Jolt

Shock Around
The Clock

Jolt
USA 2021
Directed by Tanya Wexler

Jolt is a new movie, sadly not in cinemas where a film of this quality belongs, starring Kate Beckinsale as Lindy, who has a problematic mental disorder. The central mechanism which allows that disorder to be diminished and leave her as someone who can function within the realm of social interaction has led some people to make comparisons to this with the Crank franchise. Well, it’s nowhere near the silliness of the brilliant Crank films but I can understand were the comparisons come from. They both use a personal gimmick to modify the central protagonist as the story moves along and they both also contain a lot of action.

Lindy, as we discover in a very humorous set up sequence which takes a little while and starts from when she’s a kid to the present - where she has to see a psychiatrist played by Stanley Tucci every week - has a problem in that, if she sees anything which she perceives as vaguely irritating or unjust, she just snaps and does a lot of violent damage to any individual in question perpetrating this kind of behaviour. She’s liable to hospitalise the person who has captured her ire and this makes her virtually unemployable so, despite her lovely flat, she’s ‘between jobs’ as the film opens. What this means is she’s tried every kind of extreme sport, combat or various other highly adrenalised hobbies (not to mention her time in the military where they threw her out for getting 'too enthusiastic' in fights) and this is an important part of her background because, it’s the excuse the writers need so that, when she goes into action later in the film, you at least feel she’s got a little training or experience to be able to do what she does.

However, now she’s back out in the wild and no longer in a mental hospital, her psychiatrist has invented her a kind of wire vest which gives her a big jolt of electricity. Whenever she feels the building desire to completely tear someone apart for being rude or whatever else they’ve done, she just presses a button in her hand and jolts herself back down. The director uses a visual cue in these moments which she keeps coming back to, to fill the audience in on Lindy’s mental state. When she gets angry the pupils of her eye become constricted... when she jolts herself back out of her murder rage the pupils dilate again. A useful bit of cinematic shorthand to let the audience in.

One day, she finally goes on a date with an accountant played by Jai Courtney and actually has sex with him without killing him in the process. She is completely loved up but then, the next day, she finds he’s been murdered and that he was an accountant for a mob king pin (who’s ultimately revealed as being played by the great David Bradley, in a role you might not quite associate him with).
So she steals police evidence and goes looking for his killer, causing carnage along the way and making mincemeat of the professional criminals and assassins set to stop her. She also has to contend with keeping from being found and arrested by two cops (a nicely written duo played by Bobby Cannavale from the Ant Man films and Laverne Cox) while she’s out for justice.

And it’s a great film although, it has to be said, it does kind of give away its surprise reveals of the last ten minutes about 20 to 30 minutes into the movie. There’s a certain element written into the script during her first scene at the police station which really gives things away as to what she’s going to discover at the end of her journey... both in terms of a character appearance and also the implications of that character knowing all about her. It was kind of a sloppy, ‘run through the wet paint of the corner we just painted ourselves into’ moment which annoyed me a little. But, honestly, the film is so nicely put together that I really didn’t mind being ahead of the central protagonist for an hour. The dialogue in the things is really wonderful and the casting of this is spot on.

The cinematography is pretty nice too, with some beautiful colour lighting in some sections, such as a scene in Lindy’s apartment where bright pinks and blues are pitched against each other. The whole thing looks very slick and it’s definitely one of those new breed of action movies like the John Wick franchise, where the attention to the way the frame is lit and designed is obviously as important to the director as getting the fight choreography right... and I appreciate that level of commitment to a project.

There are some nice visual details in here too such as when, for example, the number 9 of Lindy’s apartment dislodges when she goes in to have sex, twisting around on its axis to make a 6 while leaving the impression of the nine still there, signalling some of the night’s activity inside. There’s also a huge painting of Brigitte Helm taken from one of the Metropolis posters as a wall in a restaurant bathroom, which got me excited.

Above all, though, despite the obviousness of some of the plot developments, the film is a well made candy confection of a movie (like Gunpowder Milkshake was, review coming soonish when I'm allowed) and kept me entertained for its not overlong running time. If you like action movies with strong female personalities causing violence and carnage with a blatant disregard for law and order, then Jolt should be right up your street. Stay a little way into the credits for a short bonus scene finishing off a throwaway shot from earlier in the movie. I’d really like a Blu Ray of this one so I can see it in much better quality... but I expect it won’t get a physical release and so the film will never quite look as good as it should. 

Gamera VS Jiger

Gamtastic Voyage

Gamera VS Giant
Demon Beast Jiger
aka Gamera tai Daimaju Jaiga
Japan 1970
Directed by
Noriaki Yuasa & Shigeo Tanaka
Daiei/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

The next film in the wonderful Gamera - The Complete Collection Blu Ray boxed edition from Arrow films was inspired by two big things happening in Japan at the time. Due to a TV documentary, there was renewed interest in the mysterious statues of Easter Island in the country. Coupled with this, Osaka (where this film is set) was hosting a huge show called Expo 1970 (think of something like the famous New York World’s Fair or even the Millennium Dome celebrations of a couple of decades ago). Footage of the actual Expo 1970 buildings from when they were being constructed were used for this film (just like the Millennium Dome was used before it opened, by EON productions for the opening sequence of The World Is Not Enough, reviewed here) and there’s a couple of minutes of footage at the front end of this movie where it looks like one huge advert for the various countries and companies taking part, as various buildings are highlighted. As it happens, Expo 1970 opened just one week before this movie, Gamera Vs Giant Demon Beast Jiger, was unleashed in Japanese cinemas.

And so those two elements kickstarted a story idea which had a bunch of archaeologists, working for the Expo 1970 exhibitors, pulling up a mysterious statue discovered at the fictional ‘Wester Island’ (look, I don’t write these scripts, don’t blame me), ignoring an island representative’s warning that the famous curse will endanger them all if this task is accomplished.

Well, it is accomplished and Gamera, everybody’s favourite giant flying turtle and friend to children everywhere, tries to stop the pesky humans from uprooting the long statue and moving it. Regardless, the statue is pulled up and this acts as a kind of uncorking, as the statue and the shrill Devil’s Whistle sound it makes both a) reacts with the poisonous debris and so makes all the people who handle the statue sick and b) unleashes the dodgy looking monster Jiger to terrorise the Earth once more.

And it’s not a bad film, in all honesty... giving us some new spins on what you can do with a giant turtle drama and also having the requisite amount of fights occurring between the pseudo science and the comic relief. The first fight between Gamera and Jiger ends up with Jiger beating the turtle and leaving it for dead. This is because, asides form a big, sonic disintegrating ray which decays whole areas and leaves fleeing humans as standing skeletons (apparently, this weapon is called the Super Ultra Ray), she can also shoot solidified saliva harpoons out of her nose tusks. She uses said harpoons to pin Gamera’s arms and legs so he can’t retract them into his shell and he’s left helpless on his back while Jiger travels to Osaka in pursuit of the statue, so it can throw it in the sea before the annoying humans catch on it can be used against it.

In a surprisingly extended scene akin to a secret agent in a spy movie slowly escaping his bonds to head towards the next scene, we see Gamera use a nearby rock to help bash some of the harpoons out of him and then just tear the others out with his hands mid flight (which, honestly, if he could do that now then why didn’t he do that in the first place?) to pursue Jiger to Osaka. He then gets beaten again as Jiger uses her tail harpoon to impregnate him with her larvae and it’s an almost touching scene when the gummed up and dying Gamera makes it to the water front before the cancerous thing inside him turns his head and leg white and keeps him unconscious. We see him dragging himself to water where he manages to submerge some of his head and body before freezing up completely. So, yes, this is pretty much Gamera meets an inter-species version of The Joy Of Sex right here, with a kind of gender switch as Jiger’s tail is the object of penetration to perpetuate her family line.

Meanwhile, the human stars of the show, who are a bunch of kids (in keeping with most of the previous installments), use one of their dad’s new mini subs to enter Gamera’s body in an extended sequence obviously inspired by the movie version of Fantastic Voyage. Sadly, there’s no Raquel Welch in a skin tight suit to help them but they do manage to kill the small Jiger inside Gamera accidentally, with low frequency sound waves and this gives them a clue as to how to hold off adult Jiger until the sub can return with electric cables to restart Gamera’s life vitality, so he can finally take care of the opposing monster by blocking her harpoon nose tusks with a big barrel and retrieving the statue with its Devil’s Whistle from the sea.

And it’s a fun and lively film which holds the attention and, although it looks pedestrian for a lot of the time with, for example, a bad matte glass shot of the statue in front of the camera at the foreground of a scene (not because it’s particularly badly executed but because the painting actually does look more like an illustration rather than the actual thing itself), there are still some nice shots in the last twenty minutes of the film where the director uses the verticals of the windows in the headquarters of the Anti Jiger Taskforce to section off parts of the frame. Alas, though, even those shots can’t disguise that the windows behind the actors are just a slightly faded back projection. There’s also some scale issues with the mini sub which appears to be only half the size of Gamera’s head when it goes in but, presumably, is somehow a lot smaller once it’s inside and roaming about the giant turtle’s innards.

Mostly, though, Gamera VS Giant Demon Beast Jiger is pretty much entertaining, fast moving kaiju fun and, as you would expect from Arrow’s wonderful work on the set, it looks fantastic. Incidentally, although it never happened on screen ever, the two companies Toho and Daiei teamed up for a nightly show taking place at the real Expo 70, where the two star monsters of their respective studio, Godzilla and Gamera, finally fought each other. What a shame those two companies never worked together to have this happen in the movies. Still, the films are all we’ve got and this one is as entertaining as the previous entries, as far as I’m concerned. Looking forward to exploring the next one in the set.

Wild Cards - Joker Moon

 

Lunar Tunes

Wild Cards - Joker Moon
Edited by George R. R. Martin
& Melinda M. Snodgrass
Harper Voyager ISBN: 9780008283605

Joker Moon is, by my count, the 29th of the series of mosaic novels which comprise the Wild Cards saga to date. The majority of most of the novels are short stories, often split between sections, which make up an overall story arc for that specific novel, written by a hugely talented array of science fiction and fantasy writers over the years. Nowadays, the overview and editing of the novels is accredited to George R. R. Martin & Melinda M. Snodgrass although, I have to say, it’s been many years since I’ve seen Martin contributing significantly to the content as he used to (although Snodgrass still has at least one story per novel, it seems to me). That being said, this is obviously a marketing ploy for the front covers to cash in on Martin’s successful Game Of Thrones novels and, I can’t blame them, to be honest. I noticed on the inside of this one, it actually says it’s edited by Melinda M Snodgrass and ‘assisted’ by George R. R. Martin so, yeah, make of that what you will.

I’ve been reading these novels since they first appeared, with handsome paperback covers by British comic book artist Brian Bolland, in the mid-1980s and, hard as it’s been over the years where various publishing houses for the series have gone bankrupt a week after a novel came out or just jumped ship on the series, I’ve managed to buy a copy of each and every one, more or less, as they were released. On the one occasion where one went in and out of print within a week or so, as is my understanding, I actually picked that one up on ebay a few years later and... that was even more of a thrill because it turned out the guy selling it to me, who only had one copy left, was the sole writer of that tome so he personalised it for me. So, yeah, I’ve been lucky with this series of novels over the years too, for sure.

The basic plot is of an alternate history of Earth when the time line diverges from our own in 1946 due to an alien Black Card virus, which is our constant legacy for ever after, is released into our atmosphere. Many die. Some people stay the same... the Nats. Some turn into Aces with superheroic and bizarre powers. Some turn into hideous jokers of all shapes, sizes and forms. And some of them, Deuces, are a little bit Ace and sometimes a bit Joker too. And there’s anything in between. And because the virus is lodged in our genes, sometime (in puberty perhaps), your card might ‘turn’ and you get powers or go through some hideous mutation.

And the books are great, it has to be said.

Over the years we are introduced to characters and some are killed, some age and die and other generations take their place. Indeed, sometimes, as in the case of Roger Zelazny or Victor Milán, writers die and their specific characters either exit the story, are used just as little cameos or, sometimes, taken over as something all the writers can seem to include in their stories if they like. So one of the most famous characters in the saga.. Croyd Crenson (aka The Sleeper, created by Zelazny), who has an infinite lifespan because whenever he finally sleeps (when the speed he’s on to stop him from sleeping finally doesn’t do him any good) he wakes up as either a new kind of Ace or Joker... still turns up every now and again from the original generation of Wild Card heroes. And, yes, for all of those Wild Cards fans who are constantly on ‘Croyd watch’, I’m happy to report that he does indeed have a few pages of a very specific adventure in this latest volume.

Okay, so the main interlocking story points of this one, as told through multi-part chapters gluing the other stories together with split sections entitled The Moon Maid and Within That House Secure, are focused on three specific characters. We have the Indian, Aarti, whose card turns in 1948 when she’s studying at Oxford University over here in the UK (among her fellow students are J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis). She has her head swelling up to resemble the Moon and her body marked by craters etc. However, unknown to everyone, is the fact she is teleported to the moon by night and has the night time to paint and frolic and create whatever she wants with her special powers on the moon. So she’s more or less confined to her bed as a joker by day but, by night, she is the sole occupant of the Moon, and she likes it that way. Which is where her other problems begin.

The other two characters start off as children... Mathilde is a red skinned joker girl and her best friend is the super rich heir to a fortune, Theodorus. Both are lovers of science and both have the talent for rocketry. Mathilde is especially good at maths and inventing things. However, not long before his parents’ death, when he inherits the estate, Theodorus’ card turns and he becomes a huge snail centaur, half man, half snail. He doesn’t let it set him back though and he pulls the strings of his ambitions from his rich, hermit like existence with his best friend Mathilde at his side... a bit like Nero Wolfe in a way, since he’s often in his green house cultivating his army of super sized snails.

His ambitions however, take him into direct opposition to Aarti, The Moon Maid. The book takes place in various stories from 1948 up until 2020 and tells the tale of Theodorus’ plans, decade by decade, to populate the moon and terraform it so that all the jokers of the Earth can live there in peace and harmony, free from the hatred and prejudices of the Nats (aka regular humans). But, you know, The Moon Maid has other ideas.

And, like any of the Wild Cards novels, it’s a hugely emotional ride and a very clever series of interlocking stories, which I certainly won’t spoil for any potential readers here. Because it’s set over various decades, many of the characters from the past pop up in odd cameos or mentions throughout. So the original Dr. Tachyon actually turns up as a character early in the novel (a Takisian from the race of aliens whose virus got accidentally unleashed on Earth). There are also sizeable appearances from characters like Bugsy, the joker centaur Doctor Bradley Finn, Tesseract, the Infamous Black Tongue and Bubbles... including one chapter set in the heat of the battle of the war in Egypt where these ‘green’ Aces from the American Hero reality TV show ended up fighting in wars to protect the Living Gods of Egypt. And, yeah, obviously famous Wild Cards twists on history from previous stories make it in as mentions in the novel too... such as The Rox on Ellis Island (where jokers took the island in an incident in the 1990s) and there’s even a chapter where Aces are battling The Swarm again from the 1980s (if you’ve not read these then this is an indication, I think, that if you want to jump on board with these, then you really need to start from the very beginning). There are also some lovely little mentions and very brief, one liner appearances from such Wild Cards stalwarts as Golden Boy, The Great And Powerful Turtle (I really miss that character), the late but great Father Squid and, from the recent British cycle, The Green Man.

And I don’t want to say a whole lot more about the story but I will say it’s as powerful as most of the Wild Cards novels and it contains some great moments (including an unexpected villain from the most unlikeliest place, at one point) and various dramatic situations on both Earth and the Moon. Although the end is a fairly optimistic one, in some ways, it’s a mixed bag of emotional intensity again and I found myself counting the losses in terms of characters who meet their end in this novel as much as watching the bitter sweet celebration of the final mini chapter, which presumably takes us into where the next couple of novels might go. Like I say in pretty much all of my Wild Cards reviews, Joker Moon is an absolutely fantastic novel but... it’s definitely not a jumping on point. These books really should be read from the start and, fortunately for newcomers, the earlier novels are slowly coming back into print again so, if you’re going to do it, now might be a good time.

One Cut Of The Dead In Hollywood

Rom Pom

One Cut Of The Dead In Hollywood
aka Kamera o tomeru na!
supin-ofu: Hariuddo daisakusen!
Japan 2019
Directed by Yûya Nakaizumi
Third Window Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers for the first film in the series.
Do not read if you haven’t seen the first one!

Okay... here we go again. I gave One Cut Of The Dead a fairly okay review when I first saw it (you can read that here, it’s spoiler free) and, when I rewatched it a few times on Blu Ray... well once you’re in on the joke it just gets better and funnier with each viewing. I was surprised that I had no idea that a short, 58 minute sequel, One Cut Of The Dead In Hollywood, directed by the assistant director of the first and with pretty much most of the cast of the original back for more, had been made until I saw it being advertised on Blu Ray via Twitter by Third Window Films. I’m guessing it might have got a cinema release over here if it weren’t for the Coronavirus outbreak last year.

So I grabbed the Blu Ray and... it’s great for people who haven’t seen the first movie as it consists of the original film, the special features for the original and the new film. The original premise of the first one... a ‘live, shot in one take zombie movie’ for the first part of the film, followed by the comedy fiction of how it came to be and all the things which go wrong and why it’s so awful, is exactly the same set up for the sequel, which also has the film within the film as a sequel to the original film within a film, if that makes sense. So we start off with a 17 minute, one take zombie short set in Hollywood and featuring loads of bloody carnage, along with all those long pauses, actors reacting to things that go wrong and, I’m happy to say, even an end shot which totally fooled me again due to a trick which, if you’re not looking out for it, you won’t see (I had to rewind the Blu Ray to ensure they actually hadn’t cheated it).

The plot is that Holly, the survivor of the first film, has dyed her hair blond and gone to work as a waitress in Hollywood, six months after the events depicted in the first half an hour or so of the first movie... only to find herself suddenly in the setting of another zombie apocalypse. It’s the same actress plus, in an ‘in camera mind flashback', we get a load of the previous cast (who also, it turns out, help with a certain aspect of the final shot of the movie within a movie) plus, in an unexpected but very energetic cameo, the ‘Pom’ lady! Of course, once that portion of the film ends and we get the comedy of what went on in the fictional behind the scenes, all these actors have much bigger parts. We also have two American actors in the film and one of these is supposed to be the American boyfriend of the main character... but he’s also the real-life (um... fictional reel life) boyfriend of the director’s daughter (again, all the behind the scenes characters are played by the original cast, augmented by some extra characters). And, although the film maybe doesn’t have quite as many laughs as the original, I remember now what I said that about the original so, I’m pretty sure this one is just going to get better with each subsequent viewing too.

One of the unusual things and unexpected pleasures in the sequel is, of course, that you are already ‘in on the joke’ (and best that way, don’t go into this one blind as you need to see the first one to get more fun out of it), so you tend to spend a lot of the first 17 minutes of the movie, trying to work out where all the mistakes and sudden unexpected script changes throughout the live broadcast are. These movies are like The Play That Goes Wrong... but with Japanese zombies. And it didn’t disappoint in that respect either. They actually pull off a couple of surprising things which I totally didn’t see coming when you see the ‘comedy explanation’ of the various things that go wrong.

The one element that’s possibly missing here is the sense of moving emotion you get at the end, which happened at the closing of the last movie, where the director is reminded of a photograph of himself and his daughter from many years in the past which directly connects to the wonderful ‘crane shot’ of the first movie (spoilers, there’s no crane!). That being said, there is a bit of heartbreak and romance in this film but, well, I won’t spoil that for you here. And it certainly doesn’t hurt the movie any either.

So, okay, short movie, short review but, I have to say, One Cut Of The Dead In Hollywood is a real cracker of a movie and fans of the first one should surely have no complaints. I would love to see this in a double bill with the first film in a cinema with a packed audience at some point... that’s a guaranteed good time for sure. This one is definitely recommended if you loved the first, as many people did but, remember, it’s not a jumping on point, you need to see the first one too. Which is why the Third Window Films Blu Ray is so good for newcomers, seeing as it has both films one there (so don’t play the main feature, move it over to the second item in the menu and watch that one first). Great film and a true joy for fans of the comedy genre.

The Suicide Squad

Starro Starro Night

The Suicide Squad
USA/Canada/UK 2021
Directed by James Gunn
Warner Brothers

Warning: This one has lots of spoilers so,
yeah, if you don’t want to know... don’t read.

Wow... it has to be said, in the long lineage of movies and theatrical serials based on DC comics characters going back to the 1940s, James Gunn’s sequel (ahem... sorry... I meant ‘soft reboot’... nah, it’s a sequel) to Suicide Squad (reviewed here), entitled The Suicide Squad, has to be somewhere within the top ten. Or if you’re counting just the modern DC Expanded Universe films... easily within the top three. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this film all that much, it has to be said but, when I saw it I was completely bowled over by just how brilliantly put together it is.

Okay, so the film stars a few actors reprising their roles from previous DCU movies... Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Joel Kinnaman as Rick Flag and Viola Davis as Amanda Waller. It also stars a huge amount of heavy weight actors in various roles, far too numerous for me to mention here but a quick taster would be Daniela Melchior as Ratcatcher 2 (who really is the emotional heart of the movie), Idris Elba as Bloodsport, John Cena as Peacemaker, Peter Capaldi as Thinker and Sylvester Stallone as the voice of the wonderfully animated shark character, King Shark. They and all their co-stars are absolutely brilliant in a movie, which is as unpredictable (for the most part) as it is wildly entertaining and it’s one of those near perfect comic book movies where it gets almost everything right.

The film starts off before the opening logos have even started, with a Johnny Cash song which immediately ties into the opening prison scene. Most of the characters who make up the Suicide Squad this time around are newcomers (apart from Flag and Harley Quinn) and we have a very short introduction to the new characters in a kind of ‘fast forward’ through the recruitment process, including the Escape From New York style bombs implanted in the necks of the majority of the squad (and we also get to see what happens when one of those goes off). We then get the squad sent to the island of Corto Maltese, which of course is named after a character in a famous European comic book. If you remember, Kim Basinger’s Vicky Vale character in Tim Burton’s first Batman movie (reviewed here) was also known for her war torn photographs taken on the fictional island of Corto Maltese.

Anyway, I said this review contained spoilers and I’ll reveal now that, in a serious rug pulling exercise, of all the characters you meet in the early scenes, only two of the squad make it off the beach of Corto Maltese alive. It’s an explosive and incredibly violent scene which finishes most of them off before they’ve even started and... then we get the opening credits and find that Viola Davis’ character has been hedging her bets, with the first team being just a distraction to keep the military busy while another team landed on another part of the island. And then, as we get to know them, more hilarity, action and gory violence ensues as they go about their special mission to destroy the main bad guy of the movie, while of course, stopping to rescue the two surviving members of the other team who kept the military so busy. Well I say two surviving members but, the first of the two post credits scenes does one of the few things I was expecting to happen much earlier on in the film so, yeah, stick around when the end credits start up people.

And, actually, there are a few bad guys in the film but when I say the main bad guy I actually mean the main bad starfish. Yeah, that’s right. Anybody remember the truly ridiculous giant starfish character Starro The Conqueror? Starro first appeared in comics (and on the cover) in the very first Justice League Of America story from an issue of The Brave And The Bold in 1960. And as silly as the thing looks.. well... he looks even sillier in the movie but James Gunn somehow manages to pull off his character really well and, grounded by some of the truly visceral violence (there’s way more spilled blood in this one than most modern horror movies... think of the fourth Rambo movie and that should give you some idea), the big pink starfish smashing buildings kaiju style (which is also used as an ‘in film’ dialogue reference) works really well and you do fear that this could be the end of humanity as we know it... if the squad doesn’t think of something.

The film is extraordinarily fast moving, even in it’s exposition scenes... hey, if you want someone to move that kind of dialogue along fast without it getting boring, what can I say? Peter Capaldi was an excellent choice after his experience playing in Doctor Who... and it’s a real visual, eye candy assault on the senses. Some of the scenes, such as Harley Quinn breaking out of a prison, are handled in a very surprising, expressive, totally comic book manner while still being absolute adrenalin rushes of cinematic action. The whole thing works really well and even the practice of using songs to illustrate certain scenes (okay, I’d prefer it was just score utilised but hey, you can’t have everything)  is not overly distracting and gives the film a certain lift in some sequences.

My one complaint... and it’s a really minor one which most people might not notice, is that a couple of long shots don’t match up to what is happening in the close ups. For example, Harley Quinn looking to the upper right of screen in one scene and then cutting to a long shot showing her looking down at a corpse. Or the scene where she is being tortured with electricity and in one shot her feet are clenching through the pain but, when you see this repeated for a long shot, she’s forgotten to clench her toes up. It’s all pretty small stuff though and it really doesn’t hurt the film, which is frankly one of the best movies of the year.

Although the film certainly is a sequel and certainly fits in with the overall arc of the current crop of DCU movies, The Suicide Squad can also be used as a jumping on point because it barely refers to the other properties and it certainly would work as a stand alone movie when required. Truly one of the best movies DC and Warner Brothers have put out and fans of big budget comic book movies should definitely give this one some time. I can’t wait for the Blu Ray myself.

Nurses For Sale

 

Curd Immunity

Nurses For Sale
aka Käpt'n Rauhbein aus St. Pauli
West Germany 1971
Directed by Rolf Olsen (and Al Adamson)
IIP/Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

In my last review of an Al Adamson film I mentioned that, for every two or three truly dreadful movies I’ve had to sit through, an unpolished gem of a movie would surface in his directorial output. Well, after the pretty good Jessi’s Girls (reviewed here), the pendulum has already swung back and hit me in the face big time with what is easily one of the worst films on Severin’s lovely Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection box set but, it may not be completely Adamson’s fault (although, yeah, it also may well be).

Okay, so this film is mostly not Adamson’s film at all. It’s another one of his patch up jobs for the US market when this entry of the Käpt'n Rauhbein series of movies, Rolf Olsen’s Käpt'n Rauhbein aus St. Pauli, starring Curd Jürgens as the titular Captain (Stromberg from The Spy Who Loved Me, reviewed here) couldn’t find a distributor. So the film has had quite a lot taken out of it to ‘improve’ it and, Adamson has added 20 minutes of nude and sex scenes of totally unrelated nurses to it, who are supposed to blend in with the nurses who are captured by terrorists in the original version of the movie. Then, to top it all off, the original footage is badly dubbed into American English and sounds like something you’d expect to see in a Tin Tin cartoon.

The film is awful and it’s quite hard to follow but, the nurses in question are trying to tend to an epidemic in a jungle before they are captured by terrorists. Meanwhile, Jürgens and his merry men are supposed to be delivering antibiotics in their ship... which gets confused for heroin and so that gets stolen. When he destroys his own alcohol cargo, because a corrupt government official wants to confiscate it to sell and line his own pockets (sounds like the current state of UK politics, doesn’t it?), Jürgens is slung in jail. He escapes with the aid of his men but, on the way to rendezvousing with his ship in a safer port, by walking through the jungle, he gets embroiled in the whole terrorist thing and takes it upon himself to rescue the girls.

And it doesn’t hang together well, possibly because of the many excised scenes and possibly because of the additional sex stuff shoehorned into the film. I can imagine that the original version of the movie, in German with English subtitles, is far more watchable than this monstrosity, to be fair but, since I can’t judge that one (and believe me, I’m not going to be bothering to track down a copy), then I’m only able to base my judgement on what I can see and hear here.

The only real saving grace in Nurses For Sale, as far as I could see, were the performances of Jürgens and an actress who I’d not heard of before called Johanna von Koczian. Both performers manage to somehow maintain a certain dignity here, especially Koczian. The rest of the cast are... a bit up and down in terms of their credibility it seems to me. Some of them are playing the comedy element of their characters quite broadly and this may well be a hangover from previous films in the Käpt'n Rauhbein franchise, for all I know. Again, I’m trying not to judge it too harshly for something I’m only guessing at and half seeing. Adamson’s contribution to the film, apart from leaving it in a semi-coherent mess, seems to be that he has some nice breasts in it... which I can completely relate to but, honestly, it’s really not worth doing that to a movie just for the sake of a bit of nudity to sell the picture to a certain section of the audience in the US. Or maybe it is... maybe the picture was that bad anyway (apparently a Käpt'n Rauhbein musical number was excised for this edition). Yeah, I’ve honestly got nothing much useful to say about this one so... a short review and for that I’m sorry but, well, hopefully this means the next film in the Adamson box set will be another diamond in the rough.

Bloody New Year

Temporal Of Doom

Bloody New Year
aka Time Warp Terror
UK 1986 Directed by Norman J. Warren
Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

I can’t help but think that Bloody New Year was aimed at competing with all those terrible mid-1980s US slasher movies and that’s exactly why I would never normally watch this kind of movie, to be honest. In my book, giallo = good, US slasher = terrible. However, this is the last movie in the five film box set put out by Indicator, Bloody Terror - The Shocking Cinema Of Norman J. Warren 1976 - 1987. Out of the five films in this set I’d have to say I loved three of them but, for me, two of them were a little lacking for my tastes but, clearly, this last film is the worst one among them.

That being said, there’s more than the odd quirky flourish that sets this one apart from the generic 1980s slashers although, in all honesty, the lack of budget for a film like this really does show up its flaws. It does have some interesting things going on though so lets have a quick look...

After a terrible pop song and black and white credits showing a New Year’s Eve party in a hotel on an island in 1959 we get what, for me, is the first and only genuine jump shot of the film. This is where a girl is looking into a mirror at the side of the shot and we can see some of the things reflected in the mirror at the angle it is. Warren really took me by surprise here as a hand shoots out from the mirror and grabs the girl... there wasn’t a mirror there at all, just an opening with good set dressing. I have to say, after this genuinely startling moment, I was kind of let down by the rest of the film.

Now, there’s a problem which is not of the director’s making. The film stock is pretty distressed during these sequences and continues to be so for a while. I thought this was a clever and possibly first time usage in a horror film of deliberately distressed stock to show the audience that some of the footage was taking place in 1959. Alas, as more scenes play out about a group of friends (played by Suzy Aitchison, Nikki Brooks, Daniel James, Mark Powley, Catherine Roman and Julian Ronnie) who flea some trouble at a fun fair and pitch up on an island after their boat hits some rocks, I realised that, actually, we were no longer in 1959 after all. It turns out that when this was reissued by Vinegar Syndrome a few years back, the only print they could find was in terrible shape. They tried to restore it and, indeed, I think more restoration might even have been done by Warren himself for this new release but, frankly, for the first 40 minutes or so the film is in terrible shape. Still, a nice transfer of a film in terrible shape is better than nothing so... I’ll continue.

As the teenage friends wander around the hotel and surrounding environment from the credits sequence (which turns out to be Butlins at Barry Island, Wales), they start to get picked off one by one. However, this isn’t a standard slasher and it’s quite clear that antagonistic ghosts of all shapes and sizes are stalking the friends. The first shock being when they discover a small screening room in the hotel and a man from the film jumps right out of the screen to scratch one of the kids on the face before inexplicable disappearing again. This, of course, kills the young man in question because, as you know... um... scratched faces can be a life threatening injury (okay, no I didn’t know that and am not convinced, frankly). Also, the amount of emotion displayed by the group towards their fallen comrade seems a bit lacking to say the least. I mean, I know loss and grief are usually a good way out of the window in movies which have these kind of ‘get on with it’ stories to tell but, the lack of empathy on display here seems pretty ludicrous and unrealistic, truth be told.

From then on it all gets bizarrely surreal but, what could have been a bunch of good ideas suffers from the obviously cheapness of the effects and the general low budget look of the film. So promising scenes where a woman is attacked by an animated fish net, a moment where they are attacked by some kind of seaweed monster manifesting from the centre of a table and even a bit where the wooden duck carving on the bannister of the staircase of the hotel bites a woman on the hand are... well they just don’t quite make it. Which is a shame because they are nice ideas and serve to remove this film as far away as possible from the kinds of slasher pictures which were contemporaneous to this production.

During a TV broadcast the group are not really watching and, thus, fail to spot it’s actually from that 1959 party, the audience is clued in that an experiment with a new kind of cloaking device for a plane is something some scientists are condemning for fiddling with the laws of time and, I guess the lurking, ghost pilot and the explosion of the reoccurring crash of the plane explains all you need to know as to why various ghost characters, including the demonically raised and re-raised versions of the newest victims themselves, keep coming back to try and visit death on their former companions.

It’s a shame then that, towards the end of the picture, the ghost/demon thing of a fallen friend feels the need to re-explain the whole thing as to why everyone seems to be frozen in pockets of time at this late stage in the game when, frankly, the audience figured all this stuff out within the first twenty minutes or so of the movie. It does seem like overkill in a film that feels somewhat padded at times.

There’s lots of moving camera in this, especially hand held stuff which gets quite frantic during the fairground chase scenes at the start of the movie. It does get a bit tiring sometimes but there are some nice bits of framing here and there during the course of the film. Also, there’s a quirky thing Warren does for a lot of the first half of the movie where he has little visual punchlines to the ends of scenes. Admittedly, they’re all the same punchline and consist of some inanimate object in a room moving on its own, unnoticed by anyone else in the room at the time. This is presumably to build a certain amount of suspense until things really kick off and, I have to say, the moment where the hotel guest dressed as a sheik suddenly comes out of the movie screen, while not exactly a good jump scare, is fairly surprising and it’s things like this which kept me watching, to be honest.

I don’t think there’s any way this could have competed with most of the well made (although often quite dull) slashers of the time but the unusual blend of ghosts/temporal reality breaking down and, frankly, less than gory and not very well executed demises of the main cast as the film progresses, is enough to make Bloody New Year worth investigating if you want to see an alternative to what else was going on in horror cinema at the time. Well, I say cinema... I think this only got screened at a cinema in Ireland and went straight to video in most territories, including the USA. That being said, there were a lot of straight-to-video releases in those days and I’ve no idea how well the tape rentals of this movie did. Alas, this was Norman J. Warren’s last feature film and it’s a shame this is his swan song because I don’t think even he was all that happy with how this one turned out (I think there was some trouble with the producer and the budgets on it). One for the curious among you or those interested in this fascinating and much loved director but, not one I’d recommend to most people, to be honest.

Sabat - The Complete Series

Sabat Out Of Hell

Sabat 1 - The Graveyard Vultures (1982)
Sabat 2 - The Blood Merchants (1982)
Vampire Village (short 1996)
Sabat 3 - Cannibal Cult (1982)
Sabat 4 - The Druid Connection (1983)
Hellbeat (short 1996)
Sabat 5 - Wistman’s Wood (2018)
Sabat 6 - The Return (2019)
Written by Guy N. Smith

Guy N Smith was one of those horror writers I stumbled upon in my early to mid teens. Around that age I, like a lot of people I knew in the early 1980s, started reading all the horror novels on the shelves of our local book shops, as adolescence brought a taste for bloodletting and sex, both of which are in abundance in the genre. So Stephen King was always the first ‘go to’ guy, followed by the slightly more lurid and very British James Herbert. And then there were all the rest... so people like Dean R. Koontz, John Halkin, Shaun Hutson, John Farris and so on. And somewhere near the top of these ‘also rans’ was the, also very British, Guy N. Smith.

Now, it has to be said that in terms of writing style... Smith was nowhere near as good as somebody like Stephen King or even James Herbert, but he made up for that in a couple of ways. One was that the plots were silly and inventive, defying credibility even within the genre, so much so that other writers probably wouldn’t touch some of these concepts. Two, they were often filled to the brim with gory killings and frequent sex scenes.... which is what every kid wanted to read. Thirdly, he was very prolific. His novels were much thinner but there were a lot of them around and he wrote literally hundreds in the space of a decade or two. Smith’s most famous creations were probably the giant killer crab novels he wrote (and was still contributing to up until the year of his death from an illness exacerbated by Covid on Christmas Eve 2020).

The ones I treasured most, though, were his original four Sabat novels, which I must have read in either 1982 (when the first three came out) or, more likely, 1983. It’s not because they were well written that I was attracted to them... they really weren’t. It’s because the concept was so 'out there' in terms of the character, compared to most other horror novelists of the time. So fairly recently, over the last few years, I bought a copy of the 1996 omnibus edition of those four novels, Dead Meat, which also included two new short stories... plus I also acquired his two new Sabat novels from 2018 and 2019... so I could re-read and finish the stories off properly, bringing myself up to date with Smith’s, somewhat unique character.

So Mark Sabat is a sex addicted ex-priest, ex-SAS soldier who’s really good at performing exorcisms and uses his supernaturally tuned powers to fight evil and, quite often, travel around in his astral form like Doctor Strange, as long as he remembers to leave his physical form protected in a chalk pentagram with various cabalistic symbols. He also has the soul of his evil voodoo brother Quentin Sabat, who he kills at the start of the first book, trapped inside of him and always threatening to surface and become the dominant personality in Mark’s body... which it does for the majority of the third book, it has to be said.

If you’re wondering where the character’s name comes from... well I have no confirmed idea but I can hazard a very good guess. Guy N. Smith describes him in certain ways which make the character very reminiscent of a young Lee Van Cleef, right down to the pipe he uses in For A Few Dollars More. Now, Smith was a big lover of pipes himself but, trust me, the description seems almost like its begging the reader to make the connection to the Van Cleef spaghetti westerns and, of course, one of Van Cleef’s more famous characters of that genre was Sabata, who he played twice. So, yeah, he definitely has some of the Van Cleef influence, I believe.

Re-reading these now... I’d actually forgotten a lot about them, to tell you the truth. They are quite lurid and pulpy and... that’s okay, I was expecting that. They also show a tolerance in the character to issues like homosexuality and sex workers that, I realise now, was quite ahead of its time in terms of mainstream novels you could pick up at your local Woolworths, back in the early 1980s. Smith must have been a very open minded guy for his generation.

The first novel, The Graveyard Vultures, is an excellent introduction to the character, starting with the fight with Quentin and his death. We then go into an adventure involving a bunch of black magic worshippers sacrificing innocents and led by a Bishop. There’s a wonderful, extremely violent cemetery fight where Sabat wields a crucifix like a sword and cuts through legions of the undead. There’s even a moment where he temporarily manages to exorcise himself of Quentin's inner voice so he can go and rescue the local sex worker who has betrayed the black cult and thrown in with him (not that he’s all that successful in this case... the majority of the early books tend to end with hollow victories).

The second novel, The Blood Merchants, is probably the most entertaining in the series, which involves a reincarnated Lilith using a host body of a lady who once got Sabat into a spot of bother. She,  her cult of would-be Nazis who go around bleeding out victims on the streets after dark and her token mascot of a husband, proclaiming himself the new Hitler, are the main problems Sabat has to deal with... although he is also captured and mentally charmed to help them for a while. I find it interesting now that the average hourly rate for a sex worker in the 1980s was apparently between three and five pounds. I have no idea if that’s true but I’m assuming Smith would have researched that.

In the collected volume I was reading, the more recent Vampire Village short is inserted next, so it obviously takes place between the second and third books. It’s a slight tale which takes Sabat to a genuine vampire village, masquerading as a vampire themed tourist attraction by day. It’s okay but, not all that much happens.

Book three, Cannibal Cult, is my least favourite. A lot of the book seems to be the writer obsessing on the ways human flesh can be cooked and eaten and there are a lot of scenes involving this practice in the book. Also, Sabat's body has been taken over by Quentin in this one so, most of the book he’s a reluctant assistant and participant in the killing feasts, which are designed to lead to the resurrection of an evil individual who is reforming his body after a date with the guillotine.

Sabat is back to his normal self in the fourth and, for a very long time, final book in the series, The Druid Connection. This is a tale of ghostly druids from ancient times returning to punish corrupt officials and church people who have sold off the sacred land... by burning them in Wicker Men etc. Sabat starts off combating them but, when he realises this is all happening for a good reason, strikes a deal with the supernatural forces (for reasons too time consuming to go into here) and works with them to bring the corrupt officials to some kind of primitive justice.

The Dead Meat anthology finishes off with a very slight, short story called Hellbeat, where Sabat destroys a satanic girl, only to find out she’s what has become of the victim he was trying to rescue. Like I said, they were mostly downbeat affairs.

And then, a lifetime away almost, Smith wrote two new Sabat books in 2018 and 2019. And these are, it has to be said, a lot more optimistic than the originals. They are also set in a real time approximation to the originals so, Sabat is bang up to date in the 21st century, with all its mobile phones and other convenient devices... although, for some reason and though certainly mentioned, Sabat doesn’t leave his physical body in these stories, like he often does in the originals.

The first of these new novels, Wistman’s Wood, finds the sixtyish year old but still fit Sabat retired and moving from London to Dartmoor. The story involves the demonic evil area of the title, where it turns out Quentin has managed to physically manifest himself again. One of the interesting things in this is Sabat’s sex drive. It’s highlighted in all the previous books as something very prolific and he does tend to sleep with lots of women during those early books (these were written just before the advent of AIDS, I guess... and you can certainly tell). In this one, however, he takes a girlfriend and she survives through the end of the book and furthermore returns as his regular girlfriend in the last book. The end of Wistman’s Wood is great too (probably the best ending in the series). It’s vague and ambiguous and greatly reminiscent of the ending of a very famous Sherlock Holmes story... but I won’t go into which one for fear of spoiling the ending. I almost wish, however, that he’d finished the series here.

But then we get the sixth novel, The Return, published a year before the writer’s death and... it’s okay but it feels kinda cosy. This one mostly deals with a protagonist called G. N Strong (hmm... wonder where he got the name for that character from?) and a demonic antagonist called The Reaper and, indeed, it turns out it’s not only a sequel to the Sabat novels but also one to another newish book, The Reaper, which Smith wrote in 2018. In this one, Sabat, who has now moved up to Aberdeen with his girlfriend Toni, comes out of retirement and he and Toni go to stay in Shropshire with Strong and his girlfriend... at the request of the police... who are short handed and think that The Reaper will return to take his vengeance on Smith. It’s a deadly tale of The Reaper’s quest for revenge involving Russian agents with their novichock liquid (tagged as the same ones who caused so much trouble in the UK a few years ago), a buried treasure, a bunch of wolves and various other things which lead to... a disappointing ending where The Reaper comes to a sticky end through no real intervention of any of the main protagonists, it has to be said. It’s an okay novel but it does feel like it’s taking on too much and resolving it all in a rush, to be honest.

The writing in these last two is less interested in gore and sex, for the most part and they seem a little more paced and better written than the Sabat adventures of the 1980s. That being said, the publishing houses of these two tomes seem to have made a concentrated effort to subject the reader to just as many typos in these as possible... so it still feels like these are trashy, shoddy paperbacks with a cheap and cheerful route to the reader. And I guess that’s pretty appropriate in some ways. Of all the characters Smith ever wrote about, I’m still shocked that Hollywood or the nearest British equivalent of it have never optioned the rights to make a bunch of Sabat movies over the years. I mean, ex-priest, ex-SAS man who’s obsessed with sex, can roam the astral planes and performs demonic exorcisms seems a no brainer for a horror film series to me... but what do I know, I guess. As far as the novels go, sometimes it’s best not to revisit the past but, no, I’m glad I took another look at these but I doubt I’ll ever bother to read these ones again. I might try and reacquaint myself with Smith’s killer crab books at some point, though.

The Mummy's Ghost

Wrappy Campus

The Mummy's Ghost
USA 1944
Directed by Reginald Le Borg
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Another Mummy movie, another Bey. This time it’s Youssef Bey, played by young John Carradine. In an opening scene for The Mummy’s Ghost, George Zucco also appears as the High Priest, handing down the secret of the Tana leaves to Bey and giving him the mission of having Kharis The Mummy (once again played by Lon Chaney Jr), go with him to Mapleton, New England to rescue the remains of Princess Anankha and return her to Egypt. Remember the location where the rest of the film is set... Mapleton, New England.

Okay, so we then have the tentative male lead of the film, student Tom, played by Robert Lowery, attending his regular college lessons on the local campus in Mapleton, where the geology teacher is telling all the students about the last time Kharis was in town (in The Mummy’s Tomb, reviewed here), many years ago... even though, once again, the setting of the film is contemporary to the year it was released... which makes absolutely no sense, of course. He tells of the last rampage of the monster and how Tana leaves can be used to revive it because, well, of course that’s the kind of lessons you have in an American university, isn’t it?

Anyway, after class, Tom goes to see his strange Egyptian girlfriend Amina, played by Ramsay Ames. The audience can tell she’s strange because she doesn’t like talking about Egypt, has an undisclosed past and later on, when the resurrected Kharis (who it turns out, isn’t all that worse for wear after once more perishing in the flames at the end of the last movie) passes by her house on the way to murder the Professor of the college (who stupidly figures out that you need nine Tana leaves to call the mummy... so therefore does just that)... she sleep walks to the scene of the crime and collapses outside after Kharis drinks his fill of the potion and the professor is dead. Although, quite why Kharis chooses to strangle the professor for giving him a nourishing hot drink and not do the same to Youssef Bey is anybody’s guess.

The shenanigans continue for the running time of 1 hour and 25 seconds (a very short feature indeed) and it’s nicely paced and shot, although not as well done as the previous film. There’s a nice moment when the watchman at the Scripps Museum is reading a strange detective tale magazine and listening to a horror themed radio show (I’d like to think it’s an episode of Inner Sanctum but I don’t know for sure what it is) and the narrative on the radio foreshadows the watchman’s death 5 minutes later. I’m sure this brought grins of delight to the audiences who first saw this in a theatrical venue, as it still does to me.

It’s pretty run of the mill stuff throughout but, like I said, it’s certainly watchable. There’s a nice moment when Kharis is caressing the bandages of the princess in its museum case at Scripps when the bandages suddenly go limp to indicate the figure inside has vanished into the ether and it’s implied, quite strongly, that Anankha’s soul has jumped into the body of Tom’s special lady friend Amina. This would seem to be about right as there was obviously a family ancestry connection between the two anyway. When she faints the first night, she awakens with a pseudo-Lanchester white streak in her hair. When she faints again and is taken by Kharis, she then has two white streaks in her hair. Then, as Bey is struggling with himself and deciding to take the woman for his own and to make her his ‘forever partner’... in an attack of sexual attraction which seems to afflict most of these Egyptian sect members sent to be caretakers of Kharis... he looks down at her still unconscious form and her hair is suddenly replaced by a white wig.

She isn’t actually awake and when, at the end, Kharis has killed Bey and cut short his sexual enthusiasm, we see shots of her skin ageing considerably as Kharis approaches his final resting place for this movie, as he and his captive are chased into the swamp and sink into its depths to their forever sleep (where forever sleep equals... until the next sequel). Yes, sinking to their death in a swamp in... where? Oh yeah, New England. Remember that folks, for when my next Mummy movie review is up. Mapleton, New England.

Oh, and by the way, the place Bey and Kharis are seen to be hanging out at seems to be those long steps which, I believe, have somehow found their way from the coal mine in The Invisible Man Returns (reviewed here) and into this picture. I don’t mind though, it’s a nice set and it looks pretty good.

So there you have it... The Mummy’s Ghost is an okay entry into the franchise and it would be followed with another ‘continuity screwing’ sequel which tried to follow things from where they were left off in this movie, while still making no logical sense at all. If you thought the continuity was bad up until now, just you wait until the next part. All in all, though, a watchable movie and I will always watch these ones again.

Loki

Low Key Ending

Loki - Season 1
June 9th to July 14th 2021
6 episodes

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Wow, you know, this one was almost a great TV show, it has to be said. It has one huge problem which, at least temporarily, kinda puts a damper on things but, yeah, for the most part this was highly entertaining and a much more interesting, if paranoid, take on the Marvel Cinematic Universe... or, you know, the Marvel Dodgy Internet Streaming Universe as it’s now become, as Disney try and milk and dilute all their newish acquisitions to squeeze the maximum profit out of them (although I did appreciate the oblique reference to Captain Hook in one of the episodes in this show).

Loki follows the further antics of the ‘split away’ variant version of Loki, played once again by Tom Hiddleston, after he diverges from the established timeline during the addition to the epilogue scene, so to speak, of The Avengers (aka Avengers Assemble, reviewed here), as shown in the time heist sequence in Avengers Endgame (reviewed here). It reruns some of that scene and then continues after Loki escapes, thus branching off into a new variant timeline, before his future adventures leading to his ultimate demise at the hands of Thanos ever happened. But then, straight away, he is captured by agents of the seemingly all powerful TVA (the Time Variance Authority) and it gets all ‘Brazil at it’s most Kafkaesque’ for a while as he is processed and, unlike many of his allies, instead of being disposed of in ways I won’t mention due to spoilers and things we find out later in the story, he instead gets recruited to help Agent Mobius, played by Owen Wilson.

So a ‘dangerous variant’ of Loki, one of many it turns out, is taking out various TVA agents through time and stopping them from fulfilling their ultimate purpose... which is to police the one true timeline and prune any variances which might branch off into alternate timelines. After working through some trust issues, Loki and Mobius team up with the wonderful, troublesome variant they have been pursuing... Sylvie, played brilliantly by Sophia Di Martino. The chemistry between these three actors and their co-stars is absolutely amazing, I must say and the writing on this show is, mostly pretty good too... with a caveat.

Okay, so one of the things I liked about this is that it’s a heavyish look at the concept of time travel and how you would police such a thing. It’s pure science fiction and, unlike a lot of the Marvel films, which to be fair aren’t always all out explosion fests, this one doesn’t have a heck of a lot of action. Which is not a bad thing because this still has some pacing to it and there’s usually one fight or chase per episode, for those who crave such things.

There are also some very nice moments which depict other variants of characters in different guises... so there’s an alligator Loki, for example and, if you look at a small part of the screen in a particular digital tracking shot in one episode, when Thor’s hammer has just left the top of the screen it’s followed by a little ‘jumping frog’ version of Thor. Another great inclusion for, mostly just one episode apart from an epilogue and also a flashback recap, is Richard E. Grant who plays yet another variant of Loki and... this version of the character is costumed very, very closely to the version of him in the original Thor comics from the 1960s. Which was a nice thought. Also, it took her a while to get back to the franchise after her appearance in a couple of early episodes of Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D but Jaimie Alexander returns to the franchise as Lady Sif (apparently she’ll also be in the upcoming Thor - Love And Thunder movie too, which is good that she’s rejoining the series of films where her character debuted). So that was a nice surprise.

And then there’s the big problem with the series... the last episode. Things build up to a revelation and climax and... well... the answer to the whole plot of the thing takes forever and involves a lot of boring expository dialogue which I could really have done without. We already knew at this point that the series was being renewed for a second season and that may or may not be where this one continues but, certainly, it might also continue in the upcoming Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness movie and, quite possible, even the new Spider-Man - No Way Home movie scheduled for the end of the year (I say scheduled because the coronavirus pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon). So, yeah, nothing is really resolved and we’re left with a cliffhanger, of sorts which, given that I suspect it could be a while for even a second series to get sorted, is a bit of a downer... especially since this last one was a really boring episode when the rest of the show had been really cool.

And that’s more or less it. The music is good but, yeah, no CD release so I’m not investing any time thinking about this stuff anymore... quite often these days I’ll pass on a film or a TV show because there’s no CD of the soundtrack coming out and, yeah, whether I’ll bother getting around to the second series myself is anybody’s guess, if Marvel are going to keep just releasing dodgy downloads of the music instead of the real thing (and the same goes for a Blu Ray release... if it’s not physical then it really isn’t there).

Loki was, for the most part, quite a cool TV show which got incredible dull in the last episode but, may or may not continue from where it left off when we eventually get to a second season. I’m getting a little tired of trying to guess what Marvel’s never ending long term plans for the characters in these kinds of things are, though, so I’m feeling less invested in the whole MCU of late. I guess we’ll see what happens at some point.

Jessi's Girls

Stormin’ Mormon

Jessi's Girls
(aka Wanted Women)
USA 1975
Directed by Al Adamson
Manson International/
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Some spoilers within.

You know, as I rummage my way through Severin’s beautiful Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection, I’ll occasionally come across a hidden jewel. For every terrible Brain of Blood (reviewed here), Blood Of Dracula’s Castle (reviewed here) or Horror Of The Blood Monsters (reviewed here), there’s an unpolished gem of a movie such as Psycho-A-Go-Go (reviewed here), Five Bloody Graves (reviewed here) or The Fakers (Smashing The Crime Syndicate, reviewed here). Jessi’s Girls is one such precious stone of a movie. I mean, sure, it’s ragged around the edges... this is an Al Adamson film after all but, it’s engaging and pacey and makes for a good evening’s entertainment, for sure.

Now, I’ve not seen Bad Girls (got the Goldsmith score though, so I should get around to rectifying that situation in the near future, I guess) but, from the looks of the plot outline, it doesn’t stray too far from this rape/revenge western and I can’t help but think the writers/producers might have had the memory of this one in mind when they went forward on that movie.

After a not too inspiring opening title shot of Jessi’s Girls riding the open country, Adamson gets straight down to the plot when we meet the young, mormon couple of Jessi (played brilliantly by Sondra Currie) and her husband, travelling on their lonesome in their covered wagon. As they set up camp and try to get a fire going, we are treated to Jessi bathing naked by a waterfall and then doing sexy things with her main man before they are approached by the old timey Western equivalent of a thuggish, Al Adamson style motorcycle gang (but, you know, on horses).

In a particularly unpleasant sequence, the husband is tied up while the seven or so bandits take turns raping Jessi. They then shoot both Jessi and he husband dead and go off on their merry way. But what’s this? Jessi’s still alive after receiving the wound in her shoulder and, after digging the bullet out with her hot dagger (bizarrely, the shell is still in its casing which, according to IMDB... and presumably history... is not the kind of bullet wound you would get in the Old West), she starts walking her way out of the desert until she comes across a homestead and, in her primitive and brutalised state, she is befriended by the grizzly guy living there, who teaches her how to shoot so she can pursue the filthy scoundrels. He even gives her his shotgun, which he calls ‘Judy the equaliser’.

Meanwhile, as Jessi is being taught good shooting and such and such by her new ‘vengeance coach’, Adamson cross cuts the footage with three other events to set up the other members of... Jessi’s Girls.

First up we have wanted outlaw Rachel McBride played by Jennifer Bishop, riding in the desert with her somewhat damaged horse. A marshal, called Clay, catches up with her and takes her in. It’s at this point for the sake of not driving myself mad, that I have to point out that Clay is referred to by other characters as either ‘Marshal’, ‘Sheriff’ or ‘Deputy’ quite randomly throughout the entire running time of the movie. I don’t know why but I can only guess that the script kept changing or they were shooting different revisions each day and so his character, who is quite definitely a lawman (of sorts) has a kind of vague title. He does seem to be running things though so, for this review, I’ll just continue to refer to him as... Marshal Clay.

Next up we have prostitute Claire (or sometimes Clara, depending on what script was being read on the day, I suspect), who is played here by Al Adamson’s wife, Regina Carrol. For some reason, she starts shooting at a client after a good night’s sleep (portrayed by Hugh Warden, the same guy who played the heart attack client in Girls For Rent, reviewed here) and so Marshal Clay next arrests her.

Finally, we have Ellyn Stern as Kana, who gets left behind by her gang during a bank robbery, by the same bunch of bandits who attacked Jessi and her man at the start. So, of course, Clay arrests her too and puts her in a jail cell with the other two girls, ready to take them on the long, cross country trip to ‘territorial prison’ the next day.

And, naturally, the next day when he and a deputy (who also refers to him as deputy?) are trying to transfer the girls, it’s also Jessi’s first day of riding around, trying to catch up with the gang what ‘done her man in!’ She kills the deputy, wounds Clay and recruits the girls, grabbing the marshal and taking him with them for a bit so she can dress his wounds and 'sex him up for information' as to where the infamous gang hide out... which is apparently a ghost town feared by lawman and bounty hunters alike at Copper Creek. She lets Clay escape and the girls start off on their way there in pursuit of both justice and, also, the money from a recent bank robbery... the slight twist being that the robbery was the same one that Kana was at, who is the main squeeze of the gang’s leader.

After a fair amount of sexing, rogue bandit/indian killing and various other exploitation elements such as a fist fight between Kana and Claire, which is actually quite well staged and has some satisfying sound effects... we end up with the surviving three girls all arriving independently at Copper Creek for the big showdown. At the end of the confrontation it’s only Jessi and Clay, who has been following the trail of corpses left in the gal’s wake, to gun it out because... Clay just wants the bounty on the gang all to himself. The last shot is a humdinger and makes a nice, abrupt ending to the movie and, seriously, I would have easily watched a sequel to this one if somebody had thought to make one.

It does look rough and ready, for sure and, yeah, the cinematography isn’t monumentally stylish (although the fastly edited, frenetic hand held stuff in the fistfight I mentioned earlier gives a nice, kinetic feel to proceedings). But it does have a bunch of good performances at its heart which elevates things past the limitations of the script and the budget, with Sondra Currie being especially good in this movie, holding things together and looking, in my eyes at least, like a young Julianne Moore. The scene where she is raped is something she’s especially good in, as you see her eyes deaden to her plight as she loses her innocence and this intensity informs her fierce performance for the rest of the picture.

Also, the stunt work in that final gun battle, which includes Claire’s memorable last words as she is shot down, “It still beats whoring for a living!”, is actually pretty good. Some of these guys take some pretty hard and spectacular falls and I was especially impressed when Jessi does the old spaghetti western gag of lighting sticks of dynamite with her cheroot and blowing up a big wooden tower with a stuntman still standing on top of it... falling to earth midst the splintering wood fragments. Some nice action which, I dunno, feels kind of raw in that good way that you think, maybe some of today’s action directors could learn a thing or two from, by looking at movies like this once in a while.

So there you have it, Jessi’s Girls is definitely an Al Adamson diamond in the rough and I’d have no qualms about recommending it to anyone. I absolutely loved it and will watch it again no question, if I don’t run out of time first. If you’re going to do a rape/revenge Western then this is definitely the way to do it.

Aquarius

 

Resistance Is Mutual

Aquarius
Brazil/France 2016
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Arrow Academy Blu Ray Zone B

Aquarius is a blind buy I picked up in Fopp records in one of their ultra cheap sales a couple of years ago. I hadn’t heard of it but something about it felt like it would make for compelling viewing... especially since the main protagonist is in her mid sixties... that’s unusual in itself for a lot of movies. I think I lucked out again because, it has to be said, it’s a pretty amazing film.

It’s also a long film, coming in at around the two and a half hour mark but, honestly, it doesn’t feel like it. It’s one of those movies which starts after about a minute and a half of company logos, which is a ridiculous amount of time for these things (I can’t remember a single one of them) but, I guess in proportion to the total running time, that’s a small enough percentage for me to have to sit through.

The Aquarius of the title is an apartment building on an ocean front and it’s here that around 95% of the movie is set. We see photographs of the surrounding area back in their heyday at the opening of the film and then go into it proper, introduced by the first of three chapter sections entitled... Part 1: Clara’s Hair, Part 2: Clara’s Love and Part 3: Clara’s Cancer. And don’t worry, that last section title is not a spoiler so much as it is a metaphor... but I’m not going to tell you about that as it will be a surprise to first time viewers.

For the first 5 - 10 minutes of the movie we are taken back to 1980, where we meet the main protagonist Clara, played for this small prelude by Bárbara Colen (who, I have to say, has a lot of presence in the role with just this small section). As we get an idea of her and her family, as a birthday party for her Aunt is in full swing, we find out the sort of woman she is... a cancer survivor and part of a family who are not frightened to do the right thing and even go to jail for their beliefs (such as her Aunt once did).

We then come forward in time to the present day (or 2016, in fact). Clara is widowed, has had a mastectomy of her right breast, is living alone in the same apartment of the Aquarius and she’s still pretty much the same person now... passionate about music, art, wine, her family and sex. She’s also a minor celebrity in some ways as she’s a well known music journalist/writer and you get the idea that she was quite an important figure in her past. Actually, that’s one of the nice things about this movie... there are a lot of details about certain things left unsaid and merely implied. Most movies of this nature don’t usually go down this route of using shorthand to draw the backgrounds of their characters but it’s nicely done here and you soon know everything you need to know about the tenacious Clara. Little things like, when she’s interviewed by a young journalist for an article, explaining the reason why physical media and the history of the object and surrounding paraphernalia is better than the ‘digital’ world of MP3s and so on... told me just the kind of person she was. I liked the character already.

Clara is now, at this age, played by an actress called Sônia Braga, who has had a long and illustrious career both in Hollywood and her own country. And, I have to confess, I’d never heard of her. I do now though and let me tell you... there are some films which are ensemble pieces and there are some films which rely heavily on the person who is the main lead to help make the film work. There’s no criticism to direction here, either approach is equally valid and can either work or fail depending on both the cast and crew. Let me say right up front that this movie belongs in the latter category and Sônia Braga is, frankly, absolutely sensational in this film. It’s a brilliant, electrifying performance she gives here and, indeed, many... including Braga herself... think it’s her greatest role.

The plot concerns a real estate company, presented by a young hotshot business manager, who wants Clara to move out of the Aquarius so they can redevelop it. Clara, however, is staying put, cares nothing that she’s the very last person living in the block (all the other tenants have been bought out) and is adamant in the quiet fury with which she rejects their persistent, lucrative offers. This is her domain and she and all her children were brought up here.  

And the film wanders along exploring Clara’s day to day existence while, always in the background, we have the threat of the building company and what they’re going to try next to get her out. I won’t tell you but the film has a great and interestingly understated yet, still, ferocious focus to it which would not even be an event in a Hollywood movie. Here, though, it’s quite amazing and... yeah... I can’t spoil it for you.

The majority of the film is told in edits from one, mostly static or slow moving shot to another and the director often disregards any wildly ambitious camerawork. Again, that’s not to detract from the effectiveness of his choices here... it works very well. There are a few times, though, where the camera motion also does some interesting things. A couple of cross cutting dutch angles towards the end of the movie where Clara is looking up at the Aquarius, for example, are nicely juxtaposed. Also, there’s an absolutely amazing shot where the camera just looks away from Clara and pans up around a wall of her apartment and then wanders over the ceiling, as if looking for something. What makes this shot fantastic is the sound design, as it shows Clara struggling to hear the trajectory of the people outside her apartment and going into the rooms above. So the viewer's ear is almost tricked into following the sound by the implied movement of the camera within the frame... which I think was a very cool idea and I don’t remember seeing this done as well as this in a movie before.

This film sparked major political controversy when it played at Cannes which included, from what I can make out, a point where the cast and crew staged a protest. In vengeance, apparently, the film was awarded a 19 certificate to restrict it’s profits but an appeal got it to a 16 rating. Over here in the 'good old Victorian values United Kingdom,' of course, it’s been slapped with an 18 certificate for ‘strong sex’ anyway but, yeah, that’s just our stupid censorship system. I honestly don’t understand what all the political hoo hah with the film is and I’m not sure if it stems from the content of the movie (I’m not into politics so I wouldn’t recognise such concerns in a motion picture) or whether it’s for something which just happened to be going on at the time of the film’s premiere screenings but, taking all that stuff out of the equation, I can see that criticising the underhanded practices of certain real estate companies might be a threatening gesture towards certain industries (and any corrupt governments, of course).

All that shilly shallying aside, though, I can do nothing but sing the praises of Aquarius... it’s an absolutely stupendous, slice of life drama and Sônia Braga’s performance and the character she plays are an absolute joy to watch. This is definitely a film which will stay with me as the years go by. Definitely one to make yourself acquainted with.

My 2000th Blog Post

Missed Opportunities

My 2000th Blog Post
 

So here I am on my 2000th Blog Post already. I wanted to do something different for this but, I didn’t have anything I could pull out of my hat that I hadn’t already done before so I had nothing really prepared for this moment. I even did an online search to see what other people do for ‘special occasion’ blogs and what the ‘on blog celebration’ ideas might be but, some of them I’ve already done, some of them were just ridiculous and the one which I’d already wanted to do... which is to give away a big prize or something... well, I’m sorry but I don’t have a budget for that kind of stuff right now.

So, I’m sticking to my usual ‘post numbers blog’ format and doing something which isn’t a review and this time it’s... okay, well I have a love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with list articles but, yeah, this is kind of a list... I’d love it if some movie producer just stumbled on this one and got some ideas from it (like that would ever happen). What it is, is a list of ten cool characters who have appeared in movies either only once or, in the case of one of them here, a number of times in one-off attempts to get the character restarted... who really should have become running characters in a series of movies. I think the movie industry should maybe take a look at some of the characters on this list, many of whom could easily be played by the same acting talent in a number of sequels, because I really think these are missed opportunities in terms of creations who have a lot of legs and fictional people who I would love to see more movies made about.

There’s no ranking involved here... there’s no one character from this list of movie juggernauts (in my eyes) who need consideration over the others... I think all of these people deserve another shot at being turned into a franchise. So the order here is just alphabetical, as dictated by the first name of each character (in the case of all but one... you’ll know it when you see it). So, yeah, Happy 2000th to me, NUTS4R2 and, I hope you have an interesting time reading this. In the case of most of those listed here, if you’ve not seen the films in which they appear in some cases, maybe you should take a look at them because these characters are really cool. Most of these are reviewed here so, in most cases, if you click on the title of the movie in the subheading, it should take you into my review of the original film.

Clark Savage Jr
Doc Savage, 1975
Okay, so if you’re a longtime reader of this blog you’ll know of my love of the Doc Savage novels, kick started by seeing this movie in the cinema in 1975. This is a character who starred in over 180 original novels, published initially in the pulp magazines between 1933 and 1949, under the magazine pseudonym Kenneth Robeson (although almost all of these were written by Lester Dent) and then augmented over the years with new stories by the likes of Philip Jose Farmer and Will Murray. It’s a crime that only one movie has ever been made about him, starring Ron Ely and based on the first novel The Man Of Bronze. There should have at least been a 1930s serial based on this character and it’s terrible that I live in a universe where this didn’t happen. There was an attempt to get a movie made starring Chuck Connor’s as the character in the 1960s and you can read about what happened to that production here in my review of the Gold Key comic based on the unfilmed script. Doc has been picked up a few times over the last decade or so but still no movement on getting another film series of Clark’s 1930s adventures in sight. This needs to change.

Eden Sinclair
Doomsday,  2008
Rhona Mitra played special trooper Eden Sinclair in this post-apocaylyptic blend of Mad Max 2 and Escape From New York, where a wall has been put up outside Scotland to keep a lethal virus out of the UK. Many years later, Sinclair leads a team into what’s left of Scotland, to try and bring out a cure which might possibly be there. She’s a great character who has a bionic eye which she can take out and roll around so she can see around corners etc. I’d love to see another movie using this character and Mitra shows just how good she is at playing these kinds of roles.

Florence Cathcart
The Awakening, 2011
Florence Cathcart is a professional sceptic and debunker of the supernatural, until she runs head on into it, of course, in the supernatural thriller The Awakening. When we meet her, she’s played by the great Rebecca Hall and she’s both a tough as nails but also a fairly vulnerable character to throw into the deep end of the spiritual realm. As the film continues, a certain gift for channeling the spirits is exhibited in the character... even though she doesn’t realise it for a long time (although I’m pretty sure most of the audience will figure out just what that special talent is from very early on in the movie). I’d love to see more films where the previously sceptical Cathcart is involved in adventures in the realm of the supernatural, while trying to find a more explicable cause for them. And I’d love to see Rebecca Hall back in the part now (wow, is it ten years ago already since this one came out?).

Gary Seven
Star Trek - Season Two: Assignment Earth, 1968
Gary Seven was a human(ish) secret agent from Earth’s far future who was sent back in time to 1968 to find out why two other ‘time agents’ have failed to report in to his superiors... which is where he encounters Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise, also somewhat misplaced in time. Robert Lansing played Gary Seven and this episode was originally intended as a pilot for a proper full on Gary Seven TV show but, presumably, wasn’t taken up by the studio. He had a sonic screwdriver-like device and a highly intelligent, shape changing cat of dubious origin. The episode also featured actress Terri Garr as someone who was obviously going to carry on as Seven’s new human assistant... you might remember her from such films as Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Young Frankenstein. Although Lansing is long dead, I’d love to see the full TV series in development sometime with a bright, young star in the role.

It
It Follows, 2014
Well, I didn’t know what to call this demonic, sexual curse creature but, in some ways, I guess you can imply it’s an ‘It’ from the title, right? This was a big hit horror film when it came out seven years ago and I have no idea why we don’t have at least one sequel to it already... not to mention a franchise. It doesn’t even have to be populated by the same characters as in the first film, obviously, since the sexual chain that 'It' has to kill in descending order can be carried on for anyone, assuming the creature didn’t die at the end of the film... it’s kind of implied that there’s a possibility it’s still out there, still following the chain of sexual encounters back to their centre of origin.

Jerry Cornelius
The Final Programme, 1973
Michael Moorcock’s notorious and changeable Jerry Cornelius character has really only been in one film proper, Robert Feust’s poorly received (at the time) but absolutely incredible The Final Programme. There are a number of stories which could be easily adapted for cinema and, also, some which would not be that easy to adapt (although I believe a couple of them could be cross pollinated as a double adaptation if you wanted to go down that route). Moorcock himself hates this movie but I think it captures the character quite well in the snapshot of the first novel it’s trying to achieve (albeit with a whole load of stuff missed out but... that’s the nature of the medium). Jon Finch did a fine job of bringing Mr. C to life and I think the character, who is supposed to look somewhat like Mick Jagger, could easily be re-tapped for some more ‘truer-to-Moorcock’ on-screen adventures with someone like David Tennant in the role.

John Carter
Princess Of Mars, 2009
John Carter, 2012
I’ve still not seen the decidedly dodgy (by all reports), budget inadequate, 2009 straight to video, very loose adaptation of A Princess Of Mars (aka Under The Moons Of Mars) by Edgar Rice Burroughs but... I’ll get around to it (however much I’m dreading it). I love Burroughs’ series of Martian novels, many of which are headed up by either John Carter, former cavalry man and future Warlord Of Mars or his son Carthoris. The 2012 movie John Carter, starring Taylor Kitsch as the character, was not without two glaring problems... the fact that they wrote in a more scientific way of travelling between worlds rather than the accidental ‘astral projection’ of the novel and, also, the fact that the Martians in the movie wear clothes... but overall it was a pretty great movie and it was just badly marketed. This film deserved at least a couple of sequels and the character is in desperate need of a reboot... which probably won’t happen now due to the poor box office of the 2012 version.

Lilith Silver
Razor Blade Smile, 1998
Jake West’s truly brilliant movie Razor Blade Smile highlights main character Lilith Silver, as played by Eileen Daly. She’s a vampire living in modern times who has been around since she was ‘turned’ sometime in the 19th Century and who is in the thick of it against an evil cult who intend her harm. The film has a marvellous twist to it and it makes it very easy to do any number of sequels. Lilith has a lot of personality (almost like a female version of Jerry Cornelius, see above) and it shines amidst a wonderful atmosphere of blood, nudity and gore. I’d love to see more movies made about this character but, for right now, I’d settle for a decent Blu Ray transfer of this thing by some smart UK label... more people should know about this movie and character. I’m surprised there have been no comic books.

Modesty Blaise
Modesty Blaise, 1966
Modesty Blaise, 1982
My Name Is Modesty, 2004
Peter O’ Donnel’s absolutely brilliant newspaper strip character ran for a long time and, more importantly, was in a string of novels written by him which are absolutely first class ‘ex-head of crime network turns espionage queen’ novels. There have been three attempts to capture the character on screen so far and, each one has had some real problems. The first of these was the Jospeph Losey movie Modesty Blaise, which starred Monica Vitti in the title role. It’s a fantastic film if you can divorce it from the source material but, although it’s based on the first novel, it completely fails to capture the tone of the stories and instead turns it into a comedy. Monica Vitti looks perfect as Modesty... in one scene where she has her trademark black, skin tight jump suit and her dark hair... but looks completely unlike the character for the majority of the film. I can see why O’Donnell hated this one and all subsequent attempts to put her on the screen. The second attempt, Modesty Blaise in 1982, was a failed TV pilot movie and, although I haven’t seen it, the clips I have seen tell you all you need to know as to why it failed. The producers have tried to turn her into something which completely fails, again, to capture the character of the stories. I have recently come into a ‘print’ of this to watch at some stage for the blog but... I’ve not been brave enough yet to unleash that disappointment on myself. In 2004, Quentin Tarantino (who had featured a later edition of the first novel in Pulp Fiction), produced another low budget venture with My Name Is Modesty but, once again, failed to deliver the goods. Although, he and the director really made a rod for their own backs on this by making it an origin story, of sorts, so the only character from the actual stories in this one was a very young version of Modesty herself. O’ Donnel is dead now so I presume the rights to the character may well be on the market again and, seriously, we need someone to do a proper Modesty Blaise franchise of movies... especially since the actress Gal Gadot is an absolutely perfect fit for the character. This needs to happen and someone should tell her she’s perfect for this.

Scarlett Marlowe
As Above, So Below, 2014
Scarlett Marlowe is the young, rogue archaeologist who is the central protagonist in the ‘gates of hell found under the catacombs of Paris’ movie As Above So Below, as played by Perdita Weeks. She’s gutsy, persistent and unflappable... even in the face of being pursued by supernatural demons. It’s an under seen belter of the ‘found footage’ horror cycle and the ending of the film leaves it wide open for us to join the character in another adventure... presumably along the lines of a ‘horror movie meets Lara Croft’ style series of films. I would love to see her further adventures but, like the Florence Cathcart character from The Awakening (as mentioned above) the movie was presumably planned as a one off adventure and, I wish the producers would see the potential of expanding the character out into other adventures.

And that’s me done on the under appreciated, under used characters of film and television over the years... at least as I see them. I think all of the above could be mined for box office gold if done right and the fact that they haven’t been is a real head scratcher to me. Anyway, that’s 2000 posts published and... more reviews to follow. Thanks for reading.