The Oily Maniac (1976)

The Oily Maniac (1976) is peculiar piece of exploitation from Shaw Brothers that ends up making the viewer feel as greasy, grimy and grubby as the titular character.  Apparently derived from a Malaysian urban legend concerning an oily creature that lurked in dark alleyways and attacked the unwary, the film seems, at first, to try and turn the character into a minor league superhero/avenger, beating and killing various thugs, crooks and rapists, but takes a turn into darker territory in its last third.  The Oily Maniac opens like a standard crime thriller, with a crooked lawyer helping a local villain to take control of a coconut oil business, with things turning violent when one of the henchmen molests the owner's daughter.  Said owner comes barrelling in with a mob of his employees, armed with machetes and in the ensuing fight, he stabs to death one of the villains.  Despite the best efforts of his paralegal nephew, who walks on crutches after suffering childhood polio and is interned to the crooked lawyer, the owner is convicted of murder and executed.  But not before he passes on to his nephew, via a tattoo on his back, the secret of transforming oneself into an oily avenging monster, warning that if the secret isn't used for good, it will end in an agonising death.  Wracked with anguish over the owner's death and the sheer scuzziness of his boss's business, the paralegal follows the instructions, digging a hole in the middle of his living room, into which he climbs and is engulfed by mystical oil, transforming into the Oily Maniac.

His transformation couldn't have been better timed, as it coincides with a couple of the bad guys turning up at the daughter's house and trying to rape her.  In his new guise as a humanoid grease pile, the guy turns up in the nick of time, killing one attacker and putting the other to flight as they try to sexually assault her, before returning to his own house, where he turns back into his human form.  From now on, whenever he wants to transform, it seems that he needn't get back into the hole, but just cover himself with any convenient oily substance - which include petrol from a pump, a drum of boiling tarmac at some roadworks and coconut oil spraying from a ruptured storage tank.  Events take a predictable turn as he starts meting out oily street justice to various of his boss's crooked clients, starting with a woman who has falsely accused a neighbour of rape, in order to secure financial compensation from him via the courts.  In the lead up to him oozing up through her bath's plug hole in oil form, before turning into a solid monster and strangling her, we get to sit through the trial, seeing both accused and accuser's versions of events in graphic detail, providing the film another opportunity to depict sexual violence against a woman.  The abuse of women is something of a theme throughout the film, with female characters regularly reduced to being helpless subjects of male violence.  Another reckoning involves the Oily Maniac attacking, in the operating theatre, a female plastic surgeon who had botched a boob job on a young singer, just as she is about to operate on a prostitute on behalf of a pimp (another client of the bent lawyer) to 'make her a virgin again'.  It's all incredibly sleazy.

At this point, things start to get darker as a shady character hanging around the clinic follows the Oily Maniac and sees him transform back into the paralegal.  His attempt at blackmail, however, goes awry, when the Oily Maniac turns up at the dockside rendezvous arranged for the money drop and slaughters the guy and his gang, beating the blackmailer to death with his own bicycle.  With the paralegal having now used his powers for personal reasons rather than for vigilante justice on behalf of wronged victims, things get worse for him as he learns that the late owner's daughter, for whom he harbours an unspoken love, tells him that she's going to marry her cousin, who now runs the coconut oil business.  He subsequently learns from a girl at the office - who has an unrequited love for him - that the cousin has now sold the business to the villain who was originally trying to take it over and the girl with it.  This all pushes him over the edge and sets him, in Oily Maniac, guise, on a rampage of personal revenge.  Too late to save the daughter from being gang raped, after which she commits suicide, he kills, in quick succession, his boss and his mistress, the gang boss - this involves a large scale battle with his henchmen - and finally the crooked cousin, who he corners at the coconut oil plant.  At this point, too late as ever, the cops turn up with the girl from the office, who does what nobody else could seem to figure out, destroying the Oily Maniac by setting his oil ablaze to give him an agonising death. (The police are led by the most incompetent and arrogant detective imaginable).

As can be seen, this Hong Kong production - shot largely on location in Malaysia - throws absolutely everything into the mix:  super powered monsters, violence, crime thriller, courtroom drama and the abuse of women.  The result is a bizarre, but often uncomfortable, viewing experience.  On a technical level, it isn't badly made - Shaw Brothers, after all, had long experience in turning out professionally made, commercially successful, films across a wide range of genres - but its treatment of its subject matter is just, well, grimy.  Whilst, as he tries to argue, many of the Oily Maniac's victims had retribution coming to them, one can't help but feel that being murdered by an ambulatory patch of oil is more than a little excessive.  The levels of violence he employs are always well over-the-top.  The monster itself is, in a clunky low-budget way, quite impressive.  In humanoid form he is a lumbering, misshapen caricature of a man, all hulking oiliness and blazing eyes.  For some reason, we can see his heart beating in his chest, although this never seems to be a vulnerability, as one at first assumes.  He also regularly transforms himself into a cartoon patch of oil that oozes about.  Most impressively, when he has limbs, or even his head, lopped off in fights, they simply turn into patches of oil, reunite with his body and grow back into their previous solid form.  Notably, the Oily Maniac, in human form as the paralegal, is played by Danny Lee, several years before he starred in John Woo's The Killer.  All-in-all, The Oily Maniac is the sort of exploitation film that probably could only be made in the Far East, utterly bizarre and, certainly to Western eyes, pretty low rent, with regard to many of the attitudes which seem to underpin it.  Certainly entertaining, in its sleazy way, but also more than a little disturbing.

Peace Through Nudity

Going through my old files, I came across several fragments of an alternative version of the story 'Nudists From Outer Space' that ran on The Sleaze some years ago, (it was also the basis of a segment of the pilot for the 'After Hours' podcast).  I've pieced them together (with a couple of bridging sentences) to form a vaguely coherent whole.  So, in lieu of a proper post, (I just couldn't come up with anything today), here's an early, alternate take on 'Nudists From Outer Space': 

“Ten or twelve of them at a time were leaping onto the display beds and indulging in wild an energetic sex,” claims assistant store manager Ralph Milner, who suffered third degree friction burns to his groin when his polyester trousers were ripped off by a naked reveller.    “The springs just weren’t designed to take that kind of thing - they all collapsed!”  says Milner, who admits that he remains mystified by the whole incident.    “At first I thought it was some kind of performance art thing, where they get all those naked women to tun up.    Then I realised that there were blokes with this lot, and a lot of them, both male and female, were bloody ugly!    I don’t call that art!”    Police suspect that the Ikea store incident was another example of the so-called ‘Nude Mobbing’ craze.    “It’s like ‘Flash Mobbing’, where large groups of people would be organised by mobile phone to just turn up at a particular location for a few minutes,” says Inspector Tim Carling of Bucks Constabulary.    “This new activity seems to be aimed at creating an affront to decency through mass demonstrations of public nudity!”    

Carling himself has first hand experience of ‘Nude Mobbing’, having been caught in an earlier incident on London’s Westminster Bridge.    “I was driving to Scotland Yard for a police conference one Monday morning, when scores of pedestrian commuters suddenley tore their clothes off and started jumping all over vehicles,”    he says.    “They were pulling people off of buses and forcibly stripping them!    I found my car immobilised by some fellow sticking his todger up my exhaust!    When I got out of the car to remonstrate with him, I found myself overwhelmed by the mob and my uniform being pulled off!    Before I knew it one woman had my truncheon between her legs, whilst another one squatted over my blue helmet!    It was most humiliating!”    Like the Ikea riot, the Westminster Bridge incident ended as abruptly as it started, with the participants putting their clothes back on and melting back into the general populace.

Whilst the authorities suspect that militant naturists, determined to force a change in Britain’s public nudity laws, could be behind this new craze, there have been suggestions that the incidents are actually evidence of activity by alien nudists from outer space, citing the case of Eileen Starkey.  The housewife claimed to have been impregnated by an alien naturist purporting to be a man from her insurance company.  During her impregnation, Eileen was given visions of the peaceful space society her visitors represented: “They showed me these wonderful scenes of idyllic green valleys on the Moon, full of naked people cavorting peacefully! They said our leaders had lied to us when they said that the Moon was an airless, lifeless world - they were trying to suppress the truth.    In reality, space suits aren’t needed at all in space - everyone is naked there!”

Scary Stories

Sweet Jesus, why does everything have to be a scare story, these days?  I mean, I know that it's coming up to Halloween and therefore the 'scary season', but it is all year round now that we are being bombarded with stories and warnings by the media and governments clearly designed to scare us out of our wits.  If it isn't the constant 'World War Three fears' nonsense every time a conflict breaks out somewhere in the world, it is warnings that AI is going to murder us all in our beds.  None of these stories are actually authenticated in any way: just how, for instance, is AI going to kill us?  Exactly how?   Those perpetrating the stories can't actually tell us that, but that doesn't stop their constant scaremongering.  It's the same with their 'World Three' cobblers and all the current ramping up of the 'Russian Threat', in the face of which we need to spend billions on defence and face being called up for military service.  Here, there is a fundamental disconnect with the reality on the ground: Russia's invasion of Ukraine has ground to a standstill, with their supposed military might and technical superiority counting for nought on the battlefield.  With the incompetence they have shown in Ukraine, let alone the vast quantities of manpower and military resources they have expended (and can't easily replace), surely denudes any threat they might pose to the rest of Europe.  In reality, the sort of operations they are running against the West at the moment - cyber terrorism and sabotage - are the sort of thing that won't be deterred by a huge conventional military build-up on Europe's part.  Not to forget that the current conflicts in Ukraine and Iran show that modern warfare is a good deal less sophisticated than the military 'experts' have lead us to believe that it might be - any defence strengthening focused simply on building more ships, planes and tanks is unlikely to be particularly effective.

But it isn't just these specific hypothetical threats they're trying to scare us with - this week we've had the government telling us how we should all be preparing for some kind of vague possible future catastrophe by stocking up on tinned foods, as part of their 'National Resiliance Conversation'.   For fuck's sake!  Have we really reached the stage where they can't even be bothered to outline the threat they are trying to scare us with?  This is just the official equivalent of the government jumping out at us and shouting 'Boo!'  Still, they did come up with one fairly specific 'threat' this week, with which the media are now trying to instil panic into the  public consciousness - the PHP vulnerability.  As the media have been so laboriously explaining, PHP is the coding language which underpins much of the web, be it servers or webpages, so any vulnerability has the potential to be exploited by hackers.  Hence we have all those breathless reports of websites being taken offline while remedial action is being taken. A couple of points, though, which seem to have been glossed over, on the issue: firstly, it seems that though it has long existed, there is no record of this vulnerability - which was apparently discovered by AI - ever having been exploited.   Could it be that it is something so obscure that it is likely that no human hacker would ever have found it, so it is actually the media trumpeting the AI 'discovery' which has created the 'threat'?  Secondly, the fact is that it apparently affects only older versions of PHP, so those rushing to secure their sites and servers are actually admitting that they haven't been bothering to keep their software up to date.  Now, the PHP for The Sleaze is actually set by the hosting company's servers and, for quite some time now, my current host has only offered the latest versions.  So - and the site will probably crash and burn now - I'm not having to rush around in a panic thanks to this latest bit of media scaremongering.

Normalising Hate

Why is the fact that a political party whose entire existence is based upon opposition to immigration has members who are out-and-out racists treated by the UK's media as some kind of shocking revelation?  Perhaps the fact that, for the past few years, most of them have been trying to normalise Nigel Farage and Reform UK as if they are somehow a legitimate political leader and party, despite the sort of hate-speech they regularly engage in, might have something to do with it.  Of course, the upper, more visible, part of Reform (the above water bit of the iceberg, if you will), are always careful to couch their public bigotry in the sort of terms that make it easier for the media that fawns over them to present it as somehow falling within the 'norm' of political language, albeit at the 'tough' (ie extreme) end of the spectrum.  Hopefully, the recent ITV News investigation which revealed various Reform UK councillors and candidates using racist language and advocating all manner of repugnant, racially discriminatory policies, will make this normalisation of Reform UK by some sections of the media a bit more difficult.  But then again, let's not forget various of their MPs openly expressing racist sentiments - being 'sickened' by the number of non-white people being featured in TV ads, ring a bell? - which were quickly buried by the media.  Still, Farage and Reform UK seem to be on a downward spiral right now, the party dropping in the polls and Farage's personal standing with voters well down, following all the revelations about their funding, so maybe the media's love affair with them will wane.  After all, they only like to be associated with winners.

Speaking of that funding, this would  be an opportune time for a reminder that Reform UK isn't actually a political party in the normal sense.  It is, in reality, a limited company of which a  certain Nigel Farage is the majority shareholder.  Consequently, they don't have any semblance of a democratic internal structure, as do the other, legitimate, political parties, in one form or another.  Reform UK leaders aren't elected, but rather appointed by 'the board' - which, in practice, means Farage.  All of which means, of course, that any donations, memberships, etc aren't political donations or memberships in the usual sense.  They are, in effect,  gifts of money to a private company.  Not loans.  Gifts.  Which means that, if you are foolish enough to give money to Reform UK, you are, in effect, giving it to Nigel Farage.  I do wonder what will happen to all that money it has received from dodgy crypto billionaires if Nige finally gets fed up with Reform when he finds that it isn't going to get him into Number ten and decides to wind the company up?  I mean, it is all now a financial asset of Reform UK ltd and when a company is wound up, goes into voluntary liquidation, any assets that remain after outstanding debts are paid go to the company's owners. Which, in this case, would effectively be Farage as the majority shareholder.  Not, obviously, that I'd dare to suggest that good old Nige would ever contemplating such a thing.  God forbid!  He's as honest as the day is long, (barring, maybe, that five million quid 'personal gift' he forgot to declare upon becoming an MP).  But it makes you think, doesn't it?

She Killed in Ecstasy (1971)

1970-71 were busy years for Jesus Franco - even by his standards - shooting eleven films, often back-to-back, often sharing locations and casts.  She Killed in Ecstasy (1971), for instance, was shot less than a month after Vampyros Lesbos (1971) in the Summer of 1970 and features much of the same cast and crew.  Most notably, like its predecessor, it stars Soledad Miranda (under her regular alias of Susann Korda), in her penultimate role, before her death in car crash a few weeks later.  The film itself is a revenge drama, with Miranda as a vengeful widow targeting those she holds responsible for her husband's suicide.  But, Franco being Franco, the plot doesn't develop quite as straightforwardly as might be expected with such a scenario and is full of bizarre touches.  For one thing, the husband is hardly a sympathetic villain, being a doctor who had been conducting some pretty unethical-sounding experiments of human embryos.  His speeches justifying his work are worthy of Peter Cushing's rendition of Victor Frankenstein as an entirely amoral character, blinded by ambition and his unshakable self-belief, to the dangers and questionable ethics of his experiments.  It's all for the greater good, is the main theme of his self-justification, which falls on deaf ears at the medical council, who have him struck off.  But if the husband, Dr Johnson, is of questionable morals, the four members of the council who condemn him, are characterised as inflexible zealots, their language, effectively accusing him of being a heretic and a monster and calling for his work to be completely destroyed, seeming more suited to brimstone-and-Hellfire religious fundamentalists than men and women of science.

The council's condemnation goes beyond professional sanctions, however, with a mob destroying Johnson's lab and beating him up, followed by a campaign of public condemnation, which eventually hounds him to his death.  As might be expected in a Jesus Franco film, Miranda's revenge involves her seducing and murdering the four members of the council, all of whom are revealed to be hypocrites of questionable morality themselves.  Professor Walker (Howard Vernon), for instance, turns out to be a quasi-religious hypocrite who has sex with prostitutes, but preys beforehand - he ends up stabbed and castrated by Miranda.  Dr Crawford (Ewa Stromberg) ends up suffocated with an inflatable pillow, after being revealed as a closeted lesbian who practically throws herself at a disguised Miranda: a far cry from her prim and proper demeanour as a moralising council member.  The other two council members, Dr Houston (Paul Muller) and Dr Donen (Franco himself), suffer similar fates, with the latter, as chairman of the council, receiving particularly grisly treatment- stumbling over his wife's murdered body at his home, before himself being tied up and hacked up by Miranda.  Meanwhile, a laid back police inspector has been conducting a hugely laconic investigation into the deaths, always several steps behind Miranda and seemingly unconcerned by the bodies piling up.  

What lifts She Killed in Ecstasy above many similar revenge thrillers is its languid, dream like feel.  Location-wise, it seems to occupy some kind of geographic and temporal limbo.  While the setting is clearly Southern Europe (it was shot in Spain), with its sun drenched coastal locations, many of the principal characters have English-sounding surnames: Johnson, Walker, Crawford, Houston and Donen.  We're never sure where any of these people are meant to come from - even the unnamed police inspector, played by Horst Tappert, seems to have wandered in from a German Krimi film.  The action also unfolds with the  logic of a dream, particularly with regard to the death of Dr Johnson.  He apparently dies at home, yet despite everyone apparently knowing that he is dead, Mrs Johnson is never seen reporting his death, there is no apparent investigation into his death and, most bizarrely, his dead body remains at home, in the marital bed, in a remarkable state of preservation.  Its location (and state) is pertinent to the plot, as we have scenes strongly implying necrophilia on Miranda's part.  Moreover, at he film's climax, she has his body on the passenger seat of her car as she kills Donen, dying alongside the corpse when the car goes off the road as she drives away, just as the police inspector finally catches up with her crimes.

All-in-all, She Killed in Ecstasy is a fascinating film, more erotic thriller than giallo, slasher or straightforward horror film.  Visually striking, the locations are used to great effect and, unusually, Franco's direction is quite restrained, with less of his trademark gratuitous zoom-shots than usual.  Despite the typically short shooting schedule, the film comes off as, by Franco standards, remarkably polished.  Most fascinating, though, is that central conceit of a woman so in love with a man of dubious morality himself, that she is moved to extraordinary acts of vengeance against his tormentors.  That they, themselves, are such reprehensible characters, is the saving grace that stops Miranda's character, from an audience perspective, becoming the villain rather than the heroine.

Get Out of Jail Free?

One of the reasons I keep on posting here, in spite of the fact that, these days, only bots and AI seem to read it, is because I can't be interrupted, talked over or shouted down before I can properly develop an idea or construct an argument.  All of which behaviours are, in my opinion, reprehensible, demonstrating only the rudeness and ignorance of the guilty party.  Moreover, they represent the tactics of fascism - denying any opposing voices a platform.  When I taught, I certainly wouldn't tolerate any of these things in my classroom.  In the pub, unfortunately, there are a significant number of individuals who want only their own voices and opinions to be heard and are prepared to shout anyone expressing what might be something they disagree with down, refusing one the opportunity to unfold their ideas and arguments fully.  As you have, by now, doubtless guessed, I recently had just such an experience.  I perhaps wouldn't have minded so much if I hadn't have been expounding my, not entirely serious, thesis that the US is a nation of psychopaths, obsessed with violence, and that the whole Trump circus that the entire world has to suffer through right now, is an inevitable consequence of this.  Which is why I find myself constantly exasperated by Americans of my acquaintance who simply shrug and say, 'Well I didn't vote for him' as if that somehow makes it all OK and means that they don't have to bear any responsibility for what is happening.  At which point I was rudely and angrily cut off by an unprovoked tirade about how ridiculous it was to try and hold people responsible for the actions of governments they might not have voted for, because it wasn't their fault, I was an idiot etc, etc.  

The continued belittling and shouting down prevented me from my response, that, actually, you can hold people responsible not just what they do, but also for what they don't do.  The precedent, of course, being post-war Germany, where the German populace were held collectively responsible for the rise of Nazism.  A view actually shared by most of them, who understood that the Nazi regime didn't just happen, to some degree even those who didn't vote for Hitler and didn't actively support it, had allowed it to happen through their inaction.  They hadn't opposed it vigourously enough before inter-war German democracy was completely destroyed.  They saw what was happening but, through fear, through complacency, through the vague idea that all of us living in democracies have, that this is just a blip and that they system would eventually correct it, did nothing.  As long as the bad things weren't happening to them personally, it was easier to look away.  Now, this isn't something confined to either Trump's America or Nazi Germany.  All of us living in democracies and taking them for granted, are guilty of this complacency which allows evil to seep into the system and destroy it - by the time we react, it is often too late.  When I talk about 'opposing' these forces before they take root, I don't necessarily mean going out on the streets and beating them up or firebombing their offices, instead I mean simply pushing back at their poisonous narratives whenever we can, standing up for the minorities they seek to intimidate, simply having the courage to speak out.

But, more often than not, we don't do these things.  Certainly, I know that I haven't always done them: there have been times when I should have confronted individuals over their racist language, for instance, but I didn't because it would have drawn attention to myself, made me unpopular in the workplace, for instance, so it was easier not to do so.  I'm not proud of myself for these failures.  On the other hand, I did, on occasion, stand up for workers rights in my workplace, confronting management and making myself unpopular (and labelled an awkward bastard' by management and colleagues alike) in the process.  But I never regretted doing those things - doing the right thing won't make you popular, but at least you can have a clear conscience.  I've written before about the complete and utter shame as a Briton I felt while Boris 'The Fat Bastard' Johnson was Prime Minister, but back then I thought that just shrugging and saying 'Well, I didn't vote for him' was enough.  But, over time, I realised that it wasn't.  After all, how had we ever got to the situation where someone so manifestly unfit for office had been allowed to get so far?  Could it be that people like me, ordinary citizens, hadn't done enough to promote the opposing political narrative, to oppose and argue against the right wing at every opportunity?  Had we failed to win the battle of hearts and minds because we just couldn't be bothered and thought that someone else would do it for us?  So, despite not having voted for Boris, I had to bear my share of responsibility for allowing the political discourse that resulted in his ascension to go unopposed.  

Which leads, inevitably, to the not unreasonable question of what I'm doing right now to try and fight the rise of the right and their cohorts?  It's all very well preaching to people that they need to be more proactive in order to combat these people, but it means nothing if I'm just sitting on my arse complacently expecting others to respond to my call to arms.  Well, this is what I'm doing: writing stuff like this in the hope that it might inspire even one person to start actively getting involved in opposing the dark forces that seem to be gathering around Western democracies.  More than that, I'm still constantly churning out pieces for The Sleaze, satirising, parodying and ridiculing these people and their ideologies.  Satire is, I agree, a pretty weak weapon to wield, but these guys don't like to be ridiculed, it dents their egos, reveals them just to be flawed humans like the rest of us.  Besides, it is what I'm reasonably good at.  But on top of that, I try to be more vocal when it comes to opposing bigots and oafs, challenging their bigotry and ill behaviour whenever possible, (and whenever it is safe to do so).  Simply not voting for the likes of Trump or Farage isn't enough - you have to actively oppose them and their ideologies.  But, too many people, particularly middle class people, think that saying 'I didn't vote for them' is some kind of 'Get Out of Jail Free' card for their consciences.  Except that, in truth, there are no free passes in life.  No way to balance out your bad deeds by performing a few good ones - those celestial scales don't exist.  It's just a cop out to try and salve your conscience.  Hell, I've done plenty of discreditable things in my life, things of which I am deeply ashamed, things which have caused hurt to others.  But experience has told me that there is no way to take it all back, no way to truly repair the hurt and damage - I have to find a way to live with the fact that I've done these things, that I've caused this hurt, accept my flaws and wrong doing and learn from them, learn to behave better in future.  But I've digressed somewhat from my original point, which is simply that if we fail to act, if we are too complacent and think that voting alone is the only way to oppose extremism, then we allow them to triumph.

Future Shock

I read with interest the other day that story about the German dudes who had used a robot to grope a woman.  Not because I approve of such remote cybernetic sexual assault, but because it's yet another thing I predicted in a story over at The Sleaze coming true. Sometimes I astonish myself with my powers of foresight.  Most of my successful predictions involve the abuse of tech for sexual purposes, thereby reinforcing my thesis that most technological advances are actually linked to the advancement of pornography and sexual perversion.  I mean, the internet is clearly the ultimate manifestation of perfecting the delivery of pornography, following the development of cave paintings, the printing press, photography and moving pictures, with virtual reality as the next logical step.  The quest to develop humanoid robots is quite obviously all about creating submissive and responsive sex bots, while other forms of remote tech, be it drones or mechanical prosthetics and the like, are ways of enabling perversions like voyeurism and groping.  Anyway, in my version of cyber-groping it was Elon Musk developing these robots so as to facilitate him having sex with women without actually having to be intimate with them, because it is pretty obvious  that the idea  of actually having to deal directly with human beings is pretty repugnant to him.  He'd load his robots' brass balls up with his own semen and send them and their telescopic penises around to his victims prospective partners for sex.   

This latest prediction comes hot on the heels of my having successfully predicted, several years ago, the idea of 'nudifying' apps.  Of course, back then tech was less advanced so envisaged them as a set of filters for imaging software like Adobe, to turn photos of clothed women into nudes.  I imagined the user being given choices of nipple type and the like, but the advent of AI has made the concept not only real but far more sophisticated.  (But no less morally bankrupt).  So, I'm left pondering as to which of my other tech predictions is likely to come true next - could it be that Space X is about to launch a new space station which will include a film studio to facilitate the making of zero-G porno movies?  Or maybe Musk is planning to use his rockets to inseminate Mars with his own jism in an attempt to fertilise any bacteria there and create a super-race.  Not, of course, that I'm ever going to get credit for my astounding powers of prophecy.  You have to be some demented old crone who, two centuries ago, left some barely coherent ramblings, so vague that modern tabloids can interpret them as predictions of current world events.  Either that, or you have to have written gibberish like Nostradamus.  Not to forget that much vaunted ancient Mayan prediction about the world ending in 2010, or whenever it was - obviously I must have slept through that particular apocalypse.  The truth, of course, is that it is all bollocks - anyone can say that something is going to happen in x number of years and it might or might not happen.  It's all simply a matter of luck as to whether you get it right or not.  

Save the Tiger

As is ever the case with right-wing media, The Spectator - that Nineteenth Century Gentleman's Club masquerading as a periodical -  seems to have its finger firmly on the pulse of the nation with its headlining story asking: 'why is a tiger's life worth more than a human's?'  I mean, yeah sure, energy bills are soaring, pushing the cost of living to new levels, there's a madman in the White House helping this crisis along with his Middle Eastern war, black clad gangs of racists are on the UK's streets trying to intimidate anyone trying stop immigrants from drowning, but The Spectator just knows that what we really want to know is why that tiger that mauled that guy to death hasn't, itself, been shot.  Yes indeed, it's the burning issue of the day.  Well, maybe it is the burning issue of the day for Spectator readers, who probably lament, as they sit in front of a roaring fire in their wing-backed leather chairs, the good old days when a chap could go over to India, saddle up an elephant and blast away at the local tiger population on the pretext that one of them might be a maneater.  But the incident in question, of course, is quite different.  For one thing, the tiger didn't actually eat anyone.  More significantly, the fact is that an individual chose to enter the tiger's enclosure at a wildlife park - the outcome was inevitable.  Big cats are very territorial and see any such incursion into their space as a threat to be chased off and/or eliminated.  Under such circumstances, why should the tiger be made to suffer because of the unfathomable decisions of an errant human?  

Obviously, we have no idea as to why this guy decided to do what he did and I'm not going to speculate as to his motivation, but, while acknowledging the tragedy of the situation, the fact is that he made a choice to enter that enclosure and provoke a confrontation.  It isn't like when an out-of-control dangerous dog makes an unprovoked attack on someone on the street, under such circumstances it is clear that the animal is a danger to the public.  But when the beast is confined behind bars with warnings to people not to enter the cage, then it can't be deemed a threat to the public at large.  I remember some years ago in the US, a small child somehow got into a gorilla enclosure.  Despite the gorilla showing absolutely no aggression toward the child and presenting no obvious threat, it was summarily executed by the authorities before they rescued the child.  I mean, I know that the Yanks are kill crazy and obsessed with public executions, but I can't help but feel that there had to a better way of dealing with the situation which didn't involve the murder of a primate.  Let's not forget that. like that tiger, the gorilla is an endangered species, for God's sake.  We can't afford to be knocking them off willy nilly on the slimmest of pretexts.  Still, I'm sure that The Spectator will frame the authorities' failure to shoot that tiger as some kind of leftist plot instigated directly from the office of Andy Burnham - once again a Labour government shows itself more interested in protecting the rights of Asian immigrants over those of true blue Brits...

Sky Riders (1976)

Sky Riders (1976) came at that odd time in the mid-seventies when action movies seemed out of vogue, largely banished to the ranks of low budget exploitation films.  Even those studio backed action movies that saw the light of day always seemed slightly under-nourished in the action department, as if ashamed to admit that they really were action films.  Even stalwarts of the genre, like Sam Peckinpah, seemed to faltering in a haze of cocaine and booze, turning out flawed and compromised films which were largely ignored at the box office.  Those that did come out, though, like Sky Riders, could, more often than not, boast casts of quite high-profile, but either slightly past their prime or not quite A-list, actors in search of a pay cheque.  Hell, it beat appearing in Italian schlockfests, as did the likes of John Huston (on multiple occasions), Shelley Winters (ditto) and even Henry Fonda.  So it is that Sky Riders is headlined by James Coburn, a charismatic action lead getting too old to play full-on action roles and who was in the process of transitioning to be being a supporting actor, particularly in villainous roles.  In support are Robert Culp, another lead actor getting too long in the tooth for such roles, Susannah York and Charles Aznavour, rather bizarrely cast as a Greek policeman who, thanks to his accent and moustache, kept putting me in mind of Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau.  

The film's premise aims to be very trendy (for the seventies), with an American businessman living in Greece being extorted by terrorists who have kidnapped his wife and child.  With the police apparently clueless (they are being led by Inspector Clouseau, don't forget), enter the wife's former husband, (and father to her eldest child), smuggler James Coburn.  Having identified the terrorists' lair as being an abandoned and remote monastery atop a rock pillar.  (The same location featured in the climax to the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only (1981)), Coburn decides that the best way to effect a rescue is by hang glider, so enlists the services of a 'hang gliding circus' to launch a nocturnal raid on the building.  Realising what he is doing, the police plan their own ground assault on the monastery.  Coburn and his group free the hostages and, after a shoot-out with some of the terrorists, make their airborne getaway, just as the cops arrive.  A huge gun battle between police and terrorists ensue with the hang gliders caught in the crossfire.  After a helicopter chase, the cornered terrorist leader shoots himself rather than be taken prisoner, but the hostages are safe and reunited with Culp, while a wounded Coburn heads for hospital.  The action unfolds as straightforwardly as this synopsis suggests - there are no real plot convolutions or sub-plots, which is probably just as well with running time of just over ninety minutes.  While this is undoubtedly partly due to director Douglas Hickox's preference for narrative directness and unobtrusive direction, one can't help but feel that the on-set accident in which a Greek electrician died in an explosion, (which resulted in the detention of the film's producers, until an out-of-court payment (or bribe) was made), has something to do with the film's somewhat truncated feel.

Nevertheless, this directness and focus on the main plot, means that Sky Riders is a commendably fast-moving film, rapidly shifting from one well-staged action set piece to another.   Conversely, it is also its weakness, as it precludes any real character development and leaves the narrative feeling rather perfunctory.  At times it seems that the script is going to open up a potentially interesting narrative thread - the past adverserial relationship of Coburn and Culp's characters and the past love triangle involving York, for instance - then simply lets it drop.  The film's antagonists, the terrorists, are another weak link, never rising above the level of Bader-Meinfof style stereotypes mouthing the same old rhetoric about world revolution and the like, and never allowed to become actual characters.  None of them seem to have names, not even their leader, let alone any individual characteristics.  Their cause is also left very vague, beyond vaguely leftist slogans - the thinness of their motivation being somewhat adept for a gang cardboard cut-out villains.  Still, Hickox's brisk direction - peppered wit exemplary action sequences and excellent use of the Greek locations - carries the film through these weaknesses whilst it is running, but afterwards, they leave something of an unsatisfactory feeling, as if something vital had been missed.  Hickox, of course, is a director whose reputation largely rides upon the magnificent Theatre of Blood (1973), which, like most of his films, has a narrative directness, still feels more thoroughly 'fleshed out' than Sky Riders, again suggesting that, here, productions problems may have contributed to the film's sparseness in terms of narrative and character development.

Sky Riders was a film that generated quite a lot of publicity pre-production and during production, (not just because of the fatal on-set accident), largely due to the hang gliding element - hang-gliding being something that had captured the public imagination in the mid-seventies and which was growing in popularity.  I recall seeing quite a few behind-the-scenes reports about it on TV, before it seemed to pretty much vanish from view (doubtless due to the bad publicity generated by the accident) - I certainly don't recall its release or having ever seen it turn up on terrestrial British TV (although it probably did, but in a late night graveyard slot).  Not surprisingly, it was a box office failure, stymying producer Sandy Howard's plans for a sequel, (a script was commissioned from and written by Jack Hill).  Not that this, nor the fall-out from the accident, derailed Howard's continued production of mid-to-low budgeted action orientated films and TV movies, including The Island of Dr Moreau (1977), would be disaster epic Meteor (1979) and Jaguar Lives! (1979).  Ultimately, the biggest problem facing Sky Riders was its timing - it came out just before action-adventure films were revitalised by George Lucas via Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark.  If it had come out just a year or two later, it might have been able to0 capitalise on the success of such big budget studio pictures, riding on their coat tails, particularly on home video (a medium it was also too early for).  As it stands, Sky Riders remains a little-seen, but solidly made fast-moving action film with great stunt work that provides some decent entertainment for an hour and a half. 

Social Indifference

While alluding to on old movie in yesterday's post, it occurred to me that I used to talk a lot about old and obscure films here.  Indeed, at times, such posts dominated the content here.  But it my enthusiasm for writing up such films has waned.  In large part, I think, because of the dent my confidence in my movie reviewing abilities took after I joined Blue Sky.  In an attempt to reinvent myself social media-wise, I decided to focus on putting up my various articles there - such things seemed to be of interest to other users, judging by some of the accounts I followed.  But, I found my efforts met with utter indifference.  In fact, they elicited no reactions - positive or negative - whatsoever.  Which can get pretty confidence-sapping after a while.  I mean, I wasn't expecting to be awash with likes and re-posting, but my writings on the subject had always had a mild level of interest from readers when originally posted here, so I thought that, if nothing else, I might be able to reach a wider audience of those with similar interests.  After all, with web search apparently permanently buggered by Google and its AI obsession, I figured that I had to find some way of reaching a wider potential audience.  Blue Sky, though, apparently isn't it.  In fact, its indifference has killed my enthusiasm for writing about movies altogether.  (Interestingly, though, all of my previous movie posts seem to be of huge interest to the various AI bots swarming over the web at present).

I have to say that, overall, I've found using Blue Sky a desultory, soul-destroying even, experience.  There is a certain 'clique-ishness' to most social media platforms, often making it difficult for new users to gain traction, but Blue Sky is probably the worst I've ever encountered.  It feels as if there is a strict hierachy, with early adopters at the top, that rules the roost there - your job as a newcomer is simply to follow more established accounts and boost them with likes and re-postings.  Moreover, everyone there seems so concerned with being 'right-on' and displaying the 'right' attitudes, (it is the anti-Twitter, after all), that they frequently seem reluctant to like or re-post anything for fear it might be the 'wrong' thing to like.  Maybe I'm being oversensitive because Blue Sky doesn't want to recognise my obvious genius, but I'm not the only user that has noticed the cool indifference of Blue Sky - Hell, I get more responses to stuff I put on Threads and I barely have a presence there.  I suppose that it doesn't help that I keep disparaging the pretensions of those Blue Sky members who put stuff like 'working on my book' in their bios and like to casually repeat it in posts.  Look, if you've actually written a book, great, by all means brag about it.  But anyone can say they are 'working' on a book.  Plus, my embracing of AI for creative purposes doesn't help my cause, either.  I'm surprised that when I've posted links to the 'After Hours' podcast there, (I've actually given up doing so, as its utterly pointless), I haven't ended up facing the Blue Sky equivalent of a lynch mob, waving burning torches and accusing me of witchcraft.  This Luddite tendency is another deeply unappealing aspect of the platform.  Not that I intend shutting down my account there or returning to Twitter any time soon, I'll just stick around and be as indifferent as all the other buggers on there.