Black Samurai (1977)

Al Adamson tends to be associated with those films he somewhat obsessively kept re-editing and reshaping - sometimes incorporating footage he'd shot years before - sometimes re-releasing them as new movies, under different titles, years apart.  Those and the films he shaped from other people's footage, incorporated into footage he'd newly shot.  But he also directed low budget films more conventionally, sometimes as a 'director-for-hire'.  Black Samurai (1977) is one such film.  A  Kung Fu-James Bond rip off crossover vehicle for Jim Kelly, the film is ostensibly based upon the first of a series of novels by Marc Olden, the script also included 'additional ideas' from at least one credited contributor.  Which is why it feels akin to a patchwork quilt, abruptly jumping between scenarios, with no consistency of tone.  To be fair, Adamson does his best with the material, presenting a film that it is at least professional looking and reasonably well paced, but the script inevitably means that it has a somewhat jerky and sporadic feel, the story never unfolding particularly smoothly.  The script is clearly trying to emulate the successful Bond formula of presenting a series of fast moving action set-pieces to carry the plot forward.  Where it falls down is in failing to provide sufficient expository scenes in-between to keep the audience in the loop as to what is actually going on.  In some respects, this approach does succeed in emulating the feel of some Bond movies of the era, where the action keeps moving from one location to the next, with minimal explanation, frequently leaving the viewer asking 'why is he going there, now?' and trying to make sense of the latest developments.

Black Samurai was clearly also influenced by the relatively recent Bond film, 1973's Live and Let Die, with its theme of voodoo being used as a front by the villain, to terrorise and keep in line both enemies and subordinates.  It even includes a scene of an agent being killed by snake used in a voodoo ceremony, just to ram the home the similarities.  (Clearly designed to cash in on the then Blaxploitation movie boom, Live and Let Die subsequently proved influential on the genre it was ripping off, with a number of Blaxploitation pictures picking up on the voodoo elements).  Despite the Bondian influences, there is no way that Black Samurai would ever be mistaken for the genuine article.  Most obviously, it is clearly made on a very limited budget, with its 'exotic' locations, apart from some establishing shots of Hong Kong', being confined mainly to California and Florida.  The plot is also far too simplistic - master villain holds daughter of high-ranking Japanese diplomat (also DRAGON agent Jim Kelly's girlfried) hostage in an attempt to get his hands on the 'Freeze Bomb' plans - and the villain himself, 'The Warlock' simply not interesting or sophisticated enough to make a worthy opponent for Kelly, with the voodoo angle never really properly exploited.  What the film does have is a series of very lively fight sequences, choreographed by Jim Kelly himself, in which Kelly takes on a small army of henchmen, (including a number of dwarfs).  These are undoubtedly the film's highlights and are almost worth sitting through the whole film for.  As well staged as the fight sequences are, though, Black Samurai still isn't anything like Kelly's best movie.  That accolade probably belongs to Black Belt Jones (1974), which boasts a far stronger script and plot.  Still, as a piece of exploitation cinema, Black Samurai is mindlessly entertaining, if entirely derivative.  The following year Al Adamson would collaborate with Kelly again, once more on a Bond-infuenced action film, Death Dimension (1978), but this time actually featuring two genuine Bond stars in George Lazenby and Harold Sakata.

The Criminal Classes

It's the UK tabloid press' worst nightmare, isn't it?  A man drives a car into a crowd celebrating Liverpool's Premier League win, injuring scores of men, women and children and it turns out that he isn't Muslim, an immigrant, illegal or otherwise, or just foreign and non-white.  You can still feel the shock waves passing through Fleet Street as they are forced to report the news that he is actually white, British, a company director and happily married with two kids. Worst of all, he's a former Royal Marine!  The horrors of it all!  He wasn't even motivated by some wacked out religious fervour or dangerous leftist ideology - he was just off his face on drugs.  "He was a lovely family man!" say the headlines, quoting his neighbours.  The sense of incredulity that somebody respectable and middle class could do such a thing is palpable in the reporting.  It always amazes me that, despite the evidence of history, this country's press - and its citizens, the press seem to believe - still think that criminals are somehow 'different', that you can tell they are criminals just by looking at them.  The more heinous the crimes, the more 'different' they are expected to be.  It's a throwback to the Victorian notion that there was an entire 'criminal class' of society who were easily identifiable by their physical characteristics.  But the fact is that they look just like us.  Even the quietest, most respectable looking of people can turn out to be a psychopath.  That's how they get away with it - they hide in plain sight.  The only murderer I've ever met (he wasn't a murderer at the time, that came a bit later) was just about the meekest, most insignificant looking character you could imagine.  Yet, a while after I met him in the course of my then job, he murdered a woman.

Getting back to the issue in hand, you can guarantee that if the suspect in this appalling business in Liverpool hadn't been white, had been a Muslim or an immigrant, then those headlines would have been very different.  Rather than the sense of bafflement that pervades them, it would have been naked hatred, screaming for retribution and trying to implicate that every other Muslim and immigrant in the UK somehow shared responsibility for the crime.   What this reveals is the tabloids wilful refusal to try and explain criminality in any terms other than race and wealth.  Only the poor and/or non-white (which, to them, implies non-Britishness, also) can be criminals.  If you are well off, white, living in a nice house with a family and respectable job, you can't possibly be a real criminal.  Sure, you might cheat on your taxes, break the speed limit, engage in some mild fraud by falsifying your expenses claims, but those are middle class crimes.  In fact, they aren't really crimes at all, are they?  They're just misdemeanours and really shouldn't be punishable with anything other than a slap on the wrist.  Certainly not prison.  That should be reserved for real crimes.  This utter hypocrisy is why their claims about 'two tier justice' are so insidious - it's 'two tier' alright, but not in the way they like to report it.  It's instead about entitlement - if you are entitled enough, whether it be through race, social class or wealth, in the logic of the press, you shouldn't be punished too harshly and preferably should be let off altogether.  Because, of course, in their cases crime is always a one-off aberration, rather than a lifestyle choice, as it is for the oiks, the foreigners and the non-whites.  

Exploring the Mundane

One of the problems of various web-based services these days is their insistence upon you creating an account and signing in to view content.  The idea being that they can try and harvest your data, but also to 'tailor' content, so that everything you look at is analysed by their algorithm in order to serve you up more of the same.  Of course, in practice this means that, over time, the range of content you get served up narrows significantly, in order to meet your 'interests'.  Conversely, if you do click on something outside these parameters, you end up being served endless similar content, even if that click was merely a one-off on your part and you have no interest in seeing more of the same.  With the result that you don't click on anything different for fear that you'll find your content feed full of videos about Nazis, the joys of naturism or worse.  Which is why, on occasion, I like to look at You Tube, unsigned in, on a different browser than I usually use, in order to see what I get served when I'm just some anonymous mook.  A lot of it is surprisingly similar to what I see signed in - the result of the searches I make in these sessions and the videos I look at while not logged in.  But there's also a load of videos served up speculatively.  These include an alarming number of videos from those 'citizen news' sites that proliferate these days, all of them pursuing far right agendas with varying degrees of subtlety.  Then there are the celebrity videos and worse still, the fake celebrity videos produced with AI.  Not to mention the 'breast feeding' videos which are clearly intended to cater to fetishists who have a thing about women using breast pumps, (it is also a good way to get around restrictions on adult content, as they can claim that the bared breasts are all in the name of education).  

Lately, though, I've been seeing a lot of stuff from 'urban explorers'.  You know, the sort of people who like to 'explore' (or as I like to call it, 'trespass') derelict sites, ranging from deserted buildings, to scrap yards to apparently abandoned private houses.  They wander around with their video cameras desperately trying to convince the viewer that what they are doing is somehow 'edgy', 'daring' and 'perilous', creeping around as if they are in a haunted house, exaggeratedly jumping at supposed mysterious sounds and the like.  It's all utter balls.  The reality, of course, is that there is nothing at all mysterious about the places they break into, (because, let's not be coy here, that's what they are doing), they have simply been abandoned for boringly normal reasons - businesses closing down, institutions moving to new premises, people passing on and their heirs having no interest in the properties they leave, (some might even have been evicted and the property is awaiting clearance before being sold or demolished), or even structural damage which makes them unusable.  I suppose that these videos are a reflection of our increasingly small world:  back in the day there were always new frontiers to explore, places that no 'civilised' man had ever set foot.  But nowadays, everyone has been everywhere, probably on a package tour and posted pictures of it on their Instagram account.  Even the remotest places have now been overrun by hikers on 'gap years' and the like and livestreamed to the entire world.  So, instead, we've been forced to look inwards for adventure, to the new wildernesses which seem to spring up in the midst of our urban sprawls.  Where once intrepid explorers ventured into the 'Dark Continent', braving ferocious wild animals and savage natives, they instead now venture into abandoned shopping malls and factories, braving security cameras and the odd bored security guard.  

The trouble is, though, that none of these venues is particularly interesting, there are certainly no new discoveries to made by exploring them.  There might well be danger, though, if they are derelict and structurally unsound.  There also don't seem to be that many of them.  At least, judging by the videos I've seen posted on You Tube, that is - I've seen the same venues come up multiple times, crawled over by various different 'urban explorers;.  There's a 'scrap yard' full of 'abandoned' old trains, for instance, that seems to have an incredibly high footfall.  In reality, though, and despite the efforts of the video makers to conceal its location, this is actually a storage yard belonging to a heritage railway in the North East of England, where locomotives and rolling stock are stored pending restoration.  Sure, a lot of the stuff there looks in pretty poor condition, but unrestored locos, especially steam locos, always look like piles of rust before being restored.  They have, after all, usually been rescued from a scrap yard, then sat, sometimes for years, in sidings awaiting funding for their restoration.  (As most are either privately owned by individuals or societies, generating funds is a lengthy business and the restoration itself is carried out part time, as funds permit).  So, as ever, the presentation of such sites by the 'Urban Explorers' is highly misleading.  Not that they care - they are just looking for clicks on their monetised videos.  Which is why they keep on 'rediscovering' the same sites and objects, over and over again, pretending each time that they are making some incredible discovery,  (There is, for instance, a Finnish steam locomotive, stranded in a wood in the UK - it was one of a number bought and imported to the UK for unclear purposes as Finland uses a broader track gauge than the UK - which regularly turns up both online and in local newspapers, heralded as a 'mysterious' and 'baffling' find)  But hey, as long as they can make money from these videos, the 'Urban Explorers' will keep on trespassing and 'discovering' these sites, playing on the ignorance of their viewers.

The Human Duplicators (1965)

The most surprising thing about The Human Duplicators (1965) is that it isn't a United Pictures Corporation (UPC) production.  With its mix of espionage and science fiction, low production values and use of past their prime, but still recognisable actors, it certainly looks and feels like one of the low budget science fiction films produced by UPC around the same time.  Even the sets and exteriors used look similar.  Undoubtedly, the similarities are in large part due to the fact that Human Duplicators was written by Arthur C. Pierce, who also wrote the UPC films, which included Dimension 5 (1965) and The Destructors (1966).  These latter two films are very similar to Human Duplicators in terms of their low budget portrayals of secret intelligence organisations, even down to the individual characters, who feel interchangeable between the three films.  The Human Duplicators, however, has the highest science fiction content - while the time travelling of Dimension 5 and the death rays of The Destructors are ultimately simply plot devices, secondary to their espionage plots, here the science fiction elements are central to the film.  

An Italian-US co-production, distributed by the Woolner Brothers, who handled US distribution of a lot of Italian exploitation films at this time, The Human Duplicators has the 'Intergalactic Council' send Dr Kolos (Richard Kiel) to earth in order to facilitate their plans for colonisation.  His job is to take over the cybernetic research and lab of Dr  Dornheimer (George MacCready) - he's one of those maverick scientists with a huge, remote, house with a private lab - and start turning out android duplicates of various scientists, politicians etc, in order to aid the alien takeover.  Starting with Dornheimer himself.  Opposing Kolos is NIA agent Glenn Martin (George Nader), who becomes suspicious of Dornheimer when one of the body of one of the duplicated scientists is found near his house.  The plot does take a few twists and turns, with Kolos questioning his orders after developing feelings for Dornheimer's blind niece, refusing to duplicate her and destroy the original, the android Dornheimer rebelling and deciding to cut the aliens out and stage an android takeover of the earth instead and Martin gets duplicated, his android double sowing confusion with the NIA, before the real Martin breaks out and saves the day.  Somewhat more ambitious in its scope than the UPC films it so resembles, Human Duplicators nevertheless brings nothing parrticularly new to the table, its ambitions undermined by its poverty row budget and flat direction.  Its main point of interest is in seeing Richard Kiel in a leading role - in which he is actually OK, giving one of the film's more animated performances and succeeding in conveying the character's growing reservations over his task.  It is also mildly surprising to see George MacCready, a character actor who was still getting roles in A-list movies, mixed up in such a low budget affair.  Reasonably enjoyable while it is playing, The Human Duplicators just doesn't have enough to make itself linger in the memory afterwards.

Dr Frankenstein on Campus (1970)

Dr Frankenstein on Campus (1970) is one of those cases where you can't help but feel that somewhere, lurking inside a cheaply produced exploitation film, is the germ of a good idea that, with a better script and direction, could have made an intriguing film.  As it stands, the film is a somewhat frustrating watch, continually promising more than it ever delivers and never properly developing interesting seeming plot developments.  Worst of all, it throws away what should have been the film's central idea as a last minute plot twist.  A low budget Canadian production, Dr Frankenstein on Campus (also known as Flick) gets off to an interesting start, opening with a POV shot as medical student Victor Frankenstein engages in a fencing duel with a rival, in a sequence deliberately staged to give the impression that this is going to be another period-set Frankenstein film.  But it quickly transpires that we are in (the then) present day and Frankenstein promptly finds himself kicked out of Ingolstadt University, (which might be in Germany - East or West is unclear - or Transylvania, all seem to be used interchangeably in the film), travelling to Canada to resume his studies there.  Victor, it seems, is a pretty straight and buttoned up character, it seems, who finds himself standing out like a sore thumb in the university's student counter culture.  He does, however, form a bond with a professor doing brain research - most specifically mind control via implants - and starts a relationship with a girl involved with the student newspaper.  Victor, it appears, has advanced his research into mind control further than his mentor and, after finding himself caught in the middle of student protests against computerisation (!), ends up once more being kicked out, this time after being photographed by the student newspaper holding a joint, (which he was simply holding for a friend).

At this point, (more than half way through the movie), the scenario finally begins to move more firmly into horror territory, as Victor uses his mind-controlling implant to turn a martial arts expert friend into a murderous human robot.  A killing spree ensues, with various people who have crossed Victor - student activists, student newspaper journalists and the Dean - being killed.  (Victor had previously demonstrated his device on his girl friend's pets, forcing them to fight to the death - the cat eventually killing the dog.  Despite witnessing this, at no point does said girlfriend ever seem to suspect Victor's involvement either in the killings, or their Karate chopping friend's odd behaviour and frequent memory lapses).  Finally deciding to get rid of his girlfriend as well, Victor sets their friend to killing her in an art gallery, but fate intervenes and first Victors mind-control remote device is destroyed, breaking his control over the friend, then, accidentally, he takes an apparently fatal fall down a stair well.  But as a crowd gathers around his prone form, his body, quite literally, begins to fall apart at the seams, revealing that he was actually an artificial creation, his friends left pondering who had created him.  It is then revealed that, (surprise, surprise), it was the professor, who had been controlling Victor all along with his own mind control device which, with a shrug, he tosses in a bin as he strides away from the gallery, pondering the idea of rebuilding Victor again in order to continue his experiments.  

While Victor's true nature had been hinted at throughout the film - his refusal to take his clothes off, even when making love to his frequently naked girlfried, his protestations that 'Frankenstein; was a work of fiction and his name merely coincidental and that Frankenstein wasn't the monster, but rather its creator, not to mention the business of his crushing a mechanical Frankenstein monster toy the other students use to mock him (a prefiguring of his own demise) - it never becomes the plot's main thrust.  Which is a pity, because it is the film's best idea.  But it instead chooses to avoid properly confronting the issue of who is the 'real' Dr Frankenstein on the college campus, in favour of endless footage of student parties and protests - all of which go on far too long, slowing the film's pace down to a crawl.  It doesn't help that, overall, the film is very scrappily made, its low budget all too apparent, with several key exterior scenes staged on pretty obvious interior sets, very variable acting performances, undistinguished camerawork, poor plot development and pacing, with too many long talky scenes dominating the film, despite not actually moving the plot along much.  The most interesting parts of the plot - Victor's revenge and the final revelations - feel rushed and barely developed.  Now, to be entirely fair, the version I saw was seemingly taken from a truly terrible VHS transfer, possibly an off air recording, with multiple tracking problems, which doubtless made the film look, quality wise, far worse than it actually was.  Nevertheless, it is probably significant that Dr Frankenstein on Campus proved to be the first and last feature for its director, Gilbert W Taylor, whose direction, while not actually bad, is pretty dull and uninspired.

While the campus setting was a popular one for youth-orientated films on the late sixties and early seventies (and Dr Frankenstein on Campus was aimed at the drive-in audience, going out on a double bill with Night of the Witches), this film's depiction of the milieu misses the mark completely.  Quite apart from the fact that most of the university's students seem to be in their thirties, it's characterisation of student protests and student activism are laughable.  While, in the real world sixties and seventies student protests invariably focused on contemporary issues like the Vietnam war, race equality, women's liberation and so on, in the film's university, the best thing that the students can seem to find to get angry about is the issue of the increased use of computers!  While, obviously, that served the purposes of the plot, with the professor's sinister secret experiments proving they were right to be worried, it nevertheless renders the depiction of the protestors ridiculous and divorces the film's action from the real world.  (It seems clear that the film's makers were aiming at some kind of 'social relevance' but undermine their efforts with the way in which they depict their fictional student protagonists).  Yet, despite all of these criticisms, Dr Frankenstein on Campus still isn't a complete loss.  Not only does it have that intriguing, never properly developed, underlying concept, but it also boasts an interesting performance from Robin Ward as Victor, making the character suitably creepy, his emotional responses to situations always seeming somewhat off-kilter, as if they are programmed responses rather than genuine emotional displays.  It also has a fair amount of nudity, principally from Victor's girlfriend, (her attraction to him remaining a mystery throughout the film).  Sadly, none of these things are enough to lift the film overall above the average and it isn't hard to see why it has fallen into obscurity rather than becoming a cult classic, (despite having all the ingredients for the latter).

Some Thursday Thoughts

'Glory, glory, Tottenham Hotspur...'  Well, that's one thing lazy media pundits will have to stop using to beat us Spurs fans with - those seventeen trophy-less years are over.  It's always puzzled me, though, as to why they fixated on that fact as if it somehow was unique amongst Premier League clubs: a badge of dishonour to be worn in shame.  After all, Crystal Palace's FA Cup win this season marked their only trophy ever.  Not to mention their League cup victory being Newcastle's first trophy for seventy odd years.  But I guess that they simply aren't Spurs, who, for a dew seasons, had the audacity to consistently achieve Champions League qualification at the expense of one of the press' beloved 'top four' clubs.  As for the furore amongst ex-players, managers and partisan sports journalists as to the fact that winning the Europa League qualifies Spurs for next season's Champions League despite sitting near the bottom of the league after a disastrous, injury ravaged campaign, well, I've got news for them, the Europa League and the prize it gives the winner isn't decided on domestic league results, but rather on performances in the actual competition itself.  Despite sitting low in the Premier League table, Spurs and Manchester United, regardless of what those pundits think, earned the right to contest the Europa League final by being the most consistent clubs in that competition.

But Spurs winning the Europa League hasn't been the only thing going on this week - we've had yet more of the 'Madness of King Trump' to contend with, of course.  Namely, that weird and disturbing Oval Office meeting with the South African president.  I don't know about anyone else, but if I was in a meeting with the Tangerine Twat and he asked for the lights to lowered, before whipping out a remote, switching on the TV and announcing that he was going to show a video, then I'd fear the worst: that I was about to be subjected to his favourite porn movie.  Probably, bearing in mind the company, one involving some white-on-black action.  A white guy doing a black girl of course, as the other way round would doubtless be considered 'unnatural' by any self-respecting MAGA moron.  An inversion of the natural order - as they see it - of white male dominance.  Doubtless, at some point in this video, the girl would get 'grabbed by the pussy'.  Thankfully, Cyril Ramaphosa was spared this and instead subjected to one of Trump's trademark rambling discourses, this time on a supposed 'genocide' of white farmers in South Africa.  A 'genocide' that most sane people agree doesn't exist.  A pity Trump hasn't seen fit to subject Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to a rambling discourse on the very real genocide unfolding in Gaza...

Dracula Today?

Watching the 1930 and 1979 Universal productions of Dracula back-to-back the other day, (you'd have thought that they'd have released a new version in 1980, for the fiftieth anniversary of the original, but I guess that studio PRs were less savvy back then), it struck me again that the time is surely right for a radical topical reinterpretation of the story.  With hordes of illegal immigrants - many from Eastern Europe - if we are to believe the likes of Reform UK, arriving on British shores in boats, then a story about a mysterious man from Romania washing up here after a shipwreck, has surely never been more relevant.  Obviously, in a modern reworking, Dracula wouldn't be sailing to the UK on a regular merchant vessel like the 'Demeter', but instead would try sneaking in by night aboard a small boat.  Perhaps that could be a good opening - a small rubber boat washes ashore with all of its occupants dead through blood loss.  All, that is, except for a large black dog that jumps ashore and runs off before anyone can catch it.  (I know, he'd still have to find a way of getting his coffin lined with Transylvanian earth into the UK, but maybe he's had it strapped under a lorry coming across on a ferry, or something).  Once established in the UK, he could set up a series of dodgy business fronts, (Turkish barbers, Asian supermarkets and the other sorts of businesses that are apparently used for money laundering), employing illegal immigrants on below minimum wage level pay and avoiding tax via dodgy accountancy schemes.  His economic bleeding of the UK through this network could mirror his actual bleeding of the British population.  Instead of creepy old Carfax Abbey, he'd obviously be ensconced in a luxury penthouse in some fashionable part of London.

But where would the anti-immigration fanatics like Nigel Farage fit into this modernised interpretation?  Of course, they'd doubtless like to see themselves cast as the heroes - the fearless immigrant/vampire hunters who, although ridiculed by the mainstream media as cranks are, in reality, the only ones who can see the truth.  The problem with this scenario is that their ilk actually have a pretty bad record of accepting large sums of money from those dodgy Eastern European billionaires they seem to admire so much.  So, if a guy claiming to be a Romanian count offered to make sizeable financial 'donations' to their political parties, then I could see the likes of Farage becoming the Renfield character - in thrall to the count and eating bugs as everyone else think he's going insane - rather than the Van Helsing character.  The latter was, of course, a weird old foreigner in the original novel, so maybe that would still be appropriate in our updated reimagining of the story - some kind of swinging Dutch EU Commissioner for the Occult, perhaps, who uses cannabis rather than garlic to ward off vampires.  Or maybe, irony of ironies, the authorities finally realise that the only person who can help them is a refugee Congolese illegal immigrant who still practices traditional African magic which, rather than Christianity, which has been diluted and corrupted by capitalism, can ward off vampires.  

There have, of course, been a number of attempts to produce contemporary versions of Dracula, but none, in my opinion, have really succeeded.  None of them ever really got to grips with properly integrating Dracula into the modern world and finding suitable modern analogies for the various tropes and trappings of the original narrative.  Hammer had a pretty decent attempt with The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), with Dracula masquerading as a powerful property magnate, but they still insisted on him turning up in full vampire regalia to do the evil stuff, thereby, at a stroke, making him seen anachronistic and completely out of place in the contemporary world.  It would seem more logical nowadays, with current levels of media scrutiny on the wealthy and celebrities, rather than arrive openly and buy ostentatious and expensive properties which would surely attract attention, the count would prefer to sneak into the country undetected and operate as a shadowy presence, never exposing himself to the threat of publicity.  So the refugee route would make a certain degree of sense, as would the exploitation of illegals immigrants and use of innocent-looking but crooked businesses as fronts.  The rest writes itself, really.

The Castle of Fu Manchu (1968)

The Castle of Fu Manchu (1968) - the last and least of the five 'Fu Manchu' films starring Christopher Lee and produced by Harry Allan Towers - starts as it means to go on: with a chunk of footage recycled from previous films.  The whole of the pre-title sequence, with Fu Manchu revving up his power supply to dangerous levels as he tries to remotely sink a passenger liner, is lifted from Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), while the scenes of the liner sinking after hitting Fu Manchu's artificial iceberg are, aptly, lifted from A Night to Remember (1958), about the sinking of the 'Titanic'.  The borrowings don't end there - part way through the film Fu Manchu destroys a dam, depicted via a huge chunk of stock footage taken from Campbell's Kingdom (1957) - although only seen in long shot, both Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker are both recognisable in this footage.  These borrowings pretty much sum up Castle of Fu Manchu, which has a dog eared, overly familiar look and feel to it - like a secondhand paperback you feel sure you must have read before, even though the title and author are unfamiliar.  The main thrust of the film concerns Fu Manchu's attempts use a new freezing process he has stolen from a scientist to hold the world to ransom, with the sinking of the liner an opening salvo.  Which all seems pretty similar to the sound wave device he had in Brides, (with which he also destroyed a passenger liner).  But the sinking of the ship overloads his power supply, destroying his headquarters, (in both Brides and Castle, unsurprisingly as it's the same footage, even down to the bit where one of his assistants - played by Burt Kwouk - tries to stop him and is shot).  

The bulk of the film involves Fu Manchu trying to perfect the instant freezing process, for which he needs a new base - which he obtains by taking over the castle of the governor of Anatolia by force.  He also needs the help of the process' inventor, so kidnaps him.  He has a weak heart, though, so needs a heart transplant, for which purpose Fu Manchu kidnaps a top heart surgeon and his assistant, with the donor heart being provided by one of Fu Manchu's acolytes.  All of which inevitably gives the film a halting, episodic feel.  As ever, Nayland Smith and Dr Petrie are on his trail and also soon turn up in Turkey.  It all culminates with Smith infiltrating Fu Manchu's base (again - he did the same thing in Brides), releasing the prisoners and setting off the by now familiar explosive ending, with Fu Manchu's face appearing above the smoke as the words 'The World Shall Hear From Me Again' are intoned by Lee.  Thankfully, the world didn't hear from him again, as the abject critical and box-office performance of Castle of Fu Manchu ensured that a projected sixth entry in the series was abandoned.  Its poor reception was hardly surprising: not only was the whole concept badly dated by the late sixties, (let alone the seventies, with the movie only getting a UK release in 1970), with the whole idea of a white actor pretending to be Chinese seeming increasingly both ludicrous and offensive, but the film itself is very lazily put together by director Jesus Franco.  Perhaps, working on his second Fu Manchu film for producer Towers, Franco had simply lost his enthusiasm for the subject, not to mention his inspiration.  There's certainly  none of the usual verve or eccentricity one would normally expect from this director's output - even his previous entry, Blood of Fu Manchu (1968), with its female assassins with deadly poisonous kisses and an interlude involving a colourful Brazilian bandit played by Ricardo Palacios, had felt quirky and exhibited some originality.

Like all Harry Allan Towers films, Castle of Fu Manchu was an internation co-production, with locations and cast largely dictated by the origins of the finance and which countries didn't currently have arrest warrants for Towers in force.  (He was accused of a multitude of crimes, from living off of immoral earnings to espionage.  As far as I'm aware, no charges were ever brought in any of the cases).  In this case, the West German finance explains the fact that much of the supporting cast are from that country, while the Spanish money accounts for director Franco (who also appears in an acting role, as a Turkish police inspector) and a smattering of Spanish and Italian actors (many of the latter appeared in Spanish films), most notably Rosalba Neri, (who, for once, doesn't take all of her clothes off).  The presence of Lee, Richard Greene (making his second appearance in the series as Nayland Smith) and Howard Marion Crawford (as ever playing Dr Petrie), ensured an English-language release and probably British money.  The Turkish locations are very colourful and atmospheric and are well-used by Franco, but for large parts of the film, Barcelona unconvincingly stands in for Scotland, London and parts of Istanbul.  What's clear watching Castle of Fu Manchu is that by this fifth entry, the series had completely run out of steam, with scriptwriter and producer Towers having exhausted all of his ideas on the previous four films and having no idea of how to develop the franchise.  Indeed, Lee's Fu Manchu, Greene's Nayland Smith and Crawford's Dr Petrie frequently seem peripheral to the action, each vanishing for significant periods of time and Lee and Greene only briefly appearing on screen together.  Even when onscreen, Lee's Fu Manchu seems content to let others commit the depravities he would, in previous films, have gleefully presided over himself.  The result, along with the episodic format of the script, is to give the film an unfocused feel as the plot is advanced by supporting characters, often minor supporting characters, rather than the leads.  It's notable that, of the five films, only the first three regularly turn up on UK TV, with the fourth only getting intermittent late night outings and this entry, to the best of my recollection, never turning up on terrestrial TV.  Which pretty much sums up the relative merits of the films. 

The Circus Comes to Town

The circus has come to Crapchester!  Again.  They were here last year, as well, but this time they've been given a better pitch in the park across the road from me.  Last time they were on the smaller green, behind the trees, where the kids usually do their after-school football skills classes.  This year, though, they get to pitch their tent on the main green.  To be honest, it's pretty disappointing to look at: it's just a tent and some caravans.  No sideshows full of freaks or cages full of animals.  It's one of those animal-free circuses.  Wokery gone mad.  The lack of animals is disappointing as it means that I can't run through the park, waving my hands and shouting 'The lions are loose!  Run for your lives!  The lions are loose!', in the hope of creating mass panic.  I'd quite like to see those bloody joggers and dog walkers who clutter the park up desperately trying to climb trees for safety, or hiding behind the climbing frame in the kiddies' playground, or trying to scale the park wall in desperate bids for safety. 

But can a circus be any good without animals?  I mean, they'd just have to rely on things like trapeze artists and, well, more trapeze artists.  And the clowns.  Bloody clowns.  Now, I'm not one of those people who has some sort of phobia about clowns.  I don't find them scary or menacing.  It's just that I don't find them remotely funny.  There are only so many times you can see someone kicked in the arse, have a pie thrown in their face, tripped over or have a bucket of water thrown over them before it ceases to be amusing.  Not even driving a car that falls apart makes me laugh, (I've done it for real myself too many times).  I just want to shout 'Be funnier!' at them.  Maybe these animal-less circuses could instead have people dressed as animals to perform in them, instead.  They could have people dressed as lions and tigers jumping through hoops and stuff, while a 'lion tamer' cracks a whip and thrusts a chair at them, (big cats, apparently, are afraid of chairs).  The elephants might be a bit trickier, you'd probably need at least four people in the suit, two pairs for the legs, with the others on their shoulders to do stuff like operate the tail, ears and trunk.  You could also have more dangerous animal acts as no real animals could be at risk - gorillas fighting bears, that sort of thing.  You know, the more I think about this, the better it seems - it could herald a whole new concept for circuses...

A Recent Purchase

Back with the model railways - it's been a while since I posted anything on the subject here.  I bought this loco a couple of days ago at the local toy and train fair.  I'd actually intended to try and buy a completely different locomotive that one of the dealers had had for months, with no apparent interest, (it needed some repairs).  But, as is always the case, when I got there, I found that somebody had already bought it.  So, wandering around the other traders' stalls, I spotted this 4MT tank engine being offered at a very reasonable price.  After making three passes at the stall, looking at various stuff, I decided to buy it.  I think I surprised the trader as I've never bought anything so expensive from him - I'm usually found rummaging through his bargain bin, buying tired old wagons for a couple of quid, for future refurbishment.

Interestingly, it was described as being the Wrenn version of this model, but closer examination showed it to be the older Hornby Dublo version.  The confusion, I think, comes from the fact that the Dublo version was always finished in the correct black livery, while this one is green, an incorrect livery that Wrenn put it out in for a couple of years.  Nonetheless, not onl;y is the chassis marked 'Hornby Dublo', but the body has the tell-tale hole in the back of the bunker, which allowed an adjusting screw on the motor to be accessed without removing the body.  Moreover, the couplers are not just the Dublo type, but are riveted in place, (the Wrenn version came with Tri-ang style couplers as standard, with the option of replacing them with Dublo couplers, which were fastened with screws).  It's clear that the body has been repainted at some point by a previous owner, to imitate the same real-life locomotive which, in preservation, has been painted in this livery, which had been modelled by Wrenn.

My initial interest in the locomotive was based around the possibility of using it as a donor locomotive to provide parts to get another one I already own to run properly.  But, it turns out to be an excellent runner, so it will now simply join my existing roster of locomotives.  As for the one it was meant to provide spares to, well, I've managed to coax some life out of it and it looks like I might be able to get it running again without too much trouble.  Which means that I now have two BR Standard Class 4MT tank engines, (one Wrenn, one Hornby Dublo), which isn't a problem as, in reality, there were quite a lot of them operating on the Southern Region in the sixties, (which is what I model).  The latest acquisition will need its couplings changed to the Tri-ang type and it is, of course, in the wrong livery.  But you know something?  I can live with the wrong livery.  Besides, I really can't face repainting and re-lining yet another locomotive - I've a whole queue of them awaiting either painting, lining or both at the moment.

The Uninvited (1944)

The Uninvited (1944) is a product of the upsurge in interest in the supernatural, most specifically spiritualism and ghosts, during World War Two.  With significant numbers of people losing friends and loved ones, it was hardly surprising that they should want to seek comfort in the idea that they might, in some way, survive beyond death.  Even less surprising that there was no shortage of those who wanted to exploit these desires.  Sometimes in the form fake psychics and spiritualists offering the possibility of contact with the dead, (which, in the UK, culminated in the country's last invocation of the Witchcraft Acts in order to prosecute one such individual), but also in the form of a number of films on the theme from Hollywood studios.  Some of these, like A Guy Named Joe (1943) offered reassuring visions of the afterlife, with deceased souls still able to guide the lives of loved ones in a benign manner before passing on, while others presented more traditional ghost stories.  The Uninvited falls into the latter category, but, being a studio A-movie, tries to avoid the crude shocks of the B horrors and monster movies being cranked out by the likes of Universal and Monogram, aiming instead for subtlety.  Indeed, British critics praised it for lacking any explicit ghostly manifestations, relying rather on suggestion and subtle clues.  This, however, was simply a result of such manifestations being cut from the UK print before release.  In the full US print, we do get some honest-to-goodness ectoplasmic ghostly appearances, albeit briefly, although most of the time the spirits manifest indirectly, by turning pages in a book to indicate relevant information, for instance.

The Uninvited is basically a haunted house movie, wrapped up in a romance, decorated with some Gothic trimmings, (imperilled heroine driven to the brink of madness and incarcerated in remote 'institute' by sinister 'governess' character), which starts lightly and comedically, but takes a much darker turn in its latter stages as its central mystery is unravelled.  The question throughout the film is that of just who it is haunting the old Cornish house bought by siblings Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey for a suspiciously low price from the previous owner.  Said owner's young granddaughter is convinced that it is the spirit of her mother, who died there and it turns out that she is right, except that, in the film's major twist, her mother isn't who she thought she was and that hers isn't the only ghost in the house.  Much of the plot builds around the apparently contradictory nature of the haunting, with the single spirit Milland and Hussey think is in residence being hostile one moment, despairing and protective the next.  The situation is complicated by the Grandfather and his daughter's friend and nurse attempting to protect her reputation and conceal the truth of her parentage from the granddaughter.  The ultimate revelation that the woman the girl has been told her mother and who she has aspired to be like was, in fact, a jealous and vindictive spurned wife in real life who conspired to murder both the child and her real mother, her artist husband's Spanish model, comes as something of a surprise.  A heroine who is the offspring of an illicit extra-marital affair, (then brought up as the daughter of the wife) certainly wasn't common in forties mainstream cinema.  Particularly a studio picture.

The whole thing, as you might expect from a Paramount A-picture, is very well made, with excellent production values and a superior cast.  Lewis Allen's direction is atmospheric, particularly in the scenes at the house and later in the 'instiute' where the granddaughter finds herself confined, as her Grandfather desperately tries to keep the secrets of her true parentage.  At times its depiction of the haunting are quite effective, but being a 'prestige' picture and a 'legitimate' film, The Uninvited sometimes feels as if it is slightly embarrassed by its subject matter (which, after all, was usually the stuff of B-movies featuring Bela Lugosi or The Bowery Boys, sometimes both).  All too often it uses humour to try and undercut the more horrific aspects, as if trying to reassure the audience 'it's OK, it's all just an amusing anecdote', which jars somewhat in the later stages, when the spirit of the 'fake' mother starts to finish what she started in life and kill her 'daughter', while the spirit of the real mother tries to warn everyone.  The heroine's rapid acceptance of her real parentage and rejection of the memory of the woman she thought was her mother, at the film's climax, also seems a little jarring and doesn't really ring true, (particularly when one bears in mind that she's also just suffered the loss of her Grandfather and the revelation of his deception).  Nevertheless, The Uninvited remains an enjoyable experience, in its glossy professionalism and slick presentation, that are characteristic of its era.  A 'horror' film for more sophisticated audiences, or so Paramount would have you believe.

Out of Step?

Sometimes one feels oneself completely out of step with public opinion.  OK, I find myself out of step with what is supposedly popular opinion a lot of the time.  But every so often there's an issue where you find yourself scratching your head over the stance taken by others.  Take this business of the cutting down of that tree on Hadrian's Wall, for which those two guys have recently been found guilty.  If I'm to believe the press coverage, not to mention some of the reactions on social media, these guys apparently committed the crime of the century.  A crime against humanity, in fact, for which they are not only being publicly pilloried, but for which various people are screaming for them to banged up for life.  Or worse.  Judging by the foaming at the mouth hysteria on social media, there's a fair number of people out there who think that they should be publicly horse whipped.  Another school of thought seems to think that capital punishment should be brought back especially for them.  (Doubtless, arguing that they should be hanged on a gallows made from the wood of the tree they illegally felled).  This hysteria isn't even confined to foaming at the mouth right wing loonies - I've seen similar stuff from people who like to characterise themselves on social media as liberal or left-wing.  Well, I'm sorry, but I just don't understand this level of hate and rage.

Make no mistake, these two clowns are obviously utter arseholes who have committed a reprehensible act of vandalism.  But guys, it was a tree they cut down. Their violence wasn't directed at a person, but rather an inanimate object.  At the end of the day it is a crime against property, not a crime against persons and should be treated as such.  I really don't think the level of opprobrium and vitriol being directed at them is appropriate.  Let alone the amount of newspaper coverage devoted to this business - there are plenty of crimes against actual people that simply don't get reported this widely, let alone attract such levels of public hatred.  None of which should really come as a surprise bearing in mind that we live in a country where, historically, crimes against property (most specifically the property of the wealthy) have always been seen as worse than crimes against people, (especially if they are crimes against poor people).  But hey, these are the times we live in, where priorities seem permanently to be arse-about-face and we're meant to get outraged by things that should be obvious to an idiot.  Take this business of convicted terrorists in high security jails attacking prison guards, which has occupied so many column inches in the papers - we're all meant to be outraged and horrified by such incidents, demanding that the government do something about it.  But what the Hell - people convicted of violent crimes with no regard for human life continue to commit acts of violence with no regard for human life while incarcerated.  Am I supposed to be surprised?  The media apparently seem to think so.  'The public', as represented by social media, certainly seems to think so.  Clearly, I am once again out of step with public sentiment.

Seven Guns for the MacGregors (1966)

A mildly unusual spaghetti western which invokes that magic number seven in the title (Return of the Seven - also shot in Spain - would have been on release at around the same time), Seven Guns for the MacGregors (1966) is an early example of an entry in the genre that aims for laughs alongside the action.  This format would become more popular in the early seventies, following the success of the Terrance Hill/Bud Spencer Trinity movies, as an increasingly stale genre tried to revitalise itself.  But back in 1966, it was still a reasonably fresh idea.  Also novel is having a bunch of Italian and Spanish actors dubbed with cod Scottish accents instead of American accents.  To be fair, it's only the elder members of the MacGregor clan who have the dodgy Scottish accents - their offspring have dubbed voices provided by the usual array of American voice artists working in Rome at the time.  

The film's plot is pretty much by-the-book as far as spaghetti westerns of the era went: the MacGregors are a family of Scottish ranchers having trouble with horse rustlers working for a Mexican bandit and his gang.  When the younger MacGregors take their horses to a town they think is free of the bandit's influence, they find themselves in jail and their horses stolen.  Escaping, they hatch an elaborate plot - with the aid of other victims of the bandit and corrupt local sheriff - to bring down the gang.  This involves the eldest son infiltrating the gang, while the others impersonate the bandit and his men in a series of bank and train robberies.  It all culminates with the elder MacGregors, along with various relatives and neighbours, descending on the bandits' base for a pitched battle.

The film's biggest strength lies in its array of action set pieces, starting with the opening battle with rustlers at the ranch - which involves a cannon, amongst other weapons - and continuing through various bar room brawls and a train robbery.  Consequently, for the first two thirds or so of its length, Seven Guns for the MacGregors moves at an impressive pace, but slows down for the last third, as plot complications take the place of action, before returning to form with a climactic massed battle.  Like most cheaply made spaghetti westerns of its time, the film has a rough and ready feel about, with little finesse in editing, photography and general production values.  But it more than makes up for that in entertainment value.  Indeed, it was successful enough to spawn a sequel, Up the MacGregors! (1967) (also known as Seven Women for the MacGregors), which, confusingly, was released first in the US, despite the fact that it's plot follows on directly from the first film.  Certainly not a masterpiece, Seven Guns for the MacGregors nonetheless provided me with some suitable Bank Holiday afternoon entertainment.

Party Like It's 1945?

Enjoy one of those VE Day street parties that the authorities seemed to hope would spring spontaneously into life, despite the fact that today wasn't a public holiday?  No, neither did I.  There seemed to be a distinct lack of VE Day 80th anniversary celebrations going on today.  Which is hardly surprising for a number of reasons - not least being the fact that the whole thing was fumbled at the highest levels, with a half-hearted attempt to celebrate the event on Monday, which was a public holiday, but still commemorate it today, the actual anniversary.  All of which just served to confuse most people as to what was going on.  On top of that is the fact that there are now so few people alive who actually remember the original event, meaning that it no longer has the resonance it might have had in the past.  Although, in reality, VE Day never was something that was celebrated or remembered since 1945.  The last time it was an 'event' was thirty years ago for the fiftieth anniversary (when there were still plenty of people around who could remember the actual event).  Even less observed, in my experience, has been VJ Day in August, which marks the actual end of World War Two, when all hostilities ceased, (unless you were a Japanese soldier deep in the jungle of some remote island, in which case you wouldn't hear about it until around 1970).  

Anyway, to get back to the point, there were no parties on my street, either today or on Monday.   There never are, whether it is a Royal wedding, coronation, some kind of jubilee or whatever.  Every time one of these events rolls around and the local council start granting road closures for parties, I wait for my invite to arrive.  But it never does, so I assume that nobody can be bothered to organise one.  I have this lingering suspicion, though, that one day, when one of these occasions rolls around, that I'll get up to find the road closed for a party I haven't been invited to.  Which I'd take as being some kind of badge of honour - recognition that I'd established myself successfully enough as a miserable old git/recluse, that the neighbours knew to leave me well alone.  (Which some of them do already - there was that time, years ago, when some new people moved in a few doors down and threw a housewarming barbecue to which the entire terrace except me and the old bloke who lived at the opposite end were invited.  Bizarrely, despite this apparent snub, said new neighbours still thought I wouldn't mind if they repeatedly encroached on my property.  Some people really don't have any boundaries).  Getting back to VE Day, it has already been eclipsed by the election of a new Pope.  Apparently, according to crazed right wing extremist Laura Looney, he's a 'woke Marxist Pope'.  I like the sound of him already.

The Black Cat (1989)

I started watching this on a dodgy streaming service expecting to find myself enjoying a re-watch of the Lucio Fulci film of the same title, (I really should pay more attention to the synopses put up for these movies).  What I instead got was Luigi Cozzi's 1989 version of The Black Cat, which turned out to be even more deranged and have even less to do with Edgar Allan Poe's story than Fulci's film.  Ok, so like the Fulci film, there is a black cat wandering around, except that unlike in that film, it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot and its appearances seem pretty much random.  The only rationale for its presence and the title being a character noting that black cats are traditionally believed to be witches in animal form.  The key word here is witches, for this is a film about a mythical witch, (although she never turns into a cat, black or otherwise), who is unwittingly invoked by a film crew planning a movie about her.  Ratther than drawing its inspiration from Poe, Cozzi's film is rather an unofficial sequel to Dario Argento's two films about the 'Three Mothers', a trio of ancient witches, Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980), (Argento would finally officially complete the trilogy in 2007 with The Mother of Tears).  Indeed, Argento's name is invoked in The Black Cat (and Suspiria's theme music heard) with the screenwriter claiming that his script is based on the same source as Suspiria: De Quincey's 'Suspiria De Profundis'.  Unfortunately, the witch in question, Levana, clearly isn't in the mood to give script approval and starts making warty faced, green vomit spewing, appearances in the would be leading lady's (also the director's wife) dreams.

While this seems to be setting the film up to be one of those horror films where a long dead witch is resurrected in order to take revenge on those responsible for her demise, being a Cozzi film, it quickly starts going off at tangents, as it clearly isn't revenge that Lavana is after.  Her campaign of terror is firmly focused on the lead actress (Florence Guerin), who she assaults with a series of bizarre dreams and visions, to the point that reality and fantasy become blurred.  Apart from the recurrent image of mirrors smashing to reveal the witch's wart covered face, green vomit being spewed over victims and the like, some of the manifestations are even more bizarre and disturbing because of their sheer banality.  Most notably, the heroine has her broken fridge fixed by a repairman who turns out not to exist, (it turns out that the fridge still isn't working either), while a phantom version of the baby sitter's young cousin turns up (then vanishes) in her baby's room.  Things quickly ramp up though, as a plot rendered ever more confusing by the mixing of dreams and reality, (there are also random shots of the earth seen from the moon, for no explicable reason, punctuating the action and regular intervals), serves us up an affair between the director and another actress (played by Caroline Munro) who is also seeking the lead role, a medium whose stomach explodes after trying to warn the director and screenwriter about something, an undead film producer (Bret Halsey) and his cobwebbed house and lots of murders.  It all culminates with the heroine facing off against Levana as they shoot what look like green laser beams from their hands.  Not to forget that, along the way, it turns out that the heroine is being assisted by a good fairy, seen on a TV screen at one point and whose presence is often accompanied by a shot of what looks like a decaying foetus.

It's all as barmy as it sounds, moved along a at a frenetic pace by Cozzi and accompanied by special effects that look as if they came from an early video game and a thumping metal score.  Does any of it make any sense?  Well, sort of - while much of the imagery is confusing, Levana, in her final manifestation, gives a brief explanation of the plot: she's a mutant possessed of various psychic powers and she is desperate to destroy the heroine because she too is a mutant with similar, latent, powers, who the witch must destroy in order to rule unchallenged.  The rest you have to extrapolate - the fairy could be an embodiment of the heroine's powers for good, although the rotting foetus imagery might imply a twin, or even child, that never developed fully, their spirit lingering in the actress' body.  Virtually everything we've seen - the undead producer, the murders, the phantoms, have been illusions conjured up by Levana too drive the actress mad.  Which still leaves us with the black cat and those space shots - God alone knows what they signify.  God or, more likely, Luigi Cozzi.  In spite of this, The Black Cat is a lot of fun to watch, with Cozzi delivering gross-out deaths and horror set-pieces at regular intervals in order to retain audience interest and stop them from worrying too much about the confusing script.  Despite some very garish lighting, giving many scenes a neon-lit feel, (which, along with a preponderance of dry ice gives some scenes a distinct eighties music video vibe), the film is, in places, quite suspenseful, with plenty of schock scares.  

While Cozzi's direction is effective, if frenetic, he wisely makes no attempt to imitate the directorial style of Argento, two of whose films The Black Cat purports to be a sequel to, with the movie feeling quite different to those films.  There is no real subtlety in the finished film, little in the way of the prefiguring  in earlier scenes of action yet to come characteristic of Argento's giallos, nor the sustained use of colour and sound effects favoured by that director.  While, like Argento, he assaults the audiences senses with visual fireworks and audio effects, Cozzi's direction simply isn't as disciplined as Argento's, opting, ultimately, to throw the kitchen sink at the audience as his film builds to its frenzied climax.  That said, the opening scenes of the film, featuring a gruesome giallo-style murder are revealed to be a film-within-a-film, as they are being shot for the director character's most recent movie, titled The Black Cat, neatly prefiguring the film's subsequent confusion of reality and manufactured illusion.  Moreover, like Argento, Cozzi's film does shift into the surreal, except that, by the denouement, it has toppled over into full blown insanity.  As many have noted, stylistically, The Black Cat has more in common with Lamberto Bava's Demons films than it does Argento's films, with its visceral feel, (indeed, it was marketed in some territories as Demons 6).  In truth, it's best to approach The Black Cat as a stand alone film, ratherthan a pseudo sequel to anything, (at best, it is a homage to Argento's Suspiria rather than a sequel), in order to judge it on its own merits.  While it doesn't bear comparison with Argento's movies, The Black Cat is still an immensely entertaining and outright barmy eighties horror film.

The Madness of King Trump

So, Trump has claimed that he won't run for a third term as President.  Leaving aside the whole issue of legality - it would require a constitutional amendment to allow such a thing - and what Steve Bannon thinks - obviously Trump would say that.  Because he doesn't intend running for a third term when he can simply ignore the democratic process altogether, suspend the 2028 election and refuse to leave office.  No, I'm not joking - he's already invoked a fake 'state of emergency' to justify the 'disappearing' of immigrants to foreign jails without due process, so I don't think that he'd have any qualms about throwing out the democratic process.  He is, after all, a psychopath (as we've previously established here) elected by a nation of psychos.  That's the key to understanding the Trump II presidency.  Forget all the bullshit from political commentators about 'plans' and 'long term strategies' - the reality is that Trump is demented.  He was already economically and politically illiterate, so this combined with his clear mental instability is resulting in what is, in effect, governance by whim.  It's become increasingly clear that he is influenced in his deranged decision-making processes by whoever he has spoken to most recently and what he's last  seen on TV.  Judging by his latest crazed outpourings, he's just seen Escape From Alcatraz and been told about how many US film productions are nowadays actually made overseas, often in the UK, Canada and Australia.  All countries that he's lately pissed off with tariffs and the like.  Worse than that, he seems to have realised that entirely foreign made films won't necessarily embrace 'American values' and will instead promote alternative world views.

If it isn't obvious from this first hundred days that Trump is certifiable and unfit to hold office then, well, there is no hope for the US, is there?  But the fact is that it was patently obvious that he was certifiable in the run-up to last year's election, but still the psychos of the US voted for him.  But just how unhinged do Trump's behaviour and pronouncements have to get before Congress takes action to remove him from office?   Probably there is no limit while the Republicans are in control.  Even if the Democrats regain control in the mid-terms, (presupposing Trump doesn't find a pretext to postpone these, of course), they have so far been so timid that it is difficult to see their leadership growing spines any time soon.  Their timidity, I suspect, is a combination of shock - they probably secretly thought that Trump would never follow through with his more extreme threats and respect democratic norms - and the idiotic notion that seems to hold sway in the US that they have to respect the voters and not challenge the 'democratic mandate' that Trump has.   The latter, of course, completely ignores the fact that opposition is essential to the effective working of any democratic system.  It is the primary job of elected representatives to hold the executive to account on behalf of the people.  Of course, the US somewhat undermines this concept with its insistence on 'two thirds' majorities in Congress to get anything done.  But that's still no excuse - the Democrats really should be doing a better job of holding Trump to account on a daily basis.  There are a handful of Senators and Representatives who seem prepared to do this, both inside Congress and outside in the wider world, but their activities seem to frowned upon by the party leadership, who obviously think it 'unseemly' for elected representatives to actually go out and fight on behalf of their voters and in defence of the constitution.  I'm afraid that their genteel approach of sipping tea and offering mild opprobrium while the house burns down around them is unlikely to be effective in curbing mad 'King Trump'.

(It's good to finally go on a proper political rant - I've been holding off a bit on the politics of late for the sake of my sanity, but the withdrawal symptoms just got too great for me, I'm afraid!).

Billy Two Hats (1974)

Another stop on my journey through various films I vaguely recall being released in my youth, but which I never saw and subsequently vanished, Billy Two Hats (1974) is a western from an era when they no longer made westerns.  At least at the volume or scale that they once did.  By the mid seventies the genre was deeply unfashionable, with only westerns being made (outside of TV movies and series) if they fell into the category of 'revisionist westerns', which questioned the conventions of the genre and presented a far grittier, dirtier version of the Old West than classic westerns had ever done.  In this context, Billy Two Hats is something of a curiosity, on several levels.  While it isn't exactly 'revisionist' - both plot and characters fall into established western tropes - it is shot in a 'gritty' style, with a realistic, grimy look rather than the slickness of traditional westerns.  It is also very minimalist, taking place mainly in rocky, semi-desert and very sparsely populated outdoor locations.

Ultimately, it is one of those old outlaw/young sidekick pursued by relentless lawman stories, a staple of the traditional western, offering little that is innovative.  Gregory Peck affecting a not very convincing Scottish accent provides a distraction from some fairly banal dialogue, which the film falls into every time the action flags.  Which is all too often as the film progresses: a bright and brisk start with some well choreographed action soon loses momentum as the pace slows and action is replaced by talk.  By the last third, it feels as if the script has run out of ideas completely, with the young sidekick given a fairly arbitrary romance with a rancher's wife and Peck's outlaw running into a band of troublesome Indians, before the reappearance of the pursuing Marshal rushes everything to a hasty climax.  It's actually pretty well directed by Ted Kotcheff, who makes the most of his locations, (the film was shot in Israel, thereby avoiding the usual over-familiar US locations featured in every other Hollywood western).  Billy Two Hats is quite enjoyable, but ultimately unmemorable, offering nothing new - after watching it, it doesn't seem surprising that it was one of those seventies films that quickly faded from view.

North and South: The Eternal Struggle

You know what gets my goat?  Bloody northerners whingeing on about how awful the south of England and all us southerners are.  Now, if they want to do that 'Oop North' in their insular little communities, then fine.  I couldn't give a toss.  It's when they are living down here, in our glorious south and do it that I start seeing red.  Quite apart from the sheer rudeness of it - I mean, how would they like it if those unfortunate southerners forced to live in the north spent all their time whining about how shit it is up there with those bloody stupid accents, weak as piss beer and all that exaggerated macho posturing about how 'hard' they all are - it is something that is easily remedied.  If you hate it down here so much then why don't you just fuck off back home to your beloved north?  The complaint that really sticks in my throat is that we in the south are just so unfriendly - we don't butt into other people's conversations or offer loud opinions uninvited and don't feel obliged to engage in conversation with complete strangers for no good reason.  No, we're not unfriendly, we just know how to mind our own fucking business.  We respect boundaries and the privacy of others.  Like I said, fuck of back to where you came from if you hate is so much.  We won't miss your bloody whingeing and the giant-sized chips you carry around on your shoulders.  You know something?  If Reform UK campaigned on a policy of repatriating northerners to the likes Lancashire, Yorkshire and Merseyside, I might just vote for them.  But no, they persist in victimising immigrants from overseas - personally, I prefer them to the bloody northerners: they don't complain as much and don't try to start idiotic conversations with you.

Scousers are the absolute worst - banging on about how shit the south is, how Liverpool is the burning centre of the universe, all in that horrible whiny accent of theirs.   They epitomise the northern delusion: that they are somehow a bastion of working class purity, oppressed by us wealthy Tory-voting bastards in the south.  Well, I've got news for them - we have the working class here in the south (I should know, I was born into it), along with poverty, poor housing and failing public services.  Oh, not to forget, I've never voted Tory.  In fact, when it comes to voting Tory, let's not forget those poor downtrodden scouse workers have elected some of the most objectionable Tory MPS, such as Edwina Curry and Esther McVey.  As for being downtrodden and deprived, if that's the case, why is it that whenever I turn on the radio or the TV, I get bombarded with northern accents?  Hearing anything like my own Wiltshire accent is a real rarity.  Plus, every TV show seems to have to be produced in a northern city (in order to stop them whingeing).  The number of TV dramas set in my part of the world are pretty scarce, (even Casualty, set in a fictionalised Bristol is now actually filmed in Wales).  If anyone is being culturally deprived, it is us in the south and south west, who find ourselves being force fed a diet of northern bollocks - all pushing the northern propaganda line of 'north good, south bad'.  I'm not saying that I hate 'the north' - I've visited some great places there, enjoyed some great scenery - it's just this constant anti-southern whining and those  who perpetrate it that I hate.  It is especially galling when the north is already so over-represented in media terms, but they never seem satisfied and probably won't be until every mention of the south in the media is expunged.