8 plus diversions (15 ish including - possiblydo not count...) - Sherlock, When A Stranger, Jordan, The Brain 1969, Phenomena, Alligator, Bloodtide, Avalanche Express

 A Study in Terror (1965) - Sherlock vs Jack the Ripper - Round 1. Not remade as the superior Murder By Decree (that being an adaptation of the Z Cars special Jack the Ripper), despite Frank Finlay as Lestrade in both, and both also having Anthony Quayle. I like Murder by Decree, even though there are a few bits of Cancon miscasting (why did people think in the 70s that Donald Sutherland was a convincing Victorian?)  A Study In Terror, despite some gloss is such an ordinary film. It doesn't know if it is an all-star Victorian romp or a Hammer knockoff. It seems to be shoehorning in all the Sherlock tropes, including Robert Morley in a "special guest appearance" as Mycroft. Donald Houston's Watson is rubbish (his brother Glyn would have been a better fit, I feel - more solid, more composed, a convincing war veteran),  and John Neville's Holmes is ordinary, more Peter Wimsey (ironically, as Glyn Houston played his sidekick Bunter). Neville is underplaying it, to the point that he's completely unassuming. Even Robert Stephens had a power, a conviction, an anger. Neville seems too composed.   Weird seeing young Judi Dench. And Barbara Windsor being Barbara Windsor. 


 I find Neil Jordan's commentaries more interesting than his films. I find his films look samey. I like certain images in Mona Lisa (1986), the caravan in the shed, but it's a TV play. It's a Channel 4 film C4 didn't want. It's about a racist/homophobe falling in love with a black lesbian.


 When A Stranger Calls (1979) - Though Tony Beckley is good, a well-made if rather lacking, depressing film - doesn't know if it s a cop thriller or a slasher. It lacks punch. Good performances from Carol Kane and Charles Durning, but it's not that special. But then I find the slasher a rather limiting genre. I don't enjoy them really. Not even the big ones. Not even Halloween. US teens often annoy me (and a lot of US horror alienates me - even stuff like the Count Yorga films, sometimes when trying to do gothic, they just don't have the budget, locations or actors fit for it). The difference between a good slasher and a bad slasher is not the plot, but usually in the cast and cinematography. There may be one little difference in the costume or backstory,  or a difference between the filler scenes of teens doing stuff, but I realise that an intriguing experiment would be to make a slasher film out of different slasher films. Cutting scenes from one to another to try to create something as coherent as the incoherent films themselves.


 Phenomena (1985)- I'm not an Argento fan (Suspiria and Inferno look good but they're more about visuals than story), and I used to like a lot of Italian horror, but now find a lot of it bollocks because there's no substance - and often a lot of it can be very slack, visually, and overstyled where it isn't. Moments may be fun, but a lot of the films are magpies stealing from other things, and Italian exploitation's knockoffs always lack the invention of a John Sayles, and plus actors are often cast for their look, not for their presence or talent. Phenomena is a weird but sometimes enjoyable mess. It's a typical slasher at first, then goes insane with the insect attacks, and a few off-kilter additions. The Mallory Towers with an otherwise appealing Jennifer Connelly stuff is wearing, the metal soundtrack including some unfortunate Bill Wyman tracks just doesn't work, but Donald Pleasence as a Scottish professor trying to teach a chimp not to get paper cuts is just extraordinary. And the photography of Switzerland is nice. But it's a mess.


 The Brain (1969) - All-star comedy, like After The Fox, Grand Slam, a heist film that is only slightly entertaining yet extremely colourful, attractively shot but almost utterly forgettable. One of Niven's various follies around this time, Casino Royale, Prudence and the Pill, Where The Spies Are... There is a weird cartoon interlude, but there's too much laboured, utterly baffling Euro-slapstick from Bourvil, though the end gag is fun. A lot of these heist movies, e.g. the Italian Job, I liked them as a kid. But they're like cakes. Big sugary delights you love as a kid, but then as an adult, are so incomprehensible, they overwhelm you until you get violently sick. At least, Grand Slam has an affecting performance from Edward G. Robinson as a man stuck in Brazil for years who gets to see his native New York again. And a good soundtrack.
But it suffers because like Those Magnificent Men..., After The Fox, Who Is Killing The Great Chefs of Europe, et cetera, you have all these comedians from all over the world - and their comedy stylings clash because their comic timing and sense of humour are all at different time zones. Even 1941 has this.

 Bloodtide (1982) - Dull Greek sea monster thing with James Earl Jones, Jose Ferrer and aerobics.


 Alligator (1980) -The monster action is sensational, but the comedy is not the sort I ever gravitated to. It's similar to how I feel with apart from The Stuff and Salem's Lot, the cop vs monster plot is so rote and basic, and typical. I'd have made Henry Silva's character the lead. His big game hunter is so much more interesting than Robert Forster's typical B-movie cop hero. And the Chicago setting isn't that convincing. It feels too small for the size of the world. It's no Digby the Biggest Dog in the World, even though the plot is similar. Jim Dale might have been a more interesting hero, and I'm not actually joking. Forster's good, but the character's a bit of a walking cliché, albeit a bit more fleshed out than normal.  And I'm weird. But I don't necessarily want an episode of Hill Street Blues with my monster. The UK poster pushed it as a ZAZ-type spoof comedy, and I honestly wonder if that would have worked better. It's un-enthusiastically directed. A Joe Dante could have done wonders.


 Avalanche Express (1979) - What could have been an interesting film, a slightly more B-movie Cassandra Crossing with Irish production money and added British character actors (Richard Marner from 'Allo 'Allo! Cyril Shaps from everything!*), despite some well-orchestrated action can't stop but feel somewhat empty after the deaths of director Mark Robson and star Robert Shaw in production.  Gene Corman's post-production gives the whole thing a TV movie flair. Like Don Siegel's Telefon or  John Hough's Brass Target or the Sean Connery vehicle The Next Man or the same year's Love and Bullets, it is a competent but aimless Euro-thriller that is well-orchestrated but just lacks that fizz or sufficient interest from the cast and crew. Lee Marvin is good, but it lacks the weird energy of the Cassandra Crossing. The plot is also over-complicated. The action's good, but there's no fizz. The avalanche is better done than the Corman film of the same name. And at least it has a scene in a room decorated with pictures of Cyril Shaps, pencil portraits, paintings, the whole works. And every house should have a room like that, the Jackdaw Suite, if you will.

*Doctor Who, The Spy Who Loved Me, The Odessa File, Porridge, the Young Ones, lots of US miniseries - The Bourne Identity, QB VII, Holocaust, all those Hallmark fantasies, The Spaceman and King Arthur, one of Harry Alan Towers' Sherlock things...

8 - Next of Kin, Herman Cohen, Executioner, Shuttered Room, Madhouse, Untouchables

Next of Kin (1982) - Full of strange imagery, rain falling down in the desert of an Aussie old people's home, old men in baths, like an Aussie soap opera reversioned by a madman. There's no real plot, but it looks great. Nice sequence in a haunted services with a kid dressed as a soldier, an arcade machine and ballet on the telly. And lots of vehicular mayhem - a van crashing through the services. This being an Aussie horror. Thought I saw it before, but realised I saw only the opening. It gets going. It is really interesting, and also not bland, unlike a lot of Ozploitation.  It's a Clemensy idea given a good visual treatment.

99 & 44/100 Dead (1974) - Strange film,by John Frankenheimer - halfway between the French Connection and Doc Savage - The Man of Bronze. Some visual innovation but not quite enough. Richard Harris on autopilot. Similar but not quite as engrossing as 1972's Prime Cut, from the same writer. The opening is great. Chuck Connors as a feather-duster-handed assassin is great. But Ann Turkel is rubbish (she always was). The killer is the tone and the bland setting. Some of the performances are too heightened, especially Bradford Dillman. The last 45 minutes peak up, but it's so strange. If it had been an Italian film, it might have been better. The school bus chase is good, but it doesn't hang together as a film. The scene where Harris fleeces from an explosion is well-timed. Edmond O'Brien plays Frank Kelly.  I suppose it is a discovery.

Trog (1970) - Weirdly Mid-Atlantic accented spelunkers and the very English David Griffin get lost in cave, and Joan Crawford and Griffin, while searching for the others find a Missing Link, which wrecks a local TV company and then find that classical music and Major Matt Mason dolls sooth it, and light and Major Matt Mason madden it. It's an overlong story for such a film, but the whole way the film is played as if it is Flowers for Algernon, that somehow the crew were trying to make it a proper drama to please Crawford, it's just bizarre. It's a terrible idea, even if done as an Out of the Unknown.  There's an interesting germ there, if it were done with a more realistic costume and a treatment like First Born with Charles Dance, but there's a Burt Reynolds film - Skullduggery from the same year which is a more serious treatise on the same idea, and that is itself a massive folly, although it is more convincing (and the makeup much better, i.e. Japanese girls in whiteface with orangutan fur).  It is known to be gloriously awful, and it is, but who knows if it had been better if it hadn't been so earnest... Konga and Gorgo are better, if only because of the monster suit destroying London stuff is fun, and they are both fabulously silly.

The Executioner (1970) - Average UK spy thingy, feels a bit ITC. Written by Jack Pulman and directed by Sam Wanamaker. George Pepper (yes, I know but my grandad called him Pepper, so it sticks)  plays a British spy raised in the US. A lot of flashbacks. Feels like a rubbish episode of Department S. Lots of moping about with Joan Collins.

Watching the Untouchables (1987). I don't like the actual film, but I like the design and the look of it, and the recreation of Chicago (I like when they build worlds for film), and the soundtrack's great.

The Shuttered Room (1966) - Workmanlike but sporadically creepy Fauxmerican Lovecraftian horror - Carol Lynley (who I always wondered was she UK-based because of her prolific appearances in British horror, then discovered she was the longtime partner of David Frost) and Gig Young are the American imports. A fair recreation of Maine in England.  But the plot is muddled, a Beast in the Cellar-type plot (Flora Robson and all, with a female caged up adding a Jane Eyre-ish element) ensuring a typical gothic potboiler with added supernatural elements (like a lot of contemporary Lovecraft adaptations that toned down the weirdness and upped the soap), plus juvenile delinquents. Oliver Reed and Rick "Yoffy from Fingerbobs" Jones appear. Bernard Kay is scarred, and Donald Sutherland dubs at least one actor. Not that enjoyable, kind of nasty in that downbeat way the Hammer Frankensteins could be, without the period gloss. Director David Greene went on to do Roots and Rich Man, Poor Man, and Grey Lady Down. And Godspell.

Berserk (1967) - How do Joan Crawford and Michael Gough have a proper plugged-in non-portable telly in their TARDIS-esque caravan? "As old as my elephants and twice as wrinkled!" It's a grim variety show linked by murders. It's a more showbizzy Circus of Horrors. Enjoyable fluff. A lot of these mid-rate British horrors don't excite me the way they did when I was 16, and this isn't quite as weird as it appears. The murders are too infrequent considering the size of the cast. It seems afraid to kill off certain cast members. Like Trog, it seems to think it's a serious drama in order to lure Crawford, but it's a variety show with murders. Philip Madoc's good as Diana Dors' sinister foreigner husband (Prague via Glamorgan, going by the accent) with a conscience who knows what is going on. George Claydon too, as the dwarf. (Seems to have quite an initeresting life, Claydon - Oompa Loompa, club comic, Joan Collins' vengeful dance partner in I Don't Want To Be Born, and one-time sidekick to Rolf Harris!).  Robert Hardy looks disturbingly youthful. The love triangle stuff gets tired pretty quickly. The ending is OTT, and Judy Geeson's arrival so late that the supposed mystery isn't much, even though her OTT performance is something.   Better than Trog.

Madhouse (1974) - Vincent Price's last proper horror, Peter Cushing costars. A sort of Targets for the both of them, but confused whether it should be a horror-film version of Theatre of Blood, or a fitting epitaph for the British exploitation film industry. Features Michael Parkinson hosting for fictitious ITV region Rainbow Television, and Dr. Death (Price-as-Paul Toombes' fictional horror movie supervillain turned Uk telefantasy hero) reading Frank O'Connor. Very strange, could have been better, if a better script and director were involved. Too much filler, i.e. stock footage of earlier AIP-Price efforts.  But still more interesting than various period pieces of that era, i.e. I, Monster or whatever. And the ending is a keeper.

6 - Castle, Bowie, 50s B-movies, Yankee Zephyr (+non-canonically, 8 sci-fi refs and some Castle mentions)

The Night Walker (1964 - B/W) - Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor in William Castle's strange dreamsploitation. It feels very TV-like, but the dream sequences are very appealing, better than anything Wes Craven ever did. Lots of talking mannequins, whirling faces. It does feel a bit sub-Serling, better suited to telly. But then it goes all a bit Brian Clemens at the end. Like a lot of Castle's films (including dare I say it, Rosemary's Baby, the Old Dark House, less so as it is Hammer and quite fun), it is a load of TV-ish old nonsense with some standout gimmicks in the middle. The soundtrack by Vic Mizzy is good, later reused as the theme for the 1972 Stewart Granger Hound of the Baskervilles.

The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) - Slightly too disorientating and hard to follow for me. Bowie isn't a good actor. I know what Roeg is doing, but Roeg's films, apart from the Witches I find kind of inconsequential. Nice looking, but dull. Like Friedkin, I find he shoots around people than at people.

Race for the Yankee Zephyr (1981) - Nice locations in New Zealand, a good cast (Ken Wahl, Donald Pleasence, Lesley And Warren, George Peppard, Bruno Lawrence) but a confused tone (it should be a big epic adventure but ends up being a wacky comedy caper with a helicopter cockpit on tank-tracks the sole moment of innovation). The choice of David Hemmings as director may have ruined it. Nice soundtrack. Lee Tamahori as boom operator. It all boils down to a good cast and locations saddled with an uninteresting semi-heist plot about a crashed warplane (the Sneakers problems - interesting characters but rubbish situation). A lot of Australian exploitation has this problem. Always some interest, but quite often, not enough. Even Mad Max has it. Barry Humphries' movies and Howling III avoid it by throwing so much weirdness that most of it sticks. They're not great films but there's a sense of gonzo invention at work that a lot of Aussie B-movies dream of. Then again, unlike a lot of Aussie exploitation, they are proudly Australian, rather than blandly Mid-Atlantic like so many others.

Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959 - B/W) - Attractively shot Corman-produced antebellum insect attack film, blessed with a creepy atmosphere, but not much else. But more impressive than the typical poverty row studiobound shocker of the era. A lot of the Corman films of the era - there's an energy to them - something like The Wasp Woman is rubbish, but there's a kind of pop and fizz to the direction that's lacking in the acting or indeed the plot. They aren't great films, but the direction doesn't make them terrible. Uninteresting surroundings and routine action make them subpar. Corman and his mates, unlike other B-movie folk of the era tried their best, and made good out of what they had. They weren't trying to make art. They didn't know these films would still play today. It's the effort that counts. The best SF movies of the 50s are things like 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and Journey To The Centre of The Earth, the right mix of adventure and awe (which makes good SF, in my opinion), before those sort of period SF movies descended into all-star caper movies that were too busy trying to cast, mostly miscast as many stars as possible, and cramming in all sorts of jokey asides.
50s sci-fi wise, War of the Worlds I enjoy the most out of the alien movies (Body Snatchers I can see its quality, but it never connected with me, see also Day the Earth Stood Still), while The Fly's the best mad science/creature film. Jack Arnold's stuff i.e. Creature from the Black Lagoon is a good  solid journeyman thing blessed with good ideas and good performances, but not quite the scale they need, and the Creature I always felt was a character with untapped potential. And Harryhausen's early films, because they are US-made lack the great parade of British character talent that his later films benefit from - a human face alongside the creatures. The creatures carry the early films. And Forbidden Planet looks great, but it's a pilot for Star Trek, really.

Invasion of the Animal People (1960) - One of those typical poverty row shockers. But the Swedish snowbound location footage has an unearthly, alien feel  that something like Hammer's The Abominable Snowman lacks.

The Bat (1959) - Stagey, mechanical semi-period old dark house plodder with Vincent Price. Like an average Karloff Thriller or Hitchcock Presents. Nothing you haven't seen before. There's a character called Mr. Davenport, which makes everything seem like Rentaghost USA.

16 -Walker, Vincent Ward, Nothing but the Night Vincent Ward, Summerfield, Coma, Poirot

Vigil (1984) - Wonderfully shot, atmospheric, aimless but visually stunning, almost apocalyptic exploration of the New Zealand countryside from Vincent Ward.  Would be a rather average relationship drama were it not for the extraordinary setting of a remote sheep farm, and such sights as a  girl in a tutu and balaclava trying to herd sheep in the wind, Bill Kerr trying to play a tuba in a shed, and a sinking tractor. The sex scene feels shoehorned-in.

The Navigator (1988) - Ward's opus, I find some of the scenes magical, i.e.the forming of the metal in cross, but it feels very sub-Gilliam in its portrayal of pop-eyed, leather-helmeted Northumberland yokels from the dawn of time running amok Les Visiteurs-style in 1980s New Zealand, and the B/W bits look like a Guinness ad. Vigil might be his best film.

Summerfield (1977) - Confusing, attractively shot mystery with Nick Tate, the other John Waters and Charles Tingwell and Lizzie Birdsworth from Prisoner, directed by Ken Hannam (who did the 80s Day of the Triffids). A teacher in an Australian seaside community wonders why his predecessor vanished, similar to Wake In Fright (1971), but not quite as gruelling or able to build as convincing a world (a film that feels like a wonderful documentary, wherethe plot and character seem to be an obstacle), but then again, it doesn't have a soundtrack reputedly doctored by Rolf Harris. The Bruce Smeaton soundtrack is nicely creepy. The film has the feel of an Aussie kids' TV series of the era. Quite prickly, though - the ending makes it "one of those films" (it's about incest).



Rewatched the fourth wall breaking Rutherford Miss Marple/Christie Cinematic Universe expansion Alphabet Murders (1965 - it begins in the studio), with Tony Randall as Poirot doing a weird Anglo-French accent, it's weirder than the Rutherford Marples. Beginning with an Avengers-ish clown getting murdered in a swimming pool, Robert Morley as Porky Pig as Captain Hastings and Maurice Denham as Japp. It feels in the opening quite Tashlin-ish, but the fact it's in b/W may have restricted the former Termite Terrace resident. It doesn't know what it is. Is it a spy spoof? A noir spoof? A Pink Panther knockoff? British comedy and Tashlin don't mesh well. I want to like it, and it has a good cast, aside from Anita Ekberg, Guy Rolfe, James Villiers, Julian Glover, Clive Morton, Cyril Luckham, Richard Wattis, Patrick Newell, a very young Sheila "Benidorm" Reid... But nah...


Tried watching Coma (1978), but I'm not one for hospital drama.

Nothing But The Night (1973) - Ten green Bottles is the theme, Cushing and Lee are the stars, Gwyneth Strong proves she's as bad an actress as a kid than as an adult (when she was in Only Fools and Horses as Cassandra). Like Doomwatch movie, is sort of weirdly average - despite a good cast. It's not good, it's not bad, it has Diana Dors as a ginger. Keith Barron and Michael Gambon appear. Like a kids' sci-fi TV show - mysterious black cat logo - music and all. It's avaerage like a lot of British horror. Fulton Mackay does a weird Cornish-Scottish accent that ends up making him sound and look like Irish politician Willie O'Dea. The end is basically the Wicker Man via Get Out (same plotline, but with drama school kids instead of black youth). Directed by Peter Sasdy, a TV guy. Most of his films feel televisual. Taste the Blood of Dracula and Hands of the Ripper look good, but still like many 70s Hammer period pieces, bits do look like the film inserts of an ITV children's adventure serial. Countess Dracula (1971) I never quite understood the love for, because it looks very TV/Carry On level (I know it was done at Pinewood), and I Don't Want To Be Born (1975) is mental, it's just about worth it, but it has a lot of potential that it doesn't live to. Georgia Brown is a weak heroine. Characters come and go. There's not enough Cush and Lee. There's silly comic relief Scotspeople.

The Corpse (1970) was made by a load of BBC staff, and feels like one of those dull but "atmospheric" US regional horror movies that people often laud. It lacks the stable shonky but relative gloss of most British horrors of the era. It does feel like a home movie. Even Mike Raven's films looked better.

Then, some terrible films aren't helped by the bad prints - Craze (1974) looks like a cheap sex film that stars Jack Palance and Trevor Howard. But then it's badly shot too, it seems.
Pete Walker's stuff I find, well I found it fun as a kid, but the films themselves don't hold that well. House of Whipcord (1974) is a prison film, and is a bit too sleazy, Penny Irving is miscast, and it's basically a padded-out public information film. The most atmospheric bits are the hitch-hiking scenes. The Comeback (1978) is probably his best-constructed film, it's a little slow, but when it is good, it is very good, and Sheila Keith and Bill Owen are brilliant as the villains, the plotting wife and her outwardly absent-minded killer husband (and rewatching it, yes, now I can hear the bits of David Doyle that'd seep into Grandpa Pickles in Rugrats). House Of Mortal Sin (1975) has a great villain in Anthony Sharp, plus Keith, but the plot gets quite hard to follow with  Susan Penhaligon disappearing, and Norman Eshley stepping in as the doomed priest. And Frightmare (1974)is fun. The thing is they have great hooks, but the actual films are usually not great. And Schizo (1976) is not about a gorilla chasing an ice skater, as little boy me used to think (though Jack Watson is pretty ape-like). Walker tries too hard. They should be more fun than they actually are. And he wastes Bill Kerr.

Looney Tunes roundup.

Watching the Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946) - Duck Tracy, "Batman" (an anthropomorphic baseball bat), "Pumpkinhead", "Picklepuss" "Odd noodle", "Jukebox Jaw". Planes flying out of Flattop's head.  Another ad for Joe's. Just when you think they get samey, some real creativity pops up.
Shishkabugs (1962)- one of the more modern Looney Tunes. Involves kebabbed Bugs to make Hassenpfeffer. Less samey because of the almost-UPA style (a style pioneered in WB's own Dover Boys in 1942).  Some of the early samey Bugs i.e. the Wacky Wabbit can be taxing. They're no Rabbit Seasoning or Ali Baba Bunny.
The Scarlet Pumpernickel (1949) - Carry On Dick made by the Looney Tunes. Nice jokes i.e. the cliffside horse-chase and Porky as the Lord High Chamberlain.
A Corny Concerto (1943)  - Warner slagging Fantasia.
Rabbit of Seville (1950) - the one with cream fruit salad-headed/bridal-clad  Elmer Fudd, fun, exquisitely done. Woody Woodpecker did the same thing a few years earlier, but slightly more annoying.
Feed The Kitty (1952) is a bit too cutesy, Tom and Jerry for me.
Daffy Duck's Book Revue with its books dancing about and characters falling out has some of the same ideas as some of Avery's stuff.
You Ought to be in Pictures (1940) - Early meta-how to do film with Porky and Daffy, still quite babyish and cutesy, a la such other early Warner takes as Joe Glows the Firefly.  Porky wants to star with Bette Davis. Early live-action mix. Inventive stuff.


+ 1 - 1 (1987) - Bozzetto associate Guido Manuli does this surrealistic sketch- romcom about a newsreader, a Superman, a sale, and a live action Marilyn Monroe.  Slightly Klasky-Csupo ish. About how life is a film.
Incubus (1987) - Manuli's strange short about a man haunted in a hotel room. A policeman, a teeth, a giant rat, legs, a widow, all scored to music that sounds like the 3-2-1 theme. A bit Amazon Women on the Moon - specifically the Lou Jacobi bit. But Italian. Therefore better.  Extraordinary.
S O S (1979) - Live action/animation hybrid with a funny-voiced scientist, a King Kong spoof, a bride cutting open her husband instead of the cake,  cavemen, naked ladies being flattened into porn and various rather ingenious sexy jokes.
Fantabiblical - a nice but not very amusing bible spoof, though the Jesus on the moon visual is memorable
Opera - Bozzetto, features Nazis with tanks in their mouths, Batmen inside Batman, growing TV aerials and a gasmasked Statue of Librty - stunning, then a gun with teeth..
Istruzioni Per L'Uso - just lots of arse-related jokes - arse jetpacks, arse islands, people turning to ash when they pinch arss. A bit wearing.
TRAILER - spoofs Battleship Potemkin in an appealing Belleville Rendezvous type world, a cinematic experiment with a EuroDisney pisstake.
Sexy Symphony - B/W cartoon animals fucking. That's the joke. Not one of Manuli's best. .
Need to watch more Manuli/Bozzetto. More of the Mr. Rossi shorts.

EDIT: The Mr. Rossi shorts feel more Walter Mitty-ish and a bit more adult - sexy hitchhikers, congestion jokes, creepy gasmasked miners in Venice, but they do feature a rocketship made out of washing machine explode a cruise liner into a load of suds. A lot of pleasing surrealism. Mr. Rossi on Safari has some unfortunate stereotypes (amongst more civilised black characters, there's tribal stereotypes ahoy who unlike the civilised characters have big lips and darker skin but charge for dancing). But they're also routine, and lack dog action. The first film is basically an Italian knockoff of UPA - transparent skin and all.

2 - Deathwatch and The Norseman

The Norseman (1978) - Lee Majors, Cornel Wilde and Mel Ferrer in the last major film from director Charles B. Pierce (though he made a few others and wrote Sudden Impact). Pierce's films feel wrong  exploitation films that think they're old Hollywood. This may be the most extreme case. It feels like a 90 minute beer commercial  or an 80s fantasy made ten years early. It has Jack Elam as a wizard, Christopher Connelly as a lusty, rapey warrior called Rolf, and Kathleen Freeman in brownface as a Little Plum-esque Native American nana, and features a British-Asian, Susie Coelho, in the hope no one would notice one kind of Indian playing the other kind. She looks very Desi. Shot in Florida and North Carolina, even though most of it looks like some abandoned Viking world attraction in Buttfuck, Idaho. Not a good film. But you can't fault its ambition.

Death Watch (1980) - Never really saw it, because I always imagined it was a dull SF thriller like Brainstorm. With people like Harvey Keitel and Harry Dean Stanton. And though it could be, no, because it's magnificently photographed and shot in Glasgow (hence Robbie Coltrane), with even a police box visible (a nod to former Doctor Who sidekick William "Ian" Russell who appears as a doctor), it is probably one of the most appealing dystopian futures I have seen. Signs and ads are left up, a la Light Years Away (1981). Scottish police cars and uniforms, but still it works. Even in Russian, quite beguiling though overlong. The use of 70s Glasgow reminds me very much of the scenes of Glasgow doubling as Brno in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, down to some of the same locations in the market scene. There is a great chase sequence through the carnival market. The reality TV thing is interesting, but the scenery and some of the best photography I have seen, images of vans riding through the countryside, filled with Asian asylum seekers while Keitel and Romy Schneider struggle for peace. Dedicated to Jacques Tourneur deserves a better film.   Romy Schneider's last film.

Who Can Kill A Child (1976) + 3 = 4

Spanish light entertainment TV magnate Narciso Ibanez Serrrador is often hailed as some unheralded genius of horror. But his  two films are quite nasty. The House That Screamed (1969) is an 80s slasher in 60s Gothic drag, with Lilli Palmer and John Moulder-Brown (star of the similarly nasty Deep End and the similarly grotty Vampire Circus). It uses excess footage of historical tragedy in between Wish You Were Here... type footage with Lewis Fiander and Prunella Ransome wandering about the Costa Packet. The idea of an island full of murderous kids is one of those ideas that is interesting but usually don't play well i.e. Children of the Corn or the fun-if-you-are-a-kid Peopletoys/Devil Tmes Five (1974). Yes, we all dream of seeing annoying child actors get murdered, but in a realistic context, it's not so pleasurable.
Chris Tarrantino and Eli What? like this film. It seems to relish in violence (there's a fatal miscarriage played as a shock death scene), but I can see why people like it. Serrador isn't a hack. The film's slow - but that's because the idea is more of an anthology segment than a feature. His films look decent enough, especially Who Can Kill A Child/Would You Kill A Child? It doesn't look like a cheap Franco or Naschy or even Bava film. Then again, it has the benefit of being shot on location, in bright light, but still it looks good for the budget it must have had.
No wonder Serrador quit directing and created 3-2-1. It does have a lovely soundtrack, per most Euro-shock nonsense. In this case by charity shop regular neo-classicist Waldo De Los Rios, which does convincingly sound like the sort of music British/Irish tourists would bring back from a week in Marbella.

Then again, I like horror films to be fun. And only the soundtrack is fun.


Franco's best films are for Harry Alan Towers. He could've livened up the usually staid and languid adaptations of Ten Little Indians Towers did. The best, 1965's  Ten Little Indians is an okay attempt at mimicking William Castle and Margaret Rutherford (same director as her Marple films - George Pollock), but nothing more.  Better than that weird, forgettable ABC Murders with Tony Randall.