Earlier this year, the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) opened on the South Bank in London amid much publicity and a welter of puns even worse than the one above. Typically, it was only mid-November that TC finally got around to visiting it, when we had a couple of hours to kill before seeing a film.

At 3.50, it’s quite expensive, especially if you add in another 2.95, as I did, for the programme (above) – it’s not a necessary purchase, since there’s more than enough in the museum itself to keep you informed, but it’s an interesting read in it’s own right. At the end of the exhibition is the shop and you can get copies there as well as at the beginning, which’ll save you carrying it around.

The exhibition is organised in roughly chronological order, beginning with the shadow plays of the ancient Egyptians and goes up through the magic lanterns and other toys of the Victorians, the early days of silent films, and so on until the modern era, though occasionally there are also exhibits which compare how, say, censorship has altered through the decades.

One thing you should be aware of is that certain staff are dressed up in costume appropriate to the period – when I first saw a Victorian lady wandering about, I thought I was suffering from a bizarre form of hallucination, induced by having watched ‘The Railway Children’ the previous night! It doesn’t help when they stop and talk to you – all the interesting questions you want the answers to are immediately driven clean out of your head.

It’s a very visual exhibition, as you would expect, with a huge variety of exhibits ranging from Rudolf Valentino’s personal stills album to a Dalek. There are buttons to be pushed, handles turned and a lot of films – I personally enjoyed the ‘Youth Culture’ video juke-box; pressing various buttons brought up clips from ‘The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle’, ‘Friday the 13th’, ‘Baby Doll’ and ‘Night of the Living Dead’, among others.

Not surprisingly, a large section is devoted to television. I can’t really give a fair assessment of it, as we were thrown out ( not for anything anti-social, you understand – the place was closing ) before we managed to get more than a cursory glance in passing at that section. At the pace we went round, it would have taken roughly 2 1/4 hours to see the whole place, and that wasn’t hanging about watching all the films – it’d be quite possible to spend an entire day there. I did enjoy it, and want to go back when I’ve more time. If you’re ever in London, you’ve only 3.50 left and have time to kill this is an interesting, and also very educational(!), way to do it.

Or, why certain ideas that appeared in TC2 & 3 might be a little familiar. Firstly, just before TC3 appeared, Time Out came up with THEIR choice of the top 100 films of all time, chosen by a panel of directors, critics & writers. Precisely FOUR of their choices appeared in my list of favourites, given last issue: the other 96 films listed didn’t rate a mention for me, though since I’d seen just THIRTEEN of these, this may not be surprising.

When it comes to high-brow cinema, my education has clearly been lacking, though if a film like ‘The Green Ray’, which I found totally soporific, can get in their list, I can feel no great sense of loss… They followed this up with their reader’s selections. While showing a distressing tendency to follow the critics, sheep-fashion, my four films above all rated higher in Joe Public’s list, and two more were also in. I’d seen rather more of the plebs choices, which proves something, though I’m not sure what. Below are details of the more interesting entries:

	FILM BUFFS	PLEBS
Alien		39
Blade Runner	72	7
Blue Velvet	16	11
The Blues Brothers		51
Brazil	22	8
A Clockwork Orange		27
Dangerous Liaisons		100
The Exorcist	63	84=
Jean De Florette	39	37=
The Life of Brian		67
Paris, Texas		45
Psycho	14	12
Rocky Horror Picture Show		95=
Some Like It Hot	4	2
2001: A Space Odyssey	71	9
Dawn of the Dead		67
This is Spinal Tap		83

Meanwhile, following the selection of rock lyrics of awesome awfulness that we had in TC2, Steve Moss told me that NME had been doing something similar, unbeknownst to me, since about June. Great minds thinking alike, or fools seldom differing? In either case, here’s a selection of some of the best from their pages, as well as a few other unsung (and unsingable) classics :

Early attempts at song-writing can prove embarrassing to famous artists in later life. As an example of ‘It’s my first single, so I haven’t quite got the hang of this lyrics lark but what does it matter since this is the B-side anyway’ syndrome, look at Kate Bush, and “Kite”:
“Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o / My feet are heavy & I’m rooted in my wellios”

With certain people, it’s difficult to tell if they have their tongues in their cheeks or not. Are The Pet Shop Boys cleverly pointing out the tedium of modern life, or just demonstrating total lyrical ineptitude, in “I Want A Dog”:
“I want a dog, to walk in the park / When it gets dark, my dog will bark”

Winners of the ‘Incredibly Inappropriate Simile’ trophy have to be The Cult, for “Peace Dog”. Psychologists could have hours of fun analysing the writer of:
“B-52 baby, way up in the sky / Drop your love on me tonight”

Further proof, as if any were needed, that Charles Manson is TOTALLY insane:
“Garbage dump, my garbage dump / That sums it up in one big lump”
from the imaginatively titled “Garbage Dump”. Don’t give up the day job, Chuck.

Showing that if you ain’t got soul, you ain’t got, er, breakfast, is Bobby Womack:
“I’m looking for a love (someone to fix my breakfast) I’m looking for a love (bring it to me in my bed)”

Speaking of Europe, perhaps we should leave out groups whose first language isn’t English – it’s not really their fault we are so insular we don’t buy records in French (except the rotten “Joe le Taxi”). A few examples will suffice:
“One person calls someone to pour the water / Because it takes two to pour the water / To plough takes two as well”
(“Delicious Demon” – the Sugarcubes)

“Bang a boomer boomerang / Dummy dum dum te dummy dum dum / Bang a boomer boomerang / Love is a tune you hum”
(“Bang a Boomerang” – Abba)

Rod Stewart, in “Italian Girls”, shows even us Celts can have our off days :
“She was tall thin and tarty / And she drove a Maserati / …I must have looked so silly / When I stepped in some Caerphilly”

And that will do. I think perhaps next time we’ll concentrate on heavy metal lyrics, always a great source of totally laughable, over-blown, ridiculous ‘concepts’ and, at the other end of the scale, tediously sexist junk. As an example of the latter, here’s the chorus from Iron Maiden’s “Women In Uniform”:
“Women in uniform, Woo-ooh, they feel so warm”.
Any other offerings gratefully received.

**** 5. “No tears, please – it’s a waste of good suffering”.

Once again, it was that time of year, so once again I packed my rucksack with a wide variety of unpleasant T-shirts and headed off into the wide blue yonder in search of excitement, adventure and VHS video cassettes.

My holiday started a day later than planned, since I went to the Scala all-night film show on the Saturday, more out of curiosity, since it included ‘a surprise feature’. Some surprise. It was ‘Driller Killer’, a film previously shown there with no secrecy at all – ever feel like you’ve been cheated? The films on the boat across to Holland weren’t a lot better – ‘Twins’ & ‘Working Girl’ failed to compete with a comfy chair and shut-eye.

Amsterdam, for the fifth time, and I don’t think I’ll be going back there for a while. Difficult though it may be to believe, the air of sin has lost its novelty value; even the hookers in the red-light district didn’t seem as plentiful or as pretty as they used to be. Mind you, having said that, there was one who was absolutely stunning – all your fantasies made flesh (or at least, all mine) and well worth fifty guilders plus the possibility of catching a social disease. Unfortunately, I failed to strike while the iron was hot and when I came back for another look, a couple of glasses of Dutch courage later, I was just in time to see her curtains close. Hell, she wasn’t all that pretty, anyway…

When not drooling at under-dressed, over made-up bimbos, I wandered round the shops in search of films. The Netherlands’ much touted lack of censorship led me to think that Amsterdam would be a city where every shop was stuffed full of uncut ‘Toxic Avengers’ and full-length copies of ‘Videodrome’. This wasn’t quite the case – while even the Dutch equivalents of Woolworths and Our Price had their video shelves over-flowing with films where the box art alone would set a customs officer’s nose twitching at thirty paces, these were restricted to titles like “Shaved Pink” or ‘Inside Desiree Cousteau’, with splatter generally being British imports. The only exceptions that I came across were Dutch subtitled versions of ‘Faces of Death’ & ‘Faces of Death 2’, both costing the equivalent of 9.99. I didn’t bother.

By now, I had a rough idea of where I was heading – Inter-Rail V was to become a quest, a pilgrimage to pay homage at Nastassja’s birthplace. Which is why I found myself arriving at Berlin Zoo station following a surprisingly quiet journey through East Germany – about the only thing of note was that even when passing through the centre of towns, at about 8 a.m, very few cars were visible. And most of those I did see looked distressingly like Skodas!

Priority one : find somewhere to stay. This was accomplished very easily; courtesy of the tourist office I found a place in a newly-opened, low-budget, pseudo-youth hostel for DM.25 per night, or about eight quid – that included an all-you-can-eat breakfast which is a little better than most places offer! Priority two : hit the video shops. Surely I’d be able to complete my collection of Nastassja-pics, here in her birth-place. First find your video shop, though – back to the tourist office and a quick flip through the local Yellow Pages turned up a couple of possibilities. However, one of these proved totally untraceable, and the other only did rentals. Putting that idea onto the back burner, I went sight-seeing instead.

Started off with the thing Berlin is most famous for: The Wall. At first sight it’s not up to much, being a lot lower than I expected, perhaps a dozen feet high, and almost totally covered in graffiti. Some of this is admittedly very artistic, but most of it wouldn’t be out of place in any railway siding here. However, at certain points the West Germans have built towers, from where you can see over, and it’s only then that you can appreciate the scale of it all. For about a hundred yards on the other side, everything has been levelled; you can see, cut by the wall, the disused tram lines continuing into East Berlin.

Visited the Reichstag section next. Here, the border is a river, patrolled by East German motor boats, which occasionally try and drench the tourists on the bank by kicking up a wake (and getting an ironic round of applause when they fail). Since the river is East German territory, presumably any poor sod who gets splashed will be torn to shreds by machine-gun fire for trespassing.

I spent four days in Berlin, a little longer than planned since I wanted to take in a football match at the Olympic Stadium on the Saturday. On the second day, I did the obvious thing, and took a trip across to the Communist side to gawp at the primitive lifestyle of the oppressed masses, after queueing for ages to get my visa and change my 25 West German marks into 25 East German ones. This is compulsory – they clearly want to get their hands on our decadent, capitalist hard currency since the rate going the other way is 10 DDR to 1 DFR. Even that’s not available to tourists, who have no option except spending the Communist currency, because Western banks collapse in hysterical laughter if you try to exchange them. There is a flourishing black market; I was accosted while writing postcards in a park by a seedy individual who offered to sell East German marks at a good rate. As I could foresee difficulty getting rid of the ones I had, I declined.

My first impressions of the Communist world weren’t great. This was due to me coming out of the border post and heading in completely the wrong direction, into some sort of industrial estate. I eventually regained my bearings and went up the TV tower, carefully positioned to loom over the nearby cathedral as if to demonstrate that socialism is bigger than God.

The people seemed rather sullen, not really surprising considering they’re regarded as exhibits in a human zoo by most tourists. The pedestrian subways were full of people engaging in a little illicit free-marketeering, selling fruit & veg, crockery and even records. Duran Duran seemed especially popular – since the only Western artist available in the ‘official’ shops is Kylie Minogue, I can quite understand the appeal of Simon Le Bon & co.

Despite desperate attempts, I had just about failed to use up any Deutschmarks; I bought postcards for 20 Pfennigs (about 7p), stamps to send them home with for the same amount (and they took about four weeks to arrive) and a Biro for about 1.60 – presumably the high price helps keep these dangerous items out of the hands of dissident subversives. That was about it – everything else was either extremely shoddy or imported and hellishly expensive i.e. a simple mono record player, of the sort last seen here in the 60’s, cost over 1200 DM, the best part of FOUR HUNDRED pounds.

However, on looking at a poster showing “What’s on in East Berlin”, I saw a local theatre company was putting on ‘My Fair Lady’ that night, not far from where I was – I was a little surprised at this, but on consideration, ‘My Fair Lady’, with it’s idea that the rich are just like you and me, except with funny voices, is about as Marxist as musicals get. I went to the box-office hoping my remaining marks might buy me a cheap seat somewhere and discovered, to give them their due, that the government there do support the arts. Compared to a theatre in London, where seats are eight quid up, this one was astonishing; 2 marks (65p) got you a place in the roof and 15 marks, less than a fiver, got you into a box. If prices were like that here, I’d support the stage rather more.

The theatre was a little old-fashioned but perfectly restored, complete with a huge chandelier. The programs were also highly impressive; 16 A5 pages in colour for 30 pfennigs makes the idea of publishing TC from Berlin almost viable! The musical had been translated into German but since I knew the story of Eliza Doolittle from the film, this was no real problem – in fact, Professor Higgins’ dialogue almost gained from the change, since staccato, clipped German suited his character well. The actors seemed, from my limited knowledge, well up to scratch – what was perhaps lacking in polish was more than made up for in energy (the dance numbers were especially energetic) and it was overall highly enjoyable. It also gave me a chance to see East Germans ‘at play’ and they seemed no different from us at all.

As I write this, the Berlin Wall is collapsing – it’s astonishing to think that just 2 months ago, when I was there, nobody would have even considered the idea of a unified Berlin anything more than a idealists’ dream and there were no signs of the dramatic upheaval that’s taken place over the past few days. I’d love to be there now – the atmosphere must be absolutely incredible.

Back in the Western world, with it’s luxuries like Coke (although there was a similar substance in East Germany, it tasted even worse than Pepsi!), I tried a few bars with my fellow-travellers. There are two problems with German bars; one, they all have different beers and there’s little notion of ‘brewery pubs’ as we have here, so when you go to a new area, you usually end up drinking a totally different set. Good for variety, bad for consistency. The other problem is getting served. In Britain, you make eye contact with the bar staff. In Germany, they always seem to be looking three inches above your head and studious ignore you. Of course, it might have had something to do with ‘English’ people not being flavour-of-the-month; the 50th anniversary of Wrld Wr II was just past and English soccer fans had been honoured ambassadors of sport again and trashed most of Sweden.

I eventually managed to track down a video shop. No joy there, either as I find out that of the three Nastassja-pics I don’t have, two are no longer available and the third will cost me fifty quid and take two weeks to order. The fifty quid I could stand, the two weeks I couldn’t. Instead, I discovered the illustrated script of “Paris, Texas” in a bargain bookshop which cheered me up a bit – the only other bit of memorabilia I spotted was a postcard of her, and that was printed in London.

Berlin is very well served with cinemas; roughly 80 or so, and all showing different films rather than the latest block-buster. I went to see ‘Pink Flamigoes’ at what must have been the Berlin equivalent of the Scala – a couple of weeks later and it’d have been ‘Lair of the White Worm’. This set a new record of the minimum audience for a film : eight people including me and two who walked out half way through!

Saturday, I watched a football match at the Olympic stadium. The complex is very impressive, though I don’t know how the idea of an open-air swimming pool would go down these days, and the stadium itself was immense; Blau-Weiss Berlin are only 2nd division and the 8,619 spectators, including a pleasing proportion of families, rattled around a bit like Linnea Quigley’s brain-cells (yeah, let’s force the simile further than it was ever meant to go). Here seems an appropriate place to tell the only example of Teutonic humour I heard during my stay there : &n Did you know Hitler let 100,000 Jews take part in the Berlin Olympics? &f They were the cinder track. It seems to me that certain Germans are no longer feeling as guilty about the war as they might do…

Next time, we head into the Alps, discover that Switzerland is not quite as boring a place as it’s reputation has it and try to decide between buying ‘Ilsa: Harem- Keeper of the Oil Sheiks’ and going up a mountain.

**** 4. “I don’t know what the hell’s in there, but it’s weird and pissed off whatever it is!”

The Tomb (Fred Olen Ray)

Cameron Mitchell, Michelle Bauer, Sybil Danning

Fred Olen Ray is a director greatly beloved by the connossieur of celluloid junk. He specialises in gratuitous nudity; the ‘bimbo pic’. They may be bimbos with buzz-saws (“Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers”), bad bimbos (“Prison Ship Star Slammer”) or, as in this one, bimbo Egyptian goddess vampires with a grudge.

Examination of the video box reveals that the exploitation isn’t confined to the subject matter or the direction. “Starring Sybil Danning”, it trumpets – to say this is a bit of an exaggeration is being kind, since she appears, literally, for two minutes, thus becoming the only ‘star’ of a film ever to vanish from it before the opening credits roll.

Her 15 seconds of fame occur as she and her 5 henchmen – highly impressive since she arrived in the middle of the desert in a two-seater plane – try to swindle John Banning (Mitchell), an Indiana Jones style swashbuckling archaeologist, out of an artefact. This scene is completely irrelevant to everything that follows and the entire sequence can safely be ignored.

The plot really begins with Banning and his sidekick plotting in a Cairo pub. Yousef, a local guide, tells them of a tomb he has discovered and agrees to take them there – cue stock footage of Cairo and the actors leading camels through strangely un-Egyptian looking scenery. They arrive in the tomb, where their guide tells them of Nefratis, an Ancient Egyptian princess, disciple of Set, drinker of human blood, buried alive, and so on – fill in the blanks yourself.

Surprise, surprise, this is her tomb and before you can say ‘Nebuchadnezzar’, up she pops to decapitate the guide and slaughter the side-kick, with Banning escaping by cleverly bringing the roof down on her after he fires his gun. We know this isn’t the end of the story, since Nefratis mutters “You can run – I won’t follow you, but I’ll be there when you can’t run any more” as Banning leaves. 3,000 years in a coffin with nothing to do and that’s the best line she can come up with? Oddly, she speaks English – where she learned this isn’t explained. Must be a perk of the job.

Banning returns to America and has a brush with US Customs, leading to a chase which is remarkable only for it’s total lack of excitement. He sells the relics he swiped from Nefratis’ tomb to various people, before she (now dressed in the height of fashion) tracks him down and implants a scarab beetle next to his chest so he can serve her. Since he does next to sod-all for the rest of the film, this was clearly a limited success.

Nefratis is after the relics because she has to perform a ritual, involving hmn scrfc, every seventh moon to retain her youth. One relic is in the possession of a Dr. Manners, an amateur egyptologist, who describes the artefact as “older than recorded history – possibly before the Thinnite period”. Thank you, Doctor, very informative. C-, and here, get your heart torn out by this handily passing Egyptian with vampiric tendencies. From their comments, the police are baffled:

• “Nothing’s missing – except the victim’s heart”
• “A man’s dead. Murdered. And someone’s responsible”
• “People get killed in this town everyday – that’s Hollywood”.

Dr. Manners’ son, Dave, and a colleague of the dead man, Dr. Stewart, visit the local university to see Professor Phillips, a man whom they suspect of having bought the other piece. He denies dealing in illicit goods but Dave charms Phillips’ niece, Helen into helping them – hey, SHE’S into Egyptology too. Lucky, huh? She comes up with Banning’s name though when he’s tracked down (busy playing pin-ball, no doubt at the behest of Nefratis – “O, my servant, go and stick a few quarters into the machines down the local arcade”), he proves none too helpful.

Dave & Helen find out about Nefratis from a convenient academic. Our goddess feels a bit peckish and pops out for a snack, in the form of the director’s wife, Dawn Wildsmith, who is pushed onto a bed of snakes, after taking her top off, naturally. Helen finds out her uncle has Nefratis’ bit of jewellery and relieves him of it – Prof. Phillips is clearly a mad scientist, since he wants to INTERVIEW Nefratis, a task even Sir Robin Day might balk at. Nefratis duly appears, miraculously finding a portable laser to help make her entrance dramatic, before leaving Phillips feeling drained, though she does say “I’m sorry, mon amour”, proving that she’s capable of regret and has also learned French. The situation is now so serious that Dave & Helen take the evening off and go down to the local red-light district. Nefretis, accompanied by a song which sounds like a Devo out-take, follows them home and kidnaps Helen after Dave leaves to visit Dr. Stewart. The two men find Banning, knock him out, surgically remove the scarab and get him to take them to the sacrifice site, which fortunately, Nefratis has divulged to him.

And it is there that the final, dramatic battle takes place, between our heroes and Nefratis, with a brief contribution from the US Customs men (see about two pages back) who also want the artefacts returned. Nefratis is finally destroyed by a shaft of light from one of them (the artefacts, not the US Customs men!).

No, it doesn’t make sense to me, either.

The last shot is of the destroyed vampire’s skeletal arm, which moves, filling the viewer with a sense of horror at the thought that a sequel might ever be made to this film, which has otherwise failed to be horrible in the slightest.

“Low budget” springs to mind very easily when discussing this film. The script- writer, Kenneth J. Hall (who directed the enjoyably atrocious ‘Metamorphosis’), was also the prop-master and an ‘animation assistant’ as well (presumably meaning he was trying to get leading lady Michelle Bauer to show some animation; not a task in which he was overly succesful).

Distressing though it is to admit, it’s still good fun – unlike ‘Revenge of the Teenage Vixens’, this seems SHORTER than is claimed. The directors cunningly appeal to the viewer in two ways. If you can resist the ‘bimbo factor’, they throw in a variety of genre figures to attract the completist – the aforementioned Sybil Danning, John Carradine, and Kitten Natividad, probably Russ Meyer’s biggest find [FX: editor restraining himself manfully from making a childish remark], who gets a walk-on role in a strip-club for no better reason than to increase the nipple count.

However, perhaps the most memorable thing about the film is the dialogue. Ken Hall either has a wickedly ironic sense of humour or constructed the script while out of his tree on a combination of diet pills and 50’s B-movies. The best examples, other than those given above:

• Prof Phillips, on seeing the cross he is trying to ward Nefratis off with turn into a snake : “You know, I always wanted one of those things.”
• Banning’s sidekick, in Nefratis’ tomb : “What the hell’s that? That wasn’t here when we came in.”
• Customs man to Nefratis : “US Customs – we want those artefacts!”
• Banning to Nefratis : “I’ve come to kill you, you mummified bitch.”

For once, this film is no obscurity only accessible to the fanatic, the insomniac or the obsessive. Channel 5, that top producer of cheap trash who are also responsible for The New Avengers tapes and Transvision Vamp’s video EP) have let it escape for 9.99. Less than the price of 8 pints of Guinness and you too can have two minutes of Sybil Danning and 84 minutes of “The Tomb” – pity it’s not the other way round!

What atrocity will we examine next time? Decisions, decisions. Not had a prison movie for ooh, at least two issues, so perhaps it’ll be “Bad Girls Dormitory”, the most pointless bimbo-behind-bars film I’ve yet seen. Or maybe Fred Olen Ray’s contribution mentioned above, “Prison Ship Star Slammer”. Then again, Rob Dyer (a curse on him) has sent me the prequel to “Return of the Barbarian Women”…

**** 3. “Because I cut off his legs. And his arms. And his head. And I’m going to do the same to you”

I take a lot of flak for liking this film. People find it difficult to believe that the same person who rates ‘Re-Animator’, ‘The Evil Dead’ and ‘Reform School Girls’ among his favourite films, can enjoy a film like this without an ulterior motive. This usually involves Jenny Agutter, though the rapidity with which even total strangers leap to this assumption convinces me that there is a fair amount of fantasy transference going on.

I will admit, make no mistake, that Jenny Agutter is astonishingly pretty in this film (and before anyone accuses me of anything, I should point out that she was 18 when it was made; she used to have terrible problems getting served in the pubs around where they were shooting!). However, this is almost completely irrelevant to the film, in the same way that Nastassja Kinski’s presence in ‘Paris, Texas’ has little to do with why it’s another favourite.

Every frame is carefully calculated and arranged to evoke all the ‘Victorian values’ that Mrs. Thatcher used to witter on about. The characters are so nice and sweet you can feel your teeth rot as you watch this cinematic equivalent of a tin of condensed milk. The film is a totally cynical attempt to manipulate the emotions of the audience. And the worst thing of all is that the bloody thing succeeds – your poor editor, hardened gore-hound that I am, can not watch the end without pretending to fiddle with his contact lenses.

There aren’t many films that have that effect to me. When the mother deer in ‘Bambi’ gets killed, I do reach for my hankie. I also remember going to see ‘E.T’ and not being happy when the little green alien ‘died’ – say what you like about Steven Spielberg, he can twist an audience round his little finger. Of course, when I was younger, I’d start howling at ANYTHING; the first film I can remember going to see that I DIDN’T cry at was ‘Jaws’!

Back to ‘The Railway Children’. I’m sure that the plot is part of the sub-conscious heritage of every British child; a happy, upper middle-class family of mother, father, son, two daughters and several servants, living in Victorian London, have a crisis when father is arrested and charged with working for a foreign power (you can read in subtle social comment here – nowadays, they’d probably claim he bombed a pub somewhere). The loss of their bread-winner means they can no longer afford the massive house, so they go to live in the country, in a nice cottage overlooking a railway line.

The children wave to passing trains, make friends with the station-master (played by Bernard Cribbins), stop a locomotive from crashing into a tree on the line, help rescue an injured schoolboy from a tunnel and generally live the sort of humdrum life typical of country peasants last century. Be grateful we live in modern times, with more interesting things to do in the evening.

Unsurprisingly, there is a Very Happy Ending when Daddy gets released, through the intervention of a passenger on one of the trains the children wave to. Not a dry eye in the house. But not all the novel made it into the screenplay:

“Then Mother undid Peter’s boots. As she took the right one off, something dripped from his foot onto the ground. It was red blood. And when the stocking came off, there were three red wounds in Peter’s foot and ankle where the teeth of the rake had bitten him, and his foot was covered with red smears.”

Ok, Shaun Hutson it ain’t, but clearly Lionel Jeffries didn’t think it was the sort of thing for a U-certificate film (the only U-movie I possess, incidentally!).

Some people have also chosen to read a great deal of sexual symbolism into it. Their reasoning generally involves equating trains going into tunnels with sex – from this it can be deduced that the children’s interest in trains, and especially Peter’s desire to be an engineer, is symbolic of their passage through adolescence. Also, their association of trains with their father may well indicate an incestual relationship, etc, etc. Personally, I think such talk is a load of tripe and that all it proves is that certain people are in need of therapy…

It’s appeal is very difficult to explain – the characters are, without exception, Very Nice, yet I feel no animosity towards them or desire to give them a good kicking, unlike the ‘kids’ in most of Walt Disney’s live-action films! It is also unusual in that it’s dramatic content does not stem from the normal good guys versus bad guys conflict – there are no ‘baddies’ to speak of. This lack of alternative views is perhaps a benefit; with no other characters to identify with, you either associate with the children or stop watching. If we compare it with, say, ‘The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre’ (and I bet it’s the first time those two films have been paired!), in TCM most people end up cheering on Leatherface as he slices and dices hippies, even though this is not what the director intended, because it’s easier than identifying with the whining, flare-wearing victims.

Too much analysis of a film can be counter-productive, perhaps. Maybe we should just write this one off as a personal foible or as a retreat whenever I tire of the sight of psychopathic murderers, demons from Hell and brainless teenagers.

One rarely mentioned fact is that a group of Italians were initially involved in writing the screenplay, before Lionel Jeffries took it over. Below, we have printed a letter from the producer to the people responsible…