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....