STRANGE TWINKLE

 

A nice exchange from Tarkan & The Silver Saddle. I genuinely love these films, they're totally ridiculous in all the right ways.

NINETY SIX POINT SIX PERCENT FUN

SLEEPAWAY CAMP, d. Robert Hiltzik (USA, 1983)

After a speedboat accident that kills her father, teenage Angela remains withdrawn and mute. Given her obvious trauma, sending her to a summer camp full of bullies and predators seems unwise, but it happens anyway. When her principal tormentors are killed one by one, it becomes clear that a psychopathic killer is on the loose.

Mindless but entertaining for more or less 87 of its 90 minutes, it all goes wrong when it suddenly blunders into highly dubious territory about gender, culminating in a tasteless twist ending accompanied by a genuinely disturbing final image.

Four sequels appeared between 1988 and 2002, but I won't be watching those, as they apparently lean even more heavily into the elements that derailed it in the first place.

Slasher movies are not necessarily my go to sub-genre, but I watched Teenage Sex & Death In Camp Miasma three times last week, so I thought I'd give it a go.

GOLDEN YEARS, WAH WAH WAH

 

It is a basic tenet of human existence that life always used to be better in the past. 500 years ago, Lucas Cranach the Elder painted 'The Golden Age', evoking a halcyon time when men and women and animals co-existed in a peaceful, shame-free existence, you know just like the 50s/60s/70s/80s/90s (pick your era). It is a fallacy that must be resisted, it genuinely impacts our full development as a species.

PRISMATIC

 

From Diamond Pyramid, d. Andras Rajnai (Hungary, 1985)

COSMOS / VORTEX

 

This seminal artefact by F.C Judd, was released in 1963, and I've had it in my collection since the late 1980s. 

The sleeve notes state that  'this record introduces sound phenomena that cannot be produced with conventional musical instruments or by simple mechanical or electro-acoustic means'. The results are wonderful, and simply having it in the house makes me a better person.

GOOD TIMES / BAD TIMES

 

O Trapalhao No Planalto Dos Macacos, d. J.B Tanko (1976)

I've known for some time that there was a Brazilian Planet Of The Apes, but is it as good as that sounds? No, absolutely not, it's totally rotten.

HOT PANTS DETECTOR

 

September 29, 1971 - Miami, Florida: decked out in hot pants, Denise Vickary, an airline stewardess instructor, tried to fool a new hijacker device called the Mark III Friskem by putting a knife in her pants.

The device, a magnetometer, measures disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field. The disturbances are created by a large piece of metal like a weapon. If the field is disturbed, a light flashes on a small screen. The device is set to differentiate between size and mass so that a passenger with a wrist watch or small pocket knife could pass through and board the aircraft, but the device will detect a weapon or large knife. This device is now being used by Eastern in Miami is now more sensitive than previous devices used by the airlines.

From Skyjacked.

FEAR IN FLIGHT

 

Hijacking was a hot enough topic in the 1970s to warrant this 96 page black and white magazine, featuring a detailed history of air piracy, some scrappy cartoons, some ultra-grainy photographs - and about half a dozen adverts for male slimming devices like the Torso-Toner, the Body Taper-Slim Shirt and the Zip-Slim Control Brief. 

Charlton were never known for their quality, but they tried very hard indeed. I prefer their superb range of horror comics, with their silly stories and frequent misspellings, but I'm very fond of this magazine, not least because it's clearly been through some stuff (check out the various prices on the cover) and may very well be a one-off for the them (I've never seen anything else calling itself 'A Charlton AWARE publication').

It ends with a paragraph that makes it clear that this is not some exploitative rubbish wonkily printed on low-end paper, but a public service document.

VITAL SIGNS

M. John Harrison started as a key figure in the new British Science Fiction scene, before growing dissatisfied with his own work in the late-1970s, scaling back his writing and moving North to work in a book shop and obsessively climb things.

Since the mid-1980s, and his full return to writing, his best work has been characterised by a mix of documentary realism and fantastic mysticism. The characters in his stories do normal, even banal things in the shadow of something bigger and much weirder than their everyday lives: occult ritual gone wrong, alien invasion, ancient forces lurking in the depths of urban waterways...

In Signs Of Life (1997) he gives us a detailed story about four interconnected (socially, professionally, romantically) people underpinned by sub-plots about medical waste, genetic experimentation, foreign espionage and the varying fortunes of entrepreneurs in a fluctuating economy. As I re-read the book the other day I was struck by three passages that, to me, summed up just how interesting and brilliant Harrison's writing is. I present them here without context (or subtext), I just think they're cool.

'...someone who looked as if he used to run Butlins was interviewing someone who looked as if he used to run Bulgaria.'

'The girl watched, puzzled as a Martian, then said: 'They're thick and they love it. It's such a revenge for being alive, isn't it? To be thick and in the way.'

'...until I lost her I was always moving from moment to moment, incident to incident, in a kind of warm, seamless daze. I never wanted anything until Isobel. I've not really wanted much since.'

I have no idea if any of this will resonate with anybody else, but they reverberate with me, I think they are extraordinary. 

A SERIES OF ENJOYABLE DISAPPOINTMENTS

I very much enjoy Mexican wrestling movies, and I've watched a lot, but but they tend to suffer from pacing issues, repetition, and a lack of ambition. Take Santo & Blue Demon Versus The Monsters from 1970, for instance - the two most famous masked wrestlers in the world take on history's most incredible monsters: on paper it looks sensational; onscreen, however, the results are only occasionally interesting (Franquestain is very much a Mexican take on Mary Shelley's deathless monster - he has a droopy moustache).

That said, I find that these films are more of a mood than a genre, i.e. dull and daft as they can be, sometimes nothing else will do. Luckily, Santo made over 50 films, and Blue Demon 25 (including 10 together), so it's fairly easy to scratch that particular itch when it occurs, even if doing so never fully satisfies the urge.