Unpopular Opinion

As ever, I find myself out of step with public sentiment, or rather, what the media would have us believe is public sentiment.  I speak, of course, about the whole 'early release' furore whipped up by the press as stick with which to try and beat Andy Burnham - ignoring the fact that this is a policy he inherited. rather than something he came up with.   Anyway, most of the 'outrage' centres around the early release from prison of two of the three people jailed for their part in a police officer's death.  Now, I'm not going to try and argue that his death wasn't a particularly horrific crime - he was dragged behind a car while trying to foil a robbery.  But the fact is that the two people whose release is being mooted were convicted of manslaughter, rather than murder - they were passengers in the car which killed him so, arguably, had little agency in the events that unfolded.  The driver - whose release isn't being contemplated - was convicted of murder.  The reality is that manslaughter is considered a lesser offence than murder, mainly because there is no 'malice aforethought' or premeditated intent to kill involved, so is it so unreasonable that those convicted of it who have served a proportion of their sentence should be released on licence?

Now, if it was someone close to me who had been killed, then I accept that I might feel differently about this, but when dealing with matters of justice we surely need to try and be objective.  Nobody is talking about putting 'murderers' back on the streets, despite what the tabloids would have you believe.  OK, so you might think that I'm just being a contrarian here, but there's another issue related to this case which is the real sticking point for me: the suggestion that simply because they were involved in the killing of a police officer, these particular offenders should be singled put for harsher treatment.  Indeed, it goes beyond that, with suggestions that any murder of a police officer should be treated more severely than the murders of other people.  Really?  So some lives are worth more than others?  Personally, I think that all murders, regardless of who the victim is, are equally heinous and should all be treated with the same gravity when it comes to their investigation, prosecution and the punishment of the guilty parties.  I notice that in some quarters of the press they've tried to qualify this outrageous and offensive notion by saying that the 'extra severity' should apply to the murders of all 'emergency workers'.  But the same response applies - we cannot measure the value of peoples' lives in terms of the jobs they did in life - all life is sacred.  Even that of some down and out who fried their brains on meth, or that of a sex worker or even someone who is themself a criminal.  Just because a person is a scumbag doesn't give anyone else the right to take their life.  Not a popular view as far as the gutter press go, but tough - it's the right view to take.

Recent But Not Decent?

I'm pretty sure that the fact that, increasingly, I prefer old movies to new ones is a sure sign that I'm getting old.  Mind you, when I say 'old movies', that can include anything up to the nineties.  Although, I have to say that, to me, those nineties movies feel like they were released just yesterday- I remember seeing many of them for the first time at my local cinema.  But, I hear you ask, what has triggered this sudden bout of reflection on the subject of movies?  Well, it comes off of the back of a weekend of watching a lot of films, some old, some recent.  One so recent that I actually went to the cinema to watch it (a rare occurrence for me these days).  But two of them stood out as embodying my polarised feelings about old and new films.  I had an opportunity to catch up with 2018's Hereditary, a horror film that critics raved about and that plenty of people have told me was a great modern horror flick that I really should watch.  I found myself disliking it intensely, for a variety of reasons.  For one thing, like too many films of recent vintage, it runs far too long at far too slow a pace - it lumbers through a two hour plus running time to a climax that had been telegraphed what felt like an aeon before.  It needed to lose at least half an hour of running time.  Incredibly, the original cut apparently ran closer to three hours, with the producers taking over editing to bring the length time, much to the chagrin of the director, although this was clearly a case of financiers trying to protect their investment by trying to salvage a viable film from the footage.  The excessive length felt even more ridiculous as it became increasingly obvious, as the story unfolded, that it simply didn't have enough plot to fill much more than ninety minutes.

Maybe if that length had been used to build up tension, suspense and atmosphere it might have been justified.  But it doesn't, instead spending the first hour plus dragging the audience through lots of overwrought family trauma, which might give the cast plenty of opportunities to act, but doesn't really do much for audiences expecting a horror film.  Indeed, the performances all have that air of 'Look, this is acting.  Real acting!  Look at our anguish, look at our emoting - isn't it brilliantly real?  Is it awards season yet?'  Once it finally remembers that it is meant to be a horror film, it rushes through the rest of the hand-me-down plot, which is delivered with an air of knowing winks that the film makers had seen Rosemary's Baby and The Wicker Man.  Well, yeah, but guess what?  So have we.  Look, there's nothing wrong with being derivative, but you have to give those borrowed elements some kind of new spin, which Hereditary fails to do.  The movie also makes the same mistake that many modern films of this genre make: thinking that the unpleasant is, in itself, horrific or shocking, whereas it is, in reality, merely unpleasant.  I'm not saying that Hereditary is a badly made or badly acted film, as such - the great cinematography, design and performances are obvious, but it all feels so empty, so devoid of ideas.  Interestingly, I subsequently found that, according to audience research, viewers of the film on its original release seemed to have felt similarly, giving it a rating of D+.  

So, to take the lingering bad taste that Hereditary had left in my mouth, I decided to rewatch something older from the horror genre and ended up, on a whim, descending on It! (1966).  I've written about this film previously here, but to recap, it is one of a pair of low budget horror movies shot in the UK by Gold Star Productions, a company which seems to have been created simply to produce these two films, the being The Frozen Dead (1966).  It! is easily the better of the two films, being a Golem movie set in contemporary (well, 1966) London.   The Golem itself, which finds itself a statue on display at a museum, is decidedly ropey looking, the budget minimal, (my favourite 'effect' being its destruction of Hammersmith Bridge, represented by the Golem straining at some rubbery looking girders, before cutting away to bystanders' reaction shots to a load crashing noise, then a bad glass shot of the demolished bridge), and production values pretty basic.  The sets certainly look as if they've been borrowed from other productions.  But what it has in its favour is a hugely entertaining and utterly bonkers central performance from Roddy McDowell in the lead role, as the downtrodden assistant curator - who keeps his mother's mummified corpse at home - who finds himself master of the Golem.  Herbet J Leder's direction is solid, if not particularly inspired, but does include some very nice Eastmancolor photography.   In fact, the whole film is pretty much bonkers, culminating with the British government trying to destroy the Golem by detonating a tactical nuclear device at the country house where it and McDowell are ensconced.  It's every bit as derivative as Hereditary, plundering the Golem legend and Golem films for imagery and plot devices, but giving it all a lunatic spin and running through its mayhem in around ninety minutes, so as not to outstay its welcome.  Moreover, its air of general lunacy, tattyness and McDowell's performance all combine to give it, at times, a somewhat nightmarish feel.  Best of all, it is entirely free of the pretensions to art and gravitas that drag down the newer film.

It! is hardly a classic,  Indeed, it isn't even a particularly good movie.  But as entertainment, it easily scores, for me at least, over Hereditary.  In no way is it the superior film, not technically, at least, but it has a clearer grasp of its genre and a clearer idea of how best to deploy its borrowed elements to best effect.  So yeah, I'm getting old, raging at modern movies like some old guy shaking his fist at the clouds.  That said, I watched a very recent film, The Odyssey (2026) at the cinema yesterday and while I have some reservations about Christopher Nolan's approach to the source material, I most certainly don't think that the 1950s Italian adaptation, Ulysses, with Kirk Douglas, was better!  In fact, I rather enjoyed it, (all the more so because my ticket was free - part of the 'rewards' I get for having a high-interest account with my bank).  So, there you go, I don't think that all modern movies suck.  So maybe I'm not getting that old...

The Future of TV?

Yesterday I added this Roku app which simply plays loops of young women dancing.  Sometimes they are in swimsuits, sometimes in their underwear, other times low cut dresses.  Sometimes they are on the beach, sometimes indoors in what look like beach side houses, other times they are outdoors at inland locations. (Apparently, these locations are all in California).  They all dance provocatively, but never actually show anything, so the app avoids being classified as 'adult'.  It is strangely fascinating to watch - TV as moving wallpaper personified.  Perhaps, I idly thought while half-watching it today, when I had it on as 'background noise', this is the ultimate future of television - minimalist content requiring minimalist viewer engagement.  Why spend money producing elaborate dramas when you can just entrance viewers with an endless parade of anonymous girls gyrating around?  Because, the thing is, that as you watch it, you find yourself starting to speculate about what you are watching: who are these girls?  What, exactly, are they doing?  What's their backstory?  Where do they go, what do they do, when they aren't half naked in front of the cameras?  After a while, you start making up your own narratives about them, how they might relate to each other, (sometimes two appear together in a video).

I'm convinced that this basic idea could be expanded by enterprising streaming services to create a viable replacement for a plethora of more expensive content.  Just present random footage of people just doing normal stuff - no explanations of who or where they are, what they do, etc.  Instead, just let viewers make up their own narratives based on what they see and what they hear in snatches of dialogue.  As with those dancing Californian girls, you'll soo find yourself making up your own stories about how they relate to each other and what is going on - it's a psychological imperative in humans to impose narrative structures on what we see, (in its most extreme form, this results in those whacked out conspiracy theories), to create a sense of order in the observed world.  Just imagine the buzz this could generate as people discussed it online, set up blogs, Facebook and What's App groups to try and interpret what they are seeing.  You'd doubtless get competing narratives battling it out on social media.  Viewers could maybe take bets on what they think is going on - or maybe the streamers could run competitions with cash prizes for those viewers who can correctly predict what's going to happen next.  It would be reality TV, must-see drama and gameshow all in one.  Best of all, from the streaming companies' perspective, it would be cheap to produce: just random footage of real people.  No actors, writers, bloated film crews, directors, contestants, etc, to pay.  Believe me, it's the future of TV!

Stupidity and Ignorance

I really should stop reading the comments on articles on my local newspaper's website.  Not only are they, invariably bad for my blood pressure, but they are also profoundly depressing to read - it's the sheer stupidity and ignorance of the sad bastards who post them.  It's always the same half dozen, or so, idiots, all fully paid up members of Reform UK, Restore or the Crapchester Nazi Party peddling the same old bigotry and idiocy.  I mean, I really should, by now, know better than to check out any of the comments but the other day I just couldn't resist - against my better judgement - looking at the comments on an article about rising petrol and diesel prices.  Jesus Christ!  According to these bozos, rising fuel prices are entirely the fault of Andy Burnham because the government is doing nothing to stop them from going up?  So, you guys want the government to implement price controls on the free market?  Nowhere does Trump and hos war in the Gulf get mentioned - it's as if they are completely ignorant of the fact that it is his war which has directly led to rising oil costs.  In their world, it's all down to the fact that so much of what we pay at the pump is actually fuel duty imposed by the government.  Which brings us back to that tax conundrum: as these self same idiots will also rant on about failing public services, NHS waiting lists and the like in the comments under other stories, they presumably want these improved, but how are those improvements to be paid for?  That's right, through taxes - and if you want your income tax cut then the government has to make up the lost revenue from other sources.  Like fuel duty.  Finally, one idiot did mention the huge profits being made by the oil companies, yet they still chose to pass the rising costs of crude directly onto customers at the pumps.  Yeah, that's right!  You're getting there!  If you want villains here, then you should be directing your ire at Trump and the oil companies!

But at least these guys are merely stupid oafs, over on social media, their equivalents are stupid, oafish and mean.   Just this week I witnessed yet another of those 'pile ons', where some individual who is in the news for some reason, finds themselves pilloried online by bevies of self-styled experts and commentators, with the rank and file of social media all jumping in as they smell blood.  Most of the latter are individuals who really should know better, who have probably themselves suffered bullying either online or in the real world, but they just can't resist the opportunity to lay the boot into someone else, doubtless relieved that it takes attention away from them.  In this particular case, the victim was that Cambridge academic who has been accused of plagiarism.  The key word here is 'accused' - investigations are ongoing and nobody knows whether or not he actually has done anything wrong.  But that never worries those internet lynch mobs, who treat even the most innocuous of misdemeanours as capital offences.  In this case, the victim's main crime appeared to be that he is black and from an underprivileged background, which inevitably leads to all the murmurings of 'positive discrimination' and how he obviously didn't deserve his position on merit and had therefore blocked all manner of hypothetical better qualified candidates.  The mob achieved its first objective, as he has now resigned.  So, the question is - are his persecutors happy now?  Or more pertinently, are they proud of themselves?  I mean, how fragile does your own ego have to be, how insecure and inadequate must you feel about yourself and your own achievements if you feel the need to publicly utterly trash and humiliate a complete stranger?  Really, they can all go fuck themselves, from those self-appointed instigators with their bought-and-paid for 'Blue Ticks' they like to use to try and establish that they are 'someone' and therefore their opinion is more significant to yours, all the way down to the shits, scumbags and bottom feeders who travelled on their coat-tails.  Fuck 'em all!  At the end of the day, the guy involved might, or might not, be guilty of plagiarism, I neither know nor care, but at least he isn't a bullying coward hiding behind a 'Blue Tick' on Twitter.  I abhor bullies of all kinds.  So, again, fuck 'em all!

More Converter Wagons

Back to the model railway.  As I'm planning to dismantle the current excuse for a layout and start constructing an expanded version, I thought that I'd take some time over the next few weeks to shoot some videos of some of the more recently acquired locos and stock.  First, however, I thought that I'd revisit the business of converter wagons, which allow my Trix and Dublo  locos to run with stock fitted with Triang-style couplings.  Last time around I had only the solitary Triang/Dublo converter wagon.  It has now been joined by a homemade Trix/Triang converter wagon - basically just an old Trix mineral wagon I picked up cheaply which had been fitted with Triang couplings - I substituted a Trix coupling for one of these and voila!  My fleet of converter wagons doubled!

Anyway, the video shows the ever dependable Trix Warship, first with the Triang/Dublo converter wagon on a tanker train composed of assorted Triang, Hornby, Airfix and Mainline wagons, then with the Trix mineral wagon based homemade converter wagon. It is then - briefly - joined by the Trix Standard 5 with the Triang/Dublo converter and an assortment of Triang, Hornby and Wrenn wagons. The Trix wagons I recently acquired should have been part of the latter train, but misbehaved badly, as did the Standard 5, limiting its appearances in this video.  The main problem with the Trix wagons were, surprise, surprise, the couplings.  Now, I know this will upset all those people out there who champion Peco-type couplings, as used by Trix and Dublo, but in my experience, they simply do not work particularly well: frequently failing to couple at all and, even when coupled, uncoupling themselves with monotonous regularity.  Having discovered how easy it is to fit Triang couplings to Trix wagons, my intention is to fit all but the converter wagons with them at both ends and just use the latter to allow the Trix and Dublo locos to couple up to goods trains.  

That's it for this time, hopefully I'll have some more short videos of various other locos and stock in action soon. 

The House That Vanished (1973)

Another wilfully obscure low budget British would be shocker from the early seventies, the main reason for my interest in The House That Vanished (1973), is that it was directed by Jose Larraz.  Larraz was a Spanish director who directed a series of low budget exploitation films in the UK during the early seventies, of which Vampyres (1974) is probably the best known.  Most are psychological thrillers, involving protagonists, often women, trapped in remote locations and finding themselves under some kind of threat, either from unstable individuals or sometimes the supernatural.  Isolation, be it psychological or physical, seems to be a key theme in Larraz's work.  The House That Vanished conforms to this basic template, with a model reluctantly accompanying her more than slightly shady photographer to a remote house, where is to carry out some unspecified (and probably illegal) activities.  Getting lost, darkness falls, a mist comes down and they find themselves driving along a dirt track through some woods before finally arriving at what the boyfriend assumes is the right house.  He breaks in and they enter the apparently abandoned house, while the boyfriend searches for some unspecified object, they hear someone else enter the house and hide in a wardrobe.  From their hiding place, they witness a woman being murdered by an unseen assailant, before they flee.  Becoming separated from her boyfriend, the woman gets back to their car, only to find the keys missing.  Pursued by the killer, she eventually stumbles into a scrapyard, where she hides until daylight.  Later, her boyfriend's car mysteriously appears parked across the road from her flat.  In it, she finds her photographic portfolio, but missing a single picture.

It's an intriguing start for the film and further incidents are piled on top of each other: the car vanishes again, only to turn up in the scrapyard, a mysterious new tenant turns up in the flat below and the woman meets a young male designer who, we learn, is having an incestuous relationship with his aunt.  Crucially, of course, despite returning to that scrapyard, she just can't seem to locate that house.  It has, as the title says, apparently vanished.  Worried by the fact that her boyfriend had broken into the house, the woman is advised by her friends not to report his disappearance and the murder to the police.  Not that it would have done her much good as, like most exploitation movie cops of the era, the police seem remarkably complacent, even when they do have a crime reported to them - the rape and murder of the woman's flatmate.  Inevitably, of course, she does end up in that house again, but failing to recognise it because, this time, she is taken there in daylight and, most crucially, to the front of the house, rather than the back.  Equally inevitably, she finds herself in peril again as, while exploring the house, she starts to recognise some of the decor in the back rooms of the house, eventually stumbling on the bodies of the first victim and her boyfriend.  

In common with most of the Larraz films I've seen, the director goes for low key menace and slowly building suspense rather than shocks and gore.  The onscreen violence is very limited, much of it implied, rather than seen.  The opening scenes of the drive to the house and their subsequent exploration of the seemingly abandoned rooms, is very atmospheric and tense, as is the subsequent chase through the woods.  Unfortunately, the film somewhat loses pace as the plot unfolds, with too much dialogue which doesn't seem to be moving the story forward.  One of the film's problems is that both the red-herrings and the real killer are far too obvious.  The mysterious new tenant, for instance, is written and played as so stereotypically creepy, that you just know he's a diversion.  Possibly the film's biggest asset is its depiction of early seventies London in all of its grimy, run down glory.  It also captures the sheer seediness of the bottom end of the modelling business - there's a distinct lack of glamour in Larraz's depiction of the modelling scene.  The performances, like the script (by British sexploitation legend Derek Ford) and direction, are generally low key, with Judy Matheson representing the closest thing to a star name, (she could also be seen in Hammer movies and other UK horror films of the era, later enjoying a career as a local TV presenter in my region), although her supporting role here is relatively brief.  

One thing that struck me whilst watching The House That Vanished was how it didn't seem to flow smoothly in places, with what felt like a huge jump at a key juncture - the rape and murder of the flatmate, which we see nothing of, it is just mentioned as having happened.  The ending also seemed rushed and abrupt, with the police turning up just in the nick of time - and completely out of the blue.  Who called them?  How did they know where the house was?  Why was the downstairs tenant with them?  It just didn't make sense.  A little bit of research revealed that the only version of the film apparently available is the US edit, originally distributed by AIP, which reportedly had around fifteen minutes of footage cut from it.  (Indeed, it was this version which used The House That Vanished title, it had been released in the UK, at its original running time, as Scream - and Die!    This version was also given a limited US release as Please! Don't Go in the Bedroom, before being picked up by AIP for a wider release in an edited form and with a new title).  I'm assuming that these cuts explain the narrative jumps - it seems clear that we're meant to assume that the creepy red-herring downstairs guy found something out and alerted the cops.  Likewise, I'm assuming that the murder of the flatmate had a bigger build up, possibly with a murder sequence similar to that at the beginning of the film.  Once again, this just serves to illustrate the problems we have when trying to properly assess these kinds of films as, as is the case here, the only available version doesn't represent the movie's original form.

After Hours: The Battering of Britain

Once again we go After Hours to find out why streaming TV customers are finding their ordinary lives turned into TV dramas. There’s drama in the meth lab for Dr Smith, Will and the Robot in this week’s episode of ‘Lost and Spaced’ as an experiment gets out of hand, while The-Man-in-the-Pub wades into the ‘Paul is Dead’ debate and uncovers a bizarre tale of amnesia, stolen identities and market stalls. Psychic FM’s agony uncle looks into a case of ‘Naked Possession’ and we get a preview of WNKR’s new classic comedy. Finally, the ‘Battering of Britain’ is spotlighted in an investigation of a violent new trend sweeping the country: fish battery. Do fresh fish sales need to be restricted as gangs armed with fish bring terror to Britain’s streets?

‘After Hours’ was created using Google AI Studio, ChatGPT with sound effects and theme music by Freesound Community via Pixababy.com. Music: ‘Sunday Bell Shuffle’, ‘Cold Signal Burst’ and ‘Veil of Sleep’ by Cosmiczebra via Suno.com.

Listen Here: After Hours: The Battering of Britain 

Episode six!  I can't deny that this one was a bit of a trial to come up with and was completed in a rush.  For one thing, I went through something of a personal crisis of confidence amid worries over my lack of direction last month.  Even when I got past that, for the life of me, I had absolutely no idea on what the content would be, so scripting started late and recording even later.  Even then, I was still prevaricating over the running order of the segments right up to publication.  I have to say that, overall, I'm less happy about this episode than the previous couple.  I'm just not sure that the mix of items was right. Still, there are a couple of entirely original items in there, rather than just stuff reworked from The Sleaze.  I might actually give 'After Hours' a break for August, as I need time to rethink and re-jig the project, as I've had some ideas for the format of some of the individual segments.  Then again, I might not.  Watch this space.

Travelling Hopefully (Again)

I had another of those days of 'travelling hopefully'.  I thought that I'd worked out where all the roadworks were and mapped out my route to the New Forest accordingly - also taking into account how to avoid the traffic chaos generated by the presence of the New Forest Show this week.  Inevitably, of course, this being the height of summer, another set of roadworks and another diversion sprang up out of nowhere, (no warning signs until you were practically on it), frustrating me.  But, I finally got to the Forest, taking the back route across Cadnam Common to Bolderwood, in order to by-pass Lyndhurst, (which, I know from past experience, is even more chaotic than usual when the New Forest Show is on).  All well and good.  But more problems arose as I tried to get to a particular part of the forest around the back of Brockenhurst - heavier than expected traffic, (you have to cross a main road to get there), delayed me again, before finding that the car park I wanted to use had been 'temporarily' closed, so I had to use one further down, which disrupting the route of the walk I wanted to take.  Still, I did have a very pleasant walk, (my second of the day), before I did something really stupid.  Knowing that the New Forest Show had ended for the day by then, I decided to drive back via Brockenhurst, reasoning that the traffic and 'event road controls' would be absent by then, (this has worked for me before).  But no, chaos still reigned as a bunch of self-important buffoons in flourescent jackets took it upon themselves to 'direct' traffic around the two entrances/exits to the show venue. 

At one point we had a double decker bus blocking the middle of the road as it was unable to take the turn into the venue as they were directing too many cars out, blocking the turning.  After that, it was delay after delay, with traffic queuing for miles on either side of Lyndhurst, for no visible reason.  Finally, I nearly collided with a lunatic who cut straight in front of me on a roundabout outside Romsey -- quite why he felt the need to invade my lane, as both his and my lanes gave access to the Romsey turning, I have no idea.  He clearly wasn't looking as my presence seemed to surprise him when I sounded my horn and made several internationally recognised hand gestures in his direction.  Anyway, what I keep coming back to on days like this is the question of exactly why those who authorise such things think that the height of the summer holidays is the right time to put up disruptive road works everywhere?  I mean, does a committee convene in an office in mid-July every year, rub their hands gleefully as they declare 'School summer holidays?  People off with the kids to the coast?  Well, we're really going to fuck them up!'  I know the usual excuse is that they have to carry out these works while the weather is fine, but this is surely bollocks as a), they carry them out all autumn and winter too and b), with global warming, nowadays we have long runs of fine dry weather from March onwards - so there's no excuse for trying to disrupt peoples' holiday travel.  Still, I think that the therapeutic influence of being out in nature today just about outweighed the frustrations of road works and traffic disruption.  But only just.

Electoral Dissonance

It's pretty much cognitive dissonance - the ability to hold two conflicting, mutually exclusive even, beliefs simultaneously - isn't it?  The way in which our ill-informed electorate appears to think, I mean.  Or at least, the way the right-wing press seems to believe that they think, judging by their headlines.  As ever, with the arrival of a new Labour Prime Minister, the press have gone into overdrive with stories about crippling taxes to pay for his policies, etc.  They are clearly relying upon what they assume are voters' reluctance to pay taxes, to which there is an element of truth: nobody likes paying out money.  But at the same time, those self same voters are guaranteed to be in favour of cutting NHS waiting lists, building new hospitals, schools and the like.  Not to forget better mental health care provisions to keep all those dangerous nutters off of the streets that the press are always on about, more policemen to deal with those terrorists and immigrant criminals they like to try and scare their readers with, more tanks, planes and ships to see off that Russian invasion they are always scaremongering about.  Between them, the press and the public want it all.  But how do they think all of this is paid for?  The reality is that any government's main source of revenue is general taxation.  That's right, those taxes that the people who want all these services don't want to pay. 

The problem is that for decades the press and successive governments have been trying to sell us the lie that you can have both high quality public services and low taxation.  New Labour told us the shortfall could be met through Private-Public Finance Initiatives, while the Tories, once they got past their bogus 'austerity' agenda, told us it was all about simply cutting the 'unpopular' bits of public spending, (ie that targeted at the poor and minorities), to focus public finances on the 'important' stuff instead.  (A manifest lie, of course, as they also cut policing, the justice system and defence to the bone, in order to finance ever bigger tax cuts to their rich buddies).  But this 'cognitive dissonance' isn't just confined to economics.  UK voters, for instance, have consistently indicated their disdain, repugnance even, for Trump, yet, at the same time, many of them simultaneously seem prepared to vote for Nigel Fartage and his band of Reform brigands - a man who has revelled in his alleged friendship with Trump and has frequently endorsed the fat bastard's policies.  (I know he's been trying to walk this back since the disaster of Trump's war against Iran, his threatening to seize Greenland and his various disparaging anti-UK comments, but some of us don't forget).  Again, mutually exclusive positions, surely?  It's as if they have no idea what Fartage actually stands for and proposes.  Which they might well not, the British electorate seems so ill-informed (and the press seems determined to keep them that way).  Ah well, there you have it - this week's political rant

House of the Living Dead (1973)

Every so often I come across a film which has fallen into such obscurity that even I haven't heard of it.  Such was the case with Anglo-South African horror film House of the Living Dead (1973), which I recently caught up with.  Yet, despite having never seen or heard of it, the whole thing had an air of familiarity about it, reminding me, at every turn, of other low budget shockers I'd seen.  The whole business of a young woman arriving at a remote country house and finding her fiancé/husband undergoing personality changes and being suspected of various heinous crimes, along with the mad lookalike relative hidden in the attic, seems to have come straight from The Black Torment (1964), for instance.  The antagonist's experiments in capturing souls, meanwhile, is highly reminiscent of 1972' The Asphyx, while the whole voodoo-on-the-plantation business recalls I Walked With a Zombie (1943).  Despite the film's title, however, there are no zombies present, with the whole voodoo angle being a piece of misdirection, for the horrors turn out to be of the strictly pseudo-scientific kind.  The real culprit is the mad twin brother, a reclusive doctor who lurks in the attic carrying out weird experiments on the local animal population, having found a way to extract their souls and store them in large jars.  There's an equally dotty mother who opposes her other (non-mad) son's marriage to his fiancée, who is about to arrive from England, as she doesn't want to risk the insanity which runs in the family being perpetuated into another generation.  Another complication arises when an English doctor who knew the mad twin at medical college arrives at the same time as the fiancée, planning to stay with some old friends at the neighbouring farm.

All manner of mayhem ensues, with brutal murders on the plantation, at first attributed to an escaped horse, a mysterious hooded figure lurking around the countryside and an increasingly frantic fiancée trying to fathom her husband-to-be's strange behaviour, clashing with his mother and attempting to find out what's going on in the attic.  In a frenzied climax, it is revealed that, sometime before the fiancée arrived, the mad brother had murdered his twin and swapped places with him, planning to extract the girl's soul and unite it with his brother's, which he is keeping in a glowing blue jar.  Inevitably, all those glowing jars get smashed when the visiting doctor turns up with the police and the evil twin finds himself attacked by all those souls, both human and animal, he had extracted.  Cue the lead actor staggering around screaming as ghostly animal noises play on the soundtrack and coloured lights play over his face, before he falls over the banister to his death, (landing next to his dead mother who had previously tossed over that same banister).  The film ends with the girl in the visiting doctor's arms - which seems a bit creepy as he's old enough to be her father.   House of the Living Dead is an entirely derivative film, with every element feeling as if it had been borrowed from another, better, film. Even the cast, headed by Shirley Ann Field, has a hand-me-down feel, with the leads all being vaguely familiar for half-remembered TV roles.  (Still, lead actor Mark Burns did win a Best Actor prize at the 1974 Stiges Film Festival, so somebody must have liked his over-the-top, scenery chewing, performance in his dual roles).   It's all directed smoothly but blandly by Ray Austin, best known for the hundreds of TV episodes he directed, first in the UK, then the US and sexploitation films like Virgin Witch (1972).  The only thing that makes the film stand out are its South African locations, which add a certain degree of sweaty exoticism to an otherwise overly familiar scenario.

(Despite never having heard of the film under the House of the Living Dead title, I later found out that it had originally been released in the UK under the title Doctor Maniac, which I vaguely recall having been referred to, in dismissive terms, in, I think, one of Alan Frank's books on horror movies.  But I hadn't seen it, even under that title).