In the Grip of the Christmas Shopping Frenzy

Crapchester seems to be in the grip of the Christmas shopping frenzy.  It happens every year, of course, once we get into the week before Christmas, as people start getting ever more desperate to get everything they think they are going to need for those two days when everywhere will be shut.  Although, in actuality, these days most of the shops seem to be open again on Boxing Day, so it is really only the one day that people are stockpiling stuff for.  Absolute bloody madness.  Not that I behave any differently - I just get annoyed when I'm trying to still do my normal shopping and my efforts to buy regular, non-Christmas, goods is thwarted by the fact that packs of lunatics have stripped the shelves bare of everything.  It's like they've become so locked into the panic-buying Christmas frenzy that they can only assuage those acquisitive urges by just buying anything, Christmas-related or not - whether they normally buy it or not.  It's very frustrating.  But I've been attempting to stock my cupboards with all manner of Christmas stuff this week, too - all part of my eternal quest to be able to simply lock myself in my house for several days over Christmas, glued to the sofa watching dross on TV and not going out or having to have contact with other people.  It's my idea of paradise and the main reason why I observe the Christmas celebration is that it affords me an annual opportunity to indulge this fantasy.  

Now that we're down to the last few days before Christmas and the schools have broken up, it is only going to get worse.  Which is why I've been desperately trying to get everything - both normal shopping and Christmas-related shopping - done by today.  Inevitably, I've been thwarted, mainly by the inability of my local branch of Sainsburys to keep its shelves stocked with the most basic of goods, (this is a year-round problem - they really to make their minds up as to whether they are part of a major supermarket chain or just some tinpot local corner shop), but also by my local pharmacy's new IT system which, apparently, has no record of any prescription made before November.  So, I wasted a large chunk of shopping time, (during which the Christmas scavengers were buying or shoplifting everything I wanted), trying to collect a prescription renewal, but as the items were last ordered six months ago, they are denying any knowledge of me ever having been prescribed them.  Pointing out that they knew damn well that they had been dispensing them to me for the past five years did no good as 'what the system says' apparently trumps personal experience.  I tried pointing out that they had been re-ordered via their mobile app, which was telling me the order was now ready, which meant that it had been approved by my GP practice, but as the new system was denying it had ever received this approval, I left empty handed.  I now have to traipse back there (and to Sainsburys) again tomorrow, in hope that sanity might have returned.  I don't hold out much hope.

Scare Tactics

Just what is it about the British press and scaremongering?  Everywhere I look on the newsstand these days there's nothing but alarmist headlines, clearly designed to try and scare people.  If it isn't talking up the possibility of World War Three, then it is the imminent prospect of blizzards sweeping Britain, driven by hurricane force winds.  Either that or the threat of some new pandemic involving a new disease that will kill us all, or maybe this week it will be the Chinese technology which has infiltrated our homes rising up and microwaving, vacuuming or air frying us all to death.  Then again, maybe social media is creating a new army of psycho-zombies by brainwashing our kids to rape and kill, but only if the armies of immigrants arriving here on boats don't get there first.  It really is quite exhausting trying to keep up with all the various threats apparently assailing us these days.  Obviously, most of these headlines are derived from misquoting, misrepresenting and deliberately misconstruing statements from politicians, scientists and other experts.  Sometimes, they're created from completely made up 'facts'.  Vladimir Putin has been a real boon for the British press since he invaded Ukraine, with the hacks hanging on his every demented statement and threat, ignoring completely the fact that they are simply desperate propaganda promulgated by a leader and his cronies who can't even achieve victory in Ukraine, begging the question of how he could ever manage to threaten any better prepared and equipped western state.  Now, with the re-election of Trump, they've got another unstable, boastful half-wit on the world stage who will be good for insane quotes and threats with which they can try to whip up some more fear.

Right now, it is those alleged mass drone sightings in New Jersey which seem to be fuelling many of their sensationalist headlines.  The fact that, in reality, these seem to be mass hysteria sparked by a number of possible real drone sightings which have seen people mistake conventional aircraft, constellations and the like for drones, is neither here nor there.  Rational explanations - that, for instance, alleged sightings near a military base are, in actuality, drones being used to try and get illicit goods into an adjacent jail - are batted aside in favour of the demented ramblings of an addled congressman who insists that he's been told by 'insiders' that it is a Chinese spy drone invasion.  (For 'insiders' read 'prank callers' capitalising on the fact that he is a credulous loon who will take any sort of arrant nonsense at face value if told that it is from 'official sources' - 'No, really Senator, I'm definitely from the CIA.  Honestly.  No kidding.  I'm only on a payphone so the call can't be traced...' ). That's where the US really scores over the UK for generating these alarmist stories - so many of their elected representatives seem to be raving lunatics who publicly spout all manner of mad shit.  Sure, we have a few backbench MPs, Nigel Farage and Liz Truss who talk this sort of cobblers, but nobody pays them much attention.  But in the US, a Senator or a Representative coming out with this kind of bollocks seems to lend it some kind of credence and gravitas, even if they are certifiably insane.  

Inevitably, we come back to the question of just why the UK press is so alarmist?  Surely no other advanced democracy boasts such scaremongering media?  It's as if they feel a need to be constantly at war with someone or something.  Or at least give their readers the impression that the UK is constantly facing existential threats that have to be met with blood and sacrifice.  In a way, though, they are at war - most of the UK's media is controlled by right-wing billionaires and corporations pushing their own political agendas, constantly seeking to ensure that 'their' governments are always in power.  A constantly scared population, they think, is more likely to look to authority for protection and reassurance and, in the UK, that has traditionally meant the Tory party (also effectively controlled by billionaires and corporations).  So, when the Tories are in power, the fear mongering is designed to scare the electorate into keeping them in power and maintaining the supposed safety of the status quo.  When Labour governments do get elected, the press go into overdrive with their scare tactics, painting the new administration as a disastrous threat to our security, liberty and wealth, which can only be remedied by electing the Tories next time around.  Which is precisely what we're seeing now: a concerted effort to try and destabilise a democratically elected government (with an unassailable majority in parliamentary terms) through a campaign of fear.  To be absolutely fair, even the few media outlets more sympathetic to Labour aren't above scaremongering, either.  That's the problem, spreading fear and thereby manipulating peoples' perceptions of reality becomes addictive after a while (especially when press regulation is as weak as it is in the UK), regardless of which side of the political fence you are on.

Conspicuous Non-Conformism

When I was at school there were always those kids who liked to talk big, to advertise their 'non conformism' at every turn, be it by wearing their shirt with the top button undone and their tie loose so as to demonstrate the fact, or by wearing non-regulation shoes.  Sometimes they might even hand their homework in late or fake a sick note.  But when push came to shove and they found themselves confronted by authority, they always folded without a fight.  You always knew that they could never be relied upon to stand up to bullying teachers or challenge unfair and arbitrary school rules.  That was left up to idiots like me - the unfashionable kids who weren't part of a clique, didn't play sports and weren't academically brilliant enough to apply to Oxbridge and therefore couldn't add to the school's prestige.  But were were deluded enough to believe that principles mattered and that you should stand up for them.  Even if all it got you was a detention and the derision of those self-styled 'col kids' who never conformed - except when they thought there might be consequences to their non-conformity, then they knuckled under.  As an adult, I found the same pattern of behaviour in the workplace - lots of these self-styled 'rebels' were always quick to complain about management and working conditions.  But when it came to face-to-face confrontations with the bosses or calling in the union, they were suddenly silent.  Again, it was idiots like me who had to do that, with no support from those bastards.  I learned an important lesson from these experiences: mainly that doing the right thing, sticking to your principles and trying to making sure that people are treated fairly, will never make you popular.  On the contrary, it will get you labelled 'awkward' and a 'troublemaker' which, in turn, will ensure that your progress career-wise is very slow, regardless of how well you do your job.

But why should we have expecedt those 'cool kids' ever to behave differently?  For them, non-conformism and rebellion are all just an act, they do it because it is fashionable, not because they actually believe in any of it.  Scratch the surface of any one of them and you's find that, in reality, they were incredibly conventional in their outlooks and thinking, the products, usually, of comfortably off middle class families - they only rebelled as long as they felt safe doing it, as soon as it threatened consequences, they were out of there.  They were always going to acquiesce to authority because they themselves were from the same milieu as those in authority: their parents usually held positions of minor authority - bank managers, teachers, librarians, businessmen etc.  They always had excuses, of course, usually that it 'wasn't the right time' to stand up and be counted.  Although they never seemed to be able to pinpoint a 'right time' to put their non-conformity into action.  Anyway, for the same reasons, we really shouldn't be disappointed in all those people and organisations who threw their hats in the ring in opposition to Trump in the 2024 presidential election campaign are, now that he's won, lining up to prostrate themselves before him.  They've got too much to potentially lose by continuing their opposition to him, which is why billionaires like Bezos and Zuckerberg are busy kissing his ass.  But hey, surely we never really expected anything else of the mega-rich, did we?  They failed to buy the election their way, (because that's what the whole business of removing Biden from the Democratic nomination was all about - wealthy people trying to influence the vote by substituting 'their' candidate for someone perceived as a failing candidate), so it is only natural that they change horses again.  Money loves to be associated with a winner, after all.  Which is why, even before the votes were in, they hedging their bets, with Bezos stopping his newspaper from endorsing Harris.  When news outlets start acquiescing, then it is time to be worried and disappointed : ABC recently caved in to Trump's threatened libel case and paid him fifteen million dollars, while the owner of the Los Angeles Times is vetoing his paper from printing editorials critical of Trump.  

Again, it is all about them and their wealthy backers protecting their interests.  To hell with the press having a duty to hold power to account when there's a risk that the vengeful ego in the White House might not just sue you, but start deploying all the considerable force of the State against you and your assets.  Which is why revolutions are usually carried out by people with nothing to lose.  Sure, they are usually inspired and led - from a distance - by middle class intellectuals and other well off people - but the actual blood, sweat and tears are provided by the disenfranchised.  Who, if the win, are more often than usual betrayed by their leaders, (who never actually got their hands dirty or exposed themselves to risk during the revolution itself, instead shouting the masses on from the sidelines).  The trick that the establishment seems to have perfected right now is, by pretending not to be the establishment and instead 'populists' on the side of the 'little man', convincing those masses with nothing to lose to support them instead of the revolution (or, indeed, any progressive movement).  Obviously, they'll betray them just as surely the other lot will betray those who fought the revolution for them.  The difference is that, these days, people's attention spans have become so short that they seem to quickly forget the earlier betrayal and vote for the 'populists' all over again.  Hence Trump's second term in spite of what happened last time around.  So, what's the moral here?  Under no circumstances trust anyone who is conspicuously trendy, non-conformist and loudly radical, fond of telling everyone just how virtuous they are for loudly opposing stuff of supposed moral grounds, regardless of which side they purport to be on.  They're most likely pretentious pricks interested only in preening their own egos and will, when the chips are down, inevitably betray any cause they claim to support.

The Sea Serpent (1985)

Amando de Ossorio's last film, (although he's credited as 'Gregory Greens' for his direction and 'Gordon A Osburn' as writer on the English-language version), The Sea Serpent (1985) would be a poor epitaph for anyone's career, let alone for a director held in high regard for his 'Blind Dead' series.  In truth, though, aside from the four 'Blind Dead' movies,most of de Ossorio's work is fairly routine, rarely recapturing the musty menace and doom laden atmosphere of these films.  In truth, The Sea Serpent is just a fifties giant monster movie, replicating all of the flaws of the genre and offering no improvements in technical terms, other than the addition of colour.  It opens poorly, with a US warplane (represented via stock footage) is forced to jettison a nuclear weapon in the Atlantic, setting it to detonate on the ocean bed in order to stop the Soviets from getting their hands on it!  The whole thing is ineptly filmed, with the budget apparently not even running to US military uniforms - the guys back in the mission control room are all dressed in (scruffy) civilian clothes.  Of course, the explosion inevitably awakens a prehistoric sea serpent, which proceeds to rampage its way through Spanish waters.  I say 'rampage', but rather ludicrously, its attacks are always so small scale that virtually nobody sees the bloody thing, with the only survivors of its attacks not being believed.  It sinks a trawler early on, eating some of the crew, but only the captain sees it and hes accused of causing the sinking himself through being drunk on watch, losing his captain's certificate at the subsequent inquiry.  (Which calls into question Spanish maritime investigation techniques - they never seem to question how the captain's alleged drunkeness could possibly result in the boat's hull being breached below the waterline when in deep waters.  Such damage could surely only be caused by a moving, submerged, object).  

In its next attack, the creature eats a tourist who has foolishly gone to sea in a dinghy after a night in a casino - only her friend on shore sees what happens, (despite the beach being only yards from a crowded casino).  Obviously, nobody believes her and she finds herself locked up in a psychiatric unit.  So it goes on: the serpent destroys a light house but there are no witnesses except the keeper, who is killed, it attacks a boat full of cigarette smugglers, the only survivor being left semi-comatose and barely coherent.  In an incredibly contrived plot twist, this survivor is silenced permanently by the smuggling gang, fearful that he'll tell the authorities about their operation!  Naturally, the disgraced captain springs the American woman tourist from hospital and they try to find a way of proving the beast's existence, roping in a sceptical and ill marine biologist.  By an amazing stroke of luck, the captain's former first mate - who held him responsible not just for the sinking of the trawler, but also the death of his brother in an earlier accident - finally sees the monster himself, when it attacks a wharf (again, it conveniently leaves no other witnesses), joining the other three for a climactic sea serpent hunt.  

Now, the poor script, with its appallingly clunky dialogue, weak chatacterisations and plot convolutions that go to ridiculous lengths to ensure that, while it serves up a number of monster attacks, the authorities never seem to be aware of the creature's existence, wouldn't have mattered so much if the film gave us a decent monster.  Sadly, it doesn't.  Indeed, its special effects look several notches below those employed in the fifties monster movies that it is clearly trying to emulate.  The sea serpent itself is, in the main, represented by what is basically a sock puppet.  Or at least its head and neck are, every time it surfaces.  A larger model is used for when it has a victim in its jaws, but this is no more effective,  While swimming in the water, the model used looks like a child's toy.  Regardless of how it is being represented, it is a pretty lousy looking sea serpent, with bulging ping pong ball eyes and stick on fins.  In truth, all of the film's effects and miniatures work of a very poor quality.  Particularly bad is a scene at the film's climax, when the serpent attacks a railway bridge, coiling around the supports, just as a steam hauled train passes over it, (despite the fact that mainline steam haulage in Spain ended in the mid-seventies).  The miniature train itself is so crude that it barely qualifies as a model, looking more like a toy, an impression reinforced by the thin stream of pale smoke wisping from its chimney.  (This was most likely created by a Seuthe smoke unit, a crude device used by Tri-ang in the sixties on some of its model locos - it was basically an electrically heated metal plate onto which was poured oil, that burned off to produce foul smelling and unconvincing smoke - if you were really unlucky, it could warp and melt the plastic loco body).

Not surprisingly, in an attempt to disguise the poor quality of the effects, all of the monster's attacks occur at might.  On top of that, the film's photography, overall, is dark and murky, although this could simply be down to the fact that the version I saw was an old VHS transfer.  In its favour, the film actually musters a pretty impressive looking cast, including Timothy Bottoms, Jared Martin and Taryn Power.  All, however, are defeated by the script, which simply doesn't give them a chance to do anything other than go through the motions.  The biggest name, though, is an extremely ill looking Ray Milland (this was to be his last feature film appearance), who stumbles, mumbles and growls his way through the role of the marine biologist.  Even though I'm usually a sucker for monster movies, I found The Sea Serpent pretty hard going - I'd had hoped, on the basis that de Ossorio was director, that it might not be as bad as its reputation and might have some redeeming features.  Sadly, though, it comes over as barely competent, staggering through ts ninety minutes, or so, of running time, to a decidedly anti-climactic climax, with the monster getting away!  (The producers were clearly hoping for a sequel).  There's nothing distinguished in the direction, giving the impression that, to de Ossorio, it was just another low budget assignment, to be knocked out as cheaply and quickly as possible.  A sad footnote to hos career.

Psychotronic, Issue 8, Winter 1990

Another of the finds from that box I retrieved from under the model railway baseboards: a copy of Psychotronic magazine, from Winter 1990.  I actually thought that I had more of these, but this second anniversary issue is the only one which has so far turned up.  Like Shock Xpress, back in the pre-internet world, Michael Weldon's Psychotronic was essential reading for those interested in exploitation films, B-movies and basically anything cinematically weird and offbeat.  These publications, all of them, at best, semi-professional fanzines, were a treasure trove of hard to find information on such movies and the people who made them.  Eventually, Weldon would spin the magazine off into his Psychotronic Film Encyclopedia, (which I also own and was also an invaluable resource when I first getting into this stuff in a serious way).

This issue is pretty typical, packed full of reviews and interviews.  The latter include in-depth talks with noted B-movie leading men Lawrence Tierney and Russ Tamblyn and nudie director A C Stephens.  It is also packed full of adverts from various suppliers of dubious quality videos of the sort of films the magazine covered.  (All, of course, in the US, as Psychotronic was a US publication and here in the UK had to be obtained via specialist outlets like Forbidden Planet).  Thanks to the internet, most of these films have since escaped onto video sharing sites and subsequently onto dodgy Roku channels, for everyone to watch freely, (until the copyright police turn up and spoil the party).  Looking back at this and other, similar magazines and books, that I still have, it is fascinating to contemplate that what was, such a relatively short time ago, an underground pursuit for a handful of weirdos like me, is now, sort of, mainstream and trendy.  How times change.

Invasion of the Star Creatures (1962)

Invasion of the Star Creatures (1962) is another of those films I first encountered as a still in a book, many, many years ago.  The book, about horror and science fiction movie monsters, simply featured a picture of a guy apparently being menaced by a ropey-looking monster, with the caption only naming the source movie.  No other information, plot synopsis, cast, etc, was offered.  Several years and reference books later (these were pre-internet days), I learned that the film was actually some kind of comedy, with the monster deliberately ropey-looking, rather than simply being the result of an ultra low budget.  I also gathered that the film had a very poor reputation.  Subsequently, I barely gave the film a thought until, the other day, I got an opportunity to watch it.  What the Hell, I thought, it surely can't be that bad, can it?  Actually, yes, it could be, as it turned out.  Invasion of the Star Creatures was independently produced, directed by Bruno ve Sota from a script by Jonathan Haze and was picked up for distribution by AIP.  You can, sort of, see why AIP picked it up - as an actor, Haze had appeared in a number of Roger Corman movies, including the horror comedy, Little Shop of Horrors (1960), so it was possible that they were hoping for a science fiction parody, along similar lines.

Unfortunately, as a comedy, Invasion of the Star Creatures is woeful, never finding a consistent tone, let alone any worthwhile gags.  Indeed, most of the 'comedy' is aimed at the most basic level of pratfalls and slapstick, centering on two hapless soldiers, (along the lines of two particularly stupid and lazy member's of Sgt Bilko's platoon), whose antics are clearly meant to evoke memories of double acts like Abbot and Costello, except that they have no chemistry and completely underdeveloped characters, which makes them difficult to differentiate.  Most double acts have a clear delineation between the characters of 'straight man' and 'funny man', often reinforced by striking physical dissimilarities between the two, (fat and thin, tall and short, etc), but Bob Ball and Frank Ray Perilli not only look too similar to be able to tell the difference between the two characters but also both come over as idiots.  Neither brings any particular comic talent to the roles, either: Ball comes over as a mentally challenged simpleton too stupid to grasp what is going on most of the time, while Perilli clearly wants to be some kind of wisecracking club comic. but lacks the wisecracks and instead keeps falling back on a (bad) impression of Edward G Robinson.  To be fair, you can see where the film is meant to be funny, even satirical in its portrayal of the military hierarchy, but, thanks to a lifeless script and poor performances (which mistake loudness for comic delivery), it all falls flat.

Its tale of an alien spaceship crewed by a pair of statuesque women from a matriarchal planet, with an army of carrot-man monsters (grown like plants), on the look out for earthmen to take back home, might have had potential as a parody with a better script, cast and production values.  Sadly, though, it ends up as a predictable mess.  Of course, in spite of its 'zaniness' and 'irreverence' toward the establishment (as represented by the military), the film eventually cleaves to more traditional values, with the two alien women falling into the roles of traditional girl friends after they are stranded on earth, despite their technological and intellectual superiority, (mind you, holding a CSE Grade Three in wallpapering would have made them technologically and intellectually superior to any of the men in this film).  Apparently, there's a TV edit of Invasion of the Star Creatures which runs an extra ten minutes - thankfully, I only saw the regular seventy minute version, which still felt interminable.

Rehabilitating Evil

Now that the former President of Syria is safely in exile in Moscow, doubtless the task of rehabilitating him will begin.  Because just about anybody, no matter how horrendous their crimes and behaviour might have been, can be publicly rehabilitated these days.  One minute they are being denounced as an utter bastard by the press, within a few months, sometimes even weeks, they've got a column in the Daily Mail, then they start making tentative appearances on the BBC, in the guise of being an 'expert commentator' or 'former statesman', next thing they've got a book out and suddenly the media are fawning all over them again in a round of high profile publicity junkets.  Not that it always goes to plan: just look at poor Liz Truss, she's never managed to get beyond the extreme right lunatic fringe speaking tour and even there, nobody seems to want to listen to her lunatic ramblings.  But it isn't just disgraced politicians who can get rehabilitated these days - criminals, too, can be given the whitewash job, with history suitably massaged either to justify their actions and/or show that they were merely misunderstood.  Perhaps there was a miscarriage of justice, or maybe the law was just plain wrong and they shouldn't have been convicted in the first place.  Blown away an unarmed burglar - as they were leaving the premises - with a shotgun?  Hell, you aren't a murderer, not even a vigilante: it was self defence, a proud Englishman defending his property. Besides, the dead guy was just a Pikey, anyway, so deserved it.  Suddenly you are a national hero to the right-wing press and can get interviewed on Radio 4 while still in Jail.

I'm betting that if Jimmy Savile had been alive to face his accusers, they'd have found some way to rehabilitate him - maybe all those people he sexually assaulted were 'asking for it', deliberately giving him the 'come on', then having second thoughts afterward.  'It was all a conspiracy' is a risky defence, but sometimes it can open a path to rehabilitation. Just look at Donald Trump - disgraced President wo denied an election result and tried to mount an insurrection, adjudicated rapist, convicted felon, with countless other criminal charges pending against him and, lo and behold, President again after four years re-casting himself as the victim of multiple conspiracies.  So, just give Assad a bit of time and he too could be reinvented as a 'good guy'.  After all, the luck's with him - unlike fellow Middle Eastern dictators Qaddafi and Saddam, he's at least managed to avoid retribution in the form of a violent death and trial and execution.  Plus, he's safe in Moscow (so long as he doesn't fall out of a window), capital of a nation adept at casting itself as the victim, even when they invade neighbours without provocation.  In fact, they seem to have persuaded a large number of dupes globally that Ukraine was somehow 'asking for it' and that its democratically constituted government is somehow illegitimate, compare to its own leader who wins unopposed because he's locked up all of his opponents.

But where to start with Assad?  Some charity work, perhaps?  Monsters have, historically, liked to hide behind charitable work that makes them look like saints.  I well remember how, back in the day, you weren't allowed to say a bad word about Jimmy Savile, let alone suggest that some of those rumours about him might have substance, because 'he does a lot for charity' and therefore beyond reproach.  So, that would be my initial approach to rehabilitating Assad: large charitable donations, (after all, he's going to have millions, probably billions looted from Syria during his time in power), preferably to charities associated with helping children.  Especially sick children.  Then build from there: maybe set up his own charitable foundation doing some kind of research into horrible childhood diseases, perhaps even set up the odd clinic or two, to treat them.  All the time, of course, it would be essential that he had pictures taken of himself with sick kiddies.  Lots of pictures.  Oh, not to forget his glamourous wife - lots of pictures of her with sick kiddies and generally doing worthy shit while dressed in designer clothes would work wonders, too.  

If all else fails, he could always try what is fast becoming the 'go to' defence for wrong-doers everywhere to justify themselves and garner sympathy: 'it wasn't my fault I groped those women/embezzled those funds/cheated on my wife/murdered thousands of people in a genocide (delete as applicable) - I couldn't help myself as I'm neurodivergent.'  Gregg Wallace is a pioneer here, so much so that Boris Johnson has also tested the waters with a variation.  Not that it is entirely new, being an update on the old favourite, 'I'm suffering from dementia', deployed the likes of Mohammed Al Fayed to avoid rape charges, for instance.  It doesn't generate as much sympathy as the neurodivergent bollocks, but has proven surprisingly successful.  So, there you have it, Assad's path back to respectability.  Mark m y words, give it six months, a year at tops and he'll be on Good Morning and Loose Women, smiling away, telling the hosts all about his latest good works and how his memoirs are now in all good bookshops.

Shock Xpress Summer 1988

 

This Summer 1988 issue of Shock Xpress is one of the things turned up in my recent investigation of a box of old magazines hauled out from under the model railway in the spare room.  It is probably the best preserved of the three issues I've so far found amongst the various boxes of old magazines stored for years in my spare room (barring that unidentified stain on the front cover).  As ever, it is chock-full of lots interesting exploitation movie related stuff that, in those pre-internet days, you just couldn't easily find anywhere else.  This includes a lengthy look at Blaxploitation films, features on directors Anthony Balch and Larry Buchanan, plus interviews with Robert Englund, Wes Craven and John Waters.   Any one of those things alone would make the issue worth reading, but you get them all, along with much, much more, including film and video reviews, all for the price of £1.25, in a single package.  As this is only a brief post (I'm feeling a bit rough today), I'll leave you with a scan of the back cover, a reproduction of the poster for Amando D'Ossorio's Serpiente De Mar (1985) (The Sea Serpent):

I'm Dreaming of a Woke Christmas

So, why are Nativity plays these days so woke?  Actually, I have no idea whether they are - I don't have kids, so I don't tend to get invited to such things - but that was the opening line of a post Facebook decided that I'd be interested in.  God knows why - my immediate reaction was 'For fuck's sake, just fuck off you sad dick' and dismissed it without reading any further.  But t set me to thinking, just how did this saddo define woke?  It's a totally amorphous term, generally used by right wing political and media figures to denote anything that tells them that they can't be, well, to put it bluntly, cunts.  It extends to encompass anything that promotes the values of general human decency, characterising it as being somehow undesirable.  So, if you follow such broad 'guidelines', I suppose that plays depicting the Nativity - the birth of the christian Messiah who grows up to espouse a creed of love that rejects materialism and promotes tolerance - will always be woke.  I mean, what are those Three Kings about, eh?  Altruistically bringing presents to the child of some itinerant bastards so poor that they can't even afford a room at the Inn - typical bloody grifters, always expecting to get something for nothing.  Not to mention that those Wise Men are always depicted as ethnic - plus the woke bastards 'take the knee' in front of that baby.  Who, technically, is a bastard, in the literal sense, as while Joseph's name is on the birth certificate as father, but it was really God himself who got Mary up the duff.  Woke nonsense, the lot of it.

To the reactionary, the whole of Christmas must surely seem woke - all that 'Goodwill to All Men' bollocks, gift-giving and general merriment and bonhomie, not to mention all that bloody religious crap telling you that you should love your neighbour (even if they are a family of asylum seekers from 'Bongo Bongoland' on benefits) and forsake your worldly possessions.  I'm surprised that they celebrate it all.  Except that they celebrate a somewhat different version which involves getting pissed up, indulging in epic feats of gluttony, turning gift giving into a competitive exercise, pulling Christmas crackers that include exclusively racist jokes and falling asleep in front of the telly.  Basically, it's a celebration of consumerism, not to mention very conspicuous consumption.  Instead of 'Joy to the World', it's 'Fuck You to the World, you bastards'.  This is what they like to call the 'traditional Christmas' and woe betide anyone who has the temerity to do anything different - they're woke bastards, obviously, out to ruin everyone's fun.  Not that anyone tries to impose their supposedly woke Christmases on the 'traditionalists' - they merely point out that there are alternative, equally valid, ways to celebrate the season.  But for the 'traditionalists', the mere fact that these alternatives exist is the problem: for them there can only be one 'real' Christmas to be celebrated and anything else is just 'woke bollocks'.  The very idea that there could be another sort of Christmas apparently completely invalidates their version.  Which, obviously, it should.  So, to get back to the original point: no, I have no idea why Nativity plays are so woke these days and, quite frankly, don't care if they are.

Games Girls Play (1974)

The career trajectories of film directors always fascinate me: some blaze brightly early on, before tailing off into unfulfilled projects and direct-to-video movies, while others toil steadily for years, knocking out mid-budget, middle of the road movies, building a reputation as a 'safe pair of hands' to which, late in their careers is rewarded with the custody of big budget studio movies.  Back in the old days, of course, directors learned their craft in the B-movie units of studios, eventually producing low budget movies that seemed to transcend their low-budget origins and from which, you feel sure, they'll make the leap to big budget A-features of equal distinction.  Such seemed to be the case with Jack Arnold, a veteran of Universal's B-unit who, in the fifties, turned out a series of low budget science fiction films which became hugely influential in terms of subject matter and style.  These included the first two Creature From the Black Lagoon movies,  Tarantula! - the definitive giant spider movie, the cerebral Ray Bradbury inspired alien invasion film It Came From Outer Space and the Richard Matheson adaptation The Incredible Shrinking Man, all in crisp monochrome.  His genre films stood head and shoulders above their contemporaries, encompassing an intelligence and sophistication in their treatment of the subject matter that was all too often absent even in big budget science fiction films of their era.   On the basis of these movies, it seemed certain that Arnold would be 'one to watch' in terms of his seemingly inevitable transition to bigger budgets.  Yet, this never happened, with Arnold virtually vanishing from film production, instead becoming a prolific director of episodic television.  Then, suddenly in the seventies, his name reappeared on the credits of motion pictures, as he directed four or five low budget exploitation films, all in colour and none covering science fiction subjects, with Games Girls Play (1974) being, perhaps, the oddest of them in terms of subject matter.

With a US director, producers, writers and star, Games Girls Play (aka The Bunny Caper and Sex Play), raises the expectation that it is going to be a typical US sexploitation piece, perhaps along the lines of the New World 'Nurse' or 'Stewardess' films.  But, in style, format and setting, it is actually a pretty typical seventies British sex comedy.  An attempt, one assumes, of an enterprising US producer keen to cash in on the British sex comedy boom.  That it was actually shot in the UK quickly becomes apparent when, in an early scene supposedly set in Washington DC, a four star US Army general is played by Harry Towb, a Northern Irish character actor who specialised in US accents.  The action quickly moves to the UK, where the films settles down into an archetypal British sex comedy plot centering on a private girls' school, where the daughter of the newly appointed US Ambassador to London has been sent in order to try and prevent her causing the sort of problems she had created for her father by sleeping with most of the male contingent of the Washington political and military executive.  Obviously, this proves entirely ineffective as she quickly 'corrupts' the other twenty five year old 'schoolgirls', starting with her three roommates.  This starts with attending the swimming pool naked, in defiance of the starchy headmistress and butch lesbian PE teacher, (like all sex comedies, Games Girls Play is big on stereotypes), culminating in the four roommates engaging in a contest to have sex with various prominent foreign visitors to the UK, who include a table tennis champion from Communist China, a Dr Kissinger-type American diplomat and his Russian equivalent, all of whom are in London in connection with an international security conference.  A fifth girl is on hand to try and get photographic evidence of their conquests.

Inevitably, their antics result in a diplomatic incident, with the film from the fifth girl's camera falling into the hands of the Chinese delegation, who try to use it to blackmail the others.  Luckily, she has another reel, showing the Chinese table tennis team naked with one of the girls, so everything turns out OK.  Sort of - the Ambassador finds himself dispatched to Afghanistan, in the hope that his daughter can't cause any trouble there, (the Soviet invasion was still some five years off).  Cur one last bit of seventies racist stereotyping at the airport, involving Nadim Sawalha.  Which is pretty much the entire film.  As a comedy, it is pretty much on a par with the average British sex comedy of the time, not up to the standard of the early Confessions, but still a few steps ahead of the likes of The Amourous Milkman, (one of the most depressing sex 'comedies' I've ever seen), say.  It's basically good natured and amiable with the sex content all pretty tame softcore stuff, particularly by today's standards.  Where the film scores highly, however, is in the nudity stakes - there are bums, boobs and full frontal female nudity galore from very attractive seventies sex comedy starlets, including Jill Damas, Jane Anthony and Drina Pavlovic.  The star of the show is undoubtedly Christina Hart, in the lead role.  An American actress in TV and mostly low-budget pictures, she did a fair amount of nudity on film both before and after this movie and appears completely uninhibited about it.  As well as being very attractive - both clothed and unclothed - Hart is also very charismatic in the role, carrying the film along through an episodic and sometimes halting plot.  

Of course, the big question is - is the film as noteworthy in terms of direction, as any of Jack Arnold's fifties pictures?  To which the answer is a resounding, 'no'.  To be sure, Games Girls Play is more than competently made, a thouroughly professional piece of work with decent performances from the cast and a good use of locations helping it look more expensive than its actual budget.  But there is nothing in its style - smooth, efficient but somehow bland - reminiscent of any of Arnold's outstanding B-movies.  The same applies to Arnold's other seventies movies that I've seen - professional but undistinguished.  Perhaps it was the subject matter that failed to inspire him to the heights of his fifties output - none of these later films were anything special in terms of content.  Mind you, Arnold wasn't the only notable director of fifties science fiction who ended up directing sex comedies - Britain's Val Guest, after all, directed Confessions of a Window Cleaner and a couple of others, with successful results.  But Guest also had considerable experience of comedies - he'd started off working as writer on Will Hay films  - which might well have given him the advantage over Arnold, who had no such track record, in this context.  Then again, perhaps it was those fifties monster and science fiction films which were the true exception in Arnold's career - a flash in the plan, so to speak, which saw him get lucky with good scripts, scenarios and crews for a brief period.  I think, though, that his seventies films are simply the work of a 'director for hire', having no real connection to the productions other than simply being another job, where he was brought in as a 'safe pair of hands'.  Whatever the truth, Games Girls Play remains a surprisingly likeable and enjoyable seventies sex comedy - nothing really special, but at least pleasantly made.

In the Sex Kitchen

Today, I finally had confirmation that Masterchef presenter and sometime greengrocer Gregg Wallace is definitely a wrong 'un.  No, not because of the latest allegations concerning his inappropriate behaviour with various women, but because I saw that Rachel Johnson, self-styled journalist and sister of Britain's worst Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was giving him her support.  The fact that she continues to defend her brother is not only evidence that she has no judgement, but also that she is consistently on the wrong side of history.  Any endorsement from Rachel Johnson is a sure sign that its recipient is some kind of morally degenerate bastard.  Wrong 'un though Wallace might be, I think that we're now nearing the stage in this scandal where we start running out of genuine allegations for the press to splash across their front pages and instead start turning to all those completely unattributed - not to mention utterly bizarre - allegations which inevitably spring up on social media.  They're, at best, speculation, at worst, just lies, which those spreading them try to give some minimal credence to by attributing them to 'a mate's second cousin's hairdresser' and the like.  I saw one the other day, claiming that, when Wallace had been recording and episode of In the Factory at the Nestle factory he was asked to leave and never come back, supposedly for being rude to someone on the Aero production line.  Which sounds vaguely plausible, but had absolutely no attribution.  Which is probably why it wasn't picked up by the media: too vague and unsensational.

Personally, I think that, in order to get some movement behind this rumour,  the person who came up with it should have gone the whole hog and claimed that Wallace was thrown out of the factory after farting in the Aero mix, claiming that he was demonstrating a novel way of getting the bubbles into the chocolate.  Not exactly plausible, but certainly sensational enough for the tabloids, especially if it allegedly came from a 'witness' who worked there.  I'm waiting for the claims going back to his days as a greengrocer, with disgruntled alleged customers complaining as to how he used to play practical jokes on them, like painting his cock and balls green, sticking them in his fruit and veg display and pretending that they were a marrow and two cantaloupes.  Or maybe recalling the time that he was caught in the store room with his pants down, shagging a life size sex doll that he'd made out of fruit. Then there are the bizarre sex games he doubtless allegedly indulged in, like that time he got that woman to strip naked and baste herself, before trying to shove her in the oven head first and take her from behind with a parsnip - telling her that he'd get her on Masterchef if she went along with it.  Not that I'm saying that Gregg Wallace has done any of these things, but I'm pretty sure that we'll variations on such claims in social media and maybe the tabloids as this business unfolds.  Because the trouble with sex scandals that involve (usually) male celebrities  abusing their positions with regard to women, while initially seeming exciting and juicy in a dark sort of way inevitably, as the details emerge, end up just being sordid and leaving you feeling dirty just by reading about them.  The media really wants outrageous sensation, which is why the made up allegations ultimately gain currency, (plus, because, at some level, we all know that they aren't really true, we know that nobody was really hurt).

Like all scandals, this Gregg Wallace business is a bandwagon that all manner of individuals will jump on in order to try and exploit in advance of their own agendas, with the actual victims in danger of becoming of secondary importance.  At the most basic level, they become fodder for those mobs who like to bellow their outrage about, well, something.  You know the sort, they turn up outside courts to shout abuse at suspects in rape and murder cases as they leave in a police van, regardless of whether they have any connection with the victims or not.  In the case of so called journalists like Rachel Johnson, they are just another battlefield in their tiresome 'culture wars', in which women who complain about being inappropriately touched or flashed at by a male TV personality are somehow overreacting as they have been infected by 'wokeness'.  It's all part of their contention that there's some kind of sliding scale for abuse, with lower level sexual harassment being seen as somehow harmless, just a bit of 'larking about'.  The perpetrator might be being a 'bit of a cock', or even an 'obnoxious dick', but still falls short of being a full on sex pest.  Which begs the question, of course, as to where the cut off point lies: at what point do the likes of Wallace cross the threshold from being 'annoying twat' to sex offender?  But hey, at this stage, it's still allegations and he's innocent until proven guilty.  Of sex offences, that is - he's always been guilty of being an pompous, pretentious and  irritating knob end.

The Vampire Happening (1971)

Director Freddie Francis pretty much dismissed The Vampire Happening (1971) as being a 'vanity project' that he mistakenly became involved in.  Watching it, you can see why he formed this opinion, as the film stars the producer's wife, in a dual role, and the script seems largely as an excuse for her to get her knockers out.  Not that I'm complaining about the latter point, as Pia Degermark, a Swedish actress who had appeared in a number of European films, most notably Elvira Madigan (1967), had very nice knockers, but I do like my gratuitous nudity to be part of an actual plot which it can at least pretend to be integral to.  (I've often pondered that there's a whole doctoral thesis to be written on the psychology of film producers married to attractive actresses who like to star them in films where they get naked for global audiences to ogle.  Is it some kind of twisted alpha male behaviour of showcasing their wives to the rest of the male population with the gleeful underlying message of 'Yeah, you can look, but I'm the one who gets to have sex with her'?  Certainly, it is the ultimate expression of the idea of women being 'property' and objects to be displayed and paraded as displays of their husbands' masculinity).   According to Francis, he thought that he'd been hired to direct a horror parody, but quickly found that he had little artistic control over the project with the producer treating it as a 'home movie'.

The resulting film, an international co-production shot in West Germany, fails to work as either parody, comedy or horror, with a script that can never settle on an appropriate tone and performances from the cast that are far too broad to be effective in any context.  While the film's obvious inspiration was Polanski's Gothic horror parody Dance of the Vampires (1967), the script for The Vampire Happening eschews genuine parody of the genre and its conventions in favour of humour more on the level of a Carry On film or a sex comedy.  Indeed, it is very reminiscent of one of those German sex comedies inspired by classic fairy tales - and just as lame.  Interestingly, the plot's central conceit - the confusion of identity between the American actress who has inherited the castle and her undead vampire ancestress - is also vaguely reminiscent of Hammer's Twins of Evil (1971), which must have been shooting at around the same time.  Francis does, at least, manage to give it a professional sheen, with some good photography of the German locations and some occasionally mildly creepy chasing around dark and dank corridors and dungeons.  While undoubtedly conceived as a vanity project to allow Degermark to showcase her, well, assets, the fact is that her performances in the dual roles of actress and vampire aren't that bad.  She had, after all, won the best actress award at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival for Elvira Madigan.   Here, unfortunately, the script doesn't give her much to do, other than flash her breasts and bare her fangs periodically.  Sadly, these aren't enough to save the film which, at an hour and forty minutes, long outstays its welcome.