BOOKS: THE HISTORY OF THE NME by PAT LONG (Portico, 2012)

Expanded from an Amazon 5 star review entitled: The book that needed to be written.

The NME was a phenomenon. For the last 50 years anyone seriously interested in modern music will have read it at some time in their lives. While its importance has waxed and waned, it was nevertheless a serious British cultural icon. For me that was roughly from 1962-1982 (maybe a bit later) which covered my teenage years when just about everyone in my class read it and talked about what it contained and argued about the msuic, up the through (for me anyway) its golden age of superstar writers like Charles Shaar Murray, Julie Burchill, Nick Kent, Tony Parsons and so on. Murray remains to this day one of the best writers about music and its trappings.

Burchill & Parsons

 Writer Pat Long covers the NME's long internal story with a fair amount of detail -the feuding, the drugs, the highs and lows and the newspaper's coverage of the ever changing face of music. He hits the nail on the head with the appearance of Q magazine signalling a sea-change in readers' attitudes as I was one of those who wanted something more the NME could offer and found it in a glossy monthly magazine.

The NME was an important part of my cultural life and I found this account fascinating, consuming it in little over a day as if it had the readability of a taut thriller.

Criticism? Maybe I'd have a liked a little more detail of the cassettes the NME released which did a lot to widen my musical taste. Jazz, nu-country, new wave, and much more was all there for a very small sum. My favourite was All Africa Radio which showed me a new world of music before World Music was invented and which provides the seeds for very fruitful years of exploration. Also he skips lightly over the rise of the Internet while acknowledging its world-changing importance. But that's just me. Probably every reader will find their own areas in which they'd like more detail. However, as far as I can tell, this is an accurately told tale and one which needed to be told. 

 

 And this is where I came in

Post Script.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a member of the Amazon Vine programme whereby I get to pick two items twice a month from a list of freebies. Often the list is pretty crap but sometimes it comes up with a gem. This was one of them.

DVD: SHOCK-O-RAMA HORROR COLLECTION

Okay, this requires a little explanation.

Explanation

A. Shock-O-Rama is the name of a horror movie label owned by Independent Cinema.

B. Shock-O-Rama is the title of this 4-DVD box set.

C. Shock-O-Rama is the title of one of the movies in this set.

D. Independent Cinema also owns the Seduction Cinema label. Seduction Cinema is known primarily for soft-core lesbian movies which are often cash-in's on more popular films like Planet of the Apes, LoTR (Lord of the G-Strings), etc. Some of these are not necessarily parodies as Women In Black (aka Vampire Obsession) is actually a bleak study of alienation (with lengthy soft-core lesbian scenes and some horror) as is The Erotic Ghost.  

 So I've been told.

E. Seduction Cinema's biggest star is Misty Mundae (aka Erin Brown). Others include Julian Wells and A.J. Khan.

F. These three actresses also appear in most of the Shock-O-Rama movies in this collection. This is not a coincidence.

Julian Wells & Misty Mundae

 

 In praise of Brett Piper

All four of these DTV movies were written and directed by horror vet Brett Piper, filmed on video on a low budget, often in little more than a week. What is surprising is how good they actually are. Yes, that's right, I said good. Well, by cheap DTV horror movie standards. The stories are actually coherent, the characters are all distinctive, the actors aren't great and usually overact but it's forgivable. Piper knows how to frame a scene -I almost commented that the mise-en-scene is quite distinctive but that's a bit pretentious. The films are never dull. Piper eschews (probably for cost reasons) CGI but does use, and quite effectively too for the low budget, stop-motion animation and mechanical effects. Really they look like they were made for ten times the actual cost.

And so the films themselves, in the order they appear in the box.

Shock-O-Rama.

This is an anthology consisting of three separate stories.

In a piece of meta-fiction, soft-core porn star Rebecca Raven (Misty Mundae) has angrily quit and the two idiot producers are looking for a new star so they watch a couple of short films submitted to them. In the first, a couple of tiny stop-motion aline criminals on the run crash into a scrap yard run by a moron with girlfriend troubles and mayhem ensues which includes a giant robot made out of scrap. This is a lot of fun. Meanwhile Raven has gone to a house in the middle of nowhere, cuts herself shaving her legs in the bath and the blood which goes down the drain resurrects a previous owner. Raven ends up in the toolshed where she finds a... Oh come on, we've all seen The Evil Dead,  haven't we? In the third film, mad scientist Julian Wells is secretly experimenting on some young women, giving them lurid dreams which involve a naked Julian Wells. One such dream turns into a genuinely horrifying nightmare which caught me by surprise when I didn't notice a jump cut where a real woman's body was substituted for a prosthetic. That doesn't happen very often.

I really enjoyed this one.

Screaming Dead

A film of four fifths and one fifth. A cult photographer takes pictures of women under extreme distress because, he says, they expose how women are exploited in society. This is a crock of shit: he gets off on it. After the quite disturbing scene setting, he recruits three women and takes them to a spooky house along with his female assistant and encounters the macho representative of the owners who he doesn't want there but has to be there because he's our hero. Anyway, nutty sadistic photographer spends some time getting the women in the appropriate state of mind -vulnerable and scared- by a variety of psychological tricks including lying, bullying and creating pretend ghosts. Then he -and the rest of them- encounter the ghost of a previous occupant who liked to torture young men but is happy to give women a go.

This is really quite well done. Relatively slow paced, there's always enough happening to keep the interest until gore gets going. Like the previous film, there's an unexpected gore shock which caught me by surprise. The acting isn't up to much but in most other respects this is quite well done. After watching this, I ordered three other of Piper's movies.

 

Bacterium

Three young people paint-balling in the woods get trapped in house with a mutating bacterium and a mad scientist who risk getting shot at by soldiers if they try to leave and helped by two other scientists in sealed suits. The virus mutates into an ickily effective blob-type thing which could destroy the world. Rather than risk a nuke, the govt decides on a black hole bomb.

Piper really does know how to make an entertaining low budget horror movie. He keeps things eventful  while building up the suspense to his big set-pieces. Lacking the usual ensemble of actors from the other three in this set raises the acting bar a little.

 

 

Bite Me!

Mutated blood-sucking ticks emerge from a box of marijuana, a special strain created by the government, and get loose in a strip club. Their bite doesn't kill but it does induce strange behaviour. This one is played for laughs. All three strippers are useless for various reasons. The rat-like manager is fighting off a takeover from butch businessperson Julian Wells (perhaps the best actor of the studios soft-core lesbo porn regulars). The barwoman is a martial arts expert and part-time whore. There's a nutty CIA agent and our hero is a dumb pest controller. Eventually the ticks get really big.

Slightly less fun than it sounds and the weakest in the box, it still is fun.

This is the only photo of the monster I could find. Honest!

Conclusion

To be honest, I wasn't expecting to enjoy this box set (which has plenty of extras) as much as I did. Writer/director Brett Piper is  genuinely skilled in, to coin a phrase, the field of schlock-o-rama. He knows exactly how to create an entertaining junk horror movie which entertains from start to finish and to watch four in a row is, for a horror movie fan, quite a find. I'll even forgive Piper for writing (he didn't direct) Troma's A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell.

Post Script.

Mundae left the studio to work in mainstream Hollywood as Erin Brown and, while she's found some work, she doesn't seem to have done much recently.
Julian Wells left the business and now works as a journalist in L.A.

DVD REVIEW: SCI-FI INVASIONS (MILL CREEK, 2011, 12 DISCS), PART 2

Introduction.

See previous post for the general intro to this box set. I should have mentioned that the transfers are generally so poor that on my 23inch monitor they look blurry so I generally reduce the size to less that half in order to get a picture that is watchable. As for things like subtitles; you must be joking.

 The robots

The villains

The good girl

Our hero (centre)

Disc 2

War Of The Robots (1978)

This is actually the second film on the disc but I couldn't find photos for the first on Google, but these are better anyway. This does count as invasion though it's the humans invading the alien planet in search of the kidnapped scientist who is the only one who knows the codes to stop a nuclear meltdown (sloppy organisation there) and the hero's girlfriend. Spoiler alert: see above, it's the photo labelled 'the villains'. The good girl is hopelessly in love with the hero who only has eyes for his siren girlfriend (who the scientist has the hots for) and at the end has to choose which one to save. Spoiler alert: there's a happy end. The space battles are excruciatingly bad (a year after Star Wars). The dubbing is by English actors including one who has to adopt a southern drawl. The robots are terrible shots, probably because their guns go poo poo wing! as opposed to the humans whose guns go wing wing poo! and hit every time. The sets are terrible though a couple of Italian (probably somewhere in Rome) external locations look okay. There is a story but it really isn't worth repeating.

Hands of Steel (1986)

Not an invasion film. In the near polluted future, an evil polluting industrialist (John Saxon in a guest role) sends a cyborg to kill an elderly  blind crippled environmentalist -what a stinker! But the cyborg is starting to get his human memories back and only puts the ebce in hospital and so has to go on the run from everyone. The first half of the film isn't really interesting but around the halfway mark the action picks up and just doesn't stop. We find out that the cyborg (our hero) is invulnerable to bullets but he can get beaten up pretty badly. There's also a demented female cyborg who kicks the crap out of him in a really good scene. This isn't a good film by any standards, though it is half an acceptable action movie with some good fight scenes.

984: Prisoner of the Future (1982)

After ten minutes I checked IMDB to see if this film was what I thought it was and I was right. It's a bleak nihilistic totally depressing Canadian art movie with no entertainment value whatsoever. I flicked to the end to watch the final scenes as mentioned in the solitary (no surprise there) review. I also learned from IMDB that this was commissioned as a pilot. Jumping Jesus Christ! I'm surprised this film wasn't buried the first time anyone saw the complete cut.

Top Line (1988)

Spoiler alert: This Italian movie, filmed in English, actually is an alien invasion movie. Franco Nero finds (after 20 minutes in which nothing of interest happens) an alien spaceship buried inside a mountain and then finds that pretty much every authority in the world is after them. And then nothing much of interest happens again for a while until he and his new girlfriend get chased by a cyborg which, in true Terminator style, gets half his human face ripped off revealing a robot eyeball which moves from side to side with a whirring noise until the cyborg gets dismembered by a pissed off bull. An even better scene is when he's confronted by his beautiful ex-wife who metamorphoses quite gruesomely into an alien and he learns the real truth about the world. Sorry but even I have limits. You'll have to watch the movie to find out what it is. (But you can probably have a good guess.)

DVD REVIEW: SCI-FI INVASIONS (MILL CREEK, 2011, 12 DISCS), PART 1

Introduction.

Every so often I indulge myself with one of these multi-movie cheapo box sets from Mill Creek. Usually it's a horror compilation, this time it's science fiction with theme (according to the set's title) of invasion. Now even using the word invasion in it's broadest sense which, in this context, I'll take to mean unwanted intrusion by someone or something not native to the movie's environment (you'll see what I mean as we go through the individual films), there are a few which don't fit the category by any stretch of the imagination.

Now if all the movies aren't in the public domain which, I suspect, is most of them, then Mill Creek got the rights for peanuts. None of them have ever been remastered, just copied directly to DVD, and tend to look shoddy. Usually they tend to be quite old from the 50s to the 70's, some even earlier. In this box they're mainly from the 70s & 80s with one dating 1991 and the earliest from 1936. And the chances are that most of them won't be very good but at a cost of about 25p per film, so what. I'm looking for diamonds in the rough.

As usual I watch them on my pc and when I get bored (often) I'll use the slider to move it along a minute or two and can watch a 90 minute movie in 20 minutes. Normally I pick my way through these set by choosing the film I'm most interested in. However, as I'm intending to review the whole box set, I'll do it a disc at a time, starting from the beginning. And here we go.

Disc 1.

Brain Twisters (1991).

Scientist drugs students to turn them violent. Dull, no nudity/sex, minimal gore, no invasion except of the bloodstream. Flicked through it very quickly.

The Head (1959)

A black and white cheapo from an independent studio, though studio is hardly the right word. A scientist manages to a keep a dog's head alive. His mad scientist assistant keeps his head alive when he dies of a heart attack so the scientist can help him transfer the head of a hunchback nurse he's fallen in love with onto the body of a stripper. Which is what happens, though it all, naturally, ends badly. The limited budget with most of the film shot at night, the small sets, and the adequacy of the actors give this an oddly engaging and claustrophobic feel, despite the cliched melodrama. It's not good but it's better than I expected.

The Day Time Ended (1980)

This is the first which actually involves aliens invading, though they only invade an isolated modernistic house and barn where a family live. I saw this on video in the early 80's. It stars forgotten (by me at least) character actor Jim Davis (a name I associate with the creator of Garfield) and (the less forgotten) Dorothy Malone. Things in it include: a time and size-shifting glowing green pyramid, a tiny friendly alien, a hostile small space craft, two stop motion monsters fighting with the winner attacking the family, lots of flashing lights, and the family getting zapped to the future for a happy end. (Oh, spoiler warning.) It's engaging enough in a low key way.

Eyes Behind The Stars (1978)

Some dubbed Italian crap involving a couple being chased by government agents after accidentally photographing an alien space ship. I had to switch if off half way through and felt absolutely no desire to find out what happened at the end.

Films

Abraxas - Guardian of the Universe
The Alien Factor
Alien Prey
The Amazing Transparent Man
Assassin
The Bat (1959)
Battle Beyond the Sun
Beyond the Moon
Brain Twisters
The Brother from Another Planet (yes, the John Sayles movie)
The Crater Lake Monster
The Creeping Terror
The Day Time Ended
Death Machines
Escape from Galaxy 3
Evil Brain from Outer Space
Extraterrestrial Visitors
The Eyes Behind The Stars
Fugitive Alien
Future Hunters
Future Women
Galaxina
The Giant of Metropolis
Hands of Steel
The Head
Horror High
Hundra
Hyper Sapien: People From Another Star
Invaders From Space
It's Alive (not the one you're thinking of)
Life Returns
The Manster
Mission Stardust
Morons from Outer Space (yes, the British film with Jimmy Nail)
Night Fright
Night of the Blood Beast
Primal Impulse
R.O.T.O.R.
Raiders of Atlantis
Robo Vampire
Rocket Attack U.S.A.
Slipstream (yes, the one with Mark Hamill)
Star Knight
Star Pilot
Top Line
Trapped by Television
War of the Robots
The Wasp Woman
Welcome To Blood City

"Oh what fun we had."

To be continued...

GRAPHIC NOVEL: ABSOLUTE PROMETHEA VOL.3 by ALAN MOORE & J H WILLIAMS111 (DC, 2011)

 

This deserves a much better review than I can give it. In terms of story, Promethea isn't that complicated, in terms of ideas it's certainly Alan Moore's most philosophical work. Or perhaps that should be mystical or metaphysical.

Sophie/Promethea have returned from heaven only to be forced into a fight with her friend Stacia/the Grace Branagh Promethea incarnation. After a trial in the Etheria, Sophie goes on the run and refuses to invoke Promethea who will end the the world. Hounded by the FBI and hunted by Tom Strong, Sophie becomes Promethea and ends the world. Of course that isn't the end of the story.

Volume 3 returns to the more accessible narrative of the first volume and is a wild exciting ride which also resolves the fates of the many supporting characters by the penultimate chapter. The last chapter is something else again and has to be seen to be believed. Whatever you may think of it, it's certainly unique.

What is pretty much inarguable is that it's his most beautifully illustrated series and one which places the most demands on the artist; though I'm sure that Linda Gebbie on Lost Girls has her adherents. J. H. Williams 111 (who came to my attention with Chase back in the 90's) does a phenomenal job using a range of artistic and design techniques without ever losing sight of the narrative. On that level alone, I'd argue that it is one of the finest graphic novels ever. One minor but engaging and amusing part is how Williams deliberately copies the style of the artists who drew characters from other ABC titles, often simultaneously in one panel.

I've criticised the lack of extras in previous volumes, particularly the first, but I have no complaints (well, just a couple) about this one. Nothing from Moore but no-one expected that. There are the complete Little Margie in Magic Misty Land (Moore's tribute to Little Nemo In Slumberland) illustrated by Eric Shanower, some Promethea-related bits and pieces from other ABC comics (including an extract, but alas not the complete episode, from Tom Strong's view of the end of the world), Williams writing about visually creating (drawing seems such an inadequate in the context) Promethea, Moore's script for chapter 29, and a half-size replica of the poster version of the final chapter.

And that is it, the conclusion to one of Alan Moore's finest graphic novels. Yes, these three Absolute volumes are expensive but they're worth every penny. 

This review has just been submitted to amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.

SOCIETY: THE STEPHEN LAWRENCE MURDER AND THE DAILY MAIL

I'm a regular critic of the Daily Mail because of its right-wing reactionary attitude but sometimes it gets it right and when it does it deserves due credit.

The Mail's response to the initial acquittal of those accused of Stephen Lawrence's murder is an example of when it got it absolutely correct. Unlike every other newspaper, it published the names and photographs of the killers and accused them of the murder. They could have been taken to court for libel but they weren't. It may be that, at the time, the editor also saw an opportunity to raise the paper's profile but I also have no doubt that it was primarily sparked by genuine outrage at this vile racist murder by five scumbags who seemed to have gotten away with it.

Ever since they have consistently maintained their position, actively supporting the campaign for justice by Stephen Lawrence's mother. Due, in part, to their efforts the law on double jeopardize was repealed. In the years since the murder and as a reaction to it, if racism has not gone away it has certainly gone underground. The institutionalised racism of the police force has to a large extent gone, though I suspect not completely. Attitudes to racism most definitely have changed for the better.

And two of Stephen Lawrence's murderers have today been been given long sentences. Some justice has finally been seen to be done. If the other three can't be brought to justice, I hope their lives are as miserable as possible. This result certainly won't help them.

The Daily Mail, of course, is taking as much credit as it can and playing up its role as far as it can. For once, I can't find it in my heart to criticise the paper for it. What they did, as they claim, was in the finest tradition of British journalism.

Happy New Year everybody.