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Uncle Sam (Part 1)

 

From wikipedia.org / © Sean Koo

 

Having just paid tribute to the centenarian Mel Brooks, I hadn’t intended to post another film-related entry so soon on this blog.  Sadly, however, Sam Neill, whom I admired both as an actor and as a person, passed away three days ago and I thought I should pen some words in honour of him too.

 

Neill’s passing was made even sadder by the fact he’d recently been declared cancer-free after a five-year battle against the disease.  Seemingly, his immune system was so weakened by the treatment he’d received that he fell prey to pneumonia.  Rima Te Wiata, Neill’s co-star in Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) told the New Zealand Herald: “It really sucks, actually… I think he would be like: ‘For goodness sake, I got over my cancer. And now look, now I get pneumonia. What next?'”

 

Though officially a New Zealander, Neill could also be called a Northern Irishman because in 1947 he was born in Omagh, county-town of County Tyrone (17 miles away from where I spent my childhood), to New Zealand and English parents.  He moved from there to Christchurch in 1954 and presumably soon lost his Northern Irish accent.  Decades later, when he played the psychotic Belfast policeman Chester Campbell in the first two seasons of the TV show Peaky Blinders (2013-14), he asked two mates – Northern Irish actors Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt – for coaching so that he could ‘retrieve’ his old accent.

 

He also began life as ‘Nigel’, but by the age of 11 had taken to calling himself ‘Sam’.  When he started acting, he was glad he’d chosen the blokey ‘Sam’ over the slightly effete ‘Nigel’.  In an interview published recently in the Guardian, he commented, “If I’d stayed with Nigel Neill, I don’t think I would have had a film career.”  He’d obviously never encountered the great screenwriter Nigel Kneale, whose creations included the Quatermass films and TV dramas.

 

Though he’d done film and TV work throughout the 1970s, including Roger Donaldson’s thriller Sleeping Dogs (1977), described on its Wikipedia page as “the first feature-length 35 mm film produced entirely in New Zealand”, Neill first came to my attention in 1981, when I was a horror-film-obsessed teenager and when he appeared in two fairly high-profile horror films, Graham Baker’s Omen III: The Final Conflict and Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession.  I read about them in film magazines like Starburst and Fangoria, though I was too young to see them in a cinema because in the UK they were given ‘X’ certificates, meaning only people aged 18 and over could see them.  In the case of Possession, I didn’t even have a chance to see it later on video for it ended up on the Britain’s infamous (and idiotic) ‘video nasties’ list, deemed likely to ‘deprave or corrupt’ its viewers and thus banned from home viewing.

 

© Mace Neufeld Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Omen III: The Final Conflict was the third in the trilogy that’d started with Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976) and continued with Don Taylor’s Damien – Omen II (1978) and that told the tale of Damien Thorn, the son of Satan and the Antichrist who, according to Biblical prophecies, will rise to power in end times.  Unlike the earlier two movies, where Damien is depicted as a kid (first played by Harvey Spender Stephens, then Jonathan Scott-Taylor), he’s now an adult.  Portrayed by Neill, he’s the powerful CEO of Thorn Industries and soon into the film also becomes US ambassador to Britain, a position from which he hopes to launch his biggest project yet – the thwarting of the Second Coming of Christ.

 

As Damien, Neill is suave enough to be convincing as a powerful operator in purely human affairs, one who can rub shoulders with top people in top places and get what he wants; whilst also having a sinisterness and darkness that makes you accept him as the same, infernal creature he was in the earlier films (especially the disturbingly baleful Spender Stephens in the first Omen).  Alas, Neill is the only thing of value in the film.  Coming after the original, which was very enjoyable hokum, and the second film, which at least had its moments, The Final Countdown is a damp squib.  Unlike his predecessors Donner and Taylor, Graham Baker doesn’t have the directing chops to properly mount the Omen films’ main attractions – the set-piece ‘accidents’, elaborate, supernaturally-engineered and inevitably fatal, that bump off anyone who gets in Damien’s way.  That said, the scene early on where the previous American ambassador commits ‘suicide’ and conveniently creates a job opening for him, is agreeably splattery.

 

A far less conventional horror film, and a far better one, is the same year’s Possession.  Though it defies all description, you could say it was a particularly traumatic and traumatising break-up movie…  Or a brooding parable about the Cold War (it was filmed in West Berlin)…  Or a psychological thriller involving doppelgangers…  Or a body-horror film wherein a woman makes repeated love to a vilely tentacled, half-human, half-squid creature…  Or an espionage thriller leading to an apocalyptic World War III finale.

 

Director Andrzej Żuławski – himself suffering from depression after recently being expelled from his native Poland – put Neill and his co-star Isabelle Adjani through the wringer during the film’s making.  Neill remarked in 2021 that he ‘escaped’ from the movie with his ‘sanity barely intact’.  Adjani suffered even more, though, and supposedly needed a couple of years to get over the experience.  That’s understandable when, for instance, you see the berserk intensity of the now-legendary sequence where she suffers a miscarriage in a subway corridor.  Actually, a young Gaspar Noé must have been highly impressed by that sequence because he basically got Sofia Boutella to recreate it in his 2018 movie Climax.

 

© Gaumont Distribution

 

Things were looking up for Neill’s career in 1983, when he played the title role in Reilly, Ace of Spies, a 12-part TV series dramatizing the life of real-life superspy Sidney Reilly during the first quarter of the 20th century.  Reilly was scripted by Troy Kennedy Martin and directed by Jim Goddard and Martin Campbell and Campbell, a fellow Kiwi, would later direct two James Bond movies, Goldeneye (1995) and Casino Royale (2006).  In fact, for a time in the mid-1980s it looked like Neill was in with a shout of becoming the next James Bond.  (It makes sense – there have been Scottish, Australian, Welsh and Irish Bonds, so why not a New Zealand one?)

 

In the Guardian interview I mentioned earlier, he was asked about the Bond role.  He said he would have accepted it if it’d been offered to him, but added: “I’m also aware that I wouldn’t have enjoyed my life so much if I was an ex-Bond. That’s what people would say when I went for my morning coffee. ‘Look – it’s what’s-his-name, who used to be James Bond?’ ‘Yeah, he was the one I never really liked.’”

 

In 1989 he had a good role in Philip Noyce’s Dead Calm, a maritime thriller / horror movie that conveys both the claustrophobia of being at sea – you’re stuck in the confined space of a boat – and the agoraphobia of it – you’re out on a vast, empty mass of water, far from civilisation and help.  Neil and Nicole Kidman (in her seventh, and breakout, film role) play a couple who, while yachting, discover a sinking schooner.  They pick up one survivor (Billy Zane) who – surprise! – turns out to be a crazed killer.

 

Still, I had the impression that during the late 1980s Neil’s moment had passed and he was destined to spend his remaining career in movies’ supporting casts as a reliable character actor.  This was suggested, for example, by his role in 1990’s The Hunt for Red October, where he gets fourth-place billing after Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin and Scott Glenn.  He plays the second-in-command to Connery’s Captain Marko Ramius, and a participant in a plot whereby the only submarine-commander in the Soviet fleet with a Scottish accent, and his officers, commandeer a super-submarine called Red October and attempt to defect with it to the West.  When Neill’s character starts waxing lyrically to Connery about the rabbit farm he plans to start up after they reach America, you know he’s going to get killed before the end.

 

© Mace Neufeld Productions / Paramount Productions

 

However, then, Neill’s fortunes took an upswing – because Steven Spielberg and blockbuster-dom came knocking.

 

To be continued…

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The 100-year-old Mel

 

From wikipedia.org / © Angela George

 

Last week saw much hype and noise about the United States of America celebrating its 250th birthday.  Under the leadership of Donald Trump, the USA marked the 250th anniversary of its independence from the British by holding a Great American State Fair on Washington DC’s National Mall.  This featured empty booths, cancelled musical performances, racist flags, power outages, collapsing roofs and a plywood model of the victory arch Trump wants to build on the Potomac that cracked, crumbled and oozed yellow gunk.  How odd that hardly anyone wanted to go to it.

 

In other moves to celebrate America’s 250th Independence Day, Trump refurbished the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool, also in Washington DC, so that its water would shine a patriotic blue, though it immediately shone a less patriotic green thanks to a sudden and unforeseen algae bloom.  He also tried to extend the USA team’s run in the 2026 Football World Cup by arm-twisting Gianni Infantino and FIFA into breaking the sport’s red-card rules so that a key American player could play in the team’s next game – which they lost, courtesy of a 4-1 drubbing by Belgium, causing their exit from the competition.

 

The sound and fury about the 250th anniversary of American independence, and the Trump-esque shenanigans accompanying it, have obscured the fact that, one week earlier, the USA witnessed another important three-digit birthday.  June 28th saw the 100th birthday of the legendary American filmmaker, comedian and general funnyman Mel Brooks.  By the time he turned his hand to making movies in the late 1960s, Brooks already had impressive comic credentials – devising the famed 2000-Year-Old Man comedy sketch with Carl Reiner, for instance, or creating the classic spy-comedy TV show Get Smart (1965-70) with Buck Henry.  But it’s fair to say his films are the body of work for which he’s most beloved.

 

Like much of the comedy I experienced from an early age – the Carry–On movies, or those starring Abbott and Costello, or the telly career of Ronnie Corbett – I’ve had a complicated and changing relationship with the oeuvre of Mel Brooks.  As a youngster, I thought it was brilliant.  As a young adult, who took himself much too seriously, I dismissed it – certainly, the later films Brooks made – as crass, cringeworthy guff.  Now, in my old age, I can find pleasure in the entirety of Brooks’s canon and appreciate the artistry displayed in even what are, by general consensus, his lesser efforts.  A bad joke might provoke a groan rather than a laugh, but to engineer that groan you still need a certain, warped skill.

 

I think I passed from my youthful period of Brooks-disdain to my more mature period of Brooks-admiration in the 1990s.  This was when I was attempting to woo (with a total lack of success) a lady from New York whom I considered, for a while, the coolest thing on earth.  We were chatting one evening about our favourite films and the object of my affections suddenly astounded me by saying she was a huge fan of…  No, not Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967), or Terence Mallick’s Badlands (1973), or Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989), but…  Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs (1987).

 

From wikipedia.org / © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Brooksfilms

 

“Seriously?” I spluttered.  I’d seen this science-fiction / Star Wars piss-take shortly after its release and thought it was dreadful.  But, patiently, the lady explained to me the sociological depth and cleverness of some of Spaceballs’ jokes that I’d missed – for example, when Bill Pullman and John Candy rescue the princess (Daphne Zuniga) and Pullman remarks, “That’s all we needed…  A Jewish princess!”  I had to concede there was more to Brooks’s humour than I’d thought.

 

So, I had my moment of epiphany.  I decided, to misquote a line in The Producers, “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty / Come and join the Mel Brooks party.”

 

Anyway, it’s a fortnight late for the great man’s 100th, but here is a belated guide to the funniest bits, in my opinion, of his movies.  There’s no mention of The Twelve Chairs (1970) and Life Stinks (1991) because I haven’t seen those two.

 

L.S.D. gets auditioned in The Producers (1967)

The movie that put Brooks on the cinematic map, The Producers has had quite an afterlife, becoming a successful Broadway musical that, in 2005, was turned into a film itself.  For me, its highlight isn’t the famous song-and-dance number Springtime for Hitler that’s the centrepiece of the show that impresario Zero Mostel and accountant Gene Wilder stage in the hope it’ll be a massive flop (allowing them to make a fortune from the shares they’ve sold in it).  No, the highlight comes earlier.

 

That’s when hippy Lorenzo St. DuBois – L.S.D. to his friends – stumbles into the show’s auditions by mistake and performs, with his female guitar / keyboards / sax backing band, a funny-terrible number called Love Power.   (“And I give a flower to the big fat cop / He takes his glove and he beats me up!”)  Played by Dick Shawn with thigh-high furry boots and a Campbell’s soup-can hanging on a chain around his neck, the hapless L.S.D. is hilarious – and the sequence reaches a perfect conclusion when Mostel bellows ecstatically, “THAT’S OUR HITLER!”

 

From instagram.com / (c) Embassy Pictures

 

The campfire scene in Blazing Saddles (1974)

If I was more sophisticated, I’d nominate as the funniest moments in Brook’s smash-hit comedy-western the scenes where he skewers the residents of frontier town Rock Ridge for their bone-headed racism.  (“You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers.  These are people of the land.  The common clay of the new West. You know…  morons.”)  However…  I’m nominating instead the sequence in Blazing Saddles where Slim Pickens’s men sit around a campfire and stuff themselves with traditional cowboy fare – beans – with flatulent results.

 

I first saw Blazing Saddles when it played on a big screen in the assembly hall of my school as one of the movies chosen for the school’s Film Club.  When the farting began, the teenaged audience, including myself, laughed like drains.  We were still roaring our heads off minutes after the sequence finished.  No other film shown during the several years I was a member of that Film Club – not Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), not Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), not Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) – provoked so tumultuous a reaction.  I’m not proud.

 

The monster meets the blind hermit in Young Frankenstein (1974)

The most genuinely affectionate of Brooks’s genre parodies, Young Frankenstein pokes fun at the black-and-white Frankenstein movies made by Universal Pictures in the 1930s.  My favourite part of it is when Brooks sends up the sequence in Bride of Frankenstein (1936) where the Frankenstein monster (Boris Karloff) is touchingly but briefly befriended by a lonely blind hermit (O.P. Heggie) who’s unaware of his monstrousness.  Here, the well-meaning but, well, blind hermit (Gene Hackman) accidentally and repeatedly scalds and burns the unfortunate monster (Peter Boyle) whilst trying to offer him broth, cigars, etc., until the latter flees from his cottage in terror.  Despite the gleeful bad taste of the gags, the Young Frankenstein sequence retains some of the sweetness and sadness of the Bride of Frankenstein one.  It also makes you wish Gene Hackman had played more comedy roles.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Gruskoff / Venture Films / 20th Century Fox

 

The boardroom table in Silent Movie (1976)

This was another movie shown at my school’s Film Club and another sequence that sent us – uncivilised little oiks that we were at the time – into paroxysms of laughter.  Evil corporation Engulf & Devour intends to take over the studio of filmmaker Mel Funn (Brooks) but that won’t happen if the new movie Funn is making becomes a hit.  Engulf & Devour’s board of executives hatch a fiendish plan to sabotage Funn and his movie – they’ll send sultry nightclub singer Vilma Kaplan (Bernadette Peters) to seduce, then dump Funn and re-kindle the massive alcohol problem he had previously.  When a picture of Vilma is unveiled to the executives, sitting around the boardroom table, they’re so impressed that the table rises by several inches.

 

The line Funn / Brooks inspires when Vilma does dump him, and he goes on a massive bender to drown his sorrows – “He is truly the lord of the winos!” – is pretty funny too.

 

The orchestra in High Anxiety (1977)

Brooks’s next film takes fond aim at the thriller movies of Alfred Hitchcock.  Its hero, Dr Richard Harpo Thorndyke, again played by Brooks himself, suffers from the titular disorder, the vertigo-like ‘high anxiety’.  While travelling in the back of a car, Thorndyke / Brooks suffers a moment of ominous foreboding, which is accompanied by an equally ominous swell of Bernard Herrmann-like orchestral music – the sort that Hitchcock liked to insert into his films to augment the mood.  This being a Brooks film, though, Thorndyke’s car then passes a bus that contains, as passengers, the orchestra playing the music.

 

Yes, this is the second time Brooks has used that gag.  It originally appeared in Blazing Saddles and involved the Count Basie Orchestra performing in the desert,  But the orchestra-on-a-bus joke in High Anxiety works better, I think.

 

The Spanish Inquisition in History of the World, Part I (1981)

A truly hit-and-miss collection of gags and sketches, History of the World, Part 1 depicts five chapters in world history from the Stone Age to the French Revolution.  Its undisputed highlight is a segment about the Spanish Inquisition.  This features Brooks as Torquemada – his victims are warned not to try to talk him out of torturing them because, “You can’t Torquemada anything!” – and an elaborate Busby Berkeley-like song-and-dance number in a torture chamber which, with its exuberant bad taste, is as impressive as Springtime for Hitler in The Producers.

 

© Brooksfilms / 20th Century Fox

 

Snotty’s line in Spaceballs (1987)

Spaceballs spoofs Star Wars (1977) but also contains some elaborate send-ups of Planet of the Apes (1968) and Alien (1979) – the latter even drafts in John Hurt to reprise his role as the unfortunate Kane.  But the funniest, or groan-iest, bit in it for me is a simple pun.  A Scottish character called Snotty (Jeff MacGregor), obviously based on Scotty from Star Trek (1966-69), is in a control room flicking a series of switches.  “Lock One!” he shouts.  “Lock Two!  Lock Three!  Loch Lomond!”

 

The abbot in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

You have to be a connoisseur of long-ago comedy double-acts to appreciate my favourite joke in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Brooks’ irreverent take on the then-recent and hugely-successful Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991).  An abbot (Dick Van Patten) is walking in his finery outside his monastery and enjoying the adulation of the local population.  Then a guy who looks and sounds suspiciously like Lou Costello yells at him, “Hey, Abbott!”  Van Patten grumbles, “I hate that guy.”

 

Dracula tries to control Mina’s mind in Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)

I don’t hold it against Brooks’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It, which stars Leslie Neilson as the legendary vampire count, that it isn’t great.  After all, there have been many attempts over the years to spoof vampire films and hardly any of them have been funny – see Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires (1967) or Stan Dragoti’s Love at First Bite (1977).  In fact, it wasn’t until Jermaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows (2014) that I encountered a vampire-movie parody that made me laugh.

 

However, Dracula: Dead and Loving It has one funny part where, from a distance, Dracula / Neilson exerts his willpower over the bitten and partly vampirised Mina (Amy Yasbeck) and tries to summon her: “Mina…  Open your eyes…  Arise…  Come to the door…”  The operation goes less smoothly when the mind-controlling vampire discovers there’s a confusing closet door in the way, and a hazardous footstool, and an inconvenient maidservant who’s also picking up his telepathic instructions: “Mina…  You are in the closet.  Open the door and come out…  Watch out for the footstool…  Stand up…  Not you, sit…  No, you sit…  You stand…”

 

And just before I finish, some praise is due for Brooks as a producer too.  He’s the man who oversaw both David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980) and David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986).

 

From wikipedia.org / © Angela George

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It’s the hope that kills you

 

 

The footballing World Cup currently taking place in Canada, Mexico and some other place – oh yes, the USA – has now entered its second stage.  And guess what?  A certain country took part in the first stage but failed to qualify for the second one, just as it qualified for eight previous World Cups and didn’t make it to the second round of those competitions either.  In fact, it’s earned itself the unenviable record of being the most-useless-at-getting-to-the-second-round-of-the-World-Cup country ever.  Which hapless nation could this be?

 

Here’s a clue: “Yes sir, I can boogie…”

 

I had a fortnight off work during the second half of June and spent that time in Scotland, in the Borders town of Peebles, where my family have lived for nearly 50 years after relocating from Northern Ireland in 1977.  My fortnight in Scotland coincided with the Scottish men’s team playing their second and third games of the World Cup, which they’d qualified for in November last year.  Well, I thought beforehand, I’ll be in Scotland in time to see if, finally, they can beat the jinx that’s stopped them from getting past the competition’s initial stage in 1954, 1958, 1974, 1978, 1982, 1986, 1990 and 1998.  And this time, with so many countries participating in the 2026 competition, surely it’ll be easy to get into that elusive second stage?  Surely they’ll beat the curse at last?

 

Thus, I braced myself for the Scottish World Cup 2026 experience, thinking of a lyric from the Eagles’ Hotel California: “This could be heaven or this could be hell.”

 

Guess which one it turned out to be.

 

When I arrived in Scotland on June 17th, the national team had already secured three points from their first World Cup game.  It had defeated by one goal to nil the footballing colossus that is… Haiti.  Actually, given Scotland’s history of embarrassing scores against minor footballing nations they were expected to beat, such as Iran in 1978 and Costa Rica in 1990, the win over Haiti felt like the clearing of an important psychological hurdle.  Now Scotland  needed just one more point to be sure of getting through to the second round.  As I traversed the streets of Peebles, folk around me were cautiously positive.  There was a certain sense of optimism.  Hope was definitely in the air…

 

But as older, wiser heads who’d experienced countless Scottish World Cup agonies in the 20th century would inevitably muse: “It’s the hope that kills you.”

 

June 19th saw Scotland’s second World Cup game, against Morocco.  By now, like humidity in the air triggering a spectacular thunder-and-lightning storm, that pervasive sense of hope had transformed into full-scale mass euphoria.  Mind you, I was slightly less euphoric, remembering Scotland’s last game in the last World Cup they qualified for, in France in 1998, which was against Morocco too.  Back then, Morocco had humped them three-nothing.

 

I watched the game in the social building of Peebles Rugby Club, where for once the crowd contained more fans of the round ball than fans of the oval one.  I’d never seen the place as wild as it was during the build-up to the game – people were yelling, singing, dancing on tables, waving glow sticks like demented cheerleaders.  In fact, there was so much merry-making and hullabaloo that most folk didn’t even notice when the first whistle blew and the match kicked off.  They also didn’t notice when two minutes later Morocco penetrated Scotland’s somnolent defence and knocked in an embarrassingly early goal.  There was some remarkable sobering-up done when the revellers finally focused their gaze on the Rugby Club’s TV screens and realised,  one goal down already – how the f*ck did that happen?

 

To be fair, Morocco didn’t look much more accomplished than Scotland, certainly not during the second half.  But the North Africans hung onto their slender lead for the next 90-odd minutes and the game ended one-nil to them and with Scotland acquiring zero points.  If only the team had been awake from the very start and denied Morocco that early goal.  They’d have scraped a nil-nil draw, got a point, qualified for the second round and made history.  I tried to console myself with the thought that as it was a three-nil defeat against Morocco in 1998, and only a one-nil defeat in 2026, this marked a 66% improvement on Scotland’s part.  Right?

 

The next day, June 18th, was the biggest day in Peebles’ annual Beltane festival.  Among other things, there was a parade of floats, bands and people in fancy dress along the town’s high street.  Many of the revellers were in the regalia of the Tartan Army, the Scottish football team’s travelling support – one guy in such attire was even riding a penny farthing.

 

 

Yet an unhappy sense of reality about Scotland’s World Cup prospects was tangible now.  Some of the bands were still dutifully playing Yes Sir, I Can Boogie (1977) by the Spanish disco duo Baccara, which has been the Tartan Army’s favourite anthem since 2020.  However, Langholm Town Band definitely had their finger on the pulse when they marched by me playing Ally’s Tartan Army, which was Scotland’s World Cup song in Argentina in 1978 and whose lyrics go, “We’re on the march with Ally’s army / We’re going to the Argentine / And we’ll really shake them up / When we win the World Cup / Cos Scotland are the greatest football team.”

 

Ally’s Tartan Army serves as a painful reminder of what happened during Scotland’s World Cup campaign in 1978.  The Scotland manager then, Ally MacLeod, was breezily optimistic about his team’s chances of winning the World Cup; his optimism was amplified by Scotland’s sporting press; the whole nation drank the Kool-Aid and believed their team only had to turn up in Argentina to lift the trophy…  And when Scotland were knocked out in the first round, it was seen as a national disaster and humiliation.  For years afterwards, the Scots suffered from P.A.S.D., i.e., Post-Ally Stress Disorder.

 

Scotland’s final first-round game was against Brazil on June 24th.  The Scottish World Cup record against Brazil had been woeful.  In the 1982 competition in Spain, Brazil beat them four-one, a cruel result considering that Scotland went one-nil up after 17 minutes, courtesy of a goal by David Narey.  (Big-chinned English football commentator Jimmy Hill earned himself the lasting hatred of Scotland fans by dismissing Narey’s goal as a ‘toe-poke’.)  A rematch at the 1990 World Cup saw Brazil beat them one-nil and caused Scotland’s elimination from the tournament.  Despite this, I heard slivers of optimism in people’s conversations: “We only need a draw… One point, that’s all…  And Brazil…  They’re not the great team they once were…  They’ve been disappointing so far…”

 

Yes, it’s the hope that kills you.

 

I watched the game at my brother’s house, where the audience included my nephew and his girlfriend, who hadn’t even been born when Scotland last played in a World Cup.  Brazil knocked the ball three times into Scotland’s goal – actually four times, but one of the goals was disallowed – without Scotland even achieving what the late Jimmy Hill would describe as a ‘toe-poke’ in return.  Afterwards, I said to my nephew and his partner something along the lines of, “Welcome to us old folk’s world – one of Scottish World Cup misery.”

 

Even then, it wasn’t absolutely certain that Scotland was out of the World Cup.  So many countries were involved in this competition, and the rules for making progress in it were so complex, that they still had a chance.  Some of the best-placed teams with three points would go through to Round Two.  Scotland might be one of the lucky ones if certain results went certain ways.  By June 27th, though, it was clear the results hadn’t gone the right way and Scotland were taking their ninth World Cup early bath.

 

Yes, it’s the hope that…  Oh, shut up.

 

If nothing else, the Tartan Army showed yet again that they’re one of the best sets of football fans in the world.  Despite the hassle of entering Donald Trump’s increasingly authoritarian USA, and the excruciating price of match tickets, transport, refreshments and everything else in a World Cup orchestrated by the rip-off maestro and evil Mekon Gianni Infantino, head of FIFA, they won American hearts and minds by supporting their team with good humour and self-deprecation and avoiding any nationalistic preening or belligerence.  And, along the way, they had a hell of a party.

 

The citizens of Boston, where they played their first two games, were particularly impressed.  They didn’t even mind the Tartan Army’s custom of plonking traffic cones on the heads of their municipal statues.  The day after the Haiti victory in this, the home city of the Irish-American diaspora, at a downtown Irish pub called Henessey’s Bar, Scotland fans managed the exceptional feat of drinking three times more beer than is normally sold on St Patrick’s Day.  “We’ve been here for over 30 years and we’ve never seen anything like it,” marvelled the pub’s boss.  Even the New York Times was moved to publish a feature about the Boston-Tartan Army love affair.

 

Those fans were merely enjoying the Scotland World Cup experience, and squeezing in as much hectic partying, while it lasted.  Because, as 2026 proves for the umpteenth time, the Scotland World Cup experience never lasts for long.

 

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Leave a light on

 

From wikipedia.org / © Mirrorme

 

Three days ago – June 23rd – marked ten years since the electorate of the United Kingdom voted on whether or not their country should leave the European Union.  And two days ago – June 24th – marked ten years since the result of that referendum was announced.  I remember switching on the TV that morning a decade ago and seeing Andrew Neil, who looked and sounded like he’d just been hit over the head with a shovel, reporting on the BBC that against all expectations a narrow majority of the UK’s population had voted for ‘Brexit’, i.e., for Britain exiting the EU.  51.9% had voted to leave and 48.1% had voted to remain.

 

Brexit’s impact on the UK since then, to anyone who isn’t a head-in-the-sand Brexiter, has been shite.  Writing on the BBC website recently, Fasial Islam cited findings by the National Bureau of Economic Research.  The consensus was that “the UK economy is smaller now than it would have been based on the trajectory it was on in 2016…  The numbers range from about 3% to 8%…. These calculations are based on modelling how a UK still within the EU could have been expected to perform economically had it still experienced the pandemic and the 2022 energy shock but not Brexit…  The most recent study by the NBER takes account of population growth, and says the UK lost 6-8% of per capita output.”

 

The result has been a country strapped for cash.  Which, in turn, has helped fuel the visceral hatred directed towards Keir Starmer’s Labour government since it was elected to power with a huge parliamentary majority in July 2024.  People voted for Labour desperate to see a respite from the austerity they’d suffered under the Conservatives.  Yet Starmer and co. were obsessed with hoarding their pennies and served up more of the same.  They refused to scrap the two-child benefit cap.  They went after the universal winter fuel payment.  They tried to cut incapacity benefits.  And when, following outcries, they backtracked or partially backtracked on these policies, they made themselves look incredibly weak.

 

Yet, despite everything, Britain’s economy is still ranked by the IMF as the fifth biggest in the world, so someone must be making money there post-Brexit.  Presumably ones with large, offshore bank accounts and home addresses in Dubai.  Certainly not the average British citizen.

 

Brexit also cut the UK off from Europe at a time when it desperately needed to be part of a larger bloc for its economic and military security.  In geopolitical terms, the country couldn’t have picked a worse time to pull up the drawbridge and retreat in on itself.  In the east, Vladimir Putin has spent four years trying to subjugate Ukraine and, heaven forbid, if he has his evil way there he’ll have designs on more of Europe.  In the west, Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the military alliances, trade protocols and diplomatic norms Britain has relied on for stability and prosperity over the past 80 years.  The amount of groveling Starmer has done to Trump, the modern-day Caligula, in the hope of currying at least a little of his favour testifies to the enfeebled place Britain is nowadays.

 

Brexit has generated huge amounts of political instability.  Successive prime ministers struggled to negotiate to leave the EU on terms that satisfied the gibbering hardliners of the far right and to generally surf the waves of chaos the thing had created.  In fact, we’ve had half-a-dozen prime ministers in a decade: the overconfident David Cameron, who allowed the referendum in the first place; the hapless Teresa May; the unspeakable Boris Johnson; the catastrophic but mercifully short-lived Liz Truss; the inconsequential Rishi Sunak; and the tone-deaf and charisma-free Starmer.  We’re about to get a seventh, now that Starmer has just announced his resignation and the poisoned chalice, sorry, the crown seems there for Andy Burnham’s taking.

 

So, seven British prime ministers in just over a decade.  That’s an astonishing reflection of the political shitshow the UK has become, especially when you consider there were seven prime ministers during the 46 years prior to Cameron: Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, Jim Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

 

While multiple prime ministers have crashed and burned since 2016, Nigel Farage, the main architect of the Brexit fiasco, has prospered.  He’s slithered with serpentine ease from the United Kingdom Independence Party to the Brexit Party and, most recently, to Reform UK, which he runs as a limited company, owning 53% of its shares.  Making an outrageous race-baiting statement here – and hiding under a rock when that statement provokes violence on the streets – and accepting a dodgy five-million-pound ‘gift’ from a Thailand-based cryptocurrency investor there, Farage is the most despicable figure in British politics today.

 

Farage certainly knows how to divert blame.  His championing of Brexit may have led to economic and social misery for the British public but he’s convinced many people that it’s not his or Brexit’s fault, but that of immigrants and asylum-seekers and the ‘establishment’.  How Farage manages to keep a straight face when he – a son of a stockbroker, pupil at Dulwich College and one-time commodities trader in the City of London – rails about that establishment, I’ll never know.  His policies of deflection and scapegoating have won him so much support that he’s in with a good shout of winning the next election and becoming Britain’s eighth prime minister since 2016.

 

A Farage government would be ruinous for Britain.  No doubt it’d exhibit all the malignancies of the regime currently destroying the USA under Trump, whom he greatly admires: authoritarianism, racism, censorship, misinformation, corruption, cronyism, pseudoscience, climate-change denial, incompetence, general ignorance and much sucking up to Putin.

 

From pixabay.org / © Stux

 

Finally, you may have noticed the UK map at the top of this entry, showing the 2016 council districts and unitary authorities that voted for leaving the EU in blue and those that voted for remaining in it in yellow.  Scotland is entirely yellow – not one Scottish district recorded a majority for ‘leave’ and, overall, 62% of Scottish voters supported ‘remain’.  Yet, because a majority of the electorate in England voted for Brexit, Scotland was dragged out of the EU against its will.  Two years earlier, when the Scots had a referendum on whether or not their country should be an independent country, the ‘no’ side claimed that staying in the UK was the safest option for Scotland retaining its membership of the EU.  The EU argument was surely a major reason why the anti-Scottish-independence, pro-UK lobby won in Scotland in 2014.  So much for that.  Incidentally, a recent academic study has estimated that, thanks to Brexit, Scotland is 30 billion pounds a year worse off.

 

In the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, Scottish Member of the European Parliament Alyn Smith gave a farewell speech to his fellow MEPs in which he summed up how many in Scotland felt.  He asked the European Parliament to “leave a light on so that we can find our way back home.”

 

Three days ago, on the Brexit vote’s tenth anniversary, I was in Edinburgh and found myself in the vicinity of the Scottish Parliament, outside which four flags flutter at the top of four flagpoles: the Scottish saltire, the Union Jack, the Ukrainian flag and the European Union flag with its dozen stars.  In 2020, in defiance of Brexit, a majority of Members of the Scottish Parliament voted to keep the European flag flying there.

 

The parliament now has a minority of far-right Reform MSPs and one of them, Senga Beresford – who in the past has called for mass deportations of British Muslims and expressed support for fascist rabble-rouser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – marked the anniversary by demanding that the flag be brought down.  Well, to hell with that.  Especially when her party is currently planning to tear up agreements made with the EU and target EU nationals with settled status in Britain by evicting them from social housing and making it “notably more expensive for companies to employ them”.  I’m sure settled-status EU nationals in Scotland are glad to see that flag at the parliament, showing some Scottish solidarity with them.

 

And let’s hope it continues to fly there until Scotland does find a way back to Europe – with or without the rest of the UK.

 

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How low will you go?

 

From pixabay.com / © Geralt

 

When The Simpsons was the greatest thing on television a long – a very long – time ago, I remember a 1999 episode, They Saved Lisa’s Brain, that began with a contest being held in Springfield and broadcast live on TV called How Low Will You Go?  According to the entry about it on the WikiSimpsons site, How Low Will You Go? was ‘sponsored by Grandma Plopwell’s Pudding’ and its winner ‘would be the person who did the stupidest thing on the stage.’  Contestants included Bart Simpson eating ‘everything that was thrown at him’, Homer Simpson wearing ‘a suit made of popcorn kernels’ and singing a song called Kernel Knowledge, and Moe Szyslak ‘dressed in a sailor suit with a giant lollipop.’

 

When I saw the episode more than a quarter-century ago, I remember reacting to this indictment of how people are humiliated and degraded by TV and its promises of instant celebrity by thinking: Wow, that is pretty low!  Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but I hadn’t seen anything yet.  In the decades since, TV – often of the ‘reality’ variety – has induced folk to do far worse things and make far bigger dicks of themselves on camera, to the point where cavorting around in a suit made of popcorn kernels actually seems quite highbrow in comparison.

 

Anyway, I feel like How Low Will You Go? has now become a TV series that’s in the middle of its second season.  Each season lasts for four years and takes place in the White House whenever Donald Trump is the US president.  Season one lasted from 2016 to 2020.  Season two began in 2024 and is due to end in 2028.  That is, if the USA still exists by 2028.  Come to think of it, if the world still exists by 2028.

 

In season one, Trump proved that yes, he could go pretty low.  He shamelessly sucked up to Putin.  He belittled a war veteran, John McCain, who’d served his country in Vietnam and spent more than five years as a prisoner of war there.  (“I like people who weren’t captured!”)  He skipped attending an event in honour of American soldiers killed in World War One at France’s Aisne-Marne American Cemetery on the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day because he couldn’t handle the fact it was raining.  He mocked a reporter suffering from congenital joint condition in front of a rally by doing an impersonation of him that an obnoxious kid would do of someone with cerebral palsy.

 

He suggested injecting bleach as a cure for Covid-19.   He describing developing-world nations as ‘shithole countries’.  He leched after his own daughter, talking about her ‘breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her.’  He told 30,573 lies, according to the Washington Post.  Oh, and when he lost the presidential election in 2020, he claimed, baselessly, it’d been ‘rigged’ and incited a mob of his dingbat supporters to attack the US Capitol, where they chanted about hanging Trump’s own vice-president and tried to prevent Joe Biden’s victory in the election being formalised.

 

The Trump version of How Will You Go?, season one, was a ratings hit.  In fact, a sufficient number of Americans thought it was so wonderful that they voted Trump back into the White House in 2024 for a second season.  And, so far, season two hasn’t disappointed.  How far can the man go this time?  Why, far, far lower!

 

He’s threatened to annex the USA’s next-door neighbour and important ally and trading partner Canada, so that now everyone in Canada hates his guts, won’t visit his country and spend money there, and won’t buy American products like American bourbon.  He’s threatened to annex Greenland, which belongs to a country in a military alliance the USA is in, an alliance whose basic doctrine would require all the other member countries to go to war with the USA if he attempted to annex it.  Makes sense, yes?

 

From wikipedia.org / © The White House

 

He’s shamelessly sucked up to Putin, again.  He’s insulted reporters, often female ones – intelligent and independent-minded women are obviously a group he has serious issues with – calling them ‘piggie’ and ‘crooked or stupid’ and ‘corrupt’ with ‘hatred in her eyes’.  He’s whinged like a spoilt brat about not receiving a Nobel Peace Prize.  He’s fallen asleep in meetings and press conferences after he sneeringly dubbed his presidential predecessor ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden.  He’s relentlessly posted AI crap on his Truth Social platform, including footage of him in a plane dropping gigantic turds on ‘No Kings’ protestors, pictures of himself as Jesus, and images depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

 

He’s also allowed himself to be bounced into a war against Iran by Benjamin Netanyahu, with the result that the Strait of Hormuz, and the maritime route carrying 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, are now blocked.  The other day, he claimed his administration and the Iranians were on the brink of agreeing on a peace deal…  But as he’s already claimed this about 40 times since the conflict started in February, I’m not going to hold my breath.  At least for Trump, it takes folk’s minds off his sizeable presence in the Epstein Files.

 

To spice things up even further, the producers of season two of How Low Will You Go? have brought in additional cast-members to give Trump a run for his money in going low.  Thus, we’ve had Vice President J. D. Vance insulting single women who keep cats and being a malicious prick towards the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a leader with more courage in his little finger than Vance and Trump have in their entire, make-up-enhanced bodies.

 

They’ve also introduced the ultra-ridiculous Pete Hegseth, who was Trump’s Secretary of Defence until Hegseth persuaded him to change the title to the more manly and harder-sounding ‘Secretary of War’, and who pees his pants in rage when press photographers take pictures of him from what he considers unflattering angles.  At a recent gathering in France commemorating the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day landings, Hegseth gave a speech condemning European nations for allowing their beaches to be “stormed by different, dangerous ideologies”, i.e., people he considers not sufficiently white enough and Christian enough to be let in.  I really don’t know why Hegseth turned up at this event.  After all, 82 years ago, his side lost.

 

Today, June 14th, we get another episode in How Low Will You Go?  It’s Trump’s 80th birthday and he’s marking it by staging Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bouts on the South Lawn of the White House.  The Las Vegas-based UFC organises ‘mixed martial-arts’ combat – basically, violent ‘anything-goes’ scraps – inside cages.  So, the seat of the American presidency is about to host cage fights.  That really resonates with the dignity of the place and those who’ve lived there in the past, one-time holders of the USA’s highest office like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.  If Honest Abe, FDR, JFK and the rest are watching this from the clouds, they’ll be doing so between their fingers.

 

What’s been installed for those UFC bouts consists of an enclosed octagonal ring with a huge, claw-like superstructure built over it with clusters of lights and big TV screens attached.  The ring is emblazoned with the names of sponsors like Bud Light, Toyo Tires and Pit Boss Grills.  And, inevitably, the web address crypto.com features prominently too.

 

It makes me think of the 1986 movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and the hemispherical gladiatorial arena where Max and Blaster had to fight it out with chainsaws and sledgehammers.  Trump’s spectacle at the White House sounds just as dystopian – though at least in the Mad Max movie, the dictator presiding over things was played by Tina Turner.  I’d have her as my dystopian overlord rather than the revolting, decaying Trump any day of the week.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Warner Bros / Kennedy Miller Productions

 

Oh well, I suppose there’s one silver lining to this.  Trump’s crass preoccupation with having UFC fighters slug it out on his lawn has at least diverted his attention from the Football World Cup, which kicked off in Canada, Mexico and the USA a few days ago.  He hasn’t tried to insert himself into that, so far.  I was particularly worried he’d turn up at yesterday’s match between Scotland and Haiti in Boston, since he loves talking about his Scottish roots – his mother hailed from the Isle of Lewis – and since he hates Haitians.  (During the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, both he and Vance yet again showed how low they’d go by lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating people’s domestic pets.)  If he’d shown his orange face at the match, I think I would have found myself wanting Haiti to win, just to sicken him.*

 

*Trump didn’t appear, I was able to support Scotland as normal and Scotland won, just about.  Phew.       

Posted on

Steve Cashel holds on a moment

 

© Still Here Magazine

 

Still Here Magazine has just published its fourth issue, which is subtitled Moments That Hold Us and contains 56 poems, 25 prose-items and 17 artworks inspired by the themes of precious experiences and memories.  I’m pleased to say that I have a 1000-word short story included in this issue.  It’s called Flawless and it appears under one of my pseudonyms, Steve Cashel.

 

Flawless is the tale of a naïve and somewhat pretentious young backpacker making his way through Sri Lanka in the early 2000s.  He has an experience that seems to him both a moment of perfect happiness and an epiphany.  But then he discovers he’ll have to make a sacrifice if his memory of it is to be preserved – to be kept ‘flawless’.  The story isn’t autobiographical but, remembering what I was like as a youth traipsing around Europe in the early 1980s, being adventurous but also taking myself far too seriously, it feels like it could be.

 

Steve Cashel is the penname I usually attach to non-fantastical stories set in Scotland.  Though Flawless is set in Sri Lanka, it contains a few references to Edinburgh and so feels like a Cashel story.

 

With photography and occasional paintings interspersed among the poetry and prose, and with each page literally abloom with pale but luxuriant shades of green, Still Here Magazine’s fourth edition is a visual as well as a textual treat.  It can be downloaded for free here.

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Agnes, Queen of the West

 

© Polygon Books

 

By a coincidence I’d just finished reading Gentlemen of the West (1984), the first book published by the late Scottish writer Agnes Owens, when I learned that May 24th – last Sunday – was the 100th anniversary of Owens’s birth.  This article in last Sunday’s Observer informed me.

 

A long time ago, I’d read nine of Owens’s short stories included in Lean Tales (1985), an anthology showcasing work by her and her friends (and originally mentors) Alasdair Gray and James Kelman.  No disrespect to Gray and Kelman, but I thought her stories were the best stuff in Lean Tales and one of them, Arabella, blew me away.  In just six pages, Arabella paints a devastating picture of the title character, who may or may not be a witch.  Arabella obviously doesn’t have much command of , or regard for, normal social skills.  She visits her parents seemingly oblivious to the fact her mother can’t stand the sight of her, she isn’t someone you’d want looking after your pets (though she owns four dogs, whom she carts around in a pram), and her way of dealing with a sanitary inspector’s visit to her ruinous house is not for the weak-stomached.

 

Arabella was the story that brought her to the attention of her literary peers.  In the late 1970s Gray, Kelman and the poet Liz Lochhead ran evening classes in creative writing in Owens’s hometown of Alexandria, northwest of Glasgow.  Owens attended the first class and gave a copy of Arabella to Lochhead, who read it on the train back to Glasgow.  Lochhead recalled trying “to put this terrifying, terribly funny story, so anarchic and archetypal, so short and so complete, together with the class I’d just left and that middle-aged lady in the neat coat and woolly hat with the fringe of dark blonde hair sticking out and the full mouth that turned so decisively down at the corners.”  Owens, who’d been busy raising seven children and working variously as a typist, factory worker and cleaner, later claimed she’d only signed up for the writing course to ‘get out of the house’.

 

Anyway, I’m a fan of Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain (2020), Young Mungo (2022) and the forthcoming John of John (2026), and I recently read an article of his on Literary Hub entitled Poverty, Anxiety and Gender in Scottish Working-Class Literature.  This recommended a reading list that included Agnes Owens’s Gentlemen of the West alongside such better-known titles as Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (1994), Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam (1954), Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995).  Stuart described her as “one of the most detailed observers of working-class life that I have ever read” and opined that “her writing brings a tenderness and a kindness to a hard, industrial landscape that is usually dominated by men.”  I realised I had on my bookshelf a very old copy of Gentlemen of the West that I’d purchased in a charity shop and, following Stuart’s endorsement, I retrieved it and read it.

 

The book can be described as either a collection of connected short stories, told by the same narrator, or an episodic novel, each chapter recounting an adventure experienced by its hero.  That hero is Mac, a young west-of-Scotland man who spends his time toiling in frequently shite weather on a building site, jousting with his curmudgeonly mother in the small tenement flat he shares with her, and drinking in the local pub, the Paxton, among a weird, sometimes frightening range of what could be euphemistically termed ‘characters’.  The tenor of Mac’s existence is nicely summed up by the opening paragraphs of one story / chapter entitled Christmas Day at the Paxton:

 

“It was Christmas Day, a Saturday.  The streets were covered in ice and nothing was moving except me.  There was not a soul, a dog or even a bus in sight and worst of all I suspected the pubs would be closed.  I headed in the direction of the Paxton with my mother’s Christmas message ringing in my ears.

 

“’Where’s yer Christmas present ye ask?  Well, where’s mine?  Every year it’s the same.  Not a sausage dae I get aff ye.  No’ even an extra pound an’ a’ the neighbours showing aff their presents.   Well, I’m sick o’ it – ‘

 

“’And a Merry Christmas to you!’ I had shouted as I walked out.”

 

The reader never loses sight of the precariousness of Mac’s life.  In the following story, The Aftermath, he reports, “All the week after Christmas I was in a foul mood.  It was a long holiday for the building-site worker.  My money was gone by Boxing Day.  I faced New Year without a penny in my pocket…”  In the Paxton, he often wonders where his next beer or whisky will come from – though modern readers may find it quaint that the stories are set in an era when a pint cost 50 pence.  Of course, wages then were correspondingly low.  (Incidentally, I’m of a vintage whereby I can just remember being able to buy two pints of Light for a pound at the Rugby Club’s wee upstairs bar on the Northgate in Peebles.)

 

Among the tales recounted in Gentlemen of the West…  Mac, a Protestant, goes looking for a dead friend’s memorial service and gets stuck in a Roman Catholic chapel while mass is being performed.  He encounters an old schoolmate who then limpets onto him when he discovers there’s a gang after him.  He intervenes when he believes his mother is getting too friendly with a character called Proctor Mallion, who’s the very last person he wants as a stepdad – “His first wife ran away wi’ the insurance man and his second left him efter he pushed her out the windae.  Lucky for her it wis on the ground floor”.

 

He gets paid off at his work following a row between the brickies and the building site’s boss-man.  He gets re-hired, only to discover later the boss-man has employed as a general labourer someone called McCluskie, who’s just spent time in prison for manslaughter.  Mac explains the crime to a young apprentice thus: “…if I take this brick hammer an’ smash it ower yer heid, that would be murder.  On the other haun’, if I accidentally push ye aff the scaffolding when ye get up, that’s manslaughter.”

 

© Little, Brown Book Group Limited

 

There’s a supporting cast that includes the winos who drink by a local riverbank – “Billy Brown, Big Mick, Baldy Paterson and Craw Young… huddled round a large flat stone that displayed two bottles of Eldorado wine and some cans of beer” – and the memorably erratic Paddy McDonald who lives in a tumbledown bothy alongside “live rabbits in the oven – lucky for them it was in disuse – pigeons in a cage in the bedroom, and a scabby cat always asleep at the end of a lumpy sofa, with the dog at the other end.”

 

It’s tempting to view Gentlemen of the West, episodic in nature and populated by unfortunates and never-do-wells, as a forerunner to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.  But there are important differences.  Mac and at least some of his associates are in employment.  That employment’s shaky, though.  And as the 1980s unfold, you dread to think how the doctrine of Thatcherism (resources concentrated in London and southeastern England, to hell with the rest of Britain) will upend their community.  Also, they don’t have the drug-fueled nihilism of Welsh’s characters, though I suppose the Trainspotting gang could be seen as the feral, heroin-raddled offspring of Mac and his mates a generation later.

 

If you compare the chapter / story Up Country, in which Mac makes a spontaneous daytrip out of his town, ends up on a boat on the Firth of Clyde with “some sightseers on deck with the loud English patter”, and then ends up for a few hours on an uninhabited island, with the episode in Trainspotting where Renton and co. briefly visit the Scottish Highlands, the differences are stark.  Mac blunders around the island like an innocent child, first feeling euphoric (“The view was terrific, all lochs and mountains.  I felt contempt for my mates who would be firmly established in the boozer by now, slugging away at whisky and beer, unaware that were better ways of passing the time”), then feeling creeped out as he realises he’s all alone there and stumbles across a small cemetery.  In Trainspotting, the Scottish scenery inspires the far more cynical Renton to embark on his famous rant about the Scots: “The lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation.”

 

On his way back from the island, Mac encounters an eccentric German tourist who’s come to Scotland “to study castles…  Then I shall write my book.”  Mac reacts with bemusement but also respect: “I looked after him wishing I could be as sure of everything.”  He even takes inspiration from him and the story ends with the line, “…some day I will get away from this place.  Some day I might go and see castles myself.”  In Welsh’s novel, unlike Danny Boyle’s 1996 film adaptation of it, Renton and the others don’t run into a foreign tourist.  But with drug habits to finance, you know their reaction to one would be far more predatory.

 

In other parts too of Gentlemen of the West, we see decency in Mac, for example, in his interactions with the hapless Paddy McDonald.  And we see it in other characters.  McCafferty, in charge of the building site, comes across as an insufferable dick in the episode Paid Aff, but in the very next one, McCluskie’s Out, he’s willing to give a second chance to a guy just out of prison.

 

But the book’s real heart isn’t Mac but his long-suffering and sharp-tongued mother, the ‘auld wife’ as he calls her.  On the surface, their relationship is one of never-ending bickering and arguing – ‘banter’ is much too gentle a word for it.  Yet it’s clear that the auld wife is the bedrock supporting Mac’s meandering, occasionally chaotic existence.  And no doubt there are countless other, resilient women in the surrounding tenements providing a similar service to countless other men.  Owens, whose son John was a bricklayer, was probably all too familiar with the role.  In the article in the Observer, John is quoted as saying that if his mother based Mac and the Auld Wife’s relationship on the relationship she had with him, things were “a bit exaggerated… though I may be forgetting how cheeky I could have been as a young man.”

 

Only at the end of the final story / chapter, Goodbye Everybody, is the true nature of their relationship made explicit.  Mac makes good on the promise he made in Up Country and sets off for Aberdeen in the hope of finding a better living for himself.  It’s impossible not to feel a lump in your throat as you read his account of the morning of his departure and he describes how his usually formidable mother is ‘shaking’ and ‘searching for words’.  When he walks off down the street, not looking back, he knows “she would stay there watching until I was out of sight.”

 

And you suddenly appreciate Douglas Stuart’s observation that Agnes Owens brings a ‘tenderness’ and ‘kindness’ to a ‘hard, industrial landscape… dominated by men.’

 

From Glasgow Women’s Library

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Happy World Goth Day 2026

 

From youtube.com / © South Park Studios

 

I know time seems to speed up as you grow older, but it still feels weird to me that we’re not only into another year, 2026, but we’re already nearing its halfway point.  In fact, today, we’ve reached May 22nd.  And rolling around again – again? – is World Goth Day.

 

According to its Wikipedia entry, May 22nd became the annual day of celebration for the world’s darkest-clad, whitest-eyelinered, most sunlight-shunning musical sub-culture when “UK-based goth DJ Lee Meadows, aka DJ Cruel Britannia (currently known as BatBoy Slim), wrote a MySpace blog suggesting the idea of initiating a ‘Goth Day’ to a very positive reception.  In 2010, he and London-based DJ Martin Oldgoth decided to make the concept global, both ‘as a bit of fun’ and to create an environment of positivity and unity within the goth community.”

 

From worldgothday.com / © BatBoy Slim

 

As is customary on this blog, I’ll mark the occasion by providing links to a dozen of my favourite Goth songs on YouTube.  As ever, I apologise if you first have to endure some annoying corporate and insipid YouTube advertisements, packed with AI-generated visual crap, which are the antithesis of the mystical, elegiac and tenebrous aesthetic of Goth culture.

 

To get the ball rolling, here’s Wytches Chant ’98 by English Goth band Inkubus Sukkubus, whom noted punk / Goth journalist Mick Mercer described as ‘a zombie version of Fleetwood Mac.’  (Many would argue that the real Fleetwood Mac have been fairly zombified for the past few decades anyway.)  So, let’s raise our voices and sing along to that Wytches Chant ‘98: “Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Inanna…”

 

A while ago I was looking at an online list of ‘underrated Goth bands’ and discovered Container 47 and their song Razor End Falling.  The band don’t have a Wikipedia page and all I know about them is that they’re from Italy and have been on the go since the early 2000s.  This song, to me at least, is agreeably heavy.

 

On the same ‘underrated Goth bands’ list, I noticed the name the Rose of Avalanche.  Wow, I thought – I hadn’t heard of them since they supported the Mission at a gig in Aberdeen in the mid-1980s.  They originally broke up in 1993 but, following a 26-year hiatus, reformed in 2019.  I found their 1985 single LA Rain enjoyably audacious – it takes the sound, ambience and languid pace of a typical Lou Reed / Velvet Underground song and drenches it in a shimmery, Gothy 1980s guitar-sound.

 

From roseofavalanche.com / © The Rose of Avalanche

 

Here’s some more rain, served up by the Swedish Goth band Miazma (which, from soon after its inception in the late 1990s, has apparently consisted of just one musician, Kristian Olofsson).  It’s called Black Rain.  Including this song on the list saves me having to include anything by the seminal Goth outfit the Sisters of Mercy because, frankly, Miazma sounds uncannily like the Sisters of Mercy, down to Olofsson’s vocals, which reproduce the nonchalant gruffness of the Sisters’ frontman, Andrew Eldritch.  On the other hand, a band whom this Miazma shouldn’t be confused with is another band called Miazma, which is actually a death metal one from Australia’s Alice Springs.

 

And yet more rain…  If Scottish alternative-rock brothers Jim and William Reid, aka the mighty Jesus and Mary Chain, knew I’d included one of their songs in a list of Goth tunes, I suspect they’d come round to my house and murder me – using hammers.  Well, tough luck, guys – I am including you.  I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain perform in Singapore last month and the gig, at the city-state’s Esplanade Theatre, attracted a fair number of Singaporean Goths.  And I think their song Nine Million Rainy Days, from the aptly titled 1987 album Darklands, is dripping with Gothic doom, gloom and darkness, as evidenced by the lyrics, “As far as I can tell / I’m being dragged from here to hell / All my time in hell was spent with you…”

 

Halfway through, however, Nine Million Rainy Days veers off in an unexpected direction when it borrows the famous ‘woo-woo’ backing vocals that grace the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil (1969), though here they mutate into ‘woo-woo, woo-woo, woo!’

 

Talking of the Rolling Stones, eyebrows were recently raised when Mick, Keef and Ronnie announced that Robert Smith of the legendary Goth band the Cure would be contributing to their next album.  The Stones’ straight-up, unpretentious, bluesy, rock ‘n’ roll swagger seems light-years removed from the Cure’s meticulous, brooding atmospherics, so I don’t know how that’ll work out.  Meanwhile, the Cure and possibly their greatest album, 1989’s Disintegration, have been on my mind lately because my lovely mother-in-law gave me a Cure / Disintegration T-shirt as a present for my last birthday.  So, from that album, here’s the song Lullaby.  The link takes you to the song’s memorable video, where Smith, in pyjamas, sings worriedly about “Mr Spider-man” having him “for dinner tonight.”

 

 

In fact, Disintegration is such a masterpiece I could have included any song off it: Fascination Street, Plainsong, Pictures of You, etc.  No wonder that in a 1998 episode of the scabrous TV cartoon show South Park, Kyle Broflovski shouts at Robert Smith, “Disintegration is the best album ever!”  (Admittedly, he was rather excitable by that point.  His town had been pulverised by Barbra Streisand, who’d transformed into a giant, robot-kaiju called Mecha-Streisand, and Robert Smith had saved the day by transforming into a giant moth and hurling her into outer space: “I have to try,” sighed the Cure’s front-man. “I can’t let Barbra Streisand do this to the entire world.”)

 

And now for a younger band.  Boy Harsher are a darkwave duo consisting of singer Jae Matthews and producer Augustus Muller, who hail from the American state of Georgia.  They cite among their influences the late, visionary filmmaker David Lynch, though with the next track on my list, a remastered version of Boy Harsher’s 2014 single Pain, I get more of a vibe of the synth tracks John Carpenter devised for the soundtracks of his 1970s and 1980s movies.  That’s initially at least, before Pain’s propulsive beat carries all before it.

 

Actually, Pain features in a movie itself.  It can be heard during a party scene in the 2022 horror film Terrifier 2.  I haven’t seen it, but I think that’s the one where the villain (Art the Clown) flays a victim and then rubs salt into the wound by, er, rubbing salt into the victim’s catastrophic wounds.  So, having a song called Pain in the film was appropriate.

 

From wikipedia.org / © GRIT PHOTOZINE

 

In fact, Pain got a remix in 2018 courtesy of the American musician and producer Luis Vasquez who from 2009 was also the single, official member of the band the Soft Moon.  Fittingly, an influence on the Soft Moon’s sound was the celebrated industrial / electronic rock band Nine Inch Nails, itself a one-man-band for the musician and producer Trent Reznor.  (More on Nine Inch Nails later.)  The next item on the list is one of my favourite Soft Moon songs, Become the Lies, from the band’s final album, Exister (2022).  I have to write about Luis Vasquez and the Soft Moon in the past tense because, tragically, Vasquez died in 2024 aged just 44.

 

Another musician specialising in dark electronica who left us much too soon was Frank Tovey, who as Fad Gadget at the very end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s helped pioneer both the synth-pop and darker, Goth sounds that became popular soon after.  Alas, a heart attack claimed Tovey / Gadget at the age of 45 in 2002.  Here’s his first and possibly most famous single, Back to Nature, from 1979.

 

Fad Gadget has been credited as a big influence on Depeche Mode, though beyond the use of newly affordable musical technology, like synthesisers, I personally can’t see much connection between the ruminative likes of Back to Nature and Depeche Mode’s early, chirpy (and for me, annoying) hits like New Life and Just Can’t Get Enough (both 1981).  Despite being irritated by the early ‘Mode’, I’ve gradually grown to love them as, in their later incarnations, they’ve shifted away from a poppy, kid-friendly synth sound and embraced a darker, harsher, more industrial and Gothic one.

 

Here’s the stomping Barrel of a Gun, the first single off Depeche Mode’s 1997 album Ultra.  The accompanying video shows how far they’d progressed by then from their early-1980s clean-cut-boys-with-synthesisers phase – this is grungy, decadent, Anton Corbijn-directed artiness.  At least, it is until Dave Gahan starts wandering around in a silly coat covered in Christmas-tree lights.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Mute Records

 

Here’s something else that’s silly, this time involving America’s awesomely dark and bleak industrial-rock juggernaut Nine Inch Nails (which is basically musician / vocalist / producer Trent Reznor and whoever happens to be in the studio with him at the time).  No, I’m not saying Nine Inch Nails are silly.  But some years ago, they were the subject of a celebrated musical / video ‘mashup’ whereby editor and content creator Garren Lazar grafted the band’s disturbing song Closer, from the 1994 album The Downward Spiral, onto clips taken from the beloved children’s TV programme The Muppet Show (1976-81).  Hence, the song’s opening drumbeat is performed in the video by Animal, the drummer in the Muppets’ house band, Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.  (Thankfully, Animal doesn’t feature when Reznor sings Closer’s most notorious lyric, “I want to f**k you like an animal.”)

 

Watching Kermit, Gonzo, Miss Piggy and the rest cavort to this song is a reminder that, loveable though the Muppets are, if you first encountered them at a very young age you might have found them a bit sinister.  For example, the stuff in the video involving a frenetically speeded-up Dr Teeth is downright freaky.  Also featured are some of the human guests who appeared on The Muppet Show, such as Alice Cooper, Cloris Leachman, Rita Moreno, Harry Belafonte and Dudley Moore – Moore’s cameo is particularly worth waiting for.

 

However, should anyone be upset at me linking to a comical Nine Inch Nails / Muppets mashup, I’ll throw in a bonus link – to a more sombre and majestic mashup where Rory Gamble transposes Nine Inch Nails’ The Day the World Went Away (from 1999’s The Fragile) onto the trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road – Black & Chrome.  Both sonically and visually, it’s a work of genius.  You’ll punch the air when, one minute and ten seconds in, things get cranked up to 11.

 

Eat Your Makeup is the name of a short film made by American’s God-Emperor of Bad Taste, John Waters, back in 1968.  However, Eat Your Make Up – note the slight difference in the wording – is also the name of a French Goth band and here, to round things off, is their 2005 song I was the Murderer.  It’s a pleasant reminder that at least some of Goth’s musical roots lie in punk rock.

 

© Adipocere Records

Posted on

The comeback kid

 

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Government

 

I’ve always had an unhealthy obsession with politics.  Lately, however, I’ve written less about the subject on this blog because my obsession was becoming literally unhealthy – ruminating on politics and politicians in 2026 was filling my head with dark and depressing thoughts.  Nonetheless, I’ll now make some comments about the election for the Scottish Parliament, which happened on May 7th. That day also saw elections for the Welsh Senedd and for various local authorities in England, but I’ll only mention those in passing.

 

If you’re not a political anorak, you might want to skip this.

 

So: the results were 58 seats for the Scottish National Party (down six from the previous election in 2021); 17 for Scottish Labour (down five); 17 for Reform UK (up 17); 15 for the Scottish Greens (up seven); 12 for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party (down 19); and ten for the Scottish Liberal Democrats (up six).

 

Despite securing six seats less than their 2021 total, and seven seats short of a parliamentary majority, the result was impressive for the SNP in that this is the fifth election in a row where they’ve ended up as the biggest, government-forming party.  Keir Starmer’s Labour government at Westminster, which hasn’t been in power for two years yet and is already as popular as a fart in a spacesuit, would kill for such longevity and  durability.

 

It’s also quite a comeback for SNP leader John Swinney.  Originally Swinney served as SNP leader from 2000 to 2004, when his party was in opposition in the Scottish Parliament.  It wasn’t a happy experience for him.  In the 2003 Scottish election his party dropped from 35 to 28 seats and the following year he resigned.  He later described being opposition leader as “the worst, most awful, most sapping, most soul-destroying job in politics…”

 

Having enjoyed spells as a cabinet minister and Deputy First Minister, Swinney was planning to retire at this year’s election.  However,  in May 2024, after the affable but hapless Humza Yousaf resigned as First Minister, Swinney surprised everyone by standing unopposed for – with his famous negotiating skills, he managed to sweet-talk the formidable likes of Kate Forbes into not running against him – and winning the leadership again, 20 years after losing it.  And this time, he became First Minister of Scotland too.  Many assumed he would act as a ‘caretaker’ FM, until someone younger and with more chutzpah came along, but thanks to this election result he’s likely to be around for a while.

 

While I’d never describe Swinney as someone who sets the heather alight, and if he got a fiver every time someone likened his demeanour to that of a bank manager he’d probably be a billionaire by now, I have to say I think he’s a decent guy and I’d rather have him in charge of Scotland than most other Scottish politicians.  I’m biased in this regard.  As I wrote on this blog before, I encountered him a couple of times during my youth, via my old schoolmate Roger Small, who was best friends with him at university, and I liked him.  But it’s not just me.  Most people, political friends and foes alike, seem to like Swinney.

 

Even the world’s most horrible man, Donald Trump, has a soft spot for him.  In 2025, Trump declared, “John Swinney is a terrific guy — and loves golf and loves the people of this country, and we really appreciate it.”  Yes, I know that Trump thinks Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un are the bees’ knees, so being liked by him isn’t necessarily a ringing endorsement of your character.

 

More recently, when Trump announced the removal of US tariffs on Scotch whisky, Swinney claimed this was due in part to a meeting he had with the US president last September.  He was criticised for saying this by the UK government’s Secretary of State for Scotland Douglas Alexander, who argued that trade agreements weren’t in the remit of a leader of a devolved administration.  But after the election result, Trump messaged, “Congratulations to John Swinney on winning his Re-Election for First Minister of Scotland.  He is a good man, who worked very hard along with the King and Queen of the United Kingdom, with respect to Tariff Relief for Great Scottish Whiskey – and deserves this Big Electoral Victory!”  So now, Dougie Alexander looks a bit of a chump.

 

Trump, being a low IQ individual, misspelt ‘Scottish whisky’ as ‘Scottish whiskey’.  The stuff spelt with an ‘e’ is actually made in Ireland.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Parliament / youtube.com

 

Elsewhere, Scottish Labour and the Scottish Conservatives had their worst ever performances in a Scottish parliamentary election.  Labour leader Anas Sawar hit the headlines back in February when he demanded that Keir Starmer resign as British Prime Minister: “The situation in Downing Street is not good enough. There have been too many mistakes.”  Sarwar’s resignation-call distanced him and his branch of the Labour party from the wildly unpopular Starmer and it generated  a lot of publicity at the time.  But when Starmer said no, he wouldn’t be resigning, it looked less like a political earthquake and more like a mild political bowel-movement.  It highlighted Sarwar’s place as Scottish party leader in the great scheme of things – not high.  It also meant Starmer was embarrassingly conspicuous by his absence in Scotland when Labour started campaigning for the election there.

 

The Scottish Tories have been reduced to a rump, their number of Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) barely in double figures.  Their leader Russell Findlay has tried to talk them up in the Tory-friendly pages of the Scottish Daily Mail, describing them as the ‘Dynamic Dozen’.  I wouldn’t describe any dozen that includes such numpties as Murdo Fraser, the man who once asked Donald Trump if he’d consider buying Glasgow Rangers Football Club, as ‘dynamic’.  Maybe ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘dystopian’.

 

Following a near-extinction event caused by their coalition with the Conservatives in Westminster in the early 2010s, the Liberal Democrats have enjoyed something of a revival.  The passing of time has clearly detoxified their reputation a little in folk’s memories.  That said, I don’t know how anyone can stomach their Scottish leader Alexander Cole-Hamilton, who to me comes across as being insufferably arrogant.

 

And the Scottish Greens have almost doubled their representation in the parliament.  Without wishing to downplay this achievement, I suspect they enjoyed the best of both worlds in relation to the English and Welsh Greens – a separate party – south of the border.  They benefited from the wave of enthusiasm, and publicity, that their southern counterparts experienced earlier this year.  Simultaneously, as a separate party, they were distant enough from them to escape the more recent backlash against the English / Welsh party’s leader Zack Polanski, who stupidly retweeted something about the attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green and then suffered an all-out assault from the right-wing media determined to portray him as an antisemite.  (This despite Polanski being Jewish himself and despite some of the media’s caricatures of him being… hideously antisemitic.)

 

The Scottish Greens are co-led by Gillian Mackay and the chirpy Ross Greer.  I know Greer is a ‘Marmite’ politician for many, but I like how he puts the wind up gammons like Piers Morgan.

 

From youtube.com / © ITV

 

With the SNP on 58 MSPs, and the pro-Scottish-independence Greens on 15, 73 MSPs now support Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, as opposed to 56 unionist MSPs who don’t.  It’s the parliament’s biggest ever pro-independence majority.  Of course, you won’t have heard much about that fact from Scotland’s (unionist-owned) mainstream media, who instead have obsessed on a different fact – that the parliament suddenly has 17 far-right Reform MPs.  Nigel Farage’s extremist party had representation there before, thanks to one MSP defecting to them from the Conservatives.  But today, with Labour, they’re the joint-second biggest party.

 

This has prompted journalists like the Times’s Kenny Farquharson to declare ‘the death of Scottish exceptionalism’ – Scottish exceptionalism being the idea that Scottish voters are more community-orientated, more considerate of their fellow citizens, more leftwing and, generally, nicer than voters than those elsewhere in the UK, especially in England.  Reform’s showing proves that, no, the Scots are just as right-wing and awful as everyone else.

 

Well, I find it nauseating that the  parliament contains 17 MSPs who, if their party ever came to power, would enact Trump-style authoritarian and racist policies.  One of them, Senga Beresford, representing the South Scotland region, has already caused controversy by expressing admiration for fascist lout Stephen Yaxley-Lennon on social media.  But I derive some comfort from the fact that none of those MSPs were elected through the parliament’s first-past-the-post, constituency-based voting system, responsible for deciding 73 of the 129 MSPs.  Reform’s 17 sneaked in afterwards, via the additional, regional-based ‘list’ system.  Also, the Conservatives won 31 seats at the previous election, but have been culled to 12, and that number plus Reform’s 17 puts the total number of right-wingers  at 29 – two less than before.

 

I certainly don’t see Scotland as being exceptional, i.e., better than anywhere else.  I’ve met plenty of Scots who’ve been arseholes as much as arsehole-y people from other places.  But Scotland is still different from other parts of the UK.  If it wasn’t different, it wouldn’t have its own languages, literature, music, sports teams, legal system, educational system, etc.  It wouldn’t have been scunnered by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s while people elsewhere were proclaiming her the new, handbag-wielding messiah.  It wouldn’t have voted heavily against Brexit when people in England and Wales voted for it.  It wouldn’t have its own independence movement with, now, a 57% majority in the Scottish parliament.  I know that sticks in the craws of unionist politicians and journalists who’d have you believe that Scotland is absolutely indistinguishable from the rest of the UK, that a punter from Elgin is identical to a punter from Ely.

 

Talking of journalists, the coverage of the election in the Scottish mainstream media was woeful.  The unionist newspapers (i.e., nearly all of them) spent half the time wailing “Everything in Scotland is shite!” and the other half wailing, “How dare anyone suggest doing anything even vaguely radical to improve things!”  Swinney’s proposal that, in an emergency, the Scottish government should put a cap on the price of essential food products so that poor people could still buy them, was met with hoots of derision – and the sneering observation that the UK government would never allow it.  (A Labour government – “For the many, not the few” – denying someone the right to keep essential foodstuffs affordable for the nation’s poorest people?  Not a great look.)

 

I thought the recent opinion-piece by Scottish journalist Stephen Daisley in the Spectator, calling on the Labour and Conservative parties to get rid of the UK’s devolved parliaments (“Dr. Frankenstein would understand that it was his duty to put down the hideous creature his foolishness and vanity unleashed on the world”), was bad enough.  But the articles that his fellow Scottish journo Chris Deerin penned about Scottish Reform leader Malcolm Offord, for the supposedly left-wing New Statesman, went to arse-licking extremes where no article has gone before.

 

And now, with Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth the First Minister in Cardiff, and Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill the First Minister in Belfast, all three devolved governments in the United Kingdom are helmed by people who see their nations’ futures as being outside that supposedly united kingdom.  Interesting times indeed…

 

But you won’t ever read about that in the newspapers.

 

From wikipedia.org / © User Colin

Posted on

Films I’d like to see remade (Part 2)

 

From wikipedia.org / © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

Here are some more films I remember fondly from my youth that, with sufficient love and skill, I think could be remade as wonderful new films.

 

Dark of the Sun (1968)

When, in my early teens, I saw this action / adventure / war movie on late-night TV, I believed it was the toughest movie ever.  At least, I believed that until I saw William Friedkin’s nail-biting Sorcerer (1977), itself a remake, of Henri-George Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), which promptly stole its crown as Most Badass Film I’d Ever Seen. 

 

But no matter – Dark of the Sun, or The Mercenaries as it was also known, still seemed pretty hardcore to me.  Why, it even had a chainsaw fight in it!  Thanks to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies (1974 onwards) and the Evil Dead movies (1981 onwards), and to one-off entries like Motel Hell (1980) and Mandy (2018), chainsaw fights are ten a penny nowadays.  But back then, seeing someone lunge at someone else with a whirring, metal-toothed power tool was an intense experience.

 

Based on a 1965 Wilbur Smith novel and directed by Jack Cardiff, Dark of the Sun tells the story of some mercenaries being sent into action amidst the Simbas rebellion in early 1960s Congo. It stars Robert Taylor, Yvette Mimieux – Taylor and Mimieux reunited eight years after appearing in George Pal’s charming 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine – Jim Brown, Kenneth More (subverting his usual, cuddly English-gentleman image by playing an alcoholic doctor) and Peter Carsten (playing a vile, child-murdering Nazi).  At the time, critics lambasted the film for what they saw as its extreme violence.  However, as Cardiff noted, the violence depicted didn’t come anywhere near the real atrocities that’d happened in the Congo then, or near the violence featured in movies in later decades.

 

I’d like to see a remake of Dark of the Sun that updates the intensity, grittiness and violence to fit with 2026 sensibilities and that places the action within the context of 2026 geopolitics.  And is more racially sensitive – any racism in the original movie went over my 13-year-old head but I’m sure that, viewing it today, I’d cringe at parts of it.   At the very least, and despite the presence of Jim Brown as one of the mercenaries, I suspect I’d find it infused with a ‘white saviour’ or ‘white man’s burden’ complex.

 

Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan of this film (as is Martin Scorsese) so, as I did with Von Ryan’s Express (1965), I recommend old Quent as the man to helm a remake of it.  I know he’s sworn that he’s only going to make ten films in his lifetime, and his next one will be his last, but I don’t believe that for an instant.

 

Come to think of it, Dark of the Sun has quite a few things in common with Von Ryan’s Express, including a cracking movie film poster designed by the splendid Frank McCarthy and the presence of Nazis.  And like the earlier film, Dark of the Sun prominently features a train.

 

As does my next candidate for a modern remake, which is….

 

© Granada Films

 

Horror Express (1972)

The much-loved British-Spanish movie Horror Express is set on a train hurtling across Siberia in the early 20th century.  The train is being stalked by a decomposing ape-man fossil that’s seemingly come back to life – in fact, it’s possessed by an alien lifeforce and has the power to suck people’s brains out through their eyeballs.  Trying to thwart it are British scientists Sir Alexander Saxon (Christopher Lee) and Dr Wells (Peter Cushing).  Things become even more complicated in the film’s final act when the train is invaded by a bunch of Cossack soldiers, led by Telly Savalas’s villainous Captain Kazan.

 

Directed by Eugenio Martin, Horror Express is basically The Thing (1982) set on board the train from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 classic The Lady Vanishes.  Saxon and Wells are variations on the characters of Charters and Caldicott, the stuffy but unflappable English cricket-lovers in Hitchcock’s movie who get caught up in the chaos.  That said, you never feel Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are playing anyone other than themselves in Horror Express.  During their careers, the two actors made 22 movies together, were close friends offscreen and have an effortless chemistry here.

 

The decaying ape-man in the original movie is still icky, but it would be nice to see it in a modern remake with a decent special-effects budget where it could do properly mind-blowing, spectacularly gruesome Thing-like things.  To play Saxon and Wells, you’d need a pair of British actors who’ve worked together already and possess some of that Lee-Cushing chemistry – maybe Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, from the BBC TV show Sherlock (2010-17)?

 

And to play Savalas’s murderous Captain Kazan, there can be only one man: Nicolas Cage.

 

Theatre of Blood (1973)

Until recently, I’d have been aghast at the thought of anyone remaking Douglas Hickox’s brilliant horror comedy Theatre of Blood, wherein Vincent Price plays an insane and hammily over-the-top Shakespearean actor called Edward Lionheart.  Enraged by the snobbish London theatre critics who’ve bad-mouthed his performances, Lionheart murders them one by one using methods borrowed from the Bard’s plays.  “They’re not going to start killing critics for giving bad notices, are they?” exclaims the campest critic, played by Robert Morley, who eventually meets a grisly fate modelled on events in Titus Andronicus.  A very distinguished cast of English character actors goes the same way as Morley: Michael Hordern, Dennis Price, Arthur Lowe, Harry Andrews, Robert Coote and Coral Browne.

 

© Harbour Productions Ltd / Cineman Productions / United Artists

 

There’s no shortage of famous modern-day British thespians who could play the supporting cast of doomed theatre critics in a remake – I’d enjoy seeing James Corden get the Titus Andronicus treatment – but surely, surely nobody could recreate the absolutely delicious performance that Vincent Price gives as Lionheart in the original movie?

 

Well, I thought that until I saw Ralph Fiennes in this year’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.  Now I’m pretty sure he could be the Vincent Price of 2026.  And actually, Fiennes has played a character not dissimilar to Lionheart in 2022’s The Menu.

 

And if Fiennes wasn’t available, I suppose they could always call on Matt Berry.

 

The Beast Must Die (1974)

Paul Annett’s The Beast Must Die is a low-budget horror movie with an irresistible premise.  It’s about a millionaire big-game hunter, played by Calvin Lockhart, determined to bag a werewolf.  He rigs up his country estate with CCTV cameras and motion sensors, procures a helicopter and invites five unsavoury people to visit for a few days convinced that one of them  is a werewolf.  Among those playing Lockhart’s house-guests and staff are Peter Cushing, Charles Gray, Anton Diffring and a youthful Michael Gambon.  Needless to say, there is a werewolf present, but it gradually turns the tables on Lockhart and his hi-tech equipment, whilst also bumping off the supporting cast.

 

The ideas is irresistible, as I said, but watching The Beast Must Die on TV as a kid was a frustrating experience.  Due to the inevitable budgetary constraints, Lockhart’s mansion house and grounds aren’t that hi-tech and the werewolf, when it appears, just looks like a big dog.  You’d think the sequence where the werewolf takes out a helicopter would be thrilling, but it isn’t.  Let’s remake this one with a proper budget, so that it’s as awesome as it sounded on paper in 1974.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Amicus Productions / British Lion Films

 

Juggernaut (1974)

The most underrated but, in my mind, the greatest of 1970s disaster movies, Richard Lester’s Juggernaut is mostly set on a British ocean liner stuck out in the stormy north Atlantic.  An anonymous call to the company that owns the liner informs it that half-a-dozen bombs have been stashed on board and they’ll explode unless a ransom is paid.  With weather conditions too severe to allow the ship’s crew and passengers to be evacuated, and the authorities forbidding the company to pay the ransom – which would be surrendering to terrorism – a team of bomb-disposal experts led by Fallon (Richard Harris) and his sidekick Charlie (David Hemmings) are sent to try and make the bombs safe.

 

Back on dry land, a policeman (Anthony Hopkins), whose family are among those trapped on the ship, tries to discover the bomber’s identity.  I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but when a twitchy Freddie Jones appears onscreen, you know who it is.

 

Juggernaut has a wonderful cast all round – not just the three ‘H’s of Harris, Hemmings and Hopkins, but also Omar Sharif, Ian Holm, Shirley Knight, Clifton James, Julian Glover and many more.  But the show is quietly stolen by Roy Kinnear, playing the ship’s entertainment officer, who has the thankless task of keeping the passengers’ spirits up when at any moment they could be blown to smithereens.  When he organises a fancy-dress party, one passenger appears dressed as the Grim Reaper and carrying a round black object with BOMB written on it.

 

As well as being massively suspenseful, the film offers social commentary.  The ship is called the Britannic and it’s not difficult to see Juggernaut as a meditation on the sorry plight of Britain in the mid-1970s, its days as a world power well behind it, being battered by global events it had no power over, such as the Oil Crisis.  In 2026, a decade after Brexit and during the chaotic era of Trump, a remake of Juggernaut would be both more poignant and more cutting.

 

You could also cast, in a Juggernaut remake, the sons of three of its original stars, now well established as actors in their own right: Jared Harris, Toby Jones and Rory Kinnear.  But it’d be fun to see them in roles different from those their dads played.  Kinnear as the policeman, Jones as the entertainment officer, Harris as the bomber?

 

© Two Roads / United Artists