Blood and Porridge – Page 3 – Ian Smith's blog on WordPress

August 30, 2024September 2, 2024

Rab Foster makes a straw man argument

© Swords & Sorcery Magazine

The Scarecrow of Terryk Head is the name of a short story I’ve just had published using the pseudonym Rab Foster. I always attribute any fantasy fiction I write to Rab Foster and, accordingly, this story is about an elderly witch who tries to enjoy a peaceful retirement in a remote farming valley, only to have her solitude disturbed by the local farmers, who beg her to use her magical powers to combat a fearsome and malignant totem that’s suddenly appeared at the top of the valley – the titular scarecrow at the titular Terryk Head. The story appears in Issue 151 of the online Swords & Sorcery Magazine.

It wasn’t so long ago that I commented on this blog that I felt scarecrows had been overdone in fantasy fiction. Well, I still believe that, but I thought the idea behind The Scarecrow of Terryk Head was good enough to justify the presence of a tattie-bogle (as we call the things in Scotland). I have to admit the story was influenced, slightly, by scarecrows that appeared in the Thomas Ligotti tale The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, which was published in his 1991 collection Grimscribe: His Lives and Works; and in a story featured in the 2010 collection The Mirror of Paradise by the Sri Lankan writer Asgar Hussein. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what Hussein’s scarecrow story was called, and I haven’t been able to find its title online. But I enjoyed it a lot.

Other influences on The Scarecrow of Terryk Head include, curiously enough, Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970) and, yes, the Bronte sisters. And, writing it, I had fun paying homage to a scene from the 1961 film Murder, She Said. This was a cinematic adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novel 4.50 from Paddington (1957) and starred two of my all-time favourite performers, Margaret Rutherford and James Robertson Justice. What, you may wonder, does a fantasy story about witches and scarecrows have to do with an old black-and-white Miss Marple movie? Well, read the darned thing and find out.

For the next month, The Scarecrow of Terryk Head can be accessed here; while the main-page of the 151^st edition of Swords & Sorcery Magazine, which contains two other stories and an essay, can be reached here.

August 26, 2024September 19, 2024

Who chairs wins

On Friday, August 16^th, two friends and I ventured into the Foochow Building on Singapore’s Tyrwhitt Road to experience Hardcore Island 2: A Fine City, the latest extravaganza staged by the Singapore Pro-Wrestling (SPW) association. We’d been laggardly in getting there, having supped a beer too many in a nearby pub, and arrived near the end of the evening’s first bout: one between local wrestlers CK Vin and Emman. As we entered the hall where the action was taking place, we were greeted by the sight of CK Vin throttling Emman with a folded chair. He’d put the back chair-frame over Emman’s head and had the rear edge of the seat deep in his throat. Unsurprisingly, soon afterwards, Emman submitted.

This, it transpired, was a ‘chairs match’ – which, Wikipedia informs me, is a contest where “only chairs can be used as legal weapons, but the only way to win is by pinfall or submission in the ring.” I liked the publicity blurb with which the SPW presaged CK Vin and Emman’s fight: “You’ll want to get to your seats now before the wrestlers take them all for weapons.”

© Singapore Pro-Wrestling

Before I moved to Singapore, it’d been a long time since I watched a professional wrestling match. In fact, I hadn’t been a fan of the sport since my boyhood in Northern Ireland. This was when World of Sport, Independent Television’s Saturday-afternoon sports show, would always have a four o’clock slot devoted to what people in those days simply called ‘the Wrestling’. Watching the Wrestling on TV, I quickly became obsessed with such larger-than-life figures as Les Kellett, Mark ‘Rollerball’ Rocco, Tally Ho Kaye, Jim Breaks, Mick McManus (catchphrase: “Not the ears! Not the ears!”), Big Daddy (catchphrase: “Easy! Easy! Easy!”), the gargantuan (six-foot-eleven, 685 pounds) Giant Haystacks and the mysterious, masked Kendo Nagasaki who claimed to be channelling “the spirit of a samurai warrior who, 300 years ago, lived in the place that is now called Nagasaki.” (He himself lived in Wolverhampton.) But I never got into the brasher, showier and slightly more glamorous pro-wrestling spectacles served up in subsequent decades by America’s World Wrestling Federation (WWF), later World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). And though for most of the 1990s I lived in Japan, I didn’t get into the super-popular New Japan Pro-Wrestling and All Japan Pro-Wrestling promotions either.

But I’d always enjoyed wrestling movies, such as Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008) or Stephen Merchant’s Fighting with my Family (2019). Okay, Mr. Nanny (1993) with Hulk Hogan not so much. And it often occurred to me that I’d like to see some live bouts. So, last year, when a mate told me of the existence of the SPW and invited me to one of their events, I thought, why not?

Anyway, back to tonight’s proceedings. The second bout on the bill involved two more local wrestlers, Destroyer Dharma and Kentona – the former defeating the latter with a pinfall, which in wrestling jargon is when you hold your opponent’s shoulders against the ring-floor long enough for the referee to count to three. Not for the last time that evening, the fighting spilled out of the confines of the ring and into the surrounding hall – much to the glee of the spectators, always happy to get a close-up view of the carnage. I should say that the crowd was a pleasing mix of young and old, male and female, and Singaporeans and foreigners. It was a far cry from the audiences I remember watching the 1970s British wrestling, which seemed to consist mainly of demented old grannies who’d hobble forward and club Mick McManus with their handbags whenever he was against the ropes.

The third battle tonight was a hotly anticipated one between Singapore’s Jack ‘N’ Cheese and the Gym Bros, who hail from Pattaya in Thailand. Jack ‘N’ Cheese are BGJ, aka Jack Chong, described on his Instagram page as the ‘Beast of Benevolence’; and the Cheeseburger Kid, whose yellow cowl-mask makes him resemble a jaundiced Deadpool. The latter has become a popular fixture of Singapore’s pro-wrestling world and tonight it looked like he had a mini-fan-club in tow – a small but voluble group in yellow T-shirts at the front of the crowd who cheered on his every move. It has to be said of their opponents, the Gym Bros, that they were at least a wee bit camp. One had a headful of Debbie-Harry-style blonde hair and wore white spats up to his knees. The other sported a weedy moustache and was clad in tight pink shorts whose contours left little to the proverbial imagination.

To the delight of everyone – bar the Gym Bros – Jack ‘N’ Cheese won the bout through another pinfall. And nobody was more delighted than the Cheeseburger Kid, who reacted to victory by leaping up into BGJ’s arms and posing there for the cameras.

Next came a tussle between two more wrestlers from the SPW roster: Bryson Blade, wearing bad-boy black-leather pants, and Referee Ryan, who, appropriately for a person sometimes working as a referee, was attired in a more sober costume of black and white. This was billed as a ‘Loser Gets Caned Match’. The blurb for it declared, “…the loser will be forced to take a lashing with a Singapore cane post-match! Gather round, people! You’re about to be taken back, school assembly style.” That references the fact that Singapore not only allows caning as a judicial punishment – a maximum of 24 strokes for a range of criminal offences – but also as a corporal punishment in schools, for male pupils who commit serious offences. (Actually, it took me back, since corporal punishment was still legal in Northern Irish schools in the 1970s and I got caned a few times, though not with a Singaporean rattan cane but a beechwood one.)

Eventually, Referee Ryan lost through a pinfall and ended up receiving ‘five of the best’. I wasn’t sitting near enough to the ring to be sure, but I suspect the cane-strokes may not have landed with the fullest possible force.

Following a 15-minute interval, bout number five saw another pair of Singaporean wrestlers in action, Zhang Wen and Riz. The former won, again by a pinfall. Then came a trio of female wrestlers slugging it out in a three-way battle. Representing Singapore in this scrap was the formidable Alexis Lee, who also goes under the moniker ‘Lion City Hit Girl’ and is the city-state’s very first lady pro-wrestler. The Straits Times newspaper recently described her as “…a rampaging figure of death, who will stomp and slam her opponents swiftly and ruthlessly.” I assume the Straits Times writer got the ‘figure of death’ idea from the white skull-make-up that covers half her face and her costume of tank-top, shorts and leggings patterned with bones and ribs. Her foes tonight were two Japanese wrestlers, Miyu ‘Pink Striker’ Yamashita and Koya Toribami. I know tori is the Japanese word for ‘bird’, which may explain why the latter fighter turned up in an elaborate, beaked bird-costume.

After a hard-fought contest – at one point the three of them were engaged in a sort of treble bearhug, with the bird-themed Koya Toribami caught in the middle like a piece of chicken in a chicken sandwich – Alexis Lee won with a pinfall. Afterwards, outside the ring, she posed defiantly with a glass of beer, which she’d definitely earned.

The seventh and final bout was an all-Singaporean affair pitching two teams of three wrestlers against each other – the Horrors, consisting of Aiden Rex, Dr Gore and Da Butcherman, and the Midnight Bastards (billed in some quarters as ‘State of Bastards’), consisting of RJ, Mason and Andruew Tang, aka the Statement. Despite being the co-founder of and head coach at SPW, Tang / the Statement has a villainous ring persona: “Embrace the Statement or I will make a statement out of you!” This was billed as an ‘Xtreme Rules’ match, which meant there were no rules. Not only chairs could be utilized as weapons, but also tables, a big wooden board that someone dragged out from under the ring, and even a stepladder. Yes, I’d noticed how that stepladder had been parked all evening at the far end of the hall and wondered when it was going to come in handy. It did when the spiky-mohawked Da Butcherman clambered up one side of it, and Andruew Tang, in gold-streaked trousers, clambered up its other side, and they faced off at the top.

At another point, the wrestlers hurriedly assembled, IKEA-style, a table in the ring. Then someone poured dozens of small, multicoloured, plasticky things across the tabletop. And soon after, an opponent got slammed down on the covered table, on his back. Ouch! One of my friends thought the plasticky things might be drawing pins. I had a horrible suspicion, though, that they were pieces of Lego. I remember how much my foot hurt after I stepped on a Lego-piece as a kid, so having your back thumped down against a whole table’s worth of those must be hellishly sore.

Anyway, thanks to yet another pinfall, the Horrors emerged victorious. And that was it for the night. Just to make the experience a little bit sweeter, on our way out, we encountered the Cheeseburger Kid standing at the Foochow Building’s entrance. We told him how much we’d enjoyed his fight and he seemed to genuinely appreciate our warm words.

Certain sports purists might quibble about the tongue-in-cheek, even corny nature of some of what was on show tonight. But the SPW’s get-togethers never fail to provide fun and excitement. The city / island state of Singapore has a reputation for being a calm, ordered and well-run place, but it’s nice to think that there’s a little part of it where, thanks to the SPW, for an occasional few hours, good-natured anarchy takes over. Where it becomes an anything-goes ‘lion city’ or a riotous ‘hardcore island’. Where – to borrow a quote from Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) – “Chaos reigns!”

August 19, 2024August 22, 2024

God save the queen

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

I see a new Alien movie has just been released. Entitled Alien: Romulus and directed by Fede Alvarez, it’s had variable reviews – for instance, Peter Bradshaw gave it two stars in the Guardian, Kim Newman gave it three stars in Sci-fi Now and John Nugent gave it four stars in Empire. My tastes generally align with Newman’s, so I suspect if I go to see it, I’ll find Alien: Romulus a middling cinematic experience. I suspect too the critics reacting most positively to the film are secretly doing so out of relief that co-producer Ridley Scott didn’t insist on it having Michael Fassbender play a certain, cocky android spouting tediously about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Anyway, this gives me an excuse to reprint something I once wrote about James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), the second entry in the series. Film fans will probably spend the rest of time arguing about whether it or Ridley Scott’s 1979 original is the best Alien movie of all, but Aliens is probably my favourite. That may be because I first saw it in a more conducive environment – a packed cinema in Aberdeen shortly after its release, where the audience initially didn’t know what to expect but certainly showed their appreciation when the thrills started coming. (Whereas I first saw Scott’s Alien at a gathering of my high school’s film club, where the building tension was seriously interrupted by a ten-minute break when a teacher had to change the reels on the projector, and I watched the movie surrounded by loudmouth, smartass, wanker-teenager schoolmates.)

Here, then, is my paean to Aliens… With some bonus Father Ted.

© Hat Trick Productions / Channel 4

Scene: The living room of the Parochial House on Craggy Island during a 1996 episode of Father Ted. The elderly and infirm Bishop Jordan, one of a visiting trio of church dignitaries, has just been explaining how he had a heart attack last year and needs to avoid having sudden surprises and shocks.

Father Dougal (bellowing at the top of his voice): AAAAAHHHHH!

Bishop Jordan almost suffers a heart attack on the living room sofa.

Father Ted (seeing Bishop Jordan’s distress): Dougal! What are you doing?!

Father Dougal: Sorry, Ted – I just remembered Aliens is on after the news!

Father Ted: Dougal, for God’s sake! (To the stricken Bishop Jordan, who has almost collapsed off the sofa.) I’m sorry, Bishop Jordan! (To Dougal.) Did you not hear what he’s saying about his heart?

Father Dougal: I know, but it’s just that it’s the Director’s Cut! Come on everyone, let’s all have a lads’ night in!

Father Ted: Dougal, just shut up! (To Bishop Jordan.) Ha-ha. A heart attack? That’s rare enough these days.

Bishop O’Neill (trying to help Father Jordan back onto the sofa): There were certainly a lot of prayers said for Bishop Jordan –

Father Dougal: I don’t know why we can’t look at Aliens –

Father Ted: Dougal! Bishop O’Neill is speaking.

Father Dougal: But… They’d love it, Ted!

Father Ted: No, they wouldn’t!

Father Dougal: But bishops love sci-fi –

Father Ted: DOUGAL! WE ARE NOT WATCHING ALIENS!

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

Like Dougal in that old episode of Father Ted, I still get irrationally excited when I discover that James Cameron’s Aliens is about to get another airing on TV. And during the first occasion I watched it, there were a few moments when, like the beleaguered Bishop Jordan, I thought my heart was about to pop. Yes, Aliens is a film that gets the adrenalin sluicing through you like almost no other.

It’s remarkable that the film achieves this when it’s a sequel. One of the Great Laws of the Cinema is that, compared to the original films, sequels are almost always rubbish. Certainly, that law seemed to hold true in the 1980s, when cinema audiences were subjected to such puddings as Halloween II (1981), Grease 2 (1982), Rocky III (1982) and IV (1985), Jaws 3-D (1983), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988), Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) and Beverley Hills Cop II (1987). Oh, and Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981), which was directed by a certain James Cameron…

Aliens’ task was particularly daunting. It was to be the follow-up to Ridley Scott’s magnificent haunted-house-in-space movie, 1979’s Alien.

It’s unsurprising that while Cameron was shooting the sequel at Buckinghamshire’s Pinewood Studios in the mid-1980s, he had to put up with a sceptical British crew who were of the opinion that this bearded early-thirty-something Canadian wasn’t fit to lick the boots of the mighty Ridley. Mind you, the contempt was reciprocated by Cameron. A man used to pursuing his vision with the single-minded ruthlessness of The Terminator (1984) – the film that he’d directed between the Piranha sequel and the Alien sequel – Cameron was not impressed by the crew’s Great British working practices like stopping every couple of minutes to have a tea-break.

The resulting movie shows no disrespect to Ridley Scott or the original Alien. It simply takes a very different approach to the hideous, slimy, fanged, multi-jawed, acid-blooded title creatures. Whereas Alien sets one of them loose in a giant spaceship and Scott milked the scenario for all the clammy, claustrophobic horror it was worth, Cameron unleashes a whole army of them in and around a base on a distant planet and declares out-and-out war on the bastards, courtesy of a well-armed platoon of space marines who’ve journeyed there in the company of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, heroine and sole survivor of the first film. Yes, there’s clamminess, claustrophobia and horror to be found in Cameron’s vision too, but that doesn’t prevent Aliens from also being one of the best action films ever made.

That’s not to say that Aliens is a non-stop rollercoaster from start to finish. Cameron actually takes his time getting his characters to the base (after contact with the 160-strong space colony there is suddenly and mysteriously lost). Wisely, and unlike a lot of directors of scary movies who’ve come since, he gives the audience a chance to get to know, and get to like, his characters. So that when hell does break loose, halfway through the film, we’re genuinely on the edge of our seats because we’re rooting for those characters to survive.

Cameron does such a good job of it that, 38 years on, I still know those characters like they’re dear old friends. There’s Michael Biehn’s reliable Corporal Hicks, who packs an old pump-action shotgun alongside his space-age weaponry (“I like to keep this handy… for close encounters”) and who finds himself in the unexpected position of platoon leader after the aliens’ first onslaught wipes half of it out. There’s Lance Henriksen’s Bishop, the regulation android whom Ripley – mindful of what happened in the first movie – is extremely wary of; though after he’s saved her and saved the other surviving humans three or four times (even after he gets ripped in half) she comes to the realisation that he’s a good, if synthetic, bloke.

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

And there’s the motor-mouthed Private Hudson, played by the late, great Bill Paxton, who gets the film’s best lines. This is both before the aliens show up, when he’s a swaggering, show-offy git – “Hey Ripley, don’t worry. Me and my squad of ultimate badasses will protect you… We got nukes, we got knives, we got sharp sticks!” – and after they show up, when he’s a quivering, whiny git – “Hey, maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events but we just got our asses kicked!”

But Aliens is no simple testosterone-fest. Dougal in Father Ted might have earmarked it for a ‘lads’ night in’ but it’s also, subversively, a chick-flick. At its heart are no fewer than four powerful female characters. There’s the splendid Sigourney Weaver, of course, back in the role of Ripley – though it’s in Aliens that both Weaver and Ripley properly achieve the status of cinematic icons. There’s Carrie Henn as Newt, the waif-like little girl who’s the colony’s only survivor and who, gradually, awakens Ripley’s maternal instincts. While Ripley spends the original movie reacting to and mainly running from the horrors around her, it’s thanks to Newt that in Aliens she becomes increasingly proactive and ends up running at them. Admittedly, that’s when she’s armed with a M41A Pulse Rifle / M240 Flamethrower.

And let’s not forget the impressive Private Vasquez, played by Jenette Goldstein, who’s more than a match than any man in her platoon. “All right,” she snarls at one point, “we got seven canisters of CM-20. I say we roll them in there and nerve-gas the whole f***in’ nest.” And when she’s not shooting down aliens, she’s shooting down Hudson’s bullshit, as happens in the following famous exchange: “Hey Vasquez. Have you ever been mistaken for a man?” “No. Have you?”

The film’s final trump card also takes female form: the Alien Queen. Here, Cameron combines the design of the original alien, by the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, with the concepts of an egg-laying queen termite and a tyrannosaurus rex. He creates a twenty-foot foe of terrifying savagery, strength and tenacity. And when she comes bearing down on Ripley at the movie’s climax, it’s clear to the audience that this is the showdown between the Big Bad Mommas. By this time, the Queen has seen her whole hellish brood wiped out. Meanwhile, Ripley is determined to defend what’s left of her family – Newt and the now-incapacitated Hicks and Bishop – to the death.

What more can I say? Aliens remains exhilarating nearly four decades on. Slowly and inexorably, the first half of the film winches you in. Thereafter, you find yourself strapped into a thrill-ride there’s no escape from. In the words of Private Hudson: “We’re on an express elevator to hell, going down!”

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

August 11, 2024August 11, 2024

Cinematic heroes 5: Richard Johnson

© Variety Film / Variety Distribution

Richard Johnson, who died in 2015 at the age of 87, was a busy and much-admired theatrical actor whose stage CV included Pericles Prince of Tyre, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Cymbeline, Twelfth Night and Antony and Cleopatra and who could boast that he’d worked with stage directors as distinguished as Tony Richardson and Peter Hall.

From the 1970s on, he was also a popular guest star on TV shows on both sides of the Atlantic, so that, for instance, he appeared in Hart to Hart (1979), Magnum P.I. (1981 & 83) and Murder, She Wrote (1987) in the USA and in Tales of the Unexpected (1980, 81 & 82), Dempsey and Makepeace (1986) and the inevitable Midsomer Murders (1999 & 2007) in the UK. Indeed, it was on television that I first saw Johnson, guest-starring in a 1975 episode of Gerry Anderson’s silly but stylish science-fiction show Space: 1999. He played the astronaut husband of series regular Dr Helena Russell (Barbara Bain), who’s been transformed into anti-matter. Even back then, at 10 years old, I found Bain’s character so dull and humourless that this didn’t surprise me. Being married to her would transform anyone into anti-matter.

However, it’s for his film work that I’ll remember him – never more so than for his performance as the main male character, Dr John Markway, in Robert Wise’s spooky-house classic The Haunting (1963). I think The Haunting is one of the scariest films ever made. In fact, both Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese are on record as saying that it’s the scariest film ever made. The fact that The Haunting is based on a terrific novel, 1959’s The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, doesn’t do it any harm, either.

The initially smooth and charming Dr Markway investigates strange phenomena in an old, rambling and supposedly haunted house with a group of helpers – the young man who’s inheriting the place (Russ Tamblyn), a psychic (Claire Bloom) and a lonely oddball called Eleanor Vance (Julie Harris), in whom the house’s supernatural forces start taking an interest. Markway’s wife – Lois Maxwell, who was Miss Moneypenny in the first 14 James Bond movies – also turns up at the premises when things are getting properly scary, which the now-unnerved doctor isn’t happy about.

© Argyle Enterprises / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Director Robert Wise understood that the most frightening things are things we don’t see and are left to our imaginations; because what we are capable of imagining in our mind’s-eye is far worse than anything a special-effects or make-up artist can conjure up onscreen. So, in The Haunting, we hear rather than see. The film’s characters find themselves reacting to all manner of weird and disturbing noises made by mysterious somethings off screen. Wise’s sound editors played these noises aloud while Johnson and his co-stars were filming their scenes, which added to the rattled authenticity of their performances.

In addition, Johnson’s Markway gets to utter the iconic line: “Look, I know the supernatural is something that isn’t supposed to happen, but it does happen.” These words impressed Rob Zombie so much that he and his band White Zombie sampled them on the 1995 song Super–Charger Heaven. (The song also features Christopher Lee from 1976’s To the Devil a Daughter snarling, “It is not heresy and I will not recant!”)

Needless to say, when Hollywood got around to remaking The Haunting in 1999 with action-movie director Jan de Bont at the helm, the result was dire. It abandoned Robert Wise’s ultra-creepy, suggest-don’t-show approach and relied instead on a crass welter of computer-generated special effects. I hate it even more than I hate the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man with Nicholas Cage.

Elsewhere, Richard Johnson’s film biography contains an interesting what-if. In the early 1960s, when Sean Connery was known only as a bit-part actor, former body builder and former Edinburgh milkman, Johnson turned down the opportunity to play James Bond. Terence Young, who was lined up to direct the first Bond movie, 1962’s Dr No, approached him, but Johnson didn’t like the idea of being stuck playing the same character in a long contract.

However, later, Johnson played Bulldog Drummond, a British literary action-hero who’d inspired Ian Fleming when he started writing the Bond novels in the early 1950s. He was Drummond in two movies, Deadlier than the Male (1967) and Some Girls Do (1969), both directed by Ralph Thomas. Ironically, the films are far more influenced by James Bond’s cinematic franchise, massively popular by then, than they are by the original Bulldog Drummond books, which were written from 1920 to 1937 by H.C. McNeile (‘Sapper’) and from 1938 to 1954 by Gerald Fairlie. The books portrayed Drummond as an English gent with combat experience from World War I and, frankly, some very racist views of foreigners, having adventures in an upper-crust world of country houses, servants and vintage motorcars.

© Greater Films Ltd / Rank Film Distributors

I’ve seen Deadlier than the Male and, because I read a few Bulldog Drummond books in my boyhood, I find it fascinatingly peculiar if nothing else. It transfers Drummond to a glamorous Swinging Sixties setting populated with luxurious islands, private jets, yachts, speedboats, brassy music, bikinis, dolly-birds and gadgets (like giant, computer-controlled chessmen). At least, that’s ‘glamorous’ as far as its less-than-Bond-sized budget allows. Its chief gimmick is Elke Sommer and Sylvia Koscina as a pair of voluptuous, presumably sapphic assassins who go about their deadly work with a kooky cheerfulness. “Goodbye, Mr Bridgenorth!” they cry as they tip a victim (played by future 1970s British sitcom-star Leonard Rossiter) off a high building. Mr Kidd and Mr Wint did this schtick more amusingly in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever. Johnson is serviceable as Drummond, but seems bemused by the proceedings. It’s not among his most memorable performances.

Incidentally, in 1951, Johnson’s second-ever film appearance had been an uncredited one as a ‘Control Tower Operator’ in an old-school Bulldog Drummond movie. This was Calling Bulldog Drummond, featuring Walter Pidgeon in the title role.

Johnson’s other 1960s movies include Michael Anderson’s Operation Crossbow (1964), a surprisingly downbeat World War II action-adventure movie in which he plays the British minister who sends George Peppard, Tom Courteney and Jeremy Kemp on a suicide mission to sabotage the Nazis’ V1 / V2 rocket project; and Basil Dearden’s epic costume-drama Khartoum (1966), where he’s an aide to Charlton Heston’s General Charles Gordon, locked in conflict with Laurence Olivier’s Muhammad Ahmed in 1880s Sudan.

For me, his most interesting 1960s role (apart from The Haunting) is 1966’s La Strega in Amore, or The Witch in Love, a black-and-white Italian movie in which he plays a young man hired by a wealthy, elderly woman (Sarah Ferrati) to catalogue her huge library. The manner of Johnson’s recruitment is sinister. First the woman stalks him, then she places in a newspaper a job advertisement that’s so oddly detailed he’s the only person in Rome who can meet its specifications. Despite his misgivings, Johnson decides to stay in the woman’s luxurious palazzo when he meets her beautiful and alluring daughter (Rosanna Schiffiano). But the longer he remains with the two women, the more his grip on reality loosens and the stronger the insinuation becomes that mother and daughter are the same person – two versions of la strega, the witch of the title.

© Arco Films / Cidif

Italian cinema was awash at the time with full-blooded, gothic horror movies, but director Damiano Damiani ploughs his own furrow with La Strega in Amore, making it dreamy rather than macabre and creating something that wouldn’t seem out-of-place in an arthouse cinema. Unfortunately, the film’s premise doesn’t justify its one-hour-49-minute running time and it could have been a half-hour shorter. Still, after seeing Johnson play fairly upright and decent characters, it’s interesting to see him in this playing a vain bastard, somebody you partly feel is getting what he deserves. And after the languid, arty build-up, the film’s nasty climax delivers a jolt.

In 1975, Johnson not only starred in, but also wrote the original story for the forgotten thriller Hennessy, directed by Don Sharpe. This is perhaps the first film inspired by Northern Ireland’s Troubles, which’d erupted in 1969. It’s about an IRA explosives expert (Rod Steiger) who, after the British Army kills his wife and child, decides to blow up the state opening of the British parliament, destroying both the government and the Queen. Johnson gives an endearing performance as the weary, dishevelled policeman trying to stop him.

Hennessy is patchy but has an impressive cast that also includes Lee Remick, Trevor Howard, Eric Porter, a young Patrick Stewart and an even-younger Patsy Kensit (playing Steiger’s doomed daughter). The final scenes in the House of Commons, featuring the Queen, landed the filmmakers in trouble because they used real footage that Buckingham Palace had authorised without knowing it would end up in a film. Also, at the time, the film’s subject-matter was extremely sensitive. As a result, its British cinematic release was almost non-existent.

© Hennessy Film Productions / American International Pictures

Presumably because The Haunting had put him on the radar of horror filmmakers, Johnson continued to appear in scary movies during the 1970s and 1980s. These included Ovidio G. Assonitis and Roberto Piazzoli’s Beyond the Door (1974), Massimo Dallimano’s The Cursed Medallion (1975), Pete Walker’s The Comeback (1978), Sergio Martino’s Island of the Fishermen and The Great Alligator River (both 1979), and Don Sharpe’s What Waits Below (1984). He was also in Roy Ward Baker’s kiddie-orientated The Monster Club (1981). This was the ninth and final horror-anthology movie made by American (but British-based) producer Milton Subotsky. By my calculations, Subotsky’s nine anthologies contain a total of 37 stories. The Vampires, the one featuring Johnson in The Monster Club, is possibly the worst of all 37. You feel like banging your head against the nearest hard surface at the story’s punchline, when the bloodsucking Johnson reveals he’s escaped destruction at the hands of some vampire-hunters thanks to a ‘stake-proof vest’.

In 1979, 16 years after The Haunting, Johnson played another doctor, a medical one, in a very different sort of horror movie. This was the Italian film Zombie Flesh Eaters, directed by the legendary Lucio Fulci. He was Dr Menard, the weary, dishevelled – by this time Johnson was good at doing ‘weary and dishevelled’ – but stoical GP on a remote Caribbean island trying to deal with an epidemic of reanimated, hungry cadavers. The movie is both gleefully gory and lovably schlocky, with its highlights including a once-seen-never-forgotten underwater battle between a shark and a zombie. Despite this, Johnson gives it his all. He spouts the less-than-epic dialogue with as much earnestness as he would doing Shakespeare.

Financial pressures meant Johnson wasn’t able to retire and he continued working until his death. According to his Wikipedia entry, he said in a 2000 interview he was “constantly worried where the next job was coming from,” but then quipped: “At least at my age the opposition gets less and less because they keep dying.” His 21^st century roles included ones in Simon West’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Woody Allen’s Scoop (2006), Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008) and Tom Browne’s acclaimed Radiator (2014).

Also in his later years, after Lucio Fulci had become a cult figure and Zombie Flesh Eaters had become something of a camp classic, Johnson was invited to horror movie conventions to discuss his experiences making the film. A serious Shakespearean actor he may have been, but he always sounded gracious and affectionate towards Fulci. He was even complimentary about the film’s most notorious moment, wherein his character’s wife gets grabbed by the hair and dragged through a freshly-smashed hole in a door by a rotting zombie arm. In the process, in loving close-up, she gets a big splint of wood protruding from the hole embedded in her eye – this was surely what cemented Zombie Flesh Eaters’ place on Britain’s list of banned ‘video nasties’ in the 1980s. According to the journalist Tristan Bishop, an 80-something Johnson enthused to him at one convention, “That spike in the eyeball scene! Wasn’t that genius? So cinematic!”

Clearly, Richard Johnson was a man who enjoyed his work.

© Argyle Enterprises / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

© Variety Film / Variety Distribution

July 31, 2024

Jim Mountfield visits the colonies

© The Sirens Call

The Colony, a short horror story I wrote under the pseudonym of Jim Mountfield, has just been published in Issue 66, the summer 2024 edition, of the fiction and poetry magazine The Sirens Call.

For Issue 66, the Sirens Call’s editors suggested that contributors write something on the theme of ‘heat’. I thought I would write a sci-fi / horror story set in the globally-warmed future. Come to think of it, you can no longer describe global warming as ‘science fiction’. We’re living in a globally-warmed world now. This year, for example, my current place of residence Singapore has been stricken with extreme temperatures. It was headline news here in March when thermometers recorded highs of 36 degrees. And the local taxi drivers’ main – only? – topic of conversation in recent months is how they can’t remember the city-state being as swelteringly hot as this before.

Major inspiration for The Colony came from an article I read last year in the web magazine Atlas Obscura about the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab in Oregon where, among other things, scientists have been experimenting with an item called a ‘chungus’. This combats coastal erosion by “dampening the waves, robbing them of some of their energy before they crash onto the… shore.” A chungus is a ‘five-foot-wide, lumpy brown blob floating in the water, encased in webbing and studded with… floaties. Long plastic tentacles trail from its underside like vinyl seaweed.” The lab’s researchers suggest that “future versions… would be connected in a vast network, their plump bodies seeded with marsh grasses and seaweed. Eventually, they would form floating gardens surrounding coastal cities like fluffy green tutus, potentially saving them from disaster… a network of them could dampen a real-world storm surge.”

Of course, my warped mind quickly got wondering… What if these floating blobs of tentacles and vegetation weren’t inanimate objects but sentient creatures designed, then cloned, in genetic research laboratories, and tethered offshore in their millions to stop coastal erosion and storm surges caused by global warming and rising sea-levels? And what if, in the tradition of sci-fi horror stories, The Science Goes Wrong?

Meanwhile, it was a no-brainer where to set the story. I spent a couple of years living in East Anglia, one of England’s most scenic areas but also its flattest and lowest. It’s severely prone to coastal erosion – something whose effects are in plain view if you visit places along the East Anglian coast like Dunwich, Happisburgh and Orford.

As ever, Issue 66 of The Sirens Call is an absolute bargain, being free and having some 280 pages stuffed with stories and poems. It can be downloaded here.

July 29, 2024

Bernard Cornwell’s (the) king

© Martin Joseph

My reading has waxed and waned this year. Until March, I lived in an apartment that required a 40-minute ride on a single bus to, and from, my workplace every day. That meant each working day I’d spend more than an hour sitting on a bus with my nose stuck in a book. As a result, I read a lot – six books in January 2024 alone, for instance.

However, one house-move and change-of-address later, I now find myself travelling to work on one bus for ten minutes, and then either on another bus for 15 minutes or on Singapore’s MRT system for five minutes. And suddenly, my reading has been knocked for six. I’ve barely got my latest book out and started perusing its pages when it’s time to change bus or change transport-mode. Since then, in the past few months, the books I’ve managed to finish have numbered a measly half-dozen.

However, one book I’ve read lately has bucked that trend. It’s a book that, from the moment I started it, I couldn’t put it down. This didn’t just happen while I was in transit to and from work. I was sneaking reads of it at my desk in the office. I was also reading it at home, much to the disgust of my always attention-hungry cat. It’s been a long time indeed since a book has taken over my life this way.

The book was The Winter King (1995), the first volume in Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord trilogy, his retelling of the legend of King Arthur.

It’s the first Arthurian novel I’ve read in a while. The last one was Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant (though I suppose it’s better described as a ‘post-Arthurian’ novel), which I read early in the days of the Covid-19 pandemic. A couple of years before that, I read T. H. White’s Once and Future King series, which consisted of The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), The Candle in the Wind (1958) and The Book of Merlyn (1977). Yes, the first book was turned into an underwhelming animated movie by Walt Disney in 1963, but the literary series becomes impressively philosophical, political and tragic as it goes on.

From what I’d heard about the Warlord trilogy, The Winter King was going to be a very different proposition. The word people have used again and again in relation to Cornwall’s books is ‘realism’. Thus, I shouldn’t expect Merlin to tutor Arthur by turning him into a fish, hawk, goose, ant, whatever, as he did in the T. H. White books. No, I expected The Winter King to drip with grim, dark, bloody and muddy veracity, painting as authentic as a picture as is possible (1500 years on) of life in fifth-century Britain, after the Romans had departed and when the Britons found their way of life under threat from invading Saxons. And all the fanciful embellishments that, over the centuries and millennia, have been added to King Arthur’s legend would be shorn from the story.

© Martin Joseph

That was what I expected and in many ways it’s what I got. But the fanciful stuff isn’t banished altogether. Cornwall’s premise is that Arthur’s story is being written down after his death by an elderly man called Derfel. At the book’s start, Derfel is a Christian monk but, as a young man, he was both a pagan and one of Arthur’s most trusted warriors. He’s writing at the urging of the young Queen Igraine, who’s obsessed with the – already exaggerated – tales of Arthur she’s heard. And while Derfel records the story, she badgers him about the enchanting bits he’s left out. What about Arthur, as a boy, pulling a sword out of a stone? No, Derfel patiently tells her, that never happened – though in a ceremony once, Merlin did sadistically make the young Arthur stand all night on top of a stone in the middle of Stonehenge, holding a heavy sword. And what of the gallant and romantic Sir Lancelot? Well, Derfel concedes, Lancelot did exist – but he was a complete c*nt.

Revelations like these obviously aren’t what Igraine wants to hear. You get the impression that, once Derfel’s completed manuscript is in her hands, she’ll have her own scribes alter it until the story is one she’s comfortable with. And so, Cornwell suggests, even when Arthur’s exploits were transcribed for the first time, revisionism was at work. As James Stewart’s newspaper-man declares in John Ford’s classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance (1962), “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Cornwall’s treatment of magic and the supernatural is a little unexpected too. He doesn’t have Merlin performing magical feats in front of our faces, but in a way such things exist – supposedly at the behest of the druids and witches that lurk at the fringes of this primitive, violent society. They play a major role because, real or not, people believe in them. When, for example, Nimue – in traditional Arthurian mythology the main Lady of the Lake, but here a witch-girl who’s one of Merlin’s acolytes and with whom, throughout the story, Derfel has a strange, on-off love affair – constructs a ‘ghost-fence’ out of wooden posts and severed human heads along the flank of an army, it doesn’t matter if the fence possesses real magical powers or not. The fact is, the enemy soldiers are convinced it does and nothing will induce them to cross the thing. No wonder that when the novel’s various kings and warlords move their armies into battle, they’re usually accompanied by a gaggle of verminous druids who histrionically cast spells and curses at their foes.

Interestingly, though Christianity has taken hold in fifth-century Britain and has many converts, including some among the powerful, it’s generally regarded as a curious, sometimes incomprehensible counterpart to the druidic paganism that pre-dates it. As Cornwell writes in the book’s opening pages about Uther Pendragon, king of the land of Dumnonia, he “did accept that the Christian god probably had as much power as most other gods.” Accordingly, as king, he decides to play it safe and employs a few Christian priests in his service as well as a few old-school druids.

This is underlined early on when we see Pendragon, desperate for his pregnant daughter-in-law Norwenna to give birth to a healthy male heir, rely first of all on the priests of his Christian advisor Bishop Bedwin, “chanting their prayers in a chamber beside the hall where holy water had been sprinkled, a cross had been hung over the birth bed and another put beneath Norwenna’s body.” When the birth-process takes a turn for the worse, Pendragon orders the priests out and replaces them with a delegation from Ynys Wydryn – Merlin’s abode – led by the pagan priestess Morgan (a more-disturbing-than-usual version of Morgan le Fay).

“Sebile, Morgan’s slave, put a birch branch over the hall door and waved another over the writhing body of the hurting Princess. Nimue crouched in the door and urinated on the threshold to keep the evil fairies away from the hall, then she cupped some of her urine and carried it to Norwenna’s bed where she sprinkled it on the straw as a further precaution against the child’s soul being stolen away at the moment of birth. Morgan… slapped Norwenna’s hands away so she could force a charm of rare amber between the Princess’s breasts.” Meanwhile, on the ramparts outside, the pagans from Ynys Wydryn light multiple fires and create an unholy racket. “The guards beat their spear-shafts against their shields, and the priests piled more wood on a dozen blazing pyres while the rest of us screamed our noisy challenges against the evil wraiths that had slithered through the night to curse Norwenna’s labour.”

Incidentally, the baby that’s successfully delivered isn’t Arthur, but his nephew Mordred. Arthur is Pendragon’s bastard son and because of his illegitimacy is unable to inherit the crown of Dumnonia himself. He’s already an adult when Derfel begins his tale, is engaged overseas in Amorica – Brittany – and doesn’t make an appearance until about a hundred pages in, when he returns to Dumnonia to become the infant Mordred’s protector.

© Estate of Aubrey Beardsley

Also off-stage for much of the book is Merlin. He’s been on a quest to locate something called ‘the Knowledge of Britain’, and has been absent for so long it’s rumoured he might even be dead. In the meantime, life goes on at his base at Ynys Wydryn, a sort of demented, pagan hippy-commune supervised by Morgan and Nimue. There, Merlin, “for his pleasure… had assembled a tribe of maimed, disfigured, twisted and half-mad creatures…” One of its inhabitants is Derfel, who as a small child seemingly miraculously escaped a massacre carried out by the brutal King Gundleus, of the neighbouring land of Siluria. “The Tor was filled with such children who had been snatched from the Gods. Merlin believed we were special and that we might grow into a new order of Druids and Priestesses who could help him re-establish the old true religion in Rome-blighted Britain, but he never had time to teach us.” How Derfel ends up in his old age as a monk in a Christian monastery is presumably something the trilogy’s later books will explain.

Cornwall makes Merlin a memorable character, when he finally appears, and he’s responsible for much of the book’s humour. (Despite its realism, The Winter King is, in places, very amusing.) But Merlin is also, for me, one of the book’s few weaknesses. Specifically, the manner in which Merlin reappears undermines the narrative, because it’s all a bit too unlikely. A couple of times, the cunning old wizard pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. He might as well just whip off a Mission Impossible-style rubber face-mask / disguise and go, “Duh-dah!”

Anyway, that’s the set-up. After Pendragon’s death, Arthur becomes unofficial king of Dumnonia, keeping the throne warm for its official occupant, Mordred, who’s still an infant. Meanwhile, with the Saxons seizing large tracts of Britain’s east coast, Arthur knows he must try to build an alliance among the Britons’ kingdoms – Dumnonia, Gwent, Powys, Kernow and evil King Gundleus’s Siluria, i.e., what’s now modern-day Wales and western England – to fight the invaders off. That is no easy job given the rivalries and feuding that beset the leaders of those kingdoms. And Arthur ends up making the situation worse. He lets his heart rule his head and backs out of an arranged marriage designed to cement the necessary alliance – outraging everyone involved – after falling in love with a certain Guinevere. Of Guinevere, Merlin comments acidly, “it would have been better… had she been drowned at birth.”

Bernard Cornwall is, of course, best-known for his 24 novels about British soldier Richard Sharpe, set during the Napoleonic Wars. I haven’t read any of these – basically because for years I’ve been working my way through another lengthy series of novels set during the Napoleonic Wars, the Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin stories of Patrick O’Brian. Well, if the Sharpe books are as gripping and entertaining as The Winter King, I’ll certainly make a point of reading them eventually… But first I’m going to read the other two entries in the Warlord trilogy, Enemy of God (1996) and Excalibur (1997).

From facebook.com/bernard.cornwell

July 24, 2024July 29, 2024

Rab Foster makes it 100

© Crimson Quill Quarterly

The Drakvur Challenge is a sword-and-sorcery story of mine that’s just been published in Volume 3 of the magazine Crimson Quill Quarterly. Like all the fantasy fiction I write, it appears under the penname Rab Foster.

As its main character, The Drakvur Challenge features the swordswoman Cranna the Crimson, someone who takes no shit from anyone – male chauvinists least of all. She previously appeared in my tale Vision of the Reaper, published last year in the anthology Fall into Fantasy 2023.

This new story was inspired by the Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden in Bali, Indonesia, which my partner and I visited a year ago. The Water Garden made a big impression on me with its beautiful ponds, its colourful fish, its networks of stepping stones, its towering and gorgeous fountains… and its statues, some of which were startlingly monstrous-looking. The setting of The Drakvur Challenge has similar things as details, though because it’s a fantasy story, they’re exaggerated and made much more dramatic and dangerous.

And if I say that the story was also – like a lot of my fantasy fiction – inspired by the movies of Ray Harryhausen, you can probably guess what happens regarding the statues.

The Drakvur Challenge is a writing milestone for me because, according to my calculations, it’s the 100^th story I’ve had published. If I was a gloomy, miserable bastard, I’d remark that I’m delighted to have reached treble figures just before AI technology renders all human writers redundant. But I’m not, so I won’t.

Volume 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly, which also contains six other sterling sword-and-sorcery stories besides The Drakvur Challenge, can now be purchased at Amazon as a paperback here and on kindle here.

July 19, 2024July 29, 2024

A marriage made in Deafheaven

San Francisco band Deafheaven performed at the Ground Theatre in Singapore’s *SCAPE installation on Monday, July 15^th. I was introduced to their music several years ago when I heard their acclaimed 2013 album Sunbather. Some have categorized Deafheaven’s sound as ‘blackgaze’. This means it combines the screeching vocals and apocalyptic edge of black-metal music – the subgenre that began in the 1980s with the likes of Bathory, Mercyful Fate and Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s greatest-ever metal band Venom, and gained notoriety in the 1990s with Norwegian black-metal bands like Burzum and Emperor, some of whose members were not adverse to burning down churches and murdering each other – with the more reflective, swirly, dreamy sound of the 1980s shoegaze movement that embraced bands like Ride, Lush, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Swervedriver and the masterly My Bloody Valentine.

Initially, I have to admit, that sounded to me like a marriage made in hell. However, when I listened to Sunbather, I was pleasantly surprised. I found its songs intense but also captivating.

Fast-forward eight years to 2021, and Deafheaven released their fifth and most recent album Infinite Granite. This took the bold step of toning down the black-metal element in their sound, with singer George Clarke providing ‘clean’ – i.e., non-growly – vocals, and emphasizing the shoegaze component. Infinite Granite got some excellent reviews in mainstream outlets. In the Guardian, for instance, it was given a five-star rating and praised as ‘rock at its most majestically beautiful’. However, not all of the heavy-metal world was taken with its less abrasive approach. In his monthly roundup Columnus Metallicus in The Quietus, for example, Kez Whelan described it as Deafheaven’s “most drab, soulless outing yet, a conveyor belt of clean, perfectly pleasant but entirely unexciting jangle pop that sounds uncannily like an assortment of American Football B-sides.” Ouch. You spurn heavy metal at your peril.

Anyway, not knowing what to expect, I went to the Ground Theatre on Monday evening. The venue was surprisingly cavernous, with a high ceiling, and though the gig was sold out the premises looked like they could have accommodated a bigger crowd. The disparate elements in Deafheaven’s sound was mirrored by the variety of T-shirts being worn by the audience. In addition to the bog-standard heavy-metal T-shirts (like Slayer), I saw Goth (Siouxsie and the Banshees), electronica (Crystal Castles) and, yes, shoegaze ones (Slowdive). Though I’m not sure what the lady in the Heart T-shirt was expecting.

The support band tonight was a Singaporean outfit called Naedr, who allowed me to sample another hybrid subgenre I’d heard about, but never before experienced live – they proclaimed themselves a screamo band. Screamo, according to Wikipedia, “is an aggressive subgenre of emo… strongly influenced by hardcore punk.” To be honest, Naedr sounded pretty metallic to my ears. But I enjoyed them.

Before the main attraction came onstage, I tried to position myself appropriately – close enough to the stage to get a decent view of the band and feel the full force of their music, but not so close that I got sucked into any moshing that might break out among the more excitable spectators at the front. I have nothing against moshing, but I’m a frail old man now and my body can’t handle such violence.

And then Deafheaven’s five members emerged into the stage-lights and got down to business. It was an impressive performance, helped a lot by George Clarke’s antics as front-man. He leered, glared, pointed and gesticulated fiercely at the audience, looking rather like the actor Matthew McConaughey – a younger, messianic and rather demented version of him.

The first part of their set consisted of older numbers, including Sunbather, the title song from their groundbreaking 2013 album. I should say that when they started playing material from Infinite Granite, namely the songs In Blur and Great Mass of Colour, and Clarke’s shrieking black-metal vocals suddenly gave way to conventionally sung ones, the tonal shift was jarring. But I found their new stuff as hypnotic as their old stuff. It was a gig where it was best to switch off your forebrain and simply immerse yourself in the tide of noise advancing out of the speakers. That was true of both the more aggressive and the less aggressive songs in the band’s repertoire.

And, though I didn’t hear anyone in the crowd complaining afterwards, it was probably sensible that they kept the hardcore metallers happy by ending the gig with Dream House – the stormer that was the opening track on Sunbather back in 2013 and that first marked Deafheaven as a band to take notice of.

July 10, 2024July 31, 2024

Rishi sunk, Liz trussed, Penny dropped

Now the dust has settled after the British general election on July 4^th, it’s time to offer my tuppence worth about the result. This saw the Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, brought to power for the first time in 14 years. It also saw the Conservative Party, under Rishi Sunak, take an ignominious and well-deserved humping and get booted out of government. They shed 244 seats in the Westminster parliament and ended up with just 121.

But first… A message for viewers in Scotland.

As (a) someone who’s believed for a long time that Scotland would ultimately be better off as an independent nation rather than as a region of Britain, and (b) a total pessimist, I wasn’t surprised at the dire election result for the Scottish National Party, where it ceded many seats in Scotland to Labour and went from having 43 seats to having a mere nine. As I said in a post a few weeks ago about the SNP’s new leader John Swinney – what a baptism in fire he’s had – “I suspect folk in Scotland are so scunnered by the SNP’s recent scandals and mishaps, and so desperate to see the back of the Tories, that they’ll vote for Labour en masse next month.”

The SNP having so few Scottish seats in parliament and Labour having so many – they’ve now got 37 in Scotland – isn’t something that thrills me. Scotland has lost some decent SNP representatives in London, for example, Alison Thewliss, John Nicholson, Tommy Shepherd and Alwyn Smith. To be fair, I have no idea what they were like as constituency MPs, but they impressed me with their capabilities and eloquence when I saw them speak in parliament.

Also, I’m old enough to remember the 1980s and 1990s – a period of almost continuous Conservative rule from London – when the Scottish seats were also packed with Labour MPs and, the joke went, in Glasgow you could stick a red rosette on a monkey and it’d get voted into Westminster. The old Scottish Labour contingent contained several heavyweights like John Smith, Donald Dewar, Alistair Darling, Robin Cook and Gordon Brown, and also a few mavericks like the admirable Dennis Canavan and the gruesome George Galloway. But the majority of those MPs were, for want of a better word, turnips.

As I wrote on this blog a few years ago: “I’m thinking of such specimens as Lanark and Hamilton East’s one-time Labour MP Jimmy Hood, who once declared he’d oppose Scottish independence even if it made the Scottish people better off – the fact that as an MP he was busy claiming £1000-a-month second-home expenses in London no doubt had something to do with his keenness to keep Westminster running the show. And Midlothian’s David Hamilton, who in 2015 did his bit for the battle against sexism by describing Nicola Sturgeon (and her hairstyle) as ‘the wee lassie with a tin helmet on’. And Glasgow South West’s Ian Davidson, who charmingly predicted that after 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence the debate would carry on only ‘in the sense there is a large number of wounded still to be bayoneted’. This shower became known as the ‘low-flying Jimmies’ because of their lack of ambition in anything other than being cannon-fodder for Labour at Westminster and enjoying all the perks that came with being MPs. And with numpties like these populating the Westminster opposition benches during the 1980s and 1990s, it’s no surprise Mrs Thatcher’s Tories had a free run to do whatever they liked in Scotland.”

It’s possible the new crop of Scottish Labour MPs will be more distinguished than their predecessors, but I’m not holding my breath. That’s especially since the two most famous ones are the self-important Douglas Alexander and Blair McDougall, head of the ‘no’ campaign before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, who famously reassured worried Scottish voters that Boris Johnson had no chance of ever becoming British prime minister: “I think that Boris Johnson’s a clown… he’s not even an MP let alone Prime Minister at the moment.”

Nor does it inspire confidence that new PM Keir Starmer has made Edinburgh Labour MP Ian Murray Secretary of State for Scotland. Murray is more hardline-Unionist than many of the Tories. When his predecessor as Scottish Secretary, Tory posho Alister Jack, was asked if a Conservative government would ever allow another referendum on Scottish independence, he mused that support for independence would have to be running at about 60% in opinion polls. When Murray was asked if there were any circumstances in which he’d allow a referendum, he curtly replied: “None whatsoever.”

Not that I think Labour’s hegemony in Scotland this time will last as long as it did previously (when it had the bulk of Scottish MPs until 2015). For one thing, the party situation and voting situation are now much too volatile. Scotland today has six parties competing in a first-past-the-post electoral system – Labour, the SNP, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and, unfortunately, Nigel Farage’s far-right-wing Reform Party. (I didn’t include Alex Salmond’s Alba Party in that list because they lost their deposit in every seat they contested.) And Labour’s share of the vote in Scotland last week was just 5.3% ahead of that of the SNP, so their position is hardly unassailable.

Anyway, onto the results for Britain generally. While I was delighted to see the Tories pulverized – and they thoroughly deserved to be pulverized, having presided over one of the most disastrous periods of government in British history, one that brought us austerity, Brexit, Prime Minister Boris ‘party during lockdown’ Johnson and Prime Minister Liz ‘crash the economy’ Truss – I have to say I’m worried. Starmer’s Labour Party won the lion’s share of the seats in parliament, but the votes cast for them were not that many – they received 9,731,363 votes, 33.8% of the total cast. That number is lower than those won by Starmer’s predecessor as Labour leader, the much-maligned Jeremy Corbyn, who managed 10,269,051 votes in 2019 and 12,877,918 votes in 2017. What saved Labour’s bacon this time was a low turn-out and the presence of Farage’s Reform Party, luring right-wing voters away from the Tories. If you add up the right-wing votes, those cast for the Conservative and Reform parties, they exceed Labour’s figures by more than a million votes and more than three percent of the vote-share.

Which is concerning, as I don’t think Starmer’s government is going to be popular for very long. Again, as I wrote last month, his party was “so obsessed with attracting former Conservative Party voters they’ve made their policies a continuation of the right-wing ones that’ve damned Britain to rack and ruin during the past 14 years. For instance, they’ve vowed not to revisit the terms of the Tories’ Brexit arrangement with the European Union, even though it’s hobbled British businesses and it’ll thwart their plans to ‘grow’ the economy; and they won’t countenance raising taxes, which makes you wonder how they’re ever going to lift Britain’s public services out of their current, dire state.”

Meanwhile, looking at what’s left of the Tory Party, I see that its surviving MPs include that self-promoting, hard-right-wing trio Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch. As MPs, and with Rishi Sunak on his way out, they’ll be able to run for the party leadership. I can see one of them winning, swinging the Tories even further to the right and cutting a deal with Farage before the next election, probably in 2029. Farage is the favourite British politician of both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, so I’m sure lots of foreign money would mysteriously arrive to ‘grease’ such an arrangement.

© BBC

Oh well. You have to take your pleasures when you can, and there was much to enjoy on election night, when various Tory politicians I didn’t like lost their seats. I shed no tears, for instance, when Penny Mordaunt got the boot in Portsmouth. Another self-promoter, she’s always annoyed me with her jolly-hockey-sticks brand of patriotism and it confounded me how, for a while last year, she was hero-worshipped for carrying a big sword, whilst wrapped in patterned blue wallpaper, at a ridiculous Ruritanian ceremony in Westminster Abbey. Mind you, she was talked about as potential future leadership material, and was a moderate by Tory standards, so she might have prevented the party from veering off into Farage-land if she’d kept her seat.

I was also tremendously cheered by the departures of that preposterous, top-hatted, Victorian undertaker Jacob Rees-Mogg in Somerset; the braying, bearded bovver-boy Jonathan Gullis in Stoke; the middle-finger-raising Andrea Jenkyns in Yorkshire; the absurdly-coiffured Boris-Johnson cosplayer Michael Fabricant in Lichfield; and Liam Fox, Grant Shapps, Thérèse Coffey, Johnny Mercer, Gilliam Keegan… Oh, how I laughed.

Incidentally, on the non-Tory front, it was also fun to see the afore-mentioned gruesomeness that is George Galloway usurped from his seat in Rochdale, just four months after he’d won it in a by-election.

Obviously, the best result was the one that ended Liz Truss’s tenure as MP for South West Norfolk. The shortest-lasting Prime Minister ever – she managed only 44 days in office, easily beating the previous record set in 1827 by George Canning (who at least had the excuse of dying after 119 days as PM) – Truss has spent her time since showing not one ounce of contrition for her brief but disastrous reign, during which her plan to bring in massive tax cuts and pay for them by increasing government borrowing resulted in the pound plummeting, banks and building societies pulling 40% of their mortgage products off the market, and 30 billion pounds getting added to the British Treasury’s fiscal hole, effectively doubling it. Far from it. Truss has been blaming everyone but herself. She’s even accused a beastly ‘anti-growth coalition’ and woke ‘deep state’ of sabotaging her premiership. Meanwhile, she’s also been ingratiating herself with the American far-right and cheerleading for Donald Trump. I do hope July 4^th’s result terminates her political career, as her industrial-scale arrogance, incompetence and lack of self-awareness are getting a bit terrifying.

Finally, I was pleased to see the Green Party win four seats – just one seat less than Farage’s mob, who secured five. Does this mean the British media, including the BBC, will now be giving them nearly as much coverage as they give Farage? Don’t bet your life savings on it.

June 30, 2024July 7, 2024

One Donald I’m sad to see go

It’s often said you don’t appreciate the value of something until after it’s gone. I felt like that last week on hearing of the death of the great Canadian actor Donald Sutherland. If someone had asked me to list my all-time favourite actors, I wouldn’t have thought of including Sutherland. Yet when he passed away at the age of 88 – having kept working in film and TV until last year – it suddenly struck me how much I was going to miss him.

Sutherland was an actor who could inhabit a range of personalities and project many different moods and emotions, yet whom you always recognised as, basically, himself. His characters might be heroic, dignified, fatherly, tragic, eccentric, sinister, venal, slow-witted, juvenile, gormless or demented – yet you always knew you were watching Donald Sutherland. Whoever he played, he retained that unique quality of Donald Sutherland-ness.

Born in St John, New Brunswick, Sutherland graduated from Victoria University with an interesting-sounding degree in Engineering and Drama, then relocated to Britain in 1957 and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. A few years later, he found his way into Europe’s then-flourishing horror-movie industry. He appeared in the monochrome Italian-French chiller Castle of the Living Dead (1964), starring Christopher Lee, directed by Warren Kiefer, and with a 20-year-old Michael Reeves, who four years later would make 1968’s masterly Witchfinder General, working as assistant director. No doubt for budgetary reasons, Sutherland was cast in three roles, most amusingly in drag, as a witch. He played a good-natured simpleton in Hammer Films’ Fanatic (1965), a blend of the low-key psychological thrillers the studio made when it wasn’t cranking out full-blooded gothic-horror melodramas and the fashionable 1960s sub-genre of ‘hagsploitation’ – the hag here being a dangerous religious nutcase played by Tallulah Bankhead. If the cast wasn’t interesting enough with Sutherland and Bankhead, it also included Stephanie Powers, Yootha Joyce and Peter Vaughan, future stars of TV shows Hart to Hart (1979-84), George and Mildred (1976-79) and Porridge (1974-77) respectively.

The best remembered of Sutherland’s early horror films is Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), directed by Freddie Francis and produced by Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg – the first of seven anthology horror movies that Subotsky and Rosenberg’s British-based Amicus Productions would specialise in. To be honest, I don’t think the film’s five stories are up to much, but the framing device, wherein five night-time travellers find themselves sharing a train compartment with the mysterious Dr Shreck (Peter Cushing), who uses Tarot cards to foretell each man’s future, is wonderfully atmospheric. Dr Terror also has a fascinating cast. In addition to Sutherland and Cushing, there’s Christopher Lee (again) and another horror-movie veteran, Michael Gough; trumpeter, tap-dancer and TV presenter Roy Castle; disc jockey Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman; and the original M from the James Bond films, Bernard Lee. Sutherland’s segment even has a fleeting appearance by his fellow Canadian Al Mulock, who along with Woody Strode and Jack Elam was gunned down by Charles Bronson in the astonishing opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

Sutherland also featured in 1960s British TV, most memorably in 1967 when he played a villain in an episode of the surreal and stylish espionage series The Avengers (1961-69) called The Superlative Seven. This has Patrick Macnee’s debonair John Steed being invited to a bizarre fancy-dress party on board a private jet plane, which, after it takes off, is discovered to be remote-controlled. Eventually, the plane lands Steed and the other, equally-baffled guests on a seemingly deserted island. There, the party start to be murdered one by one. As well as riffing on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939), the episode has a science-fictional sub-plot where Sutherland attempts to create a race of super-soldiers. And the guest cast includes Charlotte Rampling and Brian Blessed before they became famous too.

That same year, Sutherland turned up in Robert Aldrich’s loud, raucous and violent war movie The Dirty Dozen, about 12 convicts trained by the US Army and sent to France on a suicide mission against the Wehrmacht prior to the D-Day Landings The movie contained so many famous actors playing characters who weren’t among the 12 convicts – Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Jaeckel, George Kennedy, Ralph Meeker and Robert Ryan – that, over the years, folk have become confused about who actually played the Dirty Dozen. I’ve even heard a few people declare that, with Sutherland dead, that’s all the Dozen gone. Well, no – because actors Stuart Cooper and Colin Maitland, who played two more of the Dozen, are still on the go.

The Dirty Dozen’s success led to Sutherland being cast in more World War II movies. Most notable of these was 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes, in which Clint Eastwood’s Private Kelly, a soldier in an American platoon in 1944 France, learns there’s a fortune in Nazi gold stashed in a bank behind enemy lines and persuades his fellow soldiers, including Sutherland and Telly Savalas, to help him steal it. Sutherland’s character is a loopy tank commander called Oddball who, with a blatant disregard for historical authenticity, was added to the script to satirise the then-ubiquitous hippy movement. He says spaced-out things like, “Don’t hit me with those negative waves so early in the morning!” or, “Woof, woof, woof! That’s my other dog imitation.” I suspect that for people my age – well, males my age – in the UK, Oddball is the character we’ll remember Sutherland best as, because British TV seemed to show Kelly’s Heroes every other week when we were kids.

Sutherland was also in 1976’s The Eagle Has Landed, playing an IRA man who aids some German commandoes, headed by that well-known German, Michael Caine, on a mission in England to assassinate Winston Churchill. Of Sutherland’s performance, the best that can said is that there are non-Irish actors who’ve played Irishmen with worse Irish accents.

Another war movie was M*A*S*H (1970), Robert Altman’s scabrous black comedy set during the 1950s conflict in Korea, in which Sutherland played insolent and rebellious US Army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, was the third-most popular movie of its year and gave Sutherland iconic status. I have to say that, though I like Robert Altman’s movies generally, M*A*S*H has not aged well. Today, much of its humour feels juvenile and mean-spirited, especially when directed towards Sally Kellerman’s Major Houlihan character, rather than ‘anti-establishment’, which it was hailed as at the time. Altman famously loathed the M*A*S*H TV show that was spun off from his movie and ran from 1972 to 1983, but I suspect time has been kinder to its gentler brand of humour.

Afterwards, Sutherland was in prestigious films like Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), Fellini’s Casanova (1975) and Bernard Bertolucci’s 1900 (1975) – none of which I’ve seen. But it’s in Nicolas Roeg’s masterly horror film Don’t Look Now (1973) that, of his movies I have seen, I believe he does his best work. Don’t Look Now is an adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier story in which a grief-stricken couple try to get over the death of their daughter by immersing themselves in a restoration project in Venice – only to be haunted by sightings of a small figure in a red coat who at least resembles their deceased daughter. The film has two set-pieces at its beginning and end whose emotional impact has rarely been matched in the horror genre – Sutherland features heavily in both. Films about the supernatural, despite focusing on death, memories of the departed and the possibility of an afterlife, don’t usually capture the feeling of grief that well. But the pained, brittle performances by Sutherland and his co-star Julie Christie convey it with extreme poignancy. With their performances augmented by Nicolas Roeg’s camerawork, visual imagery and memorably-elliptical approach to storytelling, Don’t Look Now is a film for the ages.

Though for me Don’t Look Now gives Sutherland his best role, it’s Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) that gives him his best image. This is Hollywood’s second adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), wherein a low-key invasion of earth is staged by alien pod-people who gradually replace all the real people. The image in question, now a popular meme, comes in the final moments when Sutherland, the film’s hero, reacts to another character by pointing at her, adopting a grotesque, gawking expression and emitting an inhuman squeal. This tells us the pod-people have now replaced him too. The original Body Snatchers movie, made by Don Siegel in 1956, was set in small-town America, but Kaufman’s version audaciously shifts the action to San Francisco, and the result is just as good. Actually, I was going to say filmmakers have treated Finney’s novel well, for in 1993 Abel Ferrara directed another version that was decent too. But then I remembered there was a fourth version made in 2007 with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, and it was rubbish.

As he grew older, Sutherland’s work in films and television inevitably saw him shift from being a leading man to being a grizzled character actor and then an esteemed ‘elder-statesman’ guest-star. His movies included star-laden Oscar-bait (1980’s Ordinary People), daft Alistair Maclean adaptations (1979’s Bear Island), slightly less daft Ken Follett adaptations (1981’s Eye of the Needle), overripe John Grisham adaptations (1996’s A Time to Kill), overstuffed British flops (1985’s Revolution), Sylvester Stallone movies (1989’s Lock Up), Clint Eastwood movies (2000’s Space Cowboys), paranoid Oliver Stone conspiracy thrillers (1991’s JFK), preposterous Roland Emmerich disaster movies (2022’s Moonfall) and Emma Thompson-scripted Jane Austen costume-dramas (2005’s Pride and Prejudice).

He made three films with his son Kiefer – who, when I first saw him onscreen in the 1980s, made me think, “Wow, he looks just like his dad!” – the afore-mentioned A Time to Kill, plus 1983’s Max Dugan Returns and 2015’s Forsaken. And he featured in four Hunger Games movies (2012-15), playing Snow, the despot running the future North American territory of Panem. I haven’t seen any of the Hunger Games series, but a future dystopian America ruled by a president called Donald sounds terrifyingly prescient.

Ironically, in the 1990s, Sutherland returned to his 1960s roots and started making horror movies again. He was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), a clodhopping film that a few years later led to a sublime TV show; 1994’s The Puppet Masters, based on a short story by Robert Heinlein, which was a low-budget but not unenjoyable retread of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; 1998’s police-occult thriller Fallen, in which he rubbed shoulders with Denzel Washington and John Goodman; and 1999’s Virus, an Alien rip-off set on board a ship, in which Sutherland’s over-the-top villain is one of the few redeeming features – his old seadog is so sea-doggish he only lacks a pegleg and a parrot on his shoulder. Horror-adjacent is his role as Ronald Bartel in Ron Howard’s Backdraft (1991). He’s an incarcerated pyromaniac whom William Baldwin and Robert De Niro’s firemen-investigators turn to for help when they’re trying to catch the person responsible for a series of deadly, fiery arson attacks. Thus, he’s the Hannibal Lector of the fire-raising world.

However, while I write this, the Donald Sutherland performance that keeps coming to mind – accompanied by the lovely, plaintive song that accompanies it – is the one he essayed in the video for Kate Bush’s single Cloudbusting (1985). He’s a kindly inventor who creates a rainmaking machine, only to be taken away by some sinister men in suits, who obviously believe there are things man was not meant to know. This rather vitiates the song’s optimistic lyric, “Ooh, I just know that something good is gonna happen…” It’s left for Sutherland’s son, played by Bush, to complete his work. I visited the video on YouTube the other day and was touched to discover how the comments below were packed with people paying tribute to Sutherland.