Tidying up on a story from a previous issue; the Sunday Times, in their review of the year, mentioned the story about Cicciolina and the squashed dove. According to them, it took place in AFGHANISTAN and not Hungary, but since they described Ms. Staller as a “dancer” (euphemistic, to say the least), I’m taking their version with a pinch of salt! They did restore their credibility a little in a recent colour supplement, with “A Day in the Life of Ilona Staller”, which was superb. A few quotes from it here are essential :

“Very often I wake up in the clouds without nearly as much sleep as my young body needs [ she’s 38! ] and the only remedy is to plunge straight under an ice-cold shower. It’s good for my breasts… I want to build love parks all over the world. I’m hoping Mrs. Thatcher will want several… Catching people’s attention is easy – going past the Colosseum on a float, I just lifted up my blouse and showed the crowd my titties, then my skirt to keep their interest, and they all listened to what I had to say”

Thief of the Year award goes to the man who tried to rob a store in America while carrying two guns. The assistant pointed out that two guns were not really necessary and offered to buy one off the robber. Following some negotiation, a price of $300 was struck and the pistol handed over in exchange for the cash. The shop-keeper then offered to buy the OTHER gun for the same amount – after some agonising, the thief agreed, snatched the second lot of $300, threw the gun at the assistant and headed for the doors. The victim pressed the button that automatically locked these and refused to let the villain out until all the cash was returned. This the robber did, and he was freed, leaving the store with a net gain of two pistols.

Only in America. Indiana University doctors attributed a patient’s anaemia to his having swallowed 80 quarters and $1.32 in loose change. He believed it was necessary “to prevent a gun in his stomach from firing”. Also, David Burling, 19, was acquitted on a charge of manafacturing the drug ecstasy because it’s scientific name, methylene-dioxymethamphetamine, was misspelled in the state law.

Pennsylvania state is planning a law that will make ‘deviant’ records and tapes carry a sticker, labelled as follows : “WARNING: May carry explicit lyrics descriptive of or advocating one or more of the following: suicide, sodomy, incest, bestiality, sadomasochism, sexual activity in a violent context, murder, morbid violence, illegal use of drugs or alcohol. PARENTAL ADVISORY. Clearly no-one has considered this might ENCOURAGE people to buy the records…

Trash sport. Robert Vance, playing cricket for Wellington in the New Zealand equivalent of the County Championship, conceded a world record SEVENTY-SEVEN runs off one over. 69 of these went to Lee German of Canterbury, who was caught out off two of the over’s seventeen no-balls, hit 8 sixes and 5 fours and whose score went from 75 to 160 in two overs. The umpires lost track and stopped the over after only five legal balls had been bowled. The reason for this odd behavior was to try and tempt Canterbury to go for a win – in the end, however, the match was a draw.

So you think TC’s bad for printing gratuitous pictures of Nastassja. Recently, the “Daily Express” had a short article on Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni and his love life, accompanied by some pictures of him and his past lovers. Mastroianni’s pic was 10 square cm, Faye Dunaway and Catherine Deneuve each got 8 square cm but the pic of NK was 14.5 by 8, or a meaty 116 square cm. Not bad going, given the only mention of her was second place in a list of his mistresses!

From the Independent, via ‘Time Out’: ‘Swaziland is to deport a self-confessed Moroccan cannibal because he has been demanding the bodies of road accident victims for his meals. The authorities feel unable to satisfy the appetites of Hitler Sharin [ sic ], a self-style mercenary soldier, who has just spent six months in prison for the illegal possession of arms’. Not to mention a couple of legs and the odd internal organ, no doubt.

For once, most of the stories on the opposite page don’t really need any explanation from me. However, the “vibrator play’ one might do (I’m indebted to Glyn Williams from bringing this piece to my attention). To quote the article:

“Aussie soap fans have blasted a Prisoner Cell Block H play which includes refence to vibrators and uses language such as ‘vinegar tits’… Fan club organiser Roz Vescey said ‘We believe this would be offensive to many genuine fans who turn up to the show expecting it to be like the series'”

Vinegar tits! Gosh! Even speaking as someone whose knowledge of the female penal system is confined to ‘Reform School Girls’, I think it might be just about possible that you would hear such language behind bars. Mind you, Prisoner Cell Block H has never really been about reality to any extent!

PATIENT ATTACKS DENTIST WITH HIS OWN DRILL. “Easygoing Al Hartman writhed and squirmed for 90 minutes as a bumbling dentist nearly ripped his mouth to shreds. Then the peeved patient leaped from the chair – and turned the drill on the dumbo doc! ‘He tore my gums bloody just cleaning my teeth and when he started to drill, the drill kept slipping off and boring holes in my gums and cheeks… I grabbed him by the shirt and shoved him down in the chair and started drilling away at his teeth. He started screaming his head off and I loved every minute of it. I know it was the wrong thing to do, but right then I just wanted to make the little twerp pay.'”

That’s what you get for having Steve Martin as your dentist.

The phone rang.

I leant back on the beach, swept up the nearest crab and moaned ‘Yeargh’ into it like a cellar door in need of liquid refreshment. A thin and insufferably cheerful voice chimed back “Your early morning call, Sir”. I asked for extra chilli on my kebab, replaced the crab and rubbed some more intoxicatingly aromatic oil into Nastassja’s thigh. Waves of fluorescent azure licked contentedly at the starfish shaded sand.

The crab rang again. “You told me to ring twice, Sir”, the voice piped cheerily. “Now why would I do a stupid thing like that?” I replied, instantly pleased with the logic. “I don’t know, Sir, but you were very insistent”. Mmmm. Sounded like me alright. I asked Nastassja to roll over so I could work the oil… “I am sorry, Sir” the creature twittered insincerely “but you know no house guests are permitted”. I told the crab to scuttle off somewhere moist or I’d pull it’s legs off, but it seemed to be attached to the beach by a length of coiled plastic flex…

Reality slid slowly sideways, capsised and sank, it’s iridescent colours and exotic smells vaporising in flame like a burning photograph, leaving me with a stiffness in the groin and a puzzled hotelier. I told him I’d be down for coffee. “I’ll make it strong, Sir” he intoned flatly. There were some days when it would be better to stay in bed. This was one of them, so I got up.

Fighting my way to the window with a hangover so big you could camp under it when it rains, I was greeted by Burton Latimer . The town has ostensibly been laid out by someone who longed to build Arndale Centres, but didn’t have the imagination. It smelt of casual slacks, Volvo estates and Sainsbury’s carrier bags.

The room was furnished with what appeared to be the result of a five minute frenzy in an MFI Closing Down Sale, and assembled by someone who didn’t know if he was going to live through the day. The colour scheme had evidently been chosen by someone who didn’t care either way. There had, I reckoned, better be a bloody good reason for my being here. _________________

Burton Latimer is very near to the Weetabix factory. Car drivers going from Northampton to Burton Latimer often get stuck behind it’s big yellow lorries. On their way home, they often get stuck behind Carlsberg lorries. Contrary to popular belief, Carlsberg is probably the best lager in Northampton. It’s an exciting place to live, Burton Latimer…

The hotelier’s expression came straight out of a Dario Argento flick. He was looking at a face worse than death, so I smiled back. I figured that his idea of living in the fast lane was probably the six items or less checkout at Sainsbury’s. With a voice like stormtroopers tap-dancing on a honeyed gravel drive, I ordered my coffee black as a moonless night and sweeter than a stolen kiss. He replied that it would be made by Dawn, which I hoped was a lady rather than a sunrise deadline. She approached my table like an extra in a Kylie Minogue promo, and I am not suggesting that Kylie is either particularly pretty or graceful.

The coffee leaked away through the table without wetting my knees, and a second cup performed the same trick. I toyed with the idea of keeping some in a sample bottle in case I ever needed a positive pregnancy test, but too much thinking like that would get you a long stay in a room with soft walls. I reckoned that I belonged here about as much as the Skin Two matchbook belonged in my pocket. The address on the flap was opulent, expansive and exquisite and that was just the handwriting, so I made a move.

The taxi driver decided I needed to see both town halls, so I decided to keep the tip. I expected someday to hear intelligent conversation from a cabbie, but I sure wasn’t dumb enough to hold my breath. The shop windows were blacked out, which was fine enough, but the nameboard was Japanese,which wasn’t. Knowing as much abiut the Bushido code as a geranium, I crossed the desert of cracked paving slabs, nostrils assailed with black bean sauce, and entered the oriental emporium.

The unscrupulous Oriental behind the counter smiled like someone who had a Magnum pointed at my balls, so I figured that my name wasn’t Robert Robinson. There was enough hardware in the place to make any gun collector/Mercenary magazine reader wet himself with delight, but none of it was projectile. It was like standing in the Shogun Assassin props room. “I have been expecting you, Detective Sahn”, he breathed, and unwrapped a shining shuriken from an oiled paper sheet as if it were made of ice and not hammered steel, never breaking eye contact like a gunfighter in a Sergio Leone movie.

“A woman”, he whispered.

THE TOXIC AVENGER PART III – THE LAST TEMPTATION OF TOXIE

Dir: Kaufman & Herz. After shooting Part II, the Troma team found themselves with a lot of unused footage and with ingenuity only they possess, decided to turn it, with a few additional scenes, into a fully fledged movie. What’s even more remarkable is that the result is a good deal better than the film from which it’s the left-overs. While it showed that II was partly funded by Lorimar (despite Lloyd Kaufman assuring me they’d no creative input into it, “though I wish they had!”), III returns in part to the original; not quite as much poor taste, perhaps, but still an acceptable film.

In plot, it’s exactly the same as II. Tromaville is threatened by Apocalypse, Inc who try to destroy Toxie. The difference is this time they try to bribe him, rather than sending him off to Japan – he goes to work for them in exchange for $350,000 to pay for an operation to get Claire, his blind girlfriend, to see again. It’s almost as if II never happened; Toxie has totally forgotten all the evil things Apocalypse, Inc did in the last film. He becomes a yuppie before seeing the error of his ways and discovering the head of Apocalypse, Inc is Satan in disguise.

The first third is a joy, in the spirit of the original. The tone is set in the opening scene, a thinly veiled attack on the big boys who rule the film industry: a video shop, full of Troma product naturally, is attacked by Apocalypse thugs (the Warner brothers!) who demand the removal of all but the top 20 titles; one customer who asks for variety & choice is blown away and left twitching on the floor. Enter Toxie. One baddie’s intestines are pulled out and used as a skipping rope, another has his face erased and a third gets a hand shredded, in merciless detail, by a VCR.

The film can’t sustain this for too long – it slides, ever so gently, down-hill with the last third being almost down to II standard. Toxie as a yuppie is a nice idea, and is about the only joke that isn’t over-played. Phoebe Legere, as Claire, has improved drastically and has something of a character now, though her tendency to lie around with her legs splayed wide is slightly distracting.

Directorially, it’s good stuff by Troma standards, at times almost psychedelic with the dream sequences being especially effective. The special effects are about as you’d expect; not expensive, with trick photography and lots of cutting away at appropriate moments – the original Toxie at least showed heads being crushed, for just enough time to allow your imagination to fill in the blanks without realising it was a cheap effect. The soundtrack, loosely based on Dvorak(!), also stood out, though it occasionally doesn’t fit in with the tone of the film.

Overall, not bad. You could edit II & III together and get one great movie; roll on IV (“Mr Toxie goes to Washington”) but will it be as naff as II or as good as III?

TOP TEN TACKY TROMA TEAM TITLES

1. Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell
2. I was a Teenage TV Terrorist
3. Ferocious Female Freedom Fighters
4. Sergeant Kabukiman, N.Y.P.D.
5. Sizzle Beach, USA
6. The Nymphoteens
7. Surf Nazis Must Die!
8. Death to the Pee-Wee Squad
9. Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid
10. Rabid Grannies

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Founded in the mid 1970’s by Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman, two graduates of Yale University (Kaufman majored in Asian studies!), Troma films have acquired an odd status among trash fans – some people swear by them, others about them. Their best known product is “The Toxic Avenger” which pulled in worldwide over $15 million on a budget of less than $1 million. It became notorious after receiving the most cuts in the history of the BBFC, though this is still better than the Ontario film review committee, who refused point-blank to watch the second half! Despite never having had a hit film in big company terms, Troma kept plugging away, releasing an average of five or six films a year, both made by the Troma team, and bought in from outside. LLoyd Kaufman was over in the country recently for a Guardian discussion on exploitation films. The other panellists were Nigel Floyd, film critic specializing in schlock/exploitation, Andrew Keyte, head of Film Rental at Virgin Video who have bought the rights to several Troma films and Derek Malcolm, ‘Guardian’ film critic.

The discussion opened with people trying to define an exploitation film. Nigel Floyd described it as a movie that cashes in on a current trend, where art comes second. This same man went on to describe ‘Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer’ as the best exploitation film of the last ten years, and completely failed to describe what trend it was cashing in on or how art came second in it. Floyd launched into an attack on The Toxic Avenger for conforming to standard values while the best exploitation films preached non-conformity; Lloyd Kaufman replied, “If we’re guilty of promoting bad values like loyalty, decency and being true to one’s girlfriend than I am very sorry!”. The conversation turned to marketing and it was suggested that for Troma, the title played a large part and marketing was used to sell second rate films. Here, it turned out that “Rabid Grannies” was the original title of the film and not a Troma device – the dubbing, too, was done in Belgium.

The subject of censorship came up, and Keyte described how the BBFC’s blanket ban on martial arts weapons was posing problems for ‘Toxic Avenger 2′, despite the Ninja Death Star used in the film actually being a star-fish, the BBFC wanted it cut. He went on to say there is a lot of caution in the video industry just now, as they want to avoid a crackdown leading to a similar situation to Germany where ’18’ rated videos are now only available from licensed sex shops.

Lloyd Kaufman was asked for the Troma formula, but replied that they didn’t go by one, beyond trying to keep the budget modest. They find a lot of subject matter in the newspapers and treat it in a new way – about the only common theme running through their films is that they are nearly all comedies (this obviously excludes bought-in product like “Combat Shock”). They’re not keen on bigger budgets; ‘Sgt Kabukiman, NYPD’ is their biggest ever at $4 million. Kaufman suggested it was the big companies that really pulled the wool over people’s eyes with marketing, quoting ‘Batman’ as an example of the power of advertising.

By now it was becoming clear that Kaufman didn’t take anything too seriously, Keyte was a company mouthpiece, Malcolm a closet trash fiend and Floyd a total prat. The man purported to be a fan of exploitation films yet, even by his own terms, the films he liked couldn’t be so described. He accused Troma of trying to create cults, failing to deliver the goods and having a ‘glib and superficial’ attitude. Then he went on to criticise their attitude towards women and homosexuals, but was totally unable to justify the latter accusation. Kaufman responded by saying it was taken to obvious extremes, but skipped neatly round a question from the floor about Senor Sida, the AIDS-ridden bad guy in “Troma’s War” (Kaufman regards the unrated version of it as a the nearest thing Troma has to a masterpiece!). He did admit that he might not distribute “Blood Sucking Freaks” now, a movie he described as being harder to watch now then when it came out and made the comment that he disliked violence to children – since this is a feature of both “The Toxic Avenger” and “Rabid Grannies”, it seemed a little odd!

After a discussion on why there hasn’t been a British equivalent to Troma since the demise of Hammer(!), which came to no real conclusions, Kaufman was asked where he saw Troma going. He said he’d never been so worried about the place in the market of the independent film-maker and warned that it was quite possible that the large amount of films on the market was no lasting trend but just the overhang from the home video explosion.

Perhaps the most chilling thing to come out of the whole evening came at the end, when it was claimed that Colorbox had come under pressure from some major video chains following the passing of “Bad Taste” uncut, threatening to withdraw other Colorbox movies unless ‘something’ was done. They resisted, so let’s hope that this is an isolated case; if the video companies start slapping their OWN censorship on top of that of the BBFC (and there’s no reason to think it’ll work the other way, with video chains stocking uncut versions of films they consider have been unfairly censored), then it’s another kick in the teeth for ‘freedom’…

BBC1 made a late, and ultimately telling, bid to snatch the ‘Censorship of the Year’ award away from BBC2 (for their scissoring of ‘Repo Man’) by cutting seven sorts of celluloid out of ‘Crocodile Dundee 2’. Not only was the dialogue doctored but whole scenes were removed: when Croc’s at a party, he goes to the toilet and sees a guy snorting coke, which leads to some highly amusing confusion. Not in this version – that whole scene never existed. And the only reason this was done, since I can’t believe they’d have bothered otherwise, was so they could show the film earlier and get better ratings for it. Meanwhile, on ITV things are getting weirder. Just before Xmas, they showed Kubrick’s “The Shining”, totally uncut. Since New Year, they’ve been showing Bond films, and the knives have been out, with cuts, clips and clumsy commercials breaks inserted in an effort to prevent PG-rated movies from corrupting the audience. Can I suggest they sack Timothy Dalton and replace him with Jack Nicholson, since it seems that neither side dares tamper with HIS films!

Unexpected little gem was one of the Channel 4 short films, entitled “The Zip”, about a man who wakes up to find said zip running down his chest. Only ten minutes long, it had some impressive special effects and lot of good, dark atmosphere. Lowlight was “The Woman in Black”, ITV’s ghost story; they seemed to be trying to do a BBC style costume drama, but the period feel was so forced, and they had forgotten about the need for a decent script. I spotted the ending half-way through. Finally, it was galling to discover on Hogmanay that BBC Scotland (I was home at the time) weren’t showing “Hazard of Hearts” with Helena Bonham-Carter, but instead had “The Ipcress File” with Michael Caine. Not QUITE the disappointment of 1989 (that was thinking “Arsenal will never win by two goals at Anfield, I’ll go and watch ‘The Blob’ instead”), but a few kicks were aimed at the cat that day…