Homicidal/Madhouse Double Bill

Far From The Madhouse Crowd

Homicidal US 1961

Directed by William Castle

Madhouse UK 1974

Directed by Jim Clark

Spoiler Break! This is your one minute spoiler break... if you don’t want to know the terrible secrets lurking in this double review, leave this article and click on one of my other reviews to read... I won’t laugh at you and point my finger at you... honest!

Okay! So once again I had to “wear shoes on a Sunday” to make it out of the house in time for @cyberschizoid and @scaresarah‘s latest London double bill to support their Classic Horror Campaign, launched to persuade the BBC to bring back their classic horror double bills of yesteryear. This month it was a double bill of two movies I’d never seen before... and I have to say, two movies I wouldn’t see again in all honesty. In fact, the reason I am reviewing them both as a double bill this time around is because I was none too taken with either of them (well, it would have been hard to follow last months killer double bill of Black Sunday and Horror Hospital) and don’t think I could find enough of interest to say about either of them separately to fill up a full on entry for each.

That being said, however, one of the best reasons for getting yourself along to these double bills is to soak in the atmosphere of like-minded people watching along with some of their favourite old friends (films can be friends) and often laughing at the twisted but camp thrills as they appear on screen. So, honestly, please don’t let my review of this one put you off getting yourself down to one of these brilliantly organised little events and make sure you sign their petition too!

Homicidal is a William Castle movie (he of the ballyhoo and gimmick publicity stunt) and it’s not a film I knew anything about. I think my only exposure to William Castle in my life has been his movie House On Haunted Hill and John Goodman's character based on him in Joe Dante's Matinee. So I'm perhaps not the best qualified person to comment on all things Castle. However, I did take note that it had been “influenced” by the success of Psycho, though it doesn’t have too much in common with that film from the previous year asides from some “through the windscreen” driving shots with the only other similarity being one of sexual identity.

Now, I might have been roundly surprised by the end of this movie had I not known of the tenuous links to Hitchcock’s movie. Unfortunately, after about 20 minutes into the film where everyone is talking about a character called Warren who has yet to show up in adult form, I suddenly twigged that the leading “homicidal” lady was almost certainly going to come back on the screen at some point as “Warren”. Sure enough, although the transformation is pretty good, the actress was soon back in a dual male/female role which gives you the entire end of the movie once you’ve realised this. If my mind hadn’t been working overtime in the background on this I probably wouldn’t have seen it coming... nor noticed the bad dubbing whenever Warren spoke. As it is, the rest of the movie was spent with me wondering when at least one of the other characters in the movie was going to catch up on this.

The general direction, acting and cinematography on this one was more than competent but nothing special and the score by Hugo Friedhofer is in the full-on romantic mode which he was used to writing and orchestrating for Erich Wolfgang Korngold... not the cooled down atmospheres favoured by Bernard Herrmann.

William Castle’s 60 second “fear break”, where you had 60 seconds to leave the theatre and go to coward’s corner to get a refund before the end sequence, was fun but... well... if you’d already figured out there was a twist coming then it kinda killed it.

So yeah... I didn’t have the best reaction in the world to this one but... it was okay and I’m glad I saw it. Ditto for the second movie which followed the usual intermission and “classic horror quiz with prizes” which is a regular feature of these shows.

Now I really like some of Vincent Price’s horror work from the early sixties to the mid seventies (that’s my favourite period for his work in this manner anyway), especially his famous collaborations with Roger Corman on the Poe movies (as a kid in the seventies I didn’t think much of these but when I finally saw them in my thirties in the proper aspect ratios as opposed to the truncated versions shown on 70s TV, I realised what little masterpieces these particular movies actually are). However, I found myself a little disappointed by Madhouse after a very short time.

For starters... Vincent Price, who plays a Hollywood actor synonymous with his role in a series of horror movies as a character called Dr. Death, is so built up as the fall guy that, when the “real life” Dr. Death murders Price’s wife to be after some heated words between them... it’s so obvious that the killer is not actually Price himself and this kinda put a slight dampner on things again for me because this all happens before the credits roll.

The credits sequence was actually quite well done, however, utilising still photography of Dr. Death and his victims and got a big laugh when Michael Parkinson came up in the cast (yes, he’s playing himself in this) and was impressed by the mention of Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff... although their only actual input in the movie turned out to be old AIP movies used to mimic the films of Dr. Death... such as Twice Told Tales and The Raven.

I was a little more impressed by the movie’s actual cast in that Peter Cushing was sharing screen time with Vincent Price in this movie as is Robert Quarry... and a horror themed party sequence during the film shows Cushing dressed as his regular on-screen nemesis Dracula while Robert Quarry gets to wear the same costume he wore when he was playing Count Yorga, Vampire.

However... while the plot of the film and the throwaway nature of some of the more novelty murders were all quite entertaining, there was nothing to really grab me in this one and when the second murder happens in the movie, some twenty or so minutes in, I pointed to the “real” Dr. Death on screen and whispered to my friend... “Is that Peter Cushing?” Alas, it turns out at the end of the movie that this is, indeed, Peter Cushing framing his friend for a new set of murders... many years after he had done the same with the murder of Vincent Price’s wife as seen in the pre-credits sequence (ushered in with the most ludicrous and highly comical scream you could imagine from Price as he goes to see his loved one and her head falls off).

The score on this one didn’t really do it for me either but I have to say at this point that, although I didnt get a great deal from either film here... at least I’ve been able to see them now without paying out vast sums of money for DVD versions and whether the films are any good or not is really secondary to the real reason for going to these Horror Double Bills which is, as I said before, the wonderful atmosphere created by the audience at the Roxy.

Please help keep these events going and support the Classic Horror Campaign by going to their homepage here... http://www.classichorrorcampaign.com/ or tweeting the organisers here... Cybershizoid http://twitter.com/#!/cyberschizoid and ScareSarah http://twitter.com/#!/ScareSarah

Room In Rome

Cunning Linguists

Room In Rome Spain 2010

Directed by Julio Medem

Optimum Region 2

When I first saw the poster for this “arthouse-cum-soft-porn-movie” I was immediately looking forward to seeing it. Not for the promise of naked lesbian sex implied in the poster but to study the fine textures and shapes made by such a union on film in terms of the colours, tones and general mise-en-scene.

Oh, and by the way, if you took that opening sentence as the gospel truth without question then, seriously, you are not reading my blog the right way. Read better!

Woohoo! Lesbian porn starring Elena Anaya from such films as Van Helsing, Sex and Lucia, Pont Blank, Mesirine and The Skin I Live In! I couldn’t wait for this one to hit my local cinema. I was waiting and waiting... and then I stumbled on the DVD going for just a few quid in Fopp records. Oh well. No cinema release then. On the other hand, the bonus when watching such films is that... at least on DVD you have pause and zoom features. :-7

Ok... so if you haven’t figured it out by now, Room In Rome isn’t technically a lesbian porn film. Although it might just as well be... it has a little more depth than that though. But not too much, it has to be said.

The film tells the story of a one night encounter between a Spanish lesbian and a Russian lady in a hotel room in Rome. They talk, they get naked (and stay naked most of the time actually... so there’s no way someone of my... err... subtle mindset was not going to enjoy this movie), they make love a few times and swap stories to try to penetrate each others real souls... after a shaky start where they are both a little less truthful with each other than you might expect someone to be (am I really too honest with people, I ask myself often these days).

If truth be told, a lot of the long conversations and emotional fallout of these are a lot less in terms of intelligence or poetry than I’d been hoping for. Perhaps I’m just getting too old for these kinds of movies and am just finding some of the writing naive? I don’t know. However... there are other things about this movie which do, at least, guarantee that this is an interesting watch.

Number one on that list is of things is, of course, the fact that the two lead actresses spend 95% of their time naked and this can, obviously, only be a good thing to watch. But the really interesting thing about this movie is that all the camera action takes place in the hotel room... even when the action is not actually set in the hotel room.

To explain, the film starts and ends cyclically with the opening where the girls decide to spend the night in one room together and the last shot where the girls say goodbye. Both scenes take place in the street outside the hotel room but the camera stays in the room, which is a couple of floors up, and captures the action in the street from the window in the room. So that’s kinda interesting stuff. But there’s more to this one basic idea which drives the movie. Because the girls have a laptop at their disposal and so GoogleEarth also comes into play and helps to take the action away from the hotel room, while still being imprisoned in it’s confines. This is all kinda intriguing and the only thing really wrong with this, of course, is the question... well why? It’s a nice gesture and all but those sequences really arent needed. Luckily they don’t ever seem at odds with the atmosphere created by the film's central premise so, thankfully, there is never really a sense of intrusion or betrayal to the way the lighting and atmosphere works with this film.

And that’s all I've got to say it would seem. Short review I know and not an absolute recommendation either. The verbal content never seems quite clever enough to be totally engaging but this is offset to some degree, perhaps not enough, by the two naked ladies romping around the set. I guess if you love looking at women, as I know some of my male and female readers do, then you might find this film an interesting diversion... but to be honest, I couldn’t say the film ever raises itself above that level. There is a very emotional core to one of the characters which gets pushed into the foreground a lot... but I never really bought into it enough to be that terribly moved by the ending of the film, which is trying too hard to be a one room, lesbian encounter version of Before Sunrise or Before Sunset. It never really makes a lasting impression. Watch only if you like the powerful beauty of the female form... stay away if you’re expecting anything more is my best conclusion to this one I’m afraid.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Sky

Sky-Fi

The Sarah Jane Adventures Season 5 Episodes 1 & 2: Sky

Airdate: October 3rd and 4th 2011. UK. CBBC

Warning: A skyful of spoilers

Back in November of last year I finished off my review of the last two episodes of Series Four of The Sarah Jane Adventures with the following paragraph...

“Looking forward to Series Five next year and hopefully by then we will have seen the new series of the other two shows in this particular family, Doctor Who and the US continuation of Torchwood.”

As the number one rated UK children’s TV programme, I thought this great show was just going to run and run until the lead actress decided it was finally time to retire and quit in a blaze of glory. Sadly, this was not to be the case.

Looking at that last paragraph now I realise how much I was in for some bad knocks when it comes to Doctor Who related product in 2011. The main flagship show is still a bit hit and miss in the quality/entertainment stakes since Russell T. Davies quit producing the show and the show Davis did produce this year, the Americanised Torchwood, was really not the success story we were all hoping for (yeah, alright it was dire and a chore to find new things to say about when it came around to writing the reviews of the individual episodes).

Plus we had the death of two major members of U.N.I.T to take in. Nicholas Courtney who played The Brigadier in Doctor Who starting from when he was a Colonel in the Patrick Troughton days (the actor also starred opposite Hartnell but not as “The Brig”) and who had the last proper appearance of the character in The Sarah Jane Adventures, tangling with the Sontarans again, died and left a void in his wake.

More shocking, though, was the news that actress Elizabeth Sladen, who played the popular Doctor Who companion Sarah Jane opposite Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison (in The Five Doctors) and in her own shows K9 and Company (only the pilot was made) and The Sarah Jane Adventures, passed away unexpectedly of cancer. People were shocked, devastated and the Doctor Who community on-line collectively mourned her passing.

Then came the news that the first half of the fifth series, six episodes comprising three stories, were already in the can and would be shown later in the year. That time has now come and I find it hard as a reviewer to be really critical of something which I know makes up the last performances of a wonderful actresses body of work... especially since I had a lot of time for this series... but found these opening two episodes to be a little less than what I’ve come to expect from the show.

Sky is an introductory show for a new character, called... um... Sky, who starts off as a baby left at Sarah Jane’s front door but grows up to a twelve year old suddenly at the end of the first episode and the whole feel of this character is that she’s very much a repeat of the Luke character in that they needed a non-human character to give the show the missing element now that the Luke character has gone to College (He's in this first episode a little, seen on-screen talking to the extended Sarah-Jane family. This doesn’t give me much hope for seeing K9 again this series as I bet they were holding him back until episodes 11 and 12, which were never filmed). Instead of being super-smart like her predecessor, however, Sky is a living bomb who is defused by Sarah Jane and company but who obviously retains some of her alien powers of “electrickery”.

We have a new supervillainess in the form of Sky’s test-tube “mum” and a metal based alien race who look a bit like stainless-steel versions of Batman. However... nothing feels really new here. In addition to the Sky character who, I’m sure given time, would have been a strong cast member on the show, her “alien mum” just feels like a repeat of every other super-villainess they’ve had on the show and the metal aliens are mostly just there to check all the boxes it seems to me... although the pre-credits sequence with them in the first episode is almost a classic Jon Pertwee opening and certainly helps lend the series the tone of the old Doctor Who which it does have quite a lot of the time throughout the show's entire run.

Don’t get me wrong... there are some really good things going on in this opener... the return of both the mysterious and magical shop-keeper (plus his parrot) and Floella Benjamins character from previous series’ demonstrate that the writers really are trying to push the show into having a very coherent universe of its own with recurring regular characters... which makes the death of the lead actress doubly poignant when you can see how they are trying to progress things.

However, the comedy element of the show, which was always very broad but which worked pretty well, is way over the top and really dumbed down on this one (so broad it falls off the humour scale into something a lot less than funny) and I can’t help but think the comedy element is also being heavily pushed when, really, it was perfect the way it was. Clyde Langer is such a strong character in the show... he doesn’t need to be made any less subtle, thanks very much.

Ultimately, this is a fairly weak couple of episodes but they certainly more than hold their own against some of the weaker episodes of Doctor Who this year... which means this show is still wiping the floor with this year’s Torchwood as far as I’m concerned (and, to be fair, that’s not really hard). Looking forward to the remaining four episodes in this series and keeping my fingers crossed that the show will somehow, cut off mid season, go out with a bang rather than a whimper.

Melancholia

Melancholia Baby

Melancholia 2011 Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany

Directed by Lars Von Trier

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: Earth shattering spoilers ensue!

Melancholia is, quite simply, one of the most visually beautiful films of 2011.

It’s no surprise to me in the slightest, though I’ve only seen a few of his films, that Von Trier can deliver such beautiful and meticulous work... but to people who associate him with the Dogme ‘95 movement, the sheer artificial beauty of his creations may come as a bit of a surprise. But like I said... not to me.

I first became aware of Von Trier back in 1991 (wow, I’ve been watching this guy on and off for 20 years?) when I went to the old Lumiere cinema in St. Martin’s Lane to see his brilliant movie Europa (aka Zentropa in some countries). It was the first film I remember seeing which relly wallowed in it’s own artificial construction to create elaborate effects on screen. The first movie I could remember, specifically, barring minor moments like a single shot in Rumblefish, where both colour and black & white photography collided on screen in beautifully surreal moments where they would bleed into each other’s separate elements like a mixed media collage. And when I say bleed, it really did in certain scenes... I remember well, one character slashing his wrists into a bowl of water in black and white and the blood flowing into the water as a bright red element.

Backgrounds could be changed too like an old 50's Hollywood rear projection shot... except here the technique was almost flawless and a character could be interacting in a real environment which could suddenly turn into a visual metaphor in the background.

It came as a bit of a shock, I would have to say, when Von Trier founded the Dogme ‘95 group with their pledge to remove pretty much all artificality from film. This never stood well with me and I was quite vocal at the time because it’s pretty obvious to me that you can’t make a movie without at least lighting or tweaking or positioning some element of a shot... the very act of which surely renders void the entire exercise in the first place. It was not that unexpected when even the first film that came out of the gate of this experimental style broke it’s own rules and many followed suit (is my understanding) in this lack of rigidity to contribute to a pretty much impossible, idealistic concept.

I remember seeing Von Trier’s Dogville (and getting bored about a half of the way through the movie), a film clearly named after the manifesto of its creator, and thinking to myself that the act of stripping down a whole community to invisible rooms marked out with white lines and labels was far more artifical in its nature than just filming in such a community could ever be.

I got back into Von Trier when his last movie, Antichrist, came out and thought this movie was pretty okay and it certainly shares the same sheer visual beauty as his new movie Melancholia... so he’s definitely back into a new phase of his work, now free to embrace the artifice of his craft once more.

Melancholia starts off with some surreal and occasionally confusing imagery... some of which I believe is based on a group of paintings that one of the two lead protagonists, Justine (played by Kirsten Dunst) puts out on display in one of her “funny spells”. Definitely spotted a nod to that Pre-Raphaelite painting of the girl in the lake which was responsible for the death of the model (no, I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name of this famous painting). The other main protagonist, her sister Claire (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg), has some very heavy footsteps in a field in this sequence which remind me of another painting, the title of which also escapes me (Not doing very well on the art front am I? Sorry people). After some 5 or 10 minutes of beautiful imagery, the earth is destroyed as it collides with another planet and, all through the film we are encouraged to assume that this is how the movie will end (although the giveaway clue here is Dunst seen in two different dresses). After the title card immediately following the destruction of the earth, the film is then split into two parts seemingly set before the events just depicted have taken place...each part named after their central characters. The first part deals with Justine who is going to her own wedding reception at claire’s mansion house. Over the course of this fairly gruelling sequence (if, like me, you are not a social animal) we see her wreck both her marriage and her career in an uncomfortable haze of aggressive depression, possibly manifested by the newly discovered planet Melancholia which appears to be on a collision course with earth, in front of a whole host of big name supporting cast (such as Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Stellan Skaarsgard and even Claire’s husband played by Kiefer Sutherland).

The second part, named after Claire, is set some time after (a few months perhaps) when Justine is so depressed she can’t even get out of bed without major coaxing by her sister (yeah, did this stuff remind me big time of my ex-girlfriend) and tells of Claire’s fear of her belief that the earth will be pulverised by Melancholia, her husband’s certainty that it won’t and, their son who is getting as excited as his dad by this rare astronomical discovery. It also shows Justine in sharp contrast still to her sister, with whom she doesn’t share much in common. However, it also becomes apparent that Justine can see things that are going to happen and she believes Melancholia will be the death of them all (even when it seems to be receding) and is not frightened by it but is happy to embrace the peace that death will bring to her.

It has to be said at this point that nothing really happens in terms of story (except for, you know, the destruction of the entire planet). It is a beautifully framed and never boring study of the thoughts and actions of two diametrically opposed sisters who are anticipating the approaching end of the world. In this way, it perhaps shares a commonality with Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice or Akira Kurosawa’s I Live In Fear (aka Record Of A Living Being) but the film is very much its own thing and is an absolute joy to watch... although be warned it is quite bleak in some ways.

If I had one complaint about the film in general it’s that we didn’t need to see the destruction of the world at the end... we know it’s inevitable, leave it unsaid and end the movie half a day before it occurs maybe? However, having said that, the shot of the death of the world at the end does elaborate the point that the imagery at the start of the film was actually nothing more than a visionary “premonition of events” by Justine and not a fixed point we’ve flashed back too... there are clues in the dialogue which may lead you to this conclusion that the opening is not actually a flashback but something else entirely... but the end shot certainly leaves no doubt in the mind of the viewer about the nature of the movie’s prologue.

As I’ve implied, I would have expected and liked to have seen a more ambiguous ending to this movie in terms of the sometimes surreal opening montage, but maybe I just prefer less clarity and room to speculate with works like this. And, anyway, Kirsten Dunst does have scenes where she takes her clothes off... so that more than outweighs the slight dissatisfaction with the last minute or two of the movie.

Don’t miss Melancholia. A beautiful film made by an artist with a sure, steady and confident hand as befitting the longevity of his career. It probably won’t be playing for long so catch this visual magic while it’s still playing on the big screen!

Drive

Drivel

Drive 2011 US

Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

Screening at UK cinemas.

This is not going to be an easy film to write about. I knew that when I’d finished watching it. Truth be told, I didn’t think a lot of it, as an overall product which hangs together at least, but at the same time I can’t quite pin down what it is about it that is so soulfully missing for me.

There are things I could site like the fact that the movie is almost a celebration of style over substance, the medium is the message and all that... I could even tag up the emotional, Pinter-like vacuum that the lead characters inhabit as being a turn off to some folks and possibly being a contributing factor in my lack of appreciation for the movie... but the thing is, that’s not it. If you know my taste by now from being a regular reader (and if you are a regular reader then I thank you from the bottom of my heart) then you’ll know that I love plotless movies where the mise-en-scene takes over and permeates the picture to the degree that it’s all you can watch.

Likewise the “cinema of reflection”, where nothing much is said and the images play out almost as a silent movie, is another thing I enjoy very much... so you would think this film would be tailor-made for me. So neither of those potential “reviewery” type of criticisms apply on this one... and my real problem is that I can’t pinpoint just what was so disappointing about this movie all in all.

It certainly had enough going for it.

It looks and feels like a late sixties/early seventies movie in the way it’s edited together with long shots and takes which evolve slowly and go along at their own pace. There’s a brilliant colour palette and sense of lighting going on in the overall shot design which just adds to some truly stunning compositions that show a fascination with pitching characters in and out of vertically striped compositions.

There’s some brilliant acting going on... Carey Mulligan is always going to be great (well, after all, she was Sally Sparrow in the Doctor Who episode Blink... she can do no wrong) and Ron Perlman is as professional and watchable as always. Ryan Gosling, who I’d not seen before, was also surprisingly good as he, quite blatantly actually, tried to combine Steve McQueen’s performance from Bullit and cross fade it with nods to young Ryan O’ Neill and young Warren Beatty. This worked really well and was used to offset little pockets of exploding violence which are scattered and used to punctuate the film.

So everything was working well, especially for the first twenty minutes which showed some really interesting “stop and start” intelligent getaway driving for a change... could have done with some more sequences like that in the movie. They really had me siding with the “smartness” of the character from the start and I was well on the way to really enjoying this movie when... it just didn’t make good on that initial promise. It didn’t really go anywhere... it doesn’t have to, of course, and again that’s not necessarily the reason why I had such an adverse reaction to it... but something wasn’t quite making it for me. Wish I knew what the heck that was. Left the cinema thinking... “Wow. That could have been a really great movie... instead, it was less than mediocre”... and that I couldn’t watch it again.

On the other hand, the really bad thing about it was the truly terrible and corny music throughout the film. The songs in it really were a touch too far and I would have given composer Cliff Martinez a lot more room to breathe and do something really driven instead of having whole sequences turn into cheesy cornball song commentary. The music choices could have been a lot better on this one and may have helped lift the film closer to what was needed to make it more of a vital piece of cinema as opposed to the “could have been a contender” status it now has. Trust me, this film won’t really be remembered ten years from now unless it’s on the strength of the director who seems to have done a fair job at juggling some of the components here... hopefully he will learn from his mistakes, which for me defines what this movie is. A glorious mistake in some ways, perhaps, but certainly not quite what I suspect it was aspiring to.

Never mind, there’s always next time. I’ll take a hasty, handbrake turn and burn rubber away from the DVD release of this one when it finally squeals into shops. I’ll park my ride somewhere else rather than watch this one again, through rose-tinted windscreen wipers.

Doctor Who: The Wedding Of River Song

Sing A Song Of Silence

Doctor Who: The Wedding Of River Song

Airdate: October 1st 2011. UK. BBC1

Warning: I guess there must be spoilers in here somewhere... except nothing appeared to happen so I’m not sure there’s anything to spoil.

Well, after the mess of last years series of Doctor Who I wasn’t at first expecting much from this years incarnation of the series but I was quite pleasantly surprised by this years offerings because probably half of them were okay and both the season opener and the mid-season opener were pretty great episodes. Perhaps it was too much to ask for a finale closer to the same level of energy and intrigue but, to be honest. this little shambles was possibly a lot weaker than even last years end of year finale. Weaker even than Russel T. Davies last two episodes with Tennant (it had been going great guns until The End Of Time and then the rot kinda set in).

There were some great things about this weeks episode, for sure. The revelation of Amy finding Rory yet again in their time-discombobulated state and the line about Amy being The Doctor’s mother-in-law gave us some nice comic moments. Also, a nice little acknowledgement to the recent death of actor Nicholas Courtney came in the form of a phone call made “by” The Doctor informing him of the death of Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. That was a really sweet and right thing to do for him. Ultimately though, anyone looking for any real answers for this season have had them left either wiped out by some cheap deux ex machina of unwritten timey wimey, mitigating, patronising nonsense or... even worse... apparently forgotten about and left completely unanswered, ready to be plundered for more self-referential nonsense in future seasons.

We still don’t know who Madame Kovarian is, the return of Canton Everett Delaware III did not happen, we still don’t know who the little girl (presumably young River) who regenerated at the end of Day Of The Moon is and we also, as it happens, never saw the footage briefly shown at the end of last weeks trailer of River Song floating in her spacesuit in a water tank. Lots of stuff cut out of this episode methinks?

It wasn’t’’t completely unentertaining... it moved like the blazes, which it would have to do in 45 minutes to answer all those questions and tie up all those loose ends... except, it didn’t answer those questions and it didn’t tie up those loose ends. In fact it made as little sense as last years finale which may or may not have completely and bizarrely unwritten all of The Doctor’s back story from the 40 plus years before then (still want to know why Amy and co don't remember the Daleks and why the inhabitants of earth don't remember Victorian cybermen). In short... it didn’t really quite make sense and it feels like the writers etc cheated and just didn’t want people to notice this stuff.

I so hope not. I hope that Mr. Moffett, who is actually a pretty decent writer with a mind full of good ideas, remembers that neither of these two seasons he’s overseen make a lot of sense in continuity and that his so called game changer didn’t change anything at all yet that he hadn’t already destroyed last year. Now I think the man is clever and he’s got something up his sleeve because he’s still dropping all the hints and questions in himself... but the rate we are going this feels like a really long, drawn out process and, sadly, this latest series has seemed just a little more like Back To The Future Part 2 than I would have preferred. That is to say... it’s just filler to get us to a point where we are all ready to play with the next part of the story and... hopefully have some fun with it. I’m sure it will get sorted someday but I’m beginning to get that sinking feeling and am sensing myself losing interest in the show just a little. Let’s please all remember the lessons people hopefully learnt from the dire last series of Torchwood: Miracle Day and not let this show deteriorate as much as that one did please!

To top it all off though, after resolving absolutely nothing, we are left with and invited to ponder a line from the very first episode of the programme from 1963 when, if my memory is kicking in correctly, William Hartnell said “Eh? Doctor who?” Apparently this glib line which was presumably written into the first script to justify a great title is the question that’s been on “everyone’s lips” in the universe... Doctor who? Oh really. How could it be you meta-textual addicts? He’s not called Doctor Who... only The Doctor. The only people who have any inkling of the concept of Doctor Who are us, the viewers. And I’m afraid that we’re really not a part of the Whoniverse the last time I looked... no matter how much some fans of the series want to believe they are.

So yeah... well this episode leaves me fairly sure of three things then...

One: It was a bit of a waste of time.

Two: We’ll be coming back to these questions later on, presumably after the Christmas special.

Three: “Doctor who?” is a question that will never be sufficiently answered in my lifetime... and certainly not anytime soon without some side-stepping of the question which involves rephrasing that question and changing it into something else.

There seems to be a lot of cheating going on in Doctor Who just lately and, frankly, I am beginning to be made to feel just like that by the show... cheated.

Zombie Strippers

Bare To The Bone

Zombie Strippers 2008 USA

Directed by Jay Lee

Sony Region 2 DVD

Well... what can I say about Zombie Strippers which is in any way going to change the image that the mind conjures up when you first glance at the title? Well, not much probably but... that's okay because Zombie Strippers is a movie which, not surprisingly, does exactly what it says on the tin. I say, not surprisingly, but I watched this movie on the same day that I saw Big Tits Zombie 3D (my review is here) and there were some definite problems with that title only delivering seperate elements of what was on the tin, rather than an amalgamation of the two as implied. Also, Bit Tits Zombie 3D cost a whopping £5 from Fopp records, whereas they were only charging £2 for Zombie Strippers... not that this influenced my decision to purchase this at this time, obviously. ;-)

Zombie Strippers, though not nearly as “out there” as the aforementioned Japanese movie, is actually quite an entertaining little piece of modern B-movie mayhem. Anyone who knows the title of the film before they go in is expecting it to be trashy and it certainly doesn’t dissapoint in terms of the naked bodies on display (which include legendary porn actress Jenna Jameson as the principal stripper in Robert Englund’s illegal strip club)... nor on the gore, which is as strong as you’d expect in a contemporary zombie film.

The story starts off with a crack team of “the best of the best” US soldiers going into an experimental research facility and getting half wiped out by zombies. One of the freshly bitten soldiers, knowing his fellow soldiers will kill him, runs away but wanders into a strip club and eventually assaults Jenna Jameson when she is doing her strip act... and when I say assault I mean tear the front of her throat out with his teeth. it looks like it’s all over for Jenna but, just as the nightclub workers are trying to figure out how to best hide her body and not draw police or military attention, Jenna gets back up again and, unlike the zombies we’ve already seen in the movie, goes back to doing what she does best... stripping on stage with her new zombie powers (zombie strippers can apparently do superstrong gymnastic, bad-stunt-double-summersault style dance moves and spin themselves around that darned pole like nobody’s busiiness, it would seem).

This act is so good for the customers and so good for the strip club owners’ business in comparison to the normal girl’s antics that he turns a blind eye when his new zombie-gal starts eating the odd customer after her act. Meanwhile, the other girls are getting restless and want in on the action, and so with the help of Jenna’s zombie stripper, they start to become undead strippers too. Just quite why none of these gals is purely interested in eating people as opposed to getting naked and prancing about on a stage isn’t satisfactorarily explained but it’s entertaining enough and makes for a fun film.

Things obviously can’t go on for very long and things come to a head when Jenna Jameson and her nearest zombie stripper" rival start tearing each other apart on stage while the rest of the military arrive to clean the place up. Everything gets taken care of and I’m not able to really give you any spoilers I’m afraid because, even though I only watched it a week ago, I’ve already forgotten the ending to the movie. It wasn’t a let down or anti-climax though otherwise it would have stuck in my memory for longer.

Zombie Strippers is another entry into the genre of films with a certain hip self awaereness of their own silliness and which are happy to display that with a certain tongue in cheek attitude which almost (watch out Robert England!) but not quite crosses into the realm of “camp”. Actually, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it has it’s tongue firmly planted in soneone elses cheek... and it’s latching on with the teeth and having a good chew. I was certainly please I purchased it to give it a spin (hey, I’m rarely dissapointed when I pay for a DVD and it only costs me two quid) and if you’re into trashy, horror movies with lots of naked female flesh, gory zombie effects and military style “bullet hit” shenannigans then you surely won’t be dissapointed in this one. And seriously folks... at two quid you can’t go wrong!

Jurassic Park

Raiders Of The Lost Park

Jurassic Park 1993 US

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Screening at UK cinemas for two weeks only.

Warning: Big dinosaur sized spoilers on this one...

if you seriously haven’t seen this movie before.

You know I couldn’t believe, when I heard the news of Jurassic Parks limited re-release at the cinemas, that it had been 20 years since I first went to the cinema to see it. The most I would have said it had been out was maybe seven or eight years. Well, as it happens I was right to an extent. It hadn’t been 20 years... I checked and it’s only been 18. What the heck? Drumming up business for BluRay sales and such like. Shame on you Mr. Spielberg. I remember a time when it was “all about the movies”.

Still, I’m not complaining too hard. It’s definitely a classic film and a bit of a masterpiece for one of America's most commercial movie makers. I’ve always liked the film and it truly deserves the status it holds with film enthusiasts and here’s why...

Jurassic Park is one of those movies which very much takes the Hollywood line of “cause and effect” cinema to its most resilient and unshakeable and, though I’ve never been an admirer of that A leads to B leads to C kind of linear and logical progression in US moviemaking... it has to be said that when a movie of this stature is released, and that whole way of focussing and sharpening a script until everything (and I mean everything) in it is relevant to what comes after and before it, then just occasionally it’s a real pleasure to be watching a movie that gets it all so right.

Starting off with a very bleak opening sequence that completely killed the illusion created by its almost cutesy, cuddly advertising, Spielberg does exactly the same thing that David Lynch did with Wild At Heart... and that is to demonstrate just how dangerous one of the main (non-human in this case) characters can be. After a few, almost atonal scene setting notes from Johnny Williams score play out to start off and continue through the sequence, we get a truly great piece of film-making where some well equipped “experts” try to transfer a Velociraptor from a cage into its enclosure. Of course something goes wrong and in an absolutely brilliant and very chilling sequence comprising of sound and rustling foliage in which we never actually see the dinosaur, a man is dragged into the cage to be eaten. The disturbing impact of this and the foreknowledge that even a bunch of well-equipped specialists could not compete with this particular breed of dinosaur does a lot to the way in which you view the rest of the film. You can watch people make googoo eyes at cutesy Brontosaurus’ and Triceratops’ all you like but you know that your central characters are really going to have to tread through the movie carefully if they want to make it back out alive.

From there on, the movie never lets up the pace (even in the talkier sections) and everything thats said or focussed on in one sequence has some kind of pay off in a later scene... all except one. Nedrys “samples” which he’s stolen from the super-rich owner John Hammond (played charmingly by Richard Attenborough in the movie but who is actually almost a villainous character in the original novel) are buried in their shaving foam tin protector under some wet mud while Nedrys is being chomped up by a roving dinosaur. This was possibly left in to be picked up on in a sequel but, ultimately, neither of the two Jurassic Park sequels chose to pick up on this little gift to future filmmakers in the franchise.

Other than that slight detour, though, it really is full steam ahead on this movie in which Spielberg really shows us he is one of the true “children of Hitchcock” in the way he controls the audience thrills and suspense. People forget how dark a movie this one actually is and frequently take very young kids to see it. There was a 6 or 7 year old in the audience behind me when I revisited this in the cinema the other night and he never made it past the break out of the Tryannosaurus Rex before his dad had to remove him from the auditorium. Spielberg even manages to throw in a cross cut set of sequences where Laura Dern and Samuel L. Jackson attempt to get the park booted up again while Sam Neill and two kids are climbing down a dead electric fence. The suspense across these two sequences is tremendous because you know that if one group are successful in their endeavour, the electric fence is going to spring back into life and one of our other characters will suddenly be toast.

The one thing I would flag up as slightly underwhelming though is the CGI work in the movie. I know it’s because of this movie that George Lucas realised that the effects were such that he could move ahead again on his Star Wars movies and finally shoot the prequel trilogy but, seriously, the effects didn’t look that great back in 1993 (especially the Brontosaurus animations) and they really don’t hold up well today when they are being screened on digital equipment. I’ve noticed this before but some of this digital stuff seems to make old effects movies look worse and certainly makes some of the stuff really look like its laying on a separate plate within a shot. This is not good and the only thing that I could throw up in its defence is to remind people that CGI hasn’t really got that much better in recent years than it was back then... especially when it comes to dinosaurs. Have you seen those awful CGI effects in the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong? And Yoda looks more like an animated cartoon these days than a real person (of course he's a real person, don’t be näive).

Packed full of some great and iconic moments (including a sound activated glass of water which is a steal from the start of the sequence of the tanks rolling in at the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia from The Unbearable Lightness Of Being) it was truly a joy to rewatch this movie in a cinema again. Jurassic Park really is like a well oiled machine... a big, well oiled, movie making machine which really knows how to reach the audience and push the right emotional buttons to engage with that audience. Especially with the assistance of Johnny Williams melodic and mostly sugary score which, though it doesn’t musically reference the 1933 Max Steiner scored version of King Kong like the music in the first sequel to Jurassic Park did in one place, has loads going for it and even the most casual viewer will most likely have at least one or two of the main, pulse pounding tunes lodged in their heads for a good deal of time after their screening.

You know, I remembered there’s a shot where a girl falls out of a heating vent, is caught by her friends and pulled back in right as a Velociraptor makes a jump for her leg and just misses... I clearly recall that back in 1993 I was so on the edge of my seat by this point in the movie that my right leg gave an involuntary kick as if to kick the Raptor away from me at that moment. I’m glad to say that, this time around, I had sufficient control of my bodily functions to not get caught out like that again but as I was watching it I realised that, really, there is a lot of power oozing out between the frames of this movie. It really is one of the great American works of commercially accessible art and it really needs to be taken out of the closet every ten or so years and appreciated and celebrated all over again. Every now and again these days, Hollywood is still capable of making, not just a good or halfway decent movie, but a really great film. Jurassic Park is one of them.

Big Tits Zombie 3D

Bust Top

Big Tits Zombie 3D 2010 Japan

Directed by Takao Nakano

Company Region 2 DVD

I suppose one wouldn’t go into a movie with a title like Big Tits Zombie 3D without guessing that this will probably be one of the less serious entries into the tiring-but-shows-no-sign-of-running-out-of-steam zombie genre. Bearing in mind that the film was originally called Kyonyu Dragon in it’s own country (presumably the title of the manga it’s based on), I find it hard to believe that the marketing people decided that the somewhat risque name Big Tits Zombie would attract a large percentage of the cinema going audience in this country... there are strings attached with that kind of titling ploy. “Oh, what are you going to watch tonight dear?” “Um... nothing much... just some zombie movie.” “Oh... what’s it called darling?” “Err... I forget.” At least, that’s how I would imagine the scenario would play out in some households.

Of course the big plus with a name like that is the extra you get out of the sheer incredulity of the title... how can you pass up seeing this one? And so, being mildly but sensibly and cautiously incredulous, I waited with baited breath for Big Tits Zombie to come around to my local multiplex in all it’s glorious “oot-and-in-yer-face” 3D and play to similarly “incredulated” crowds. Packing them in the aisles, I thought to myself.

Alas, while still awaiting said tribute to the bosom of the undead, I came across a copy of the film going for a fiver with two pairs of free 3D glasses in Fopp records a couple of months ago. This put paid to my hopes that such a finely marketed movie would be playing at a cinema near me anytime soon... still, there was no way I was going to miss out on the latest example of, no doubt inventive, Japanese gore fests. I remembered the last one I reviewed actually had buildings in it that bled great gouts of arterial spray when they were being trashed by a giant automaton (you can read that review here) and I also remembered realising that these Japanese movies were getting a little more aware of the lack of seriousness with which the audience is treating them (whilst devouring their blood soaked content greedily).

The pre-credit introduction on this DVD by the director, before the film plays out, told me everything I’d needed to know about this movie. He said, quite clearly, that he wanted the audience to watch and laugh with the film (well, yeah, I would have done that anyway, believe me) and also that he’d started working on it in February and that it was in cinemas by, I think he said May of the same year. Yep... that would explain why this film has slightly lower production values than some of its cinematic cousins like The Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police. Some of it looks a bit ropey and the zombie make-ups are definitely played for laughs... think The Toxic Avenger rather than Zombie Flesh Eaters.

Even though it does have some pretty manky sets and a “shot on video” kind of feel to it, this story of a troupe of “female dancers” who are sent to a “resort” to “dance” for cash does have it’s moments. There are some nice, bizarre one-liners in the film (assuming the english subtitles can be trusted), and a couple of quite interesting scenes which will stick in my memory for a while. One is where we see two zombies playing table tennis and using an eyeball for the ball (their attitude of a pursuit for healthy sports as opposed to flesh guzzling is not actually explained) and another involves one of the main female protagonists turning into a zombie after an early bite wound which, apparently, gives her special powers of being able to use her naked vagina as a flame thrower. This is not the most subtle of zombie movies and nor did it need to be in a genre which is not known for its subtlety in the first place.

The 3D scenes in the movie take place randomly but you are pre-warned when one of these scenes is about to turn up by an icon of 3D glasses appearing in the top left of the screen with a six second countdown on it. It’s then a mad scramble to reach around and grab your 3D glasses while you concentrate on trying to keep your hand out of your cup of tea and scalding yourself before you can be rewarded for your effort with a 3D effect that seems to shift from being okay some of the time but mostly shows up as a ghosted image slightly to the right and superimposed over the main image, which would probably destroy your eyesight permanently if not for the fact that the 3D scenes are actually few and far between.

At the end of the day, Big Tits Zombie 3D is not a bad watch if you’re as curious as I was to know where the new wave of ultra-violent, ultra-tongue-in-cheek Japanese movies are up to at the moment. Especially when the DVD is so cheap. Be warned though, while everybody in the movie is “ever so” over-the-top enthusiastic, these are not the greatest actors and actresses in the world. Watch at your peril but if you do decide to give this movie a spin, please get back to me on the rationale behind the title of the movie because, while there are examples of both undead, flesh gorging ghouls and nubile and bounteous bosoms on show, I didn’t once spot a zombie that could fit the character description so prominently and, perhaps buxomly, displayed in this proud movie’s title.

Martyrs

Martyr, My Dear

Martyrs France/Canada 2008

Directed by Pascal Laugier

The Weinstein Company Region 1

Warning: Slight spoilers on this one.

You know, when I first heard about Martyrs, when it was doing the festival circuits a few years back, I was gagging to see it. Not because I like the so-called “torture-porn” subgenre of horror movies that seem to have become so popular over the last half a decade or so... I’ve seen both the first Saw and the first Hostel movies and frankly I could have done without either in my life (and especially since they’re not actually horror movies but movies about killing and killers). It’s not a genre I’m that interested in, to be truthful. Films which are tailored to deliver gore and suffering as both the method and the result of their own madness somehow kind of take the edge off things a little. They’re not great movies as a rule... at least that’s the way I see them.

But I was interested in seeing Martyrs because I’d heard that people at Frightfest were throwing up in the aisles. Seriously people... at Frightfest, a film festival which caters to hardened fans of all kinds of horror movies... people were getting seriously freaked out by this movie, for some reason. So as soon it was out on US DVD I picked one up and, you know what, for some strange reason I’ve just never got around to watching it until now... could have waited for the UK edition to arrive the speed I get to watch these things at.

So anyway... I took a look at Martyrs last night and was both impressed and also unimpressed by this movie at the same time. Impressed because it was so much more in terms of the art of film-making than I was expecting from it and also unimpressed because it’s really not anything which lives up to the hype of its initial screening reactions. Shame on the Frightfest audiences if they gave this such an inadvertent but glowing endorsement.

Okay... so Martyrs is a well made piece of cinematic art which is like two films in one. It feels, especially for the first half, like a grungy 70s exploitation film from Sweden and you can imagine an eyepatch wearing Christina Lindberg turning up in this exact same movie if this had been made 40 years ago. It’s got the right kind of vibe.

The movie starts off strong with a pre-credits sequence of a young girl escaping from her unknown captors who have been systematically torturing her for a long period of time. As the credits progress and you get to know her and see her growing up with her friend at an orphanage, you see she is both terrorised by her memories and... terrorised by a fast moving shadowy figure who she wants to escape from at all costs. Now I really didn’t know much, if anything, of the plot of this film before I started it but it was at this point, just before the title card comes up at the end of the opening credits, that I realised there was a twist in this movie... and I immediately figured out wat it was. After another quarter of an hour, where the grown up girl goes on a rampage with a shotgun for payback time, I was pretty darned sure that at least one of the characters in this movie was not real. I’m not saying who that is in this review but... it seemed pretty obvious to me what was going on. The strength of this particular film, though, is that it reveals the twist about a third of the way through, just after one character’s friend comes to the rescue to help clear the bloody carnage and bodies from the house.

And then, after a little while more, something else I won’t reveal happens, which is again fairly obvious... it’s actually quite painfully inevitable actually, and the film goes into this newish, commercial “torture-porn” subgenre but, it has to be said, that although this film does have some gory violence, most of that takes place within the first half of the film... the later sequences are actually quite calm in places as the tortures inflicted on one of the girls are either shown as a "movie magic" montage or take place off screen. Frankly, the whole thing has a sense of reality to it because Pascal Laugier turns out to be a fine director who is a bit of an artist. However, it also has to be said that there’s not much to see here in terms of any shock value or such... the kinds of things which might satisfy a regular “horror” audience. And this really isn’t a horror movie anyway.

What it does have going for it, is a quite nice little ending sequence which stems from the motivation of the girl’s torturers and which, as suggested by the title of the film, lends a kind of quasi-religious tone to the movie and I’m thinking... well, I don’t know but... maybe the religious angle of the picture is what disturbed audiences so much a couple of years ago when this thing was getting seen? I don’t really see why there was all the furore over this movie myself and, truth be told, I’m not even sure at what part of the film audiences began to lose it, but my one straw I can clutch at before assuming everyone has gone absolutely insane for making a big deal about this one... asides from the obvious talent and artistry of the director... is because of the pseudo-religious ingredients of the film. Because, frankly, I find movies which devalue the consequences of violence and turn it into some glib entertainment for the masses, like the Saw and Hostel movies, far more disturbing in tone and also, as it happens, far more gorier than anything seen in Martyrs.

For Martyrs, you see, is impressive as a well put together film with believable performances but it’s not something which is going to visually burn into the collective visual cortex of an audience like the eye slashing scene from Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andaleau, for instance. It does, though, as I said, have a nice ending with an extra tease at the end, the first part of which, after a sequence which is quite reminiscent of the end sections of Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is very much like the final shots in Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation... if you’ve seen both Lost In Translation and Martyrs you’ll probably know exactly what I mean. The end icing on the cake, where the final solution is denied both the “audience” in the movie and also the audience watching the movie, could be construed as a brilliant tease by the writer/director or, perhaps, a cop out because you can’t really reveal what can’t be known.

Either way, Martyrs is a nicely made if inconsequential thriller... to be fair I don’t think the torture-porn genre of horror has really any right to call itself a sub-genre of horror... they’re just extreme thrillers, no more no less. So the question I keep asking myself, as I come to the end of this review, is would I recommend this film to other people? Well, in all honesty, if you’re looking for an extreme thriller which will shock or at least disturb you... I’d say give this one a miss. If, however, you want to see a well directed movie and don’t mind some gore with some religious, cod-philosophy overtones on it... yeah, give it a watch. It’s a competently made movie by someone who’s bound to go on to better things. It’s just not quite something I’d put on for the extra easily squeamish though... all things considered.

Doctor Who: Closing Time

Welcome Mat

Doctor Who: Closing Time

Airdate: September 24th 2011. UK. BBC1

Warning: Timey wimey spoilers.

Ok, so that wasn’t a bad episode then. Was looking forward to it quite a bit more than I enjoyed it, to be fair (yeah, set myself up for a fall there) but I think part of the problem for me was... in an episode which guested James Corden (Craig) and was a sequel to last season’s The Lodger, I was hoping to see at lot more of Daisy Haggard as his partner Sophie than just a couple of bookends to the main storyline this week.

However, it really was a nice piece of writing in spite of this... Craig being left with the baby and the comedy antics of The Doctor playing against the two of them was all very welcome and it was also nice to see Linda Baron returning to Doctor Who for the third time (I think it counts as three, at least in terms of "television" appearances in the show, even though her first appearance opposite William Hartnell was actually just her voice singing a song). I always used to fancy her in Open All Hours when I was a kid... gave me a completely different spin on that show’s title in my adolescent brain. Here, though, she was just as lovely as ever, even when she was literally “left holding the baby” at one point towards the end of the show.

So what we seem to have here is an excuse for a cyberman story and, if truth be told, that seemed to be all it was... an excuse for a cyberman story. For a little while there, from its facial damage and the fact that it had an arm replaced, I thought it was exactly the same cyberman that featured in The Pandorica Opens season from last year... but I’ve had a closer look at the images now and it doesn’t look like it’s the same character... which is a shame. Would have been nice to have a stonehenge connection!

So... nice little episode, big on broad comedy, not so good maybe on the little details? Couldn’t help but notice that the cyber-conversion process, as it took hold of Craig, was a lot less bloody and quick than we’d previously been led to believe by the show's more recent incarnation. Frankly, I really hate it when they change well established details of a substantial historical legacy like this purely in favour of giving the audience a dramatic moment. It totally didn’t work for me and what could have been a great and powerful TV moment, Craig’s death and the orphaning of his son purely because he “knows” The Doctor... was snatched from us by a not terribly well done piece of... oh... “TV magic”?

Also not good that The Silence weren't acknowledged until the end... when River was nabbed by... well if the trailers were anything to go by, either a future or past version of herself... which I sincerely believe is what Steven Moffat probably wants us to think, so I’m almost ruling that one out in my head because, honestly, it’s too obvious isn't it?

And we’re also meant to think it was River Song in that lake (yeah, that was kinda obvious from day 1 on this series) but again, we’ve only caught a glimpse of her in a water tank and so far nobody has mentioned the little girl (or whoever) regenerating.

So will she regenerate into the eyepatch lady or, indeed, regenerate into The Doctor... or both? I have no idea and I’ve stopped caring about the details and specifics of next weeks double revelation... as long as everything makes sense and we reach our final solution largely entertained then I’ll be happy with it.

Couple of really good things happen in this one though. Amy and Rory, for example, make a totally unexpected appearance (Woohoo... I love it when this show can actually surprise me for once) and it was also nice to see where The Doctor got his cowboy hat seen in the opening episode of this series from (I’m not telling you that one, go and watch it to find out). And there was also a quick reminder, towards the end of the episode, about “the question being asked”.

Well then... “the question is asked” is it? What question is that then, do we think? Could it possibly be... “Will You marry Me?” Is all this action and destruction just an elaborate set up to get The Doctor to ask for River Song’s hand in marriage? Perhaps. Like I said before... I’m not going to sweat the details. For alll I know, after all, Matt Smith has not signed on for another season and River Song is the new Doctor. Bit of a stretch I know but... stranger things have happened.

And that’s about all I can say about this weeks episode really... good solid entertainment if, perhaps, lacking in certain areas where logic and “producer’s bravery” could have been paid better heed to. Never mind though... it was still a pretty good episode in terms of being an entertaining time... so looking forward to next week's offering big time. Bet it will be a tad more than just a little fast paced is my guess. They’ve got a lot to cover (and hopefully not make amends for).

Horror Hospital

Confessions Of A

Zombie Instructor

Horror Hospital (aka Computer Killers) 1973 UK

Directed by Antony Balch

Screening as part of a combined presentation of the Classic Horror Campaign and Scala Forever at the Roxy Screen and Bar on September 4th

And so... on to the second part of this extraordinary double bill following on from Black Sunday (reviewed here). After the first movie had shown there were a load of rather generous prize giveaways for answering quiz questions and I won a hardback novel I’m looking forward to reading at some point by correctly identifying that Harry Manfredini was the composer of choice on the Friday the 13th series. Now I have to own up to something here and now about answering that question... even though it’s true I'm really into my soundtracks and I have somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 of the things on CD, I’d never heard of Harry Manfredini until the day before this screening took place, as I really don’t have a lot of time for the American variety of slasher pics such as the Friday the 13th series (preferring to look to the sheer artistry and beauty of an Italian giallo when I’m in a stabby-stabby-naked-sexy-music mood). However, by sheer coincidence my friend and I had been chatting away with a friendly and quite enthusiastically charming American guy who was ordering a custom made iced coffee at the Queen Elizabeth Hall the night before. When I went in to see a seminar on horror film music which was part of a short series of concerts entitled The sound Of Fear, one of the guests was Harry Manfredini, the composer of the Friday the 13th scores... who, it turns out, was the guy we’d been chatting to in the foyer, ordering the iced coffee. So... great way to know the answer to win a prize I reckon.

Anyway, after lady fortune (or in this case ScareSarah) had smiled on me, the lights went dim and we were in for what turned out to be a rare treat... a gravely appalling film called Horror Hospital. This movie was truly an eye opener for me in that it was both cinephile torture and unbelievable fun all in one hit. It really is a great movie to watch where everyone in the cast and crew seemed to be on their own special brand of acid and this was reflected in some really crazy (aka especially incompetent) editing and a sense of on screen chemistry which seemed to be working really well for the actors but possibly less well for some of the members of the audience, it has to be said.

This movie really made my day and was absolutely, trashily brilliant. This one stars, if you want to use that word in this particular context, young generation hero Robin Askwith (playing Jason Jones) who, at the time he was doing this, was just a hairs breadth away from starring in the successful Confessions Of A... series of movies and who had only the year before played Sid James’ son in the movie version of successful British sitcom Bless This House. Now I’ve not personally seen any of the Confessions movies, and I really count myself fortunate in that respect, but I can just tell from the tone of this movie that this was definitely a forerunner to the social attitudes on display in those kinds of movies.

This film is horrendously sexist... but in a good way that only a lot of water passing under the bridge can help to render this stuff in a hazy cloud of nostalgia for a time when things seemed much simpler in life. So while there’s some blatantly obnoxious behaviour in this movie from most of the main leads (some of it rubbing off on the character of Michael Gough’s bizarre mad scientist/clay monster) it’s also truly hilarious to watch and, in a scene on a train which set up the lead actress/love interest (Judy Peters, played by Vanessa Shaw), young Mr. Askwith bought the house down in fits of laughter from the audience with his hip and ingratiating chat up line... “There’s no need to get so uptight about things, I’m not going to rape you!”

There’s no way my mere words can do this justice so I’ll do something I rarely do and put this little link in right here so you can see a two and a bit minute clip I stumbled across on youtube... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aimXehypwd0

Honestly... some of this stuff in here is amazing and people under the age of, say 35, probably won’t understand how natural all of this seemed to us in a time when our media bombardment comprised of TV shows like On The Buses and Love Thy Neighbour and movies like the Carry On... series. Back in the seventies, a fair number of people wouldn’t have recognised the atrocities of this kind of omnipresent demeanor in the arts except for, maybe, the victims of such behaviour themselves.

Horror Hospital is a fun watch dealing with a crazed Michael Gough (Dr. Christian Storm) who has a car which slices the heads off of passers-by and a dwarf sidekick (who I last saw at the Classic Horror Campaign’s screening of Vampire Circus) who steals the show with hammy, over the top readings of his dialogue and who got away with that, probably, because everyone on the set adored him (according to my research). MIchael Gough, is of course, running a "Health Farm", in conjunction with a travel agent for Hairy Holidays, which turns out to be “recruitment” for Storms experiments with removing parts of young people’s brains so they can become his super-strong and obedient zombie army. Jason and Judy are both heading to Storm’s “Health Farm” and soon find themselves "a couple" in danger of zombification... after some gratuitous shower scene nudity and sex shenanigans, of course.

One of the things that struck me as I watched this amazing piece of fluff unfold was just how inappropriate the musical score is. Way over the top. When the film started I saw the composer listed as De Wolfe, who I’d never heard of, but after a while I was pretty sure what was going on with the music. I checked the movie on the International Movie Data Base a week or so after the screening and saw that a music credit for Horror Hospital is not even on there. This pretty much confirmed my suspicions and so I did a little bit more research. The problem with the music is that this 1973 movie had a 1940s, over the top romantic score a lot of the time... and none of the music seemed that much related to a shared concept throughout the movie. And with the arrival of a second lead actor, the hippy called Abraham (played by Kurt Christian), the music suddenly takes a detour and starts playing beat lead, funny sitar funk to completely overplay what is already an over the top performance. It was at this point that I realised this movie had a “needle-drop” soundtrack... that is to say, it has no original music composed for it and the score is assembled from cues from a big music library (this is something that Quentin Tarantino does successfully to this day in his movies but instead of a specially written library he just cribs the scores from other films), which in this case was a fairly famous one, it seems, called De Wolfe. I can honestly say that the clumsy attempts to support the music with what can only be called “some of the most lame-brained and incompetently inappropriate choices ever" only adds another layer of “f*ck me, if I laugh any harder my sides will come undone” to the proceedings.

So, bit of a schizophrenic reaction to this second movie I reckon. Did I like it as a horror movie. No, it was awful on that level. Did I like it as an entertainment. Absolutely... truly genius rubbish which I could happily watch again (and will if I can ever find a decent DVD) and, yes, I would recommend it to anyone wanting a good time with a truly cheesy flick... with the caveat that you need to not be so sensitive to any rampant sexism on display. You can’t do anything about that now anyway and, honestly, watching stuff like this, that’s half the fun.

My thanks to the Classic Horror Campaign and, of course, to the brains behind it, http://twitter.com/#!/cyberschizoid and http://twitter.com/#!/ScareSarah for introducing me to this wonderfully awful slice of “Great British Movie Making” which I thoroughly enjoyed. More great stuff to come, hopefully, from future events from http://www.classichorrorcampaign.com/ so check out their website now and sign their petition for them!