The Damned(Joseph Losey, 1961)

If you take popular culture as your yardstick, it is easy to conclude that Britain during the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s was a pretty strange place. Perhaps it is simply due to a weird nostalgia for our parents era, or for the ghosts of the kind of society that was fading out through our own childhoods, but whatever – it is hardly news that the generation currently in their 20s and 30s have imbued the more evocative aspects of that whole era’s film, TV, design, architecture, radio, literature etc. with an inescapable aura of rich, fetishized, near mystical weirdness.

From old Dr. Who episodes and the original Quatermass & The Pit through to movies ranging from ‘Kes’ to ‘Psychomania’ to ‘O Lucky Man’ to ‘Blood On Satan’s Claw’, to old BBC test patterns, ‘60s Penguin paperback designs, back issues of the Moorcock-era ‘New Worlds’, to new build polytechnics, ‘Watership Down’, Sandy Denny and the bloody shipping forecast, all these and much, much more are touchstones in a vast network of interconnecting reference points creating a psychotronic alternate Britain – mass subterranean nostalgia on a grand scale, enough of it keep the likes of Andy Votel and Johnny Truck cackling in basements for their entire lives, uncaring of whatever may have transpired since 1985. Not that I’m immune of course, as a card-carrying fan of all of the above (bar maybe the polytechnics); give me a white Bakelite typewriter to play with and some weird quota quickies about Telly Savalas visiting Birmingham, and I’ll be happy as larry. And I mean, I wasn’t even BORN until after Thatcher was elected. Whatever the indefinable textural appeal of Old Weird England is, it doesn’t seem to be fading as new generations with no actual memories of this era whatsoever take up the flame. Dare we say, it’s actually CATCHING.

In recent years, new creative endeavours arising from this morass of whatever (primarily in the musical sphere) have been dubbed ‘hauntology’. Slightly contrived and overly portentous I suppose, but as catch-all phrases go it’s not bad, and I guess it gets more bums on seats than just opening up a psycho-media studies department next door to psychogeography in the nighthaunted polytechnic of our dreams.

(And hey, when do we get around to ‘psychohistory’, the discipline that, as I recall, the dude in Asimov’s Foundation books used to scientifically predict the future or whatever it was? After that, what say we really freak out the square with some psycho-biology…)

But I digress; point is, oh my hauntological brethren, we have here a rarely seen film so rich in authentic British weirdness and such, it’s surprising that it hasn’t managed to yet bag itself a prime spot in the pantheon discussed above: Joseph Losey’s ‘The Damned’.

Director Losey was actually an American, who began his career in the theatre, working with Bertholt Brecht before moving on to cinema to helm a variety of low budget dramas and crime movies, before being blacklisted in Hollywood for refusing to testify before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Relocating to the UK, he proceeded to ingratiate himself with the British film industry, making a sporadic series of films of reportedly highly variable quality over the years, apparently countering accusations that none of them ever made a farthing by stressing his uncompromising approach and his rejection of Hollywood formula.

Both of these boasts, and probably HUAC’s interest in the guy as well, are certainly borne out by ‘The Damned’, produced for (oh yes) Hammer at the dawn of the ‘60s, with results deemed so unpalatable to a contemporary audience that the film didn’t actually see the light of day until it received a limited, and heavily edited, American release in ’65 (when ‘These are..’ got appended to the title).

Perhaps initially born from an attempt to cash in Wolf Rilla’s adaptation of John Wyndham’s ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ into ‘Village of the Damned’ the previous year, ‘The Damned’ is loosely based on H.L. Lawrence’s novel ‘The Children of the Light’, but Losey and screenwriter Evan Jones expand significantly on the expectations of their precursors, turning in an film that presents a unique mixture of chilling, anti-authoritarian cold war science fiction and teenage-orientated juvenile delinquency high-jinks, set against the backdrop of an authentically dilapidated South Coast seaside resort.

Filmed primarily on location in and around Weymouth, the films setting captures a sense of the town’s reality that can’t be faked, and which, combined with the definitive UNreality of the film’s characters and events, creates an atmosphere that is by turns eerie and positively surreal, whilst still retaining the odd sense of inertia and dislocation I for one have always experienced when visiting similar coastal locales.


After opening with a sombre credit sequence featuring a series of unnerving expressionist sculptures set against windswept cliff tops, we move to Weymouth’s promenade on a sunny afternoon. Joan (Shirley Anne Fields) utters the film’s first line of dialogue, as she strides past the war memorial, a switchblade stuck into her slacks looking like she just stepped off the front of a pulp paperback;

“What’s the matter, you never seen a clocktower before?”

I don’t know about you readers, but I was sold on this film from that moment onwards.

Her remark is aimed at Simon (Macdonald Carey), a world-weary American tourist who seems to have been casually ogling her. The film switches to a silent aerial shot showing the town from overhead as he apparently decides, what the hell, he might as well try his luck, switchblade or no, and follows her down a few streets, attempting to make conversation.

Little does he know, this is the signal for a gang of leatherclad biker/teddyboy guys to set out behind them. Joan leads Simon down a blind alley, where the teds rob him and beat him senseless. Joan looks guilty. “Are you happy in your work Joanie?” sneers one of the gang, and they leg it.

Accompanying this whole sequence is the film’s nominal theme tune, James Bernard’s ‘Black Leather Rock’, a song which is nothing short of insane. Sounding like a middle-aged soundtrack composer’s idea of the kind of music juvenile delinquents might listen to, it consists of a sort of light big band mambo, over which a crooner-like vocalist lustily sings “black leather, black leather, crash crash crash! Black leather, black leather, smash smash smash! Black leather, black leather, kill kill kill!”, etc. The track continues in this vein for several minutes with little in the way of variation. It’s absolutely hilarious, goofy and kinda hypnotic, and seems to be one of the things people remember most about the film.

Anyway, in turns out the biker gang is masterminded by Joan’s sister King (Oliver Reed), who seems to eschew the teddyboy look in favour of a tweed overcoat, driving gloves and a jauntily swung umbrella. Reed, in one of his first significant film roles, casts a magnificently menacing shadow across the film, his portrayal of King as a self-made thug with hidden depths seeming to prefigure Malcolm McDowell’s legendary turn in A Clockwork Orange a decade later to such an extent that it’s hard to believe Kubrick and/or McDowell weren’t looking to this film as a reference point. King’s style and mannerisms seem like a deliberate restatement of conservatism in contrast to his rocker pals, and indeed he seems to stand for a sort of hard-edged puritanism, sneering dismissively at his gang's irresponsible japery whilst enjoying an intense, quasi-incestuous relationship with his sister, controlling her movements and forcibly preventing her from associating with other boys or from having a life outside of the gang.


Meanwhile, we are introduced to the more sinister side of the film’s plotline, in the shape of Bernard (Alexander Knox), a nervous, haunted-looking civil servant who is in charge of a top secret Home Office/M.O.D. project based on the cliffs outside the town. Bernard is taking a spot of tea in a crumbling sea-front hotel with Freya, a bohemian sculptor played by Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors (yes, the cliff-top sculptures in the credits sequence were hers). It seems Bernard is letting Freya live and work in an isolated cabin on M.O.D. land whilst the two enjoy an ambiguous on-off sort of relationship.

Freya seems to like being a bit mean to poor old Bernard, despite his apparent generosity, but when she ribs him about the secrecy of his work (“they say when a civil servant is in danger of losing his top, he just starts stamping everything ‘top secret’..”), he becomes deadly serious, informing her in ice-dripping tones that if her were to utter but one word about his project, it would put her in mortal danger.

So something a bit rum is definitely going on, and indeed, we next see Bernard going about his business in another cliff-top portacabin, where, after the obligatory confrontation with some military hotheads (“I suppose you’d rather raise these children to be damned beatniks!”), he has his science guys set up some broadcasting equipment, and calmly delivers a daily lesson and question & answer session via video link-up to a class of unnaturally pale, well-spoken children who appear to have never seen any other adults, and are utterly ignorant of the outside world. Yes, it seems the British government have their own collection of weird children, whom Bernard is raising in complete isolation in a complex of sterile bunkers within the cliffs, reassuring them that they will have “an important role to play”, “when the time comes”. The children seem pretty bored and unhappy, no longer entirely satisfied with the vague answers they get to their questions. It seems they had a pet rabbit once, but it started to get sleepy, and succumbed to “the black death”. There are a lot of radiation suits hung up in Bernard’s office. What the hell is going on?


Viewers are left to ponder this for quite a while, as we return to our scheduled juvenile delinquent yarn. Joan has apparently decided that Simon, more than just another victim, could represent an opportunity for her to assert her independence from her dominating brother, and returns to visit him on his fishing boat, where he’s chilling Papa Hemingway style, presumably reflecting on how he doesn’t much appreciate having quit his high-powered job and travelled across the Atlantic in search of freedom, just to be bashed in the face by some limey punk with an umbrella the first time he speaks to a dame.

So one thing leads to another, as it is apt to do in the movies, and before we know it Joan and Simon are off on the run, skirting along the South Coast, with a furious King and his gang in hot pursuit, vowing to kill them good & proper.


As you might expect, this night-time chase brings both parties first to Freya’s cabin, where an increasingly psychotic King has a memorably existential showdown with Freya in one of the film’s best scenes, and subsequently across the barbed wire, through a hidden doorway at the base of the cliffs, and into the bowels of ‘the project’, where dark secrets are revealed, and the confused and over-excited children start to see the intruding adults as champions who can assure their escape.

And, in most other films, escape of some kind might be on the cards. But not here, as Losey propels the film’s various strands toward a conclusion so disturbing, chaotic and unremittingly bleak, it’s breathtaking. If the ending of ‘The Damned’, and the political/moral questions it raises, are still chilling and unsettling today (and they are), it is hard to imagine the subversive weight it must have carried in the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis. There is little doubt that this is the main reason such a fine film was shelved for years, only emerging in heavily edited form five years after it was shot.

Losey pulls no punches as, via a succession of increasingly disturbing imagery mixed with Bernard’s self-justifying rhetoric in a manner that seems to hint at the influence of Eisenstein, the film makes clear that nuclear annihilation is inevitable, and that the authorities, in their confused and inadequate preparations for it, are prepared to sacrifice all vestiges of morality and civilisation, in order to ensure that a crippled, mutated new strain of humanity may limp on into the post-nuclear age; a new strain which is already so mortified by the conduct of it’s bungling masters that it is ready to destroy itself rather than march in line.

You’re all fucked, Losey seems to be telling his 1961 audience with deadpan sincerity, and the lies and crack-brained scheming of your government are doing more to drag you toward the brink than the “enemies” and their missiles ever will.


Up to this point, ‘The Damned’ has thrived on ambiguity – it’s a testament to the strength of the intelligent, character-driven script and the fine ensemble performances that the whole thing seems like a real ol’ ripping yarn, despite the fact that none of the relationships between any of the protagonists seem at all stable or healthy, despite the fact that mash-up of different genre conventions renders the film’s tone bizarrely inconsistent, and despite the fact that the audience are kept in the dark about the main details of the plotline through most of the running time.

But, with the film’s conclusion, Joseph Losey really puts his cards on the table, marking himself out as a filmmaker whose radical agenda prefigures not only Kubrick’s work in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but the concerns of other uncompromising British directors such as Peter Watkins and Lindsay Anderson too, and all in the guise of a bizarre teens-on-the-rampage / science fiction flick that’s got to rate as one of the most startling, entertaining and compelling British films of it’s era.

I quite fancy the idea of taking a few trips down to the South Coast this summer. I’d love to hit Weymouth, soak up whatever’s left of the atmosphere, and see whether I can still hear that familiar refrain faintly echoing on the sea breeze….

Black leather, black leather, crash, crash, crash….

Spider Baby, or The Maddest Story Ever Told (Jack Hill, 1964)

I realise I’m not exactly reinventing the wheel by writing a review of ‘Spider Baby’. Most self-respecting horror/weirdness fans will have seen it, and those who haven’t will surely be familiar with it via it’s killer rep as a – sigh – “cult classic”.

But, for all that, it is still a film which has never been commercially released in the UK and Europe, a film which is still more frequently referred to in passing than it is actually screened or directly discussed. Thus: I feel the need to write about it.

Perhaps one of the reasons for it's ‘limited’ public exposure, even whilst the movie is established canonical viewing for horror fans, is that ‘Spider Baby’ is lumbered with a plot line that is difficult to summarise without making it sound like a thoroughly ghastly enterprise.

Opening with a shot of the ‘Encyclopaedia of Rare Genetic Diseases’ sitting atop the coffee table, the camera pans up to a rather smug, well-adjusted looking fellow, who proceeds to deliver a monologue regarding the curse of the Merrye family, whose bloodline is subject to a unique hereditary disorder that causes it’s victims’ minds and bodies to effectively deteriorate from puberty onwards, subjecting them dementia and psychopathic behaviour from a young age and eventually reducing them to “a pre-human state of savagery and cannibalism” as they advance into adulthood.

As you might well expect, such an affliction has not exactly made for a happy or healthy family tree, but the remnants of an aristocratic fortune have enabled the family to cling onto SOME sort of existence over the years, and ‘Spider Baby’ proceeds to introduce us to the last survivors of the Merrye lineage, teenage sisters Virginia and Elizabeth and their older brother Ralph, who live alone in ascetic poverty, confined to a crumbling, isolated Californian mansion and cared for by the family’s dedicated chauffer Bruno (Lon Chaney), a man whose vow to protect and raise his late master’s offspring has rendered him scarcely any less maladjusted than his charges.


Realised with rare skill and imagination by writer/director Jack Hill, the whole set up becomes an instant masterpiece of American Gothic, as the bored, disobedient children struggle to scratch a life for themselves out of the detritus left by their doomed ancestors. Raven haired psychopath-in-training Virginia obsessively identifies herself with spiders and bugs, separating edible and poisonous toadstools in the garden and playing her favourite game ‘spider’, filling a room with rotting drapes and crouching near an open window, kitchen knives at the ready. Marginally saner sister Elizabeth meanwhile acts out a slightly satanic parody of a bored schoolgirl, fruitlessly trying to provoke her siblings into hating each other, whilst Ralph is a more overtly monstrous presence; a simple-minded, weirdly lovable beast-man, clambering across the rooftops and hunting cats, Ralph is realised in perfect drooling, gurning form by professional really-weird-lookin’-dude Sid Haig. And, in good, gruesome Lovecraft-via-EC-comics backwoods gothic tradition, the family is completed by the unseen “Uncle Ned” and “Aunt Clara”, who dwell in darkness in the basement, their presence noted largely through ominous growls and scrapes.



A potentially grim scenario for a movie, I’m sure you’ll agree, but the choice of actors charged with bringing this deviant family unit to life easily manages to transcend the potentially tasteless subject matter, each of them offering a performance that is little short of extraordinary. Lon Chaney, who at the time had long been cruelly relegated to the sidelines of even b-movie production thanks to the changing times and his legendarily debilitating alcoholism, manages to put in a real career-best performance here, acting with a dignified solemnity that it’s tragic to think he had hidden within him through the proceeding decades of pisstakes and bit-parts. Apparently Chaney was drawn to the script of ‘Spider Baby’ for personal reasons, seeing the role as reflecting his own experiences caring for troubled teenagers. And indeed, it is from this sort of genuine feeling, rather than from horror movie grotesquery, than Chaney builds Bruno’s character, drawing on a reserve of pathos that, combined with the sort of slow, mannered theatrical performance style that was dying out in cinema by the ‘60s, is almost heartbreaking as he patiently tries to discipline the children, explaining to them yet again that “it’s not good to hate” as they listen doe-eyed, knowing that he hasn’t got the strength to protect them from the outside world for much longer, as they grow older and crazier and the family’s position grows ever more untenable.

Actually, I’ve always had a soft spot for Lon. Somehow, he always managed to come across as a hell of a nice guy and a really gifted actor, even when he was portraying villainous cartoon freaks, and, even moreso than his contemporaries Lugosi and Karloff, I feel his eternal typecasting as “the monster guy” was deeply unfair. It was a brilliant stroke of luck therefore that he found a film as good as ‘Spider Baby’ in which to prove his talents to the world at the tail-end of his career, and boy, does he ever make the best of the opportunity. It’s a shame barely anybody got to see the damn thing within his lifetime.



And if ‘Spider Baby’ brought out the best in Chaney, the casting of 17 year old unknown Jill Banner as Virginia was a stroke of genius. She is, to resort to some much-overused filmic clichés, unforgettable, burning up the screen with an extraordinary combination of genuine dementia, childlike malevolence and warped charisma – one of those performances that seems less like a good acting gig, more like a record of a truly incredible and fascinating person, captured on film and doing her fucking nut, so to speak.

In a certain sense, ‘Spider Baby’ can be seen as a final knife in the belly of the classic Hollywood Noir tradition, and as such, Jill/Virginia manages to perfectly embody the vengeful, shrieking lunatic girl who was always lurking behind the soft focus eyes of our favourite femme fatales, fully unleashed at last thanks to the more brutish aesthetics of ‘60s exploitation flick, with her filthy antique dress, wild eyes, pet tarantula and butcher’s knife in each hand, as the vague spider/liar metaphors of ‘Double Indemnity’ and ‘Angel Face’ are blown up into an actual, literal fucking homemade web, with a spider at the centre expressing a perverse teenage fury that wouldn’t be seen again in popular culture until Lydia Lunch was fronting Teenage Jesus in the late ‘70s. It’s scarcely surprising that the early advertising for ‘Spider Baby’ (what little of it there was under that name) concentrated largely on Banner, billing her as “The Spider Baby” and promising “seductive innocence of Lolita, the savage hunger of a black widow!”

She’d steal the show no question, were Chaney, Haig and Beverly Washburn as Elizabeth not all equalling compelling. If such performances were the only thing ‘Spider Baby’ had going for it, it would still be a pretty unique motion picture, but thankfully the same qualities are reflected in every other aspect of the film’s production too.



There is a telling moment in one of the short documentaries accompanying the DVD in which Jack Hill confesses that, at the time of ‘Spider Baby’ at least, he tended to feel jealous of his friends in the movie business who got to work on more ‘serious’ studio films. Such concerns apparently didn’t stop Hill from subsequently embarking on a long career working with Roger Corman, bringing all manner of sleazy, action-packed craziness to the screen over the following decades. But, bearing the above quote in mind whilst viewing ‘Spider Baby’, it is interesting to note the extent to which Hill relies not on the style and conventions of contemporary horror movies (although ‘Psycho’ certainly exerts an influence), but upon the classic Hollywood stand-bys of solid storytelling, broadly painted emotion and carefully composed, articulate mise en scene. Despite it’s grotesque subject matter and sometimes graphic violence, this helps to give ‘Spider Baby’ a wonderfully old fashioned atmosphere that’s perfectly in keeping with it’s gothic lineage, a proud throwback to an eerier era, much as H.P. Lovecraft’s batty faux-Victorian prose must have been in the 1930s.

Some of the credit for this must be given to Alfred Taylor’s beautiful black & white photography, which, at a time when many horror flicks were moving into the realms of garish technicolor gore, pays tribute to the dense interplay of sunlight and shadow of the best of ‘40s Hollywood, lighting the exterior shots of the Merrye house in such a way that you almost expect Philip Marlowe to stride up the front steps.

(The fact that the guy who DOES stride up the steps, and with whom the audience is encouraged to identify for the film’s opening sequence, is actually disgraced black comic actor Manton Moreland, says a lot for ‘Spider Baby’s status as an impossibly strange one-off – a film that was never going to find a comfortable home in the time/place of it's creation.)

Hill’s direction too is often suitably stately, managing to imbue the Merrye family with an internal logic and a deep sense of recognition and sympathy worthy of a Frank Capra film, albeit one turned on it’s head, as the mantle of lofty, everyman humanity assumed by Jimmy Stewart in Capra’s most memorable films is taken on here by a gang of murderous, damaged outsiders, whose happy isolation is threatened by the venal, cowardly “normals” who intrude upon them. All this nearly thirty years before Tim Burton (you knew he was gonna get a mention somewhere) explored the same themes in a slightly less extreme form in ‘Edward Scissorhands’.


Not everything in ‘Spider Baby’ is flat-out wonderful of course: there are a few moments when the low budget and quick shooting time clearly show through, and other scenes that are just plain goofy, attempting to rope in some bankable exploito fare and just sorta… failing weirdly, as the film’s more genuine feeling of humour and humanism win through. There’s also the fact that when the aforementioned “normals” arrive, although each of the actors does a prerfectly sterling job, they nonetheless somewhat undermine the film’s odd sense of realism by basically acting like they’re hamming it up in a William Castle monster movie… although in a sense, this very lack of depth helps to set them apart from the warmth and empathy generated by the “weirdos”, in way that serves the film’s themes very well.

Overall though, ‘Spider Baby’ is an unlikely masterpiece, a creative triumph for all concerned. Given the love, thought and commitment that was clearly put into the film by cast and crew alike, it remains nigh-on unbelievable that it was written and shot as a drive-in circuit filler under the working title “Cannibal Orgy”. A perfect example of how great, moving, life-changing art can happen when the right elements just happen to come together and throw up sparks, someplace where no one would ever think to look.

There are so many more things to say about ‘Spider Baby’ – I haven’t even yet mentioned Ronald Stein’s amazing, unconventional score, the cartoon credit sequence or Lon Chaney’s utterly bizarro speak-singing ‘theme song’ ; I haven’t got around to discussing how gleefully effective the twist-in-the-tail ending is, despite being so predictable it’s nigh on inevitable. I haven’t discussed how the various sub-plots involving the ‘normal’ visitors are kinda fun in their own right, or found time to riff about the extent to which the life histories of some of this movies cast and crew read like choice examples of California Gothic in their own right (check out Jill Banner’s biog some time), or related the history of how the lay completely unseen for decades, building a legendary word-of-mouth reputation as a lost classic until Hill was eventually forced to effectively steal the negatives of his own film so that he could get a remastered print made to counteract the emergence of terminally degraded VHS bootlegs.

But, I’ve said enough. The fact is, whether you reckon the film is an over-exposed, obvious cult reference point or you’ve never heard of it before in your life, we should give thanks for the fact that anyone with a multi-region DVD player or a boradband connection can now watch ‘Spider Baby’ in full, so I’ll just conclude by recommending you go and do just that - you know where to find it, I'm sure.

Lameness Excuse # 1

Writing about good films, films I really love, for a weblog like this proves challenging. Reviewing trashy films, or flat-out weird films? – sure, great – I can talk about what happens in them, whether or not they were fun, crack wise, go off on a few tangents; job done. Really great films though, unique ones that don’t really fit into any canon or generic framework – they take a bit more effort. I feel the need to do them justice, to explain, to expound, to cross-reference, to fully get to grips with the totality of the elements that make the film special. And, more so than most other art forms, a LOT of different elements go toward making a ninety minute film. It’s a tough gig alright, perhaps going someway toward explaining why, despite it’s many fine and valuable proponents, “film writing” has never really taken off as a self-sustaining, independently entertaining form in quite the same way that “music writing” has, and I’m out of practice at it too.

Added to this, I’ve not had much time on my hands recently, with annoying crap (and probably some good crap) sapping my attentions from all directions as I try to get some quality writing time in, which as you may have noticed has starved this weblog of content a bit recently.

Because you see, a couple of months ago, I sat down at home with a bottle of wine, grabbed a few recently acquired DVDs, and treated myself to what turned out to be one of the most rewarding and enjoyable accidental double bills in recent memory.

Two films that we should rightly have all seen many years ago, but for the uncaring tyranny of PAL/Region 2 DVD/video distribution. Two films made a continent apart with drastically different aesthetics, but that share a very specific theme: that of doomed, unfortunate children locked away from the rest of mankind, to whom they pose an unintentional threat. Two films that are also oddly linked by their status as low budget features that began life as exploitation/’b’ pictures, but ended up venturing into such unexpected, intelligent and engaging directions that they manage to render themselves wholly unique and unrepeatable artistic endeavours. Two films that were both initially punished for their audacity with studio hostility, botched, butchered theatrical releases, decades of neglect, and only a relatively recent rebirth as bone fide “cult classics”.

In short, two of the best films I’ve happened to see in years, and I really would not be able to live with myself if I ended up posting some jokey round-up of the ‘Tombs of the Blind Dead’ sequels or the later Hammer Dracula movies or that god-awful 28 Days Later sequel before I’d at least TRIED to share my profound admiration for these two movies.

First review is above, second one forthcoming.

FURY, by Henry Kuttner(Mayflower-Dell, 1966)

Yeah, listen up fatso - this ain’t none of your high falutin’ rocket engine shit – this is a novel of VIOLENCE!



Actually, this book is cobbled together from a 1947 Astounding Science Fiction serial, and seems to be a fairly decent bit of interplanetary heroic fantasy, but I thought Mayflower-Dell’s somewhat unconventional attempt to sell it to the SF audience by accusing them of being pussies deserved to be preserved for the ages.

I don’t know how well it worked out for them, but I don’t recall ever seeing another ‘60s SF paperback packaged like this one; “so you think you got the stomach for it, four-eyes?”

Night of the Saucers, by Eando Binder (Five Star Paperback, 1972)

“You mean they’re planning to blow up the Pentagon?”

“Yep, they’re going to blow up everything.”

“They’re going to blow up the Vatican…?”

“They’re going to blow up EVERYTHING.”

Etc.

Fucking Vexxans, honestly, infiltrating alien cultures through dark political machinations just so they can blow shit up...



How indeed!

I was going to say “it’s not as much fun as it sounds” just as a natural reflex action, but actually, unlike every other Five Star Paperback I own, it turns out ‘Night of the Saucers’ is kind of a blast. It’s really simple-minded good fun, like if someone wrote a straight up novelisation of a whacked out AIP b-movie.

I’ve scanned some choice examples of "Eando Binder"s typically two-fisted prose for your enjoyment below:

Deathblog: J.G. Ballard, 1930 - 2009

For days now, I’ve been struggling to find an opportunity to get something down in writing on the death of J.G. Ballard. A decent obit of such a contentious and fascinating character would be difficult at the best of times. A writer/thinker who added an entirely new, autonomous region to the landscape of twentieth century culture, who birthed an aesthetic which is forceful, definite and yet impossible to fully define upon the world… yes, an appropriate headstone for Ballard does not exactly roll off the chisel, so to speak.

Perhaps what’s most fascinated me about Ballard’s work, and what’s kept me coming back to it occasionally ever since I started working through his reserves of global disaster sci-fi as an apocalypse-obsessed teenager, is that I can never QUITE get an angle on where he’s coming from. As a kid, I was looking for catastrophe, ruin and reassuring daring-do in the Wyndham mould, and, I suppose in theory, Ballard delivered. But at the same time, his stories – if you can call them that; they’re often more like gigantic, slowly unfolding canvas of choreographed destruction – left me completely cold. This guy seemed to be approaching the end of the world not from the point of view of someone who WANTED it to happen, or from someone who wanted to STOP it happening, nor even from the point of view of someone who’d SEEN it happening and wanted to convey the experience. He seemed instead to be operating from a perspective completely removed from humanity, delighting in taking apart the pieces of the modern world, flinging them around violently to see what new shapes they make. Characters, such as they were, were just some poor, self-serving shmucks who got in the way. Even when characters are blessed with a bit of development in these early novels, they tend to exemplify the trend found in much ‘new wave’ British SF (also see Priest, Aldiss etc.), wherein heroic everymen are phased out in favour of new everymen who are shallow, immoral, deeply unhappy bastards who tend to spend their time running grim small businesses that they secretly hate and cheating on their wives just for the sake of it.



It is perhaps this sense of alien perspective, of emotional coldness, that helps make Ballard one of the most genuinely challenging of the pantheon of 20th C. modernist/punk novelists. Whilst most of his books might still ‘make sense’ in narrative terms, they lack the underlying humanitarianism of Burroughs or the humour of Joyce, and these absences prove far more disturbing and off-putting than the simple matter of one sentence following another; I know I’ve spoken to several people who find Ballard’s books borderline unreadable, impossible to connect with.

Was Ballard really a modernist though? It seems to me that on the one hand he was an ultimate, uncompromising futurist in the sense Marinetti originally intended – a proponent of vast, violent, impersonal action, of the artistic properties of physical, industrial weight, of the momentum of a movement, whether creative or destructive, being more important than it’s direction. But at the same time, how can you possibly throw a ‘modernist’/’futurist’ label at someone who seemed so obsessed with distrusting, disassembling, sabotaging all forms of post-industrial structure - indeed of pulling apart the whole veneer of socially constructed reality? Someone whose work seems so fixated on stasis, inertia, endless repetition, with the only peace to be found in sitting in a blankness beyond ruins, dreaming of nothing? You’d be forced to conclude that Ballard was at once modernist and anti-modernist; perhaps turning the tools of modernism against themselves in some appropriately Crash-like auto-destructive suicide pact? Quite what that makes him in the ‘-ist’ stakes, who the hell knows.

Some pretty jinky ideas there to try to get to the bottom of in a quick, belted-out-in-60-minutes weblog obituary, huh?



Like other such similarly omnipresent yet tricky characters as Lynch, Borges and Burroughs, Ballard lived to receive the dubious honour of seeing BALLARDIAN enter common critical shorthand, a quick shortcut to a common set of ideas/images/meanings that most of us implicitly understand, but couldn’t possibly express in words.

I’ve spent a long time reading Ballard over the years, and his ideas have no doubt filtered through me pretty thoroughly, but if challenged I’d probably hesitate before saying that I even LIKE his work. Appreciate, certainly, but LIKE? Even for his fans, there’s still an implicit threat within Ballard’s view of the world, a baffling ambiguity in the pictures he paints, that can provide a fly in anyone’s ointment…. but isn’t it that threat and uncertainty that keeps successive generations coming back? Unlike most of his contemporaries, Ballard’s pre-‘Empire of the Sun’ body of work has never settled down, never been tamed.

It seems appropriate then that Ballard picked an awkward time to die; just as I’ve been busy travelling, working, faffing around, settling into new house, lacking an internet connection, and I even bloody locked myself out yesterday and wondered the streets for hours instead of getting a chance to sit down and write this. So, a belated obituary I’m afraid to say farewell to a man for whom the more common deathblog standbys of “what a great guy” and “I’m really sad” and “watch this clip of him being awesome” just won’t suffice.

All I’ve said above is more or less random observation trimmed as it fell out of my head ; novices are advised to steer clear of the perplexingly bad string of recent novels currently choking up charity shops, and to take in everything he wrote up to, say, the mid 80s instead, for a whole universe of other notions to scratch away at.

Huge array of tributes and the like at Ballardian.com, including words from pretty much every surviving writer whose work I enjoy. In particular, this piece from Michael Moorcock makes me feel guilty for writing such a cantankerous obit for a guy whose personal life I’ve never really taken the time to experience/understand.

30 SILLY ANIME NAMES (or, a quest to briefly understand Japanese animated television before I waste too much time), Part # 3

11. Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure

Episode 1, part 1, English Sub.



PAUL'S COMMENT: Same old, same old. Nothing to say about this. A Mecha show with an 'unwanted Harem' (i.e. the protagonist is surrounded by girls and is embarrassed by the fact, whilst the girls, for the most part, exhibit more extrovert behaviour).

BEN’S COMMENT: You should give this one another go Paul, I think you’re selling it short – it seems pretty well made, smart and interesting to me! It seems to tell the tale of this kid who spends his whole time fantasising about giant robot battles, and writing stories about them, a hobby that obsesses him to the extent that he not only has no friends and blushes and runs away whenever a girl talks to him, but he regularly has crazy, involuntary visions of his giant robots. I can relate! So it seems that he gets mixed up with this mad professor dude, ala Back to The Future, who sends him into a parallel world where his family & home don’t exist, and where his robot knowledge is coveted by a bunch of fascistic military types, the scientist guy is head of something called the Earth Defence Force, and the girl who tried to make friends with him in his homeworld is an evil, emotionless solider who helps capture him, or something. Quite reminiscent in tone to one of Philip K. Dick’s early novels actually, and the first anime we’ve looked at so far that I’d actually quite like to watch in full, if only I had the time…


12. Samurai Pizza Cats

Samurai Pizza Cats - The Case of the Bogus Billionaire



PAUL'S COMMENT: The American team didn't get a transcript of this one in time to do the English dub and had to write their own based on what the action seems to depict. Hence, the dialogue and commentary run in the style of Danger Mouse (after all, The Magic Roundabout was 'translated' from the French in much the same way). The result is not as good as all that: (1) it is not hard to work out what is going on without a script, leaving little room for invention and (2) Americans wrote it, so it is not funny in the way it is intended to be. A curiosity.

BEN’S COMMENT: Imagine being the poor guy the American producers hired to write/sing a new English language theme tune for this damn thing! The results sound like the work of an utter lunatic, so I guess they must have found their man.

13. Strawberry Panic

Episode 1, part 1, English sub.



PAUL’S COMMENT: I honestly can't tell the difference between this one and # 17 - honest. Hence... see # 17 for comments.

BEN’S COMMENT: Hmm…. more uneventful catholic schoolgirl shenanigans. Less jolly hockeysticks, more hyperreal, dreamlike, chaste gothic romance. Certainly LOOKS a hell of a lot better than the last one of these we looked at too. In my weaker moments, I can almost see myself getting really into this sort of thing, and waking up sprawled across the living room floor a week later, wondering what happened.

14. UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie

Season 1, Episode 1, Part 1, English Sub.



PAUL’S COMMENT: A set of characters in an unreal setting. It vaguely resembles a 'magical girl' series (e.g. Card Captor Sakura, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha). However, nothing terribly out-of-the-ordinary seems to happen beneath appearances, at a glance - quite unlike the name in that respect.

BEN’S COMMENT: Nothing out of the ordinary…?? This show opens with some wonderfully realised scenes inside a vast spaceport of some kind, with all kinds of aliens wondering through customs etc., before switching the action to the travails of this wistful looking young guy whose day job involves managing this sort of communal public bath wherein a whole host of cute girls with cat ears seem to gain an inordinate amount of pleasure from lounging around in the nude chatting to blobby alien types. Our protagonist seems to be assisted in his bath-related labours by a whole crew of oddballs, most notably a strange, hyperactive little girl who is indeed dressed as some Japanese equivalent of a valkyrie, and who seems to live in the swimming baths and just kinda gets in everyone’s way. Cut to some school girls standing on a bridge, watching our hero pass by beneath. They seem pretty enamoured with him, but swiftly change their minds when they notice he’s walking hand in hand with the weird valkyrie girl and conclude that he must be a paedophile. Wistful guy and valkyrie girl watch a rocket taking off, and he explains to her that, yes, the rocket is full of people going into space. She gets incredibly excited at this prospect and experiences some kind of dream vision, or something. Cut back to the swimming baths, and more naked cat girls. They seem to be emerging from this robotic contraption that looks a lot like a transformer. They seem to be finding it very enjoyable. That’s what happens in the first EIGHT MINUTES. It’s beautiful, and dreamlike, and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Those responsible for producing popular entertainment in the west should watch and learn. The theme tune is totally awesome Shonen Knife-style bubblegum punk too. Nothing out of the ordinary..?!?

15. Zombie Loan

Episode 1, Part 1, English subs.



PAUL’S COMMENT: Boring. No, the hero doesn't go to the bank and say 'I'd like to arrange a loan for 1000 zombies'. The explanation is too dull to be worth repeating.

BEN’S COMMENT: This is a kind of gothic horror/action anime that largely seems to focus on these two tall, skinny dudes going about the place looking cool, and doing slo mo action sequences with magic swords and guns and suchlike. More unhappy catholic schoolgirls too. Fair enough. Another awesome theme tune though. (Yes non-Stereo Sanctity readers, I think just about anything with a loud guitar and somebody shouting is ‘awesome’; get used to it.)

Breakfast / Ruins

Saw this photo on The Gunslinger this morning, and thought, well hell, this HAS to become the new title picture for this weblog.

It's London, 1940, although I'd prefer to view it as more of a universal image, outside of historical context.

I'll see if I can't knock together a new title-banner-thingy for it as soon as I've got my life & home back in one piece, an internet connection, some time etc.

How sad it is that we don't really have milkmen anymore, as this photo makes me want to raise a toast to their whole noble lineage.

My Back Pages.

This weekend, I will be leaving my current residence in Tooting for good and moving east across South London, to New Cross.

Although I’ve always liked the South East, and look forward to finding it a lot more lively and generally conducive to my way of thinking than my current suburbanised locale, one of the things I will miss most about life on the bottom end of the Northern Line is being able to walk across the common of an uneventful weekend afternoon to visit ‘My Back Pages’, opposite Balham station, one of my favourite bookshops in the city.

Now, I’m not the biggest Dylan fan in the world (I’m not the smallest either, but… that’s a subject for another blog), but I've got to admit, a bookshop named after one of his songs bodes well. It certainly suggests that, a) it’s unlikely to be some crusty, collector-centric antiquarian hang-out, and b) it’s liable to be an establishment with a certain amount of character, run by someone with at least a passing interest in the pointy end of 20th century culture. And indeed, this proves to be the case.

‘My Back Pages’ is about 75% second hand, with a fiction section stretching across several vast walls, divided (hell, why not?) by nation/continent with sections devoted to British, American, Irish, Russian, French, African, Hispanic, Asian etc. literature, each of them managing to largely avoid the tide of pastel-coloured middlebrow crap that has consumed most of London’s charity bookshops, instead offering a wide variety of books which, even if they’re not universally wonderful, are liable to be more than fifteen years old, of varied and interesting character, and, y’know, generally worth a look.

There are correspondingly big sections for history, politics, art, poetry, philosophy, media and, you know, all the other rubbish you may care to read about so as to gain knowledge and insight during your tenure on earth. They don’t have biggest crime or SF/fantasy sections you could hope for, but you can’t have everything, and there’s plenty of good stuff in that general vein scattered through ‘fiction’ anyway.

The ‘new books’ section of the shop is pretty good too, presumably reflecting the proprietor’s own tastes to some degree by mixing a selection of current bestsellers etc. with a heavy back catalogue of ‘cult’/beat authors, including some intriguing small press items, and some choice New Directions / City Lights paperbacks that I can only assume get taken down and dusted off every year or so before returning to the shelf and waiting for some random hipster dope like me to turn up and shell out for ‘em.

On my last visit, I believe I picked up a VHS copy of ‘Walkabout’ and a water-damaged book by Richard Hell off the bargains stall out front for 50p each, then headed inside to find ‘Over the Frontier’ by Stevie Smith, ‘Whitechapel, Scarlett Tracings’ by Iain Sinclair, Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, ‘Nightmare Movies’ by Kim Newman (long OOP, and essential reading for horror fans), Richard Williams’ book about Phil Spector, the abridged version of Gibbon’s ‘Decline & Fall..’ and one or two weird-looking pulp sci-fis – total bill: £25, and the Newman book alone was £11.

The shop briefly closed down about eighteen months back, and when it reopened I remember speaking to the owner, who said they’d just about scraped together enough dough to stay in business, and were hoping to keep on making their rent on a month by month basis, or somesuch. That was before the recession hit.

I realise Londoners who don’t live nearby may be hard-pressed to find any other reason to make the trip to Balham (you could, um, I dunno, walk across the common to Streatham Hill, and get the train to Battersea or Victoria? – it’s quite nice), but ‘My Back Pages’ is exactly the kind of shop I wish this city (or hell, this world) still had more of, and paying it a visit and throwing them some business could be well worth your while.

Listening to Richard Brautigan.

All good people dig Richard Brautigan.

They just might not all know that all the other good people do yet.

Whilst I was growing up, working my way through as many canonically ‘weird’ mid-20th C. books as I could lay my hands on, as scattered references and recommendations led me on a merry path from one ‘cult’ author to the next, nobody ever bothered to hip me to Richard Brautigan.

In fact, I’d barely even heard of the guy when I happened across a few of his books in the always reliable charity bookshop on Queen’s Road in Leicester, and thought “hmm… these look interesting”.

I have neither the time nor the eloquence to attempt to encapsulate the man’s work here, but needless to say, within ten minutes of getting stuck into those two paperbacks, I knew I had a new favourite writer all to myself.

I’m not usually a big re-reader; the vast majority of books I read get ploughed through once, and sooner or later end up shelved forever back in my old bedroom in my Mum’s place, in waiting for the day when I fulfill my dream and open a lending library for weirdos. Not so “Revenge of the Lawn” and “A Confederate General at Big Sur” though - they travel with me. I return to them whenever I feel the need, almost like music albums. I’d feel uneasy deeming a place ‘home’ were they not within easy reach.

In subsequent years, happy shadows of Brautigan have started popping up all over the place, much like a style of architecture or, I dunno, a fashion accessory or something, that you don’t notice until someone points it out to you, and then you start to see it everywhere.

I’ve still never actually read any tributes to Brautigan on the printed page, but all of his books have been republished with garish new covers (I much prefer the lovely old ‘70s Picador editions, most of which seem to feature a photograph of the author standing near a pretty girl, looking confused), and you can probably find one or two of them on the shelves of your local Waterstones for £8.99 a pop, which speaks of a certain ongoing popularity.

I’ve also bumped into various other Brautigan fans, most of whom seem to have independently discovered his writing in much the same way I did, and all of whom have been united by the fact that I have found them to be thoroughly decent, friendly, upstanding folks. One of my favourite bands, Comet Gain, sang a song about Richard Brautigan on the b-side of a recent single.

From once briefly thinking of him as a lost luminary whom I’d haphazardly rediscovered, I now tend to accept the possibility that EVERYBODY reads Richard Brautigan…. but they just don’t think to mention it to each other all that often.

ANYWAY, point of this post is: a while back, I was having an online forum type conversation about Richard Brautigan, with some fellow fans who were lamenting the lack of any but the barest scraps of audio/visual documentation of the author’s life, and in particular, the complete unavailability of “Listening to Richard Brautigan”, an LP that he initially recorded for Apple in 1969 (The Beatles were quietly busy being big fans of his too, it would seem), but that actually only saw the light of day a couple of years later on Harvest/EMI.

Quickly dropping out of print, and having never been reissued on CD, it’s a tough one to track down, but I came across a rip of the LP on a download site a few months back, and I guess it’s my duty to pass it on to all the other good guys out there, so, here goes:

Listening to Richard Brautigan (120mb .zip file).
[Link updated 03/11/12.]

It’s a pretty fun listen all in all, although perhaps not the best introduction to RB’s work. He reads extracts from “Trout Fishing In America”, “Revenge of the Lawn”, "In Watermelon Sugar" and “A Confederate General..”, along with a whole swathe of pomes from “The Pill vs. The Springhill Mine Disaster”, in addition to which you get to hear the great man goofing about the house with some friends, discussing how one guy has an obsession with making really strong coffee, and what they’re gonna have for dinner. He records some “sounds of my life in California”, answers the telephone, and somebody decides to subject the world to a couple of post-Revolution No#9 type “sound pieces”. Unsurprisingly, Brautigan sounds like a really nice, easy-going guy. His voice is a kinda half Kermit, half Stephen Hawking monotone that I’d imagine could get real whiny real quickly if he was in a bad mood, but thankfully here he’s in a good mood, and everything is cool.

I think this would be a perfect record to put on on a spring afternoon, at the weekend, whilst you’re, say, carving something out of wood, or rewiring a hi-fi. Or perhaps in the early morning, laying in bed with a headache. Yeah!

30 SILLY ANIME NAMES (or, a quest to briefly understand Japanese animated television before I waste too much time), Part # 2

6. I! My! Me! Strawberry Eggs

Episode 1, part 1, English sub.



COMMENT: Begins with a ruthless old lady collecting rent with a gun. However, from promising beginnings, we find a show about a teacher who pretends to be a woman so he can teach sport at a girl’s school (or something to that effect). I'll say more about this sort of thing under # 17.

BEN’S COMMENT: I think here we meet some profound cultural disjuncture, because all my instincts tell me this should be really funny and entertaining, yet somehow… it really isn’t. Portrayal of the school girls seems kinda sleazy, although I feel I’m probably going to have to get used to that as we go through all thirty shows on this list. They are depicted as having different levels of ‘immunity’ to the lures of boys, which are built up almost like a forcefield.


7. Goldfish Warning

Opening, English sub.



COMMENT: the first 5 seconds - a television picture of a fish on a spire is obscured by a band (with instruments) of cows, one of their number holding aloft a similar fish, flying by on a clock-face. Again, another old-fashioned anime to confuse and confuse once more. The subs. of the opening theme suggest that the 'warning' part of the title is related to weather forecasting.

BEN’S COMMENT: "A high pressure of bowknot... is approaching your heart"? Um….. right. Ok. Next.


8. The Virgin Mary Is Watching You

Episode 1, part 1, English sub.



COMMENT: 'Watching you' is meant in the sense of 'watching over you', alas: merely lost in translation. Added to Youtube in English since last I surveyed. It is a romance in a Catholic Girls School. See # 17 for further comments. In fact, seems, on the face of it, like a very serious, Catholic, version of # 17.

BEN’S COMMENT: the way the girls are drawn in this one is strange and kinda ugly – odd, misproportioned faces, and all that softly shaded hair blowing in the wind. It’s sorta aesthetically disagreeable. The seeming HYPER-INNOCENCE of this stuff is also curious, not to mention the Hyper-Boringness. Is this an anime with some kind of sinister Christian chastity agenda, or are they just trying to cop the signifiers of old-fashioned, ‘respectable’ Western culture (tedium, Christian iconography, classical music) to try to assert their artistic seriousness? Perhaps shows like this serve as a deliberate rebellion against the OTT sexualised carnage of much other manga/anime? Who knows…


9. Ebichu the Housekeeping Hamster

Episode 2 (English sub.) - Episode 1 (in English) seems to have been censored by Youtube community.



COMMENTS: Japanese 'South Park' with a hamster. However, while this is the best description, it does not capture the concept. There is a sense of despair in this cartoon. Some might call me a lightweight for saying this. Whereas South Park is quite a blanket treatment to the notion of the comedy of taboo, Ebichu is much more of a dagger: it is directed and without mercy... then again, it is just an 'exceptionally naughty' hamster. Must be my religious vein...

BEN’S COMMENT: I gather this is supposed to be… funny? Actually, this gives me a similar sense of despair and confusion to much contemporary British/American ‘comedy’. I dunno * sigh *.


10. Panda Z: the Robonimation

Episode 1, English sub.



COMMENT: Cartoon with Panda Mechas (giant robots). Not much talking. 'Heavy Metal' soundtrack plays all-the-way-through. Silly. Not much fun.

BEN’S COMMENT: Now, you see, when I wanted to do some posts investigating crazy Japanese pop culture, THIS was the kinda thing I had in mind, not that grim, misanthropic hamster sex comedy shit! Does this have any kind of story, or is it just nifty retro-toy visuals and absurdly awesome novelty hair metal songs? Why so I even feel the need to ask?

30 SILLY ANIME NAMES(or, a quest to briefly understand Japanese animated television before I waste too much time)

BEN’S INTRODUCTION:

Japanese Anime is an odd business to say the least. Most of us who grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s will have at least some knowledge of the movies and series that have attained a higher profile in the West following the success of ‘Akira’ and subsequent stand-alone blockbusters, not to mention the concerted efforts that were made a few years back to get English speaking teenage boys hooked on good-natured nonsense of the ‘Gunsmith Cats’, ‘Dominion: Tank Police’ variety and the widespread distribution of, and renewal of interest in, the genuinely wonderful films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.

But, for the most part, the mind-bogglingly vast range of animated TV series and episodic movies that form a huge part of the entertainment-diet of Japan remain the concern of only a small, hardcore fanbase in the West, a fanbase which, needless to say, includes neither myself nor anyone I know, hence my general ignorance of the subject.

A few months ago however, my brother Paul emailed me a list he had compiled of the thirty anime series with the most ludicrous or unlikely translated titles, and stated his intention to track down and watch extracts from each of them in turn.

Now the raving linguistic insanity that inevitably seems to result when Japanese titles are translated directly into English is nothing new – even the quickest overview of Japanese exploitation cinema for instance will instantly have the curious reader marvelling at the existence of ‘The Sperm Hunts At Night’, ‘Go Go Second Time Virgin!’ and ‘Emperor Tomato Ketchup’ – but nonetheless, Paul’s list blew my mind.

Sure, it featured a few better known series such as ‘Cowboy Bebop’. But what of ‘Boogie-Pop Phantom’? ‘All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku’? ‘Hayate The Combat Butler’? – clearly this is an avenue of world culture that demands further investigation!

Thus I have arranged with Paul to present the results of his marathon survey on this very weblog, for your entertainment and education, in six parts beginning below.

Needless to say, all text in these posts is his, unless otherwise stated.

30 SILLY ANIME NAMES (or, a quest to briefly understand Japanese animated television before I waste too much time), Part # 1

Close to six months ago, I found I had time on my hands and went on a mini 'anime crusade'. That is, I systematically drew, from a LIST, the animes with the silliest names, and watched, or attempted to watch, them on YouTube. I found material from almost all of them and watched my fill of a surprising number of them. Afterwards, I wrote a short report, which I was asked to reproduce here. I find myself, currently, with a little time and, thus, thought I'd re-write my report with fresh links and fresh material that I have learned of since writing the original. My thanks to the work of the tropers at TVtropes (above link) for their sum knowledge.

In writing this list, I have excluded the better manga/anime canon items: like Akira, Studio Ghimli films, such as Whispering Heart, Princess Mononoke and the Gainax TV series Neon Genesis: Evangelion (as well as the films). I suggest you turn to these first; this is an exercise in ad-hoc sampling and not a means to finding the best of the medium.

What follows is the list of anime titles. I chose 30 because that was the number of silly names I found to the nearest ten. Surprisingly, some material on ALL THIRTY of these shows can be found on YouTube, though not all are in any way completely represented. If you have witnessed some anime, a few of these titles may not be new to you. Rest assured, they were all new to me.

Before we begin, a few disclaimers. Do not be thrown by the funny names: most of these shows are not as funny as the names suggest and will merely waste your time. There will be comments, as well as some asides about generalities. Some do not deserve comment. Neither comments nor asides are meant to be comprehensive, but are merely points of interest.

1. Boogiepop Phantom

Episode 1, parts 1, English Dub:



COMMENTS: Interesting - but a bit of an obvious replica of the so-called "Mind Screw" anime (e.g. Neon Genesis - Evangelion) but without the same sense of authorial 'high-weirdness'. Likely it’s just the bad acting leading me to say that. It’s a pity it’s only available (for free) with the English dub. Anime is often better with original sound. Still, suggestions of better things.

Quote: (close up on girls eyes as she thinks, dead-pan) "He was probably killed... by Boogiepop."

BEN’S COMMENT: This seems a lot more dull and angst-ridden than something called ‘Boogie-Pop Phantom’ has any right to be.

2. Cowboy Bebop

Episode 1, parts 1, English Sub.:



COMMENTS: Original. Best of the bunch. A simple plot that can be told well through the limited medium of the cartoon. Excellent music. Episode 20 (I think; the one in the amusement park) is an insane gem. It seems to squeeze-in aspects of every genre, especially Westerns, Detective Noir and Science Fiction without really breeding a new genre, as some of its fans will claim. Hence, you can't really put your finger on a template used to construct Cowboy Bebop, but, at the same time, it provides no guidelines for its replication (so to speak).

BEN’S COMMENT: I watched this a few years ago. Ok, it is indeed pretty good, but, foolish westerner that I am, I’m still infuriated by the lack of either cowboys or bebop.

3. Coyote Ragtime Show

Episode 1 Trailor (English dub) & Strange clip (Japanese):





COMMENT: None, really. Doesn't seem terribly earth-shattering. Then again, hard to tell with so few clips that aren't in Spanish. The second link leads to the interesting sight of the '12 sisters' (robots, apparently) raiding what seems to be the prison of the first clip. They are dressed in costumes that, I am informed, are examples of GOTH LOLI: short for 'Innocent Gothic Lolita', which is a 'goth' version of dolls clothing.

BEN’S COMMENT: This is just about the greatest thing I’ve seen in my life. All hail Coyote Ragtime Show!

4. Doctor Slump

"the Super Driver" - part 1. English Sub.:



COMMENT: When I did my original survey, there wasn't much on this. However, I infer from YouTube posts, that there is a new version in the pipeline. This is an older Japanese cartoon (as a cartoon, one for kids: you remember those). One thing I've noticed about Japanese cartoons is that the older they are, the more incomprehensible (with some exceptions, qua Bobobo, #30 below). This is an example.

BEN’S COMMENT: Wow, this is insane and wonderful! Like a psychedelic Japanese Hanna Barbara show! Makes about as much sense as ‘Stop The Pigeon’, but it’s a thousand times more visually imaginative – I love it.

5. Fafner in the Azure: Dead Aggressor

Episode 1, part 1/1, English sub.



COMMENT: Anime these days can look very impressive, and usually borrows pop music from the Japanese charts. Fafner seems to be an example of this. It wasn't on Youtube when I searched previously. A giant robot caper in the manner of Evangelion, though, in the 1st episode, without the strangeness. Bland, at first glance.

BEN’S COMMENT: Hmm… this one isn’t doing much for me. Seems like an over-earnest rip off of ‘Independence Day’ or something?

[Insert bad "Who watches the Watchmen? - nobody if they can help it" type joke here]

As the final nail in a pretty damn secure, lead-lined critical coffin, Jessica Hopper tells me everything I need to know about the Watchmen movie in one convenient paragraph.

I remember years ago reading an interview with Alan Moore in which he talked about how he found overblown, poorly thought out Hollywood blockbusters to be actively offensive, saying something to the effect of; if I write a shitty comic, ok it wastes some paper, but I'm not throwing away $150,000,000 that could be used for the betterment of mankind on realising some teenage videogamer's wank fantasy.

So quite what karmic/magickal evils the poor guy must have wrought in a past life in order to see ALL of his major writerly works transformed into a series of movies so point-missingly crippled at birth that they alone could stand as a pretty thorough A, B, C of everything that's wrong with the past two decades of Hollywood cinema, I can scarcely imagine.

Seriously: all we need now is M. Night Whatshisname doing an Americanised 'Voice of the Fire' in small town Ohio and Ridley Scott's idiot cousin making his directoral debut dragging that woman in the leather from the Underworld movies through the mill as Halo Jones, and that's Moore's whole life's work, shot in the belly and left for dead.

I guess he must at least be enjoying the royalties, extra sales, publicity, suits reading "V For Vendetta" on the tube etc, and can rest safe in the knowledge that he still has a pretty huge cadre of longtime fans who are able to appreciate his work on it's own merit, but still, it must hurt.

And, word to wise: if I were an evil, scheming studio mogul who was gonna set out to desecrate the work of one cantankerous cult author, I probably wouldn't pick a guy who looks like this, carries a big stick everywhere and practices ceremonial magic:


I've seen "Theatre of Blood". I know what's coming down.

Witches, Zombies, Hair Metal and Orson Welles: February Film-Watching Journal Part # 1

I had a couple of weekends to myself last month: no social events, no responsibilities to take care of, no plans, nothing. Meaning? A few perfect evenings to catch up on the backlog of horror movies I’ve been acquiring recently you’ll be unsurprised to hear, as I’ve yet to start a damn blog about staring at the ceiling in existential anguish, or building cathedrals out of matchsticks or something.

Rock N’ Roll Nightmare (John Fasano, 1987)

First into the DVD player one Friday night was Rock n’ Roll Nightmare, which I’ve read about here and there over the years and, speaking as someone who takes an interest in just about any rock n’ roll / horror crossover movie, no matter how bad, you can appreciate that I was looking forward to some enjoyably stupid, rampagin’ fare. God, what a disappointment. “Cult classic” my ass, this film fucking stinks. I mean, I’ve seen some uninspired, slapdash, “will this do?” filmmaking in my time, but can you imagine the lack of commitment necessary to take the following concept - ‘80s hair metal band led by charismatic glam-rock barbarian called Thor go to deserted old house with their girlfriends, fight goo-dripping Evil Dead style ‘80s monsters - and produce a movie that is not only a crass, ugly and deeply stupid work (as might well be expected), but is also utterly lacking in any kind of entertainment value…? How can this be? Couldn’t you just, I dunno, put the rockers, the girls and the monsters in a room, tie a camcorder to ceiling and let nature take it’s course, and still emerge with something that’s at least…. kinda fun? To screw up this badly takes a special kind of incompetence.

Don’t get me wrong here. I mean, I’m not being some witless “films should be coherent and well-made” bore, writing an Amazon product review to reveal to the world the shocking truth that “Werewolves On Wheels” isn’t actually very good. I love all kinds of objectively *bad* films: mysterious-bad films, weird-bad films, funny-bad films, sublime-bad films, culturally interesting-bad films… but Rock n’ Roll Nightmare is just a downer on every level that fails to throw the audience anything to reward them for sitting through the damn thing. A bad-bad film.

I can’t even think where to start in shooting this thing down, there are so many easy targets. The supposedly creepy, isolated old house is right next to a main road, is mainly filmed in overcast daylight, and looks like a Barrett Home! Nothing at all happens, for ages! When the inevitable monster/death scenes do turn up, they’re short, crap and filmed in such a joyless manner they might as well have not bothered, and just had the characters declare “ok, I’m dead now”, and wander off, which in some cases they pretty much do! They can barely even be arsed to make clear who’s alive and who’s monster-ised at any given point! The band is so boring and polite they make Stryper look like Mayhem by comparison, and we have to watch them playing all their dull-ass, six minute songs in their entirety! Much of the rest of the running time seems to be taken up with awful, awful dryhumping sex scenes – soundtracked by Thor’s own love ballads, natch – that it’s fair to say NOBODY wanted to see.

Ok, so vaguely on the up-side, Jon-Mikl Thor manages to pass himself off quite well as a likeably earnest and engaging…uh… protagonist (I’m reluctant to say ‘hero’, as he doesn’t actually do much), and it would be fun to see him strut his stuff in a better film. He seems like a nice enough guy. The legendarily ludicrous ‘trick ending’/final battle sequence/flying starfish bit is pretty funny, in a ‘would provoke some chuckling if you stumbled across it on late night TV’ kinda way, but, if you’re sufficiently bored, I’m sure you can probably find it on youtube without slogging through an hour’s worth of aimless, lifeforce-suffocating crap to get there (here ya go).

Somewhat unfeasibly, my DVD of ‘Rock n’ Roll Nightmare’ is a ‘collector’s edition’, packed with ‘special features’, a circumstance that seems akin to putting a new rocket engine in a slug. They’d better be pretty damn special, that’s all I’m saying.

The Witching (Bert I. Gordon, 1972)

Another one well worth avoiding. Director Bert I. Gordon was responsible for b-movie classics such as ‘The Amazing Colossal Man’ and ‘Village of the Giants’ back in the ‘50s, but squandered the resultant goodwill by spending much of the rest of his career turning out the occasional bit of unremarkable hackwork. If you were feeling particularly cruel, you could say Orson Welles did much the same, only, y’know, with ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘Touch of Evil’ to look back on instead of ‘War of the Colossal Beast’.

Certainly, ‘The Witching’ would seem to mark a definitively depressing example of the decline of both men, as Gordon sets about directing it with all the flair and atmosphere of a public information film about crop blight. Apparently, this movie was originally released under the title ‘Necromancy’, with all the nudie witchcraft scenes cut out, a strategy which I can only assume was an attempt to create the most boring 70 minute film on record, but hey, what do I know? Maybe there was a big gap in the family movie market in ’72 for really dull, PG rated witchcraft thrillers featuring former cinematic luminairies sitting in a big, uncomfortable chairs muttering to themselves. Anyway, the nekkid witches and occasional bits of bloodshed were reinstated (they were part of the original production, not later inserts) when ‘The Witching’ got a second chance at life on the ‘80s home video market, and that’s the one I’m watching here.

Things start on a high with a pretty enjoyable satanic ritual scene, as Orson’s coven initiate a new witch by slicing a chunk out of her chest and trying to persuade her in turn to stab a voodoo doll which causes the death, hundreds of miles away, of Pamela Franklin’s unborn child. From there the action (and henceforth I use the term loosely) cuts to Pamela and her husband (played by Michael Ontkean – Sheriff Truman in Twin Peaks), who are driving across the desert en route to the isolated small town – called ‘Lilith’, would you believe - where Welles rules supreme in his capacity as a sinister patriarch/warlock type guy. Hubby has been offered a new job there you see, with the town’s sole employer – Orson’s toy factory.

From this not entirely unpromising opening however, the rest of the movie basically just reheats scraps from ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ in flat TV movie fashion, as the townsfolk try to get the new couple interested in joining their hip, swinging witch cult (they “worship pleasure” you see, which in Lilith seems to amount to holding cocktail parties where lots of housewives lounge around in witch gear with their tits hanging out), and Pamela, understandably though boringly, gets all ‘I-don’t-like-it-here’ and ‘am-I-hallucinating-or-are-they messing-with-my-mind’ and ‘why-did-they-bring-us-here’ and ‘can-I-still-trust-my-husband-or-what’ and BLAH BLAH BLAH.

As for Orson Welles’ performance, about the best thing you can say about it is that, well, at least he turned up, and allowed them to point the camera at him for a bit, which is more than can be said for certain other occasions on which his services were engaged during the ‘70s. Obviously overcome with disgust at being reduced to appearing in such a crappy motion picture, Orson spends his scenes motionless, lethargic and grumpy, delivering his lines in a resentful, semi-coherent monotone as if reading them off an autocue. A fun, powerful performance from a decent character actor as the villain could have livened this picture up 100%, but Welles is a complete charisma vacuum throughout. Still, at least Gordon got to stick “starring Orson Welles” on all the marketing without even having to lie about it, thus presumably increasing this otherwise lousy movie’s distribution/profit potential by a factor of ten, which was probably the point of persuading the big O to do it in the first place. Hell, I know curiosity re: ‘Orson Welles + witches = ??’ is what suckered me into watching it.

And that’s yer lot really. I can’t really recommend wasting your time on this one, unless you really, really, really like topless witches and watching Orson Welles looking sleepy, and have already exhausted the possibilities of all the other motion pictures in the world that feature such things.

Day of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1985)

After all that, I felt like I REALLY needed some real solid horror, with guts and substance. So I’ll admit it, I just watched “Day of the Dead” again. Job done. And as with my most recent viewing of “Night of The Living Dead” a few months ago, this time around I found myself mainly contemplating how fiendishly effective George Romero’s manipulative good cop / bad cop characterisations can be, and the way he employs them to undermine expected audience reaction.

For instance, I’m sure I’ve watched ‘Night..’ upward of a dozen times over the years, but it was only on the last viewing that I finally realised that arch-asshole Mr. Cooper actually purveys pretty sound survival advice throughout the film, and that, if they’d listened to him rather than to Ben, they might conceivably have all lived through the night (assuming they could bring themselves to behead the infected kid). But neither characters nor audience take heed of this, even after obsessive repeats viewing in my case, because, y’know, he’s such an unbelievable asshole, what kind of world could this be where he could actually be right about stuff?

Similarly, on maybe the fifth or sixth viewing of “Day..”, I still manage to get me all hot and bothered, thinking, christ, those soldiers are SUCH inhuman jerks, and the helicopter pilot and the radio guy are SUCH solid, likeable, no nonsense awesome dudes; I vow that when the apocalypse arrives, I’m gonna be like them (at least until I die of hyperglycaemia)! There I am, putty in George’s directorial hands, as per usual. Of course, he doesn’t repeat the same subtle morality vs. practicality turnaround used in ‘Night..’, but instead concentrates on ratcheting up the audience’s hatred for the ‘bad guys’ until it comes time for them to suffer stomach-turning, visceral deaths at the hands and teeth of the undead, at which point you’re caught thinking HA HA, THAT’S RIGHT, DIE YOU…. oh my god, there are maybe only a dozen human beings left alive in the world of this film, and I’m here CHEERING as half of them get their entrails ripped apart and their throats torn out by walking corpses….? – at which point things take on a distinctly unsettling resonance for us liberal humanist type viewers.

Analysis of Romero’s zombie films (prior to his heartbreakingly awful recent efforts at least) has often tended to dwell on their oft-praised social/political commentary, but to me those elements sometimes seem shallow and heavy-handed (in ‘Dawn’ and ‘Day’ at least – admittedly you could write whole books on the cultural resonance of ‘Night’), taking a definite backseat to his truly subversive mangling of character dynamics and narrative expectations.

Planet Terror (Robert Rodriquez, 2007)

After the failure of that fateful Friday’s attempt to get with some simple-minded, gory fun, the following evening’s viewing began with a flick that’s SURELY got to deliver: Robert Rodriguez’ ‘Planet Terror’. Now, let it be said that I’m not generally a fan of Rodriquez’ somewhat chauvinistic, stylised action movie aesthetic, but I , like all good people, adore ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’, I loved Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’(both parts), I think the two directors joint b-movie fascination tends to bring out the best in both of them and, well… essentially this is a movie in which Rose McGowan from out of The Doom Generation fights zombies with a machine gun for a leg. Ok, I realise Rose McGowan may have been thoroughly blanded out by over a decade doing stuff like ‘Charmed’, made-for-TV Stephen King adaptations and an unfortunate stint as Marilyn Manson’s ladyfriend, but to me she’ll always be Rose McGowan out of ‘The Doom Generation’, and, in this movie, a post-ironic b-movie-pastiche blockbuster staring out at me from the shelves of Fopp with a £4 pricetag, she fights zombies with a machine gun for a leg.

If you think I’m not gonna watch it, you give me more credit than I deserve.

So how was it for me? Well, by way of a review, simply close your eyes and imagine the sensation of drinking four beers in quick succession, then open your eyes and heed my words as I say, MAN - THAT WAS FUCKING AWESOME.

And what more is there to say? A whole bunch of stuff happened, I don’t quite remember it all, and in retrospect it probably didn’t make much sense, but it seemed reasonable at the time. There were a whole crew of weird, entertaining comic book type characters, and loads and loads of hideous gross-out violence and a hospital full of mixed up zombies, lovable redneck cops, nasty crooked mutant soldiers, and loads of guns and bombs everywhere! Gunshot wounds that do a big, satisfying SPLAT like in an old Peckinpah movie only more so, and sleazy b-movie injokes, severed limbs and goofy, interesting sub-plots and really, really cute girls riding around on motorbikes, wielding shotguns and doing go-go dances and kung-fu and stabbing guys with syringes (but they have real characters and are tough and idiosyncratic and kick-ass and stuff too, so the modern day “not being a misogynist bastard” rules say it’s allowed). Oh my lord, it was good.

And that’s that! It’s a film that consciously avoids any kind of intellectual engagement, so I’m gonna respect its wishes and not give it any. It’s clearly the best mainstream Hollywood movie in years, just by default! It rules! Even the music was quite good! It wins my Oscars! The End!

I know I should be grumpily discussing how conspicuously Rodriquez fails in his brief as regards making a modern day recreation of a ‘70s exploitation movie. For one thing, ‘Planet Terror’ is half an hour longer than any actual b picture, it’s far too carefully planned out/shot/edited, and any one of the aerial shots, explosions, car crashes or stunts that it lays on by the screaming dozen would be beyond the reaches of the blowing-the-budget finale set-piece of a genuine grindhouse effort. Not to mention the incongruous appearance of faces like Bruce Willis, which make the whole conceit seem a little flimsy (I mean, that would be like what – Cary Grant turning up in a H.G. Lewis flick or something?).

BUT, I don’t think that’s really an issue. As with ‘Kill Bill’, the true intent here is not the authentic recreation of a b-movie, but an attempt to bring to life the kind of film that the more crazed and imaginative b-movie directors COULD have made, had they had access to the budget, time, technical ability and talent necessary to fully realise the majestically fucked up panaramas of awesomeness that we fans would like to think were buzzing around their heads as they set out with joy in their hearts to film some fuzzy footage of lingerie models doing amateur kickboxing moves in the desert, or whatever.

‘Planet Terror’ often succeeds very well in capturing this spirit, but…. I can’t help but feel maybe it succeeds TOO well, in some ways. In the midst of its modern day Hollywood excess, it perhaps ends up crushing to death the very b-movie essence it seeks to reserve. After all, one of the basic prerequisites of b-movie fandom is to realise that you WILL be disappointed, that the movies will very rarely live up to the decadent depravity of their advertising. But, if you’re lucky, you may find instead that they make amends by offering something a little more strange, touching, funny or disturbing than the unaffordable/unfilmable adolescent wish fulfilment of their posters ever could. That's what we love 'em for really.

By laying on it’s expectation-surpassing gore/action/sex with all the restraint of a 12 year old psychopath and then throwing the results into a contemporary multiplex context, a film like ‘Planet Terror’ can easily lose this mixed up charm where ‘Kill Bill’ was (arguably) stylish and idiosyncratic enough to retain it, cracking the legitimizing veneer of post-modern trash homage, and leaving, well…. what exactly? A soulless parade of girl-porn, gun-porn, explosion-porn, car-porn, gross-medical-disaster-porn, flying limb-porn and more girl-porn (although strangely little porn-porn) that plays to a patronising, reductionist idea of what a male audience wants to see just as thoroughly as a lowest common denominator ‘chick flick’ plays to the assumed idea of what a female audience wants to see? Although the inherently patriarchal nature of the film industry and movie fandom allows ‘Planet Terror’ a far greater level of critical acceptance than ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’ is liable to receive, are they not, in some sense, flipsides of the same grim, exclusionary coin?

And I swallowed the whole damn thing, hook, line and sinker.

GOD, that’s depressing.

Me and my stupid brain! Why did I have to pay attention to it? I was having so much fun! Stupid, crappy ‘thinking’! Whose idea was that anyway? Fuck!