More animation

Been watching Sally Cruikshank's award-winning short from 1975, Quasi at the Quackadero, which is set in an interesting carnival dystopia and its sequel, Make Me Psychic (1978), which isn't as good, despite the appealing fat-bellied Quasi character. Cruikshank's 1987 short, produced by her ex-Corman associate husband Jon Davison (and featuring a thanks to Dick Miller credit), is basically a music video for its composers, Danny Elfman and Oingo Boingo. A lot of 70s student animation has a weird undergraduate thing to it that people would say, "oh it's all made by hippies on drugs", but definitely there is a part of that that is true.


Also watched Canadian animator Gerald Potterton's 1970s adaptations of Wilde's The Selfish Giant and The Happy Prince (1974, narrated by Glynis Johns and Christopher Plummer) and The Remarkable Rocket (1975, with David Niven and Graham Stark), which although undeniably beautiful have this slightly too reverential feel, and feel like better versions of those cheap Australian adaptations of classics, and animations that are not tongue-in-cheek, especially if they outlast their welcome, and Potterton's shorts are half an hour.  The Remarkable Rocket might be the most enjoyable. It is very simplistic, with a range of anthropomorphic national stereotype fireworks, Stark giving us his Indian and his Scouse and his Italian (i.e. his character Tony the Italian trattoria owner in Hi-De-Hi) and Stark clearly gets a bit self-indulgent with his voices. Shorts like the NFB output such as the UPA-esque Potterton-Leacock My Financial Career, the blackly comic Beano-esque EB White adap The Family that Dwelt Apart (1972), Rene Jodoin's experimental  plotless wanders e.g. 1976's Monsieur Pointu and Bretislav Pojar's Mr. Men-esque 1972 short Balablok or the ahead of its time 1963 Potterton-Norman McLaren collaboration Christmas Cracker or John Weldon's 1990 woman's picture To Be and 1991 photomontage The Lump or Cordell Baker's 2002 short Strange invaders (not the crap 80s film but the story of a button-eyed nightmare child) don't outstay their welcome. Especially not the wondrous  ant-mad stop-motion/live action musical crossbreed of Juke Bar (1989). As well as the bizarre 1976 NFB death-umentary Afterlife and the simple 1997 dance sequence of Bully Dance.


Also watched the shorts of George Dunning, like Potterton, an animator on Yellow Submarine, and they're surrealist for the sake of it, Gilliamesque drivel.

The 1973 ABC Depatie Freleng special The Incredible Indelible Magical Physical Mystery Trip is odd, a cutesy but psychedelic mix per US kidvid of the era, two live action kids on an animated Fantastic Voyage inside their smoker Uncle Carl, guided by the anthropomorphic Timer, a Public Service announcement character and featuring lungs moaning about lack of fresh air in their nicotine stained domain.

Also watched Fred Wolf's 1967 short NFB-ish The Box, about a beardy old man pulling girls (that's it) and the pre-Irish move Murakami-Wolf 1971 special The Point, a cutesy Harry Nilsson-scored allegory with (depending on the version) Dustin Hoffman, "friend of Rolf" Alan Thicke or Ringo Starr, and Brady Bunch kid Mike Lookinland as a kid with a round head in a world where everyone has pointy heads so he wears a pointy hat cos he doesn't have a point. Also saw the trippy but sugary Puff the Magic Dragon specials they did with added weirdness such as Puff helping liars, orphans and kids with an imaginary friend called Mr. Nobody, a duck in a feathered saucepan hat. The Magic Pear Tree (1967), another Murakami short with Agnes Moorehead as a French princess. It's very caricatured, and somehow American shorts lack the strangeness and well, how else can I put it, sheer Canadian wit.
And also a few shorts by John Hubley, whose style I don't really enjoy - because it's almost identical to Charley Says. And thus they feel oddly preachy even when not.

Though in terms of NFB-like ability, the simple but pleasing children's book adaptations of Weston Woods e.g. Gene Deitch's creepy Teeny Tiny and the Witch-Woman (1980, narrated by Marie Rosulkova, the American tourist in possibly the greatest sci-fi film of the 1970s, Tomorrow, I Shall Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea*) and Deitch's Tomi Ungerer adap The Beast of Monsieur Racine come close.  Also saw Weston Woods' Harold and the Purple Crayon (1971, based on a book that possibly inspired Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings). Deitch's stuff was mostly post-his UPA days done in Eastern Europe like the uplifting underage soldier tale of Munro (1960, which surely inspired Grampa Simpson's youth) and looks appealing because it's based on a Jules Feiffer story.

Also watched the 1971 Spike Milligan-narrated video for Cat Stevens' Moonshadow, with a little lad in a top hat, one of those ITV region fillers like Rondo Veneziano or the Butterfly Ball by Halas-Batchelor.




Also looked at the popular 1970s Hungarian-TVNZ Gustav shorts, which are about a rather seedy middle-aged bald man going about his life, basically a cartoon Reggie Perrin, but with the odd transvestite bridal fantasy and dinosaur encounter thrown in, and an episode called "Gustav is a Muff".


I've also been trying to delve my toes into Yugoslavian animation, having seen Zagreb film's shape-changing sporadically coloured surrealist journey and seeming Disney satire and Oscar submission Diary (1974) full of striking images such as the bouncing micro-universes in cubes.   Their Cypporat/Surrogat by Dusan Vukotic is very a UPA-esque genii-related Tales from the Crypt-like twist in the tale and 1959's Cow On The Moon is similar modernist, though I couldn't tell if the Angelica from Rugrats-ish little girl is the titular cow, as an actual cow only features briefly. Has a neat bucket-and-aerial headed "alien" disguise.  In the 70s, we got the witty Benidorm-set insomniac's battle Tup-Tup (1972), (featuring a nude lady with grotesquely droopy boobs and a flying Red Bull ad-esque postman and kissing a Moomin-like hippo-thing in a crown that becomes a princess in a grave) and the Deux-Deux-esque radiophonic-soundtracked rivals of Learning to Walk (1978),  By the 1980s, they were making Posla koka u ducan, a Yugoslavian music video featuring a clucking chicken leading a funny animal disco. There's a lot of similarities with the NFB, to the extent, that one of their guiding lights, Zlatko Grgic made the NFB's Hot Stuff, amongst others.





The Magic Pony (1977) - a remake of a seminal Soyuzmultfilm film, that inspired Disney, this one of the few Soyuzmultfilm animations to reach a western audience, dubbed by Gadabout Gaddis communications with the voices of Hans Conried and Joanie from Happy Days. Has that folky feel Soyuzmultfilm specialise in, and were dubbed for PBS and hosted by Mikhail Baryshnikov, which then resulted in a lawsuit.  But this is also a typical "magic horse" film, like the Last Unicorn, but better animated and not as psychotronically weird.

Fyodor Kitruk, who did Soyuzmultfilm's Winnie the Pooh also did Great Troubles (1961), a sort of domestic sitcom told in child's drawings featuring dancing to Soviet rock and roll, narrated by a woman with a Russian "50s voice actress dubbing child" voice, and the modernist photomontage of Story of One Crime (1962) which features an extraordinary range of images - live action footage on television and even creating the platform videogame 20 years early. His Man in the Frame (1965) and the Bob Marley-on-a-desert-island-plus-some-scientists fun of Island (1973).

Also saw the most interesting Soyuzmultfilm, Robert Silverberg adaptation Contract (1985), a very strange Soviet Metal Hurlant sci-fi with a matchbox, a cashier cat-bot and a disco hosted by a Max Quordlepleen-type.

And finally after a while tracking, saw Bretislav Pojar's Elahw the Whale from 1977, the charming tale of a whale newsagent. Yes, really. Also features a grumpy suitcase-hatted cat.

Been watching the Herbs/Parsley the Lion. Charming but every ep the same.

Have been sampling Ladislas Starewich's stuff e.g. 1933's The Mascot and his early re-animations of dead ants have a spooky, uncanny valley feel - like if Toy Story was a found footage film from the early 20th century.

Also been for the first time, seeing Ray Harryhausen's early fairy tale adaptations, and the dolls are terrifying, Auton-esque blank-eyed things. No wonder monsters are his first love. It says something when Humpty Dumpty for once is the jolliest looking creature. Even the witch in Hansel and Gretel is actually quite normal compared to the titular grotesque charity box-like sprogs.

Also been reading Animation - The Global History and the work of Paul Grimault (whose unfinished and rather strange Dogtanian-esque steampunk epic Mr. Wonderbird ended up in Herschell Gordon Lewis' film Jimmy the Boy Wonder), e.g. the steampunky LES PASSAGERS DE LA GRANDE OURSE and the attractive but very odd to look at work of Nazi animator Hans Fischerkoesen. A lot of early 2-D animation, especially immediately post-Disney is strange, it's pretty but it almost feels too hard to be matching Disney, and therefore though there will be some invention, it feels  very pleasant but very generic. Found the work of Columbia's early animations from the 30s sickly sweet, though.

*Looking at a list of 70s SF films, and I find it weird that a lot of them I'm indifferent on. Too many dull dystopias and cold, characterless scientific experiments. Not enough fun. Worthy, interesting but not that enthralling films like the Andromeda Strain, Rollerball (Death Race 2000 is better), the Terminal Man, the Forbin Project, the Groundstar Conspiracy, ZPG, the Stepford Wives, THX 1138, Slaughterhouse 5, I realise that I'm not really a literally SF man. Then again, I'm not into 50s sci-fi so much. I'm in the middleground, intelligent but fun. I'm more into fun, big concepts.

Animation Roundup

Been watching a lot of animation, mainly foreign stuff.

First with the US stuff.

The 1930s work of Disney collaborator-turned-rival Ub Iwerks, like another ex-Disney hand, David Hand's Animaland try to be too Disney, lovely but dull. Flip the Frog is halfway between a Mickey and a Bugs, trying to be mischievous but quite annoying, similar to Terrytoons like Heckle and Jeckle and even Mighty Mouse who always seemed out of place in his rural Funny Animal world. The John K-Ralph Bakshi series felt more tuned to the superheroic element. 

UPA's stuff is fascinating if not always appealing, their surrealistic style seems to be constructed to hide lack of budget. The Tell-Tale Heart works, almost Eastern European, and with James Mason to boot.  But for example with Gerald McBoing-Boing, there are sign of laziness - clothes are the same colour as skin AND the wall, and it changes, because it is actually transparent skin. Some neat scenes, though - i.e. Gerald in the radio room in a cowboy outfit doing gun noises. I never understand why he can't just impersonate human speech.

I've been delving into the output of National Film Board of Canada. I don't know how. I think their shorts were shown on RTE when I was little, but I have no memory of the shorts themselves, just the logo and the name. Obivously, they have done lots of live action documentaries from the fascinating crazed daredevil profile The Devil At Your Heels (1981) to the disturbing Not A Love Story (1981), and live action fiction - e.g. The Railrodder (1965) - possibly my favourite Buster Keaton, because it is him as an old man, on a final madcap journey through the great white North.


The Owl Who Married A Goose (1974) shows the range of the NFB. Lovely inky black animation, similar to the later Sniffing Bear. Although by the 80s, the likes of Special Delivery, the piano-themed Getting Started (1979, with unusual 3D-like painted backgrounds), the fun fire educational short Hot Stuff (1971), the snaggle-toothed couples' argument The Big Snit (1985) and the Cat Came Back (1989) showed that the NFB were mainly making wobbly Dilbert-esque animations about people or animals in social situations backed by a harmonica score. Still in vogue by the time of 2006’s At Home with Mrs. Hen. The Big Snit's animator, Richard Condie also put his style to effect in the fun John Law and the Mississippi Bubble (1979), about the history of paper money, the medieval-themed Apprentice (1991), the early rough draft short Oh Sure and the early CGI ugliness of La Salla.


Although this style was in the NFB as early as What on Earth (hence why it looks newer than it is) and the witty Spinnolio (1977), where a little puppet gets his wish – of becoming Onslow from Keeping Up Appearances, after the cricket gets eaten.

Also in that often-scratchy Cat Came Back style the lovely geriatric love story George and Rosemary and the biscuit ad-esque Tale of Cinderella Penguin, the UNICEF-sponsored Every Child, which becomes its own making of, and the overlong educational Les Drew’s Every Dog’s Guide to Home Safety, with voices by Cagney and Lacey’s Harvey Atkin, although the 1991 short Every Dog’s Guide to the Playground is more traditionally animated, more sitcommy, with its typewriting blue-furred protagonist. Drew's pollution-themed Dickens spin The Energy Carol (1975) with a blue pig as Marley is also recommended.

The NFB always are attractive, or were, pre-CGI, nothing as grotesquely rudimentary as the Steadman-esque ugliness of British animator Geoff Dunbar’s Ubu (1978), with the voice of  Canadian trailer narrator Bill Mitchell. The NFB always have a soul, like a lot of inventive foreign stop-motion cartoons, there’s no soulless weirdness for the sake of it like the Brothers Quay or even the slightly too pleased for yourself charming but not captivating spirit of the Animated Tales of the World or the Fool and the Flying Ship. A lot of foreign cartoons have this soul, something like the astonishing man-rat love story One Day A Man Bought By House, made by Pjotr Sapegin in Norway, who made for the NFB, the evil Filmfair-like Aria and the Moomins-styled Moms’ Cat.

S.P.L.A.S.H. (1980) has a nice Cosgrove Hall feel.

Also sampled were the Milky Way ad-meets-Tex Avery living comic strip The Persistent Peddler (1988), Disney-esque Get A Job (1985), with the grotesque Carmen Miranda frog-businessman, the natural-themed animation of Sand Castle (1977), Garden of Ecos (1997) and Bydlo (2012) – all about moving nature and the arty, trying to be poignant Subservience (2007), the more recent Skeleton Girl and Uncle Bob’s Hospital Visit, which has the traditional NFB harmonica soundtrack, the uncanny valley Ryan, which with its CGI was a modern break from the norm. One thing about the National Film Board is that there can be shorts from 1966 that look like they are from 1986, and shorts from 2006 that could easily come from 1976, or 1952's the Jay Ward-esque Romance of Transportation in Canada or the early-CGI of 1974's Hunger, both of which could easily come from fifteen years later. They are ageless.
2011’s the Big Drive – a mix of photo-collage, off-model CGI and Clasky-Csupo/Mike Judge esque characters doing their own National Lampoon’s vacation, becoming increasingly freakish and uncomfortable, with added harmonica, then introduces cutesy cats riding the car, and earlier stuff as the surreal documentary-mixed-in-with-metaphorical psychedelic freakout animation of Man – The Polluter (1973) and the Underground Movie where a Scots-accented narration and chunky Noah and Nelly-types experiment on a dog Clockwork Orange style, while the drilling ship they’re all in digs through the various layers of the Earth (1972), as we are taught about limestone and sedimentary layers. That was by Les Drew, who also did the strange Dingles from 1988, about a loving depiction of a possibly-crazy-but-actually-nice cat lady.
Also watched the historical montage of 1990’s Mirrors of Time – which pleasingly feels like a 90s educational videogame, with weird cel-shaded animation, and Asterix-type Romans. Propaganda Message – which has scratchy hand-drawn, hand-shaded animation and French dialogue with comic strip dialogue bubbles as subtitles, to explain the differences between the Canadians and their neighbours.
Mindscape (1976) is very nice and appealingly gothy. It reminded me of the titles to  the BBC's Late Night Story.

A favourite is the witty detachable-eared ex-actor Roger Rabbit-esque yuppie dog in a live action office, Buck Boom of John Weldon’s Real Inside (1984), a former Disney star (“I was in Snow White”) with an obsession for having sex with live action girls, arguing with his live-action prospective boss, familiar character actor Colin Fox.
Bretislaw Pojar’s egg-headed story of caution, To See or Not To See (1969) has cutesy egg-head men turned into spiral ghosts and disturbing human whirlwinds to show us which way is right, Pojar did various shorts for the NFB including the satirical E, featuring bowler-hatted arguments and resembling an educational study on the letter E until a violent denouement.
Also saw the 1995, rather Jim Henson/Cadillacs and Dinosaurs-esque How Dinosaurs Learnt to Fly. Almost every NFB short is at least fun vignette. The quality astounds me. Very few boring adaptations of Pushkin among the gold, like you’d get with Soyuzmultfilm.
Another of the recent ones is the stunning railway dance sequence of Runaway, which reminded me a lot of Belleville Rendezvous, same composer and all. Then, 2012’s Wild Life is stunning, but feels like a Honda ad. Its moving painting style needs narration by Garrison Keillor.

Blackfly (1991) is a Canadian folk story with a nice wobbly style a sequel to the earlier Log Driver's Waltz (1979). Very Canadian, by the McGarrigle Sisters too – Rufus Wainwright’s mum and aunt. Another folk story short the NFB did is the Alberto Frog-esque Frog Went A-Courting. They also did a version of An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly – similar in style to the Cat Came Back (1989).
Cosmic Zoom (1966) is extraordinary. Exactly what the title says.
The Sweater (1980) has that painterly style – like leaky paint, common as the aforementoned style.

Overdose (1994) is poignant – about a happy young boy’s day told in appealing broad-strokes and large head style – then he overworks himself and it all goes wrong.

Yes, that is Peter Ustinov promoting one of the NFB's few cartoon franchises, the limited animation of Peep and the Big Wide World. 

Also been watching the Soviet animations of Soyuzmultfilm, the leading animation company of the Cold War.
Cheburashka – a Monchhichi-esque stop motion character – like a Soviet Rankin/Bass. Apparently, he's a Mickey Mouse figure in Russia, like Soyuzmultfilm's Soviet adaptation of Winnie the Pooh.

Moy zelenyy krokodil – Duncan the Dragon-esque blue crocodile and Babycham cow fall in love, then crocodile turns suicidal and turns into a leaf.

Yuriy Norstein – Tale of Tales (1979)- oddly apocalyptic, painterly photomontage, Gilliamesque mix of figures, autobiographical not unlike Raymond Briggs.

The wondrous Hedgehog in the Fog is like an MR James cartoon – disturbing Soviet hauntologia.

Lisa i zayats – has a bear in floral crown – something woodcut-like, folklorish, and also gets meta, with lots of screens, characters jumping from screen to screen.

Seasons – moving, like a serious cartoon of the Morecambe and Wise Doctor Zhivago Sketch.

Also saw the shorts Choonya – fat pig’s adventures, and Antoshka – with an androgynous Wickie-esque caveboy.

Grey Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood, from 1990, feels more like 1970, but nicely surreal - with the 3 Little Pigs, Musketeers and Red fighting a big bad Wolf. Their later films often feel trapped in an earlier era, as in their 2-D Russian folk village tale Laughter and Grief by the White Sea (1987).

1969’s Bremen Town Musicians – weird half-trad half-surrealist style, James Last-esque score, Soviet’s view of Western music, very odd. Funny animals played seriously. Soyuzmultfilm Boring Pushkin adaps.

Soyuzmultfilm is so strange – because their stuff feels quite basic, in some respects, sometimes they’re stunning, like Hedgehog in the Fog, and other times, they’re basic kidvid, but because they’re Soviet, they can get weird like the baseball-hatted medieval donkey of Bremen Town, but they’re always well-animated, there’s no Hanna-Barbera cheap cuts, there’s always something organic especially Murun Buchstansangur-esque Fru-89. Their views of the world are especially alien - weird views on what little they have seen of American cinema as 1967's Spy Passion, the supposed Godfather spoof Robbery on... (1978) (which has an MGM spoof) and the pale face-people's movie studio-themed Film, Film, Film (1968) (which uses photos of Marilyn Monroe, Buster Keaton,etc), the caveman-themed time-travelling love story of I Shall Give You A  Star,, and the Donald Sutherland-as-Frank Spencer cartoon the Adventures of Vasi Kurolesov (1981). про сидорова вову (1985) is odd, very cutesy, little boy in the army, couldn't tell if it was a comedy or a parable. тайна третьей планеты (1981) and 1953's A Flight to the Moon are very interesting Soviet space operas, the former a fantasy with dustbin-robots and a Goldblum-esque hero and lots of nice designed aliens and worlds including a six-armed Sontaran-type thing, while the latter is an educational "what if?".

Soyuzmultfilm - the Soviet Disney, Hanna-Barbera and NFB all rolled into one. 

As for Soyuzmultfilm rivals, there were Ekran - who then spawned Pilot - makers of Mike, Lu and Og for Cartoon Network and otherwise often disturbing, weird, feel-bad shorts like the b/w Andrei Svislotskiy and the bestiality-themed John Carpenter/Cronenberg-like Hen, My Wife. In contrast, I watched Ekran's considerably jollier Plasticine Crow - like the 2-D stop-motion of the Moomins, its shape-shifter a bit like the tongue twisters in RTE's Bosco. Ekran's Relatives (1993),  about two brothers is especially Csupo-like, but their Soldier's Tale (1983) is much more solemn and painterly.

Remember Mike, Lu and Og - "I can't believe it's not Klasky-Csupo!"
 Although Pilot's Igor Kovalyov would work for Csupo.

Also watched 1935's the New Gulliver, the stop-motion Soviet Jonathan Swift reimagining - which has a weird newsreel-like feel, and nicely grotesque animated characters. Better than the actually quite interestingly designed-though-slightly too Disneyesque Fleischer version of Gulliver's Travels (1939 - where, like its stablemate, Hoppity Goes to Town, every character seems lifted from a character in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves - though some end up looking like Elmer Fudd's inbred family - which clashes with the heavily rotoscoped Gulliver). New Gulliver is by Alexander Ptushko, the maker of such MST3K-friendly Mosfilm/Corman Viking fantasies as the brownface-heavy Arabian/Indian adventure of Sadko, the Sword and the Dragon and Sampo - which often seem to feature pixellation. Ptushko also worked on 1967's  Viy, a "fairytale" which is actually the same story that Bava adapted in 1960's Black Sunday, told in the style of the Singing, Ringing Tree (hence how it get away with being the first Soviet horror film), with flying broomstick scenes and scary gargoyle-goblins and stop-frame teleporting-ageing scenes. Therefore, it might be better than Bava.

I find British animation best from when it comes from between the 60s  and 80s. As a kid, I was kind of disturbed by cartoons where all the voices were done by one middle-aged narrator, even though I liked the series enough., which is I think why I avoided watching much of the 70s Paddington on reruns, and prefered the 1997 Canadian version, although while Michael Hordern voiced the 70s one, the 90s one only had Cyril Shaps!

Because you can never have enough Cyril Shaps.

In terms of British animation, the 50s and beforehand is too quaint, and the 90s post-Aardman, post-Snowman seems to be trying to be very quaint, and aimed at doing specials for C4 that I watched as a kid, but wouldn't watch now. Even in the late 1980s, there is invention like 1988's Rarg, by Tony Collingwood, whose stuff became quite quaint, but there's a Gilliam-esque (not in terms of animation, but in terms of design) approach in the masses of giant babies gathered around a cartoon Michael Gough in a strange clockpunk techno-dream city, similar but darker than their series Oscar's Orchestra. 

The Goffster

I wonder if Cosgrove Hall is to blame. I watched their stuff constantly as a kid. Their stuff is endlessly high quality. Chorlton and the Wheelies from what I've seen of it is fun and it has Joe Lynch doing voices and sneaking in jokes about Dun Laoghaire (and pronouncing it the RTE way too), DangerMouse is fun, the Wind in the Willows is sweet, but I think their trend of sweetness is to blame. dd since their BFG (1989) is one of the best Roald Dahl adaptations,  miles better than what Spielydrawers and his Globe Theatre-running "pantomime dame of legitimate theatre" pal Mark Rylance did. But their stuff does go for either cutesy or in the case of their 1990 short the Fool and the Flying Ship, that nice "you'll like this" (but you'd rather watch Diamonds Are Forever) well-animated but rather static prestige animation based on a folk tale your parents sit you down to watch a la the Animated Tales of the World or the Animated Shakespeare (though IIRC, my mum thought they were too frightening for me).

Though I must watch more Alias the Jester, because Richard Briers as an alien time-travelling Flash-cosplaying dwarf in the time of King Arthur may be the best concept for a television series ever. Fantomcat is rubbish. A British attempt to do a Batman The Animated Series, but with Robert Powell as a feline Adam Adamant. Yes, really.

Watching Bob Godfrey's stuff - which I find a bit nudge nudge wink wink, a bit men's magazine editorial cartoon - though I like that his "Know Your Europeans" list of British heroes includes Virgil Tracy, John Steed, Arfur Daley, Des O'Connor, Roger Moore, Alan Bennett, Custard the Cat, John Cleese, Sid James, etc. 

Also been watching Halas and Batchelor's shorts such as Automania 2000 and The History of Cinema, Flow Diagram, and they are beautifully done, charming, but they are nowhere near as joyous as the NFB. They feel a little "Make Learning Fun" at times, and sometimes as if they are trying to pass themselves off as Canadian, or in the case of 1967's the Question and the Foo Foo stuff, as UPA films.

Also been watching several shorts by Oscar-nominated Dane animator Borge Ring (e.g. the Bruno Bozzetto-referencing Anna and Bella, Run of the Mill, O My Darling, all quite like the NFB - little snippets of life), the grotesque work of Ukraine's Studio Borisfen (makers of BBC's 64 Zoo Lane), and Tallinnfilm's junk-filled portrait of marriage The Triangle from 1982, all weird, colorful, unique, although Borisfen's Bluebeard is nonsensical.

January Part 2 41 And No, I'm Not Reviewing The Terminator - Not Interested. Aliens is Cameron's nearest-decent film.) Orton, Scalawag, Chosen Survivors, Up..., Sneakers, the Kiss, 30s sf, Naked Jungle, the Mask, Eyes Without a Face, Aussie/NZ horror, Canadian films, Devil with Hitler

Crossplot (1969) - Post-Saint Roger Moore vehicle, with a Department S-type teaser pre-credits. Roger Moore is a milk bottle-snatching, swinging ad exec, in scenes with Bernard Lee.  It does feel like it was made for TV, down to very dodgy back projection scenes in a park. It is produced by regular ITC/Moore collaborator Robert S. Baker, so it has a reason to feel like Alexis Kanner appears, still in character from The Prisoner, while the likes of Derek Francis (as angry boss), Francis Matthews and Dudley Sutton have large-ish roles. It gets tiresome pretty quickly, and has a weird Great Race-style Edwardian car show diversion.

Watched a few 70s ITV anthologies. Classics Dark and Dangerous, Haunted, Worlds Beyond -all have a sort of atmospheric mediocrity. A lot have a sameyness. One gets petered out. Shadows, a mix of middle-class hauntings and subTomorrowPeople/Grange Hillness and a good range of character actors. 3/5.

Watched Scalawag (1972) - schmaltzy semi-musical (Lionel Bart!) spaghetti western Treasure Island with Mark Lester, Kirk Douglas,George Eastman, Lesley Anne Down. And Danny DeVito.

The House On Garibaldi Street (-1978) - Despite a fascinating cast and setting (Leo McKern as Ben-Gurion, Alfred Burke as Eichmann), quite boring.

Chosen Survivors (1974) - low budget bats in bomb shelter film, really interesting design, TV movie level cast. Not much else.

"Joe Orton's Loot" (1970) - the OTT "knowing, eccentric performances" a la the Avengers irritate bar Joe Lynch and Milo O'Shea.

Naked Jungle (1954 - B/W) - turgid romantic melodrama starring Chuck Heston, Hispanic William Conrad and guest starring killer ants.

Watching 30s SF - The Tunnel (1933 - B/W) and Things To Come (1936 - B/W). Both visually astounding, but most 30s films sort of alienate me. Things is baffling.

Been watching and enjoying the Up... (1971, (1972, (1973) films. Never been a fan of Pompeii, but the fact it goes disaster at the end makes up for it.

Watched clips of Jerry Lewis' Which Way to the Front (-1970). Set in a Danger 5 ish 70s 40s, unfunny comedy including some Krustyish Japanese jokes.

Watched Sneakers (1992), and just couldn't understand. A bland, characterless "quirky" drama, with not much daring or interest or curiosity.

Watched Stephen Volk's the Kiss (1988). A confusing mess set in New York/Belgian Congo, shot in Montreal.

Dellamore Dellamorte (1994), Charming, well-shot, pretty zombie movie, but the comedy is lost in the dubbing. It's tonally odd, going for Raimi/Jackson splatstick, but has a weirdly genteel flavour rather than going all grotesque. Rupert Everett's best performance. 

The Mangler (1994) - Harry Alan Towers/Tobe Hooper adaptation of the Stephen King spoof, played seriously, why is Robert Englund in callipers and old age makeup that makes him look like Gay Byrne yet talks like the Crypt Keeper? Why does South Africa actually pass quite well as New England in some shots, yet not in others? Why are the old and young women still working in a laundry press that surely would be considered a danger since it publicly eats their co-workers? Why would you throw holy water on a laundry press even if to get rid of a demon?  Why don't they have washing machines? God knows. It looks good for a cheapjack HAT production shot in Africa, but it is bollocks.

The Mask (1961 - b/w) - Canadian 3-D horror, for 1961, quite explicit - with Raiders-esque melting cults and looking because of the 3-D effects, like a late 70s spoof of old horror movies shot on video. It feels quite Mid-Atlantic,and stranger than the likes of the idiotic but earnest"white head on brown body" rampage of The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959 - b/w) or  the more normal/gothy Night of the Eagle or any of the Thriller/Twilight Zone esque cheapies of the time that it resembles in the more normal, non-3D bits. It also has an odd Mid-Atlantic feel, like a British film trying to feel American or vice versa.

Eyes Without A Face (1959 - b/w)  - Atmospheric, not really a horror, but a sort of atmospheric mildly fantasy drama about trying to do the right thing and creating a misfit, and hope, nice Maurice Jarre score.

Footrot Flats (1987) - Beano-esque New Zealand comic strip adaptation animation, fun, breezy but too Kiwi for international audiences.

Long Weekend (1978) - One of those Australian horrors like Next of Kin and even Picnic at Hanging Rock that feel quite  slow, then hit you with some real shock moments of dread, then plod along, then wow you again. A moaning couple bicker through a camping trip because the Harold Robbins reading Michele Dotrice-esque future Neighbours star wife  Briony Behets would rather stay at a hotel, while guitar-strumming husband John Hargreaves wants to live a wastrel Foster's-drinking survivalist delusion. Then, they start ruining nature so nature plays back. The characters are deliberately horrible, both unlikeable and also cruel, mowing down kangaroos, while insects feast on their picnic. Features a cameo by Michael Aitkens, future creator of BBC geriatricom Waiting For God. Like a lot of the Australian suspense films of the era, it seems to be sub-Neighbours drama punctuated by some really strange and intriguing moments (or in the case of Patrick (1978) - The Young Doctors being literally torn apart by telekinesis, and Alison's Birthday (-1979) - John Bluthal's Aussie remake of Bless This House being a front for Satanist child-napping). Here, the drama starts being replaced by more and more weird and intriguing vignettes - a Sindy doll washed up on the beach. A lot of the US animal attack movies are mostly awful melodramas on a TV movie level, or inspired by westerns e.g. the TV movie on mescalin-esque Phase IV (1974), Bug (/1975 - which I can't remember how much I've seen), Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), Night of the Lepus (1972), etc., but this one, although at first seems like an Antipodean counterpart then gets increasingly tense, and is excellently photographed. The soundtrack is great, at first sinister and orchestral, then hissy and pseudo-electronic. The ending, while seemingly inspired by one of the kills in Damien - Omen II (which came out the same year) is memorable, and a fitting end.


Sleeping Dogs (1977) - The film that stared New Zealand cinema. Sam Neill's first film, with some party-fezzed Warren Oates sprinkled about to add some American appeal. Set in a sort of dystopian future.  A gritty, excellently photographed, well-performed thriller.  a sort of dystopian future.  A gritty, excellently photographed, well-performed thriller. It peters out by the end, with a soppy love story and the chase element slowed down, but then it perks up, with an escape in a sheep truck. And it becomes the sort of into the bush manhunt that Neill would return to in Hunt for the Wilderpeople almost forty years later, but even more insane, with explosions and helicopters and the RNZAF.

Mr. Wrong (1984) - Slightly backward/eejity girl buys a haunted Jag. Slow, uneventful New Zealand horror, based on a story by Elizabeth Jane Howard, of the Cazalets fame, script by Geoff Murphy.

The Lost Tribe (1985) - Another NZFC horror. Feels at first like a kids' TV series, i.e. The Boy From Andromeda or Under The Mountain, being narrated by  the daughter of anthropologist John Bach (in one of two roles as brothers). Nicely shot New Zealand vistas until it gets murky. Atmosphere, rather muddled and dated. Also in the same vein is Bridge to Nowhere (-1986), where bushman/NZ cinema staple Bruno Lawrence stalks a bunch of annoying Kiwi teen show rejects including the requisite headband-wearing asshole on a hiking trip. I find a lot of NZ films rather bland, apart from Peter Jackson's work and Strange Behaviour (1981) and Sleeping Dogs/Hunt for the Wilderpeople and the bizarre The Quiet Earth (also with Lawrence). A lot of the early stuff, like Battletruck (1982) and Race for the Yankee Zephyr, and the repulsive Death Warmed Up (1984) seem mired in coproduction deals and confusion as to what they should be. There never feels as much action as there should be.

Goodbye Porkpie (1981) - Another seminal NZ film. Despite an appealing performance by Tony Barry as a jilted flying helmet-clad schlub trying to reunite with his ex, some really gorgeous photography and a quite spectacular flaming Mini stunt, it is let down by the annoying Marjoe Gortner-esque baseball hatted titular delinquent.

The Devil with Hitler (1942 - b/w)/That Nazty Nuisance (1943 - b/w) - Hal Roach comedy shorts about Hitler (lookalike Bobby Watson playing him as a Jewish/Italian ethnic sort) and Mussolini first having to deal with the denizens of Hell judging them and then having adventures with the Japanese (yellowfaced Hirohito double Suikyaki), in Arabia, in the Pacific and with an orangutan. Basically a live action 40s Beano strip. Bizarrely features "the events and characters depicted are fictitious" warning.

Frog Dreaming (1986) - Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, a post-ET Henry Thomas (having already appeared in another Aussie genre vet, Richard Franklin's Cloak and Dagger) is Cody, an American orphan living in Australia  who thinks there is a "bunyip" or a sea monster called Donkegin in the lake, and is aided by two blonde sisters. A post-Doctor Who Katy Manning does her screaming bit again as the girls' mum.  Produced by Harvey Weinstein, who apparently liked the film (maybe, he was a fan of Manning's Dalek photoshoot). Goodbye Porkpie's Tony Barry plays Thomas' guardian, having previously appeared in The Earthling with William Holden and Ricky Schroder - another film where an American child star plays a Yank orphan in the outback). Trenchard-Smith, while not as outrageous as his other films does well with an appealing Children's Film Foundation-style romp, and regular Ozploitation writer Everett De Roche adds various neat touches including an Aborigine named Charlie Pride ("what, like the country and western singer?"). And the whole thing is atmospherically photographed.

The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood (1986) - Strange Newfoundland comedy.  Feels like a student film,  with b/w flashbacks and a few of those sub-Waterford Newfie accents. A lot of Newfie films feel amateurish, i.e. 1992's Secret Nation which doesn't even bother to use stock footage for its fake London scenes, just a black screen and the word "London", though it does have Ken Campbell, and the more lavish Kiefer Sutherland vehicle The Bay Boy (-1984) where Sutherland Jr. wears a flat cap and does an accent not unlike his da in The Eagle Has Landed.

The Peanut Butter Solution (1985) - Strange Canadian kids' film, very downbeat feel, with a boy regaling us how he gave money to a tramp, and then goes bald - when he sees some ghosts and falls out of a window down some masonry, so he uses a hair growth formula made out of peanut butter, but his hair won't stop growing. Has a character put peanut butter on his crotch to make his pubes grow. Very Canadian, tonally all over the place, entertaining, with songs by teenage Celine Dion.  Part of Rock Demers' Tales for All, alongside The Great Land of Small (1986), a Cirque Du Soleil-starring fantasy that despite a pre-Twin Peaks Michael J. Anderson as a burping, floating dwarf never gets past feeling like a shameless cash-in on The Neverending Story, and the rather fun-looking time-passing Australian coproduction Tommy Tricker and The Stamp Traveller, which features kids transported throughout the world via magic stamps that briefly turn them into cartoons and again features Tony Barry. Canadian kids' films are weird, even the earlier likes of the sub-Krofft Jacob Two Meets The Hooded Fang (1972), Mystery of the Million Dollar Hockey Puck (1975) and The Christmas Martian (1971),which feel like Disney films made by people who have never seen a Disney live action caper. The Million Dollar Hockey Puck has kids having romantic dinners and a snowmobile chase in a junkyard.

Demers' film The Dog that Stopped the War (1984 - its credits begin with the early Miramax logo, a montage of all the awards it has won  - all of which seem to be toys bought from a boot sale) is a good-natured if preachy story of snowball fights, but it is overlong.

Eyes of Fire (1983) - US period horror, feels like a  solemn PBS drama that might play well in the US but does bugger all in the UK/Ireland. The end scene - with shapechanging FX out of a kids' film of the period is odd. The Americans doing olde worlde accents kind of ruin it.  Features future Ninja Turtle/Yakko Warner/Pinky Mouse  Rob Paulsen doing a less convincing Britoid accent than his Cockney in Pinky and the Brain.

Discoveries of 2016

I made this list for Rupert Pupkin Speaks, but somehow it never got published last year.
So here it is. And yes, my writing style has changed. But this was written for a slightly different market.

Discoveries of the Year

Fedora (1978)

Bonkers Europudding potboiler with obligatory bad dubbing and Munich doubling as England and California. Directed by Billy Wilder, it resembles a cross between his own Sunset Boulevard and an episode of Tales of the Unexpected (complete with José Ferrer). William Holden plays a Hollywood producer who investigates the apparent suicide of his ex-lover, the titular ageless Garbo-esque movie queen (Marthe Keller) who he tried to rescue from a life of being cooped up in a castle in Crete with Ferrer's mad scientist with a gold earring, Frances Sternhagen's Stephanie Cole-esque maid and a mad old wheelchair-bound countess in a black veil. Then discovers that the mad Countess is an old, disfigured Fedora - played by Hildegard "the Lost Continent" Knef, driven mad by Ferrer's injections of animal semen, and that the seemingly ever-young Fedora is her daughter. And from here on it gets rough. Henry Fonda and Michael York appear as themselves, the latter becoming an object of infatuation with "Fedora" keeping Logan's Run pinups hidden behind the wallpaper. With Ferdy "Grace Brothers' Ten Pound Perfume" Mayne and Stephen "Gold Monkey" Collins as a Hollywood director and young Holden respectively, and Mario "Don Camillo" Adorf and Gottfried "the mad Soviet in Goldeneye" John appear as Greeks to please the German co-producers.

11 Harrowhouse (1975)

Interesting if not very good heist movie with Charles Grodin and Candice Bergen as idiotic Americans taking the mick of British society while embroiled in a heist with English lord Trevor Howard and dying banker James Mason with the help of a cockroach. Proper bloody British cast including Johnny Sconny Gielgud, Peter Vaughan, Jacks Watson and Watling, Clive "always the Governor" Morton, Glynn "Dave the Winchester" Edwards and Cyril Shaps. With 70s easy-listening theme par excellence by Peters and Lee.

Jacqueline Susann's Once is Not Enough (1975)

Turgid bonkbuster. Hollywood producer Kirk Douglas marries richest woman in the world Alexis Smith, while she shags Garbo-esque movie queen Melina Mercouri. Kirk's daughter Deborah Raffin is lured into an incestuous relationship with her cousin George Hamilton only to fall for sugar daddy David Janssen in a dry run for her later screen romance with Charles Bronson in Death Wish III. Highlight of the film is a bizarre appearance early on of BBC TV variety host/"Doctor Who" Time Lord president Leonard Sachs as a Swiss doctor with an outrageous accent coupled with his Good Old Days word-precision, presumably only appearing either as a favour to British director Guy Green or for a free holiday in Geneva.

Alf's Button Afloat (1937)

Wonderfully odd British comedy, basically a cinematic panto, complete with bare, traditionally panto-esque weird hybrid Chinese/Arabic generic "Eastern" setting in the opening. Alastair Sim is the camp, extremely un-Arabic genie who grants wishes based upon the misunderstandings of the British comedy troupe the Crazy Gang. "Well, stripe me pink!" 

The French Atlantic Affair (1979)

Technically a miniseries, but my first Warner Archive purchase, and what can I say, the Love Boat goes to Jonestown was how I described to fellow site contributors William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold, and I guess that'd be a sufficient comparison. Produced by Aaron Spelling like LB, it's set on a French ocean liner, the SS Festivale (played by the real life SS Festivale cruise ship, the difference is in size and scale and is obvious so they use the Queen Mary for bits too, I believe). It begins grey stock footage of New York Pier and a model cruise liner in full color pasted over, and from there, a crazed terrorist/UFO cult leader, Fr. Craig Dunleavy of the Church of the Cosmic Path (Telly Savalas, doing the same religious terrorist schtick he did in Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, the Equalizer, even the Dirty Dozen to an extent) has gathered a hundred and something members of his cult as his undercover passengers to hold the ship hostage  (they are described at one point as ""paranoid primadonnas" disguised as inspectors to sell the ship to Texans to turn it into a floating Texan bordello) and with an army of creepily-permed henchmen including John Rubinstein's computer expert who has a Julia McKenzie lookalike wife (Rebecca "the Boogens" Balding) and believes that his computer has pointed to Telly being God, presumably due to his giant medallion. On board is Chad Everett as fellow medallion man Harold Columbine, a Harold Robbins roman a clef who has written a Sybil Fawlty-aimed bonkbuster about the Cosmic Path, which Dunleavy believes is his new bible or something. Michelle Philips of the Mamas and the Papas plays the cruise director love interest, Shelley Winters does her Poseidon schtick wearing the same hat she does in Tentacles, while her fellow Poseidon Adventurer Stella Stevens plays another cultist who dies while Savalas makes out with her and then drops her overboard. Carolyn "Morticia" Jones plays a middle-aged tourist dressed like one of the Rubettes, Louis Jourdan the captain, and meanwhile in France (mostly genuine shooting in Paris with a few ropey studio interiors), Jose "he can play any nationality" Ferrer is the President, and Donald Pleasence is the head of the French Atlantic line whose VP James Coco leaves due to fat jibes. French import Marie France Pisier (after her failed Hollywood career in The Other Side of Midnight) plays villainous ransom-taker Richard Jordan's hooker floozy, while Jean Pierre Aumont of the Surete and criminal computer expert John Houseman and his sidekick Ted Danson (yes, Ted Danson!) try to find a solution, which is solved by  the Disney-esque subplot thirteen year old Tristram Fourmile-alike son's proficiency with ham radio and his ham radio girlfriend played by Dana "Audrey Griswold II" Hill and her dog MacMutt. It's filled with nonsensical subplots to fill out the six hour runtime. Michelle and Chad are disguised in a niqab and french foreign legion outfit/st. Bernard costume - mistaken as Stella/BoPeep's lost lamb at the masquerade party. We get Dana Hill's home life including GW Bailey from Police Academy as a Texan cowpoke stereotype, who says, "Texas, where the girls are prettier than the cows". Pisier shares an apartment with a dingy M. Emmett Walsh (reunited with Jordan in Raise the Titanic the next year). To emphasise this is France, someone actually says 'allo 'allo! A bomb timer appears on screen William Castle-style. Kraut cowboy Horst "which one was he again?" Buchholz, the key to being a pub quiz champ, as a French doctor tries to help Jourdan turn off the bomb. There's a trip to the imaginary African city of Libwana, Brazaka, which is really a Californian desert airfield. And there's an astonishing scene where unmarried couples are rounded up for a photograph and are brutally gunned down on a veranda, all Dutch shots.

SPOILERS! The end is a double gut-punch. The ship explodes, with Mama Michelle still on board, seemingly, and then Shelley shoots Telly. THen, it turns out all on board the ship escaped in lifeboats, the Captain staying on board, and it ends with Michelle and Chad a couple at the funeral with an awful oil painting of Jourdan hung above, and the son finally meeting his girlfriend for the first time.

The List of Adrian Messenger (1963)

Made in Ireland, and aside from the star cameos, it's a good cast, a mix of Hollywood-based British talent, a few Irish stars e.g. the living embodiment of Dublin that was Noel Purcell, and even an appearance from British TV regular Bernard Archard in a rare US role. Seeing not-Sinatra as a gypsy entertained me, and the usage of Huston's beloved Ireland intrigued me, as I live relatively nearby from Cabinteely and Powerscourt, where they shot part of the film. And the sub-Children's Film Foundation end fox chase was a surprise.

White Dog (1982)
Sam Fuller's last major film, possibly his most interesting. Kristy McNichol is an actress who with the help of Burt Ives and black trainer Paul Winfield, tries to turn a dog trained by racists to attack blacks around. With a neat shock ending. Intelligent pulp. Saw it with the different but similarly maddening in a different way and very good Wake in Fright (1971). 

The Name of the Rose (1986)

Yes, I'd never seen this. Watched it and loved it. The intricate mystery, Christian Slater's accent, the roundup of international character talent (Vernon Dobtcheff! Yay!) and the weird Uncle Fester-y gay priest character who apparently was once in an episode of CBBC's Silas, it's all good. 

Britannia Hospital (1982)

I never much liked Lindsay Anderson. If? Iffy. Oh Lucky Man's confused, and so is this, but Graham Crowden's performance, possibly the only time he gets above the title billing (alongside Leonard Rossiter, and in a cast full of stars, no less) is possibly one of the most refreshing I've seen. It's a pity this didn't lead to a career as a modern horror icon, the Lionel Atwill of the 80s, playing mad scientists in various movies. And it has the most ridiculously stellar cast of British/Irish actors. Aside from the two supposed leads we have -  Joan Plowright! TP Mckenna! Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis! John Gordon Sinclair as Gregory! Richard Griffiths as Jimmy Savile! Peter Jeffrey again! Alan Bates as a corpse! Fulton Mackay! Vivian Pickles! Robbie Coltrane! Robin Askwith! Arthur Lowe! Frank Grimes! (yes, Simpsons fans, there's an actual actor called that, Irish too) Roland Culver! Liz Smith! Betty Marsden! Dandy Nichols! Tony Haygarth! Brian Glover! Valentine Dyall! And an appearance by a certain Mark Hamill. And the ending is just barking. 

The Hard Way (1979)

I love ITC. I love films made in my home of Bray. Why did I wait so long to see the film in the middle of the venn diagram? There aren't many Irish action films. The Hard Way (1979) is the nearest 1970s cinema got to a proper hard-boiled action thriller that Ireland can call its own. Made by Lew Grade's ITC in 1979, produced by the head of the lower budget end of Grade's film output, Jack Gill and his subsidiary Chips Productions, it was directed by John Boorman's regular second unit director Michael Dryhurst, and Boorman is credited as executive producer. It begins in a London underground station that looks like a redressed Dublin rail outlet, and then quickly moves to the unfortunately named Irish mercenary John Connor, played by Patrick McGoohan (remember, he was raised in Leitrim) dreaming of his wife (writer Edna O'Brien in a rare acting role) as he lies on the Sealink to Dun Laoghaire, handling Bank of Ireland cheques. He then visits O'Brien in their terraced house at Carlisle Terrace, Bray. Then cut to Lee Van Cleef as an American mercenary, McNeal arriving in Dublin airport before a meeting with he and McGoohan's fellow boss in the Shelbourne Hotel. Seeing Van Cleef wandering around Wicklow being cool alongside McGoohan, drinking in the same pub in Newtownmountkennedy and wandering around Luggala/Roundwood is worth the film itself. Seeing such icons walking about in the area where this writer grew up is surreal and adds something, so it'd be hard to be critical on the film, but it is a well-paced programmer, though never theatrically released. McGoohan's accent is a little slipshod at times, but he has enough presence, especially opposite Irish stalwarts such as Donal McCann, John Cowley, Kevin Flood (once again playing a Frenchman in 1979 Paris the same year as his role in the Doctor Who story "City of Death")and Joe Lynch. It is also unconventionally framed, narrated by O'Brien, pontificating on her husband's exploits. It also features Ireland doubling for Paris, as well as a tense Entebbe-esque attack amongst Dublin Airport. It's quite innovative and twisty,especially the funhouse-themed Van Cleef vs McGoohan ending, not unlike "The Prisoner" series that McGoohan had helped change television with. It is a lost gem of Irish cinema and television. 

Midnight Express (1978)

Another one I'd tried to watch, lost interest, but watched it again and sort ofloved it. Yes, it's Alan Parker, who bar the Commitments and the nostalgic filter of Bugsy Malone, tends to be quite insufferable, even though I find him quite an interesting interviewee. And yes, it doesn't promise to be the strange mix of action and intrigue in the dirty world of Turkish prison corruption the initial moments promise, but there are diamonds amongst the rough. And it has a fab cast, Brad Davis, Bo Hopkins, John Hurt, Peter Jeffrey as a mad Turkish paedophile, Kevork Malikyan around the time Mind Your Language started, Randy Quaid before he became a fugitive himself... Great soundtrack.
EDIT: Watched it again, and the cast save it. But it could have been better. And the actual escape in real life was much more exciting. 

Also runners-up - Silver Streak (1976), A Kid For Two Farthings (1955), 

January Part 1 - 28 ( INC. REFS inc. The Other plus 2 tv movies) - McGoohan, Magus, Jonathan, Fragment of Fear, CHUD, Fellini, Help, King, Queen, Knave, Legacy, Bronson, Wisdom, Boys in Band, Von Trier, AIP UK...

Kings and Desperate Men (1981) - Canadian tax shelter reunion for Prisoner stars Patrick McGoohan and Alexis Kanner, who also directs. Plot confused by the very similar Margaret Trudeau and Andrea Marcovicci cast opposite each other. Similar atmosphere to The Silent Partner. McGoohan is good, but it's basically a bland Canadian Die Hard with a confusing surrealistic ending.

Jonathan (1970) - West German folk horror take on Dracula, similarly sombre and static a la Nosferatu the Vampyre even in nude scenes, visually interesting (the crucifix-wielding crowd versus the bathing vampires climax is memorable) but directed in a staid, arty style by Germany's leading soap writer. Also stars the star of the short-lived German Fawlty Towers.

The Magus (1968) - Couldn't stand it - like the Prisoner in Corfu.

The Cay (-1974) - Made for TV life raft in the Caribbean story. A Nicholas Bond Owen-esque schoolboy is stuck with a blonde-afroed James Earl Jones, doing a racist-sounding Jim Davidson as Chalky voice. Nice photography, typical US equivalent of Children's Film Foundation.

CHUD (1984)  - Like a less odd Larry Cohen film, almost TV movie-like, like the 1988 The Blob, it is forgettable despite its monsters.  It has the typical 80s post-Corman New World blandness, but unlike Cohen's The Stuff, doesn't have the joy or wit or imagination to fight against that style.

Fragment Of Fear (1970) - Like the Internecine Project, one of those British giallos that despite a good cast and some winning dialogue (a neat cameo from Mary Wimbush on a train, Arthur Lowe namechecking Boris Karloff), it is just bobbins, more psychedelic sub-Prisoner fluff.  The end is nicely Hammer House of Horror - David Hemmings haunted in his own mind by Glynn Edwards. But then it goes all psychedelic for the sake of it, and he becomes a pensioner or something. It is not slow but oddly engrossing a la Vampyres and Symptoms, it's too fast and just loses one. It's as if you're on drugs.

Spirits of the Dead (1968) - First two stories boring period dramas, while Toby Dammit begins as a typically interesting, beautifully designed Fellini piece - like most of the more creative Fellini - like a live action cartoon, but gets lost, both overwhelmed by the style and trying too hard to find a substance.

Amarcord (1973) - Watched this and Bertolucci's 1900 (1976), and both are living paintings, but while 1900 is a vaguely realistic attempt to capture its setting, Amarcord is a nostalgic cartoon, powered on visual punch. These are not films, but moving paintings in live action. 

King, Queen, Knave (1972) - unfunny Anglo-Germanic oversexed schoolboy comedy with David Niven and John Moulder Brown unconvincingly cast as nerd. Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. whose films, even the strange German attempt at a 30s gangster hostage drama, The Lightship have a weird, hungover quality, as if made by drunks. The Shout and Deep End almost work, but they feel like they're made by a drunk crew, so obviously they don't go well. 

Help (1965) - I find the Beatles' films insufferable, and this is no exception. It's not the brownface, in fact Leo McKern and John Bluthal are actually quite fun, it's the way the Children's Film Foundation-ish plot stops for music videos.

The Legacy (1978) - Dull Omen cash-in with Sam Elliot, Katharine Ross, Charles Gray, Roger Daltrey and a theme by Kiki Dee - halfway between British horrors of the 70s and US studio snoozers like the occasionally creepy cobblers The Mephisto Waltz (1971) and The Other (1972). It is somewhat laughable, bits like Daltrey's death scene, John Standing in old age makeup that makes him look like he's wearing a Halloween mask of Peter Cushing in Top Secret, but it is clearly a script that Jimmy Sangster had in a drawer for fifteen years. However, if it had been made then, it'd have been an atmospheric but otherwise forgettable thing like 1964's Witchcraft, and not a trashily OTT but rather dull 70s attempt to crossbreed a thriller,  a possession movie and a murder mystery, with faux-European accents to match.

Death Wish (1974) - Had only seen extensive clips before, and the sequels. Wow. Much better, than the too-brutal Death Wish 2, the hilarious 3, and the routine 4 and 5. Winner's view of New York as full of traffic jams and rape. Do son in laws constantly refer to their father in laws as Dad? Winner gives it lots of interesting diversions, i.e. the Wild West show bit.  More original than the identikit likes of St. Ives and Mr. Majestyk (1973) and even Winner's swift and stylish the Stone Killer (1973 -  which has a great Roy Budd soundtrack and a weird interlude in a hippie carnival).

The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968) - Confused sub-Produces Broadway nonsense, notable for being the supposed American break for Norman Wisdom. It's weird to see Sir Norman in a period 30s Noo Yawk setting, and not going about, screaming, "O, Mr. Grimsdale!" Britt Ekland plays Amish, semi-convincingly, semi because while she gets the alienation right, she's too Swedish.

The Boys In The Band (1970) - Two unlikeable queens being catty filtered through the hard-to-relate-to cinematic vision of William Friedkin (one of those directors like De Palma, Ashby, Altman, Peckinpah, etc that I can't warm to - New Hollywood  mostly leaves me cold.I prefer the dying embers of the old straggling along, trying to survive, thanks to producers like Irwin Allen, Lew Grade and Jennings Lang.). Then again, I'm a genre/ideas man.

See China And Die (-1981) - Larry Cohen's pilot for a detective show - fronted by Esther Rolle as "Momma", an intelligent, sixty-odd crime novel fan, maid/cook and amateur detective who gets involved in a conspiracy involving tax shelters, culture clashes with the upper class New York art world, stolen Chinese statues and a pigtailed, mutton dressed as lamb Jean Marsh. Despite showing promise, especially being a genre show with a black female lead (something still very rare - drama-wise, there wouldn't be a black female lead fronting a weekly drama series on American primetime television between Get Christie Love in 1974 and Scandal in 2012), it was not picked up. And that's a shame, especially as Cohen's quirky New York-centric vision comes through.

Element of Crime (1984)- Lars Von Trier's first film, with an odd, futuristic setting, initially appears to be lighting not unlike Richard Stanley's Hardware but it is actually a sort of coffee-spill copper sepia tint. Saved by the bizarre casting of Michael Elphick in the lead, alongside Esmond Knight and Me Me Lai "being fucked back to the stone age".  A noirish mess.

Bloodsuckers (1970) - Rather ITC-ish vampire caper, set in Greece, despite an interesting cast - Peter Cushing, Patrick Macnee, Patrick Mower, Edward Woodward, Johnny Sekka as a rare black lead in a British horror, and genuine Greek and Cypriot locations, it doesn't go anywhere, and becomes a daft travelogue. Woodward is good as a vampire expert, though.

Cry of the Banshee (1970) - Not Irish, not about a Banshee unless you count the mad old cow played by Elizabeth Bergner (who is called Oona, so possibly), with Blackadder-esque music to increase the Elizabethan mood in a setting less convincing than Carry On Henry, a young Michael Elphick fondling maidens,  Patrick Mower as the actual "banshee", a  male were-minstrel and much occasionally laughable, mostly boring cobblers, like a lot of the B-list period horrors of the era. Like the Shoes of the Fisherman and Lolly-Madonna XXX (not as exciting as the title or poster promise), a film that can be seen by watching its trailer.

Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) - Fun British horror. Michael Gough has lots to do, electrifying police inspectors with huge 50s sci-fi computers, dumping bodies into acid baths, all in the name of inspiration for his Edgar Lustgarten-esque crime writings. And apart from Geoffrey Keen, the other cast isn't particularly great, especially young Shirley Anne Field who clearly got acting lessons after this. But it has some good setpieces, and an interesting fairground sacrifice climax.

The Pit (1981) - TV's Tom Sawyer, Sammy Snyders plays a slightly backward kid  who feeds stuff including people and a cow to pit-dwelling vermin-monsters whom he calls Trologs and are instructed by his teddy bear. Slow, and Snyders' performance is strange, written for someone slightly younger. Some fun moments are included, including tossing down a wheelchair-bound old lady  as "we all have to go somewhere". He then rides off in the wheelchair.  Ends with the Pit bulldozed, and Snyders being packed off to his cousins, who also keep Trologs in their own pit and feed Snyders. It's too slow, but it has that nice Canadian atmosphere and a nicely dramatic orchestral score.  And it looks good, the production is stable, the monsters look cool. It is certainly as good as the likes of Bloody Birthday and better than the cutprice A for effort, but even more dull and amateurish likes of The Orphan (1979) and The Child (1977) and even Bert I. Gordon's Necromancy (a lot of those Nightmare USA regional exploitation efforts on grainy film I find sometimes interesting but often dull, A for effort, but a lot of them feel nightmarish for all the wrong reasons).

Necromancy (1972) - Orson Welles does Cockney. HARVEY JASON WEARS MAKEUP. Not good. Slow, boring Rosemary's Baby imitation. Pamela Franklin's weird transatlantic accent probably her own.

Also watched the shortlived almost-but-not-quite-steampunk series QED from 1982 with Sam Waterston as an American scientific genius in Edwardian England, directed by the likes of Don Sharp and Roy Ward Baker, and lots of top British crew, but. it's weird. It's tonally a mishmash, going for more Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines/Wrong Box/Assassination Bureau wearisome comedic swashbucklery than Talons-ish gothic, and being written by John Hawkesworth, is more lightly comedic period drama than adventure, with George Innes and Caroline Langrishe (replacing Sarah Berger as a different but similarly star-billed character in the pilot). And despite having Julian Glover as lead villain, and the likes of George A. Cooper as a Northern inventor and George Baker as a Northern newspaperman, and the likes of John Abineri, Ron Pember, Tony Caunter, Jean Anderson and Cyril Luckham (both given their own separate billings in the end credits) doing the best as he can as a butler with exposition, Pauline Quirke, a German-speaking Frederick Jaeger as the Kaiser, all wasted. It needed to be more gothic, less whimsical. Waterston also seems somewhat miscast. He doesn't seem like a 19th century gent, and the script doesn't call for him to be an anachronism, so he just tries his best and gets lost, and the diddly-daddy "Victorian" music doesn't work. The last epsiode is a diet Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng Chiang, but lacks atmosphere, yet actually casts all Chinese with Sarah "Adventure Game" Lam and for once, Burt Kwouk given proper opening titles "special guest star" status (he being a British actor who Americans would actually recognise, Ian Ogilvy, Glover, Elizabeth Shepherd and Paul Freeman the only others to do so for same reasons) while murders go on, Timothy Bateson plays a predatory comic relief Jewish tailor, and Peter Cellier is Kwouk's MI5 narcotics boss. Though Edwardian set, and made in UK, maybe the NTSC film helps make it look American, one of those duff US attempts at Victoriana. Everything's too jolly for their own good.


Also been trying to watch Brian Clemens' Thriller (-1973-1976), but it's too mundane, hopelessy padded, with thriller ideas that are very stupid, rather than daft. I have a love-hate relationship with Clemens. I think as a kid, I worshipped  people like Clemens, Ray Bradbury, mainly because a. you're a kid, and the difference between what's stupid and what's daft hasn't come clear, but also that whole thing, when I'm older, I'll be like these guys, I'll have a big writing room full of tat like Bradbury.  I admired their work ethic, and I read their synopses of their work, but didn't see much of their actual work, and when I did, I was bored by it. I'm not into the Avengers or much of the ITC shows, and re:Thriller, I think they should have gone more OTT horror/fantasy, more like Dan Curtis’ stuff. The Poe-themed costume party comes too late in the episode Kiss Me and Die comes too late, George Chakiris dressed as Davy Crockett,too much romance between Agutter and Chakiris, Anton Diffring a solid villain, Russell Hunter fun as a West Country “old fashioned rat”-fancier. But Death to Sister Mary – its opening between Jennie Linden in a fake convent set, revealed to be a sub-Crossroads soap, doesn’t really work, as Thriller has the same production values. As I said, things come too late. Troughton isn't in enough of the episode Nurse Will Make It Better, which despite Diana Dors as the Devil and an appealing lead in Andrea Marcovicci, feels like a soap with not enough barmy fantasy nonsense. It is The Omen if it were an episode of Emmerdale Farm.
As for Clemens' other work, I like Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974), but it's a pilot, and is a bit more pedestrian than people give it credit for, and Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) feels like a made for  US TV musical with most of the songs cut out (bar that very 70s-sounding street singer's ballad), there's too much supposedly charming but actually rather grating comedy,  and not enough Philip Madoc. And you could have easily cut out Burke and Hare, and just either made Madoc Hare, or cut Burke and Hare out entirely, and give it all to Madoc.

December - 85 (it could be 87/90 but it mayb eisn't)

I, Madman (1989) - stylishly shot, neat idea but not quite pulpy enough, not enough focus on the monster, and with not quite a strong enough cast. But I just realised my problem with a lot of post-80s horror. Prosthetic monsters being witty, often coupled with an unattractive NTSC smear. Post-Freddy, post-Fango, Chucky, Crypt Keeper, various Charles Band beasties, most post-80s telefantasy (Friday the 13th: the series, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Tales from the Darkside/Monsters, Babylon 5, Amazing Stories, Tales from the Crypt), neither scary or funny - more uncanny valley Shiver and Shake than anything. And it continues - NuWho's characters like Strax the Sontaran butler.

The Salamander (1981) - From a book by Morris West, whose adaptations (The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), the 1977 John Mills Devil's Advocate) can be watched by simply seeing their trailers. This is a confused mess from the dying days of Lew Grade's ITC. Basically a faux-polizioteschi film with Franco Nero travelling the world, shagging Sybil Danning, versus Anthony Quinn, Christopher Lee, Eli Wallach, Cleavon Little, a bunch of cameos strung together by a vaugely interesting plot failed by its makers - a typical ripe Europudding.

Trial by Combat - A Dirty Knight's Work (1976) - Ropey CFF-type medieval-themed capers with Barbara Hershey, David Birney, John Mills, Donald Pleasence and Peter Cushing in blue-tinted stock footage, and the villain turns out to be John Savident. Bernard Hill pops up. Brian Glover does Cockney. Margaret Leighton does Dame Edna.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (1976) - slow, but oddly compelling tale of posh, unlikeable killer schoolboys and their leader versus the lad's mother Sarah Miles and her new man Kris Kristofferson in his full 70s prime. Seeing Kris (my dad's hero) potting about small towns in the British Isles isn't as weird a sight as it seems. Like a lot of US country stars, he has been known to tour the small, country-mad towns of Ireland.

Agatha (1979) - Dull, without the spark of the Christie adaptations. Like one of the duller TV adaptations, than the camper films.

Zeppelin (1970) - Confused early Michael York vehicle, WW1 caper with Elke Sommer, the inevitable Anton Diffring, Marius Goring playing a steampunky scientist, cool model work, aerial shots of the Irish countryside per usual for a WW1 film of this era. Directed by Etienne Perier, whose short English language career (this and When Eight Bells Toll (1971)) encapsulates the British film industry of the early 70s, of not entirely worthless but unremarkable films designed to fill Sunday afternoons that bored one so much at times that you can't remember if you tuned out halfway, the not terrible, reasonably solid but only intermittently fun likes of Innocent Bystanders, Mr. Moses (1965 - so unmemorable I forgot I had seen it), the racist THE SOUTHERN STAR (1969 - which also counts as one of those steampunk adventures, and has a comedy ostrich called Olga) the Mandela-esque Wilby Conspiracy (1975 - despite being written by RTE's Peter Driscoll, and with an interesting focus on Indian immigrants in Africa), the overlong Michael Winner's Scorpio (1973), Figures in a Landscape (1970), the overrated Gumshoe (1970), various United Artists war movies (half a dozen at least), the fun if you are in a drunk/unexpected state of mind Paper Tiger (1975), Kidnapped (1971), the Chairman  (1969), 11 Harrowhouse (1974), The Day of the Jackal (1973- though The Odessa File (1974) is actually decent and effective), The Black Windmill (1975), the depressing A Dandy in Aspic (1968), Otley (-1968), various Eurospy joints that failed to capture that Bond magic,  The Human Factor (1975 AND 1979), Perfect Friday (1970 - David Warner as a kohl-eyed pretty boy who then disguises himself with grey hair and puberty tache), Universal Soldier (1971) Permission To Kill (75), the not-as-fun-as-it-should-be Avalanche Express (The Cassandra Crossing shot in Dublin, and with added Cyril Shaps and Robert Shaw is the less of its parts), The Looking Glass War, Fragment of Fear, The Marseille Contract (1974), A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square (1979), A Twist of Sand (1968 - Honor Blackman as a German), Callan! (1974), most of Sky Riders (1976 - it's a little Zoo Gang-ish), the stuff in Puppet on a Chain (1971) that isn't that chase scene, the Persuaders-esque You Can't Win 'Em All (1970), Inside Out (1975), Penny Gold (1974), File of the Golden Goose (1969), Midas Run (1969), Play Dirty (1968), Only When I Larf, the tonally all over the place Robinson Crusoe-meets-Reuben Reuben Man Friday (1975), Riddle of the Sands, worthy but overlong flops like the Royal Hunt of the Sun, the Long Duel (1967 which inspired Carry On Up The Khyber) and the depressing The Last Valley (1971), the lesser Richard Lester canon and that's the decent budget stuff, not the actually not very good Harry Alan Towers stuff or Medusa with George Hamilton. But at least, they're not the 80s equivalents, the even more boring likes of The Disappearance (1977), Eye of the Needle (1981), all those Michael Caine films funded by dodgy Arabs. Although I actually like The Mackintosh Man (1973) a little more, because my grandad's in it. Hennessy is for an Irishman, too unintentionally funny, and while Brannigan  (1975) does go into these areas, the sheer novelty of John Wayne in a British action film lifts it. And most of them do have the Spatz effect, as The Sitcom Club podcast describes it, they entertain because they encapsulate the era in which they were made. Dark Of The Sun seems like it is going to be one of these, but is actually brilliant.

Farewell To The King (1988) - I admire John Milius. The Wind and the Lion  (1975) is overlong, slow and not as fun as it should be, but it looks fantastic. Conan's good for what it is. But I'm not a surfer. I'm not a westerns guy. I'm not really a cop movie guy. Red Dawn I should like, but the "young" cast annoy me. And unless it creates a convincing enough world (like the lovingly sleazy Thailand of the much underrated Milius-produced Uncommon Valor (1983)) or is fun in an adventure movie sense, war movies don't usually grab me. This is Nick Nolte as the Man Called Horse/Man from Deep River versus World War Two, and Nigel Havers and James Fox pop up too. And it's not very good. It's got that Return from the River Kwai "nothing else on satellite TV" feel. Unless they're different or adventurous or international themed, the typical, usually domestic American-based "tough guy" movies don't quite appeal to me. I appreciate good action here and there, but a lot of those films are forgettable fare made to be rewound and fast-forwarded and then forgotten. They are films you can watch simply by seeing the trailer.

The Black Stallion (1979) - Saw bits as a kid, but then learnt about the opening, which has a ship at sea exploding, like my script. And it is one of the most gorgeously shot films ever, by Caleb Deschanel who later directed the similar and much underrated The Escape Artist (although I would have loved to have seen Paul Daniels in the Gabriel Dell role of that, but I'm going off topic). I'm not a sports movie guy, but it's lovely. The sequel, The Black Stallion Returns (1982) is more of an adventure film, with our hero, the likeable Kelly Reno returning, only to find his horse taken by its original owner, a sheik played by Ferdy Mayne and his browned up granddaughter, so Reno goes off and stows away in a seaplane to Casablanca/Italy and then it becomes an Arab movie with Joisey-accented Berbers, less the Wind and the Lion and more like dire ITC Terence Hill vehicle March Or Die (again proving why Hill never broke out of "last video on the shelf" in the English speaking market), but the opening stuff is great.

The Last Run (1971) - George  C. Scott drives through "Portugal"  into "France" (actually it's all Spain) with his two wives and whatshisface from Bird with the Crystal Plumage, while a great Roy Budd-esque Goldsmith score plays.  Featuring Ski-Boy/Chopper Squad's Robert Coleby as a randy British hitchhiker. Caught up between being a relationship drama, and an action film, and doesn't quite gel,yet that adds something - conflict! And the race stuff is great - especially a drive directly from desert into snowy foothills. Aldo Sambrell dubbed by Robert Rietty.  Richard Fleischer directing after John Huston quit.Huston was in the middle of doing a run of films that ranged from the boring Reflections of the Golden Eye to the nice western The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972 - from that 70s "slow western" boom of Wild West tales about nothing much, the likes of Oklahoma Crude and Another Man, Another Chance) to the incomprehensible messes of Casino Royale and the Kremlin Letter.

The Producers (1968) - I'd give it three stars. The beatnik Hitler doesn't really work, Mostel and Wilder have charm, the best bits probably the stuff with Christopher Hewett and William Hickey. There's an infectious joy, but you can see Brooks is building.

Knight Moves (1992) - Lacklustre Christopher Lambert neo-giallo from the assistant director of the Legend of Tim Tyler. Should be more international-flavoured than it is, though.

Black Christmas (1974) - Doesn't really get going until the last 15 minutes,  Bob Clark tries hard as director, the atmosphere is suitably Canadian, cold, nervous, but stilted - then Wham - towards the end, it improves. I've a weird relationship with Canadian film. I find the majority of Canadian exploitation from the tax shelter era, the likes of Death Weekend and a lot of the slashers boring, most of Cronenberg's oeuvre bland bar the entertaining The Brood, I like the Silent Partner and Murder By Decree (Bob Clark's best film), think The Amateur (1981) is an entertaining Cold War programmer, find Guy Maddin's stuff baffling. A lot of the stuff I find bland. I like bits of SCTV, but can't quite understand Strange Brew. The other SCTV spinoff The Shmenges - The Last Polka is so much better (maybe because chintzy European music loved by grannies is a more universal subject - James Last, for example). The weirder stuff is the better. The National Film Board stuff on the other hand is almost always great, though.

Screamtime (1983) - Rather fun compilation of British shorts by Stanley Long disguised as an anthology. Best story is Robin Bailey as crazed Punch and Judy man killing the likes of Bosco Hogan and Adrian off Bread.

The Cabinet of Caligari(1962 - B/W) - Cash-in on the original. Depsite Cinemascope, still like a dull episode of a TV anthology.

The Brain (1962 - B/W) - Freddie Francis-directed, Kenneth Kendall-guesting suspenser. Nicely shot, nice cast (Cecil Parker, Miles Malleson, Bernard Lee) but nothing special, like the dozens of similarly gothy British b/w psychothrillers churned out by Hammer, Merton Park, etc, with titles like House in Marsh Road and The Snorkel. And overlong. An idea better suited to a 30-minute anthology.

The Head (1959 - B/W) - Fun, routine but nicely gothy-in-a-modern-setting German horror, similar to the Brain that Wouldn't Die with Horst "the Baron from Tim Tyler" Frank and the head of Michel "Boudu" Simon. In the same mould as similar era films as the Mask, the Maze, etc.

Theatre of Death (1966) - Nonsensical 60s horror, in the same barrel of poverty row nonsense like The Vulture (1967), The Projected Man (1967), The Black Torment (1964), the Frozen Dead (1966), the Hand of Night (1968, NICE PERFORMANCE FROM EDWARD UNDERDOWN) and Devils of Darkness (-1965) and the better made but still slightly overrated likes of Night of the Eagle (1962 - B/W) and the "fun when you're 12" Sorcerers (1967). Christopher Lee and Julian Glover in what appears to be an episode of a rubbish ITC series hijacked by a giallo. 

Cuba (1979)-  Tonally muddled Richard Lester (per usual for him) film, can't quite tell if it is a tragic romance, a romp, a documentary-style exploration of pre-revolution Cuba or a chance for Connery to make a film in Spain. A slog, beautifully shot but a slog. Has Hammer regular Wolfe Morris as Batista, watching Horror of Dracula in B/W, and a dubbed  Roger Lloyd Pack playing Latino, a la his role in the Professionals, amongst a cast of unconvincing Hispanics (Brooke Adams doesn't ring as a Latina, while Earl Cameron, one of numerous Afro-Caribbean-British support actors in this, for once is cast colour-blind playing Rossell-Leyva, a white Hispanic military leader who in real life resembled oddly absent Lester regular John Bluthal). I like Lester's Superman films, and Juggernaut (1974), but the rest are never as enjoyable as they should be.

I've been watching the Tales from the Crypt TV series, and despite interesting casts and directors, unlike the Amicus movies, they never end up more than padding to neat imagery, the crutch-using  ghouls, and shoes haunting undertaker Moses Gunn, the Don Rickles foetal-dummy,  the dead M Emmett Walsh, John Astin's Hamlet, Whoopi Goldberg holding a head of James Remar in a Caribbean island plantation,  Zelda Rubinstein torturing David Warner with her disfigured skull-faced daughter. There's a reason why they work best as comics. They're still images, good as comics, but probably better as trading cards. And the heightened performances, multicoloured yet bland style and NTSC smear detract. Then again, I'm not that mad on 50s US B-Movies or even the US gothics. I appreciate the Corman-Poe stuff, but it always felt a little like a dodgy US TV series of the period, especially the supporting performances. Once AIP moves that sort of thing to Britain with Masque of the Red Death (1964), it gets  slightly better. As mundane as something like The Oblong Box (1969) is, I'd still watch it over, say The Fall of The House of Usher, because at least it has numerous solid character actors to support Price rather than just say a brief performance from Karloff or Lorre or Rathbone or a dubbed Barbara Steele. They are stylish films, but like their Italian brethren, style isn't everything.

Also watched the Black Cat (1934 - B/W). The thing is I am not an expressionist fan, but I don't hate them. Karloff is nicely camp. I see a lot of classic films as paintings. They are nice to look at, and you can admire them for what they are, but you don't have to like them. But you can't really hate them. What I like in black and white photography is the clear, sunny style you see in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Night of the Iguana, Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964 - b/w - a load of melodramatic pish), etc, something which very few master.

Nightmare Alley (1947 - b/w) - Again not a noir man, but I found the setting interesting and the concept something. Solid.  Although more should have been made of the carnival.

Dinosaurus (1960) - Really beautifully shot dinosaur movie that used to show up on C4 back in the day. Unoriginal, uninspired, but the Virgin Islands locations lift it. And some stop motion. Feels like I've seen it before, and my mum turned it off halfway through cos she thought it silly. And some pontificating on why a caveman should die.

The Cellar (1989) - Unoriginal but nicely shot, Raimiesque desert Native American-themed demon-hog monster horror, by Kevin Tenney. The monster's okay. Fair enough.

The Caller (1987) - Charles Band film, as with all Empire-era Band films, well-shot, with good solid production value in Italy,  Slow duologue,  Malcolm McDowell as a strange person who doesn't understand certain phrases, and talks with a weird Mid-Atlantic accent between Yorkshire and Calgary. Good performances, but it's a stretched out Tales from the Darkside. It's not a film. The ending is neat (it's all a game), and the effects on McDowell are interesting.


The Bat People (1974) - nicely shot in Carlsbad Caverns, nice atmosphere, but its slow, dull, with dull monsters, not great acting. From the director of Raise the Titanic.

Invasion of the Blood Farmers (1972)- cult sacrifice, homemade horror. Diverting but rubbish at the least, godawful at the most. 

Sky Pirates (1986) -  John Hargreaves a solid Aussie Indiana Jones-alike, even if his chemistry-free love interest is wooden,  but the too on-the nose named Dakota Harris is an interesting character in his own right, a sort of Antipodean Biggles in this rather odd, fun little Australian Raiders cash-in. Assigned by US general Alex Scott (the frog-masked bloke in the Abominable Dr. Phibes) to fly a plane to Washington, only to be re-routed to French Polynesia. Strikingly shot by Colin Eggleston (director of 1979's eco-horror Long Weekend), and with an interesting time loop plot, and intriguing imagery - floating Easter Island heads,and location shooting on the island itself. Good dialogue. "Fancy taking my chances on a mirage." With many of the cast of George Miller's miniseries The Dismissal (Hargreaves, Bill Hunter, Max Phipps as the blond-flattopped villain). And a plot that doesn't quite go the way you think it would (our heroes are rescued, then thrown into military  prison, then Dirty Dozen-style, Hargreaves steals a plane from RAAF ally-turned-enemy Max Phipps find the missing Reverend). Also features Nigel Bradshaw, the English actor who played a Yorkshireman on Prisoner Cell Block H simply because Yorkshire TV were the only ITV region showing the series, and thought that some local appeal was needed. An interesting little pulp pleasure. Brian May's soundtrack is serviceable, but not his best, and a little too indebted to Williams.

Shatter (1974) - Not very good Hammer-Shaw actioner, Stuart Whitman as assassin, sort of whitesploitation feel, a middle-aged white Conservative take on similar Blaxploitation efforts like That Man Bolt. Peter Cushing and Anton Diffring turn up. 

The Amsterdam Kill (1977) - Basically the same as Shatter, but actually with some standout action sequences, and Robert Mitchum and Leslie Nielsen, and for Golden Harvest rather than Shaw Brothers. It begins with Mitchum (no stranger to foreign weirdness, having starred in confused Swedish TV spy spinoff Foreign Intrigue (1957), arguably the first true Eurospy film) undercover in Wandsworth, and watching a badly-accented TV football commentator over some clearly American stock footage of "the Rangers",  which then cuts mid-match to a flash news bulletin of an Amsterdam drugs raid that no British station would ever do. Mitchum wears a flat cap well, probably why Lean cast him in Ryan's Daughter. Since it was directed by Robert "Enter the Dragon" Clouse, who was deaf, you can watch it without sound and still follow. Has fun scenes of Chinese goons basically getting trapped in the title sequence of the Adventures of Black Beauty.  And Mitchum gleefully crashes a bulldozer through a greenhouse.

Mother Lode (1982) and Death Hunt (1981) - Two serviceable faux-Canadian actioners. Mother Lode is a muddle, but it has the Two Ronnies Christmas Special 1987's Charlton Heston as two Scottish brothers named Silas and Ian, who have a Scrooge McDuck-like obsession with gold, while one lusts after Kim Basinger, who's searching for her husband. Nonsensical, and confusing. Death Hunt has RCMP men Lee Marvin and Carl Weathers hunt for mad trapper Charles Bronson, in a Golden Harvest production based on a true story. Nicely shot adventures, both, though Death Hunt is the better film. Both better than the various mountain men/Great North movies of the same period, the High Country, the Wilderness Family, Surfacing, Challenge to be Free, etc.

The Return of Captain Invincible (1983) + 5 refs to Mora's career

The Return of Captain Invincible (1983) - A shambles. Philippe Mora is a director whose work is very strange, from Ozploitation ventures as the rather silly Australian western Mad Dog Morgan (1976) to the Sullivans-esque GIs in Australia murder conspiracy of Death Of A Soldier (1986) to US ventures as dire Howling II: Stirba Werewolf Bitch (1985) and The Beast Within (1982), a film which has an interesting cast, concept and setting and does everything that it sets out to do, but is still quite icky and unfocused, and nasty. The fact that his best film might be the insane Howling III - The Marsupials (1987) may say it all. He's a director who specialises in the daft. But Captain Invincible isn't quite daft enough. Written by future US action specialist Steven E. De Souza, the Australian setting feels tacked on, as if to please the Australian producers and also Actors' Equity to keep a mainly Aussie cast. Alan Arkin is decent as Captain Invincible, and Christopher Lee is perfect as his nemesis, Mr. Midnight. But the  film is confused. Arkin, then pushing 50 plays a Second World War veteran superhero who surely is pushing 80, but then again he is beyond human, who somehow has spent the last few years in Sydney, but still thinks it is NYC. The US President (Australian-born western vet Michael Pate, who would reprise the role in Howling III) is handily in Australia, when a hypno-ray is stolen, and the alcoholic Cap, taken in by an unlikeable female cop/journalist (the script is hazy), has to stop Midnight and his goblin sidekick Julius from wiping the ethnic minorities of New York (i.e. a few stereotyped Arabs and Jews, and ex-Laugh In star Chelsea Brown, the only African-American woman living in Australia at the time in a cameo). It is also a musical, featuring a few songs written by Richard O'Brien, and a few not by the Rocky Horror creator/future Crystal Maze host. An interesting joke is ignored - that Invincible's singing style is rooted in the 1940s, but then the soundtrack resorts to using old standards and the Peter Gunn theme. A lot of goofy comedy emerges, a lot of repeated training routines and magnetism jokes, endless flashbacks, endless in-your-face Americana to distract you from the barrage of Aussie faces (Blankety Blanks host Graham Kennedy, his regular panellist Noel Ferrier, Bill Hunter, David Argue, Chris Haywood, Arthur Dignam, Bruce Spence) and some of these are baffling (a bizarre few seconds of interlude with a female supervillain distributing dog excrement from robot doghouses there to give Australian drag act Mr. Tracey Lee some screentime), while one, a foodfight involving the legendary John Bluthal, one of the finest comic actors of his generation as a "Jewish deli owner" who isn't Jewish or a deli owner, and has a fish-shaped rifle instead makes one think what Bluthal would have been like as Captain Invincible. If the film did have Bluthal as a more unorthodox hero, the film less glossy (the high-quality second unit shots of 42nd Street in the climax jar with the obvious sets where we see the main cast),  perhaps with a more heightened sense of reality and artifice, and either the songs written by one unit, or dropped entirely altogether, it might have worked. Perhaps with the plot changed too. Instead of Captain Invincible being an alcoholic, he could have been a deli owner whose life is no longer interesting, because he is now afraid. In all, a tepid mess.