ROUGH SEA @

 

Rough Sea @ Hoylake, Merseyside

I'm simultaneously impressed and creeped out by the man in the long coat defiantly facing the elements. He probably caught cold and died, people did that a lot more then, it was considered character building.

BOOM TIME

 

The underwater atomic test at the Bikini Atoll in July 1946 was captured for research purposes by five hundred cameras stationed on unmanned planes, high-altitude aircraft, boats, and from more distant points on land around the Atoll, the island group forming an almost complete ellipse, a natural stage for this most terrible show of man's destructive power. The mushroom cloud is perhaps the single most iconic symbol of the 20th century: both synthetic and organic, horrifying and enthralling, a seething mass of ever-changing death.

We still have these bombs like this, of course, more than ever, in fact, but we now think about them in the same way we think about sharks, or fire, or falling off a cliff: a primal but somehow distant fear. Besides, being instantly vaporised is the least of our worries these days, we all know it won't be anything like as easy as that.

WE'VE ALL DONE IT

Choreography For Copy Machine AKA Photocopy Cha Cha Cha, d. Chel White (USA, 1991)

Relentless and brilliantly animated, like a jollier version of the unforgettable and disquieting title sequence of The Tomorrow People.

PENNED INSIDE

 

Police Lieutenant Jim Corrigan finds himself in trouble in The Spectre #6 (DC Comics, 1968). You must know it, it's the issue in which he and his supernatural lodger The Spectre battle against a horde of reanimated devil worshipping Pilgrim Fathers. More on The Spectre soon.

MEANWHILE, IN LYNCHLAND...

Absurd Encounter With Fear, d. David Lynch (USA, 1967)

David Lynch's enigmatic debut film is a mere two minutes long, but manages to be packed with his characteristic mix of horror, humour and unknowable oddness. In it, a blue faced man lumbers across a meadow towards a frightened looking girl. Drawing close to her, he fiddles with his fly and pulls out handfuls of dandelions. The girl is oblivious to what he is doing. When he is finished, he turns to gaze directly at the viewer, and he then collapses, presumably dead. 

Lynch died on the 16th of January last year. This world is lousy without him.

DANCE AWAY

 

Hepcats get hip in The Horror Of Party Beach (1964), a genuinely terrible film made all the worse by having some quite good elements, not least some of the music and the editing, which is excellent. 

In it, a radioactive waste spill on the ocean floor turns the skeletons of long dead sailors into rubbery looking monsters with big googly eyes and a grudge against teenagers. As there are hundreds of them constantly frugging on the beach, the monsters assume someone has laid on a buffet and proceed to kill as many as they can. Only sodium can stop them, and lots of it. It's quite gory, really, but the monsters are made unscary by looking exactly like our old mate the Soup Dragon from The Clangers.

Anyway, there's a lot of dancing (see above).

REMEMBER!

 

Happy New Year, whatever that means. I genuinely wish you all the best.