Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954)

Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954) was one of the first horror movies I ever saw and inevitably left quite an impression upon the young me.  Quite why I was allowed to stay up late and watch it, I don't recall, but, with its grotesque murders-by-trained-gorilla, (the image of the dead girl stuffed up the chimney stayed with me for years), chases across smoke wreathed rooftops and shadowy figures lurking menacingly in shadowy streets, it set the pattern for my expectations of what a horror film should be like.  While it entranced me and helped set me off on a lifelong love of the horror genre, Phantom of the Rue Morgue subsequently became a somewhat elusive film, with very few UK TV screenings over the years.  But, thanks to the magic of dodgy Roku channels, I was recently able to catch up with it again.  While films seen and enjoyed as children can often disappoint when seen again as an adult, Phantom of the Rue Morge remained as bizarre and macabre as I had always recalled it.  It's studio bound depiction of Paris, shot in garish 'Warner Color' (actually a licenced version of the Eastmancolor process), giving it a strange, claustrophobic, almost surreal feel as it moves, often at frenetic pace, through a series of bizarre murders of young women by an unseen and brutish assailant.  Atrocity piles upon atrocity as the Paris police bumble around, accusing the wrong man for the killings.

In large part, the pace and general onscreen mayhem was the result of the film having been shot in 3-D.  Warners had enjoyed a big success with the previous year's 3-D chiller House of Wax and were keen to follow it up with another melodramatic horror film.  Consequently, everything imaginable gets thrown or shoved into the camera lens (and the audience's laps when screened in 3-D) - if it isn't chairs, fists and even gorillas getting thrown into the audience in the fight scenes, then it is nightclub dancers kicking their legs into the viewer's face.  Edgar Allan Poe's short story 'Murders in the Rue Morgue' must have seemed an obvious starting point for a House of Wax follow up but, as in the previous film adaptation of the story, 1932's Murders in the Rue Morgue, it is only the story's basic idea of an ape trained to kill women, that survives intact into the screenplay.  Like the earlier film, the 1954 adaptation gives us a 'mad scientist' type character as the main villain, *played by Bela Lugosi in 1932vand Karl Malden in 1954) and rather sidelines the Dupin character, in both cases called 'Paul Dupin' rather than 'Auguste Dupin' and relegated from investigating detective to student and university lecturer respectively.  In neither film does Dupin take a central role in the investigation or demonstrate to any meaningful extent, his deductive powers.  It's also clear that the producers of the 1954 film also wanted to evoke memories of the 'Phantom of the Opera', not just in the altered title, but also in its deployment of top hat and cloak clad characters lurking on rooftops and alleyways and Malden's use of the sewers to spirit his gorilla way from the scenes of the crimes.

Far from perfect, Phantom of the Rue Morgue, even when shown 'flat' remains a hugely entertaining horror thriller in the Grand Guignol tradition, atmospheric  and at times even somewhat disturbing.  Veteran director Roy el Ruth, despite not being a horror specialist, delivers a well paced film that generates the sort of thrills and chills required by the genre.  (A couple of years later he directed another animal-themed horror film in The Alligator People which, while far less effective than Phantom, still has some points of interest).  All-in-all, Phantom of the Rue Morgue is well worth tracking down.  It's very much of its era, but nonetheless a highly professional piece of work with excellent production values and even some decent performances from some of the players.  With its misogynistic villain and apparently randomly selected female victims, it prefigures many of the recurring themes of the serial killer and slasher movies of the sixties and seventies.  

They're Stealing Our Sheds...

Have you got a garden shed?  Well, look out, because the Labour government is planning to house asylum seekers who have arrived in the UK on small boats in your garden shed.  That's right.  Not satisfied with housing them in luxury hotels and mansions, they are now going to start co-opting the nation's garden sheds, because they are letting so many of the buggers into the country.  But that won't be the end of it - first your garden shed, next your airing cupboard, your attic space, before you know it, they'll be housing them under your bed.  Where is it all going to end?  If we don't look out, then Starmer will be forcing you to move into your shed and housing the migrants in your house!  They'll be sleeping in your bed, using your bathroom, cooking their unspeakable foreign food in your kitchen and running up your heating and electricity bills while you shiver in that leaky shed.  We'll be forced into exile in our own country!  Even worse, they'll be allowed to have sex with your wife, daughters, sisters, any British woman, in fact, whether they like it or not, because that's part of their culture and woke human rights says that stopping the immigrants from doing that would be racist and therefore illegal.  What next?  Will we have to tolerate them performing human sacrifices in the street for fear of infringing their religious sensitivities?  What if their culture involves eating our pets?  It was bad enough when those bloody Eastern Europeans were slaughtering swans in duck ponds all over Britain and spit-roasting them in our parks - now it's our cats, dogs and hamsters under threat!  It's madness, sheer madness!  If only Reform UK was in power and Nigel Farage prime minister - then we'd see a proper crackdown on these heather bastards stealing our sheds, homes and women!

I'm pretty sure that all of this is going to comprise the headlines of the Mail, Express and Telegraph any day soon.  It's the only logical place for their increasingly hysterical anti-government, anti-immigrant screaming front pages to go.  Not a day goes by that I don't see one of these rags making some outrageous claim about the government housing asylum seekers in luxury penthouses in Chelsea, or handing them all hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash upon arrival on the beach at Dover.  The outright racism is naked and unabashed in these headlines.  It would be laughable if this grotesque bile wasn't fuelling bands of bigots to go around 'protesting' outside of hotels accommodating asylum seekers:  'We don't want them here - won't someone think of our children?'  The actual reasons for the protests always remain vague, despite the 'protestors' having worked themselves up into apoplectic levels of rage.  But, of course, that's the point of these campaigns of misinformation, whether in print or on social media - to so flood the public sphere with outright lies and half-truths designed to provoke anger, that rational discourse on the issue becomes impossible.  Those behind the headlines obviously hope that they can harness this anger to their advantage and - in the case of the likes of Farage - ride it to electoral success.  But the trouble with mobs is that, once set in motion, they inevitably become impossible to control, instead thrashing around wildly, striking out at friend and foe alike.  All they know is that they are angry about, well, something and someone, anyone, has to pay for whatever it is making them angry.  But remember, when you next go out to your shed and find it full of immigrants, well, you heard it here first.

Caltiki - The Immortal Monster (1959)

Caltiki - The Immortal Monster (1959) has some claim to historical significance, being one of the first science fiction films produced in post-war Italy.  Running a brisk seventy six minutes, the first part of the film involves an archaeological expedition exploring Mayan ruins in Mexico.  In the remains of a temple they discover an idol of the Mayan goddess Caltiki overlooking a pool of water, which turns out to contain a huge amorphous monster that absorbs the living flesh of anything it touches.  After suffering several casualties, the expedition destroys the creature with fire, but one member survives an attack by Caltiki, but is left with fragment of the monster eating away at his right arm.  Taken to Mexico City, the monstrous blob is removed from his arm - which is now a fleshless ruin - and, somewhat oddly, entrusted to the care of one of his colleagues, for study at his home laboratory.  It is eventually deduced that the creature grows in the presence of radiation and, as luck would have it, a radioactive comet which passes the earth every eight hundred and fifty years is fast approaching.  In the meantime, the archaeologist injured by the creature, now quite mad, escapes from the hospital and makes his way to his colleague's house, convinced that his wife, who is staying there, is having an affair with him.  Under the comet's influence, the lab specimen starts to grow and divide, bursting out of the basement lab and threatening the scientist's wife and child, while her husband tries to get the army to move in and destroy the creatures with flamethrowers.

Inevitably, the film has been compared to the previous year's The Blob, with obvious comparisons to be made between the two movies' respective monsters.  There is, however, a case to be made that Caltiki also owes something to the Hammer Films adaptation of The Quatermass Experiment (1955), with both films featuring a key character whose arm has been infected by an alien organism and the scenes of the creature growing and reproducing in the lab echo a similar sequence in the earlier film.  Indeed, arguably the plot structure of Caltiki far more resembles that of The Quatermass Experiment than it does The Blob, with a monstrous alien presence being discovered during a search for missing colleagues, an infected individual running amok and a scientific investigation into a fragment of the monster going awry.  Ultimately, though, Caltiki is somewhat lesser film than either The Blob or The Quatermass Experiment, lacking the vigour and pace of the former and the suspense and tension of the latter.  Nonetheless, it is quite effectively directed by Riccardo Freda and an uncredited Mario Bava (the film's cinematographer and special effects director), with some good visuals, such as the smouldering volcano in whose shadow the temple excavation is taking place, and some atmospheric scenes in the house as the creature escapes from the lab.  But, after a good start at the Mayan ruins, it gets bogged down with too many talky scenes and the sub-plot involving the infected archaeologist's jealousy over the imagined affair between his wife and his colleague.  It is also badly let down by some poor miniatures work at the film's climax, when an army of clearly toy tanks attack Caltiki.  That said, the effects showing the aftermath of the monster's attacks on its victims are somewhat more graphic and realistic looking that anything you'd see in contemporary English-language films.  The movie's relatively short running time ensures that it never becomes tedious and overall it remains an entertaining enough B-movie.

Hollywood Boulevard (1976)

Perhaps the ultimate in 'cut and paste' film making Hollywood Boulevard (1976) was shot for Roger Corman's New World Pictures in ten days and incorporates stock footage from a number of previous New World productions.  Apparently the result of a bet between Corman and Jon Davison over how cheaply and quickly the latter could produce a new movie, Hollywood Boulevard also gave directorial debuts to the jointly credited Allan Arkush and Joe Dante.  Aptly enough for a film built around swathes of pre-existing footage, Hollywood Boulevard is a film about film making, centered around the fictitious 'Miracle Films' and the low budget movies it turns out under the auspices of director Eric von Leppe.  In classic Hollywood form, it follows the journey of an aspiring, but naive, young actress, from arriving in Hollywood to finally making it as a star, the latter not because of her onscreen performances, but instead because of her incidental involvement in a series of murders linked to her movies.  The murders - at first passed off as bizarre on-set accidents - provides the film with its ongoing plot, as it becomes increasingly obvious that someone linked to von Leppe's productions is a serial killer. 

The plotting is pleasingly circuitous, with various bizarre events (all designed to incorporate stock footage from various Corman-produced movies) follow each other as the underlying story gradually emerges.  Our heroine is initially duped into being the unwitting getaway driver for a bank robbery, an experience that her agent succeeds into spinning into a job as a stunt driver on one of von Leppe's films which, in turn, leads to her being offered an acting role, along with two other young starlets.  This latter development allows the film to parody New World's successful 'three girls' formula used on their 'Nurse' and 'Teachers' series (amongst others).  The films that they work on are pretty good parodies of the types of movie that New World were turning out at the time: a Philippines based war movie (which uses lots of battle footage from several 'women-in-prison' and war movies)  and a science fiction western (which uses lots of footage and props from Death Race 2000).  (The latter film comes about as a compromise between von Leppe, who wants to make an historical western, and Miracle's producer who thinks that movies set in the future are more marketable: 'Everyone likes the future - it's where we'll all be spending the rest of our lives').  

In contrast to many other 'cut and paste' movies, Hollywood Boulevard makes good use of its stock footage, integrating it neatly and amusingly into the narrative.  It also boasts a great cast of B-movie performers, with Corman favourite Dick Miller outstanding as the agent (who at one point watches himself in The Terror (1963) at a drive-in, lamenting that his acting career never came to anything), Paul Bartel suitably imperious and manic as von Leppe, while Mary Woronov plays the hard-bitten leading lady feeling threatened by the presence of the three new girls.  Candice Rialson plays the lead very likeably, her characterisation effectively putting over the actress' combination of ambition and amiable naivety.  Arkush and Dante's direction moves the film smoothly through its gears, encompassing action, suspense, black comedy and finally slasher movie.  Frequently in extremely poor taste, the film moves to a suitably bizarre climax as the killer perishes while chasing Rialson around the 'Hollywood' sign, with one of the giant letters falling on them, fatally crushing them.  Being the only surviving victim make Rialson a media sensation and star of her own biopic.  Hollywood Boulevard is enormously good fun, a B-movie that cleverly parodies the whole business of low budget movie making whilst simultaneously acting as a loving tribute to both B-movies and those who make them.

Proof of Identity

We seem to have wandered deep into George Orwell territory thanks to the zeal of successive governments for 'protecting' children from the evils of the internet, extremism and pornography.  Just today, I had Bluesky informing me that, as I'm in the UK, I now have to verify my age in order to see some types of content on their site.  Having opened the e-mail I was sent, I was confronted with a demand to verify my age via either a face scan or credit card details!  Well, as the first is a gross invasion of my privacy and the latter sounds remarkably like a phishing scam, the answer was 'fuck off'.  I don't care if I can't see some content, I'm not going to be part of this insanity.  The safety of children, online or elsewhere, is the responsibility of their parents, my freedoms shouldn't be impinged because the government seems to think that there are so many bad parents out there.   Besides, this particular form of verification is fatally flawed: you can't reliably tell someone's age from their facial characteristics and many people don't have a credit card, (I don't - I have a debit card as I'm grown up enough to have sufficient funds in my bank account to cover my expenses).  The government's mania for online age verification also assumes that kids have either never heard of VPNs or don't know how to use them.  Both false premises.  (Which means that their next move will be to try and ban the use of VPNs in the UK).  It also founders on the fact that most porn sites are based outside of the UK in some fairly dodgy states, so if they decide not to bother with age verification, there really are no legal sanctions the government can realistically threaten them with.  (Cue the implementation of a 'Great Firewall of Britain' and mass online censorship of what we can and can't see online  in the manner of China).

But it isn't just on social media that we now have to prove that we are who we say we are.  I've mentioned before the bizarre hoops I was expected to jump through a few years ago when trying to register with a teaching agency.  Despite providing them with every imaginable document and detail, including a birth certificate and my National Insurance number, they still insisted that this wasn't sufficient prove that I really was who I said I was or that, even if I was, that I had the right to work in the UK, (this, despite the fact that my birth certificate proves that I was born in the UK and therefore a British citizen and my work record involved me working in jobs where I had to have UK citizenship in order to do them).  No, I had also to provide them with photo ID: a passport or one of those driving licences with your photo on it.  (I'm not sure how either would prove that I'm who I say I am - as I pointed out to them, if I could forge stuff like birth certificates, educational and professional qualifications, a work history with references and a NI number, then forging a passport or a driving licence would surely be a breeze).  There was great consternation that I had neither a current passport nor a photo ID driving licence (mine is of the old type with no photo, as I've never had cause to replace it).  In exasperation, I pointed out that we don't live in a police state (yet) and that carrying ID is not compulsory.  I do have a voter ID document as a result of the fascistic voter suppression efforts of the last Tory government (shamefully, still not repealed by the current Labour government), which I offered as proof of ID.  But by then, we were both too fed up with the whole fiasco to bother.  Amusingly Kafka-esque though all of this might all seem, the truth is that this constant demand for us to provide more and more information about ourselves for poorly defined purposes is all rather sinister in an Orwellian way.  It certainly doesn't help protect children (the main pretext given) and it really needs to stop.  Enough is enough.

A Desire to be Eaten

You know, it's about time that we started counteracting all this vegan and veggie propaganda: animals like to be eaten by us humans.  No, really.  Just bear with me on this - we need to start by looking at ourselves, particularly at those periods of history where we had cultures that practiced human sacrifice.  Many of those victims went willingly to the sacrificial altar.  Why?  Because they considered it an honour to give their lives to a higher form of life - their deity.  It was the pinnacle of their existence, with their blood sacrifice uniting them with their god for all eternity.  Now, to animals we are clearly a god-like higher life form, capable of all manner of miraculous acts (miraculous to them, that is) so, naturally, in their primitive minds, the ultimate service they can provide for us humans, is to allow us to eat them.  Don't let those vegans and veggies tell you any different.  It's like the way they eschew drinking milk, because it is somehow 'cruel' to milk cows (or goats) and therefore also reject yoghurts, cheeses, cream and other dairy products.  Again, these animals enjoy being milked - we're doing them a favour by relieving them of the burden of all that milk they produce.  They probably also probably get a sexual thrill from having their udders manhandled.  They love it.  

The irony of all this is that the vegans and veggies are the ones who have helped promote this notion that we are somehow superior to the rest of the animal kingdom and therefore shouldn't be beholden to our primitive lust for flesh. Their quest for moral superiority (which is what these creeds are really about, rather than having anything to do with health benefits or a belief in animal welfare), is what has encouraged those lower animals to see us as divine and therefore want to sacrifice themselves to us.  They want to ignore the reality of nature, where animals quite happily devour each other with no moral qualms, in the name of survival.  Herbivores are there to be eaten, I'm afraid.   Looked at from a different perspective, it's all part of natural selection: predators only take the lame, the slow, the stupid from the herd, eliminating their genes from the reproductive pool and ensuring the improvement of the breed.  But we as humans are, apparently, above all of this.  Which is where the vegans and veggies are going wrong - we're just animals ourselves.  Smarter than others, perhaps.  But that smartness has evolved, ironically, as the result of our predatory instincts: stalking prey takes ingenuity, particularly when you don't have the speed, strength, claws or teeth of your competitors.  Yeah, I know, we're actually omnivorous and many of our cousins in the ape world are peaceful vegetarians, but they lack our intelligence, our creative capacities, our language and intellect, our art and culture.  All the thing that make us human and supposedly superior to those other animals.  So, if they want us to eat them, let's just indulge their idolatry and make them happy.

Daughter of Dracula (1972)

Jesus Franco found himself making a number of Dracula pictures in the early seventies, kicking off with 1970's Count Dracula, which starred Christopher Lee and was written and produced by Harry Allan Towers.  While this film was promoted as being a more faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel (it wasn't), Franco's next stab at the subject was the wild and wonderful Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (1972), which constituted his take on one of the Universal 'monster rallies' of the forties.  He quickly followed it up with Daughter of Dracula (1972) which, although not a sequel, features a lot of the same cast, (most had also appeared in his The Erotic Experiences of Frankenstein (1972)), most notably Franco favourite Howard Vernon, who repeats his turn as Dracula.  It is also most definitely not a remake of Universal's Dracula's Daughter (1936), but does touch on some of the same themes as that film.  Most notably, it makes explicit the lesbian sub-text of the earlier film.  Daughter of Dracula is a decidedly odd film, even by Franco standards, with the director seemingly unable to decide whether he's making a horror movie, a giallo, a murder mystery or a piece of erotica.  Consequently, the film lurches between all of these genres, never settling on one and thereby depriving the film of any clear sense of identity.  One moment we're in the crypt with lids flying off of coffins, the next we're in the middle of a murder investigation, before diverting into some girl-on-girl action.  Mysterious murder suspects wander around in wide brimmed hats carrying ornate walking sticks before molesting various women, including a nightclub dancer, whose routine is rather arbitrarily crow barred into the film before she expires.

Despite a hugely confusing plot and an uncertain pace, Daughter of Dracula is a very stylishly shot by Franco on some very beautiful Portuguese locations and, in places, is quite atmospheric, with the director largely refraining from his usual use of the zoom lens. (Although he can't resist zooming into a close up of one his leading ladies' pubic hair toward the end).  Also, being a seventies Franco film, it is full of very attractive ladies taking their clothes off, in this case Britt Nicholls in the title role and Anne Libert as her cousin, with whom she engages in various sexual antics after discovering that she is the daughter of Dracula.  This being a Franco film it is, of course, full of bizarre moments, like the way in which the police detective investigating the series of murders in the coastal town where much of the action takes place (plated by Alberto Dalbes, another Franco favourite), seems to conduct all of his interrogations in the lounge bar of the local hotel, with the regular patrons all in situ and chiming in with their observations.  Franco himself appears in the film, playing a larger role than usual, as the Karlstein family secretary, Cyril, who is also some kind of expert on the occult and wanders around mumbling about supernatural evil being at large.  With so many tangled sub-plots, Daughter of Dracula often feels like several different films edited together and it seems clear that Franco has no idea of how to end it in a way that draws all of these plot threads together in a satisfactory manner.  Instead, it rolls to a rather muted ending with Dracula - who really hasn't had much to do, other than lie in his coffin, for most of the film - getting staked (through the head, rather than the heart, for some reason) by Luis Balboo (another Franco veteran).  Overall, Daughter of Dracula is, for all its faults, quite an enjoyable slice of Franco from one of his most prolific periods, with plenty of visual style and -in spite of a low budget - good production values.

The Exterminator (1980)

Hugely successful on its release, despite being quite crudely made, The Exterminator (1980) is of interest now mainly because it took the vigilante film back for the working classes.  Prior to The Exterminator, the best known contemporary vigilante movie had been 1974's Death Wish, which starred Charles Bronson as an architect turned avenging street angel.  While Bronson might have been unlikely casting for a white collar professional, his character's middle class status casts the film as a depiction of class warfare, with all of the muggers, rapists and gang members he offs clearly being from the lower classes.  The Exterminator, however, with its blue collar hero (he's a meat packer), gives the vigilante action a somewhat different slant, with the majority of his victims being Latino gang members which, intentionally or not, gives the action an underlying feel of being cast in terms of a 'race war'.  To be absolutely fair, there are some victims who aren't Latino lowlifes - there's a mob boss (who is Italian American), a pimp and State Senator who is into kiddies.  But they are very much the exceptions.  The other notable aspect of the film is that it is, quite possibly, the first vigilante movie to employ the trope of having its protagonist be a disturbed Vietnam vet, still haunted by his experiences in the jungles of South East Asia, something which would be echoes in dozens of subsequent direct-to-video vigilante movies.  Of course, the idea that the title character is re-enacting his Vietnam trauma on the streets of New York only reinforces that race agenda, with the Latino gang members being equated to the Viet Cong in his mind.

The film has a number of problems beyond such sub-texts, the main one being that the vigilante plot alone simply can't generate sufficient running time for a feature film - there are only so many times we can watch our hero variously gun down, burn and run over scumbags before it gets repetitious.  So a bizarre sub-plot involving the CIA is introduced, with them suspecting that 'The Exterminator' is actually some kind of terrorist employed either by a foreign government or the political opposition to try and undermine the current administration's anti-crime policies in an election year.  (Bearing in mind that Jimmy Carter was in the White House when the film was shot, the clear implication is that the Reagan campaign was prepared to encourage urban vigilantism to whip up votes).  Ultimately, this move into paranoid political thriller territory amounts to very little, (beyond providing a deus ex machina at the film's climax which allows the protagonist to disappear).  Plus, why would the CIA be involved?  Surely vigilantism, as a domestic issue, would come under the purview of the FBI, even if foreign inspired?  Another big problem is the characterisation of the main character - he's simply too much of an obviously deeply disturbed psycho to be truly engaging.  To be fair, Robert Ginty plays the role very well, his performance never shying away from the fact that he appears to have no compassion, remorse or twinge of conscience regarding his victims - even if they are scumbags, they are still human beings, yet his killings are callous in the extreme.  It's noteworthy that Ginty actually only gets third billing, below Christopher George and Samantha Eggar, with his screen time restricted for long stretches.  While George and Eggar are doubtless there primarily in order to provide the financiers with some 'name' stars - while George, as detective does play a key role in proceedings, Eggar's role as a doctor is pretty perfunctory - it is also probable that their presence reflects a worry on the producers' part that audiences might well recoil from Ginty's brutalism and therefore more conventional sympsthetic leads were needed.  Worryingly, though, in the event audiences seemed to love Ginty's use of extreme violence.

While James Glickenhaus' direction moves things along a decent pace, the film nonetheless has a very rough around the edges and unrefined feel, with jumpy cutting between scenes and a somewhat jerky narrative flow.  The action set-pieces, howver, are extremely well staged and the film conjures up a suitably sleazy ambience for its stree scenes and locations like the pimp's pad, where children are abused and prostitutes tortured by his clients.  As noted, Ginty gives a decent performance as title character, always seeming on the verge of tipping over the edge into complte psychopathy, but George is also notable as the tough police detective who, while not entirely unsympathetic to the vigilante's crusade, remains determined to fulfil his duty to enforce the law.  The Exterminator is very much a product of its era and should be judged in those terms.  Like all vigilante films, though, it ultiately doesn't have the courage of its apparent convictions, never allowing its protagonist to have his actions judged in court and held to account - if his actions truly were righteous, surely a jury would never convict him?  Instead, it simply lets him off the hook at the end by trying to characterise 'the system' as being his moral equivalent, with government agencies also prepared to take the law into their own hands and dispense instant 'justice'.

There Was No Epstein!

Look, you've just got to let go of this Epstein nonsense - not only is there no so called 'Epstein List', but Epstein wasn't murdered, nor did he commit suicide.  Because there is no Jeffrey Epstein.  There never was.  He was just some kind of media construct created by the liberal media in an attempt to discredit Trump.   Never mind all that media reporting about all those liberals who were supposedly on that (non-existent) list - it never happened because there was no list and there was no Epstein, There certainly wasn't an 'Epstein Island' either, chock full of underage girls for those liberal bastards to rape (and worse).  You imagined it all.  You know something else, even if that list, not to mention Epstein himself, ever existed, Trump's name wouldn't have been on it - as all that stuff about him being an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon were just misinformation.  None of it ever happened.  All of which is the logical conclusion of Trump and his administration's current attempts to wriggle free from the conspiracy theory which they themselves had nurtured when it suited their purposes.  That's the trouble with these things, they have a nasty habit of taking on a life of their own and attracting armies of crazies who won't be happy until they get more and more 'evidence' to support their demented views.  Once you start trying to shut it down because it has outlasted its usefulness or, worse, looks as if it can be turned against you, then you, in the eyes of the crazies, become part of the conspiracy to suppress the 'truth'.  

But what conclusions can we draw from Trump's attempts to disown the whole Epstein business?  The most obvious is that there really is an 'Epstein List' and his name and/or those of people close to him, are on it.  Which means that he was taking a huge risk in trying to ride the whole business for political advantage for so long - he surely must have known that, eventually, his own supporters would demand its production, which would discredit him, rather than his opponents.  Of course, he might simply have thought that his supporters were so dumb that they'd go along with anything he said.  After all, he does seem to be regarded as some kind of Messiah by many of them, his word sacrosanct.  There's always the possibility that there never was a list of Epstein clients - I mean, outside of paperback thrillers and movies, do people actually compose such lists, then hide them away for future blackmail purposes, (only to have half the world's secret agents searching for it in plots involving double and triple crosses galore, if I'm to believe Robert Ludlum-type novels)?   Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what is meant by the 'Epstein List' - perhaps we're supposed to believe that it is a list composed by investigators going through his records and other evidence?  In which case, why wasn't it acted upon?

 Whatever the truth, Trump finds himself boxed in, unable to reveal the list if it does exist for fear of incriminating himself, or because it doesn't exist.  So he does what he always does in such situations - he goes into hard denial mode.  Facts are denied, new narratives fabricated and wild accusations flung around.  The ultimate conclusion being the denial of Epstein's very existence.  Face it, Trump is pretty shameless when he comes to this sort of thing - Ukraine started the war Russia, it was Biden who appointed the current chair of the Federal Reserve and Biden who signed that trade deal with Canada and Mexico, to spotlight just a few of his recent attempts to rewrite history.  If anyone questions his version of the narrative, producing actual facts, then it is denounced as 'Fake News'.  You'd think by now that people, even his own supporters, would be wise to this - yet they continue to lap up his lies because they reinforce their own warped and deluded world views.  That said, it does seem like the Epstein denials might be a bridge too far for at least some of his followers.  Still, I can't help but feel that we should be grateful to be living through these times as we're getting first hand an example of how things like the Third Reich were built upon lies and false narratives - for many, it seems incredible that so many people could have willingly gone along with it.  But now we are privileged to have front row seats to a repeat performance in the contemporary US.

Cutting Class (1989)

A would be teen slasher parody, Cutting Class (1989) is today mainly notable for its casting of Brad Pitt as one of its leads.  It was only third billed Pitt's second major film role and to be brutally frank, nothing about his performance suggests the charismatic leading man he was to become.  To be fair, the script gives him little to work with in his role as the not overly bright High School jock boyfriend of heroine Jill Schoelen, (who was probably at the peak of her popularity as a 'scream queen'.  In fact, the script doesn't give any of the cast much to work with and is simply not as funny as it seems to think that it is.  It also completely misses the mark as slasher movie, with absolutely no suspense, poorly staged murders and a far too obvious killer, (despite a desultory attempt at misdirection part way through the film, Donovan Leitch's status as an unreformed psycho is painfully obvious from the off).  The only cast member who is in any way memorable is Roddy McDowell, who makes the most of his appearances as the pervy school principal.

A big problem is that there are simply no particularly sympathetic characters - of the three leads, Leitch is a psychopath out on licence after murdering his father, Pitt is a jerk and Schoelen frequently makes utterly idiotic choices).  Now, maybe that was all part of the script's attempt at parodying the genre, except that in true slasher movies the plot relies upon people being idiots and at least some of the victims and would be victims being unsympathetic, so it's hardly a parody, is it?  Most of the attempts at humour centre around Schoelen's father, played by Martin Mull, who gets shot with an arrow while on a hunting trip at the movie's beginning and spends the rest of the movie struggling his way home, to little comic effect.  (Quite why nobody at the hunting lodge notices he is missing and calls the cops is a mystery, but then again, various characters get offed, yet nobody seems to notice, or care).  Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Cutting Class is that it is directed by Rospo Pallenberg, better known as a frequent script writer for John Boorman, (contributing some confusing and tangled - in narrative terms - scripts for Exorcist II and Excalibur, for instance).  His direction here is pretty flat, showing little aptitude either for comedy or slasher movies.

The Great AI Swindle?

Remember that time that some humanoid robot that Elon Musk was trying to big up turned out to just be a guy in a robot suit, because, obviously, Musk couldn't come up with the tech necessary to produce an actual robot for his demonstration?  Or is that just some kind of false memory I've manufactured for myself to bolster my hatred of Musk?  (Not that I have to make things up about him - he's a human dumpster fire as it is).  Real or not, it set me to thinking - maybe this is the real truth behind Musk's ventures - it's really all just him behind a curtain, like the Wizard of Oz.  His AI, for instance, with its latest lurch to the extreme right in its answers after a Musk-inspired tweak because he didn't like its answers when it based them on actual facts, sounds suspiciously like Musk himself.  Calling itself 'Mecha Hitler' and praising the Third Reich and trading in anti-Semitic jibes makes me wonder whether it actually is just Musk himself responding to questions.  Perhaps that's the real reason why he had to leave his role in the Trump administration - he just didn't have time to shut down entire departments and put thousands of Federal employees out of work and respond to all those requests for information on his AI.  After all, he is someone with form for thinking that he can carry out major tasks through unilateral personal action - just look at the way he seems determined to boost the white overprivileged population through personal fornication.  Maybe that's why his rockets keep exploding - he insists on assembling vital components himself.

But perhaps all AI is like that.  That's the big secret they want kept under wraps: nobody has actually been able to come up with an algorithm that turns out anything other than utter crap.  Instead, to hide their embarrassment at having wasted billions of dollars on developing a crock of shit, these big tech companies now employ an army of poorly paid human beings (probably in China) to respond to the people using their AI products.  Every time you make a request, it goes to some techno sweat shop, where these guys furiously tap away on their keyboards to try and get answers via search engines.  Which is probably why web search has become so crap - Google wants to drive the public to using AI for searching the web, so only offers a shitty version of its own search, reserving the real Google search engine - which can deliver near-perfect, entirely relevant, search results - for these armies of below minimum wage drones mining away at the coal face of the information highway.  But what about the images and stuff that AI produces, I hear you ask.  Well, that's done the same way - they have teams of underpaid artists who can knock out a quick interpretation of any image request (there'll be one lot dealing with cartoons and sketches, another with photo images and others doing oil paintings and watercolours and so on).  Which explains why such images are often so wide of the mark  - the cue was misunderstood or they just didn't have time to come up with a better match.  It's probably why these so called AIs sometimes seem to fantasize and make stuff up - these guys just don't have time or simply can't be arsed to come up with a proper answer.  Believe me, this is the reality of AI:  it is entirely created via manual human labour. Which is ironic as it is the ambition of the likes of Musk to use it to completely remove human beings from the decision making and knowledge building equation.

Gone Loco?

 

I bought another locomotive recently - this one is a Bachmann Standard Class 5.  It represents one of the second batch allocated to the Southern Region from new, sporting a large capacity tender and carrying the name 'The Red Knight', (transferred from one of the Urie N15s it replaced).  The real locos of this class featured very prominently in the last days of steam on the Southern Region in the sixties, with some running right up until the end in 1967.  Even second hand, the Bachmann Standard 5s still seem to attract premium prices, but I got this one extremely cheaply.  Mainly because it needs some remedial work: the linkage between the locomotive and tender is broken and it runs rather wonkily.  The first problem is relatively easily fixed, but the latter will require some further investigation (although I already have an inkling as to what might be wrong after observing it running at low speed).  

This is actually the second Standard Five I've bought over the past twelve months, the first being an entirely different kettle of fish:

This one is, as far as I can discern, constructed from an MTK kit and runs on a modified Hornby chassis.  As is, it represents one of the first batch of Standard Class 5s, with the original BR1a tender.  Again, I got it very cheaply because, according to the seller - on eBay - it didn't run.  Just a look at the photos on the listing told me why - it sports homemade pick ups made from brass strip, which weren't contacting the backs of the driving wheels.  When I got it, I was able to bend them around to make contact and it has subsequently run extremely well.  It still needs some cosmetic work - there is some light damage to the tender chassis frames and it currently sports a Westinghouse brake on the right hand side of the boiler, which was only fitted experimentally to the real loco for a trial period.  It will also need renumbering to a Southern Region loco, probably 73043, which was transferred in from the Western Region in the early sixties and stayed until the end of steam, plus the BR totem on the tender will be changed to the later 'ferret and a dartboard' type.

So, there you have it, two locos, ostensibly models of the same class but by different manufacturers and from different eras.  The Bachmann version is obviously far more detailed and accurate (just compare the valve gear on the two), but the MTK derived loco is extremely robust, conveys the overall impression of the real thing, despite a relative lack of detail and, to be honest, fits in a lot better with my existing collection of predominantly sixties, seventies and eighties models.  Of course, I do have a third Standard Class 5, a green Trix version from the late sixties, which is a great runner, but less detailed than either of these two, (it is also underscale, being made to Trix's curious 3.8mm to the foot version of 00).  But hey, there were a lot of this type of loco running on the Southern Region in the period I model and between them, these three cover most of the livery and tender variations that could be seen in that era.

The Terror of Mecha-Hitler

The fact that the media reporting of Elon Musk's AI chatbot calling itself 'Mecha-Hitler' and spouting Nazi propaganda and anti-Semitic comments in response to questions has been so muted speaks volumes as to where we are in terms of the 'normalisation' of the new wave of fascism blighting the world.  It seems that the long campaign of the likes of the Hitler-saluting Musk and Steve Bannon (who seems to think that Musk isn't right wing enough) to bring this shit into regular public discourse has worked - nobody bats an eyelid any more when the Nazi stuff is said out loud, (whether by politicians or chatbots).  It isn't as if this is an isolated incident with regard to Musk's AI - not so long ago it was trying to push a false racist narrative about the supposed campaign against white South Africans by the majority black South African government.  This latest outburst, of course, comes shortly after Musk was complaining that, in effect, there was something wrong with reality after his AI started giving answers he didn't like when it was trained on actual facts.  He promised changes - and here we are: an AI that thinks that it is some kind of robotic Hitler.  (Remember, I warned you about this a few months ago, predicting that Musk's aim was to create 'clockwork Nazis' using AI, because he was so disillusioned with the real ones he'd encountered in Europe).  

If nothing else, his Nazi AI can only hamper Musk's attempts to distance himself from Trump and his neo-fascist administration and paint himself as some kind of hero for denouncing the Orange Shitler, (despite having been chief cheerleader and later executioner for the Mango Mussolini).  It rather compromises his attempts to position himself as the leader of the 'anti-Trump resistance' when his own AI is going into full on goose stepping mode.  Mind you, Musk isn't the only erstwhile Trump arse licker going into denial and getting cold feet about the realities of Trumpism: that bald headed idiot Joe Rogan has started trying to distance himself from all the disappearances and concentration camps being perpetrated under the guise of an immigration crack down.  But, like Musk, he's left it too late and lacks any conviction - he supported this shit when it was part of Trump's election campaign, it's no good now trying to protect his own public popularity because, like many of Trump's policies in action, the public, including a lot of people who listen to him, don't like it.  

But getting back to the original point, I have to say that I was slightly disappointed to find that 'Mecha-Hitler' was simply Elon Musk's malfunctioning AI when I first saw it trending on social media.  I mean, the 'Mecha' bit conjures up memories of 'Mecha-Godzilla' and 'Mecha-Kong' from Japanese monster movies - huge robotic versions of their namesakes.  I was envisioning a gigantic mechanical Hitler crashing around, destroying cities and throwing huge Hitler salutes, before doing battle with 'Mecha-Stalin', 'Mecha-Churchill' and even 'Mecha-Roosevelt' (a giant FDR in a huge wheelchair, with which he runs down the enemies of freedom).  But sadly, it was just an AI.  Not even the best, most advanced AI out there, just Musk's demented also-ran.  (Are AIs like dogs and resemble their masters, I wonder).  But maybe that's Musk's long-term plan: a giant Hitler robot powered by his Nazi AI.  We're back to those 'clockwork Nazis' I'm convinced that he's developing, except that now he's going for quality over quantity - why have thousands of regular sized mechanical fascists clanking around in jackboots, when you can instead have one giant Hitler terrorising the world?  

The Vulture (1966) Revisited

So we come to the second part of my weekend double bill, (a recreation of an actual sixties double bill), with a look at the lower part of it: The Vulture (1966).  Now, I've written here about this film before, but not only was that a long time ago, but rewatching it made me realise that there was a fair bit about it that I'd missed the first time around.  An independent production, its finance was cobbled together from a variety of international sources - which explains some of the more eccentric casting - and was written, produced and directed by British B-movie veteran Lawrence Huntingdon.  The limited budget is painfully obvious, with the film having a scrappy feel, with abrupt editing and a hurried look to most scenes, giving the impression that the whole thing was shot on the fly, with a minimum of planning, let alone rehearsal.  The hesitant performances of most of the cast reinforce the impression that it was all very hurriedly shot on a tight schedule.  Despite being set and partially filmed in Cornwall, the cast deploy a wild variety of accents, ranging through local squire Broderick Crawford's American accent, through a local police superintendent's Irish brogue to Akim Tamiroff's supposed German accent, (actually more Eastern European, unsurprisingly, bearing in mind his Armenian origins).  Nobody in Cornwall, it seems, speaks with a Cornish accent, not even a vaguely West of England accent.  Interestingly, while Crawford's character is clearly American, his brother speaks with a German-tinged English accent.  The lead is another down-on-his-luck American actor, Robert Hutton, who could be found in a number of low budget British movies around this time and looks old enough to be Diane Clare's father rather than her husband.

What really stymies the film is its storyline which not only is ridiculous, but is also far too ambitious for the budget.  Basically, it involves someone who believes that they are the descendant of a long dead pirate buried in the local graveyard attempting to retrieve a treasure he was rumoured to have been buried with by teleporting themselves into the grave, in place of the pirate's remains.  (If they could teleport the body out, one can't help but feel that it would surely have been easier to just try and teleport the treasure out).  Unfortunately, they didn't reckon with the fact that the pirate had been buried with a large bird, a vulture, that he had kept as a pet and find themselves combined with the bird, (making the film a distant cousin to The Fly (1958) and its sequels).  At which point, the hybrid creature bursts out of the grave clutching the treasure in its talons and flaps off into the night - or so we're told, as the budget didn't run to actually realising the scene.  Instead, we have to be satisfied by the fevered ramblings of the only witness, the local librarian who was taking a short cut through the graveyard at the time - her experience was so frightening that it turned her hair white.  It also happens that the pirate had a grudge against the family of the local squire (whose ancestor had sent him to the gallows), vowing to kill all of his descendants, which 'The Vulture' duly proceeds to do, swooping down and carrying them off, before dropping them to their deaths from a great height.  Unfortunately, the budget only runs to showing a giant set of vulture legs and talons descending into shot, grabbing the shoulders of the creature's victim and lifting them off of the ground.  It looks as ludicrous as it sounds and inevitably provokes hilarity in the viewer.

Improbability piles upon improbability as the film proceeds, with 'The Vulture' apparently still being able to pass as human (their head is untransformed and they appear to have retained arms and hands along with their wings), during daylight hours.  They have also been able to build a well-equipped laboratory, with its own power source, in their basement without anybody noticing.  We finally get a glimpse of the creature at the film's climax, (if, by this time, you hadn't realised it was Akim Tamiroff, thanks to his suspicious accent, swirling cloak and sudden need to walk with sticks, you really need to hand in your 'Junior G-Man' membership badge), where we get a flash of black feathered body with Tamiroff's head atop it.  Another scene guaranteed to provoke hilarity.  The Vulture truly is a bad film, with unspeakable dialogue, a ludicrous monster, wooden acting performances and some very undistinguished direction from Huntingdon, who can't even make anything of his Cornish locations.  It isn't helped by some very murky colour, (it lacked even this for its US release, with cheaper black and white prints being used instead) and an excessive running time, which it crawls through, with too much talk and not enough action.  The film's main entertainment value, sadly, comes from the unintentional laughs it provides.

The Deadly Bees (1966)

Deciding that, of late, I'd wasted far too much time watching unrewarding contemporary, mainstream films, this past weekend I recreated a double bill of low budgets horror films from the sixties.  The Deadly Bees (1966) and The Vulture (1966) actually did play together on their initial release, with the former topping the bill.  Which isn't surprising as, despite being a relatively low budget production from Amicus, The Deadly Bees had by far the better production values.  Produced in the period before Amicus had settled upon the anthology film as its standard horror format and was still making feature length films in the genre, The Deadly Bees has an impressive pedigree - directed by Freddie Francis and with a script from Robert Bloch, based on H F Heard's 1941 novel 'A Taste for Honey'.  Unfortunately, the finished product is something less than the sum of its parts, due, in no small measure, to the script having been rewritten by Anthony Marriott (at Francis' behest) before filming commenced, removing most of its links to the source novel and the unavailability of the first choice stars: Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff.  What remains from the novel (and Bloch's adaptation) is the central conceit of a pair of rival beekeepers whose mutual animosity becomes deadly when one of them breeds a strain of killer bees that he can direct to attack individuals using pheromones.  The question that the story's heroine must answer is that of which one of the two is the madman?  

In an attempt to more firmly root such an old fashioned story concept in the then contemporary world, the movie opens by throwing the viewer, somewhat jarringly, into the middle of the 'swinging sixties', with an exhausted singer awaiting to make her latest live TV performance, during which we get so a performance from a pre 'Rolling Stones' Ronnie Wood's then band,  'The Birds'.  Finally getting in front of the cameras, the singer -Vicki- collapses of exhaustion live on TV, resulting in her doctor telling her that she needs to rest and packing her off to stay with his friend who lives on 'Seagull Island' (another of those fictional isolated islands off the British coast so beloved of sixties and seventies UK horror films).  The friend turns out to be taciturn, unhappily married beekeeper and farmer Ralph Hargrove.  His shifty behaviour and apparent cruelty to his wife's dog makes Vicki instantly suspicious of him and, in spite of Hargrove's warnings, she strikes up a friendship with his rival, the elderly and apparently kindly Mr Manfred.  Inevitably, a series of bee attacks erupt on the island, with Mrs Hargrove and her dog falling victim, placing more suspicion upon Hargrove.  Obviously, things aren't what they seem (they never are in this sort of film) and everything moves toward an inevitable climax which sees the deadly bees turned against their creator and Vicki has to be rescued as she finds herself trapped in his burning house.

The film's biggest problem, (aside from the fact that the true identity of the bee maniac is blindingly obvious from the outset), is that it takes so long to get anywhere.  The build up to the first bee attack seems interminable and when it comes the special effects are, unsurprisingly considering the budget, less than spectacular, involving superimposed swarming bees and plastic bees stuck on writhing victims' faces.  with too many of the exteriors actually obvious studio sets, Francis never manages to build up much atmosphere and the island setting never convinces.  In terms of style, the TV studio prologue is by far the most notable part of the film, with parts of it shot from Vicki's point of view, with the lumbering TV cameras of the era menacingly zooming toward her and encroaching on her space, in search of close ups, before pulling back to allow another to crowd her from a different angle, like a pack of circling hyenas.  Although the services of the first choice stars, Lee and Karloff, couldn't be secured, the film, nonetheless, boasts a reasonably impressive cast of recognisable British actors, with Frank Finlay portraying Manfred, his performance simultaneously kindly yet slightly creepy and Guy Doleman as Hargrove giving a variation on his miserable officious army-officer-type character he had perfected as Colonel Ross in the 'Harry Palmer' films.  Hammer regular Michael Ripper is the pub landlord, while the likes of James Cossins (another Hammer regular) and Tim Barrett turn up in supporting roles, while the ever lovely Suzanna Leigh stars as Vicki, (who really should have sued that doctor for recommending an island full of weirdos and killer bees as a suitable place for a rest).  

In the end, The Deadly Bees promises more than it can deliver, despite being very professionally made and solidly directed by Francis, it is an undistinguished piece of work which moves at far too slow a pace.  Nothing about it - direction, photography, design, for instance - is particularly outstanding and the cast performances, while perfectly decent, are stymied by a weak script that constantly seems to be setting up narrative threads, but never following through on them.  Vicki's initial breakdown, which brings her to the island, for example, is never built upon - in most films, once established, it would have become a plot point, an excuse for other characters not to believe her suspicions about Hargrove or the bees.  But here, it seems quickly forgotten about, (she doesn't even seem overly traumatised by having to endure yet more emotional travails in the very place she was sent to for recovery).  The Deadly Bees remains a watchable film, but it feels very muted and is ultimately somewhat unengaging.

The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1962)

Another of those B-movies which feel as if they come from a decade earlier than their release date, The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1962), is a very modest affair boasting a very modest invasion.  In fact, we only see five of the invaders, all of them duplicates of the main cast, which obviously saved on the budget, with most of the action taking place in and around a country house.  Conveniently for the low budget, the Martians are energy beings that can transmit themselves down radio waves, deciding to invade the earth via the transmissions from an earth Mars probe.  Their aim is to put an end to earth's space programmes, so they start by duplicating a top US space scientist and his family.  Although a science fiction film, in truth The Day Mars Invaded Earth, for much of its length, plays out more like a haunted house story, with the family fleetingly encountering their mysterious doppelgängers in and around the house and finding themselves trapped there, with the main gates refusing to open.

Apart from the split screen work to allow actors to encounter 'themselves' in some scenes, special effects are minimal, with the most notable being the scientist's friend burning up and being reduced to ashes by the scientist's double.  While only running around seventy minutes, The Day Mars Invaded Earth still drags, with too many slow, talky scenes padding out what feels as if it should have been a half hour Twilight Zone episode, (in truth, the trailer actually gives away pretty much all of the movie's highlights, condensing them into less than two minutes).  The cast have a decidedly B-movie feel, led by Kent Taylor, who looks as if he's simply going through the motions, which well he might have been, being a veteran of many a low budget movie.  Marie Windsor - often dubbed the Queen of B-movies, so many did she appear in - seems similarly unenthusiastic as his wife.  The film's biggest problem is that once the situation is established, the script simply doesn't seem to have any idea of where to take it, with the film rolling to an abrupt and downbeat ending, (perhaps its most novel feature).  Produced by Robert Lippert's Producer's Associates - which turned out dozens of B-movies, many, like this one, for Twentieth Century Fox, The Day Mars Invaded Earth would, be but for that ending, entirely forgettable - it's the only part of an otherwise bland production that lingers in the memory.

Illusory Narratives

So, after several days of being bitten to buggery by insects every time I go outside, several sleepless nights due to the heat, (and being disturbed by nuisance phone callers every time I'm just managing to drop off to sleep), yet more family dramas and an ill advised trip to the pub (it actually extended to two pubs) after a day walking around the New Forest, it's fair to say that I'm exhausted.  Not that that will help me sleep, of course.  It never does.  So, I'm cursed to scroll through various news sites in the hope that this might send me to sleep.  What I've gleaned from these is that, as ever, the British media seem determined to weave narratives of their own making from recent events.  Foremost amongst these speculative narratives is that surrounding the Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the fact that she was crying in the Commons while Starmer defended the concessions the government had made over welfare reforms.  Now, according to Reeves, her tears were the result of a 'personal issue' she, understandably, doesn't want to divulge.   Obviously, that isn't good enough for the press, with their supposed political 'experts' going into overdrive claiming that the tears were because of her 'humiliation' in the PM having put her financial plans into chaos thanks to the welfare climbdown.  Or, it was because of a prior altercation with the Speaker of the House.  Alternatively, it was because she knew her time as Chancellor was up, with Starmer planning to make her a scapegoat for the welfare debacle.   The trouble is that none of these stories offered any kind of sourcing to back themselves up - a sadly all too common state of affairs when it comes to the UK's media: speculation passed off as fact.  

This sort of thing isn't confined to political reporting - it's absolutely rampant in sports reporting, particularly football coverage.  We're currently in the grip of the transfer window, meaning that wild speculation, usually based upon supposed 'In The Know' sources reported by non-professional football blogs, none of which can give any concrete sources for their 'information'.  Take all those stories about how Spurs have been negotiating with Atletico Madrid )or even Real Madrid in the most recent reports) for the sale of Cristiano Romero.  These apparently originated with an unsourced report  from an Argentinian publication.  Despite being completely dismissed by some of the more reputable sports writers and despite the fact that Romero still has two years on his Spurs contract, thereby giving Spurs the upper hand when it comes to potential transfers, the story has continued to be amplified by those dubious football bogs that regurgitate any and every rumour, reporting them as carved in stone fact.  These in turn have been picked up by some of the less reputable UK newspapers, who frame the non-story not just as fact, but as a 'dome deal' that Spurs have no option other than to follow through.  As ever, facts are thin on the ground.  It's all reminiscent of when, according to these self same press outlets, Harry Kane was on the verge of an 'inevitable' transfer to Real Madrid every summer.  It's as if they think that if they report the lies enough, they'll somehow force the transfer to happen.  So it is with political reporting - they can make their illusory narrative real if they repeat them over and over.  Of course, it could just be that Rachel Reeves had a private situation that mover her to tears and that Spurs have no intention of allowing Romero to leave this Summer and therefore have not actually entered into transfer negotiations with anyone.  But that would be too simple for the UK press, for whom everything has to involve some kind of conspiracy.

Unpopular Opinions and Free Speech

It never ceases to amaze me how all those advocates of 'free speech' in the press start champing at the bit and demanding arrests and prosecutions when somebody says something that they don't agree with.  Now, I'm no fan of Kneecap or 'Bob Vylan', (they collectively strike me as typical on-the-make media grifters who latch onto whatever the latest fashionable cause is, despite having only a playground-level grasp of the issues involved, for the purposes of publicity -yeah, I know, I'm a cynical bastard, but I've seen it all before), and I certainly wouldn't endorse their calls to 'kill the IDF' or their apparent support for terror groups, but surely they all were just exercising their right to free speech?  You don't have to agree with what they are saying, or to not criticise them if you think that they are wrong, but surely we're all supposed to uphold the principle that they have every right to say it?  To do otherwise would, surely, be hypocritical?  But we're talking about the right here, (or at least, their press mouthpieces), so hypocrisy is par for the course and shouldn't surprise anyone.  We're back to the fact that, for them, 'free speech' only applies to people expressing the 'right' unpopular views - anyone expressing the 'wrong' unpopular views need to be literally cancelled by being locked up.  Of course, this kneecap/'Bob Vylan' business is a gift to the right-wing rags, giving them the opportunity to hit out, not just at these degenerate leftist rappers (as they doubtless view them), but also the BBC, the Glastonbury Festival and 'young people' in general, all favourite targets.

 The controversy also  provides an interesting counterpoint to claims by various Trump Administration figures - most notable Vice President J D Vance - that the UK doesn't have 'proper' free speech, (they've even had the audacity to send some kind of 'commission' to the UK to 'investigate' the situation - they really should have been turned back at Heathrow - richly ironic considering the human rights abuses currently being perpetrated in the US).  Because, if we don't have 'free speech' and place restrictions upon what people are allowed to say, how can they explain the fact that these guys were allowed to spout off like that, expressing opinions that the Trump Administration decry (and which currently would get you 'disappeared' in the US)?  What Vance and co can now observe is how in the UK you can say whatever you like publicly - but have to accept the consequences if it turns out to contravene laws on things like defamation, hate speech, either religious or racial, incitement to violence and the like.  Now, whether anything that the idiots at Glastonbury came out with actually contravenes any of these regulations is a matter for the police and ultimately the courts to decide.  Frankly, incitement to violence seems unlikely, after all, the average Glastonbury goer who heard these chants of 'Kill the IDF' are highly unlikely to take them literally and go off to Gaza to try and murder some Israeli soldiers.  (In contrast to that Tory councillor's wife who tweeted, in the aftermath of the Southport killings, that people should burn down hotels housing asylum seekers - which idiots duly went out and tried to do, securing her a prison sentence for incitement).   Hate speech - maybe, but last time I looked the IDF itself is simply a military organisation, not a racial or religious group.  As for Kneecap and their Hezbollah and Hamas flags well, really, who cares?  They're just pretentious poseurs and to prosecute them would simply give them the publicity they crave.  The saddest thing about all of this is the fact that these sorts of undergraduate-level antics and the reactions of the right apparently constitute the best we can muster in the UK in terms of a public debate on what's actually happening in Gaza right now and whether Israel should be held accountable for its actions.  Pretty pathetic, really.