Frankie Goes to Hollywood – Blood and Porridge

October 28, 2024October 31, 2024

Mama Mia

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

One more post in advance of Halloween…

I’ve now watched all of the X trilogy of horror movies directed and written by Ti West and starring Mia Goth (who also co-wrote one of them). These are X (2022), Pearl (2022) and MaXXXine (2024), which focus on the characters of ruthlessly determined actress Maxine Minx and frustrated wannabe actress Pearl Douglas, both played by Goth. At its best, the trilogy is great. At its worst, it’s still good fun.

X is the story of some city-folk heading out into the countryside and falling prey to a foe their slick city ways can’t deal with. Yes, that’s the plot of half the horror movies ever made, from Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1982), from John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999), from Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever (2002) to Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019). In West’s spin on it, the city-folk are six young filmmakers, including Goth’s character Maxine. The year is 1979 and they intend to make a porno movie on the quick and on the cheap. As a market for their product, they’re eyeing the up-and-coming technology of VHS, which will allow people to pay money and watch steamy movies they’re never likely to see in their local cinemas. The filmmakers have rented a building on an out-of-the-way farm for the shoot, a farm belonging to an elderly couple called Howard and Pearl.

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

Incidentally, Howard and Pearl are also the names of an elderly couple featured in the BBC’s long-running, almost never-ending – and terrible – situation comedy Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010). I guess an American like West wouldn’t have known that. Though maybe Mia Goth, who’s English, could have warned him that those character names were likely to give viewers from the United Kingdom PTSD-type flashbacks to Last of the Summer Wine.

X‘s Pearl is clearly unhinged and she’s about to get worse. Ruminating on her current wrinkly decrepitude, mourning the loss of her youth, and jealously resenting the nubile young bodies performing sex-acts for the cameras on the other side of the farmstead, the old woman flips. Bloody mayhem ensues, involving guns, knives, pitchforks and a large alligator who hungrily lurks in a pond elsewhere on the premises. The scene where Maxine takes a naked dip in the pond, not suspecting that its scaly occupant is slowly closing in on her, is one of the creepiest things in the movie. Rarely have aerial shots been so unnerving.

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

In all three movies, West revels in the setting. X takes place during a Texas summer and the heat and sweatiness are nicely conveyed by the 1970s-aesthetic of the visuals. The daytime shots, at least, have a faintly bleached and blurry look that evoke all sorts of bucolic American horror movies really made in that decade – the aforementioned Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the likes of John Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), Jack Starrett’s Race with the Devil (1975) and Jeff Lieberman’s Squirm (1976). Meanwhile, the way Pearl embodies the horrors of the aging process gives the film an extra depth. This theme is touched upon both melancholically, as when Pearl realises how much Maxine resembles her when she was young, and queasily, with Pearl shuffling down to the makeshift film studio, spying on the actors doing their sex scenes and imagining she’s taking part herself.

But X’s greatest gimmick is its casting, for Mia Goth plays not one, but two characters. She’s Maxine and Pearl. The latter role required her to spend ‘a good 10 hours in the make-up chair’ in order to get the old-lady prosthetics applied.

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

X ends with Maxine’s escape from the farm. She drives off into the night, still determined to make it big as an actress. But what comes next isn’t a sequel but a prequel. If it was plausible for Goth to play Pearl with heavy make-up as an old woman, she could obviously play the character without make-up as a young woman. Hence, we got Pearl, also released in 2022. This is set in 1918 with the title character stuck on her parents’ farm (the same one as in X, though disarmingly smart and new-looking compared with the crumbling, rundown version of it in the previous film) whilst waiting for husband Howard to return from World War I. She’s especially stuck because the Spanish flu pandemic, the early 20^th century’s equivalent of Covid-19, is raging and Pearl’s family are isolating themselves. It doesn’t help matters that her father (Matthew Sunderland) has been crippled by a stroke and her mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) is humourless, censorious and bitter. Pearl responds to the situation by fantasising about becoming an all-singing, all-dancing silent-movie star – which increasingly provokes Ruth’s wrath.

Meanwhile, Pearl is already subject to the psychopathy that’ll lead to X’s bloody events 60 years later. In an early scene, she takes a hay-fork to an unfortunate goose who didn’t display sufficient enthusiasm for a show she put on for the animals in the barn. She then goes to the pond and feeds the dead fowl to an alligator, whom she’s named Theda after the silent movie actress Theda Bara (and who’s presumably the granny of the alligator in X).

Though her mother is determined to clip her wings, other things seemingly pull Pearl in the direction of her dreams – namely, the flattery of a handsome but lecherous projector at the local town’s movie theatre, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join a travelling dance troupe, the auditions for which are being held in the local church. Predictably, during the ensuing conflicts, betrayals and disappointments, Pearl snaps. The bodies pile up and Theda the Alligator gets some unexpected meals.

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

Even more so than X, Pearl shows West and Goth at the top of their games. The director excels in orchestrating the showbiz-y fantasies that Pearl weaves around herself, including one set in a cornfield and involving a scarecrow that’s inspired by The Wizard of Oz (1939). We can’t help but pity her even though we know she’s turning into a monster. And Goth is amazing. She’s particularly awesome at the end, when Howard finally arrives back from the war and finds the farmhouse kitchen in a less than decorous state. Pearl presents herself – “I’m so happy you’re home!” – with a rictus-like smile, simultaneously heartfelt and terrifying, that seems to stay on her features forever. No wonder Peter Bradshaw, film critic in The Guardian newspaper, hailed Goth as ‘the Judy Garland of horror’.

Pearl isn’t around for MaXXXine, released in 2024 and set in 1985, six years after the events of X. But we glimpse her in flashbacks and her presence is felt in one of the film’s most harrowing scenes. This is when Maxine – now in Hollywood and trying to graduate from starring in porn movies to starring in something slightly more upmarket, i.e., horror movies – sits in a make-up chair and has a cast made of her head. With her face buried in the cast, and blinded by it, she suffers a panic attack and imagines Pearl is in the room, caressing her, as she did during one creepy moment in X.

Whereas the action in X and in much of Pearl was confined to a farm, MaXXXine is far more expansive. Its story unfolds all over Los Angeles, from the Hollywood Hills to the back-lots of Universal Studios (where, significantly, we see the Bates house and motel from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho), from the city’s luxurious mansions to its ultra-dodgy strip-clubs, peepshows and back alleyways. But it’s the time rather than the place that gives the film its vibe. MaXXXine unashamedly immerses itself in the garish sleaze and excessiveness of the 1980s: big hair, Ray-Ban sunglasses, spandex, lip-gloss, neon colours, graffiti, cocaine, hustlers, flashy convertibles with personalised number-plates, X-rated video stores, lascivious hair-metal bands, gory slasher movies and general ‘me’-generation greed. West depicts this world as a cesspit, but a somehow joyous cesspit. Maxine, of course, has taken to it like a duck to water.

But it’s still water that contains alligators. Maxine gets caught up in a murder spree by an apparently Satan-worshipping serial killer who’s targeting people close to her. She also has to deal with a crooked private investigator, played with scenery-chewing magnificence by Kevin Bacon, who knows she was present at the bloodbath at Pearl and Howard’s farm in 1979. These things happen while she’s pursuing what she believes is her big break – a starring role in a schlocky horror sequel called The Puritan II, about to be filmed by a hard-as-nails lady director (Elizabeth Debicki).

© A24 / Motel Mojave / Access Entertainment

This leads to the first of a few unsatisfactory things in MaXXXine’s plotting. Maxine is so determined to hold onto the film-role that she refuses to cooperate with the cops investigating the serial killer, because getting involved in a murder case will prevent her working on The Puritan II. We know that Maxine is now in some ways as psychopathically ruthless as Pearl – early on, she’s shown dealing with a would-be mugger in a manner that’ll bring a grimace to the face of anyone possessing a pair of testicles – but come on. Your friends are being slaughtered around you. There’s a good chance you’ll be next. How could you not go to the cops, important impending film-role or not?

Also awkward is the film’s ending, which veers off into a completely different style of movie – admittedly still a 1980s style, that of a Jerry Bruckheimer-Don Simpson action thriller. At the same time, when the identity of the villain is finally revealed, it’s scarcely a surprise, since it was heavily signalled beforehand.

However, criticising a film paying homage to the 1980s for being illogical is self-defeating, considering that bona fide 1980s movies were hardly known for their logic. It’s telling that one 1980s movie MaXXXine has been compared to is Brian De Palma’s violent thriller Body Double (1984). (Both have scenes prominently featuring Frankie Goes to Hollywood songs, Relax in Body Double, Welcome to the Pleasure Dome in MaXXXine.) Body Double is regarded as a classic now, but on its release the critics dismissed it as De Palma at his most throwaway, as a series of stylish set-pieces in search of a plot. MaXXXine is a similar, De Palma-esque mixture of splendidness and shonkiness.

© A24 / Motel Mojave / Access Entertainment

Anyway, there’s much to enjoy in it. Goth’s first scene as Maxine is brilliant. It culminates in her emerging from the audition for The Puritan II and contemptuously informing the long queue of would-be starlets waiting outside that they’re wasting their time because she has the job in the bag. She then struts off to the sound of ZZ Top’s Gimme All Your Lovin’. The cast is great too. As well as Goth, Bacon and Debicki, it has Giancarlo Esposito playing Maxine’s shady agent. Esposito, of course, was the terrifying Gus Fring in Breaking Bad (2008-13) and Better Call Saul (2015-22) and here he does a shockingly Gus Fring-like thing near the movie’s end.

In my opinion, then, X is the best horror movie of the three, Pearl is the best movie full-stop, and MaXXXine, despite its flaws, is very entertaining. I wonder if West and Goth will get around to making a fourth film. Goth has played Pearl young and old, but played Maxine only young. How about a fourth movie set in the 2020s, with Maxine now as aged as Pearl was in X and living reclusively like the embittered Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950)?

Being a horror movie, though, it would be in the vein of what used to be called ‘psycho-biddy’ or ‘hagsploitation’ movies. These constituted a sub-genre of horror that featured aging female movie stars playing old ladies who’ve become psychopathically loopy: for example, Betty Davis and Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Tallulah Bankhead in Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) Zsa Zsa Gabor in Picture Mommy Dead (1966), Shelley Winters in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) and Lana Turner in Persecution (1974). I have every confidence that the mighty Mia Goth, in old-lady make-up, would hold her own among the likes of Davis, Crawford, Bankhead, Gabor, Winters and Turner.

Come to think of it, she’s done it already, in X.

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

June 22, 2023July 22, 2023

Under the dome: the Flower Dome

A while ago, I described a visit my partner and I made to one of Singapore’s leading tourist attractions, the Gardens by the Bay. Well, I described half of the visit, because I wrote only about our experiences at the Cloud Forest, a vegetation-draped artificial mountain in the controlled environment of one of the Bays’ two enormous domes. So, here’s an account of our time in the other dome – the Flower Dome.

Having spent the late morning exploring the Cloud Forest, and before spending the early afternoon in the Flower Dome, we had lunch in a Gardens-by-the-Bay food-court called the Jurassic Nest. (The place lived up to its name by having a pair of animatronic dinosaurs on the premises, a brontosaurus and a T-rex, that during our meal came to life, rather feebly, and growled a bit and wagged their heads at one another.) It was here that the Internet coverage on my smartphone suddenly conked out, for the first time in the year since I’d bought it. No amount of fiddling with the settings would get it back online. This was a great nuisance, as I’d paid for entry into the Gardens’ two domes the night before and our e-tickets were in my Googlemail account, which I couldn’t access now. When I tried to access the account on my partner’s phone, I wasn’t allowed in for ‘security’ reasons. Then, just as we were leaving the food-court, and just as I’d resigned myself to having to buy a new pair of tickets for the Flower Dome, my phone’s Internet coverage suddenly and inexplicably returned. We were able to show the original e-tickets at the entrance after all.

That outage was a mystery. I even wondered if the copious water vapour inside the Cloud Forest had affected my phone and temporarily disrupted its online functions. Anyway, on to the Flower Dome…

As domes go, the name ‘Flower Dome’ hardly conjures up the same excitement as, say, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s (and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s) ‘Pleasure Dome’, or Public Enemy’s ‘Terrordome’, or the third Mad Max movie’s ‘Thunderdome’ (which was presided over by the great, and now sadly late, Tina Turner). And it certainly feels a wee bit less dramatic than the Cloud Forest, which as I said contained its own mini-mountain. The terrain here is relatively flat, though there’s a sunken area in the middle. Spread over this is a host of not only flowers, but also shrubs, trees and other plants assembled from across the world, organised in sections representing ‘gardens’ from South Africa, South America, Australia, California and the Mediterranean.

The first part we explored after going in, up and along to the right of the entrance, was for me the most botanically interesting. This was home to an array of baobabs, a tree I’ve always found fascinating because of its ungainly, bottom-heavy shape – well, I guess that’s why it’s also known as the ‘bottle tree’. This part also featured the oddly named ‘Succulent Garden’, which was full of cacti, plants that hardly seem succulent. The specimens were formidably spiky, thorny and quilled. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM TOUCHING THE FLOWERS said a sign here, unnecessarily.

As with the first dome, a variety of wooden statues and carvings, some of them traditional items from indigenous Asian cultures, others more modern in design, were occasionally positioned amid the vegetation. I particularly like the Game–of–Thrones-style dragon perched on top of the knob of a truncated tree-trunk. Later, after I’d descended to the lower level, this dragon looked very impressive seen at a distance and in silhouette.

At the time, the Cloud Forest had been hosting an exhibition relating to the 2022 movie Avatar: The Way of Water, which mainly featured life-sized fibreglass statues of characters and creatures from the movie plonked here and there in the foliage. We were spared the Avatar stuff in the Flower Dome, although another exhibition was in progress – Sakura, which capitalised on Japan’s famous cherry-blossom season, typically occurring between late March and early April. A mock-up of a traditional railway station in the Japanese countryside, with wooden platforms and buildings, had been installed in the lower level and was festooned with pink cherry blossoms. Its ambience would have been charming if the site hadn’t been thronged with people snapping endless selfies of themselves in front of the pretty blossoms. The majority of the culprits, I should add, weren’t members of the usually selfie-daft younger generation. No, the crazed snappers were mostly senior citizens. A few newly-married couples were also using the display as a backdrop for their wedding photos.

Though topographically less spectacular than the Cloud Forest, the Flower Dome’s flatter contours at least allow you to admire the dome itself, curving up over everything like a sky of multi-panelled glass. According to the dome’s webpage, it actually contains 3332 glass panes. It gives an impression of breathtaking spaciousness and it’s no surprise that it’s in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s biggest greenhouse.

April 30, 2022

A threadbare future

© BBC / Nine Network / Western-World Television Inc

I can’t imagine what has prompted me to repost in April 2022 this entry about Threads, the BBC’s terrifying 1984 drama about a nuclear strike on Britain, which I’d originally put on this blog four years ago to coincide with a remastered version of it being released on Blu-ray. I mean, it’s not as if anything is happening in the world at the moment to kindle fears of a holocaustic nuclear war breaking out. Is there?

It’s said that everyone remembered where they were and what they were doing on November 22^nd, 1963, when they heard that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. Likewise, I remember where I was and what I was doing on the evening of September 23^rd, 1984, when BBC2 broadcast the apocalyptic drama Threads.

I was staying in the youth hostel in Aberdeen, with my second year as an undergraduate at Aberdeen University due to begin in a fortnight’s time. Having worked abroad for the summer, I was now back in the city trying desperately to arrange accommodation for myself for the year ahead. I’d spent the past few days trudging around flat-hunting without any luck and, to make matters worse, I’d just been informed that I wouldn’t be eligible for a student grant for the next year either. So I was feeling pretty low about my residential and financial situation that evening when I wandered into the youth hostel’s lounge and sat down among a crowd of hostellers who were about to watch something on television called Threads, a much-anticipated documentary-drama showing what would happen if a nuclear conflict broke out between America and the Soviet Union and the UK was struck by 210 megatons of nuclear weaponry.

It’s fair to say that by the time Threads ended 112 minutes later, my mood had not improved any. Mind you, nobody else in the lounge looked like they were bursting with joie de vivre. Bill Dick, the hostel’s usually easy-going and affable head-warden who’d been in the audience, couldn’t have looked more down in the dumps if he’d been buried to his neck in garbage. (I got to know Bill four years later when I spent a summer working at the hostel as a warden and had him as my boss.)

A while ago, something compelled me to view Threads again. Here are my thoughts on it from a 21^st century perspective. I should warn you that the remainder of this blog-entry will contain spoilers, though you’ve probably gathered already that in Threads absolutely nothing good happens.

Directed by Mick Jackson and written by the late Barry Hines, author of the 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave that a year later established Ken Loach as a cinematic force when he filmed it as Kes, Threads consists of three sections. There’s an initial 45 minutes showing life during the build-up to the cataclysmic nuclear strike. Then there’s another 45 minutes showing the strike and its immediate aftermath. And lastly there’s a 25-minute epilogue chronicling Britain a year, a decade, ultimately 13 years into the future when, with its natural environment, economy and social infrastructure pulverised, the country reverts to the Middle Ages. That’s the Middle Ages minus the chivalry, balladry and pageantry, but with plenty of fallout, nuclear winters, depleted ozone, ultraviolent radiation, cataracts, skin cancer and genetic damage.

The gruelling central section imprinted itself on my 19-year-old memory. I’ve carried its images around in my head ever since: milk bottles melting on doorsteps in the heat of a nuclear detonation, a charred cyclist (still on his bike) lodged amid the branches of a burning tree, cats igniting, dolls melting, a crazed woman squatting amid the rubble cradling her baby’s burnt corpse, a traffic warden with a bandage-swathed face holding off a starving mob with a rifle, doctors in an overrun hospital sawing away a leg while the un-anaesthetised patient screams through a gag, and several dozen other things involving flames, rubble, cadavers, rats, blood, wounds, excrement, vomit and general mayhem and horror. In particular, I’ve never forgotten the moment when a mushroom cloud rises terrifyingly above the skyline, causing one poor woman to wet herself in the middle of a street – something that led to the actress Anne Sellors having the briefest and most poignant entry ever on IMDb.

But having seen Threads again, I now appreciate the queasy effectiveness of the opening section too. Here, Hines and Jackson establish the focus of their story, two families in the Yorkshire city of Sheffield. These are the working-class Kemps and the middle-class Becketts. The Kemps’ eldest boy Jimmy (Reece Dinsdale) has been courting the Becketts’ daughter Ruth (Karen Meagher) and Ruth has just realised she’s pregnant. Jimmy and Ruth resolve to get married and start renovating a flat to live in while their families uneasily make each other’s acquaintance. Interestingly, this reflects the uneasy working relationship between Hines and Jackson themselves. According to Threads’ Wikipedia entry, the working-class Hines saw Jackson as something of a middle-class prat.

Meanwhile, ominously, news reports chatter in the background about escalating superpower tensions in the Middle East. The characters are initially oblivious to what’s brewing. Early on, we see Jimmy fiddling with his radio, wanting to get away from some boring news bulletin about the crisis and find the latest football results. Apathy gradually changes to shoulder-shrugging helplessness, something summed up by Jimmy’s workmate Bob (Ashley Barker). In the pub, he declares that they might as well enjoy themselves now because there’s bugger-all else they can do. Plus, if things do kick off, he hopes he’ll be ‘pissed out of his mind and straight underneath it.’ Ironically, Bob survives after nearly everyone else has perished and we last see him tucking into the raw and probably irradiated flesh of a dead sheep.

By the time the characters try to respond to what’s coming, it’s too late. The bomb goes off while the hapless Kemps are still assembling a fallout shelter comprised of a couple of doors propped against a living-room wall. The Becketts, being posher, have a cellar to retreat into. Not that they fare any better in the long run.

For me, it’s this opening section that brings home what Threads is about. A preliminary narration talks about the economic threads necessary for a society to function: “…everything connects. Each person’s needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.” However, my impression is that the truly important threads – which are obliterated once the missiles hit their targets – are the ones between people, of feeling and compassion, which have been refined by centuries of civilisation and, today, are the essence of what it means to be human.

Thus, we see Jimmy (whom we know has been cheating on Ruth and is a bit of a tosser) standing in the aviary in his family’s back garden, doting over the birds kept there. We see Mr and Mrs Beckett (Henry Moxon and June Broughton) trying to look after an ailing relative discharged from hospital after the NHS is ordered to clear its wards in anticipation of a flood of war casualties. We see Clive Sutton (Harry Beety), the local government official put in charge of an emergency team that will run things from a bunker underneath Sheffield City Council, attempting to reassure his nervous wife. But empathy for our fellow creatures rapidly disappears as, in the war’s aftermath, humanity degenerates into a shell-shocked, zombie-like rabble fixated only on its own, scrabbling-in-the-dirt survival.

This is made explicit in Threads’ final stages when, years later, we’re introduced to Jane (Victoria O’Keefe), the daughter of Ruth and Jimmy. When Ruth dies, sick, exhausted, blinded by cataracts and looking decades older than her true age, an impassive Jane reacts by stealing a few items from her mother’s corpse and then clearing off. The few kids born post-holocaust are a scary bunch, by the way. Their language is limited to phrases like “Gizzit!” and “C’mon!” and they generally act like feral mini-Neanderthals.

Threads came in the wake of the bleak 1983 American TV movie The Day After, directed by Nicholas Meyer, which depicted the effects of a nuclear strike on Kansas City and caused a considerable stir on both sides of the Atlantic. But while I like The Day After, I think the altogether more graphic and relentless Threads beats it to a bloody pulp. For one thing, Meyer’s film is disadvantaged by its cast of familiar actors like Jason Robards and John Lithgow, which means you can’t ever forget you’re watching a dramatic fabrication. In Threads, the cast is comprised of unknown performers, which adds to its harrowing sense of authenticity.

That said, saddoes like myself might recognise David Brierley, who plays Ruth’s father, as the voice of K9 in the 1979-80 series of Doctor Who; and a couple of voices heard from the early blizzard of news reports are familiar, like Lesley Judd from the BBC’s famous kids’ magazine programme Blue Peter, and Ed Bishop, star of the Gerry Anderson sci-fi show UFO (1970). I’m glad Jackson decided not to go with his original casting idea, which was to use actors from the venerable north-of-England TV soap opera Coronation Street – disturbing though the sight of Jack and Vera Duckworth puking their guts up in a makeshift fallout shelter would have been.

Threads also contains the sonorous tones of the great voiceover actor Patrick Allen, whom the UK government had hired to narrate its Protect and Survive public information films that would be broadcast if nuclear war looked imminent. By 1984, the media had got hold of these films and discussed them at length and they’d been derided for their epic uselessness if Armageddon really happened. (At one point in Threads we hear Allen crisply and matter-of-factly advising the public on how to deal with corpses: “…move the body to another room in the house. Label the body with name and address and cover it as tightly as possible in polythene, paper, sheets or blankets.”) Earlier in 1984, Allen’s Protect and Survive voice-work had been sampled in Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s hit single Two Tribes – for which he sportingly added the lines: “Mine is the last voice you will ever hear. Do not be alarmed.”

The futility of Protect and Survive and officialdom’s attempts to deal with the holocaust generally are embodied in Threads by Sutton and his team, who utterly fail to provide leadership and control once the bombs have gone off. Trapped in their bunker under the rubble of the flattened council building, with insufficient training, malfunctioning equipment and limited supplies of food, water and air, they succumb to bickering, despondency, hysteria and – finally – asphyxiation. Predictably, when order is re-established in Sheffield, it’s pretty brutal in nature.

Brutal too is the narrative as it moves forward in time, with Telex-type captions flashing up on the screen giving statistics about fallout levels, the nuclear winter, the ozone layer, epidemics and an ever-rising death-toll. Things climax with the now-teenaged Jane giving birth after she’s been raped by another of the feral kids. The baby is stillborn and deformed, and Threads’ last image is a freeze-frame of Jane’s face as she recoils in horror from it. Early on, Jimmy’s kid brother Michael (Nicholas Lane) had embarrassed his parents by asking, “What’s an abortion?” Threads ends with the implication that humanity has unwittingly aborted itself.

It isn’t perfect. Thanks to budgetary restrictions, there’s a reliance on stock footage and stills from previous wars and conflicts, which don’t necessarily look like they’re occurring in Sheffield in 1984. And despite valiant efforts by the make-up department, the actors playing the long-term survivors are a bit too plump and healthy-looking – by then they should have resembled death-camp inmates. Additionally, the fact that Threads takes place in a pre-Internet, pre-social media world gives it a quaint distance now. Imagine the reaction if the equivalent events happened today. While the first warheads exploded over Britain, Twitter would be babbling with idiots blaming everything on immigrants or Muslims or woke-ism or the Covid-19 vaccine. But, as a traumatic account of what might engulf us if our political leaders are possessed by a moment of trigger-happy madness, it’s still unbeatable.

And, in April 2022, with Vladimir Putin making threatening noises about nuclear retaliation against NATO for helping to thwart his military campaign in Ukraine, Threads seems no less relevant than it did 38 years ago. That’s a sentence I take no pleasure in writing.