Dead and Undeclared

Apparently, the recently deceased Alex Salmond's body has been brought back to the UK on a private jet paid for by a private individual.  Well, I hope that he's declared this hospitality through the correct channels.  Being dead is no excuse for not doing so, as it is clearly an outrage that politicians should be accepting gifts and gratuities from donors who obviously would be expecting their generosity to be reciprocated in some way and not offer a full and frank explanation to the electorate.  I fully expect the plane carrying his body to be met by a mob of reporters from the Daily Mail, Daily Express, The Sun and the Daily Telegraph, demanding answers, when it lands in Scotland.  I'll be hugely disappointed if I don't hear that they knocked his coffin to the ground as it was being taken out of the aircraft, spilling his body onto the runway as they thrust microphones in his face and demand answers about who is paying for this free trip on a luxury private jet.  because, like I say, being dead is simply not a good enough excuse for his continued refusal to answer these questions.  Where will it all end, other wise?  Will we see his coffin propped up against a wall during a Taylor Swift concert, having been gifted tickets?  Will we find that he's being buried in a designer suit donated by a wealthy Alba Party donor?  We need answers.

If the right-wing press don't pursue Salmond, dead or not, on this issue as vigourously as they have Keir Starmer over his alleged acceptance of undeclared gifts from donors, then I'll be looking to make a complaint to the press regulators.  You know, the regulators set up and run by the press themselves, rather than any of those outrageously biased independent regulators that we don't have in the UK because, well, the press wouldn't like it.  I don't care that Salmond is a corpse - and have the press investigated whether his death is merely a tax avoidance scheme? - he needs to be held to account and censured by the Scottish parliament if it is found that he's been accepting undeclared gratuities.  I don't want to hear that it's impossible because he's already been buried.  Dig the bastard up.  It's doubtless what the right-wing press want to do to Jim Callaghan, Harold Wilson and probably Clement Attlee, in order to question them on what gifts they received while in office.  (Obviously, Churchill, Eden McMillan, Douglas-Hume, Ted Heath and the sainted Maggie Thatcher are all above suspicion).  Politicians, specifically those who aren't members of the Tory Party, ho are beyond reproach, need to learn that there's no hiding place, not even the grave, for the grasping, corrupt bastards.

Naked You Die (1968)

A pre-Argento giallo from Antonio Maghreti (directing under his 'Anthony Dawson' alias), Naked You Die (1968) prefigures many of the tropes that would come to characterise the genre as it became more 'formalised' in the seventies.  Before Dario Argento started making his giallos, where the motivation for a series of stylised and bizarre murders is usually rooted in some deeply buried and terrible past crime, the most influential director of the emerging genre was probably Mario Bava, with The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964).  Magrheti's film certainly has something of the feel of these films, but also comes over as a sort of Italian version of one of the contemporary Edgar Wallace inspired Krimi films from West Germany.  Whereas these tended to be in monochrome, with their action unfolding against a dank, grimy and darkly lit, somewhat Gothic, version of London - usually recreated in the studios and streets of West Germany - Naked You Die takes place in the sunny and colourful South of France and its colour photography displays the sort of bright and lush colour palette typical of Italian movies of the era.  While its mysterious killer preying on young women and its plot hinging on inheritances and the like seem very Edgar Wallace, the enclosed setting of an out-of-term girls' boarding school, with its limited cast of suspects, seems suggestive of the influence of Agatha Christie.

While the film's trailer is clearly trying to persuade us that Naked You Die is some kind of salacious sex thriller full of semi-naked teenage temptresses, in reality there is no nudity or explicit sex.  There are plenty of scenes of twenty five year old teenage 'schoolgirls' in their underwear, or seen from behind, from the waist up, in the shower, but that's as far as it goes.  None of the murders are sexually motivated  - it is all about money, as it turns out -indeed, one murder and another attempted murder are actually cases of mistaken identity (the killer apparently can't tell the difference between the various teenage students at the school).  Despite the relatively standard plot and criminal motivations, Magrheti's execution includes various giallo-style touches: the murders committed from the killer's perspective, who is represented by a pair of black leather glove clad hands, for instance, a body seen by a major character which then vanishes, calling into question her mental state and the murderer hiding in plain sight are all present.  The film also features the usual giallo quota of misdirection, with suspiciously acting characters all paraded before the audience as suspects, including a Peeping Tom caretaker who sees too much, (voyeurism was to become a significant recurring theme in the genre).  

While Magrheti never had the same level of visual flair as Bava or Argento, his direction was never less than professional and in Naked You Die he delivers a well shot, good looking and quite pacy film, neatly contrasting the sunny, almost idyllic, setting of the exclusive school with the bizarre and terrible events that take place against its background.  He gets the film off to an intriguing and memorable start, with an unseen assailant choking to death a woman in her bath, loading her body into a trunk, the travels of which, strapped to the roof rack of a taxi, in the guards van of a train, in a minibus meeting the train, then to the school, which sets the tone of the film - not mention establishing the scenario and some main characters via a conversation on the bus - stylishly and efficiently.  The various misdirections and plot twists are well handled, never becoming too confusing or difficult to follow.  He also gets some decent performances out of a cast that includes Mark Damon as a teacher knocking off one of his students (another common genre theme) and Michael Rennie as the investigating police inspector and Luciano Pigozzi (billed under his usual English language alias of 'Allan Collins') as the pervy caretaker.  While not exactly a classic of the genre, Naked You Die is an enjoyable late sixties giallo made with an agreeable degree of verve and style.

The Stone Killer (1973)

Back in the day, before he became involved in Cannon Films' identikit vigilante cop movies and seemingly endless Death Wish sequels, Charles Bronson was a huge star of action movies.  Re-watching The Stone Killer (1973), it was easy to see why: you knew exactly what you were getting with Bronson and he delivered every time.  Sure, he was an actor with limited range and always played the 'Charles Bronson role' - a strong, silent, character who prefers decisive action to talk or prevarication, betraying little of his inner self in his outer behaviour - but he was very good at playing that role.  Despite his limitations as an actor, he delivered what lines he was given surprisingly effectively in his distinctive voice, usually displaying a dry wit, which always made his characters curiously likeable, despite their proclivity for violence and disregard for such things as morality or subtlety.  Most of all, he had undoubted screen presence - when he's on screen, you can't take your eyes off of him.  The Stone Killer is a pretty good example of Bronson at his peak, before he became a parody of himself in those eighties Cannon productions.

Clearly inspired by the success of the Dirty Harry movies, The Stone Killer casts Bronson as one of those rogue cops so beloved by seventies film makers.  (It was pretty much obligatory around this time for every action movie star to appear in one such movie - even John Wayne got in on the act playing a superannuated rogue cop beating up hippies in McQ (1974)).  As with others of this ilk, Bronson's character isn't bent and doesn't actually take the law into his own hands, but he does push it to the limits and certainly has little regard for the rights of the perps he deals with.  To demonstrate that he's actually quite liberal, he is teamed with am openly racist and rule-breaking cop, rather startlingly played by Ralph Waite - Pa Walton himself, an actor usually associated with far gentler and avuncular roles.  The plot of The Stone Killer feels, in places, impenetrable, as hit men themselves get hit, Mafia Dons mumble on about stuff that happened forty years ago and the action ricochets between New York and LA.  But there are an abundance of extremely well-staged action set pieces, culminating in a chaotic shoot out in a multi-storey car park, to keep the viewer occupied and stop them asking too many questions about the plot.  

The film is directed by Michael Winner, who might be a deeply unfashionable director nowadays, but he fact is that, back in the seventies, he delivered a number of exceptionally well crafted action movies of this type.  The Stone Killer is a very professionally made piece of cinema - it doesn't skimp on the action, it is well shot, making excellent use of its locations, maintains a good pace and features a strong supporting cast, including the afire-mentioned Waite, Norman Fell, Paul Koslo, John Ritter, Stuart Margolin and Martin Balsam.  On top of that, it has Charles Bronson at its centre,his monument-like features and performance stoically holding it all together.  Interestingly, its source was a UK-set novel by John Gardener in which the hero's first name was Derek, rather than Lou, as it was in the film.  (On a personal side note, in 2007 Gardener dropped dead of a heart attack outside of my local branch of W H Smith - something that went pretty much unremarked upon locally at the time).  Bronson and Winner might both be out of fashion these days, but quite a bit of their work from the seventies is well worth revisiting.

The Golden Age of UFO Sightings?

So, right now, I'm watching this film on a streaming channel - it has something to do with UFOs and looks as if it was made, with no money, in the eighties (I came in partway through, so have no idea what it is).  Like all such films, its lack of budget means that it resolves into a series of scenes of people sitting around talking to each other.  The closest thing to action we ever get is somebody wandering around the woods at night.  The lack of budget also means that its alien presence has to remain vague and peripheral, which at least lends it an air of mystery.  Which set me to thinking about how much better stories about UFO sightings were in my childhood.  Now, I know that is partly because I was a child at the time, so anything like that seemed weird and unsettling, but it was also because the sightings back then were just more, well, mysterious.  It seemed that the tabloids were full of tales of motorists glimpsing strange-looking craft in their rear view mirrors, or something shiny or brightly lit in woods as they passed by on the road.  All of the sightings back then (and there seemed to be a lot, especially in the 'silly season' at the end of summer), were vague and inconclusive without much in the way of concrete evidence, giving your imagination far more room to run riot filling in the details.  Even the supposed photos taken of alien spaceships and their occupants were always satisfyingly mysterious - always out of focus and blurry, taken on grainy film stock from, seemingly, great distances.  In truth, they could have been of anything, (and probably were of hubcaps suspended on wires and the like).

These days, however, the supposed sightings always seem to be far too detailed.  Every man and his dog seems to have a tale of being abducted by aliens, then subjected to an examination that sounds suspiciously like some kind of masochistic sexual fantasy.  Too many 'contactees' nowadays seem to be on first name terms with the aliens.  Back in the day, the best you'd get in terms of aliens would be a glimpse of someone in a silver spacesuit - sometimes while they were peering through peoples' windows (another sexual fantasy, possibly).  As for physical 'evidence', well, it now turns up in abundance, whether in the form of  alleged ancient 'alien' skulls or papier mache alien corpses.  It makes me yearn for the days when the only physical 'evidence' of alien visitations would be some dubious looking circular burn marks in a field.  I grew up with what, at the time, was regarded as the 'UFO capital' of the UK - Warminster - up the road from me - but while the reported phenomena there were numerous, they never seemed to manifest themselves as anything other than mysterious lights in the sky, (the fact that Warminster is in the middle of Salisbury Plain, a major Army training area and is home to the School of Infantry obviously has no bearing on the origin of these lights).  But in those days, the UFO spotters who regularly descended on Warminster were all enthusiastic amateurs, mildly eccentric characters who would otherwise probably have been bird or plane spotters.  These days, by contrast, UFO spotting has become an industry, full of professional 'UFOlogists' who carry out 'research' into the phenomena and feature in the media.  That's the problem - now that there's money (not to mention fame) to be had in UFOs, the need for actual 'evidence' has increased in order to keep interest going.  Encounters also have to be more sensational - all the better for grabbing the attention of the media.  Consequently, all the mystery is gone.  More importantly, the fun of UFOs has gone.

(The film itself turned out to be UFO: Target Earth, from 1974, making it even older than I thought).

National Disgrace

It was with huge relief that I learned last week that the BBC's prime time interview with Boris 'The Fat Bastard' Johnson had been cancelled as that Laura Kuenssberg had 'accidentally' e-mailed him her briefing notes.  It is beyond my comprehension that the BBC would ever think that anyone would want see a man who had to resign in disgrace as Prime Minister and who was found to have lied to parliament interviewed in prime time - we'd all had enough of him long before he left office.  More than that, as a licence fee payer I object to having my licence money spent on helping that fat slob to publicise his self serving and, let's face it, completely made up memoirs.  Really, if he was happy lying to parliament then he's going to have no qualms about publishing a pack of lies, now is he?  But the past few weeks have seen the British media bending over backwards to allow this egotistical mound of blubber air time in which to try and justify his shambolic conduct in government.  Why?  We're all well aware of the facts, that his Brexit deal has been a disaster, that he and his government completely mishandled the pandemic, to the extent that people died unnecessarily and that he spent much of his time in office lining his own pockets via contributions to the costs of everything from holidays to redecorating his flat, from wealthy party donors.  The man's a national disgrace, not say embarrassment and should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

But these attempts to rehabilitate Boris Johnson - who, if it not for the existence of Liz Truss, would hold the title of Britain's worst ever prime minister - are par for the course for the UK's right-wing dominated press, so I really shouldn't be surprised.  They've spent every day since the election relentlessly trying to trash the new Labour government, launching personal attacks on its senior figures, so it seems only logical that, as a follow-up, they'd try to resurrect one of their fallen heroes.  ('If only Boris was still PM, everything would be alright').  On one level I can almost admire their ingenuity in finding a negative spin to put on every Labour policy - today, of course, it's all been about how bad for UK businesses the government's modest proposals to reinforce some workers' rights will be, (do they really think that's a line which is going to fly with most working readers/viewers who probably voted Labour because their basic rights had been so eroded by the Tories?).  As for their hand-wringing over the fact that the OAPs winter fuel allowance will no longer be universal is quite something coming from the people who happily supported the last government's failure to act to curb soaring fuel bills.  (It also ignores the fact that the value of the fuel allowance hasn't increased since it was introduced, while average pensions have risen significantly.  Plus, those 'poor' pensioners they are featuring on their front pages wailing about how they'll have to choose between food and heat would, if really that poor, still be eligible to apply for the fuel allowance as a means tested benefit.  But why print facts when you've got misinformation instead?).

While I expect this sort of nonsense from the right-wing press, it is disturbing to see the BBC get so nakedly caught up in it all.  It's not just that Johnson interview that never was, let's not forget their political correspondent Chris Mason making Sue Grey's salary public - his subsequent floundering around trying to justify it as being, somehow, in the public interest because she was earning more than the PM, was painful to watch.  As was his failure to mention that Simon Case, head of the civil service and appointed by Johnson, also earns more than the PM, as does Mason himself.  It just came over as an obvious slice of partisan reporting, deliberately aimed at derailing the new government before it had even got properly started - hardly in the spirit of the politically neutral reporting the BBC, as a public broadcaster, is meant to pursue.  Perhaps the BBC's apparent downer on the new government and its eagerness to 'hold it to account', is a reaction to the justifiable criticism that it spent fourteen years giving the Tories pretty much a free pass in that regard.  Clearly, they aren't as scared of  the possibility of a Labour government retaliating via the threat of budget cuts than they were of the Tories.  Or maybe it is because the Tories spent fourteen years packing out the BBC's senior ranks with its own supporters?  Time for a purge, perhaps?

House of Mystery (1961)

Director Vernon Sewell's fourth (and final) stab at filming the play 'L'Angoisse' by Celia de Vilyars and Pierre Mills, House of Mystery (1961) definitely falls into the programmer category.  Indeed, running at under an hour, it was originally shown in the US as part of the Kraft Mystery Theatre TV series and more recently was marketed in the UK as part of the Edgar Wallace Mysteries DVD box set, (despite not being part of that series nor being based on a Wallace story).  It has to be said that Sewell showed considerable ingenuity in his reworkings of the story.  While the first two versions, The Medium (1934) and Latin Quarter (1945) were relatively straightforward adaptations of the play, retaining its background of artists and the central twist of a body concealed within a sculpture, both Ghost Ship (1952) and House of Mystery change the settings and characters quite radically, while retaining the same basic plot.  House of Mystery, as its title implies, confines the action to a single house, with the sculptor antagonist of the original play replaced by an electrical scientist, (who, naturally, has his own lab in the shed), who decides to turn the tables after his wife and her lover try to electrocute him in his bath, via a staged 'accident'.  His revenge is to trap them in the house's living room, which he has wired up so that they don't know what is 'live' and what isn't, putting them at constant risk of electrocution.  He gives them an hour to find a way to escape, after which he'll kill  them anyway.

A simple enough plot, but it takes the film, (which only runs fifty six minutes), a seeming age to get to it.  The problem is that Sewell has chosen, this time around, to wrap it in not one, but two sets of flashbacks.  The film opens with an unnamed young couple viewing a house in the country, which is being offered very cheaply.  There, they are startled by a mysterious woman, who proceeds to explain to them why the house is priced so low and why it has been empty for several years - it's reputedly haunted.  Which takes us to the first set of flashbacks in which another couple inherit the house from a distant relative, an electrical scientist whose wife had mysteriously disappeared some years ago.  Weird phenomena start to plague them, with the wife seeing a man standing by the windows in the living room, then on the TV screen, while lights switch themselves on and off and all manner of other apparent electrical faults manifest themselves.  After ruling out any faults with the house's wiring, the couple reluctantly call in a psychic investigator who, in turn, calls in a medium.  The medium then has a series of visions - which take us into our second set of flashbacks, through which the original story, at last, unfolds.  Unfortunately, not only does the narrative structure slow things down, but it also serves to confuse - it isn't always easy to keep track of who we are currently watching or when the action is taking place. Despite the three timelines apparently taking place years apart, there is no indication of this in the film itself, with the house's decor and the characters' costumes always appearing to come from 1961.

To be fair, despite an obviously tiny budget, the film is decently enough made, although somewhat slow - thanks to that tortuous narrative structure - and drab.  In these respects, it is very much of a piece with other British programmers from the era, such as the Edgar Wallace series (with which it shared its producers):  small scale, understated and very much made with limited means.  The cast contains some soon to be familiar faces, including Nanette Newman and Ronald Hines, with Colin Gordon, who gives the film's best performance as the ghost hunter, the closest thing to a 'star' name.  Sewell does attempt a final twist in the last reel, which most viewers will have seen coming a mile off - the mysterious woman telling the story is herself the ghost of the murdered wife, whose body was walled up in the house and never found.  She is the ghost haunting the property, rather than her murderous husband.

The Mummy's Revenge (1975)

At one time or another Paul Naschy seemed to have played just about all of the classic horror monsters in his movies, so it is no surprise that he'd eventually turn his hand to portraying a reanimated Egyptian mummy.  The Mummy's Revenge (1975) came out at a time when mummy movies were deeply unfashionable - Hammer's last effort, Blood From the Mummy's Tomb (1971), didn't even feature a traditional perambulating mummy - with the sub-genre feeling played out.  In truth, mummy movies had never been as popular as those about vampires and werewolves, their obvious problems being both the monster's lack of personality and the lack of variations in storylines.  Most mummy movies, from both Universal and Hammer, had the title monster cast, essentially, as a slave, acting as an instrument of revenge against desecrators of its, or its master or mistresses, tombs, controlled by a present day High Priest of some Ancient Egyptian sect.  Along the way, it usually encounters some contemporary woman who turns out to be the reincarnation of his lost love, resulting in the mummy's loyalties being torn between her and the High Priest.  There were variations along the line, of course, but they were all minor.  Which is precisely the problem that The Mummy's Revenge runs up against: no matter how much Naschy, (in his capacity as writer, under his real name of Jacinto Molina), tries to work new twists and variations into the story, it just can't help but keeping veering toward the traditional mummy movie format.

His main innovation is to make this film's mummy, once revived, far more proactive than his predecessors.  He is very much in control of the narrative, with the contemporary High Priest, his descendant and therefore also played by Naschy, merely his facilitator, reviving him and hiding him while he carries out his plans.  Moreover, this time around, it is the priest who starts getting cold feet and having divided loyalties, rather than the mummy.  (Naschy's mummy is alaso, as far as I know, the first to actually speak since Karloff's version, back in 1932).  But the plot is still revenge-driven - this time it is personal as the mummy is that of an assassinated Pharaoh known for his cruelty and sadism, now looking to find a suitable vessel for the soul of his also murdered concubine, so that they can pick up their activities again, four thousand or so years on.  Of course, that 'vessel' turns out to be the daughter of the owner of the London museum that the Pharaoh's sarcophagus had been transported to after its rediscovery, who just happens to be the physical reincarnation of the mummy's lost love. The film is also far gorier than previous mummy movies, with Naschy in mummy mode crushing a lot of heads and lots of virgins being sacrificed.  

Overall, the film feels like a compendium of of highlights from previous mummy films: we have the late nineteenth century English setting of Hammer's The Mummy (1959), the mummy wandering around the London sewers and its tussling with British bobbies, are also borrowing from a Hammer film, this time Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964).  The Ancient Egypt opening is an obligatory part of every mummy movie, while the casting of Naschy as both mummy and modern day High Priest seems to be a nod toward the 1932 original.  The museum owner's daughter being the reincarnation of the mummy's lost love might well be an homage to Blood From the Mummy's Tomb, where the archeologist protagonist's daughter is the reincarnation of an Ancient Egyptian queen, whose mummy and sarcophagus are in his private museum in his cellar.  Ultimately, there's little that we haven't seen before.  Except that it all looks as if it was shot on an even lower budget than the latter day Universal mummy movies, ground out as programmers.  Everything about it looks and feels cheap - the Ancient Egypt scenes, in particular, feel threadbare, with everything seemingly happening inside a tent.  Even Hammer's largely studio-bound version of Ancient Egypt in The Mummy feels both more extravagant and more authentic, with director Terrance Fisher using the restrictions of Bray Studios stages to create an oppressive and claustrophobic feel that sets the tone for the whole film.  Even the use of some authentic London locations, though, doesn't help The Mummy's Revenge, with it all feeling as if it was shot somewhere just outside Madrid.

The whole thing is very flatly directed by Carlos Aured, in his fourth and last directorial collaboration with Naschy, had done far better work on both Horror Rises From the Tomb (1973) - which also features Naschy in a dual role as both an executed medieval sadist and his present day descendant - and Curse of the Devil (1973) - with Naschy again in a similar dual role.  The only sequence in The Mummy's Revenge which shows any real directorial flair is that showing Naschy's sarcophagus being entombed in darkness, gathering dust then suddenly illuminated again as a pick axe breaks through the wall of the tomb centuries later - all in a single, seemingly continuous, take.  The Mummy's Revenge is one of those films that I badly wanted to like - I've enjoyed many of Naschy's monster movies - but it just never seemed to spark into life - the plot is too plodding, the pace too slow and it looks too bland.  Even most of the acting performances feel bland, (even taking bad English dubbing into account) - Euro exploitation favourite Jack Taylor tries valiantly to make something of the hero, but never convinces as an Egyptologist who just seems ineffective.  Naschy is as fascinating as ever in his dual role, but curiously, his attempts to actually give the mummy a character, rather than just portray him as a shambling, dusty, hulk, make the character less interesting.  Stomping around, his face covered in what looks like clay, as he plots his lover's reincarnation and sacrifices virgins, he comes over like any other sadistic horror movie villain, lacking the aura of ancient menace that the traditional shuffling, bandage-clad mummy creates.  Indeed, in the hands of a decent actor, the mute and crumbling mummy can even evoke a degree of pathos - as in Christopher Lee's performance in the title role of Hammer's The Mummy, a film which, sadly The Mummy's Revenge never comes close to emulating.

(Although the release date of The Mummy's Revenge is usually given as 1975, this is apparently its Spanish re-release date, with its first screenings in Spain having been in 1973.  An English language version apparently showed on US TV in 1974.  There was also, apparently, an English language  'international' version with added nudity, but this seems never to have been released anywhere and appears to have vanished completely, with all current English versions using the original Spanish print).

Under the Weather

As I recall, the US daytime soap General Hospital once had a storyline in which the local mega-villain held the world to ransom by using his weather control machine to freeze the city it was set in with blizzards and sub-zero temperatures, threatening to do the same to the rest of the planet.  (There was also, in the early seventies, also a UK soap called General Hospital which aired in a daytime slot, but nothing that exciting ever happened in it).  It seems that in the US right now, there are people in positions of influence who seem to believe that storyline was real.  Well, Republican Congresswoman, pro-Trump fanatic and generally raving lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene, (you know, the one who thought UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron should 'go fuck himself' and told journalist Emily Maitlis to 'just fuck off', when he challenged Greene on one of her other pet conspiracy theories about 'Jewish space lasers'), seems to think that.  Perhaps she saw those episodes as a child and thought that she was watching a documentary.  Whatever the reason, she seems to think that the recent hurricane in the US was man made, saying that 'they' control the weather.  Who this mysterious 'they' are, she didn't specify, but I think that we might hazard a guess based on her aforementioned belief in the existence of 'Jewish space lasers', which, she claimed, were being used to start wild fires in the US.  

US daytime soaps can have some pretty bizarre storylines, (General Hospital itself has also featured aliens, dead characters being reanimated and all manner of murders, spies and ghosts), some, like Dark Shadows, even end up going full on supernatural with vampires and werewolves, so I suppose that we should think ourselves lucky that Greene so far only believes in the weather control thing.  I do find it genuinely disturbing when people who are patently insane get elected as representatives at the highest level.  (The US has a particularly bad record here - not only did they elect Trump as president once but, having subsequently rejected him, now seem as if they might elect him again, despite his lunacy becoming even more obvious).  Not only does it speak poorly of the selection process that allows them to become candidates in the first place, but it also calls into question the intelligence of the electorate who voted for them, (thereby giving credence to calls from some quarters to restrict voting rights to an 'elite').  Not that we in UK have much to crow about here: the likes of Boris Johnson, (not so much a lunatic as an utterly venal and corrupt moral degenerate) and Liz Truss (definitely crazy), spring to mind.  But to get back to the original point, if 'they' really can control the weather, then I wish they'd send some better weather my way - I'm still traumatised by the abrupt ending to Summer this year.  

King Kong Escapes (1967)

I feel like I've watched a fair few King Kong movies of late, ranging from the original sequel, Son of Kong (1933) to the much more recent Godzilla vs Kong (2021) and Godzilla x Kong (2024).  Most recently, I watched King Kong Escapes (1967), one of a pair of Kong movies made under license in Japan by Toho studios.  Interestingly, it seems to have no continuity with Toho's previous Kong film, King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), giving Kong a different island home and origin story.  Indeed, this second stab at a Japanese Kong was apparently inspired by a US cartoon series, The King Kong Show (1966-69), produced by Rankin/Bass, who also have a co-production credit on the movie.  Despite this animated origin, the film also seems to take some inspiration from Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) film and subsequent 1964-68 TV series: its hero is in command of a futuristic UN super-submarine that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Seaview in Voyage, the crew of which wear uniforms which look very similar to those from the US TV show.  Like the Seaview, the submarine in King Kong Escapes is on a mission of research and exploration and its commander, Commender Carl Nelson, like Admiral Nelson in Voyage, is not just a military man, but also a scientist and engineer, well versed in many subjects.  In fact, it seems that he's long been obsessed by the legendary giant ape, King Kong, being a leading authority on the subject and has even designed, but never built, a mechanical King Kong - as you do when obsessed with such things, obviously.  Little does he know, however, that his plans for robot ape have been stolen by the evil Dr Who, who used them to construct Mechani-Kong, which he intends to use to mine a rare element - 'Element X' from the arctic on behalf of an unnamed Asiatic nation that wants to use it to construct nuclear weapons.

When Mechani-Kong malfunctions, Dr Who reasons, naturally, that the ideal replacement would be the real King Kong.  By an amazing stoke of luck, Commander Nelson has just stumbled across Kong's island where, the giant ape saves one of the sub's crew - Lt Susan Watson - from a dinosaur, falling in love with her and attacking the sub when it tries to leave with her aboard, (also fighting a sea serpent along the way).  Eventually Watson appeals to Kong's reason and he returns to his island, with Nelson deciding that he should be left in peace there. But with the discovery of Kong's island becoming public, Dr Who is soon there to kidnap Kong and take him (suspended beneath a fleet of helicopters - a sequence echoed in Godzilla vs Kong) to his arctic base.  When hypnotising the ape to work for him doesn't go according to plan, Who kidnaps Susan Watson, Nelson and another officer in order to get control of the ape.  Naturally, things don't go to plan, Kong breaks out and runs amuck, Mechani-Kong is reactivated and everybody ends up in Tokyo, where the two monsters trade punches, wrecking half the city in the process.  Like most Toho monster movies of the period, King Kong Escapes is clearly orientated toward western audiences, most specifically English-speaking audiences, featuring American actors (Rhodes Reason and Linda Jo Miller) in the main sympathetic human roles.  It also casts Mie Hama, recognisable to English-speaking audiences for her recent appearance as Kissy Suzuki in the Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967).  The whole design of the submarine likewise seems intended to reassure these audiences, being very 'western' in design, clearly referencing Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (although, apart from Reason and Miller, most of the crew are played by Japanese actors).  Even that lead monster - Kong - is a US creation and the foes he faces are all suitably generic (a robot double, dinosaurs, sea serpents) rather than being obviously drawn from Japanese culture.

The end result feels, on the one hand, somewhat bland in comparison to the exotic monster menageries and plots of other Toho monster films but, on the other hand, reassuringly familiar.  What it does have is spectacle - while the final dust up between the two main monsters isn't quite on the same scale as Kong's punch up with Godzilla a few years earlier, it is, nonetheless, suitably destructive.  King Kong Escapes features some especially fine miniatures work, with the model ships and submarine particularly impressive, (you get some idea of their massive scale and detailing when Kong grapples with, first, the sub then, at the climax, Who's ship).  Mechani-Kong is, in his clanking way, quite impressive too, as are the dinosaur and sea serpent fought by Kong.  Kong himself, however, appears to use the same, less than convincing, ape suit used in King Kong versus Godzilla a few years earlier.  To its credit, unlike many other apes suits, it does get its proportions right, with the arms noticeably longer than the legs, it retains the ridiculously cartoonish face, with its unblinking eyes, seen in the earlier film.  But perhaps that face is apt, bearing in mind the film's origins in a Saturday morning TV cartoon - the film's whole look is, in fact, pleasingly reminiscent of the sort of up market science fiction comic strips, often adapted from Gerry Anderson series, we used to have in British comics in the late sixties and early seventies. 

I have to say that, overall, I enjoyed King Kong Escapes far more than I did either Godzilla vs Kong or Godzilla x Kong.  While its man-in-a-suit monsters can't hope to match the CGI effects of those far bigger budgeted recent productions, the Japanese film is far more accessible and much more easily liked, not taking itself too seriously or overloading itself with too many subplots and characters (and their 'development').  It knows that we're really there to see the monsters rampage around and battle each other - the human characters and plotting are of secondary importance and simply don't need to be especially complex.  There's no doubt, though, that the Japanese movie benefits from being a stand-alone entity, with no ongoing plot lines and character relationships from previous movies to tie up - unlike the more recent US films.  Moreover, although those modern CGI effects are very slick, they never really seem that convincing to me - I'm always aware that they have no physical existence and can never quite suspend my disbelief while watching them.  Honestly, when you have a CGI giant ape slugging it out with a CGI giant lizard, wreaking havoc in a CGI generated city, are we really that far away from a man in a monkey suit slugging it out with a man in a robot monkey suit, wreaking havoc in an intricately detailed large scale model of a city?  Both are equally artificial, but the very fact that you know the latter is physically real, lends it, if not realism, then a certain dramatic weight.   (Although, of course, neither solution, in my opinion, is as good as using stop-motion animation).

The Politics of Self Delusion

Isn't it about time that the friends, relatives and colleagues of Liz Truss staged an intervention for the former Prime Minister?  She's clearly not right, wandering around, giving talks to empty rooms and interviews to media outlets that nobody listens to, as if she was still someone of significance, filling these things with  increasingly bizarre claims and pronouncements.  The latest being that there's an 'underground transgender mafia' plotting against her and which brought down her premiership.  Presumably this is separate from that Marxist cabal including the Bank of England and the stock market she previously identified as the cause of her downfall.  Or maybe they are linked - perhaps, somewhere, there's a Venn diagram showing the intersection of the groups conspiring against Truss, which will reveal their leadership as Marxist transgender economist formerly called Bernard, but now identifying as 'Sandra', a lady truck driver from Dartford.  She has also been claiming that if she had still been PM, then the Tories would have won the last election - this, despite the fact that her forty eight hours, or whatever it was, in Number Ten had crashed the economy and driven both her and her party's popularity ratings to somewhere below those enjoyed by Jack the Ripper at the height of his Whitechapel murder spree. Not to mention that at said election, even her constituents decided that they couldn't stand her any more and voted her out as their MP.  What next?  Can we expect to see her on random street corners, possibly dressed as a chicken in a desperate attempt to attract attention, assailing random passers by with her increasingly unhinged claims?  If she was anyone other than a former Tory Prime Minister (and there are quite a few of those about these days), she'd have been sectioned months ago.  So really, somebody needs to do something - now.

But Truss isn't the only former failed Prime Minister currently plaguing the public with wild and nonsensical claims.  Right now Boris Johnson's completely made up memoirs are being serialised in the Daily Mail.  Amongst his tall tales is the story of how, during the Covid lockdown, he supposedly planned to send the SAS round to his local Superdrug pharmacy to kick down the door and seize those thousand boxes of viagra they'd refused to dispense to him on the grounds that it was a non-essential drug.  Or was it that he was going to send them to break into a warehouse in the Netherlands (a NATO ally) and steal Covid vaccines?  No, it had to be the former, as the latter is too ridiculous, even by Johnson's low standards, to be true.  If he had sent the SAS to raid the Netherlands then it would probably have been to steal sex aids, lubricants and condoms and to kidnap some prostitutes in order to keep those illegal lockdown parties at Number Ten well stocked.  Then there's his ravings about how President Macron of France was out to 'punish' him for Brexit, even going to the lengths of sneaking into the UK, donning a black balaclava and leaping out at Johnson as he walked through a dimly lit alley, swinging a baseball bat at his knees.  Obviously, the then Prime Minister wasn't skulking around a back alley in dead of night with the aim of forcing a rear entry into the home of a secret lover and his attacker wasn't her enraged husband.  ('It wasn't so much her infidelity, but rather her lack of taste and self-respect that pushed me over the edge', the husband most definitely didn't say in his own defence).  I think that I can speak for the entire nation that I can say that I look forward to more of Johnson's completely true revelations, such as the time that he saved Number Ten from a terror attack when he threw himself on top of a naked female suicide bomber on the Cabinet Room table, the muffled blast blowing his clothes off and leaving him, naked, grappling with her when the rest of the Cabinet walked in for a meeting...