Unnecessary Remakes

For some reason last weekend I watched that remake of Assault on Precinct 13 (2005).  Why?  I really don't know.  I suppose it was mainly down to the fact that Tubi has been shoving it in my face the past few weeks, every time I opened their Roku app.  So I finally gave in, hoping that they might stop pushing to me now.  This latest viewing did nothing to change my feelings toward it from the last time I saw it, at least a decade ago (probably more).  It falls into that burgeoning cinematic category of 'unnecessary remake', doing nothing to improve upon the original, let alone find a new perspective on the source material.  It's not that it's a bad movie in itself - it's actually well made, with a good cast and some well-staged action sequences.  But whereas the John Carpenter original was a lean, minimalist movie, made on a shoestring with a largely unknown cast, yet delivering brilliantly in terms of suspense and action, the remake is plot heavy, with an over-complicated story line, weighted down by too much backstory for its characters (of which there are too many) and no real suspense.  While the essentially faceless gang attackers of the original are menacing because of the fact that we never really know who they are and know none of them as individuals, the remake's team of corrupt police officers are just too real and identifiable to be really scary.  I've no doubt that the makers of this remake thought that they were being really radical by upending audience expectations by making the villains cops, swapping the races of the two main protagonists and giving the cop hero of the first film's name to the criminal, in reality it just weakens the whole premise.  Moreover, making the criminal who ends up in the station's cells the actual target of the attackers, rather than just someone caught up in the fight by happenstance, takes away a crucial element - the sense of randomness that underlines the original.  There is no complicated conspiracy, everything that happens is the result of a series of random coincidences.

The fact is that the remake of Assault on Precinct 13 would have been a perfectly decent film if it had been released as an entity in its own right, rather than being marketed as a remake of a beloved cult movie.  Which is the same way I've always felt about another 'unnecessary remake', the Colin Farrell version of Total Recall.  While vastly inferior, not mention vastly less imaginative, to the Schwarzenegger original, it is still an enjoyable enough science fiction action film, which, if it hadn't been released as a remake, would probably have performed better, as it wouldn't have drawn unflattering comparisons with the original.  At least, though, it had some relationship to the first film, being based on the same Philip K Dick short story, 'We Can Remember it for You Wholesale'.  Its mistake was in taking the title and too many plot elements from the first adaptation, rather than trying to reinterpret the original source to make something different, but with the same basic premise.  But in both of these cases, if the new films hadn't have invoked the titles of the older movies, then they wouldn't have been able to try and exploit their reputations to try and boost their own popularity, the makers and distributors doubtless hoping to build on an established audience for the originals also.  As with so much in the creative world these days, it's all about exploiting intellectual properties owned already owned by studios and publishers.  It is seen as easier than creating something completely new - just keep reworking the old stuff that proved popular before.  As well as remakes, this manifests as the various 'sequels' which invoke the title of a successful property, despite being only loosely connected, or the spin offs, often in the form of TV series, which are ground out endlessly, diluting whatever made the original popular even further.  In truth, there's nothing new in any of this: back in its 'Golden Age', Hollywood happily ground out B-movie series, often inspired by a successful A feature, but with lower budgets and lesser stars.  The model eventually proved unsustainable, as B-movies became uneconomic to produce and audiences tired of paying to see these cheapskate productions in the cinema, when they could see similar stuff at home for free on their TV sets.  At what point the current version becomes unsustainable and what will supercede it, I have no idea.  But it is inevitable.

An Abrupt Ending

I was watching The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) again this evening and it reminded me of just how abrupt the endings to these old forties horror movies could be.  In this case, the monster goes berserk, the castle catches fire and collapses, burying him and Dr Frankenstein under the rubble before the obligatory mob of villagers with blazing torches shouting 'Kill the monster' can get to them, we get a quick shot of Frankenstein's daughter embracing the hero who has just saved her from the fire, then the credits roll.  Accompanied by a surprisingly jaunty piece of music, in view of what had preceded it.  Contrast this with the preceding film in the series - Son of Frankenstein (1939) (the titular character being the older brother of the son of Frankenstein in Ghost) - where, after the monster's demise in a sulphur pit and Bela Lugosi's Ygor being filled full of lead, we get a reasonably lengthy final scene with Frankenstein and his family catching the train out of the village, but not before giving a speech to by the now grateful villagers and police inspector, who are there to wave him off.  Here, the jaunty music over the credits seems justified as we've just witnessed a happy ending, rather than the somewhat nihilistic denouement to Ghost.

Abrupt endings, of course, were pretty much de rigeur for B-movies, due to low budgets or simply the fact that they usually had to pack their plot into a running time of just over an hour, leaving them little time for scenes that didn't move the story along.  Significantly, Ghost of Frankenstein marks the point at which Universal's Frankenstein series ceased to be A-features.  From now on, the pictures would be churned out annually, in contrast to the first three, which had appeared, widely spaced, over an eight year period.  Whereas Son of Frankenstein had a running time of around ninety minutes, the longest of the subsequent movies was seventy five minutes.  The lowering of their budgets was reflected in an increased use of recycled sets, music and stock footage.  They also combined Frankenstein's monster with other members of Universal's monster menagerie in scenarios that frantically scrambled through their running times to abrupt and apocalyptic endings that, nonetheless, always left some room for a sequel.  (The various writers' showed a commendable fidelity to the continuity of prior entries in the series).  

Of course, Ghost of Frankenstein wasn't quite a B-movie, but rather a 'second feature' that could either headline a double bill of such films in B-circuit cinemas, or act as support to a bigger feature on the A-circuit.  The studio certainly felt it prestigious enough to star Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Frankenstein's second son, perhaps to compensate for the fact that, for the first time, Karloff wasn't playing the monster.  Instead, their new horror star, Lon Chaney Jr, who had scored a hit in the title role of The Wolfman (1941) the previous year, took on the role (for the only time in the series).  Bela Lugosi, as Ygor, was retained from the previous film to help give the cast a weighty feel.  Nevertheless, the production values are noticeably lower than in the preceding films and the script thinner.  But it all felt a bit stodgy - the subsequent three films might have been closer to true B-movies, with even lower production values and budgets, but they were also a lot more fun, while still retaining those abrupt endings.

The Last Shot You Hear (1970)

My quest to catch up with obscure low budget films which used to turn up on the late night TV schedules when I was I kid continues with The Last Shot You Hear (1970).  This one was a regular part of ITV's post News at Ten schedule in the seventies.  I never saw it then, being too young to be allowed up that late, but the title always intrigued me.  By the time I was old enough to stay up that late watching TV, it had seemingly vanished from the schedules, never to return.  Information on the film also seemed scant, with many reference works seeming to think that it was in black and white, which seemed odd for a film from 1970, while others credited it as being a colour production.  None were very complimentary about it, noting that the film had actually been shot in 1967, but not released in the US until 1969 and the UK in 1970.  I finally managed to catch it the other day - the version I saw was in colour, as were all of its TV screenings, a black and white print had, however, been released to US cinemas (in 1969).  The Last Shot You Hear was based on a stage play - William Fairchild's 'The Sound of Murder' - and very much looks it, with lots of talky indoor scenes and a very static feel.  The play was first produced in 1958 and the film feels very much as if it belongs in that era rather than the sixties.  Despite the addition of some exterior scenes, the film's production feels very 'stagey', with the lighting in interior scenes seemingly always directly overhead and a lack of any fluid camera movements.  

The plot itself reinforces the feel of a time warped stage production, featuring one of those elaborate murder plots which rely on carefully timed phone calls and the like to establish alibis.  Inevitably, it all goes awry, with vanishing bodies and secret tape recordings of the main characters hatching their plot.  The whole thing goes through a number of entirely predictable plot twists before a final, equally unsurprising 'shock' denouement.  There is some attempt to update the play's scenario: whereas in the play the main antagonist is a children's author who won't release his wife from their loveless marriage for fear of a divorce damaging his image and sales, in the film he is the successful author of a series of books and newspaper columns on maintaining perfect relationships.  In both versions, the wife plots with her lover to kill him.  Unfortunately for them a third party, the author's secretary, overhears and records their plot, using the tape to blackmail them after the author has, seemingly, been murdered, with the secretary claiming to have subsequently hidden the body.  There's nothing here that the average audience wouldn't have seen countless times before, but usually better produced.

The film's limited budget is painfully apparent, with poor colour, which looks so weak that it might as well have been monochrome and minimal production values.  The film lacks any real stars, the closest it gets being American actor Hugh Marlowe, best remembered for playing the lead in fifties science fiction movies like Earth Vs the Flying Saucers as the author, in his last film appearance.  It has to be said that he does a pretty good job in making his character thoroughly dislikable, a selfish, egotistical domestic tyrant who treats his wife abominably.  The rest of the cast is made up of familiar British TV and B-movie faces, including Patricia Haines, Zena Walker, William Dysart and Thorley Walters, all of whom give decent performances in the face of an unyielding script.  Most startlingly, though, the film is directed by Gordon Hessler and it is hard to believe that this is the same man who would shortly direct Scream and Scream Again (1969), a visually far more interesting film, with lots of action, fluid camerawork, interesting angles and decor.  Indeed, Hessler was a director noted for his distinctive visual style, (most notably seen in the quartet of films he made for AIP between 1969 and 1971), incorporating lots of camera movement, so the static nature The Last Shot You Hear is quite jarring.  Sadly, he never seemed to quite fulfil his potential, eventually ending up directing TV movies in the US.

The film was the last to be produced by Robert Lippert's company for Twentieth Century Fox, an association which had produced some two hundred low-budget features, many, like this one, produced in the UK in association with British producer Jack Parsons.  The Last Shot You Hear is far from a lost classic, but watching it has at least scratched an itch that has been bothering me since I was a child.

Frustration on Fleet Street

It must be absolute Hell running a right-wing newspaper these days.  With Trump in the White House, the natural instincts of the likes of the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Telegraph, Sun and so on would normally be to revel in his 'achievements'.  Damn it, he's firing civil servants left, right and centre, promising tax cuts to billionaires, trashing diversity and equality initiatives, he's even bashing the EU and being rude to foreigners.  It should be their wet dream.  Except that Trump's unpopularity in Britain, fuelled by him and cronies cosying up to Putin and other dictators, stabbing Ukraine in the back and, worst of all, insulting the UK's military prowess, means that they instead have to keep writing broadly negative pieces about him.  It must be so frustrating.  Indeed, you can tell, reading many of the articles they publish about Trump, that they really, sneakingly, admire what he's doing.  Riding roughshod over democratic and academic institutions, trying to intimidate the judiciary, locking up pesky non-white people who disagree with him, even deporting them in chains without due process - it's what they've been calling for in the UK for years.  Ordinarily, they'd be holding Trump up as an exemplar for British politicians to follow.  But he's just so toxic and destructive, they don't dare.  It's the same for those right-wing British politicians who have, in the past, banged the drum for Trump and courted his attention.  Boris Johnson is desperately trying to spin Trump's approach to ending the war in Ukraine as anything but the betrayal of Kiev that it actually is, while Nigel Farage - Trump's self-styled 'best buddy' - now an MP with ambitions of parliamentary respectability is doing his best to avoid answering questions about the Mango Mussolini.  Openly supporting a foreign leader despised in the UK is a sure way of losing votes rather than expanding your tally of MPs.

You'd think that the right-wing press would find some respite on the domestic front, with a Labour government in power.  There should be lots of scope for lambasting 'loony lefty' policies, outrageous government spending on benefits for one legged black lesbians and the like.  But they find themselves in the unusual position of having to criticise a Labour government for cutting benefits to minority groups, including OAPs, proposing to slash public spending by sacking civil servants and not rolling back Tory devised restrictions on civil liberties.  Once again, it must be extremely frustrating for them.  After all, this is the stuff they used to heap praise on Tory governments for doing, screaming for them to do more of the same.  You'd think they'd be happy that Labour finally seem to have seen it their way.  Instead they are forced to indulge in hypocrisy - not just on matters of government policy, either, but also things like ministers' expenses and hospitality.  After all their years of defending Tory ministers for taking backhanders in all manner of hospitality and freebies, justifying it all as somehow being a necessary part of the process of governing, they are now jumping on even the tiniest hint of an irregularity.  Amazing how they've suddenly become so keen on holding politicians to account.  Obviously, the UK's right-wing press have cornered themselves into these ever greater acts of hypocrisy, because what's their alternative?  Having spent so long painting Labour as irresponsible 'tax and spenders', they can't really admit that this Labour government is fiscally just as right-wing as their Tory heroes.  But to offer a coherent critique of current Labour policies would mean embracing progressivism, both economic and social.  Which would mean aligning themselves with the likes of Jeremy Corbyn who, to them, is the devil.  A real conundrum for them.  But watching their hypocritical convulsions as they try to navigate the current political situation, both at home and globally, is hugely entertaining.

Authentic British Smut

Every so often Pluto's Cult Movies channel turns up trumps.  Much of the time it screens pretty run-of-the-mill fodder: B-movies and public domain films which barely qualify as 'cult'.  But then it goes through phases when it screens Giallo movies and other Italian horrors and thrillers or, as it has been most recently, British smut.  Well, actually, international smut, with some seventies Jesus Franco erotica and a couple of Russ Meyer pictures, along with assorted continental arty smut fests showing up.  Most interestingly, they seem to have acquired the rights to a number of Stanley Long produced movies - the other night I had an evening's viewing consisting of Secrets of a Windmill Girl (1966), This, That and the Other (1970) and Nudes of the World (1961), plus Harrison Marks' Naked as Nature Intended (1961).  Rather bizarrely, there was also a Laurel and Hardy film sandwiched in there somewhere as well.  I have to say that watching the two naturist themed semi-docmentaries I felt a bit like Sid James in the opening scenes of Carry on Camping (1969), when he's watching something similar in a cinema, cackling away at the faux innocence of it all, as the narrators do their best to assure us that this is a serious educational documentary.  I found Nudes of the World particularly fascinating, a sort of second cousin to Long's later Mondo-style movies London in the Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965).  The main difference being that it presents its material as a dramatised, albeit supposedly true, narrative, with a group of international beauty contest finalists deciding to set up their own nudist camp, (or 'Sun Club' to use the vernacular of the time).  To this end, they persuade a titled landowner to lease them his property while he is way that summer, but neglect to tell him what for.  Inevitably, there is conflict with the prudish local villagers, but all ends well when his Lordship returns home and defuses the situation, revealing that he is, himself, a naturist and has been on holiday at a continental nudist colony.

The acting is terrible, but the girls very attractive, with or without clothes.  It is, however, an amusingly chaste nudist camp that they run, with everyone only going topless and wearing thongs to protect their modesty.  Startlingly, for viewers of my age, the narration (supposedly provided by an unidentified member of the beauty queen organisers) is provided by Blue Peter's Valerie Singleton, who keeps a commendably serious tone throughout, treating it all as if it really is a serious look at naturism rather than titillation.  Whilst Nudes of the World gets to its topless girls fairly quickly and then keeps them on screen for most of the film's remaining running time, Harrison Marks' contemporaneous nudist documentary Naked as Nature Intended, seems to take an age to get to the actual nudity.  But when it comes, we get lots of full frontal female nudity, (while the male nudists are only seen from the waist up or from behind).  Most of the film is taken up with a seemingly interminable travelogue, as we follow two groups of girls - three in a borrowed Buick, the other two hitch-hiking - as they head off to their holidays in Cornwall.  That said, the journey has fascinations of its own, as it paints a vivid picture of early sixties Britain, with landmarks like Stone Henge not inundated with tourists, no motorways and main roads looking, by today's standards, remarkably empty.  Most startling is the lack of parking restrictions - back then you could just pull up and park pretty much where you liked, a situation that I remember persisting into the seventies, before the increased crowding of the roads with motor vehicles was accompanied by more and more restrictions and regulations.  When both groups finally reach their destinations, at Land's End, one group stumbles onto the private nudist beach where the two hitch-hikers have gone, discovering the joys of naturism as they throw off their swim suits and visit the local nudist colony.  Nudity aside, it is, like Nudes of the World, all rather charmingly chaste and innocent.  It might have been titillating stuff in its day, but I can honestly say that I found neither film remotely erotic.

Before leaving this subject, a few quick thoughts about Secrets of a Windmill Girl and This, That and the Other.  The latter is an anthology film produced by Long with the Ford brothers, originally released as A Promise of Bed.  It has a certain raw feel, being shot entirely on location with rather grainy film.  The three stories are meant to be sex comedies, but actually deliver little of either.  The first is notable for featuring a young Dennis Waterman in the lead and is a very slight story as he is mistaken by an actress seeking a role for the photographer son of a producer.  The second story, featuring Victor Spinetti as a suicidal man who mistakenly finds himself hosting a party for a group of bright young things is actually quite poignant and features an excellent and moving performance from Spinetti.  The third and final story, centering on John Bird as a cabbie, wanders into pure fantasy, as he apparently finds himself in the middle of some bizarre sexual shenanigans in a country house, as pursues his female passenger (Yutte Stensgard) for his fare.  Overall, the film constitutes an enjoyable enough, if not very memorable, diversion, notable for presenting a vivid snapshot of late sixties/early seventies Britain.  Secrets of a Windmill Girl (originally released on a double bill with Naked as Nature Intended) is interesting because it is pretty much Long and his frequent partner Arnold Miller's first attempt at a feature film rather than a documentary.  It replicates the look and feel, though, of their preceding films London in the Raw and Primitive London, with much of the action taking place at the eponymous Windmill theatre and in various sleazy strip clubs as it chronicles the fall from grace of a 'Windmill Girl', played by Pauline Collins.  It's tempting to think that the many Windmill performances it preserves were actually unused footage from the two 'London' films and this feature was built around them.  The sense of kinship between this feature and the 'documentaries' is reinforced by its extensive use of voice over narration, as Collins' fellow former 'Windmill Girl', played by April Wilding, relates the story in flashback.  It's even less titillating than the naturist films and there's certainly nothing particularly original plot-wise, but, like them, preserves a fascinating snap shot of a particular era and milieu.  Overall, though, a fascinating evening's entertainment.

From Beyond (1986)

A follow up to Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna's first H P Lovecraft inspired movie, Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986) similarly takes its source story as a framework, expanding upon it to produce an over-the-top piece of body horror.  The film's opening scenario isn't that far from the original story, featuring a pair of scientists developing a 'resonator', whose vibrations allow them to see and interact with other dimensions, with one of them seeing translucent creatures swimming in the air.  Inevitably, the senior scientist turns up the power, becoming entranced with the inter-dimensional experience before the device malfunctions, with the other scientist fleeing the old house where they are conducting their experiments.  When the police are called, they find the senior scientist decapitated and his colleague is arrested for his murder.  His story of inter-dimensional creatures ensures that he end up in a secure psychiatric unit.  From there, the script goes off on its own track, with a doctor treating the scientist finding that his pineal gland has been enlarged and deciding that his story is true.  Believing that the 'resonator' could be adapted to treat mental illnesses, she has the scientist released into her custody and along with an escorting police officer, they return to the house and start experimenting with the 'resonator'.  

Once it is reactivated, the first scientist, of course, crosses back into this dimension, telling the others of an alternative dimension where his particular pleasures can be fully experienced.  Which is bad news, as his particular pleasure was S&M.  The rest of the film chronicles the battle between him and the others as they try to turn off the 'resonator' and banish him back to the other dimension and he tries to take control of the device and ensare them in his fantasies.  In the course of this, he demonstrates his new shape-shifting abilities, transforming into a series of oozing, tentacled manifestations.  Various other inter-dimensional creatures hamper the heroes and the lady doctor starts succumbing to the vibrations and starts turning into a dominatrix.  The various transformations are, obviously, the film's highlight and are handled extremely well, with the prosthetic effects still quite convincing, despite their age.  Which brings us to one of the complaints against the film:  that its sexual content makes it highly un-Lovecraftian.  In truth, though, Lovecrafy's fiction is just chock full of waving phallic tentacles and oozing slime, which could, quite easily, be argued to be expressions of his own repressed sexuality and that From Beyond is merely expanding upon and exploring these ideas in a graphic fashion.  Now, while, as far as I'm aware, there is no evidence that Lovecraft was secretly into bondage, the S&M obsessions of the transformed scientist emphasise the theme of a sexuality that is normally repressed and kept secret in the everyday world, but that can be unleashed via a transformation into a different, secret, world.  As such, it could be argued, the transformed scientist acts as a proxy for Lovecraft himself.  

Interestingly, this character, created by the screen writers usurps the place of the story's main antagonist who is instead relegated to being the film's other scientist, who mostly resists the temptations of the 'resonator' and its vibrations.  Indeed, when he is finally overcome by the urges it awakens in him, causing him to molest the doctor and try to eat her brain, his enlarged pineal gland pops out through his forehead, like some kind of mutant penis.  He only releases her and comes back to his senses when she bites it off.  Perhaps this, also, could be read as a dramatisation of Lovecraft's fears as to the consequences if he ever allowed his repressed sexual urges to be released.  However you choose to read these aspects of the film, the fact is that From Beyond comes over as deeply 'Lovecraftian', from its creepy old house setting, preoccupation with madness, strange bodily transformations to its conjuring up of eldritch, unspeakable horrors from beyond this world.  It might not be as gory as Re-Animator, but like that film, it does a pretty decent job of fully fleshing out a relatively minor work in Lovecraft's canon which sits outside of the 'Cthulu Mythos' cycle he is best known for, into a full-blown story.

Despite its low budget, From Beyond is a good looking film, with excellent production values and visual style - all helped by being shot in an Italian studio.  Stuart Gordon's direction hits the mark, keeping the film well paced, building plenty of tension and contrasting the sleek modernity of the psychiatric hospital with the scientists' lab in the old house, which evokes echoes of the sort of set-up you might encounter in a Universal B horror from the forties.  The special effects, as noted, are surprisingly good bearing in mind the film's age and budget.  The cast are also strong, pitching their performances at exactly the right level for the material: taking it just seriously enough to be convincing while never straying into outright parody.  Ted Sorel is great as the transformed scientist, by turns imperialistic, sleazy and downright crazy, while Jeffrey Coombes is suitably twitchy and disturbed and his colleague.  Barbara Crampton as the doctor and Ken Foree as the cop also contribute strong performances.  All-in-all, From Beyond remains a tremendously enjoyable and exhilarating horror movie, which never seems to drag and has just enough black humour to stop all of the horrendous body transformations from becoming completely repulsive.  My enjoyment of it was greatly enhanced by watching an old VHS rip of it, complete with previews of forthcoming Vestron releases and lots of fuzz and tracking adjustments - it really took me back to the halcyon days of watching illicit videos!

Getting Straight (Out of the Closet)

The Tate brothers.  You know that sooner or later we have to talk about them.  Because they seem to be everywhere, frequently trending on social media, featuring in news stories both in print and on TV and seemingly whipping up strong feelings both in those who think them some kind of macho messiahs and those who loathe them as misogynist influencers corrupting the minds of young men.  Personally, I look at them and see one of the most obvious cases of repressed homosexuality I've ever encountered.  It's all there: the exaggerated masculinity, the shaved heads and neatly trimmed facial hair, their continued debasement and hatred of women, their boasting of their sexual domination of women while simultaneously being clearly repulsed by female sexuality.  Obviously, I'm not saying that homosexuals are preening woman haters, but rather that these are the traits of men desperately trying to deny their own true sexual orientation.  Their hatred for themselves is projected onto the opposite sex, who they blame for their failure to be sexually attracted to them.  In their twisted perspective, these damned women have to be punished for not arousing them and therefore rescuing them from their gay thoughts.  The truth is, though, that the Tates would probably find it a lot easier if they simply admitted to themselves that they are gay and are actually attracted to other men.  Dropping the deception would allow them to let go of that hate and see women as fellow human beings.

 Of course, the latter is a big sticking point for the kind of young men who idolise the Tates.  They seem to be permanently angry at the fact that women have the audacity not to know their place as sex objects, overawed by these guys' sexual prowess.  Perhaps they read - or more likely saw the TV adaptations - of too many of those Mills and Boon-type romances where even the strongest women find themselves swooning at the feet of some hunk of masculine machismo.  At least my generation had the excuse of growing up on a diet of seventies TV and films, where women were all 'birds' just 'gagging for it' and even the likes of Robin Askwith could get their ends away on a regular basis.  In defence of seventies British TV and sex comedies, while women were undoubtedly objectified, they were usually also given personalities and more often than not portrayed as strong and savvy individuals capable of knowing their own minds and even saying 'no'.  Ultimately, though, this stuff doubtless contributed to a male culture that assumed women were always available to male sexual advances - if they weren't they were disparagingly dismissed as being 'frigid' or 'lesbians'.  It must have come as something of a shock to many guys brought up on a diet of Sid James, Robin Askwith, James Bond and the like, that if you wanted any chance with a real woman, you might actually have to talk to them, treat them as human beings and establish a friendship with them first.  Damn it, according to seventies British TV, even a man as obviously gay as Peter Wyngarde could pull birds by the dozen every week in Jason King.  Anyway, to get back to the original point, I really think that it is about time that someone staged an intervention for the Tate brothers with the aim of getting them to just admit their true sexuality and come out.  I'm sure they'd feel much better for it and set a good example for misogynists and homophobes everywhere.

The Neanderthal Man (1953)

The Neanderthal Man (1953) bears a lot of similarities to Jack Arnold's Monster on the Campus (1958).  Most fundamentally, both films feature scientists who find a way of regressing animals and subsequently themselves to earlier evolutionary forms.  But whereas Arnold's movie was a relatively well resourced Universal B feature, The Neanderthal Man, independently produced and distributed by Eagle-Lion, the successors to poverty row's PRC, is clearly made on a much more limited budget, with a poorly realised monster and scrappy looking sets, (it's remarkable the number of windows that look out onto brick walls).  The key difference between the two movies' scenarios are that whereas in the later film the scientist's transitions into an apeman are involuntary and he has no memory of his murderous activities whilst in this state, in The Neanderthal Man the scientist has experimented on himself deliberately, with the intent of transforming and is well aware of his apeman activities.  Ultimately, it becomes a relatively straightforward Jekyll/Hyde variation, with his alter ego channelling all of the scientist's darker urges and thoughts.  Unfortunately, the film seems to take an age to get anywhere, with much running time devoted to another scientist - who is up in the mountains where the first scientist's house/lab is situated investigating reported sightings of extinct sabre tooth tigers - laboriously piecing together the evidence and slowly concluding what the audience have known from the outset - that the first scientist and the apeman are one and the same.

We're kept waiting until the latter part of the film for the monster's onscreen appearances, with lots of overly talky scenes set in bars, hotels and living rooms occasionally punctuated by some sabre tooth tiger attacks.  There are also far too many characters, often poorly delineated from each other, wandering around the mountains, just waiting to be attacked.  Unsurprisingly, the narrative doesn't flow smoothly, with too many cul-de-sacs and distractions from the main story.  It really doesn't help that the makers seem to have a very cavalier attitude toward prehistoric life: the sabre tooth tigers (created by the scientist experimenting on domestic cats with his serum) are just that, regular tigers with fangs stuck on them.  As everyone surely knows, sabre tooth cats weren't, in reality, related to modern cats at all, being a separate and parallel evolutionary line from a common ancestor, meaning also that it is unlikely that a domestic cat could regress to a creature that wasn't its ancestor, (let alone bulk up to many times its natural size in minutes, then regress back).  The film also seems shaky as to exactly what a Neanderthal man was, with the creature in the film depicted - via a very poor mask incapable of expression and with unblinking eyes - as some kind of generic movie apeman.  Most bizarrely, he runs around fully dressed in the scientist's clothes, (doubtless because the budget wouldn't run to a full apeman costume).  To be fair, the film is ahead of its time in that the scientist is obsessed with proving that Neanderthals were actually intelligent human ancestors, in opposition to the then widely held belief that they were a savage evolutionary dead end.  (Unfortunately, of course, his experiments seem to prove him wrong).  His attempts to convince his colleagues of his theories becomes mildly hilarious, however, when he includes Piltdown Man as an actual human ancestor.  (The film was unfortunate in that it was made literally months before Piltdown Man was conclusively shown to be a hoax).

Another aspect in which the film seems to be ahead of its time is in the quite clear implication that one surviving female victim of the apeman has been raped, or at least sexually assaulted, by him.  Usually, in films of this era, the closest to such an implication would be the dishevelled state of a female victim's clothes, but here, the girl's dialogue, although it trails off without the word 'rape' being uttered, clearly indicates what has happened to her.  The girl was played by Beverley Garland, in an early role, who would go on to appear in larger roles in many subsequent B-movies.  The film's other main actors were both established B-movie players, with Robert Shayne as the Jekyll/Apeman scientist and Richard Crane as the hero.  In fact, the film has a pretty solid B-movie heritage, co-produced and co-written by Jack Pollexfen, who had also been behind the likes of Daughter of Dr Jekyll, Son of Dr Jekyll, Son of Sinbad, Man From Planet X and The Indestructible Man.  Overall, though, it is vastly inferior to the similar Monster on Campus, which, despite being one of Jack Arnold's lesser efforts for Universal, is far better directed, scripted and produced.  Its story is also far more smoothly and logically developed, (not to mention featuring a much better apeman make up), with the serum for the transformations, for instance, being derived from the body fluids of a celeocanth, rather than being vaguely originated, as in The Neanderthal Man.  While it has quite a few unintentional laughs, even at only seventy eight minutes long, the film begins to drag long before the end.

It Defintely Didn't Happen to Me

Back in the days when I used to read crackpot nutrag Fortean Times, one of my greatest pleasures was the 'It Happened to Me' feature, where various readers related their 'strange' experiences.  The fact that so many of them were so obviously made up, riddled with inconsistencies, inaccuracies and contradictions, just made the column all the more entertaining.  A good indication that it was all a fabrication was when an item started along the lines 'This didn't happen to me actually, but to my sister/brother/cousin/neighbour/some bloke at the bus stop, who told me about it.'  Many of them were really simply stories about coincidences, sorry, strange coincidences, although why any coincidence should be stranger than any other is the real mystery.  Coincidences, no matter how unlikely they seem, are simply a matter of statistics: even if the odds of them happening seem remote, the laws of statistics dictate that they must happen at some point.  There were also a fair number of ghost stories, UFO sightings and strange creature sightings, none of them very convincing, not to mention plenty of conspiracies.  My absolute favourites, though, are the ones that involve such exotic entities as 'shadow men' - quite literally shadows with a life of their own - which seem to spend a lot of time scaring young children in their bedrooms.  I think the key to these is the fact that what are being related to us readers are decades old childhood memories of things that supposedly happened as they were drifting off to sleep.  While dreams, especially vivid one, can, at such a distance in time, can be confused with actual memories, the fact is that even memories of real, recent, experiences can be highly unreliable.  I speak from the experience of twice having to give witness statements to the police within a short time of an incident and finding myself questioning my recollection of the events, the order in which they occurred, even the timescale.  So, not surprisingly, I don't give much credence to these sorts of stories.

A variation on the 'shadow men'  are the 'stick men', which are, yeah you've guessed it, quite literally life sized figures looking like the stick men which we are often drawn to represent human beings.  Once again, these stories always seem to be relating events from many years ago, which immediately renders their veracity suspect for the same reasons as outlined above.  Sometimes these 'stick men' are abnormally tall and have a habit of chasing people who see them (apparently even to their front door, according to one particularly barmy story).  I find these accounts impossible to take seriously.  Not just because I'm a natural born sceptic, but also there is something inherently ridiculous in the idea of giant 'stick men' running around, unnoticed by anyone other than drunks coming home at dawn or people driving on lonely roads - the usual types of witnesses to these supposed events.  But some of the strangeness involves apparently regular people, rather than 'shadow men' or 'stick men', encountered by the contributor, who turn out to be somehow 'weird' in vaguely defined ways.  Some of my favourites amongst these involve encounters with strangers while out walking in remote places.  Strangers who seem to appear out of nowhere.  Sometimes they simply walk past the author of the piece, sometimes they stop and speak, quite normally, to them then, after they've walked on, the author turns to look back at them - and they've vanished again!  There were no turnings or paths they could have taken, the writer assures us - which, as someone who spends a fair amount of time out walking in the country, is nonsense: there are all sorts of paths and routes which can be taken off of the established paths, but which don't seem immediately obvious to the casual walker.  

What all of this comes down to is that it is clear that, at some level, we all need a bit of mystery in our lives.  In the past, religion was the go to place for mysteries for the average person.  But with religion's hold weakening, especially here in the western world, people are forced to turn elsewhere for mysteries: UFOs, Bigfoot, mysterious big cats, lights in the sky, 'stick men' and so on.  Some can even find mysteries in their everyday lives in the form of 'strange' coincidences or encounters with 'vanishing' people while out on a walk.  I'm glad they do and even gladder that some of them write their experiences up (or even make them up) to publish in places like Fortean Times as they provide me with endless entertainment.

The Ultimate Warrior (1975)

Not to be confused with the former WWE wrestler of the same name (aka the late Jim Helwig), The Ultimate Warrior is one of a slew of post apocalyptic movies turned out by Hollywood during the seventies.  It has to be said that The Ultimate Warrior is one of the lesser entries in this style, made on a very limited budget, that didn't stretch to any location filming, but it does boast some strong leads and a fair amount of action.  Having seen it on TV as a teenager, I retain a soft spot for the film, despite its inadequacies.  The scenario is very simple: in the far flung future of 2012, the world has been devastated by a pandemic, which has not only wiped out most of the human population, but also much of the planet's plant and animal life, resulting in restricted food supplies for the survivors.  One group, led by Baron (Max von Sydow) has secured a fortified base in New York, where they are constantly harassed by rival survivors, principally a group of violent brigands led by Carrot (William Smith).  One of Baron's followers has succeeded in breeding plants resistant to the viruses that caused the pandemic, providing them with a constant source of food.  In order to protect the community and its food supply, Baron secures the services of mercenary warrior Carson (Yul Brynner).  Eventually, Baron realises that the only chance for the survival of bis pregnant daughter and the future of humanity is for Carson to take her and the disease-resistant seeds from which the plants are grown, to a safe haven on an island off the coast of North Carolina, escaping via the defunct New York subway system.  

To the film's credit, it tells its story efficiently and simply, without much in the way of plot complications, focusing on the action.  Its problems lie in its limited resources, making its depiction of its post-apocalyptic world somewhat bland.  IT's all filmed on the Warner and MGM backlots and looks it - no matter how much the street exteriors are redressed to represent a post-apocalyptic New York, they look overly familiar, not to mention far too clean and tidy.  The script also does nothing to elaborate on the plot's background - once the cause of the apocalypse being a pandemic is established, it is never expanded upon.  In fact, it is never mentioned again - we have no idea what viruses caused it or where they originated.  It is all too obviously merely a plot device.  Moreover, despite the presence of the likes of Brynner and von Sydow in the main roles, their characters are barely sketched in by the script, leaving the actors little work with.  Perhaps most damagingly in this respect, having established Brynner's character early on as an enigmatic, stoic warrior - he advertises his services by standing atop a building, shirtless and motionless, not speaking to, or even acknowledging, von Sydow and his delegation when they go to recruit him - once he joins the community he becomes overly talkative, losing his aura of invincibility in the process.  Even Brynner's charisma and screen presence aren't enough for him to really make anything out of the character.

Most disappointing. though, are the action scenes.  While there are no shortage of them, most come over as somehow underwhelming and repetitive.  With Robert Clouse, a specialist in action films whose work included Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon and Darker Than Amber (which also featured William Smith as the villain, engaging in a ferocious fist fight with star Rod Taylor at the climax), directing, audience expectation for the quality of the action scenes is naturally high.  But they disappoint.  Like the rest of the film, they never really seem to spark fully into life.  Only at the climax, as Brynner squares off against Smith in the subway, amongst abandoned trains, does it come anywhere close to fulfilling its potential.  Yet, despite all of this, The Ultimate Warrior remains an enjoyable enough second tier post-apocalypse action film, if somewhat bland and generic in its depiction of the post-apocalyptic world.  It at least moves along fairly smoothly and at a decent pace and at just over ninety minutes, never quite outstays its welcome.