Clockwork Nazis

I suppose that one benefit of Elon Musk currently being Trump's ass-kisser-in-chief and financial hatchet man is that this might at least distract him from his usual nonsense.  You know what I mean: the rockets to Mars (or usually all over Florida in pieces), the robots, wrecking social media sites, encouraging Nazis, eugenics and the like.  Because I fear that his next obsession might have involved a couple of these 'hobbies' as he tried to develop robotic Nazis.  It just seems like the obvious next step for him, bearing in mind his apparent inability to relate to actual living and breathing human beings and his control freakery.  Despite having developed a passion for extreme right-wing politics, particularly in the UK and Germany, he's already had a serious falling out with Nigel Farage, with the Reform Party leader apparently not meeting Musk's high standards for potential authoritarian dictators.  He just wasn't right-wing enough, refusing to commit the political suicide of embracing convicted mortgage fraudster and violent football hooligan turned rabble rouser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon/Tommy Robinson.  It can surely only be a matter of time before he has a similar falling out with Germany's AfD.  Probably when he finds out that they don't have plans to invade Poland and Russia and subjugate the whole EU under a fascist tyranny, with him as their Führer.  The answer, obviously, is for him to create robots programmed with fascism.  They'd be unfailingly devoted to the cause (and Elon), Hitler salute and goose step perfectly and, best of all, have no moral qualms about sending minorities and political opponents to concentration camps.

Now, you might think that I'm being ridiculous here but, trust me, clockwork Nazis would be a perfectly logical step for someone like Musk.  Not only would they be unfailingly obedient, but in appearance they could encompass the Aryan ideals of physical appearance.  Even now, he's probably got people training AI on Nazi ideology.  Which is maybe why he's effectively turned Twitter into an extremist cesspool, where racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia and just about every form of hate you can think of seems not just to be tolerated, but welcomed with open arms - it is going to form the database for the fascist AI which is going to power his Nazi robots.  Doubtless they'll also use that footage of his definitely non-Nazi salute to train them how to perform the perfect fascist greeting.  But would he stop at creating an army of goose-stepping automatons?  How about those pesky Senators and Representatives of both parties who might try to hold Trump to account and obstruct his most outrageous policies?  Why not replace them with automated look-a-likes?  Or even just create new robot candidates so sophisticated that they can pass for human, who can run against them in primaries?  Before you know, maybe even Trump will be replaced by an AI simulation controlled by billionaire super-villain Musk.  Actually, an AI simulation might actually be a better president than the real Trump.  Certainly, it would surely possess more humanity than the real thing.

Toilet Humour

Is it just me, or have TV commercials really crossed a line in terms of good taste when it comes to certain products?  Things like toilet paper, for instance - we all know what it is for, do we really need ads involving people actually sitting on the crapper?  OK, I know that they've been heading this way for many years now, but it just feels as if they are getting worse.  It isn't just toilet paper, it is bodily functions generally.  I mean, a while ago I had the TV on in the background when, suddenly, I've got someone in my living room bellowing out 'Stubborn stool?' before going on to try and sell me a stool softening product in between shots of sufferers' straining faces as they try to painfully pass a particularly recalcitrant turd.  I was eating, for God's sake!  But, worse than interrupting my meal with thoughts of chronic constipation, the ad was screening in the middle of an episode of The Love Boat, (Pluto has a channel that shows it on a loop - it is one of my 'go to' places for passive, inoffensive, background TV viewing) - a TV show from that Golden Era of seventies and eighties US TV when nobody had a toilet.  Not in their workplace, not in their home, certainly not public ones on the street.  Trust me, that entire ship in The Love Boat doesn't have a single toilet lurking anywhere amongst its hundreds of cabins.  Leaving the question of where people actually went back then?  Maybe in The Love Boat, they just crapped over the side.  Perhaps that's why Starsky and Hutch and The Dukes of Hazzard spent so much time roaring around at high speed in their cars:  they were desperately seeking a secluded place to take a dump.  I know that there's long been a theory that in Star Trek, Kirk, Spock et al just used to beam down to random planets they were passing to relieve themselves.  Doubtless causing all manner of diplomatic incidents with Klingons.

The alternative, of course, is that back then people on US TV simply didn't have normal bodily functions.  After all, not only do they not have toilets and apparently never take a dump or a piss, they never seem to fart either.  Ever seen Captain Stubing on The Love Boat suddenly excuse himself from a conference on the bridge, stick his arse out the door on the port side and let rip in the direction of the bridge wing?  Of course not because, like everyone else on seventies/eighties TV he simply doesn't break wind.  By contrast, on UK TV in the seventies and eighties, toilets were very much in evidence.  After all, we have a whole system of humour based around bodily functions, which we find hilarious.  But toilets, for some reason, are also considered hilarious in their own right by us Brits.  Especially when they aren't being used for their correct purpose: characters flushing unlikely objects, intentionally or by accident, down toilet bowls is a staple for seventies sitcoms.  Blocking a toilet in this way, causing it to overflow, flooding the house, was always a sure way of guaranteeing big belly laughs.  Even better was when somebody stuck their foot, or even better, their head, down a toilet - there was a whole episode of Some Mothers Do Have 'Em devoted to Frank Spencer suffering such mishaps with his brother-in-law's toilet.  Similarly, I recall there being a whole episode of On The Buses devoted to Stan's attempts to install a new toilet in his mother's house and another, if I remember rightly, involving goldfish getting flushed down the pan.  This obsession with the comic potential of toilets wasn't just confined to British TV: the 'Carry On' series had an entire movie - Carry On at Your Convenience - devoted to the subject, for instance, while the rest of the series was permeated with toilet humour.  Even pop stars recognised the comic value of the toilet - why else do you think that Keith Moon kept blowing them up?

Now, you'd think that having grown up immersed in toilet humour, TV ads like the 'Stubborn Stool' one, wouldn't bother me at all.   But that's the point - that this humour quite literally focused on the toilet itself, not the functions it was meant to serve.  Sure, we had plenty of fart jokes and gags about people pissing or shitting themselves in embarrassing situations, but they were never explicit as to the mechanics, so to speak, of the functions involved.  The sort of TV ads I see now take us to a level of specific detail we really don't need to know: far too much information, as they say.  Besides, when it comes to those stubborn stools, the answer is to drink more water.  Really, it is, more often than not, down to a lack of proper hydration.  Believe me, having been forced to drink large volumes of water for the sake of my kidneys for the past few years, I can honestly say that it isn't a problem I have the misfortune to experience any more.

Obssession: A Taste for Fear (1981)

Another film (along with Whirlpool (1970)) that I watched over the weekend without any prior knowledge of the movie.  While I usually like to know something about whatever I'm going to watch, in order to try and avoid watching absolute clunkers, the blind approach can sometimes pay off.  As it did with Whirlpool, which turned out to be an interesting, if rather bleak, early Jose Larraz movie.  Obssession: A Taste for Fear (1981), however, left me with somewhat more mixed feelings.  From the streaming channel's very brief description, I was expecting a giallo of some kind, which it is, sort of, but it mashes this together with several other genres.  The basic plot concerns a mysterious figure who is murdering models involved in a series of S&M photo-shoots, which sounds like a giallo, except that the setting is a futuristic Rome, where porn seems to be mainstream, people drive cars that come straight out of science fiction comics and policemen carry pistols that shoot laser beams.  The plot is pretty thin and lacks any of the twists, suspense and bizarre over-the-top murders (not to mention sex) you'd normally expect from a giallo.  The cast, likewise, is fairly bland, seemingly cast, in the main, for their looks rather than their acting ability (with a couple of notable exceptions).  Ultimately, the film is a triumph of style over substance, with Piccio Raffinini's direction making it all look like a TV commercial or a pop video.

Rome, in Raffinini's vision, is permanently bathed in bright neon colours, often red or pink, with plenty of dry ice providing swirlimg ground-hugging mists outside to provide a noirish feel to these scenes.  The interiors are all brightly lit, open plan and decorated in shades of white.  It's a striking look, creating a memorable vision of an urban tomorrow, which predates Blade Runner's similar vision of a noirish neon-lit future by a year.   Unfortunately, the film fails to find any balance between content and presentation, with the plot and characters feeling perfunctory and under-developed, simply a prop on which the stylish visuals are hung.  The murders themselves aren't particularly imaginatively staged and the attempts to cast suspicion on various cast members unconvincing - for anyone who has seen a few giallos, the real identity of the murderer will be obvious from early on.  As already noted, the cast is fairly bland, but does include Virginia Hey (familiar from Farscape and various Australian soaps earlier in her career), Goia Scola (The Atlantis Interceptors) and Gerard Darmon (Betty Blue, The Good Thief and many others).  While it wasn't quite what I was expecting, Obssession: A Taste for Fear was, nonetheless, a fascinating film to watch, with its combination of giallo, science fiction and sex film, even if its central story was ultimately disappointing.

Whirlpool (1970)

A Danish-UK co-production directed by a Spainard and featuring then populat Page Three model Vivian Neves, Whirlpool (1970), seems like it should be some kind of wild erotic thriller, full of bizarre sex and psychedelia.  In reality, it is a pretty downbeat affair, focused of sex, violence and obsessive behaviour.  Jose Larraz's first directorial credit, the film never quite attains the weirdness of his best known film, Vampyres (1974), with its thrills remaining firmly grounded in everyday reality rather than venturing into the supernatural.  Like most of Larraz's films, Whirlpool was clearly shot on a very low budget, with most of the action confined to a remote cottage and neighbouring woods and a limited cast - indeed, for much of the film there are only three characters present.  Even when other characters appear, they are only cursorily sketched in, existing primarily as dramatic contrivances.  The core of the plot centres on Sarah (Pia Andersson), a photographer edging into middle age, who owns the cottage, where she lives with her adoptive 'nephew', Theo (Karl Lanchbury), an aspiring photographer and Tulia (Vivian Neves), a model who Sarah invites for the weekend, so that Theo can photograph her.  Looming over the three is a fourth, unseen, chatacter, Rhonda, the previous model to pose for Theo, who seems to have disappeared.  The plot unfolds in much the manner one might expect, with Theo hiding a dark secret in his cellar dark room, a strange old tramp wandering the woods and spying on Theo's shoots with Tulia, who is seduced first by Theo - who can't perform one-on-one - then Sarah, before engaging in a threesome (where Theo can perform).  It all builds to a downbeat 'twist' ebding that will surprise no-one familiar with the genre.

What makes Whirlpool stand out from similar films, though, is the level of violence (mainly directed toward women) - with Tulia suffering a sexual assault in the woods by one of Theo's associates, which stops just short of rape - and the amount of pretty explicit (for a 1970 non-porn film) sex, including the afore-mentioned threesome and Tulia and Sarah's lesbian encounter.  Certainly, it was apparently too much for the British censor, as the film was originally released in the UK (under the title She Died With Her Boots On) with twenty minutes of footage, (comprising most of the sex and violence) removed.  Like most of Larraz's work, Whirpool is very decently made, with an excellent use of locations.  The bleak and wintry countryside around the cottage, particularly the woods, become a sinister presence, filled with foreboding, characterised by an ominous quiet.  The outbursts of violence seem even more extreme, staged against the background of the english countryside, a location usually associated with peace and tranquility.  His screenplay is also above average for such a film, if not in terms of its subject matter, then in at least providing its main cast with some half decent dialogue and allowing its story to unfold straightforwardly.  Larraz keeps everything low-key, which once again makes the violence, when it erupts, seem all the more shocking.  While there's nothing really ground-breaking in Whirlpool, it is a decently made, if humourless and stony faced, piece of early seventies exploitation, whose violence is filmed in a way that is still disconcerting, if not shocking.

Nazi Business

He knew what he was doing.  The fascist fuck.  I'm obviously referring to techno jerk in chiel Elon Musk and his Nazi salute at the recent Nuremberg Trump inauguration rally.  Yeah, I know that there have been plenty of apologists for the arsehole explaining how that wasn't a Nazi salute, or that he didn't mean it to look like that.  Not to mention all the usual right-wing lackeys on social media posting photos of various non-Nazi politicians caught with their arms outstretched, accompanied by those emojis with shit-eating grins, as if they've done something clever.  Except, of course, that a momentary freeze frame capturing an individual's arm extended as part of a wave to a crowd isn't the same thing as a billionaire backer of right-wing extremists deliberately thumping his chest then extending his arm, the palm of his hand open.  Twice.  I know there are some people trying to claim that he was actually giving a Roman salute but, FFS, everyone knows that this was a gesture co-opted by fascists in the thirties and which is now exclusively associated with them, most specifically the Nazi party.  (Another case of the Nazis irrevocably tainting and ruining something by association - just look at the bad name they've given to goose-stepping and jackboots, for God's sake).  But to get back to Musk, of course he knew what he was doing - he certainly hasn't actually denied that it was a Nazi salute, instead trying to brush off critics by trying to mock them for characterising anyone they don't agree with as a Nazi.  

But that doesn't answer the question - was it a deliberate Nazi salute?  To which the answer is an unequivocal 'yes'.  I mean, a South African who grew up during the apatheid regime and who has vocally backed right-wing extremists in Germany and the UK makes a gesture that looks like a Nazi salute and we're supposed to think that it is an accident?  He's trying to push the boundaries, to see what he can get away with - witness also his slew of tweets involving Nazi 'puns' following the Nazi salute - as part of a strategy by the extreme right to 'normalise' fascistic policies and attitudes.  Damn it, he bankrolled the election campaign of a president who seems to be keen to implement the old Nazi policy of 'Lebensraum', with Canada, Greenland and Panama apparently top of his list for annexation.  Again, the apologists will tell you that 'hey, this is just Trump talk!  You shouldn't take him seriously and engage your sense of humour to see when he's joking', except, of course, that Trump is dangerously unpredictable and obsessive.  Moreover, he's now repeated his intent to seize the Panama canal and Greenland on several occaisions and, reportedly, alreadt attempted to coerce the Danish PM into selling the US Greenland with the threat of tariffs if he doesn't get his way.  I can't help buy feel, though, that his other target, Canada, is currently being given an opportunity to pre-empt Trump.  They should seize the moment as the US deploys its army to the border with Mexico in its war on unarmed immigrants, Canada should imvade from the North and take control of New England in order to offer its inhabitants the benefits of proper health care.  There's a fair chance that Trump won't do anything to retaliate as the states making up New England usually vote Democrat.

The Persecution of Youth?

Somewhen before Christmas I started going through stuff that I'd recorded on my DVR, but had never gotten around to watching.  Amongst these was the Hammer film Fanatic (1965), albeit in a US print, titled Die, Die My Darling.  This was a relatively early example of what is apparently known as the 'Psycho Biddy' sub-genre, a type of film that stars some fading female star considered by Hollywood to be too old to play leads any more, in a convoluted grand guignol style plot, emphasising the horrific elements.  This particular example starred Tallulah Bankhead and featured all of the tropes that the Hammer version of this sub-genre would re-use in subsequent variants - namely the crazy old female relative who imprisons and psychologically tortures a girlfriend of their son/grandson/nephew they deem unsuitable, in their rambling old house.  This one co-stars Stefanie Powers as the emperilled girl, a role she was pretty much too repeat in a subsequent Hammer entry in the sub-genre, Crescendo (1969), this time with Magretta Scott (although Joan Crawford was originally sought for the role) as the weird old lady.  It also threw in crazy twin .sons for good measure.  This sub-genre enjoyed a spurt of popularity during the sixties and - to a lesser extent - the early seventies, kicked off by Robert Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), which had starred Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

But just why did Aldrich's film spark a sub-genre at this particular time?  The pat answer, of course, is that, by the sixties, there were plenty of ageing female film stars around, ripe to be exploited by producers taking advantage of traditional Hollywood's sexism and ageism to squeeze their stardom one last time by starring them in vehicles they wouldn't have touched with a barge pole during their prime.  I can't help but feel, though, that there was more to it than that and the popularity of these films, particularly the Hammer variation with young female heroines, is inextricably linked to the period in which they were made.  The most obvious sub-text is one of age's jealousy of youth - how else can one interpret scenarios where older women played by actresses who, in their youth, had been known for their beauty, imprisoning and persecuting attractive young women.  (Young women who are usually also threatening to usurp them as their younger male relative's main female interest).  Bearing in mind that the sixties saw the rise of youth culture in the west, with the young increasingly idolised in the form pop performers, film stars and fashion models, it shouldn't be any surprise that this sub-genre should flourish at this precise moment in time.  Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that those actually making films at this time were predominantly middle-aged, jealously trying to preserve their position against a rising tide of younger talent while at the same time trying to exploit it onscreen.  They doubtless found this sub-genre of film, featuring the persecution of youth by representatives of the old established order quite satisfying, playing to their own fears and insecurities.  Then again, I could be reading far to much into what, at the end of the day, are simply exploitation films.

Private Parts (1972)

Had it been made ten years later and credited David Lynch as director, then Private Parts (1972) would probably have been hailed as minor classic of dark cinema.  But back in 1972 audiences clearly didn't know what to make of it and first time director Paul Bartel's name, at that time, held no cachet for them.  The biggest problem doubtless lay in the fact that it was marketed by its distributors as a straightforward horror film when, in reality, it is more of the sort of macabre, quirky black comedy that Bartel was to become known for directing.  No doubt other audience sectors were equally disappointed to find that, despite the suggestive title, Private Parts wasn't a porn film.  Not that it doesn't include some sex and nudity, not to mention a large dose of voyeurism, but these elements certainly don't run along the lines expected from the adult movie genre.  Likewise, while there are horrific elements - several murders, including a decapitation and a young girl being stalked by an unseen assailant, hiding in the walls of the hotel where much of the action takes place - these don't provide the mainspring of the plot.  The run down hotel itself - mainly occupied by dead beats and weirdos - also helps give the impression that Private Parts is going to settle into familiar horror tropes - a haunted house story, perhaps.  But it isn't ghosts that haunt the hotel, but rather a very human menace who, it turns out, is more akin to the disfigured protagonist of The Phantom of the Opera, forever skulking in cellars and spying on the occupants of the rooms above.  But this phantom figure's disfigurement is, as it turns out, psychological, rather than physical, wearing not so much a mask to hide their true self, but an entire alternative identity.

For a film running around the ninety minute mark, there's a lot going on in Private Parts meaning that it rarely flags, with a constant stream of new developments and twists to keep the audience's attention.  The various elements also keep viewers guessing as to exactly what is going on in the hotel - is there a serial killer at large, responsible not just for the two onscreen killings, but also the disappearance of two young girls formerly resident there?  Or is something supernatural going on?  Is the hotel's owner, the heroine's eccentric aunt, involved?  Just why does another resident, a fashion photographer, tape a picture of the heroine's face to his blow up sex doll, before injecting it with his own blood?  To Bartel's credit, you are never quite sure where it is all going, with the film starting with a runaway teenage girl falling out with her friends and taking refuge in the crumbling LA hotel owned by her aunt, before seguing into a slew of bizarre developments, as bodies and weird sexual antics pile up. The dilapidated hotel which provides the main setting is used to great effect, lending the film an air of faded seediness, you can almost feel the damp and mildew through the screen.  The residents (those that we see) match the hotel in dilapidation and strangeness, including a middle aged man who alternates between dressing as a priest or in black leather, a confused old woman who once owned the hotel and an enigmatic photographer.  The heroine's aunt, with her pet rat, her habit of wiring up the bunch of keys hanging in the kitchen to the mains and hobby of attending funerals in hope of photographing the soul leaving the body, not to mention her views on female morality, is equally off -kilter.  Even the heroine, a naive young girl with voyeuristic tendencies is shown to be manipulative and less than honest in her dealings with both family and friends.

The theme of duality of nature is, of course, central to the film, running through the heroine, the priest/black leather bondage guy and culminating in the film's mysterious antagonist.  Even the hotel itself conforms to the theme, with its external appearance and entrance hall still clinging to the last vestiges of its former respectability and opulence, in contrast to its decaying interiors.  The cast, while not exactly star-studded, give performances far stronger than is usual for a low budget film.  Ayn Ruymen, as Cheryl, the heroine, ensures that her character never becomes entirely dislikeable, despite the way in which she uses various characters, portraying her as an insecure and confused teenager, hopelessly confused by sex and relationships.  Lucille Benson is outstanding as her batty yet imposing Aunt Martha, while Laurie Main is memorably odd as the reverend.  The main criticism that can be levelled at Private Parts is its unevenness of tone, veering between suspense and bizareness, before finally settling into Bartel's more characteristic black humour at the climax.  If you are looking for a straightforward horror film, then Private Parts is likely to disappoint, but if you are interested in the more bizarre and off beat by ways of schlock cinema, then you'll find it an enjoyable experience.

Artificial Entertainment

I think that it is time that the entertainment world fully embraced AI and just handed over creative activity to the computers.  No, really, just hear me out on this - we really would be better off if we just let AI write all of our books and film and TV scripts and replace all of our flesh and blood actors with AI avatars.  Once you've done that then you might as well just hand over the direction, editing etc, of films and TV to AI as well.  OK, I know what your objections are going to be: that the end result of this would be to render the creative industries entirely derivative, turning out bland, indentikit projects, barely distinguishable from each other.  But let's face it, most books, films and TV are already like that, despite apparently being created by humans.  So, would you really be able to tell the difference?  But what are the benefits of removing the human factor, I hear you ask.  Well, I'll tell you - it will save us from disappointment.  I mean, how many times have you really enjoyed the work of a particular author, really invested in their writing, recommended it to friends and family, extolled its virtues on social media, only to have the rug pulled from under you when it is revealed that they are actually some kind of raving sex offender?  Not only do you have to burn all of their books that you have in your collection, but you have to go on social media and totally cancel them, eating your own words of praise as you do it.  Plus, your judgement will forever be called into question by your family once it becomes clear that you've been recommending books written by a gross pervert to your thirteen year old niece.  

You only have to look at the fall out from those recent allegations of sexual impropriety made against Neil Gaiman - the trauma it is causing former fans is terrible to behold, as they rush to denounce him and cover themselves by claiming that they always thought there was something dodgy about him, threatening to crush each other in the cancellation stampede.  (I feel that I should point put here that, as I write this, these still are just allegations against Gaiman.  He hasn't been charged with anything, so I add the usual reminder that, under our system of justice, people are innocent until proven guilty.  Personally, I'm not a fan and I have no idea whether any of the allegations are true, but I do feel in an awkward position as I've given his books and graphic novels to my teenaged great nieces as birthday and Christmas presents in the past).  Imagine, though, if all of his body of work had instead been written by an AI called 'Neil Gaiman' - a disembodied collection of algorithms incapable of any kind of sexual misconduct.  There'd be no risk of fans having to go through this sort of trauma, would there?  That's the beauty of AI: it might lack any spark of originality, but it also isn't ever going to embarrass you by turning out to be a rapist, racist, misogynist or anti-Semite.  (And if it did develop any such tendencies, then a swift tweak of the algorithm would sort it out).

The same applies to performers.  Imagine if Russell Brand had been created by AI - just imagine how much safer women would feel.  If Klaus Kinski had been an AI creation, then countless actresses and other women would have been spared sexual molestation on Italian film sets.  Sure, he could have been programmed to be a sex offender by some twisted tech type, but he'd only have been able to molest AI women, not real ones.  I'm guessing that this is the main attraction of AI actors for studio chiefs and producers: no risk of having your box office ruined when your star goes psycho and starts assaulting people, no expensive re shoots to replace the star accused of shagging horses and no shelving of complete films when it comes to light that your leading man is prime suspect in a series of cannibalistic murders.  Likewise, AI directors won't be blowing budgets on vanity projects, or sulking after their film is re-cut by the producers.  But, just as with writers, the main benefits of AI actors will be felt by fans, who will never again have to worry that their hero is going to be revealed as a drunken wife beater or a drug addled Nazi sympathiser.  Parents could rest easy that the idols whose posters their darling daughters pin up on their bedroom walls won't turn out to be predatory peadophiles, flashers or simply all round sleaze balls.  So come on, embrace the AI revolution!  It will improve your mental health no end as you find that you no longer have to invest so much time and energy into cancelling that person you formerly idolised. 

The Car (1977)

Despite the fact that it is a hugely derivative film, there is something about The Car (1977) that lingers in the memory.  Obviously inspired by the enigmatic, homicidal truck of Duel (1971) and the shark of Jaws (1976), (both directed by Steven Spielberg), relentlessly stalking the seas for prey, The Car tries to transplant the same basic scenario to the sort of small and remote desert town setting beloved of fifties science fiction B-movies.  Unfortunately, director Elliot Silverstein isn't as adept as Spielberg when it comes to building up and maintaining the suspense and tension.  He isn't helped by a script that never really feels as if it knows where it is heading, spending far too much time on sub-plots involving the town's residents and not enough on properly defining and developing the titular threat, an apparently driverless car that keeps targeting other road users.  Clunky dialogue and some correspondingly clunky performances from the cast don't help, either.  But it is the car itself which remains the film's most problematic element.  The script can seemingly never really make up its mind as to its nature.  Now, there's nothing wrong in refusing to give definitive explanation of a cinematic threat of this nature - Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), for instance, steadfastly refuses to explain why the eponymous creatures suddenly turn against man, with the continued enigma enhancing the threat that they represent.  Similarly, Duel never explains the motivations of the truck's mostly unseen driver, but this never lessens the menace of the truck or the tension that its appearances generate.  But The Car tries to have its cake and eat it, floating and hinting at all manner of explanations for the title menace, but never settling on any one, until the ending half heartedly giving a vague demonic apparition in the explosion accompanying its apparent demise.

This inability to define the threat (in Duel, we know that the truck has a driver - we see his arm at the window - but this doesn't lessen the threat or undermine the audience's identification of it as a rampaging force of evil, likewise the shark in Jaws is clearly flesh and blood, but this doesn't lessen its menace), means that the car itself is highly inconsistent as a threat throughout the movie.  At times it seems to be a supernatural threat - its inability to enter consecrated ground, for instance and its ability to seemingly disappear into thin air - while at others it seems a very real and solid threat, which obeys the laws of physics and mechanics - its attacks on pedestrians and its appearance in the protagonist's garage, for example.  It is at its most intriguing and menacing when it appears to act as a living being in its own right - reacting violently to being insulted or rebuked, stalking its victims, taunting the protagonist by cracking open its driver's door, but not enough to see who or what is inside.  Which is where the car also becomes the film's biggest strength.  Not only does it have a terrific physical presence thanks to George Barris' customisation of a Lincoln Mk III, its grill and lights combining with its lowered stance to give the impression of a glowering, crouched predator, but some of its appearances are filmed in a such a way as to be suspenseful and menacing.  Particularly effective are the in car, point of view, shots as it stalks victims (most notably the two cyclists at the beginning), taken through its tinted windscreen (the yellowish colour of the tint hinting at a sulphurous atmosphere).  Unfortunately, these also confuse the viewer as to the nature of the car, implying the presence of someone behind the wheel, observing the victims.

The car also has one particularly spectacular and memorable kill, when it crashes through a house in order to get at a victim.  This is also one of the best shot scenes in the film, with the victim on the phone, framed in front of a window, through which the audience can see its lights appear and approach the unsuspecting victim.  Moreover, the scene is doubly jolting as, without warning, it abruptly kills off a key sympathetic character.  If the film had had more scenes of this kind and had been equally as ruthless with regard to other characters, then The Car might well have been a far more effective horror film.  As it is, it is far too long, badly needing to pare down those talky scenes in the town and focus more on the car itself and its murderous antics.  Perhaps the most surprising thing about the film is its failure to develop its central idea as any kind of analogy for the rise of the American obsession with the automobile and/or its detrimental effects of society and the environment.  Such things wouldn't necessarily have had to be rammed down the audience's throat, some subtle irony or satire would have been as effective, but The Car steadfastly ignores these potential themes altogether, leaving it as a an entirely superficial cinematic experience.  Nonetheless, the car itself remains memorable, having far more screen presence than any of the human cast, its appearances creating a genuine sense of unease and the film's basic idea has considerable potential that is never realised.  Ultimately, the car is a great movie monster, deserving a far better cinematic vehicle than The Car. 

2000 AD. Prog 174, 23 Aug 80

 

Borag Thungg, Earthlets!

This is the other issue of 2000 AD that I recovered from that box in the spare room.  This one is about a year older than the one I posted the other week, dating from August 1980 rather than August 1981.  Apart from 'Judge Dredd', who - as ever - was occupying the colour centre page spread with an episode of 'The Judge Child', it has a different slate of stories from the later issue.  This one features an instalment of 'The Stainless Steel Rate Saves the World', an adaptation of the Harry Harrison novel of the same name, an episode of 'The Mind of Wolfie Smith', the teenager with psychic powers, 'The VCs' a future space war story that clearly owed something to both Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers' and Joe Haldeman's 'The Forever War' and the denouement of 'Robo Hunter in Day of the Droids'.

Interestingly, the cover doesn't illustrate a current story, instead depicting a scenario from 'Nemesis the Warlock', (I have to confess, that I was never really a fan of this strip, but I'm clearly in the minority here, as it ran, in several instalments, for quite a while and now has cult status), and ties into the 'Fabulous Pull Out Booklet' that started in this issue.  This, in turn, was a tie in to the 1980 Moscow Olympics (which ended up being boycotted by the US in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, resulting in the GB team winning more medals than was usual in that era).  'The Galactic Olympics' booklet featured various futuristic sporting events, presented in a satirical vein.  The first few pages are printed on the back cover and inside back cover.  The masthead identifies the comic as being 2000 AD and Tornado, 2000 AD having absorbed fellow IPC comic Tornado some months earlier.  Such amalgamations were something of a tradition in the seventies, with new titles constantly being launched and, if failing to gain a large enough readership, being combined with a more popular title.  (Failing established titles also went the same way - I originally only ended up reading Valiant because it had absorbed TV21, which I'd been reading every week).  In reality, only a handful of stories (never more than three) would transfer from the absorbed comic into the new combined title.  By the time of this issue, only 'Wolfie Smith' remained from the Tornado line-up, with both 'Blackhawk' (which had had its setting changed from Ancient Rome to outer space via an alien abduction, in order that it fit in with the science fiction theme of 2000 AD, and 'Captain Klep' having been dropped).  Only a few weeks after this issue, 'Wolfie Smith' would also conclude and Tornado vanished from the masthead.

Splundig Vur Thrigg!

Divine Judgement?

Inevitably, a lot of the coverage of the wildfires in California has focused, at least here in the UK, on those celebrities who have had their houses burned down.  I have to say that I find it hard to feel that sympathetic to people who probably have several other luxury homes across the US and probably internationally and are wealthy enough to eventually rebuild their California homes.  I'm sure that it is terribly traumatic for them, but I'm sure that it is far more traumatic, not to mention catastrophic, for the large numbers of regular people who have lost their homes and belongings.  Of course, in some cases, I was secretly sniggering at some celebrities having lost their houses.  Particularly Mel Gibson.  Because, you know, if I was as religious and God fearing as he claims to be, then I might just decide that having my house burn down while I'm on some bald idiot's podcast spewing forth yet more of my crazy ideology represents some kind of judgement from God.  Maybe, just maybe, he's trying to tell Mel that he should dial back on some of his apparent beliefs - less of the racism, anti-Semitism and sexism, perhaps. Less banging the drum for Trump and crazy right-wing politics, too, maybe.  Because what other conclusions could the truly righteous draw from such a calamity?  

But the likes of Gibson, who like to get on their high horses about religion and morality always seem tone deaf to these things. It isn't that they don't believe in divine retribution, it is just that they seem to think that are so tuned in to what God really thinks that it won't happen to them.  Just to other people.  Like those gays, when they got struck down by AIDS in the eighties and nineties.  (Not that I'm saying that homophobia is one of Mel's particular prejudices, he's too busy disapproving of other groups to have time for the gays).  Or people who lose their homes to floods, hurricanes and tornadoes elsewhere in the US, (particularly if they are in states that voted Democrat).  But when it happens to someone like Mel, well, it has to be someone's fault, rather than divine judgement.  Most specifically, in the matter of Mel's house burning down, then it must be the fault of the (Democratic) Governor of California.  Clearly he's been getting those 'Jewish space lasers' that raving lunatic and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green believes in, to target the properties of God fearing , red blooded, real (but Australian born) Americans like Mel Gibson.  Although he apparently missed fellow right wing crackpot James Woods' house, despite initial reports that it had burned down, which had me dancing with glee.  (Look, I have the utmost respect for Woods as an actor, he's given some truly great sleazy performances, but as a human being he's a complete arsehole - and not just because of his politics).  So, obviously, al these wealthy celebrities' houses burning down couldn't possibly be divine judgement, if not for the vile and hateful opinions espoused by some, then for their embracing of Mammon.  Quite ridiculous.  Almost as ridiculous as the idea that it might have had something to do with climate change.  It's definitely the Jewish space lasers.

Crimson: The Colour of Blood (1976)

Just as there are certain actors, directors and producers whose names on a film's credits are an indication that you are about to see a certain type of production, the same is true of certain production companies and distributors, who are instantly recognisable for dealing in certain genres.  Hammer is an obvious example - despite producing films in a wide range of genres, they will always be associated with Gothic horror, just as Republic are with serials, Monogram with cheap B-movies and Universal with monsters.  Likewise, whenever I see Eurocine credited as a producer or co-producer of a movie, I know that I'm set to experience some bizarre continental concoction of schlock genres.  In this respect, Crimson: The Colour of Blood (1976) doesn't disappoint.  A French-Spanish co-production, it crosses a number of genres and stars Paul Naschy (billed as 'Paul Nash' on the English language credits tacked onto the English sub-titled French language version I recently saw).  Despite feeling somewhat like a Jesus Franco movie, it is in fact directed by his fellow Spaniard Juan Fortuny, who had his own catalogue of schlocky B-movies.  Crimson opens as if it is going to be a gritty Euro crime thriller, with Naschy attempting to crack a safe in a jeweler's shop, only for the alarm to go off as a result of a fellow gang member triggering an alarm by snatching a necklace from a display case.  In the resulting getaway from the police, involving car chases and shoot outs, Naschy suffers a bullet wound to the head.  The gang's doctor tells them that Naschy needs to go to hospital, but the gang's leader, Henry, is naturally reluctant to go down this route.  The doctor then remembers an old colleague, a brilliant professor who fell out with the medical establishment due t his unusual experiments.  So the gang and the doctor decamp to the professor's remote mansion.

At which point the film takes a turn into science fiction territory, with the professor declaring that Naschy needs a brain transplant (in the English sub-titles, at least) and that the gang need to find him a freshly severed head.  He warns that such a procedure might have side effects and that Naschy might not quite be himself afterward - well, obviously, if he has someone else's brain then, in effect, he'll be someone else.  Of course, there are complications, the professor's hands have been badly scarred in an accident, leaving him unable to do the surgery himself, but luckily he has trained his wife in surgery.  The gang decide to obtain the donor brain from their arch-enemy, 'The Sadist', who happens to have the right blood group.  Just to make out sure the Prof and his wife actually do carry out the surgery, the gang hold their young daughter hostage.  The film then takes a turn into black comedy, as Henry's two sidekicks succeed in killing 'The Sadist', but neither can bring themselves to decapitate him, instead deciding to put his body on a railway lime and wait for a passing train to sever the head.  As it turns out, what the Professor is proposing isn't a full brain transplant, but rather using a part of the new brain to replace the damaged part of Naschy's (which makes slightly more sense).  With the operation done and Nascy recovering, Henry can't resist taunting his rival's former gang by sending them their deceased leader's head, sparking a gang war between the two groups.  While the rival gang search for Naschy and co's whereabouts, torturing the doctor and Naschy's girlfriend along the way, Naschy begins to recover, but finds himself subject to alien thoughts and urges.  In particular, he starts becoming violent toward women, ('The Sadist' having earned his name from his predilection for getting rough with girls).  

Inevitably, Naschy attacks and tries to rape the Professor's wife as the gangs shoot it out in the grounds of the house.  Eventually, the police turn up and gun down Naschy as he staggers outside.  Overall, Crimson is a curious film, never quite making up its mind as to whether it is a science fiction, horror or gangster film, with the latter elements pretty much dominating the film, or, indeed, settling on a tone, with its jarring excursions into black comedy amidst the torture and violence.  That the thriller elements eventually prevail is no surprise, as much of director Fortuny's previous experience had been in this genre and this was the material he was clearly most comfortable with.  The science fiction elements seem somewhat arbitrarily tacked on, with the whole business of Naschy's identity crisis feeling rather perfunctory and never really explored.  The film is, in effect, a variation on Universal's 1940 film Black Friday, in which mild mannered academic receives part of gangster Bela Lugosi#s brain in a transplant and gradually becomes a gangster himself.  The problem that this version has is that its protagonist was already part of a gang of violent criminals (who think nothing of kidnapping little girls in order to coerce people into doing their bidding), making it hard for the viewer to see how having part of a sadist's brain and consequently his sadistic urges, actually makes him any worse, with his subsequent actions hardly seeming surprising, brain transplant or not.  Indeed, the film's complete lack of sympathetic characters - Naschy, his gang and their rivals are violent criminals, the doctor's a broken down, weak willed drunk while the Professor is blinded with regard to the morality of his actions by his fanatical devotion to his research - makes it difficult for the viewer to ultimately care what happens to any of them.  

Obviously made on a limited budget, Crimson looks very much like a typical Gallic policier, all moody autumnal colours, drab interiors and muted lighting, while the Professor's basement lab comes over as something out of a Monogram mad scientist B-movie. Fortuny moves it along at a reasonable clip, with enough action in the form of gunfights and car chases to stop it ever becoming tedious, but never really making enough out of its more bizarre aspects.  Most criminally, though, it doesn't give star Naschy enough to do, keeping him comatose for a large part of the film and affording him only the most modest of evil rampages at the climax.  Crimson, nonetheless, is an enjoyably eccentric slice of Euro exploitation, albeit never really doing full justice to its horror elements and thereby never quite fulfilling its potential for mind-boggling weirdness.

The Idiot With the Digital Delusion

So, another week of techno jerk in chief Elon Musk doing his impression of a really crap super-villain.  According to some (completely unconfirmed and sketchily sourced) reports, he's now plotting how he can bring down the UK's democratically elected government - most specifically how he can somehow unseat Starmer as PM.  Well, good luck with that.  As I've noted here time and again, the UK's political system makes it extremely difficult to get rid of a government with a decently sized majority.  Bearing in mind the size of this government's majority, I don't see any prospect of it losing a confidence vote in the Commons, meaning that, regardless of any destabilising attempts by outsiders, it is likely to run the full five year term of this parliament.  (Which is why all those polls the right-wing press like to run supposedly showing how unpopular Starmer and the government - conducted exclusively amongst their own neo-Nazi readers, of course - are utterly meaningless at this point in time as we won't be going to the polls any time soon).  Even if Starmer could, somehow, be removed from Number Ten, what does Musk expect to happen?  Because all that would happen would be that he'd be replaced by another senior Labour politician, unlikely to be any more sympathetic to Musk's right-wing fantasies than Starmer.

But we shouldn't be surprised at Musk behaving in this way, as if he has the power to topple governments in foreign countries and bend their political systems to his will, regardless of local democratic processes.  What else could be expect from a man whose father was behind the smuggling ring providing South African diamonds to Ernst Stavro Blofeld back in the early seventies, in order to power his space laser, with which he held the world to ransom.  You've surely heard of that - they made a fictionalised account of it called Diamonds Are Forever (1971).  Now, I know what you are thinking - didn't Ian Fleming write the novel it was based on back in the fifties?  Well, it might have shared a title, but the film ditched the plot, replacing it with a new, ripped from the headlines, story.  Before you say it, I know that Blofeld had appeared as a character in Fleming's books back in fifties as well.  But, as was often the case, he used the name of a real would be super villain - back then Blofeld was pretty much a two-bit minor gangster, however, spurred on by the notoriety given him by Fleming's novels and his portrayal in the subsequent films, he decided to enter the big leagues and hatched his space laser plan.

His father's involvement with Blofeld obviously inspired Elon Musk to bankroll his own super villain in the form of Donald Trump.  Musk, however, has clearly concluded that he wants to be the villain himself, rather than being the shady sidekick providing the finance.  Which is why we need to be wary of all those rockets he keeps trying to launch - believe me, one day one of them is going to put a space laser into orbit.  He's obviously learned the lessons of Blofeld's failure - his new position in Trump's government will allow him to starve the US's intelligence services of finance, so that they can neither detect nor defeat his scheme, while his attacks on the UK are obviously designed to try and neutralise the threat posed by MI6's Double-O section.  Not that I'm worried that he'll succeed as I've no doubt that Musk will be every bit as crap as a super villain as he has been in his other ventures: the catastrophic mismanagement of Twitter, exploding rockets and electric cars that catch fire and/or crash when driving themselves.  Need I say more?  Most crucially, of course, he has absolutely no understanding of human beings and the fact that the majority of them neither share his own opinion of his own genius or his enthusiasm for undermining democratically elected governments.  We like being able to choose our own leaders, even if, as far as Musk is concerned, they are the 'wrong' governments.

The Invisible Ray (1936)

One of a number of vehicles devised by Universal to team up their new horror stars Karloff and Lugosi, The Invisible Ray (1936) opts for a science fiction scenario rather than the Poe-inspired Gothic horror of The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935).  Surprisingly ambitious for a horror film of the era, The Invisible Ray's action takes place across the globe, encompassing locations in Africa and Paris, amongst others, although, in reality, never leaving the Universal backlot.  This constant shifting of location gives the film a rather episodic feel, almost like a serial, opening like a mad scientist picture, before becoming a jungle adventure and finally a horror-revenge movie.  (Indeed, director Lambert Hillyer would later direct the cult favourite Batman serial for Columbia in 1943).  Obviously, the film's big selling point to contemporary audiences was the teaming of Karloff and Lugosi.  Their billing on the opening titles gives an indication of the way in which their respective careers were already heading:  Karloff's name is billed above Lugosi's with the actor identified solely by his last name (the only other actor of the time afforded such billing was Garbo), with the added suffix 'The Uncanny'.  Lugosi, by contrast, is not only billed second, his name below Karloff's, but his full name is used and is in a noticeably smaller font size that his co-star's.  This marks the point at which Lugosi found himself being relegated to what were effectively supporting roles to Karloff's star turn, a pattern repeated in subsequent team ups like Son of Frankenstein (1939), Black Friday (1940) and The Body Snatcher (1945).

Perhaps most disconcerting, The Invisible Ray sees Lugosi cast as the sympathetic character, a reasonable scientist devoted to humanitarian research,  whereas Karloff is the paranoid, ostracised rogue scientist, who eventually succumbs to the effects of his latest discovery, goes mad and becomes a literal monster.  Karloff's initial research - which has been decried by the rest of the scientific community - actually seems perfectly reasonable: he is studying light from distant stars, believing that this will allow him to see into the past.  While demonstrating his latest experiments to a group of scientists, including Lugosi, he sees in the ancient light a meteorite striking the earth millions of years ago, landing in Africa.  Believing that such an ancient meteor might contain rare elements otherwise unknown on earth, he and the other scientists team up to find it.  Karloff discovers the meteorite, which contains a radioactive element that he calls 'Radium X'.  Not only can its energy be directed as a death ray, but it also has healing properties in small quantities.  Naturally, Karloff ends up being exposed to the meteorite's full power and ends up glowing in the dark, with his touch proving deadly to all living things.  Despite Lugosi devising a serum that, with daily doses, can return him to normal, Karloff, fuelled by the knowledge that his wife has fallen in love with another man, starts losing his mind, convinced that, with his 'Radium X' powered treatments for the sick, Lugosi is trying to steal credit for his discovery.  Inevitably, he stops taking his treatment regularly and starts using his deadly touch to kill off other members of the expedition, before eventually falling to his death and exploding.  

While not quite a top drawer Karloff/Lugosi entry, The Invisible Ray is still an above average horror/science fiction film of its era, still highly watchable.  Lambert Hillyer might have been primarily a B-movie director (especially of B westerns), but he moves the film along at a reasonable pace, despite its somewhat halting, episodic structure.  Overall, despite utilising the familiar Universal backlot sets seen in countless other of their pictures, the film has decent enough production values, well above those of the B-movies that Lugosi, in particular, would subsequently find himself embroiled in, (Karloff always managed to contrive to appear in bigger budgeted and better appointed B-movies in addition to prominent character roles in A pictures).  The film's biggest weakness, perhaps, is its lack of a truly striking monster - Karloff's glowing madman is, in its way, quite striking, but nowhere near as memorable as Frankenstein's monster or the Mummy, both of which he had recently played. 

Confidential Sources?

There's been much furor today over the announcement that Facebook was to end third party fact checking, as part of Zuckerberg's attempts to cosy up to Trump.  (Apparently, third party moderation is too open to political bias, whereas the 'community' fact checking system they are proposing as a replacement isn't - a theory which flies in the face of established facts on the subject).  The irony of this sort of reaction from the UK's media is that, increasingly, most of their reporting is barely fact based.  OK, in many cases, it is entirely fact-free.  Most of their reporting seems to based upon a journalist's access to 'confidential sources' who must always remain anonymous.  The implication being that these sources are somehow 'connected', insiders, be it in politics, business or whatever, ho have access to actual information.  Personally, I find them of highly dubious quality.  Indeed, I wonder if they exist at all.  Or, are they like those 'In-The-Know' sources endlessly referenced by football websites, who supposedly have the inside track on player transfers and managerial sackings and appointments, but are invariably wrong and usually turn out to be the assistant groundsman's sister's boyfriend's second cousin's hairdresser, who once cut the boot boy's hair.  I mean, bearing in mind that both the police and security services in the UK seem to want to rely upon the public for intelligence gathering, forever urging us to ring confidential phone lines to report on any suspicious 'foreign-looking' types we see buying the New Statesman or The Guardian, are the media now following the same model?

Could it be that the likes of The Daily Mail and Express are  down to using nosy neighbours as sources?  (Let's face it, The Sun has been doing it for decades while The Daily Star hasn't run a story that wasn't complete fiction since, well, the day it first rolled off the presses).  After all, for stories abut horrendous crimes, who could be a better source for speculation about the victims and suspected perpetrators than that bloke from down the street who spends his days peering at houses through binoculars, logging his neighbours' every movements?  "Yes, I have it on record here, that I definitely saw Mr Smith from Number Nine, regularly going in through the back door of Number Sixteen to have sex with Mrs Jones in her living room - they never drew the curtains - in the weeks leading up to her murder."  Even better, nowadays we have those voyeurs who set up cameras all all over their properties, not to protect them against burglars, but to spy on the neighbours - they have footage that could rival any surveillance operation by MI5.  Then there are those bloody doorbell cameras which are becoming ever more prevalent, again ostensibly so that you can see who is knocking on your door without opening it, or when you aren't at home, but in reality capturing footage of every passer by.  

Now, you might say, this is all very well as a source for information on news stories that involve ordinary people in ordinary neighbourhoods, but how could it ever be an effective replacement for high level sources on stories involving the great and the good?  Well, what if that nosy neighbour had been adamant that it wasn't Mr Smith going in Mrs Jones' back door before she was murdered, but Liberal Party leader Ed Davey?  Or Prince Andrew (a more likely candidate)?  Not good enough for an arrest, perhaps, (although with the current state of the UK police, you never know), but certainly good enough for the press to smear the allegation across their front pages.  What if he reckoned that it wasn't Mr Brown from Number Forty's dog shitting on Number Twenty Two's lawn, but the Archbishop of Canterbury, (presumably taking time off from covering up sex abuse cases)?  Again, I strongly suspect that that might make the front pages, too.  You can also guarantee that, if they get their observations into the papers, even anonymously, for the smaller stuff, before you know it, these nosy neighbours will get a taste for it and start expanding their operations.  They'll start hanging around parks where politicians take their afternoon strolls, in the hope of overhearing a confidential conversation on a sensitive subject, or standing on milk crates to peer through the windows of motels where some minor league celebrity (or someone who looks a bit like them) has gone for an illicit assignation.  For all we know, some of those supposed high-level political sources are actually simply the nosy neighbours of the politicians involved, busy listening at connecting walls with upturned glasses, or watching them on their security and doorbell cameras.  Who needs facts in journalism when you can have much more interesting rumours, instead?

2000 AD, Prog 227, 29 August 1981

 

Borag thungg, earthlets!  Amongst the stuff I found in that box of old magazines from the spare room that I investigated before Christmas, were a couple of issues of 2000 AD comic from the early eighties. Quite how, or why, those two issues survived, out of God only knows how many hundred I must have had at one time, I have no idea.  Anyway, this is the 29 August 1981 issue (or 'Prog' to use the publication's own nomenclature) of the weekly comic.  Like most British comics of the era, it was printed on cheap newsprint, complete with ragged edges to the pages, where they had been cut from the continuous newsprint roll they were produced on.  Also in common  with other British comics of the time, only the front and back covers and the centre spread were printed in colour.  For this issue, the cover illustrates the concluding episode of 'Meltdown Man', a strip about an eyepatch-sporting Snake Plissken-type ex-SAS guy who finds himself projected, via a nuclear explosion, into a dystopian future world, where a human elite ruled over human-animal hybrids created by genetic engineering.  The centre spread is devoted - as it usually was at this time - to the first two pages of the  'Judge Dredd' strip, in this case an episode of the 'Judge Death Lives' story, illustrated by Brian Bolland (one of the best, in my opinion, artists working in British comic strips at this time).

The rest of the issue is filled out with episodes of  'Strontium Dog', 'Nemesis the Warlock' and future sport story 'The Mean Arena'.  There was also the regular readers' letters page - 'Nerve Centre' - presided over by The Mighty Tharg, a two page feature on the TV version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was then showing on BBC2, with the back cover devoted to readers' illustrations of various 2000 AD characters.  The inside back cover is taken up with two announcements related to the comic itself: an advert for the upcoming 2000 AD Annual 1982 and an announcement that, from the next issue, 'Rogue Trooper' would be replacing 'Meltdown Man'.  Another inside page consists of adverts for two other of IPC Magazine's  publications: Roy of the Rovers and Shoot!, the former being a football-themed comic featuring the titular long-running character, the latter a football themed magazine aimed at teenagers.  'Roy of the Rovers', of course, had originally been a strip in another football comic, but became sufficiently popular that he got his own comic, something that 'Judge Dredd' was on the verge of emulating.  Indeed, such was Dredd's popularity by this time, that his name is featured on the cover, with the comic's full title being 2000 AD Featuring Judge Dredd during this period.  Whilst I loved 2000 AD in my mid-teens, I have to admit that I hadn't been reading it right from the beginning - at that time I was still an Action! reader, but jumped ship when that title was subsumed by Battle Picture Weekly.  At the end of the day, I preferred to read a comic devoted entirely to science fiction than one devoted entirely to war stories.  (Ironically, I'd shifted allegiances to Action! after Valiant had been absorbed by Battle, preferring a mix of adventure stories to war stories - and I was only reading Valiant because it had been amalgamated with TV21).  So there you have it, a fairly typical issue of 2000 AD from the early eighties.  Splundig Vur Thrigg!, as the Mighty Tharg might say.

Easing into the New Year

Well, I'm trying to ease into the new year.  I've never understood those people who simply plunge on into a new year on 2nd January, immediately packing away the festive season as if it had never happened and trying to go straight back into their regular routines.  Let's face it, this time of year is bleak and depressing enough as it is - it's cold, dark and damp - without subjecting yourself to the shock treatment of trying to pretend that you can just snap back to business-as-usual after the Christmas break.  Which is why I like to try and enjoy all twelve days of Christmas in order to ease into the new year.  I really used to resent it when employers expected me to cut short my break directly after New Year - I simply wasn't ready to go back to work, still being in festive mode.  There also used to be a backlash in the press against those of us who chose not to go directly back to work and instead use some more of annual leave to get the full twelve days off.  Thankfully, this seems to have faded away somewhat, perhaps as a result, thanks to the Covid lockdowns and working from home, reduced hours, etc., everyone's but used to the idea that more time away from the workplace, enjoying ourselves, is actually a good thing.  Of course, in my current state of semi-retirement, where work is a choice rather than a necessity, being plunged back into the workplace prematurely in early January, is no longer a concern.  Nonetheless, I find myself still clinging to the festive season for as long as possible.

At least I've managed to get myself back into some kind of regular posting patterns here on the blog and even managed to get my first post of the year up on The Sleaze.  I'm afraid, though, that getting back up to speed with posts about schlock movies here is going to take some time, (despite managing two such posts this week), as, over Christmas, I've been watching a lot more 'mainstream' movies than usual - many of them rewatchings of old favourites from my DVD collection.  So, it will take me a while to get back into my usual schlock-watching schedule and build up a reservoir of stuff to write about.  Hopefully, I'll be aided in this by the various dodgy Roku channels I regularly watch, (one of which has just resurrected itself after vanishing late last year, allowing me to watch a typically near-incoherent Jess Franco film yesterday), which constantly throw up all manner of obscurities.  But long sought after obscurities turn up unexpectedly in the most unlikely places - I found Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You (1970) and The Love Machine (1971) on Daily Motion and YouTube respectively last year for instance, having searched fruitlessly for the latter in any media for years.  Even terrestrial TV can turn up obscure gems - Talking Pictures TV constantly screens films, even exploitation films, that haven't seen the light of day for years.  I've also found Legend a good source of movies that seemingly vanished from regular channels decades ago.  So, there you have it, my plans for easing into 2025, in as leisurely a fashion as possible.

The Curious Female (1969)

The Curious Female (1969) is basically a typical late sixties nudie movie, except for its presentation, styling itself as a film-within-a-film.  The actual 'nudie' part is a soft core sex comedy called 'Three Virgins', which is enclosed within a futuristic framing device of having it secretly watched by a group of young underground movie enthusiasts.  In between the reels of 'Three Virgins', this future audience discuss the film and the strange twentieth century morality and sexual norms it depicts, to satirical purpose.  The whole business of low budget sex movie production is also satirised, with the young woman presenting the film telling her audience that one reel of the film, supposedly chronicling a crucial plot point, was censored at the time of its release and is lost, while confiding to her male co-host that, in reality, it was never filmed because the producers ran out of money.  The Curious Female itself was, of course, shot on a low budget, with its future world depicted in the simplest and most basic ways possible - all we really see is a whitewashed cellar with lots of futuristic curved spaces, populated by young people wearing what look like togas.  We're told that in this future world everything is controlled by a central computer, which has outlawed monogomy and ancient sex movies like 'Three Virgins'.  The dialogue elaborates this world a little more, telling us that at age thirteen girls are, by order of the computer, relieved of their virginity by an approved 'old man'.  (We aren't told if thirteen year old boys get similar treatment from either approved 'old men' or 'old women').

The 'Three Virgins', which we see episodically throughout the framing story, plays out like a regular sex movie of the era, with its college campus setting, mix of female leads, comic asides involving a computerised dating agency, (we never learn if the 1969 computer is an ancestor of the central computer of the future, but the implication seems clear - some of its assumptions while matching up dates seem just as eccentric as the rules enforced by the future machine, including matching up an adult man with a little girl).  The film-within-a-film's plot involves a client of the agency looking for virgins - there are apparently only three left on the books, although the computer later becomes confused and thinks that a woman from Virginia is a virgin.  One girl wants to remain a virgin until she is married, but her bastard of a boyfriend wants only one thing and later gets it from her mother.  When he finally relents and marries her, it turns out that he's still a selfish bastard in the bedroom.  Another is escaping a home situation where she is constantly threatened with violence from her father and rape from her uncle.  The third finds that the client looking for a virgin is a wealthy aesthete who simply wants her as an accoutrement,  reasoning that any woman still a virgin at her age isn't interested in sex and therefore won't bother him with any nasty physical demands.  Consequently, she starts having frenzied sex with a variety of men.  

Overall, The Curious Female isn't exactly a great, or even groundbreaking film, but it is quite enjoyable while its playing.  Although clearly made with limited resources, it is actually pretty decently made, not looking too threadbare, with decent photography and sound quality and direction, from Paul Rapp, which, if not inspired, is at least competent.  The cast, which includes Angelique Pettyjohn, are also decent enough, putting in more than passable performances, with the main female leads playing dual roles in both framing story and film-within-a-film.  All in all The Curious Female is an agreeably slightly offbeat take on the late sixties nudie movie.