88 Films

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Last year, DVD label 88 Films launched their 'Grindhouse' collection with cult-worthy Cannibal Women In The Avocado Jungle Of Death (1989), a comedy adventure that stars Shannon Tweed and Adrienne Barbeau; and The Day Time Ended (1979), sci-fi that’s clunky as a bag of hammers, and pits Jim Davis against stop-motion animated monster effects. January’s titles were Ken Dixon’s Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity (1987), space opera nonsense recycling the basic plot of The Most Dangerous Game; David DeCoteau’s Creepozoids (1987) in which Linnea Quigley fights ugly bug aliens; and the same prolific director’s Dr Alien (1989), featuring Judy Landers as ‘Xenobia’.

February continued the parade of cheesy subgenre stuff, perhaps fondly remembered from the video rental/ retail decades - long before such B-movie material was tamed by Hollywood, and eventually became standard blockbuster fare. Seedpeople (1992) has audacity enough for genre-splicing Invasion Of The Body Snatchers into its low-budget creature horror. Beach Babes From Beyond (1993) attempts a simple gender-reversal of Julian Temple’s Earth Girls Are Easy, but lacks any genuine imagination or funny business.

The robotic hero!

One of the better efforts from Charles Band’s productions, Mandroid (1993), directed by Jack Ersgard, is about a tele-presence robot invented by a Russian boffin, whose duplicitous partner plots to sell the machine to CIA agents, for weaponisation. As the prototype machine clomps around, we are reminded in particular of RoboCop and its sequel (both are obvious influences), but the ghosts of many earlier SF movie metal-men haunt this movie, too, and its humour is far closer to amusing spoof than biting Verhoevenesque satire. There are two victims of accidents, with weird biotech, and one results in a human monster being given a cybernaut face. 

Overall, Mandroid is a hodgepodge of B-movie sci-fi elements (such as the elderly scientist’s beautiful daughter) but the commonplace/ retro tropes here are quite charming, and it avoids the naff mistakes that other, similarly intentioned, flicks tend to make. The eastern European locations (ruined buildings, etc. in Romania) add production value to some action scenes like the climactic shootout but, even with a Swedish director, the murky politicking is merely routine stuff scavenged from Cold War spy-fi. Mandroid is a minor gem from the Full Moon back catalogue, and a sequel was made, titled Invisible: The Chronicles Of Benjamin Knight (1993), for which the heroine was re-cast.

March mags

Interzone #245 is just out, and this issue includes my latest 'Laser Fodder' column of DVD/ blu-ray reviews. Here's the line-up, with ratings:

     Neverlandscapes
Peter Pan (2000) - (4/10) 
Peter Pan (2003) - (5/10)
Neverland (2003) - (6/10)
Finding Neverland - (7/10)
Neverland (2011) - (6/10)

Crawlspace (2/10)
Looper (8/10)
Game Of Thrones - season 2 (7/10)
Alps (1/10)

    Best Bonds
Licence To Kill (8/10)
Skyfall (8/10)

Black Static #33 has also been published, containing my 'Blood Spectrum' column, and here's the list of new and recent DVD/ blu-ray releases that I've reviewed this time:

Fear Itself (6/10)
Holy Motors (8/10)
Resident Evil: Retribution (6/10)
Chained (3/10)
Antiviral (7/10)
Sinister (8/10)
Lost Girl - season 1 (6/10)
Rust And Bone (7/10)
Room 237 (6/10)
The Tall Man (7/10)
Silent Hill: Revelation (5/10)

    Retrothon: 4 Decades
Dracula (7/10)
Black Sunday (5/10)
Lisa And The Devil (5/10)
From Beyond (7/10) 

Zoostorm

Got my new PC working fine, so far... but yesterday was an epic migraine by teatime.

New PC hardware

Windows 7 home premium (x64-bit system)

Bemused to note: a 32-bit system is called x86, but a 64-bit is x64. Such clever confusion! 

Intel i3 CPU @ 3.3GHz  

1 TB hard drive

8GB RAM

Blu-ray player + DVD RW

Everything runs through the HDMI cable from 1Gb NVIDIA graphics card to a new  Samsung 21.5 inch widescreen (1920 x 1080 p) monitor.

I'm still using M$ Office 2003 Pro.

All of my usual and old-favoutite software (like Paint Shop Pro 5) from previous desktop (Win XP) has installed without any problems.

The only thing I found was incompatible with x64 was a Casper 5 back-up maker, but I don't think it's necessary on this machine.

Anyway, this is very fast indeed, compared to the old XP desktop or my Vista laptop. If only my slow broadband connection had the speed to match this machine, I'd probably be doing the happy dance.

Ironic chancellor

I woke up with all this rattling around in my headache, so it’s as much a satirical rant as political commentary.

Why this man is a fool -->

Shark-boy

Campaigners for the separation of church and state often miss the point. It’s not just the encumbrance of traditional religions, and lobbying by modern cults, that hinder social progress; it’s also the many and varied, but all misguided, attempts to manage economies on national or global scales. Economics is simply another belief system, not a practical science. Consequently, there is no good news on political fronts, and I doubt there will be, unless the people demand/ enforce some radical social changes.    

Ministers in government can trace their jobs back to positions in the imperial system.The current Chancellor of the Exchequer probably thinks his job can be traced back to a royal treasurer for kings and queens, but he’s actually a modern version of the court jester. In popular mythology, King Canute became his own ‘fool’ when he seemed to believe that his royal blood granted him some kind of magical authority over the waves. Since tides are prompted by the Moon, what ‘delusional’ Canute really needed was anti-gravity technology.

That famous misquote: ‘the business of America is business’ no longer holds true, in any sense, because America itself seems no longer to be a nation, it’s just a business. Now, it's just too late to be an optimist.

Meanwhile, some notes for a hopeless manifesto:

For the 21st century, government needs inspired leaders not jobsworth managers. Of the currently elected officials, none are capable to solving the problems of a corrupted economic system. The political tools might well already exist, but the will to use them is not there. We need a new political system, and a social contract with a global reach. Something based on secular principles of a ‘united world’, not just a United Nations. Is it any wonder the dream of utopia (as process not destination) is lost?

Wild beasts

On the Mississippi delta, there’s a post–Katrina disaster area where levees are so broken that “everything beautiful is gone.” Indie hit Beasts Of The Southern Wild is a picture maintaining legends of a noble primitivism that glorifies political and cultural stagnation. This is Sundance bait with a deeply romanticised ‘plot’ of irrational nonsense. It presents us with a defiant sensibility so keen to stress the importance of feelings, as if logical thought holds no sway or relevance, that overdose on folksy hippie sentimentality seems a likely response to its worst moments of backwoods charm, all seemingly inspired by the worst pretensions of magical realism.

Helicopters pass overhead, appearing as far away as comets, and no more in touch with the plight of the protagonists below their flight path. If taken on face value, this has some marvellous fantasy images but it has all been created in the service of third world survivalism without hope of progress. Being content with less is portrayed here as hardly one step above blissful ignorance. Living in squalid flooded slums with nothing at all worth having is not the ultimate in spiritual freedom, despite this movie’s exploration of bohemian dreams. A compassionate humanity in a perfect kind of balance with feral nature must be far more than just a commune of scavengers (or tribal ‘beasts’), southern or otherwise.