, in the US, where it had changed network from ABC to CBS and era, from WWII to the then present day.  The first season of WWII set adventures was never (as far as  I am aware) shown by the BBC, so we in the UK remained blissfully unaware of its existence, (there were pre-internet days, remember).  To confuse us viewers even more, the BBC, at some point during its showing of season two, screened a TV movie entitled The Return of Wonder Woman, the events of which clearly preceded the episodes we'd already seen.  This, of course, was the pilot for the rebooted CBS version of Wonder Woman (correctly titled The New Adventures of Wonder Woman, but always billed in TV listings under the shorter title), although the title remained a mystery - how could Wonder Woman be returning if this was the first episode?  The BBC continued to screen series 2, then the third series, but at some point during their run of the show, a TV movie entitled The New Original Wonder Woman turned up on ITV.  When I caught it, I was surprised to find that while, like the BBC episodes, it featured Lynda Carter as the title character, perplexingly it had a WWII setting.  At the time, I just assumed that this was an earlier pilot for the series which had been reformatted to a contemporary setting in order to reduce costs.  Which would also explain the title of the Return of Wonder Woman TV movie, which I assumed was a second pilot to establish the new format.  (I only became aware of the fact that the WWII set pilot wasn't an isolated episode, that there was whole series with this setting, when, decades later, they turned up on, I think, ITV).

But just when I thought that I'd figured out the chronology of all of the Wonder Woman TV movies and series, a spanner was thrown into the works when another TV movie, entitled simply Wonder Woman, turned up on ITV.  While this had a contemporary setting, it was quite different form any of the other episodes I'd seen - most notably, it had a different Wonder Woman -Cathy Lee Crosby - and a different Steve Trevor.  I eventually worked out that this was the original pilot for the series, which had obviously been rejected and the whole thing recast and retooled as, first The New Original Wonder Woman, then The New Adventures of Wonder Woman.  I'd forgotten just how different it was until I watched it again recently.  While, as in the CBS version, Diana Prince/Wonder Woman is an Amazon from Paradise Island who is working undercover for a US government intelligence agency, her Amazon heritage seems to play only a minimal role in her work and just about everyone, (except her colleagues) seems to know that Diana Prince and Wonder Woman are one and the same person.  She employs none of the super powers that the Lynda Carter version would subsequently demonstrate, seemingly only having faster than normal reflexes and accuracy when it comes to throwing javelins and the like - basically, she's simply very athletic, rather than being an actual superhero.  Absent also is the distinctive outfit traditionally sported by the character and any transformation scenes where she changes from Diana Prince to Wonder Woman.  The costume she sports as Wonder Woman is somewhat more modest, looking more like a tracksuit, although it is red, white and blue.  This version of the character is presented more as some kind of James Bond-style super spy, armed with all manner of gadgets to get her out of tricky situations.  (The invisible plane is mentioned, but, as with many things in the film never seen, so to speak).

Even the plot is a sub-Bondian tale of stolen code books being used to blackmail the US government, with a not so super villain with a secret hideout carved into the walls of the Grand Canyon.  Wonder Woman is a curious creation, particularly in view of the fact that it was intended to sell a potential TV series - the whole thing is so muted, lacking much in the way of action set pieces, suspense or atmosphere.  It moves at a leisurely place, with its heroine never feeling imperiled and getting out of not so tight jams far too easily.  The plot itself isn't terribly interesting, the stakes too low and, as played by Ricardo Montalban, the main villain not at all menacing.  Montalban goes for charm and, to be fair, makes his character very personable and likeable - but just not threatening.  The main menace is provided by his henchman, played sneeringly by Andrew Prine who, despite all of his posturing and murderous activities toward minor characters, never feels as if he is any kind of threat to the heroine.  The whole adventure feels perfunctory and anti-climactic, making it no surprise that it wasn't picked up for a series. Worst of all, it simply doesn't seem to know who its target audience might be - it really isn't sophisticated enough for an adult audience, is unlikely to appeal to fans of the comic book and is just too slow and uneventful to interest kids.  Interestingly, like the subsequent WWII set series, this version of Wonder Woman was also produced for ABC, but by a completely different production team.  As an updating of the character it is far less successful than the subsequent New Adventures of Wonder Woman on CBS, making the mistake of changing the character so much that she is barely recognisable as Wonder Woman, removing most of what makes her unique and interesting. 

Adventurer Issue 1

Yep, I've been going through those boxes of old magazines that share the spare room with the model railway again.  It never ceases to amaze me, the stuff I bought in my misspent youth.  Even more amazing is the fact that so much of it survives.  Anyway, this is the premier issue of Adventurer, a magazine devoted to role playing games.  I have no idea whether it ever had a second issue, certainly, this is the only one that I have in my 'collection'.  According to the contents page, it was published in April 1986, a time when computer games were in their infancy and role playing games were the cutting edge of the gaming experience, eclipsing traditional board games and war games in popularity, particularly amongst younger gamers.  The boom was kicked off, of course, by Dungeons and Dragons, but pretty soon rivals appeared as new entrants to the games industry and established companies alike vied to grab a slice of the new market.  Naturally, in this pre-internet age, magazines devoted to the hobby began to appear, allowing players to connect, both with each other and the industry.  In the UK, the market for role playing games magazines was dominated by Games Workshop's White Dwarf, (Games Workshop were also the UK importer and distributor of several of the main US role playing games).  Which might come as a surprise to anyone who has read White Dwarf for the past few decades, during which it has become the house magazine of the Warhammer fantasy miniatures game system.  But in its early days, it was devoted to role playing games.

Adventurer was clearly an attempt to cash in on White Dwarf's success, with this first issue putting heavy emphasis upon the fact that it was an entirely independent publication, with no ties to any particular system or manufacturer.  (In contrast to White Dwarf, which was published by the UK's then main importer of role playing games).  In terms of content, it isn't a million miles from its rival, with scenarios and articles covering most of the then popular systems, including Dungeons and Dragons and Call of Cthulu (of which I still own a copy) and previews the private eye role playing game Gumshoe, (which I also own).  There are articles on more generalised aspects of role playing games, such as the role of psychology in role playing games and the effects of blood loss on characters and a competition to write a short story to explain the cover painting.  There's even a piece on applying the principles of 'method' acting to playing characters in role playing games!  There are also lots of reviews, a round up of fanzines and a comic strip.  I vaguely recall reading the magazine for the first time, but I couldn't have gone back to it much as it is still pretty much in pristine condition.  Even the colour poster is still inside (it is a double page spread of the cover painting).  All of which is amazing, considering that it has spent the better part of the last forty years in boxes full of other role playing magazines, stored in various rooms - most recently under several bundles of  00 gauge model railway track.  

(A quick check with The Internet Archive reveals that there were a total of eleven issues of Adventurer published 1986-87, although I don't own any others, nor do I recall seeing any on the shelves of my local branch of WH Smith after this debut issue).

Not Recommended

You Tube is clearly getting frustrated with my viewing habits again. We're back to it recommending pseudo porn videos and right wing 'news' and commentary channels.  Neither of which I am remotely interested in.  I mean, if I want porn, there's plenty of the real thing available elsewhere on the web.  These pseudo porn videos usually pass themselves off as travel videos and feature young women in their swim suits or underwear swimming in exotic places.  It raises the question - again - of just why You Tube's algorithms come up with these recommendations.  In the case of these pseudo porn videos, I can only assume that the travel element is triggered by the fact that I watch model railway videos by some dude who, every so often, goes off on his travels, both in the UK and Europe, and posts videos of them on his channel.  That and the fact that I sometimes watch videos by ex-pat Ukrainians and Russians forced to flee their respective countries by either the Russian invasion or their opposition to said invasion.  The focus on young women possibly derives from the fact that, for some reason, a lot of these ex-pats are female.  So to You Tube, this means that I obviously want to watch young women on holiday in a state of undress.  

The right-wing stuff is harder to explain - I go out of my way to watch this trash.  To be fair, I avoid pretty much all political content on You Tube, regardless of orientation - it simply isn't a platform where I'm likely to find any kind of balanced, rational analysis.  But I particularly avoid the stuff from right-wing conspiracy crackpots, (because most right-wing 'commentary' quickly descends into conspiracy gibberish).  As far as I can see, most of it is put out either by media 'personalities' who can no longer get a job on regular media and self-styled 'citizen journalists' and 'experts'.  The latter two categories usually composed of spectacularly ill informed Americans apparently happy to demonstrate their utter ignorance to the world, (I'm not being anti-American here, it is just that US citizens always seem to be very poorly informed with regard to anything that occurs outside of their own borders - either state or national).  I always try to be fair - if one of their videos turns up amongst my You Tube recommendations, I always check out their channel to be absolutely sure as to their right-wing nut job status before clicking on 'Don't Recommend Channel'.  (Many, on first glance, seem quite respectable, but the clue to their raving rightie status is who they interview or profile in their videos - there was a UK one that, on the surface, seemed like a respectable legal advice channel - except that a quick glance at their entire canon of videos revealed interviews with the likes of 'Tommy Robinson', treating him as if he were a legitimate commentator being persecuted by the state for his (neo Nazi) views.  Straight to 'Do Not Recommend').  Only this evening I had to block disgraced GB News 'personality' Dan Wootton's channel from being recommended, after one his videos turned up in my recommendations.  Dan Wootton?  Really?  As I don't look at sites about collecting Nazi memorabilia or videos espousing neo Nazi philosophy, I just can't explain why these fuckers keep turning up in my recommendations.

Crime Under the Palm Trees

I've watched quite a few episodes of Hawaii Five-O of late, (the Roku channel XPUS is currently running all twelve series back-to-back), marvelling at Jack Lord's hair, the always magnificent theme tune and the surprisingly well-constructed plots.  I remember the show from my childhood, when it was a perennial fixture on ITV, coming back year after year.  By the time it ended, in 1980, after twelve seasons, it only seemed surprising because most people were amazed that it was even still running.  A series that spanned across three decades - it started in 1968 - it was hardly surprising that, by 1980, the format was beginning to look outdated and stale.  Even 'Danno' had left before the final season started, with Jame MacArthur being replaced by B-movie tough guy William Smith's Chimo and a female cop being added to the line-up in a final attempt to bring the format into the eighties.  Only Jack Lord's Steve McGarrett and the Honolulu locations remained a constant until the end, (it was joked that, by the final series, having played the part for so long, Lord believed that he was McGarrett and wanted to have real bullets in his gun).  One of the reason's for the show's longevity was, undoubtedly, the fact that, unlike most cop shows of its era, its subject matter ranged far and wide: one week the 'Five-O' team might be investigating gang wars, the next espionage or terrorism, with other episodes involving anything from murder to hostage situations to fraud or kidnapping.  But its biggest asset was that location.  Whereas most crime series gave their viewers gritty urban locations, from the backstreets of LA to the alleys of New York, Hawaii Five-O played out against a colourful tropical backdrop that made you yearn to be on holiday.

Hawaii, of course, has long been the 'go to' location for US TV producers seeking to inject an exotic flavour into otherwise standard formats: Charlie's Angels, for instance, spent around half of its final season there (although it wasn't enough to avoid cancellation), while, for its last two seasons, Baywatch became Baywatch: Hawaii.  Other TV series would frequently have the odd episode set there, (often a two-parter to either open or close a season).   Moreover, Hawaii Five-O was neither the first nor the last crime series to utilise the location - it was preceded by Hawaiian Eye and succeeded by Magnum PI - but remains the TV show most identified with the fiftieth state.  It was Hawaii's status as a US state that made it such an attractive location for TV producers seeking exotic locations: easy to access from the mainland, none of the problems inherent in filming overseas, no problems with language or labour laws.  Yet, at the same time, it looked sufficiently different and distinctive from any mainland US location, both in terms of appearance and culture, for viewers to feel that they had been transported to some exotic foreign country.  A useful asset for TV producers to be able to fall back on in order to get that 'foreign' vibe without ever having to leave the US.  Sadly, here in the UK, we had no real equivalent.  Producers of low budget British sex comedies, for instance, had to settle for some out-of-season seaside resort or holiday camp if they wanted something 'exotic', (more often than not, somewhere on the Norfolk coast, with Arctic winds blowing in across the North Sea - although Bournemouth or Brighton on the South Coast, or even Blackpool, might offer something more upmarket but also more expensive).  In TV terms, the closest UK equivalent to Hawaii Five-O would probably be Bergerac, shot on our own 'Hawaii', Jersey, whose proximity to France gives it, to BBC producers, at least, a 'foreign' and exotic feel.  Actually, when you think about it, there were similarities - both featured cops working for a fictional island-based police department charged with dealing with foreign criminals, although John Nettles' hair wasn't as magnificent as Jack Lord's, while McGarrett was never in danger of driving off the edge of his island if he accelerated his car above thirty miles an hour...

The End is Nigh!

Apparently there was some kind of global IT outage today, which threw the world into chaos.  Not that I noticed, as I wasn't catching a flight overseas, wasn't visiting a doctor or picking up a prescription.  I also slept through the 'panic', only finding out about it when I finally got around to checking the news on my tablet.  Of course, every time we have some kind of IT glitch affecting the computer systems of various businesses, all of the usual suspects crawl out of the woodwork, (including that hairy loon who used to be a TV historian and now spends his time foaming at the mouth and spewing apocalyptic gibberish on GB News), to issue dire warnings of how we've become too dependent upon technology and that we're all doomed.  In today's case, there was all sorts of hysteria over the probable collapse of the global banking system, with people unable to use contactless to pay for stuff in shops, or to get money from cash points.  Yeah, it was all so bad that only did I pay for some groceries in Iceland (the shop, not the country) with contactless, but was then able to get some cash from the ATM at the bank.  Listening to the commentariat, you'd think that there had been aircraft falling out of the sky, trains crashing into each other and cars spontaneously exploding.  In reality, the worst that seemed to happen was that Sky News went off the air for a while - which is surely a good thing.  In fact, the only time that I felt remotely in danger today was when I thought that I was going to get swept away by a tidal wave of little girls rushing out of MacDonalds, where they'd been celebrating the end of the school year.

Nevertheless, for the doomsayers this was an earth-shattering event that doubtless heralds the end of the world, (just like any regional conflict, from Ukraine to Gaza, presages the outbreak of World War Three).  I'm guessing that they are the sort of people that, the first time in history one of those new fangled automobiles ran out of petrol, threw their hands in the air and decried the fact that we were now too reliant on this new technology and that now delivery and transport services would collapse, presaging the end of civilisation as they knew it.  Instead of warning about the perils of going cashless, they were warning of the perils of going horseless.  Look, I know that if you, personally, were affected by this outage then it would have been hugely frustrating, but the fact is that not everyone in the world, in fact nowhere near everyone, was affected.  Bearing in mind that this particular outage was caused by a software update, the solution was simply to roll back the update.  I recall that something similar happened to me a few years ago, when The Sleaze (and a whole lot of other Wordpress based sites) displayed a blank screen when you tried to visit them, the result of a plug in updating automatically with a defective update.  The solution was to go into the site's back-end and delete the plug in.  (The main problem was the lack of contrition from those responsible for the plug in, who basically just tried to shrug it off.  Needless to say, many, many users deleted the plugin and never re-installed it).  You see, it's simple to solve these problems!  OK, maybe today's outage wasn't quite as straightforward, although ultimately, it apparently could be solved by simply booting the affected machine into safe mode, accessing the file manager and deleting the offending update.  Having to do that on such a large scale was what caused the delays today when it came to restoring services.  Anyway, to return the original thrust of this post, the moral of today's incident is to keep calm and not listen to the doom sayers trying to stir up panic.

Bonnie's Kids (1972)

A solid piece of sexploitation from 1972, Bonnie's Kids, as the trailer indicates, focuses firmly upon the charms of its two female stars. Styled as a neo-noir chase thriller, it sees them spend a lot of the film on the run, initially after the older of the eponymous girls kills their step father to prevent him raping her younger sister, then from their uncle's heavies after he involves them in a money laundering scheme, with the older sister absconding with a cash delivery.  She also involves a hapless private eye, who was meant to receive the money, who ends up on the run with her.  Various double crosses ensue before it moves to a downbeat ending.  The film is moved along at a brisk pace by director Arthur Marks, (who was later to direct a number of Blaxploitation pictures, including Detroit 9000 (1973), Bucktown (1975) and Friday Foster (1975)), despite a somewhat meandering plot and an uncertain tone.  It's helped by some nicely photographed desert locations in Arizona and Texas and a decent cast, which includes Tiffany Bolling and Robin Mattson as the titular kids, Alex Rocco and Timothy Brown as the heavies and Scott Brady as the uncle.  Leo Gordon also puts in a memorable, if short lived, performance as the step father: spewing bile and misogyny before being gunned down.

The film's biggest weakness is a lack of truly sympathetic characters.  Both girls are depicted as borderline psychopaths - the younger girl's utter lack of emotional reaction to her aunt's suicide, for instance, or her easy abandonment of her sister at the film's end.  While it might be argued that their lack of regular emotional reactions, their easy acceptance of the use of violence and general amorality might be a result of their abusive relationship with their step father, the film seems to go out of its way to imply that they are simply 'bad girls'.  Indeed, it seems determined to impose a somewhat antiquated cinematic moral code to them.  In the case of the older girl, the script appears to want to impose the traditional movie code that characters who break the law can't be allowed to benefit from their actions.  While her shooting of her step father might be justified, thereby gaining her audience sympathy, the film later contrives to have her gun down a police officer without cause, as well as being instrumental in the death of another character, effectively turning audience sympathies away from her.  As far the younger sister is concerned, it is established early on that, despite being only fifteen, she's an object of lust for most of the male population of her home town, with them gathering outside her bedroom window to surreptitiously watch her undressing.  (An unsettling scene, as the audience are effectively made complicit in ogling the bare breasts of an underage girl).  Not only is it implied that she flashes her breasts at the window because she knows that she's being watched, but, by extension, that her promiscuous means that she is 'asking for it' with regard to the attempted rape by her step father.

Overall, though, Bonnie's Kids stands a decently made piece of entertainment, firmly aimed at a drive in audience and bereft of any pretensions: it not only knows that it is exploitative but also knows its target audience and delivers the goods.  There's enough action to keep the film moving along and the two lead actresses are undoubtedly very attractive, (even if one is underage), something the film makes the most of.  Not only that, but it evokes its era perfectly, presenting a flavourful slice of the early seventies in both its look and its sounds.

It Was All a Hoax!

I'm not going to be a hypocrite about this - I'm sorry that 'they' didn't recruit someone who was a better shot to try and kill Trump.  I ask you, where is the justice in this world?  Lee Harvey Oswald, a poor shot with a crappy rifle, somehow managed to pull off a near impossible shot from the book depository in Dallas in 1963 and blew JFK's head off, yet a guy with an AR15 gets a clear shot at convicted felon Trump, (also found by a court to have molested a woman), from closer range and only hits his ear and a bystander?  FFS, who are they trying to kid?  The Trump assassination attempt was clearly a set-up.  I mean, just look at the timing - it dominates the news cycle just as a pro-Trump judge throws out the documents case against him, (in which prosecutors had him bang to rights), in a bizarre ruling and evidence of his close involvement with Jeffrey Epstein is coming to light.  How very convenient that someone tries to off him and it diverts attention from these things.  Too convenient.  Believe me, the whole thing was staged - nobody got shot, they were all crisis actors and the supposed assassin was dead before he reached that roof.  They just dumped his body there with a rifle before the rally started.  The so-called 'eyewitnesses' who claimed to have seen him climbing up there?  Again, crisis actors.  Obvious ones at that - just look at that weirdo with the red beard and wild hair they interviewed: nobody looks like that for real.  He was some casting director's idea of what a hick Trump supporter might look and sound like.  Besides, I'm sure I saw him in a porno movie once - that beard is distinctive.

If you ask me (and I know that nobody is, but I'm going to tell you anyway), they shot the whole fake assassination attempt in advance in a studio, with the whole Pennsylvania venue replicated there.  They probably employed some top Hollywood director to shoot it - like they got Stanley Kubrick to shoot that fake moon landing - and ensure they got those neatly composed shots of a supposedly wounded Trump raising his fist defiantly, in front of the American flag.  Yeah, maybe they got Michael Bay to do it.  Anyway, at the appropriate moment, they cut this pre-filmed footage on the live broadcasts - some blank shots being fired at the venue was probably the cue.  It was also, doubtless, the cue for all those crisis actors making up the audience to react appropriately so that when the feed switched back to the live event, so it looked seamless.  Because, obviously, they were all crisis actors and it was all fake.  Just like at Sandy Hook.  According to Alex Jones and all his Trump supporting trolls, that is.  The very same trolls who are busy on social media denouncing claims that the Trump shooting was staged as 'sick', 'bad taste' and 'offensive'.  Pity they weren't so sensitive to the feelings of the relatives of all those kids who were killed at Sandy Hook, eh?  But hey, the hypocrisy of the US' right is apparently without limit.  After all, Trump has spent most of his time in politics inciting violence against his opponents, (remember January 6th, anyone?), his rhetoric is laced with violent imagery and his supporters seemingly love to tote large guns in public.  So why is it such a surprise that, having engendered such an atmosphere of violence in America's political discourse, Trump himself should become a target of violence?

But no - it's all the fault of the Democrats and 'Extreme Left', (look, the US has no idea of what the 'left' actually is, let alone this mythical 'Extreme Left').  Apparently they are the ones who have been using violent language and making threats against their opponents.  Like I said, the right's hypocrisy has no bounds.  But also like I said, I won't be a hypocrite on this issue: if the assassin had succeeded, then I wouldn't have been shedding any tears for Trump.  He's scum.  Worse than that, he's dangerous, rabble rousing, grifting scum without a conscience.  Not that I'd wish violent death on him - personally, I'd rather see the fat bastard expire from a massive coronary on stage at one his rallies, his rabid fans cheering as he turns purple.  But, while I'd in no way endorse political violence or assassination, (certainly not in what is still supposedly a democracy, anyway), I'm afraid that if you spend your time indulging in violent political rhetoric, there's a fair chance that you'll fall victim to someone who thinks that you've legitimised it with your words.  Personally, I think it high time that President Biden took advantage of the Trumpist Supreme Court's ruling that presidents have immunity from prosecution for official acts, by declaring that Trump constitutes a threat to American democracy and ordering his assassination by someone competent.  Problem solved - and it would all be legal.  According, ironically, by a Supreme court dominated by Trump appointees.

Modern Movies Are Still Rubbish (Well, Some of Them...)

Just why are modern low budget genre films so bad?  I know that this a familiar refrain from me, but having endured some more examples of contemporary 'poverty row' product, I was struck again by exactly how faceless and devoid of any kind of character, let alone suspense, dramatic tension, production values or anything approaching coherent scripts these things are, particularly when compared to their equivalents from the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies and even eighties.  At this point, it is important to say that I don't think that all modern day low budget fare is bad, but there seems to be a vast number of truly shitty products being released into the market these days.  You know the sort of thing I'm referring to - those minuscule budgeted horror and science fiction films that get released direct to streaming, all shot digitally and exhibiting no apparent cinematic style.  I sat through the entirety of Monsters of War (2021), a UK produced example of the genre, the other day.  It pretty much encapsulated everything that is wrong with such films.  It teases the viewer in with the promise of tale of various monsters, both prehistoric and mythical, suddenly returning to the earth and threatening the existence of mankind,  Now, it does give us some rather jerky CGI monsters, but confines most of the action to a remote hostel, where the various characters seek shelter, and some adjoining woods.  The occasional creature turns up now and again to sniff around the exterior and eat any character foolish enough to venture outside, but most of the 'action' consists of a group of highly dislikeable stereotypes, played by excruciatingly bad actors, arguing with each other in stilted and poorly written dialogue.

We're told that the military are battling the monsters, who are devastating cities, but the only evidence of the army's existence we see are a pair of stray soldiers, who appear to be armed with anachronistic Winchester rifles which never fire.  Perhaps the props department was the local toy store.  But what am I saying?  Most toy departments sell squirt guns and water pistols that look more contemporary and realistic, (in my local B&M store the other day, for instance, they had on sale a water gun that was a near full-sized replica of an M16, complete with M203 grenade launcher - don't take it near any extreme right-wing political rallies in Pennsylvania, kids).  Which encapsulates what is wrong with this sort of production: a complete lack of resources and imagination.  Worst of all, Monsters of War, like every other one of these type of films I've seen is utterly bland - no style in the camerawork or sound design, no imagination in the production design, (it is simply shot on location, with no set dressing, rudimentary lighting, no studio re-recording of dialogue and using what are clearly non-professional actors).  I caught the end of another such, film, this time from the US recently - My Deadly Playmate (2018) - and was left thankful that I hadn't endured the whole thing.  This appeared to be a home movie version of Child's Play, with the cast consisting of the director's friends and family.  OK, the way the end titles were styled, it seemed pretty obvious that it had been intended as a parody of the Child's Play films, although why anyone thought there was any point in parodying a series of films which effectively parodied themselves in later entries is beyond me, but that didn't stop it being utterly shit.

Both these films had the disadvantage that, of late, I've been catching up with a number of schlock movies from the 'Golden Age' - made between the forties and eighties - to which they compare very poorly.  These also were films made with tiny budgets, but which still managed to employ half decent actors and script writers and appeared to be made by people with an understanding of how film-making works.  Sure, many of these films, especially in the forties and fifties, were studio produced B-pictures, so could at least draw upon the resources (sets, props, technicians etc) on hand at the studio, (even if it was a poverty row outfit like PRC or Monogram/Allied Artists), but they were still being made on absolute shoe-strings, budget wise. In the sixties and seventies, times had changed and low budget genre movies were increasing made by independent producers, on even lower budgets - but they still looked better than the stuff turned out by today's 'poverty row'.  Possibly because they were still being made by people who were, in the main, industry professionals.  Which is where we come to David L Hewitt's Wizard of Mars (1968), which I caught again after that awful Child's Play knock off.  Hewitt could never be described as a big budget film maker - he specialised in turning out exploitation movies on the lowest possible budgets, often using borrowed props and costumes.  He was so cheap that he couldn't even pay the lab processing bill on one of his films (The Lucifer Complex), so it ended up being sold, incomplete, to someone else, who actually released it.  Incredibly, he even managed to sometimes get 'name. actors to appear in these movies.

But to get back to Wizard of Mars, it struck me while watching it that, cheap and shoddy thought it might be, it was actually reasonably well shot, with professional looking camerawork, sound and lighting.  Oh, and it actually had sets!  Sets that showed some imagination in terms of their design.  While its special effects were variable and decidedly on the shonky side, they were quaintly effective.  That, of course, is the big difference between 'classic' low budget movies and their contemporary equivalents - these older movies were clearly made by professional film makers.  Stuff like Monsters of War give the impression that the director might have been to film school and knew the theory of film making, but no practical experience - aside, perhaps, for the odd music video or maybe a commercial.  They've doubtless seen the classic B-movies and want to emulate them, but seem to have no idea of how actually to do that.  To be absolutely fair, the film making landscape has changed since those halcyon days of B-movie production.  Back them, even the likes of Hewitt had access to actual studio space, (he had a small studio that did process work and special effects for other people's films and TV commercials).  Nowadays, it is far more difficult for the independent low budget producer to get this sort of access, let alone serve an apprenticeship in the industry.  That said, I can think of plenty of instances of film-makers who put together enjoyable and very watchable direct-to-video releases in the eighties with next to no resources - Cliff Twemlow and Michael Murphy come to mind, for instance.  It all comes back to that paucity of, well, vision, though, in the modern product - B-movies don't necessarily have to be original in terms of content, but some imagination and originality in execution would be welcome.

Untamed!

 

A short lived men's magazine which published eight issues between 1959 and 1960, Untamed often featured content with historical settings, but with the emphasis always firmly on sex.  The cover story of this issue (from April 1959) - 'The Cowboy and the Dance Hall Floozie' - is a pretty typical example, with the cover painting featuring plenty of cleavage, while the belt brandished by the cowboy and the girl's shocked/surprised expression hinting at all kinds of kinky business.  Elsewhere, it's men's magazine business as usual, with the promise of 'Terror at the Burlesque' in 'The Naked and the Deadly', and a visit to the 'Lusty Island of Lost Women'.  There are also the usual 'True Sex' features - 'How to Make a Girl Say Yes!' ('Lively Photos' included, apparently) and 'a Doctor's Shocking Expose' about 'Substitutes For Sex' - which are presumably like sugar substitutes: never as sweet and satisfying as the real thing.

I suppose that it depends upon how widely one defines sex as to what these substitutes for it might be.  If you confine the definition to the purely physical act of intercourse between two people, then masturbation, pornography, voyeurism, underwear sniffing or even mechanical stimulation devices might be included under the rubric of 'sex substitutes'.  While I hope that the story was about elaborate home made mechanical sex machines, powered by the user pedaling a modified exercise bike, which give you a good spanking while increasing your fitness, I suspect that it is actually about the sort of very mild pornography of he era.  Doubtless accompanied by warnings that widespread porn addiction amongst America's youth threatened to end sex as we know it and herald the end of the human race amid falling birth rates.  Lest you think that Untamed lacked any class at all, at least one issue featured, among the house names, a story by Algis Budrys, later to find fame as a writer of upmarket science fiction.  Of course, all manner of other recognisable writers might have lurked behind the house names - Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellision, for instance, turned out vast numbers of pseudonymous stories for pulps like Untamed during the fifties and early sixties.

The Living Idol (1957)

The Living Idol (1957) is a real oddity.  Its plot comes straight out of a forties Universal B-picture, but made with A-picture production values, in widescreen and Eastmancolor.  Befitting its A-movie pretensions, the film treats its central idea - of possession and reincarnation - as completely novel and original, dressing it up with all manner of pseudo scientific and anthropological mumbo jumbo, in endlessly talky scenes which seem to assume that the audience needs every detail laid out for them, so novel are the ideas.  Consequently, the film's pace is glacial, frequently feeling as if it has come to a complete halt, with no clear idea of how to proceed.  In truth, though, it's plot is overly simplistic: the discovery of an idol of a jaguar god in some Mayan ruins triggers strange feelings and dreams in a young girl - these are accompanied by a series of strange, apparently accidental, deaths, including that of her father, crushed by an altar stone his archeological expedition is trying to raise.  Adopted by her father's colleague, she moves to the city, where he teaches at the local university, but remains plagued by strange thoughts and visions, eventually falling ill.  Her adoptive father naturally concludes that she is the reincarnation of a Mayan priestess of the jaguar god, having found an ancient bust that resembles her, and in the process of becoming possessed by her spirit.  The obvious solution is to release a real jaguar from the local zoo, which makes a bee-line for his house and the girl, where it faces off against her reporter boyfriend in what the professor believes is the re-enactment of an ancient legend.

The average B-movie would have raced through such a flimsy plot in less than seventy minutes, without ever leaving the studio back lot, working up some monochrome scares along the way.  The Living Idol, however, spends an hour and forty minutes strolling through the story - narrated in flashback by the hero, in the manner of a weird anecdote being told in a gentleman's club - at a languid pace, frequently stopping off to show us widescreen vistas of the Mexican landscape.  Stylistically, it seems to be trying for the sort of understated suspense typified by Val Lewton's 1940s RKO B-horrors, but only fleetingly managing to conjure up the unsettling feel of the supernatural pushing in around the edges of the everyday characteristic of those films, principally in a carnival scene a somewhat surreal dance scene in a back-projected nightclub.  The casting and characterisations all feel very haphazard.  French actress Lilliane Montevecchi is exotically beautiful as the possessed girl, but never really manages to summon up the sort of otherworldly presence required for such role, all too often seeming like a merely petulant teenager rather than the reincarnation of an ancient priestess.  The character of her adoptive father is hampered by the fact that he is played by James Robertson Justice, an actor whom, by 1957, had such a well established screen persona that it is impossible to see him as anything other than a brusque, egotistical professional, bulldozing his way through the plot.  His attempts to shock his daughter out of her stupor with his vivid descriptions of ancient Mayan ritual sacrifices and by forcing her to participate in re-enactments of these rituals are doubtless intended to show him as a deeply caring parent, forced into desperate measures to save the soul of a loved one.  But instead, they come over as cruel and insensitive bullying which, when he releases the jaguar, seem to tip over into the sort of insanity usually reserved for B-movie mad scientists.  Steve Forrest as the heroic boyfriend is, well, stolid and completely overshadowed by James Robertson Justice's powerful screen presence.

The film does, however, look very good, Jack Hilyard's cinematography making the most of the Mexican locations, drawing striking contrasts between the isolated ruins and rural Mexico with the modernity of the bustling city.  Producer-Director Albert Lewin had previously tackled fantasy-orientated material with greater success, in 1945's The Portrait of Dorian Grey and 1951's Pandora and the Flying Dutchman,  But with these films he had had more substantial material to work from, in contrast to the thin plot and characters of The Living Idol.  It really is a very strange film to watch, its allusions to Lewton making the viewer hope for something along the lines of Cat People (1941) or The Leopard Man (1943), with apparently supernatural events having possible psychological explanations, but the plot and scenario raising expectations of bloody curses and human sacrifices in low budget idiom.  Sadly, it delivers neither of these, instead settling for leaden paced turgid drama, often in danger of drowning in its sea of pretentious-sounding expository dialogue.  It only really comes to life in the final few minutes, after that jaguar is set free, (and rather improbably fatally mauls James Robertson Justice who, as anyone who had seen him as sir Lancelot Spratt in  Doctor in the House would know, was more likely to bite the jaguar, rather than the other way around).

Special Delivery

A part of the post-election return to normality, I attended the local monthly Toy and Model Train Fair today.  As ever, I managed to pick up a couple of bargains.  While I was tempted by a number of things - including a Bachmann Standard Class 5 that need some repairs, lots of trackwork and some more cheap freight stock - I eventually settled upon a tatty Wrenn Pullman brake second that needs replacement couplings and the roof repainted and a maroon Lima British Railways General Utility Van (GUV), still in its box.  I've been looking for a reasonably priced example of the latter for a long time - prices on eBay are insane.  This one cost under a tenner, partly because there is a roof to solebar scratch on one side, possibly caused by a slipping craft knife.  From normal viewing distances it isn't visible at all.  Anyway, here is said van,  coupled up to its ex-Southern Railway equivalent:

The BR GUV (on the left) started appearing in the fifties, part of a series of standardised designs intended to eventually replace older pre-nationalisation designs such as the Southern Railway GUV (on the right).  Unlike the older design, the BR GUV had steel sides and end doors for loading large items, in contrast to the wooden sided SR design, which was equipped with end passenger gangways, (as well as running in van trains with similar vehicles, they were frequently to be found coupled to passenger trains, to provide additional luggage space - they were superceded in this role by the BR Mk1 BG).  The end doors meant that BR GUVs were often to be found carrying cars in specialised 'Motorail' type services.

This particular GUV is numbered as a Western Region vehicle, making it likely that it would have also  been seen on the Southern Region on inter-regional trains.  Thanks to the large numbers of SR GUVs in service on the Southern Region in the steam era, the BR version tended not to be allocated there until later in the sixties, but nevertheless could often be seen on Southern Region trains, (as were Western Region allocated BGs, which eventually supplanted the SR GUVs as luggage vans on boat trains and Pullman services, with the SR eventually getting its own allocation of green-painted BGs in the mid-sixties).  While Lima did produce a Souther Region numbered green liveried BR GUV, I'm not entirel sure that was prototypical.

The SR GUV, in the later blue livery that started appearing from the mid-sixties, was also bought from the Train Fair, a few months ago.  It is the old Tri-ang model, (but fitted with some replacement wheels by a previous owner), but was even cheaper than the Lima model, being unboxed.  It's a nice model, pretty much in 'as new' condition and joins three others I already had (two in bauxite, one in green, although they all sport the same running number).  

So there you go - more luggage/parcels stock.  Believe me, you can never have enough such vans, especially when modelling the Southern Region where they featured prominently on both regular passenger services and boat trains, as well as being formed up into dedicated parcels and newspaper trains and being used as brakes on milk trains.

Night of the Sharks (1988)

Night of the Sharks (1988) sounds like it should be another Italian Jaws rip-off, but as the trailer indicates, it is more of a violent crime thriller that uses some moth-eaten looking sharks as window dressing.  Indeed, even by Italian exploitation standards, twelve years would be a heck of a long time after the release of the original to be releasing a cheap knock off.  (Although, to be fair, Universal kept on releasing its own sequels to Jaws which increasingly felt like cheap Italian knock offs).  Night of the Sharks is pretty typical direct-to-video fodder for its era: recognisable lead actors to give the impression that it is a bigger film than it actually is, (not to mention misleading audiences into thinking it was a US production), exotic locations and lots of action sequences involving cars racing past the camera and machine guns being fired.  To be fair, it makes the most of its limited budget to pack in a lot of incident.  But this is also its problem - it is far too plot heavy, with an overly complicated story fatally slowing down the film, as the main story deviates into various sub-plots.  This gives it a 'stop-start', which dissipates any tension built up in individual scenes and stops the action from unfolding smoothly.

The potentially most intriguing aspect of the plot - the main villain's incriminating phone calls with various high-ranking US politicians, which are recorded by the main protagonist's brother - is never developed, serving instead as a mere 'McGuffin' to set the story rolling.  Having effectively ditched this part of the story, the film settles first into a chase, as the brother and the diamonds he has received for not releasing his recordings, being pursued by the villain's henchmen, (the chief of which decides to go into business for himself), then into 'one man against the mob' scenario, as the hero takes on an army of heavies to protect the diamonds and the recordings.  Sub-plots proliferate, before the gun-hating hero demonstrates he has no qualms about burning and hacking people to death, or even setting that mangy shark on them.  It has to be said that while it is on, Night of the Sharks is actually quire enjoyable, but also instantly forgettable.  There's nothing here we haven't seen before and director Tonini Ricci, while moving things along reasonably efficiently, with some well staged action scenes, just can't summon up anything original or memorable.  It's quite slick for a low budget exploitation film, but not particularly distinguished in any department. 

It does benefit from some good locations in the Dominican Republic (pretending to be both Florida and Mexico), features quite a few shark attacks using a real, but toothless looking, shark and boasts an above average cast.  Treat Williams and Antonia Fargas re clearly enjoying their holiday in the Dominican Republic and aren't over-familiar from similar Italian productions, while Christopher Connelly, by 1988 something of a veteran of such productions, gives decent support as a priest.  John Steiner, a UK based actor who, like David Warbeck, became something of a star in Italian exploitation, spending most of his career in such films, makes for a restrained and almost sympathetic villain, Sal Borghese (without whom no Italian exploitation action film is complete), plays a heavy and Linda Agran, another exploitation favourite, graces the middle part of the film with her presence, playing Williams' ex-wife.  While Night of the Sharks isn't a particularly good film, it isn't a particularly bad one, either.  It makes for some enjoyable, but undemanding, late night entertainment.

A Final Word on Elections

Well, I'm exhausted, having been up all night watching the election results come in.  I was determined to stay awake long enough to make out sure that Labour really did reach the magic 326 seat mark needed to secure a majority and to see my own constituency's result.  Just before I finally went to bed I'd not only seen Labour exceed 326 seats, but I also saw Jacob Rees Mogg lose his seat and Crapchester finally turn red.  So, I finally get to live in a constituency with a Labour MP.  More than that, I finally get to live in a consituency where I actually voted for the sitting MP.  As I drifted off to sleep, I thought that it just couldn't get any better.  But I woke up to find that Liz Truss had lost her seat.  Such joy!  I know, I know, I'm a very sad man for rejoicing in the misfortune of others - but I've waited a long time for this.  This election, I opted to watch it all unfold on ITV - I tried watching the BBC coverage, but it was all too frantic, with too many pundits and too many graphics.  ITV was far lower key, far calmer, with a minimum of graphics and a manageable number of pundits.  Plus, they didn't seem to be as determined as some others seemed to be, to 'big up' Farage and Reform UK.  They never lost sight of the real narrative - that Labour was about to achieve a massive majority, less than five years after suffering a big defeat, while the ruling Conservatives were decimated.

Nevertheless, the rival narratives are still being pushed, a lot of them centering on the fact that Labour's share of the vote was less than they achieved in 2019 under Corbyn.  Which is utterly meaningless, as in 2019 they lost the election and a lot of seats, whereas this time around, they were able to translate their share of the vote, although lower, into a landslide.  Likewise, we've had Reform supporters whining on about how they had four million votes but that only got them five MPs.  Well, tough shit.  That's the electoral system we have and which you have to work within.  Which is what Labour succeeded in doing this time around - they played the system and won.  The key to 'First Past the Post' isn't, in reality, overall vote share, but where those votes are cast.  All Corbyn did in 2019 was increase the Labour vote in seats that it already held, so they simply didn't help, while failing to focus on seats that, with a bit of effort, they might have won.  This election, Labour put the effort into seats where their research told them they had chances of making breakthroughs, (like Crapchester, where party workers were brought in from other constituencies they already held or had no realistic hope of taking), even if this meant putting some of the seats they held at risk.  It was a gamble that paid off, with far, far more seats won than lost.  Doubtless, we'll now have Reform embracing the cause of electoral reform.. Whereas those of us who do support electoral reform find ourselves saying 'Thank God for First Past the Post', as this time around it restricted the number of their nutters that extremists like Reform could get elected.  

Whatever narrative you choose to believe, the fact remains that we now have a Labour government with a substantive majority.  Do I think that that, consequently, the world will now be a bed of roses?  Obviously not.  But I do think that this government will at least be less corrupt, less incompetent and less elitist than the previous one.  I hope that they can begin to rebuild our public services and economy, while restoring the UK's reputation in the world by not braking international law and threatening to leave the ECHR.  Anyway, that's enough of elections and political rantings for now - time to get back to the usual trivia and pop culture fripperies this blog usually deals in.

Looking Backward

Nostalgia, eh?  My life seems to be entirely about the past these days, as I plough my way back through old movies, old TV series, old magazines and old books.  Growing older does that to you, especially once you pass that point where, although you don't like to admit it, you've got more to look back on than you have to look forward to.  You find yourself trying to relive what you remember as those good times from your growing past via the media of past days.  There's comfort to be had in past.  Except, in truth, a lot of the past I find myself reliving isn't actually my past - in large part it consists of catching up with all that stuff from back then that I missed at the time.  The fact is that while we're living through something, some era, we are, more often than not, poor judges of what is actually good, in media terms, frequently missing on something that turns out to stand out the test of time in favour watching some ephemeral crap that nobody remembers today.  Indeed, much of the 'must see' TV from my youth has turned out, in retrospect, to be pretty terrible.  Of course, back then, we only had the three channels, home entertainment in the form of VHS (and Betamax) were in their infancy and there was no internet and hence no streaming.  If you didn't see something, then catching up with it later was nigh on impossible. Which is why, with a lot of the stuff I didn't see at the time, (often because I was too young to watch them, not just because I was a poor judge of their quality),  I'm finally able to catch up with, thanks to modern streaming (and associated piracy).

While I've been enjoying a lot of my catch up viewing - which also includes stuff that I did see, but was too young to properly appreciate at the time - there have been a few things that I've seen (and read) that I'd earlier experienced and enjoyed but which, to my adult eyes, now seem awful.  The things that appealed to me as a youth now, more often than not, seem clunky and either painfully naive or painfully pretentious.  But it isn't just media where I find myself getting nostalgic.  I've mentioned before those snacks and chocolate bars of yore which seem to have vanished (and often apparently completely forgotten by everyone but me) but every so often one of them will unexpectedly return.  Recently, for instance, I spotted that Rancheros had reappeared on some shelves.  If you don't remember them, Rancheros were one of the many rivals to traditional potato crisps that appeared in the seventies.  These tended to boast exotic flavours and shapes and were generally corn based rather than potato based, often produced by companies like KP, who were more closely associated with snacks like peanuts, rather than traditional crisps.  Some have stood the test of time - Monster Munch comes to mind - but many simply faded away.  Like Rancheros - which, as I recall, came in flavours like 'barbecue beef' and were advertised with a 'Western' theme.  The resurrected Rancheros, though, came only in bacon flavour and were in unfamiliar yellow packaging.  Naturally, I bought a packet.  Unfortunately, they weren't as I remembered them - they were just another bacon-flavoured corn-based snack, little different from those Bacon Frazzle type snacks that most supermarkets have own brand versions of on their shelves.  Perhaps they were always like that and it is my memory which is at fault - back when I was a kid they were the big new thing and seemed exotic and my memory has consequently conflated their novelty with their satisfaction.  

But there you go, you just can't trust memories, particularly where nostalgia is concerned.  I have to say, though, that one piece of nostalgia that hasn't, so far, disappointed me is the whole area of vintage model railways.  Thanks to the monthly local toy and train fair, over the past eighteen months or so I've been able to acquire a lot of sixties, seventies and early eighties stuff made by Tri-ang (in all of its guises, including Triang-Hornby and the current plain Hornby), Hornby Dublo, Wrenn, Lima and Mainline at bargain prices and none of it has disappointed me.  Sure, a lot of it is far cruder and less detailed than modern (very expensive) equivalents, but all of them are decent representations of their prototypes, all quite recognisable as models of their real life counterparts. They are also far sturdier than the equivalent modern product.  Of course, these were the objects of my desire as a child but back then were beyond my financial means, and those of my parents, so it shouldn't be a surprise that finally getting my hands on them gives me such pleasure.  At long last, I can achieve my childhood dream of building a layout similar to those pictured in 1970s Triang and Hornby catalogues!

Kick 'Em Out!

Thank God we're only a couple of days away from polling day and the Tories finally getting the electoral kicking they've so richly deserved for the part fourteen years - if the polls are reliable, that is.  Hopefully we'll see hundreds of Tory MPs suddenly unemployed.  Personally, I'd like to the bastards chased out of their former constituencies by mobs with whips, baseball bats and the like, shouting that 'we don't want your sort round here' as they pursue them to the boundaries of the constituency.  Maybe pelt them with eggs and rotten fruit, too.  Yeah, that's right, I'm a petty minded vindictive bastard.  Fourteen years of Tory corruption can do that to you.  If the polling is to be believed, it looks like Corbyn will be kicked out of his constituency by Labour as well - so much for the Cult of Corbyn's claims that he was such a good MP and so popular that, as an independent, he could defeat the official Labour candidate.  Hah!  Where's your fucking messiah now, eh?  Maybe they should have nailed him to a cross and carted him around Islington telling people that he was such a saint he was even prepared to suffer for their sins.  Because that seems to be their whole schtick - that as Labour leader, Corbyn was uniquely attacked by the right and is therefore a martyr to the cause.  Which is absolute bollocks.  Some of us have been Labour supporters long enough to remember the absolute onslaughts of personal attacks that the likes of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock had to endure as Labour leaders.  They were far worse than anything Corbyn had to take - not to mention that a lot of his bad press was self inflicted as the result of his extremely poor political judgement.

Whilst I'd hope that Corbyn's defeat would signal a withering of the Cult of Corbyn, I'm sure that his hardcore fanatics will simply see it as a another stage of his journey to martyrdom.  They've been out in force on social media not, as you might expect, trashing the Tories, but instead busily attacking Labour.  Just yesterday I came across one of their number trying to turn the possible Labour landslide on Thursday into some kind of defeat for Keir Starmer.  This was based on the fact that his victory would be based upon gaining only 40% of the vote, marginally less than his hero Corbyn had achieved in 2017, (neatly ignoring the fact that he still didn't win).  As ever, this is comparing apples and pears - no two elections are ever exactly alike in their dynamics.  At the moment, this election is projected to have a low turnout (also Starmer's fault, apparently), whereas 2017 had a higher than usual turnout.  It is highly possible that, this time around, many Tory voters, feeling alienated by what their party has become, will simply not vote at all, which, combined with Reform splitting the extreme right vote, will mean that Labour will need a lower proportion of the total vote to achieve a majority.  By contrast, back in 2017, Brexit was still an open wound, with both sides in the debate mobilised to support whoever they thought might be more likely to back their side of the argument.  Labour ended up being the beneficiary of the anti-Brexit protest vote, (something the Cult of Corbyn still refuse to grasp), despite being led by a leaver and not being committed to remaining in the EU.  But hey, since when have the Cult of Corbyn ever worried about logical analysis and facts?

It isn't that I think that the Labour Party doesn't need to be bolder and more left-wing than it currently is - it is just that I'm a realist and accept that, in order to change anything, you have first to actually gain power.  Which was something we were never going to do under the shambolic leadership of Corbyn.  The electorate didn't trust him and weren't going to accept many of the policies Labour was proposing under him.  If you try to go too far, too fast, radical policy wise, you are likely to scare the electorate.  So, you start moderate and once you've gained power and shown the electorate that your kind of policies are beneficial to them, you can start to push the envelope and get more radical.  If the Cult of Corbyn were true socialists (as they claim), then their immediate priority should be to start giving ordinary working class people hope by seeing that this Tory government is voted out of power and replaced by a Labour government, any Labour government, which is far more likely to do some good.  But that would mean that they would have to start taking some responsibility for decisions made while in power - which is something they'd rather not do, instead preferring to posture on the sidelines, eternally criticising others for not being ideologically pure (the pursuit of which is apparently more important than the pursuit of meaningful power) and reveling in what they see as their positions of moral superiority.  Thankfully, the rest of us live in the real world and understand the compromises we sometimes have to make in order to secure at least some progress.

The Brain Eaters (1958)

The Brain Eaters (1958) is probably now best remembered as being a uncredited adaptation of Robert Heinlein's 1951 novel 'The Puppet Masters', (which was finally officially filmed in the nineties).  Indeed, Heinlein took legal action against the film's producers, including an uncredited Roger Corman, for plagiarism.  Interestingly, Corman claimed never to have read the book prior to producing the film (and working on its script), but conceded, after reading Heinlein's novel, that there were similarities and settled out of court.  (Heinlein, however, was happy to keep his name off of the film, which he considered to be extremely poor).  The fact is that the film is remarkably similar to the book, not just in plot details, but also in tone and characterisations.  In plot terms, the whole arrival of the alien parasites that can take control of human hosts, their transportation device discovered in woodland, their attempts to use animals as hosts and their stealthy takeover of the nearest town, infesting first local politicians, then communications professionals, like telephone and telegraph operators, all follow the pattern set by the novel, (In which the city in question is Des Moines).  The characters could also have been lifted from the novel - while the man directing the anti-alien investigation is now a no-nonsense US Senator, he is pretty much indistinguishable from the intelligence chief known as the 'Old Man', his literary analog.  The rest of the male characters are, likewise, the sort of efficient and highly competent professionals, who are just at home with a slide rule as they are toting a Colt .45, favoured by Heinlein.  The main female characters, too, are the sort of feisty women favoured by the author - always supportive of their man, but still happy to get two-fisted with the bad guys when necessary.  The whole thing is, like the book, steeped in an atmosphere of Cold War paranoia, creating a world in which no one is to be completely trusted, as they could be one of 'them'.

Book and film diverge with regard to the origin of the parasites and the scale of the invasion.  Instead of originating on Titan, the creatures in The Brain Eaters turn out to come from deep within the earth, having been buried since the Carboniferous and discovered by human explorers.  While 'The Puppet Masters' shows their initial beach head in Des Moines becoming a full scale global invasion, The Brain Eaters confines it action to their attempts to establish themselves on the surface.  Consequently, the film has a claustrophobic feel, its action confined to a small number of provincial locations, with its protagonists gradually realising that they are effectively being cut off from the outside world.  Despite Heinlein's feelings on the subject, The Brain Eaters isn't without its merits.  To be sure, it is clearly shot on a tiny budget by director Bruno VeSoto (better known as a character actor in low budget films), but this lack of resources simply adds to the air of claustrophobia, with characters having to tightly group together on its small and cheap sets and camera shots kept tight, often from odd angles.  This sense of everything being off-kilter is added to by the fact that one gets the distinct impression that there are entire scenes missing, or more likely never filmed for budgetary reasons, creating a disjointed and often frenzied feel to proceedings.  It frequently seems to jump abruptly from scene to scene, denying any smooth narrative flow - it constantly feels as if, in these jumps, the audience has been denied important plot information.  The abrupt cutting continues right until the end - with the parasites destroyed at their surface entry point, the Senator and his sidekicks stride off back to the town, ominously promising to 'deal' with the remaining possessed citizens, at which point it simply ends.  We never know just how he proposes to 'deal' with them, (unlike the book, in the film removing a parasite kills the host),but having seen the ruthless and unsentimental way in which the film has already treated its main characters, (another Heinlein trait), it isn't hard to guess.

Being a cheap B-movie, The Brain Eaters, naturally, doesn't boast an A-list cast, but they nonetheless deliver the sort of performances required for this kind of film.  The cast is headed by Ed Nelson (who also produced the film), later to find lasting fame on TV, in particular as one of the leads in the Peyton Place TV series.  It also boasts an early appearance from Leonard Nimoy (whose name is misspelled 'Nemoy' in the credits), hidden under 'old man' make-up, but his distinctive voice immediately identifying him.   All-in-all, The Brain Eaters makes for a surprisingly satisfying piece of schlock, delivering the authentic late night 'fever dream' feel of the genre over the course of its sixty minute running time.  Whether by design, or simply as a result of he shoestring budget, VeSoto's direction succeeds in creating a strangely atmospheric and frankly utterly deranged viewing experience.  .