RANDOM HARVEST: HE WILL HE, WHO BURIED YOU IN THIS SHIT WILL DIE

 

Folder find. I don't remember where this came from, doesn't matter, something Spanish, maybe. Needless to say, this attracted my attention even though everything else about the source clearly did not.

NINJA TERMINATOR (A SERIES)

 

Hong Kong born film director Godfrey Ho is an interesting fellow, but a total rogue. A prolific movie maker and copyright violator, his method was to combine 'borrowed' footage from other films, stolen music and badly dubbed and appallingly written dialogue to provide a series of incomprehensible Z quality martial arts movies. To maintain a claim to being an auteur, he would also cheaply film fight and sex sequences of his own and then insert them into the melange seemingly at random, often spreading the poorly executed original material across several movies. He made a 100 films in total,  81 of them between 1982 and 1992. 

The oddest thing is that the results are supremely watchable, and never boring, mainly because you  never have to go more than a few minutes before there's a big old scrap or something so ridiculous that it makes up for the chaos around it.

Ho retired from film making in the year 2000, and became a film teacher. Seriously, the sheer audacity of this guy. Anyway, one thing I've always liked is stills of people punching and kicking each other, so here's some action from 1985's Ninja Terminator.

VARTOX

 

The Bronze Age (1970-1985) is my favourite period for American comics for lots of reasons, not least because that was the period I grew up in, and I found Marvel, DC, Charlton, Gold Key, Atlas (and other) comics terribly exciting and alluring, especially as they were still quite hard to come by (I don't think I ever read consecutive issues of any US comic until the late 80s). It was also a period when things got weird and groovy and kind of cosmic in a way that dull people might attribute to drugs, but someone more astute might say was the zeitgeist, a time of extraordinary creativity, curiosity, freedom of expression, war, protest, music, film, technology, alternative religions, the occult, and, yes, drugs, and lots of them.

Superman, however, stayed kind of boring. Perhaps wary of besmirching the good name of their golden goose, DC kept Superman safe and stuffily heroic, and the stories that featured him were noticeably more staid and steady than those of most of his competition.

In this issue, from November 1974, the villain is called Vartox (no prizes for guessing what wild film release of the same year inspired this character), and the cover at least offers a hint of deviance that lasts a mere couple of pages before settling into a fairly mundane battle between supreme good and the mildly naughty (Vartox isn't that bad, just a bit of a dick).   

I love Zardoz too much not to appreciate this shameless steal, so I now have two Superman comics*. Purchased from e-bay, the buyer baited the trap by describing it as having a 'slightly gay' cover.

*  The other comic, issue 261, has a cover that references feminism, BDSM and a foot fetish, but goes absolutely nowhere interesting with any of it.

NON-TERRIBLE LIZARDS

 

The Animal World is a 1956 documentary directed by 'the Master of Disaster', director and producer Irwin Allen. After a brief look at amoebas and protozoa, there's a ten minute stop-motion sequence about dinosaurs put together by King Kong man Willis O'Brien and all-round special effects genius Ray Harryhausen. 

This kind of animation can look a bit quaint now, but I'm still able to connect to how thrilling it would have been to watch back when I was less jaded and CGI was the stuff of science fiction. The dinosaurs here are menacing, violent,  rheumy eyed and slobbery: they look tired, desperate, hungry and under pressure. 

I'm 57 years old, but I still have a favourite dinosaur, the Triceratops. I really love those guys.

FEEL THE BURN

 

I'm still on a TV movie kick, and I have absolutely no regrets. One of the additional benefits to watching these things is that often the only copies available now are digitised from video tapes, so the viewing experience is characterised by specks, lines and signal loss, drained or other saturated colour, and quiet, distorted or intermittent sound. It's not a problem for me, I like it. 

Here's a degraded scene from The Savage Bees, an ABC TV Movie Of The Week from 1974. It's disappointingly light on killer bee action, but has a weird gothic vibe going on that almost (but not quite) makes up for that. That's Gloria Swanson, by the way, in her last acting role. Her first film was in 1914, so it can't be said that she didn't make an effort.

THAT'S THAT

It is estimated that, by the age of 75, most people with access to media will have seen approximately 120,000 onscreen deaths. In this new series, you can further bump up your total. 

001: A totally real guy gets his head split down the middle by a killer Mummy with a meat cleaver.

STILL I DREAM OF IT

 

'What is the nature of that mysterious condition, called sleep, in which we pass one third of our lives? One of the most inexplicable rhythms of life is explained - as far as modern research can explain it - in this new Pelican by a psychologist who has specialized in the study of sleep'

PORTRAITS OF URIEL

 

The many looks of Ruth E. Norman aka Uriel (1900-1993). Not a God, not a dictator, but a 'benign authoritarian' with an amazing wardrobe.

A WHOLE NEW LIFE! THROUGH PAST-LIFE THERAPY

Past-life therapy is fundamental to the Unarius Academy of Science: they believe that by reliving your previous lives you can resolve issues in your current life and improve your future. Which seems perfectly reasonable when you think about it. Apart from the 'past lives' (i.e. multiple) part, isn't this just what counselling / psychoanalysis / psychotherapy is about? We all have traumas, and they all need sorting, so why not have fun with it by dressing up for a camera and acting out scenes from your previously unremembered incarnations?

The string of films Unarius made in the 1970s and 80s can be seen on various platforms, usually slightly degraded and noisy as the copies are taken from the original VHS tapes. They are repetitive, and some are wilder (and more accomplished and expensive looking) than others, but they are never less than fascinating*.  Most importantly, the participants always seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves, which is what differentiates them from other nastier and more oppressive 'unlock your repressed past with thousands of dollars and a total mental breakdown' cults.

*After writing this post, I remembered that some of the films have Unarians in black face. I do not condone this, nor excuse it.

CATHARSIS

 

Things get emotional when you hold fervent beliefs. So they tell me.