Category: [Films & TV]

The Erotic Nightmare of the Daleks?

Here’s a slightly perplexing triple bill I found via Twitter. It’s not even so much the mix of films, though that’s odd enough; I could imagine The House That Dripped Blood and the Dalek film showing together cos they were both made by Amicus (technically the latter is an Aaru production but that was just Amicus posing under another name for some reason), but adding the Romero film into the mix gave the whole thing an… interesting if not traumatising flavour. But the thing that the original poster highlights is the “An erotic nightmare” tag… which I suspect may have been meant to refer to House (though that’s still a stretch), but its placement certainly makes it look like it’s about the Dalek film. Which… no?

That said, you may well find Dalek stories to be perfectly erotic and arousing. In which case, please get the hell away from me, you freak.

Foolstencroft MUFFs it!

Once upon a time (since 1952) there was a Melbourne International Film Festival, and once upon a time (around 2000) they rejected a film called Pearls Before Swine by a filmmaker called Richard Wolstencroft. So, because the latter is a grown adult and not a big sooky pissbaby, he started his own event just a few months later to showcase his film and his mates’ films, the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, or MUFF for short. Like I said, grown adult.

I remember following this bullshit back in the day cos at the time I was doing the film show on 2SER so kind of had to stay abreast of this sort of thing, cos it was a kind of big film culture event and we were supposed to be interested in that sort of thing on the show. As such, I’ve been following it on and off for 20+ years now, whenever it’s come back into the news. Which it just did again the other day:

Travis is a friend of various other friends of mine, one of whom is a filmmaker (hi Chris) and retweeted this, which is how I discovered the current situation. It is, incidentally, not just “someone else” who snapped up the name. But more of that in due course. This will be a long one…

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The point misser

Spotted this while going through some Tumblr archives:

This is from a scene in The Tingler, one of William Castle’s gimmick horror films (the first film about LSD, too). And it’s a black & white film. And I’ve seen black & white stills from black & white films colourised before, so I’m not really surprised by this one. But Castle actually filmed this scene in colour. The woman goes into the bathroom and hallucinates this blood-covered arm rising out of a bath full of blood, and the blood is red on screen; to get the effect, Castle shot this bit in colour but painted the whole set white and grey and black (and gave the actress similar makeup) to make the red splatter stand out. This is how it actually looks (as screenshotted from my blu-ray copy; the picture above is evidently a production photo from a different angle):

Imperfect (the colour film was of evidently poorer quality than the actual b&w stock) but not ineffective. In any case, though, colourising a picture of this scene from the film strikes me as a bit odd, cos the point of it is that it is actually in colour. Judith Evelyn wasn’t wearing a red dressing gown. I wonder how old this colouring job is (there’s some obvious damage to the picture) and how it was done.

The ultimate crossover?

I always like discovering new things I didn’t previously know, and today’s was a particular what-the-fuck moment of history:

To give credit where it’s due, they weren’t kidding with that tagline: I did, in fact, not believe it when I saw this ad, and was sure it had to be some bizarre photoshop job. No way did Boy George appear on The A Team… hang on, what do you mean he did? Well. Fuck me dead.

I don’t believe it. It’s real, and I don’t believe it. I’ve now actually seen a clip of the episode where George makes his first appearance (and OH but the other George, i.e. Peppard, does not look right with that moustache) and I STILL don’t believe it. It’s just… goddamn, I know both the band and the show were struggling by the end of 1985 when I presume this would’ve been filmed for broadcast in mid-February ’86, and I’m wondering who on Earth had the bright idea of combining the two. It’s not, you know, an intuitive mix of elements, and I’d love to know what the thinking behind it was. Or, indeed, if it was.

Mr Magician!

I feel the sentence “Mr Inbetween is streaming on Binge and Foxtel Now” possibly answers the questions the article has about it not being more popular. Could be why I haven’t heard about it before today…

Anyway, saw someone mentioning it on Mastodon, was curious, went to the Guardian article screenshotted above, and thought “hmm, that looks like the bloke from that movie The Magician“… lo and behold, it actually is Scott Ryan, which is why he looks so much like himself. I saw The Magician at the cinema when it came out and I remember quite liking it, made a real virtue out of its budgetary limitations (the whole thing only cost $3000 to make) and turned its absurd cheapness to its advantage; apparently Ryan and Nash Edgerton spent ages trying to get it done in TV form, but not until about five years ago when an American network suddenly approached him about doing it did it finally come about. I am accordingly intrigued.

And yeah, I’m downloading the lot because fuck Fox (the local co-producing company) and because I don’t like or trust streaming services. Put it out on disc and I’ll buy it. I know that discs don’t necessarily stay in print either, much as a film or show on a streaming service won’t be there forever, but if I get on disc when it is available then it’s mine and I don’t need to rely on someone else when I want to watch it. Glad I made the decision to buy all the old series of Doctor Who on DVD when I still could…

Cannes ’39

I know Cannes kicked off post-WW2 in 1946 but I think I may have known it had been planned before the war… but I don’t think I realised before tonight that it actually made it as far as this; there was a special screening of Hunchback of Notre Dame on August 31st, and then there was to be 20 days of films after that. Except that, on September 1st, Germany invaded Poland, didn’t it. And the organisers decided that was a bit more important than the festival, which they opted to put on hold to see what happened next. And, well, we know what happened next and the festival was accordingly on hold for seven years…

2 Passion 2 Christ

Apparently the Passion of the Christ sequel we were threatened with a few years ago is finally about to happen… I recall it was supposed to come out in 2021 but I presume a certain worldwide pandemic got in the way until now, assuming of course that it is in fact happening (I don’t know if it’s actually confirmed or not). Either way, the news has inspired a string of possible titles for the film as you can see in the article I linked (I quoted my own favourite in the post title), which further inspired this:

I rewatched the original Passion a few years ago, having not watched it since the day of its release in 2004, and where I didn’t like it on that first viewing, I hated it on that rewatch. It’s pornography by and for an anti-Semitic ghoul, and seeing Jason’s post above moaning about the mockery really let me know where he is as a fucking idiot. Mel Gibson knew exactly what he did, and I’m disinclined to forgive him for it.

Next stop: Christian cinema?

I might normally feel sorry for Gina Carano’s new film being a spectacular box office failure, but she’s a kind of atrocious person so I can only join in the chorus of laughter.

As a result of Carano’s return film’s $804 domestic gross, the actress received backlash on social media for her theatrical performance, with one user claiming that she “didn’t bring much to the role.” The user took to Twitter and shared his review of the film and wrote, “The movie wasn’t terrible, but it was very simple, and honestly Gina Carano didn’t bring much to the role. One time watch.” Another user wrote, “Sorry sad how she pissed away such potential to make boring schlock.” Another user quipped, “Gina caranos first big release post Mando exit.” One user said, “67 People paid to see the movie.” One user shared a meme and wrote, “”Go Woke Go Broke”

Bit curious as to why this is only getting attention now, cos the film came out about six months ago. Mind you, this is the first time I’m hearing about the film having been released; maybe if they’d advertised their film a bit more than they apparently did, more people might have watched it… or maybe not.

But the thing that took me by surprise was that this thing was directed by Michael Polish, whose career I haven’t exactly followed but I recalled him having received some acclaim for Twin Falls Idaho back at the end of the 90s, and I assumed he’d kind of maintained a respectable career… though looking at his Wiki entry, I may have been wrong about that; indeed he’s already got a Christian film to his, er, credit, and thus far he seems to have avoided falling back into that particular gutter. But, by the same token, making a film for Ben Shapiro’s company doesn’t strike me as a positive career move either…

Anyway, when all else fails, as I suspect it will, Gina’s probably got a place awaiting her in the Christian film industry as well, and that’ll keep her going for a good long time. I expect her to make her first appearance on God Awful Movies within two years; indeed, given that they’ve already covered one other not particularly goddy movie distributed by Daily Wire (though they rather unfairly blame Shapiro for the content of same), I have a feeling they may even cover this one at some point…

As opposed to what, fake books?

Spotted this on Mastodon this afternoon. What an odd and kind of infuriating question. What do you think I’m reading, the fucking Necronomicon?

I know electronic copies of books aren’t “real” in the physical sense but they still require a physical device to read them—Kindle, phone, computer, whatever. The issue of audiobooks is a lot more vexed, but if we leave that aside for now and limit ourselves to the words on the page, are the latter any more real in a paperback than in an .epub file? Is it more real in hardback? Is the author’s original manuscript written by their own hand more real? What if they never actually “wrote” it as such and did the whole thing on a typewriter or (perish the thought) a computer? What if the author types it all up in Word then sends it to a publisher to actually print it, is it not real or something until the latter step takes place?

I don’t know, I just find this sort of thing to be bullshit and always have done. Saw it decades ago with cinephilia (I still hate that fucking word), here’s an example from an ancient (year 2000!) edition of Senses of Cinema:

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