Needless to say, the above worked considerably better as a printed publication than in an online format. I’m not going to make you read the remainder of the issue back to front, and have reversed the pages for you. You’re welcome!

10 Potentially useful Japanese phrases*

* subject to word-processing limitations!!

1. Joshi-inransho – nymphomania.
2. Uguisu no tani-watari – literally, a nightingale jumping back and forth over a narrow valley – a less florid translation is a man in bed with two women.
3. Rimbyo – gonorrhea. Slightly more poetically, the lonely disease.
4. Nikuyoku no gonge – the embodiment of lust.
5. Kobu-maki wo suru – ‘kobu-maki’ is a roll of seaweed with a dried fish inside. This phrase is actually a geisha term for the first love act with a patron after the New Year.
6. Wakame-zake – During ‘O-Shogatsu’, a geisha may disrobe for one or more favoured clients, lie on her back and clasp her legs together tightly. A guest will pour sake over her pelvic region from where he then begins to imbibe like a horse at a watering-trough. The floating motion of the pubic hairs in the puddle of sake is fondly imagined to resemble the motion of the seaweed wakame in the ocean.
7. Danshu Tomo no Kai – Alcoholics Anonymous.
8. Tokkuri to shinj– suru – To die from excessive drinking. Literally, to commit double suicide with a sake bottle.
9. Zakone suru – the characters mean miscellaneous fish sleeping. It also means sleeping together in groups promiscuously i.e as done by Japanese rock bands.
10. Kary–kai – flower & willow world. More usefully, red-light district.

‘Eat Them Alive’, by Pierce Nace, NEL, 75p (in 1977), pp 158.

Described on the cover as “a new peak in horror”, this book marks probably the lowest depths the great New English Library, publishers of James Herbert and Stephen King, have ever sunk to. In a genre not exactly noted for humour, this book succeeded in making me giggle hysterically on the train into work providing my fellow commuters with the edifying sight of a sober suited gent biting his hand while reading a book whose cover depicted a blood-stained insect chewing a gobbet of flesh.

Let’s be honest – it is no exaggeration to say I was capable of producing more coherent, better written stories when I was eleven, and I wasn’t an especially gifted essayist. The whole book, presumably written under a pseudonym, is the literary equivalent of a ‘Best of Italian Cannibal movies’ tape put together by the Monty Python team while out of their collective heads on amphetamines. However, enough talk; let’s continue with a prize example, in both style and content:

“I wonder what it’s like to watch a beast eating a part of your body while you’re helpless to prevent the gruesome snack that you’re arm is providing. Well, he thought on, I’m right-handed. If Slayer bites off one arm, I’ll still have my best one.”

Slayer, in case you were wondering, is a giant preying mantis. An earthquake opens up gigantic cracks in the earth on the South American island where Dyke, the main character (‘hero’ is not the word, as you’ll see) lives and these monsters crawl out and chew their way through the entire population. Inverse Square Law, get outta here:

“What were those giant creatures that were crawling out of the cracks in the earth? Were they animals of some strange kind? Were they outsized snakes…? But no. Snakes had no flailing legs, no bulging bellies, no shapes like – whatever those things were. They were insects!”

Fortunately, Dyke was out in his boat when the mantises appeared and was thus safe to watch the spectacle. As early as page 9, we start to suspect he may be a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic – “But now I’ve got something to live for, because I LOVE watching a man being eaten by a monster! Maybe it’s a substitute for my lost virility, I don’t know”.

The same page also sees an octogenarian ripped apart, with a flagrant disregard for the rules of English; one sentence contains the word ‘and’ no less than FIVE times. We are then treated to a flash-back, to explain why he’s lost his virility. This is not his only problem: “No man’s mind could forget the viciousness Dyke had suffered, especially when it left ever-present headaches and impaired eyesight in it’s wake”.

This all came about when Dyke was young; he and his three criminal associates in the South of the States decided to try a big job – as can be judged for the following passage, Mr Nace has a keen, sympathetic ear for racial minorities and their patois:

“Pete Stuart was the really mean one. He was from an eastern ghetto somewhere, white enough to pass but gouging out the eyes of any man – or woman – who called him anything but black… His best leisure activity was chopping small animals to bits or maiming children… It was Pete who jolted the lot of them out of their lethargies one morning when he said ‘I don’t know about you damn whiteys. But I’m sick in’ tired of penny-ante stuff. I’m takin’ me out to get me some bread that’ll buy somethin’ big. You damn whiteys can come along or not, suit yourselves'”

[The dialogue is reproduced word for word].

They go on to dismember another OAP (senior citizens have yet to catch up with teenagers as favourite targets, despite Nace’s best efforts), but after making their getaway, Dyke tries to sneak off with all the swag. This action is not taken kindly by his partners in crime, who take their revenge by castrating him. Here, Pierce shows a mealy-mouth approach which is a little surprising; given his enthusiasm for sentences like: “Slayer clawed at the abdominal cavity, tearing it apart, wrenching the intestines and stomach from their hold on the man, chewing down the coils of intestines as if they were the greatest delicacy he had ever tasted”.

It’s odd to hear him using phrases like “manhood” and “private parts”. Dyke is left for dead, but is rescued and nursed back to health, or at least, NEAR health as we hear in this exchange between him and his doctor (all … are Nace’s, for once!):

“Will I be – all right? I mean, except for…”
“Yes, except for that. And…”
“And what?”
“You will not have twenty-twenty vision again”

Back in the present day, Dyke captures a mantis which he plans to use to extract revenge against his torturers who, handily, have also decided to settle in South America. He names the insect Slayer and tries to train it; before he has done so, the creature escapes – the descriptions of Slayer as lightning fast are slightly devalued by the discovery that it’s prepared to hang round while Dyke delivers a soliloquy (Nace is unable to cope with his characters THINKING anything, probably because he’s incapable of it himself, so they all speak their thoughts aloud):

“God, he’s out! He’ll kill this scum and me too! Nobody will have a chance against him. He’ll kill everything in this whole jungle, animals and men and women and kids! Nobody’ll be safe from him!”

Such respect for human life is a little inconsistent – “this scum” refers to a native he found in his hut, and who was about to be offered to Slayer as a snack.

Slayer is recaptured and eventually taught NOT to eat Dyke, who smears himself with a foul smelling stuff (that also kills armadillos when a pint is forced down their throat). He’s then off, accompanied by Slayer, pausing only for a snack at a local village, or to be more accurate, OF a native village – he takes all the inhabitants across to the island (more sympathetic ethnic dialogue: “Man come by yesterday, say green things there. Big, fierce. Scared to go.”); the insectoid equivalent of home delivered pizzas perhaps. These sights (entrails, glistening, blood, torrents, fill in the blanks yourself) turn Dyke on, because “for a man who could never make love to a woman, who had put females from his mind years ago, the sight of one being denuded and dined upon should excite and delight him immeasurably”. Er, yes.

Having acquired a few more mantises, he heads off to get revenge on his torturers. The first one he assaults is Pete, who mysteriously no longer speaks like Eddie Murphy doing an impression of a Black & White Minstrel. At first, he doesn’t recognise Dyke :

“Remember me now, Pete? Or shall I take off my pants and let my castration jog your memory?”

Eventually, he does and, along with the rest of his family, is turned into a “muggy slush”. The other three follow in rapid succession, with THEIR families – having spent 107 pages building up to this, it’s a sudden collapse to 149 all out. leaving Dyke burbling to himself as ever: “Am I insane?… Yes, I could be. But if I am, I’m a happy mental case.”

In a sudden turn-around almost up there with “and it was all a dream”, one of the murdered men turns out to have a brother, who gets his own mantises using a “suit of armour they couldn’t bite through” and shoots Dyke; Slayer eats them both and is killed by the poison in Dyke’s ointment, which suddenly stops repelling the insect.

The End. Of course, I may be entirely misjudging it – the book may be a subtle comment on totalitarianism, with Dyke representing a tinpot dictator and Slayer the secret police. I doubt it somehow – the overall impression is that even the raison d’etre, the messy bits, were constructed by pulling words at random from Shaun Hutson books and rearranging them having carefully removed all traces of literary skill. A lot of trees died in vain for this one – perhaps we could get the same people who made ‘Slugs’ to film it?

#1. UFO’S EXIST, THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT KNOW ABOUT THEM AND HAVE RECOVERED A CRASHED ALIEN CRAFT, WHICH IS KEPT HIDDEN IN A USAF BASE.

“On April 30th, 1964, the first communication between the aliens and the U.S. government took place at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico…During the period of 1969-71, Majestic-12 representing the U.S. government made a deal with these creatures, called E.B.E’s (Extraterrestrial Biological Entities)…The ‘deal’ was that in exchange for ‘technology’ that they would provide, we agreed to ‘ignore’ the abductions that were going on…The EBE’s assursed MJ-12 that the abductions (usually lasting about 2 hours) were for the ongoing monitoring of developing civilizations. In fact the purposes for the abductions turned out to be:

1. The insertion of a 3mm spherical device through the nasal cavity of the abductee into the brain. The device is used for biological monitoring, tracking and control of the abductee.
2. Implementation of posthypnotic suggestion to carry out a specific activity during a specific time period, the actuationof which will occur within the next 2 to 5 years.
3. Termination of some people so that they could function as living sources for biological material and substances.
4. Termination of individuals who represent a threat to the continuation of their activities.
5. Effect genetic engineering experiments
6. Impregnation of human females and early termination of pregnancies to secure the crossbreed infant.

[Example] Sgt. Jonathan P. Louette…was found three days after an Air Force Major had witnessed his abduction by a ‘disk shaped’ object at 0300 hrs while on a search for missile debris downrange. His genitals had been removed, [his] rectum cored out in a surgically precise ‘plug’ up to the colon, eyes removed and all blood with, again, no vascular collapse. From some of the evidence it is apparent that this surgery is accomplished…while the victim…is still alive.

The various parts of the body are taken to various underground laboratories, one of which is known to be near the small New Mexico town of Dulce. This joint occupied (CIA/Alien) facility has been described as enormous, with huge tiled walls that go on forever. Witnesses have reported huge vats filled with amber liquid, with parts of human bodies being stirred inside.

During the period between 1979 and 1983, it became increasingly obvious to MJ-12 that things were not going as planned…Part of MJ-12 wanted to confess the whole scheme and shambles it had become to the public, beg their forgiveness and ask for their support. The other part ( and majority ) of MJ-12 argued that there was no way they could do that…and the best plan was to continue the development of a weapon that could be used against the EBE’s under the guise of SDI (Strategic Defence Initiative) which has nothing whatsoever to do with a defence for inbound Russian nuclear missiles.”

[The above passages come, not from an unmade Hollywood screenplay, but from ’20/20 Vision’, a journal produced by the Yorkshire UFO Society. They may be contacted at 15 Pickard Court, Temple Newsam, Leeds, LS15 9AY.]

‘Above Top Secret’ by Timothy Good, Grafton, 5.99

Like all good conspiracies, the aliens one comes in a variety of flavours to suit personal taste. At the saner end we have people like Timothy Good, whose book is a weighty, 590-page tome of evidence that purports to show the existence of some sort of cover-up. Unfortunately, it has to rely rather heavily on the circumstantial, with a lot of un-nameable “reliable sources” and some arguable interpretations of generally equivocal Armed Forces documents. These were obtained under the American Freedom of Information Act which allows citizens to see documents unless there are over-riding considerations of national security. This get-out clause was used by various governmental organizations in some cases to avoid releasing certain UFO-related documents, a fact pounced on by Mr. Good despite protestations that it was done only to protect the SOURCES of the data rather than to hide the fact aliens had landed.

Which makes little or no difference to the conspiracy theorist. Denials by the Air Force can be met with knowing nods and a chorus of, “Well, they WOULD say that, wouldn’t they” without in any way disturbing the ‘reality’ of the paranoia. Meanwhile, any documents allegedly leaked and all tales involving alien landings are eagerly swallowed, with a distressing tendency to gullibility.

To be fair, ‘Above Top Secret’ does recognise the weaknesses in the arguments and is generally a well balanced, written and researched piece of work. The same can not be said of all the literature on the subject, some of which, such as the example given at the start of the article, is so unbelievable the suggestion has been made it’s actually a deliberate attempt by the CIA/FBI/NSA/insert own choice spy network to confuse the issue and make the whole topic a laughing stock.

If the above sounds highly sceptical, it’s not intended to be. Over the past 50 years, there have been enough weird happenings to convince me that there are more things in heaven and earth, etc. Whether it’s aliens, time-travellers, or merely psychological delusions, SOMETHING odd is going on in our skies. The question all U.F.O. conspiracy theories face, and which none I have encountered have ever successfully answered, is “Why the conspiracy?”

Various alternatives have been put forward to explain the need for secrecy; fear of causing a panic, desire to be the first power to acquire any new technology, ~~. However, I believe it’s a mixture of apathy, ignorance and force of habit that’s to blame for any cover up – though governments undoubtedly do receive reports of UFO’s, I doubt if any sections will investigate them beyond their immediate remit. Thus, reports sent to the Air Force will be examined for defence implications, then discarded; the police will only be interested if property or human life is at risk, etc. The reports will then be filed away in some dusty cabinet. Governments also do not like saying “we don’t know”. Admitting that they haven’t got the faintest idea what’s going on in the skies is not going to inspire a great deal of confidence in the mind of the electorate. Governments tend to operate on a ‘need to know’ basis; not many people need to know about UFO’s, and it’s always safer to keep the masses in the dark, isn’t it?

My rule of thumb is that the weirder the theory, the stronger the evidence needed before I’ll believe it. As theories go, this one is pretty weird and I find it very difficult to believe that the American government, who couldn’t stop a model plane-maker from producing copies of their super-secret, non-existent Stealth bomber, are capable of keeping the lid on such a can of worms for over 40 years.

A voltage appeared.

Electrons drifted away. Crystals rotated in a field. Polarised light scattered. A digit changed. A light breeze aligned the hairs on his wrist. The night air carried the sounds and smells of a million human lives, a million wonders. The earth rolled slowly beneath his feet, a cosmic dust ball charting a path through spiral lanes of stars. Start adrift. Time and space, chaos and order, truth and beauty. “Sod it, I’m going for a pizza” he muttered, stepped out from under the sodium umbrella and began to cross the street.

My quarry was not a happy man. He looked like the kind of guy who turns up dead in the fifth reel, floating face down in a canal in Amsterdam. He was not what you would call personable either, as I had already discovered. His English accent could only have been learned from an old Linguaphone tape, played endlessly in a used Skoda in a railway siding in Riga. I swear that when he spoke I could hear the trains rolling past on their way up the line to Leningrad in the gathering twilight. He had the cheery disposition of an arthritic undertaker with shares in the Channel Tunnel. Oh, and he smelt like a dispatch rider’s helmet lining. He made me feel that living was good.

He never made it. The tarmac pressed into my face and hands, cold and wet, and I felt only joy at its presence, like meeting an old friend in a pub, seeing double yellow lines when you return from abroad or pouring yourself a glass of water in the dark. His blood ran past me, eager to reach the gutter, dark fingers cooling like lava, gleefully running away with the man that was Chekov.

There was only one thing that I couldn’t handle. It wasn’t the money. If the fee was more paltry, it’d grow feathers. It wasn’t being shot at either. I was getting to like the sensation of time stretching away in all directions, and the silence like velvet earplugs immersing you in a soft and private cocoon. No, I just hated losing a lead. It was careless. Messy.

Anyway. So there I stood, shrugging into his trenchcoat, adding the contents of his pockets to mine, strapping on his digital watch, noting in the absent way you do just how much trouble someone was going to have identifying a man with no face. The ratcatchers downtown wouldn’t mind clearing up the mess. It gave them something worthwhile to do. Well, more worthwhile than checking tax discs or telling you that you should expect to have your blue spot stolen if you park in Peckham.

I hoped that he found street names as unimaginative and unmemorable as I did. I was relying on that deep seated insecurity that rolls around in all of our subconsciouses. That fear of forgetting, of being the only one who doesn’t know, the only one who has to ask and accept certain, silent, damning, contempt. I figured I’d have more luck finding a master chef in a Wimpy or a London bus conductor who didn’t wear green corduroy trousers, but there it was, written on the back of a dial-a-pizza card with a chewed bic on a slippery surface while holding the phone. The address.

As I walked, the broken threads of my pocket lining lost their unequal battle with the death star, and the finger warm steel slipped into the fluffy netherworld of sugar cubes, return parts of cheap day return tickets and condom packets, carried in the misguided hope that they might be useful someday.

That our cooling cat was a pig there was no doubt, the Securitate pass was a first class piece of ergonomically terror inducing typography, almost as good as a metric spaces paper or a draft for jury service. I figured posing as Chekov was about as good an idea as being given head by an epileptic or making toast in the bath. Why was I always in these weird scenes? Typecasting, I guess. Ah well, put a sane man in a room with a tea-cosy and it’s only a matter of time before he puts it on his head. It was only a matter of time before I ran out of analogies or ran out of luck, not a cosy thought, but then wondering just who was sane was worse.

The address was a dead end street between a canal and a railway yard. Chekov would have felt at home, but I would rather have been at home. The mist was backlit, throwing the 280SL Mercedes into relief sharper than Nanga Parbat. Two doors swung open, two figures placed a foot on the cobbles, rotated their heels silently and straightend slowly like synchronised swimming silver medallists. Even in silhouette, I had seen them both before.

“It’s a great pleasure, lady”, I drawled.
“I know, I’ve tried it”. She laughed and froze. Her expression collapsed in an instant, elements of horror, disgust, surprise and crystal cool shock jostled for position, tried several entirely unsuitable arrangements and eventually settled, muscles twitching, into a cubist’s nightmare. Her face simultaneously contained just about every conceivable emotion that could result from pastimes either illegal, immoral or fattening.

“I’m sorry, but I’ve run out of coffee”, I joked.
“Where’s Chekov?”. She managed a hoarse croak and the effort showed. The thought I had been playing origami with finished nicely. I pulled the tail and it stood up. Everything clicked.
“Why not ask your friend?”.

He moved so fast his suit changed colour, and sold me a dummy I sure as hell didn’t want but something told me he wasn’t in the business of giving refunds. He pulled iron as lightning flashed between my fingers. The shuriken danced across my palm like the Ace of Spades in the hand of a wild west card shark. With a burst of energy down my arm, I burst his pineal gland.

“Nice weapon”, I murmured approvingly as he bounced. Once.

But she was gone.

Amsterdamned (Dick Maas) – Something nasty is prowling the canals of Amsterdam, doing away with a selection of inhabitants at a rate of knots. A swim ‘n’ slash pic? Maybe, it’s just like we’re back in 1981, save a lack of teenagers. There’s a bit of a cop-out at the end – to say more would spoil the deftly (or indeed, Delft-ly) generated tension. A slight air of Dutch Tourist Board here; you get to see Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ on a flimsy pretext, but is at least tulip-free. It reminds me of ‘Taggart’ with bad dubbing. Nice boat chase, too! 7/10

Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow) – Jamie Lee Curtis plays a rookie cop who blows away a low-life scum store-robber, only for said scum’s gun to vanish. People then start getting shot, and bullet cases with her name on them are found at the scene… The plot of this is annoyingly flimsy, with any number of holes, contradictions and ridiculous twists – for example, we are asked to believe an untrained stockbroker is capable of wielding a .44 Magnum with 100% accuracy (except when shooting at Jamie Lee, naturally!) from when he first picks it up. Ignore these, and Bigelow screws up the tension with skill, despite a climax ripped off straight from ‘The Hitcher’. presumably by Eric Red who wrote that one and co-wrote this one. Curtis still can’t act for peanuts, though she does a fine Martina Navratilova impression. Leave your logic at home. 6/10.

Celia (Ann Turner) – A little girl possessing an overactive imagination, a rabbit and Communists for next door neighbours are the ingredients in this impressive debut from Australian director Turner. Set in late 50’s Victoria, it’s another of those childhood-loss-of innocence films, with rampant McCarthyism and a plague of wild bunnies having disastrous consequences on the life of the title character, played with unsettling intensity by Rebecca Smart. Looking at the past through refreshingly non-sentimental eyes, it evokes the childhood world of rituals, gangs and the incomprehensible nature of adults with clarity and style. The first film I’ve seen with a credit for ‘Rabbit Wranglers’! Recommended. 8/10.

Class of 1999 (Mark Lester) – A storyline of robots-in-public-service, a la ‘Robocop’, who are closer to ‘The Terminator’ in style, may score low points for originality, yet ends up as further proof that if you purloin ideas from decent films and have a cast, crew and FX of any merit, you can still produce useful product. The robots in question here are teachers, sent in to control a Seattle school, where pupils check in their weapons on arriving. Needless to say, the androids get a little out of hand, killing the hero’s brother and kidnapping his girlfriend (who’s also the Principal’s daughter) before he leads a gang of students into the school for the final battle. Lots of weaponry on view, not the least of it on the teachers – the performance of John P.Ryan as the History teacher is especially chilling and the tension & violence build steadily until the (fairly predictable) end, producing a pseudo-rebellious film that succeeds in wasting a lot of property en route. 7/10.

Date With An Angel (Tom McLoughlin) – Blatant ‘Splash’ clone in spirit, with an angel hitting a satellite and plummetting into a swimming pool to be discovered by the hero who has to save her from being exploited while she heals. His fiancee (Phoebe Cates) sees her and misunderstands totally, etc, etc. About rescued by nice touches as fiancee gets increasingly psycho; totally salvaged by the angel – she’s played by Emmanuelle Beart who does little apart from squeak, open her eyes wide and flutter her wings yet still leaves fellow world ranked beauty Cates a moist smear on the carpet. Absolutely gorgeous; if angels are really like her, I’m converted. The film gets 6/10. The angel 10/10. Amen.

Dead Man Walking (Godfrey Brown) – Not read much about this one, surprising as the cast includes Wings ‘LA Bounty’ Hauser and Jeffrey ‘Re-Animator’ Coombs, and a pity as it’s one of the better post-apocalypse (plague, to be specific) films. Coombs’ girlfriend is kidnapped by an escaped criminal and taken into a plague zone; he hires Hauser, who’s terminally ill (and enjoys playing Russian Roulette using a chainsaw!), to rescue her. A well-thought out world structure, excellent ideas and some memorable moments plus a healthy dose of violence to produce a film which could easily pass for ‘Mad Max 4’. Try not to confuse it with the TVM of the same name about capital punishment! 8/10.

Faceless (Jess Franco) – Rumours that Franco was the man behind ‘Edge of Sanity’ made me seek out this, which had been widely described as better than his average. Not much of a compliment perhaps, but it is a classy mad surgeon movie – after his sister is scarred by acid, Dr. Flamand (Helmut Berger) tries to build her a new face with the aid of his nurse (French porn queen, Brigitte Lahaie), by transplanting one from a beautiful model (Caroline Munro), whose father (Telly Savalas) sends a private eye to track her down. Good cast for a Franco movie, huh? After a shaky start. the effects start to fly, with a lot of surgical splatter, a chainsaw decapitation and a syringe in the eye that deserves entry in TC4’s Eyeball Violence chart. Only a heavily overused, rotten song prevent it from being watchable both on sex ‘n’ violence and aesthetic grounds. 7/10.

Hardware (Richard Driscoll) – As a distillation of 80’s genre cinema, this film is near perfect. Aliens, Terminator, Hellraiser, Predator, Max Headroom and Blade Runner are all ruthlessly milked of their best parts, not to mention ‘Paris, Texas’ and every woman-alone-with-a-psycho film to date. If the monster thus created isn’t up to the sum of these parts, ‘Hardware’ is, to use the cliche, a roller-coaster ride, albeit one we’ve been on before. Plot is slim (android goes berserk) and there’s a disconcerting change of focus in the middle when attention switches from hero to heroine but you don’t notice the flaws at the time – the imagery (75% pop video, 25% Nescafe advert), a detailed futureworld, good effects, cool soundtrack and more flashy camerawork than I’ve seen in ages help execute the cinematic equivalent of the three-card trick. There’ll no doubt be the usual predictable whining from certain predictable quarters, yet it surpasses it’s budgetary and location limits, setting up (and discarding, unfortunately) some lovely ideas on the way – Motorhead’s Lemmy as a taxi driver??? 8/10.

Heathers (Michael Lehmann) – Suffering deja vu? Yes, it was reviewed in TC4 when I expressed disappointment that it wasn’t black enough. I recently saw it again, and enjoyed it a lot more, possibly because I had different, more accurate expectations; although I’m still not happy with the ending and dialogue that borders on the unintelligible occasionally, the lovely camerawork, good acting and a vicious streak a mile wide more than compensate. If perhaps I’m being swayed slightly by lust for Shannon Doherty and Winona Ryder, who cares? Upgraded to 9/10.

I Changed My Sex (Ed J. Wood) – aka Glen or Glenda aka I Led Two Lives aka He or She aka… An early plea for tolerance of transvestites, partly auto-biographical since the director is widely reported to have gone into several WWII battles wearing lacy panties under his fatigues. Not quite as exploitative as it might have been, it still seems tasteless, even without Bela Lugosi saying lines like “Beware, beware, beware the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep!”, for no apparent reason. You’ll never be able to look at an angora sweater again without giggling. 5/10.

Kali-Film (Brigit & Wilhelm Heim) – Weird film of eight sections which seems to be trying to explore the way the cinema sterotypes both men & women. The best of these were two in the middle, the first of which was just a sequence of stills, taken from movies, of women being terrorised & assaulted. Taken out of context, their power is multiplied, leaving this viewer feeling very uncomfortable. This is followed by a series of clips, which show women acting aggressively themselves; far more acceptable, including bits from ‘Reform School Girls’, ‘Ms.45’, ‘I Spit on Your Grave’, ‘Chained Heat’, etc, making a Violent Femmes Greatest Hits compilation. Another good pair of sections contrast fictional war with grim reality. A slight tendency to over-kill everywhere doesn’t hurt too much. 7/10.

Living Doll (Peter Litten & George Dugdale) – A classic case of a nice idea foiled by poor direction and a pedestrian script, despite valiant acting. Mark Jax plays a morgue worker who worships a flower seller from afar – when she’s killed in an accident, he flips and steals her corpse, believing her to be suffering from a form of catalepsy. He dresses the body up, talks to and eventually ‘marries’ her; then she starts to talk back. Sort of “live fast, die young and LOVE a pretty corpse”. Too tastefully done, skirting all the details you REALLY want to know; the highly average direction overpower Jax’s neatly underplayed necrophile and the occasional frisson. 6/10.

Orgy of the Dead (A.C.Stevens) – If you removed the topless go-go dancing from this movie, you’d get a gorgeously silly horror movie about a couple that crash their car near a cemetery and discover the Emperor of Darkness within. However, it’d only be 15 minutes long, as at least 80% of this picture is taken up with various ghouls, all female, ‘dancing’ round a tiny, ultra-cheap set. This ‘Eurovision Zombie Contest’ is alternately numbingly & hysterically dull; not many films can provoke jeers at the Scala by showing naked nubiles! 9/10 for everything but the dancing, 2/10 for that.

Scarecrows (William Wesley) – No danger of this film wearing out the guns in your TV since it all seems to take place in a cellar at midnight. You’ve got to be a genius (Ridley Scott) to get away with lighting like that, and William Wesley isn’t one. Despite scarecrows animated by the souls of dead people being a neat twist on a theme and a quite high mess factor, by BBFC standards, the characters aren’t engaging on any level, being a mix of kooks, cowards & killers, and as spam-in-a-cabin films go, this is very ordinary. 3/10.

sex, lies and videotape (Steven Soderbergh) – This film could easily have been some sort of prequel to ‘Videodrome’; James Spader looks very like a young James Woods, and his character, who goes around filming women talking about sex because he’s impotent, also resembles a prototype Max Renn. It’s a little slow in places, to the point of tedium, yet has a bleak beauty that does sustain interest and the characters are realistically complex. As a debut movie for the director, it’s impressive – the man is clearly one to watch in future. 8/10.

A Short Film About Killing (Krsysztof Kieslowski) – The 12″, disco remix cinema version of one of his ‘Ten Commandments’ series, shown recently on BBC2, is perhaps the best argument I’ve seen against capital punishment. It depicts the crime and the state’s retribution in stark focus, comparing them and noting uncomfortable similarities. Initially a study of three characters. The murderer, his victim and the defence lawyer, it gradually focuses on the first & last, then finally the lawyer alone. A savage indictment of violence, committed by individuals or society. 9/10.

Der Todes King (Jorg Buttgereit) – ln 1988, ‘Nekronantik’ crashed onto the scene, provoking acclaim, disgust and bewilderment in equal amounts by its tender portrayal of necrophilia. Two years on. Jorg’s back – has he mellowed? Well… ‘The King of Death‘ is a collection of segments, one for each day of the week, each of which depict a facet of death; Monday, for example, has a suicide by overdose and Thursday is about a bridge and the people that have jumped from it. These segments are linked by time- lapse photography of a corpse decaying – very Peter Greenaway! The soundtrack also provokes comparison, sounding impressively like Michael Nyman on a bad trip. As with other ‘compilation’ films, the result is uneven. On their own, the segments are mainly intriguing and shocking – Tuesday was my personal favourite, being laced with poisonous irony and a delightful parody of ‘Ilsa, She- Woll of the SS’ (specially remarkable given Buttgereit’s nationality). This is the only time it plumbs the depths of taste as explicitly as ‘Nekromantik’ did, the others concentrate rnore on generating atmosphere (with success) and less on blatant shock tactics.

The overall effect isn’t quite as impressive. After a while, apathy starts to set in and the episodes become blurred – was that Friday or Saturday? The links between the days (where they exist at all) are at best tenuous and at worst annoying. A couple of the later sequences are. let’s be honest, disappointing and smack of padding ~ “we’ve still got two days to fill. folks!”. Overall, however. it’s a relentlessly depressing movie, perhaps a little too much so. Appreciate it best by watching it one day per day – that way it’ll ruin your whole week… 3/l0 to 9/10.

Torrents of Spring (Jerzy Skolimowski) – Nastassia’s latest, previously seen as ‘Les Eaux Printenaires’, now in English, albeit very briefly (it lasted two weeks in the cinema here!). Plot is as described before: Timothy Hutton falls in love with Valerie Golino and they get engaged. He then decides he’d rather have Nastassja. A wise move, until his fiancee finds out. Definitely a classy pic, probably her ‘best’ since ‘Paris. Texas‘ and she’s looking lovely ~ there’s one scene at a gypsy wedding which is the stuff of dreams, where she doesn’t look like a mother of two in her thirties! As a film. 7/10, + bonuses as applicable depending on how much you value the Kinski content!

Tremors (Ron Underwood) – Wonderfully gloppy monster movie provides us with another new way to cook spam: spam-in-a-valley, an allusion made concrete when one character says “This valley”s one long smorgasbord“. The inhabitants of Perfection. Nevada (pop. 14 – no, make that 13. Oh, now 12…) are under attack by giant worms: wisely, no attempt at justification or explanation, “Them’s not local boys for sure” being all we have time for. The rest of the film is just as unpretentious. social comment being restricted to a husband & wife survivalist team (car registration UZI 4U). Likeable characters and a lot of orange slime add to the ambience ~ it’s really tough to think of anything that would make this film any better as sheer entertainment. Even the ‘15‘ certificate is on the lenient side! 9/IO.

When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner) – What was that flying out the window? That, Jim, was your street-cred. Films like this remind me why I prefer watching films like ‘Nekromantik’ to this predictable, over-inflated. mindless pap for people who dislike having to confront anything. It’s not badly acted: Ryan & Crystal struggle bravely but are finally buried under a script so laden with inanities. cliches and desperate attempts to avoid offending anyone that it’s the most vacuous viewing I’ve seen in a longtime. As for the notorious ‘orgasm’ scene. I’m sure 1 saw an electric flex running up her leg. 3/10