These are my credentials

Right, for discussion today class, we'll be looking at a tired bit of 60's kitsch which has been talked about to death. But that's never, ever, stopped me from banging on about anything so Casino Royale it is. I refer of course to the brilliant one with the mighty Niv, not that piece of overblown mobile phone advertising starring Daniel Craig (whose position as possibly the worst British actor of his generation we will hopefully be discussing in the future), although while we're mentioning it now, I would just like to ask the laydeez how on earth can any of you find Spongebob Squarepants attractive:

Even Oldfield in his scants is a more appealing sight. Although obviously that's a bit like saying a rotting cadavar in its scants is a more appealing sight. Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh yes, the GOOD Casino Royale. Now, as any fule nose, Casino Royale gets off to a truly cracking start with what may well be the best theme tune ever written for a movie. In fact old Bacharach really pulled out all the stops with the whole soundtrack, giving us the gift of a cross between old school classic songwriting and incidental music for late Benny Hill sketches. And let me tell you, it doesn't get better than that. The film itself has often been derided in the past for being an unholy mess of half-baked ideas, mismatched talents and the disastrous product of a selection of different directors and producers all sticking their oars in. But to those who slag off the Casino, I ask, have you ever watched it? It's BRILLIANT. It's an unholy mess of half-baked ideas, mismatched talents and the disastrous product of a selection of different directors and producers all sticking their oars in - and in the late 1960's what could possibly be better than that? What?? It's as if some stuffed shirt in the film industry had been asked to write down what they would imagine a "trip" on "LSD" might be like. For a start is there a more disconcertingly trippy sight than the Niv in pyjamas and a sort of "night-fez" knocking over giant bekilted Scots with cannonballs while a bevy of classically fantastic looking 60's "chicks" look on? Maybe, but only if you've actually taken psychotropic drugs. Which I know none of you have, gentle readers.

Sellers, Andress and Welles - trois a la banque

The plot, such as it is, naturally has absolutely nothing to do with the novel at all and instead has David Niven, a retired James Bond taking over the position of M and renaming all of the secret service agents "James Bond" to confuse the enemy. Well, never mind whether any enemy is confused, that's the point at which the viewer might as well give up trying to make sense of the movie and just enjoy its finest qualities - namely a seemingly endless succession of images that have "1967" written through them in flourescent indelible marker pen. It's no surprise that the best scenes in the film are those directed by the disparate talents of John Huston (in charge of the "Niv/cannonballs/kilts/cuties" scene referred to above) and the great Joe McGrath (who not only made the Spike Milligan masterpiece The Great MacGonagall which we will look at in the future no doubt, but also the best British "big dog" movie of all time Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World - ah the 1970's) who oversaw the Peter Sellers/Ursula Andress seduction scene which for my money puts any of Sellers' Clouseau falling-about nonsense in the shade.

The cast is absolutely top-hole with a selection of 60's A-listers all obviously equally confused as to what the hell is happening around them but clearly enjoying it nonetheless and Andress looks like she's having the time of her life when she's firing a bagpipes-machine-gun. The obvious exception is Sellers who, angry at not being able to play a straight Bond, walked off mid-filming apparently hacked off with the whole thing (I've never really liked Sellers, I've always had the feeling that people like Lionel Jeffries and Ronald Fraser must have found him to be a joyless creature to work with), but everybody else is going great guns, even Woody Allen who it would be fair to assume would already have been considering this glorious mess to be beneath him (and indeed he has no kind words to say about it at all). Then there's the fabulous Joanna Pettet:

(She signed that for me you know. No she didn't, I just found it off of the computer's "the internet"). And there's the stately George Raft. And there's John Wells, and Richard Wattis, and even Jean-Paul Belmondo. Deborah Kerr, William Holden, Charles Boyer, Jacqueline Bissett, the awesome Alexandra Bastedo (awesome just for being in The Champions alongside William "Arthur Crabtree" Gaunt), Nimmo, Corbett, Cribbins, I mean the list just goes on and on, and that's just for the named characters. Uncredited we have a whole new layer of remarkable names: Angelica Huston, John Le Mesurier, Dave Prowse (oh yes, THE one and only Dave Prowse - check his website by the way, he manages a sort of nu-metal band these days, no shit), and Bob Godfrey (and yes, that's THE Bob Godfrey who, before taking up the pen, did the occasional bit part).

So, there we have it, even if we were to agree that Casino Royale is an indulgent scramble composed of lunatic directing and editing, and even if we agree that to have the whole thing climax with everybody dead following a scene in which the casino is invaded by (i) the US cavalry on horseback, (ii) a troupe of naked dancing girls painted gold, (iii) some seals and (iv) a bloke pushing a machine making bubbles is totally mind-meltingly stupid (and we disagree with both of those things, don't we kids?) one would have to admit that the sheer weight of 1960's talent, style, imagery, psychedelic disinterest in narrative form, post-modern disregard for structure and outright bloody brilliance carries the day.

Hi kids! Well, I've been a bit under the weather the last few days and rather than waste the time spent in bed watching Paul Lewis and David Dickinson, I went instead for Neil Marshall's jaw-droppingly dire movie Doomsday.

Now, we can all see what happened - the idea clearly was to recreate a kind of Escape from New York/Mad Max type of vibe with the twist being that it's all very English (well, Scottish). Fine, straightforward enough, get a Fairlight, some straightfaced actors to slice their ham very thickly and design some steaming bits of cyberpunk machinery and off we go. The problem is that we're all so far beyond post-irony that Bob Hoskins spitting out "fuhkkin" in the middle of every other sentence ONLY sounds like Bob Hoskins saying "fuhkkin", not like any hammy actor overdoing it in an ironical 80's fashion, and hard-ass men and women saying hard-ass things just looks sort of crap, not like Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken being all snarky. To cut to the chase, too many bad films have been made seriously in the style of Escape from New York, that it's impossible to tell the difference now between a clever homage and all the rest. The other big problem is that Rhona Mitra isn't up to the task of being hard-ass, ironic and not shit. She's great at the action stuff and she can jump-cut leap about with the best of them, and she's good at looking like this:

But when it comes to the acting, she's a wash-out (and the problem with this kind of movie is that the actors have to really convincingly act at not being able to act, a demand which requires exceptional acting ability, er, if you follow me. Like Hoskins.). As someone whose career thus far has consisted of Ali G In Da House, Hollow Man and an Underworld sequel, she's got some way to go before convincing anybody that she's got the chops and unfortunately this mess certainly isn't it. It's a big shame as Neil Marshall's previous films Dog Soldiers and The Descent had some interesting stuff in them but where those films only unravel when their influences start to weigh too heavily (An American Werewolf for the former, The Thing for the latter), Doomsday's conceit needs, through necessity, to be played out from the start and you're left with nothing but gore and ham to grab hold of from the opening titles onwards.

We've got the girl in the box

As we're all learning in this late capitalist society, the disingenuous nature of "choice" is making it almost impossible to make any genuine or valuable choices about anything. So I discovered last night when having failed to make the "choice" to not just watch TV all night, I then had to decide what bit of product from the mountains of garbage I've got at my disposal to enjoy. Home alone, so obviously it had to be something that the significant other wouldn't enjoy, so I quickly whittled it down to three:

1) a couple of episodes of The Persuaders:














2. 60's Italian freakout heist drama Danger: Diabolik:

3. mind-alteringly brutal Russian WWII movie Come and See:

In the end I couldn't face Tony Curtis' spleen-rupturingly annoying Danny Wilde (not even Moore's brilliantly even-more-wooden-than-usual Lord Brett Sinclair can make up for him), and to be honest I didn't really want to experience what promises to be an entirely accurate cinematic representation of Hell while I had my curry and regulation three cans of lager. So, Danger: Diabolik (1968) it was. Now, Danger: Diabolik has a number of things going for it. For a start it was the inspiration for the Beastie's excellent Body Movin' video. It also features a manic Terry-Thomas who was in the middle of a run of lunatic European dubbing heavy movies. Then there's John Phillip Hall who also made the undeservedly famous Barbarella and the deservedly unfamous Skidoo (although the soundtrack to Skidoo by Nilsson is a psychedelic work of art) in the same year as playing the lead role in Diabolik. By some Italian make-up magic, John Phillip Hall genuinely looks as if he's made of moulded plastic and I can only assume that this is deliberate because he also sports a very "Eagle-Eye" haircut. The film itself is, of course, dreadful, a hideous mess of disconnected scenes that start and end unexpectedly and with a soundtrack so ill-matched to the film one assumes that one has put on a Goblin soundtrack and turned the movie down (more on the mighty Goblin in a later post I'm planning about Dario Argento). Diabolik is also surprisingly boring, with a story that starts nowhere and ends in much the same place. However, it is also utterly brilliant, chock full of scenes that scream "IT'S THE 1960's", not least a fabulous moment in which we discover our hero and his partner Eva (played by the remarkable Austrian model Marisa Mell, whose eye-popping figure (her thighs are genuinely terrifying) is clearly the only reason she was hired) "doing it" on a revolving white leather sofa, buried in dollar bills:

Anyway, the plot such as it is, involves Diabolik nicking stuff from governments and toffs, occasionally getting into trouble, getting out of trouble, "doing it" with Eva and once in a while having a shower. He also sometimes wears a figure-hugging body suit (white or black, apparently depending on his mood, because he wears a white one while pulling a night-time heist) and pulls the kind of ready to spring into action poses that Kenny Everett did in his Spiderman going to the bog skits. The big finish involves a molten 20-ton gold ingot and the kind of suggestive glittering liquid dousing that only the Europeans could pull off in the 1960's, and we can all be grateful for that. Director Mario Bava is much more well-known for his equally eccentric horror and giallo movies, but to be fair, Diabolik is probably the most iconic. And stupidest.

It

Speaking of people exploiting other people of shorter stature, I'm reminded of possibly the best book about music ever published, "Lords of Chaos", an insightful and dramatic history of the north European black metal scene. But never mind the writing, it's the priceless photos that really make this one a cut above. For instance, to illustrate the harshness of the environment in which these stupid kids grew up there is a photo of some snow with the evocative caption "Icy Norway". I say stupid kids, but apparently I mean stupid fully grown men:











But never mind the scene setting, pick up a copy, skim read the stuff about Count Grisnakh killing a rival with a pair of scissors, Samoth of Emperor getting down to some seriously committed church-burning and then settle down to the story of Abruptum and their frontman, who is faithfully described in the photo caption in Lords of Chaos as "It - the evil dwarf of Abruptum".

Ai Haf More Toice....Upstairz

If you're of a mind to get totally freaked out by what CinemaRetro described as "The mother of all 'dwarfsploitation' films! Over the top with nudity, sex and disturbing images. It just doesn't get any sleazier, folks!" then check out what promises to be the most utterly repellant film ever committed to celluloid. In 1973. In Denmark. "The Sinful Dwarf". In fact, don't check it out, but check out the lunatic trailer for it with the bizarre American voiceover on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AWiOy2D9RQ

In fact, don't watch that either. It's the sickest thing I've ever seen.

Old, old, Oldfield

If anybody wants to experience a truly electrifying dose of blistering erotica, you could do worse than check out this month's edition of Q magazine, which features possibly the dullest interview with a grumpy old bastard since Bernard Ingham said "hnh" to John Sargeant, with none other than king of toryprog Mike Oldfield, but is illustrated with the kind of pictures that would make the Marquis de Sade blush. Unfortunately I can't find any of the pictures on TV's "the internet" to share with you, so let's make do with a previous bit of astonishing vainglory, being the cover of his utterly abysmal new-age album Voyager:


Anyway, let's not get too carried away with slagging off the Oldfield, after all this is the man who had the audacity to rip off the Turin Shroud for his "difficult third album" Ommadawn, and made a whole album about sitting on a hill and thinking about whether to bother flying a kite. Instrumental work, naturally. Hey and away we go, through the grass, 'cross the snow....