George Kennedy – Blood and Porridge

July 6, 2025July 6, 2025

Jim Mountfield gets slotted in

© Schlock! Webzine

Jim Mountfield is the pseudonym I attach to fiction I write that’s dark and macabre in nature, and I’m delighted to report that a new Mountfield short story has just appeared in Volume 19 Issue 6, the July 2025 edition, of Schlock! Webzine. It’s entitled Slot Boy and it takes place in Scotland, against an appropriately Scottish backdrop of parochial wee towns, middle-aged neds, cranky auld wifies, mobility scooters, and terrible football.

Despite its Scottish setting, Slot Boy – like many of my stories – owes a lot to the works of Stephen King. Although the inspiration for this particular story comes from something I suspect King isn’t in a hurry to trumpet as one of his finest hours, the anthology movie Creepshow 2 (1987), which was a sequel to the rather better Creepshow (1982). One of the three segments in Creepshow 2, The Raft, was based on a short story included in King’s 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, but the other two segments, Old Chief Wood’nhead and The Hitchhiker, were apparently stories he devised especially for the film. He wrote an outline that was then polished into a script by legendary horror filmmaker director George A. Romero, though the final movie was directed by Michael Gornick.

Weirdly, it was Old Chief Wood’nhead that inspired Slot Boy.

The Raft and The Hitchhiker both have their moments, but Old Chief Wood’nhead is rightly regarded as the worst of Creepshow 2’s stories. That’s despite it featuring the stalwart character actor George Kennedy (a man I always associated with crashing airplanes – he was in 1965’s Flight of the Phoenix and all four of the 1970s’ Airport movies) and Dorothy Lamour, star of the Bob Hope / Bing Crosby Road to… movies (1940-62). Kennedy and Lamour play an elderly couple who own a shop with a hulking, timber cigar store Indian, the titular Old Chief Wood’nhead, standing outside it. Predictably, bad things happen to them. Then, magically, seeking revenge, Old Chief Wood’nhead comes to… Well, you can guess the rest.

Native American culture is a rich source of stories and myths – see the works of Stephen Graham Jones – but Old Chief Wood’nhead operates at the level of a crass old Hollywood western, with a caricatured ‘injun’ shooting arrows, removing scalps and wielding a tomahawk. Of course, the horror in the story, or in any horror story, is nothing compared to the real-life horrors that North America’s native American population had to endure during history. Estimates suggest that population stood at about eight million in the whole continent in 1492; but in the USA, by 1890, it’d been reduced to a quarter of a million. Though no doubt Trump will soon rewrite all that and have it taught in schools that life was peachy for Native Americans after European settlers arrived.

If Old Chief Wood’nhead was a bit asinine, why on earth did I think of it again after so many years, let alone get an idea for a story from it? Well, for the first two years that I lived in Singapore, I regularly ate and drank in an establishment on Singapore’s Mountbatten Road that, bizarrely, had this standing on the edge of its premises:

I don’t think I ever saw a cigar store Indian during my time in Scotland, but shops there used to have other figurines standing outside their doors, usually for charity purposes. One of those figurines features in Slot Boy and plays a role in the story similar to that played by Old Chief Wood’nhead in Creepshow 2. I just hope the result is scarier – and funnier – than the movie segment.

During July 2025, you can read Slot Boy here, while the main page of Schlock! Webzine, Volume 19 Issue 6, can be accessed here.

© Laurel Entertainment / New World Pictures

February 21, 2023February 21, 2023

When Raquel ruled

© 20^th Century Fox

From the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, Raquel Welch was probably the cinematic sex symbol as far as unreconstructed blokes in the Anglosphere were concerned – blokes who were a bit intimidated by the exoticness and general foreignness of, say, Brigitte Bardot or Ursula Andress. Welch, who sadly died last week at the age of 82, was Chicago born but raised in San Diego. Her time in the latter location seemed to imbue her with a healthy, clean-cut Californian glow that was an obvious physical advantage to her in her film roles. Cerebrally, though, she didn’t win a lot of respect from her (mostly male) peers. This sorry state-of-affairs was epitomised by some advice that Don Chaffey, director of One Million Years BC (1966), offered her early on in that movie’s filming. Her function, he explained, was not to think, but merely to run from one rock to another.

I should say that when Raquel Welch was at the height of her popularity, I was too young to actually fancy her. Instead, I just remember her as a talismanic presence in a number of movies that I found incredibly enjoyable at the time and that have stayed in my memory during the decades since. Here are my half-dozen favourites that showcase the late, great Ms Welch.

Fantastic Voyage (1966)

In this science fiction epic, Welch plays Cora Peterson, technical assistant to a brain surgeon (Arthur Kennedy) and member of a medical team who are miniatured in a submarine and injected into the bloodstream of a seriously injured scientist. Why? Well, there’s a blood clot lodged deep in his brain that can’t be reached on an operating table, and the only option is to have miniature people inside him zapping the pesky clot to buggery with a laser beam. Which makes sense.

© 20^th Century Fox

As the scientist is a leading expert in the field of miniaturisation, which apparently is being developed on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it’s no surprise when it transpires that the Soviets have put a secret agent on board the submarine to sabotage the mission. Neither is it a surprise when this secret agent turns out to be a character played by the reliably-twitchy Donald Pleasence. Actually, Pleasence’s death-scene, in which he falls victim to a hungry white blood-cell, is worth the price of admission alone.

Yes, it’s all very silly. In fact, when he wrote the film’s novelisation, the respected sci-fi author and professor of biochemistry Isaac Asimov tied himself in knots trying to make its plot seem more scientifically feasible. But with imaginative sets representing the inside of the human body, and decent special effects depicting the movements of the cast and their submarine within this strange micro-verse, and capable direction by underrated filmmaker Richard Fleischer, it’s a piece of hokum that’s both entertaining and memorable.

One Million Years BC (1966)

To be fair to director Don Chaffey, running from rock to rock was pretty much all that Welch, as the cavewoman Loana, and John Richardson as her caveman beau Tumak, needed to do for the duration of One Million Years BC, whilst trying to escape the claws and fangs of legendary special-effects man Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion-animation dinosaurs. The film, made by Hammer Films, is even sillier than Fantastic Voyage. Not scripted with much attention to paleontological science, it depicts Welch, Richardson and the rest of the human cast existing alongside monster-lizards in the Calabrian Stage of the Pleistocene Epoch. Nonetheless, Harryhausen’s splendid work transforms it into pulp-art and its poster, with Welch standing imposingly in a fur bikini, became one of the great cinematic images of the 1960s. It’s the last poster, for instance, on the wall of Tim Robbins’ cell in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), sneakily concealing the tunnel that he’s digging out of the place.

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts

In the late 1990s, while I was living in Edinburgh, Ray Harryhausen appeared one day at the (now sadly defunct) Lumiere Cinema to give a talk about his movie-making career. I attended, and I recall the queue that formed afterwards at Harryhausen’s table as people got him to autograph items related to his films. Many of these were posters and video cassettes of One Million Years BC and I remember him demanding, “Did you buy these because of my dinosaurs or because Raquel Welch is on the cover in a fur bikini?”

Bedazzled (1967)

This being the late 1960s, it was inevitable that Welch would appear in a number of self-consciously groovy, achingly unfunny swinging-sixties comedy-movies, such as Leslie H. Martinson’s Fathom (1967) and Joseph McGrath’s The Magic Christian (1969). However, I do like Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled, a comic retelling of the Faust story with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Cook is the devil, trying to ensnare the soul of the hapless Moore, and he enlists the Seven Deadly Sins to help him. Welch, as Lust, is definitely the most fetching of the sins – not that she has much competition, considering that, for instance, Barry Humphries plays Envy.

By the way – a shout-out for Bedazzled’s lovely opening credits, orchestrated by Maurice Binder and accompanied by Moore’s brassy but also subtly-melancholic theme music.

© 20^th Century Fox

Bandolero (1968)

God, when I was a western-daft 10-year-old, I loved Bandolero. Directed by seemingly inexhaustible western-movie director Andrew V. McLaglen, it contained everything I could have hoped for – action, humour, bank robberies, ghost towns, a gang of outlaws, a rival gang (consisting of bloodthirsty Mexican desperadoes, the bandoleros of the title), a tenacious sheriff and his posse, and a climactic shoot-out where (nearly) everyone gets killed. The cast is excellent too. In addition to Welch, there’s Dean Martin and James Stewart as the brothers leading the outlaws, the ever-reliable George Kennedy as the sheriff, and a supporting cast of familiar faces like Andrew Prine, Will Greer and Denver Pyle. You even get a glimpse of former Tarzan actor Jock Mahoney, playing Welch’s quickly-killed-off husband.

All right, even at the age of 10, I knew Bandolero was pushing it a bit to have us believe that Dean Martin and James Stewart could be siblings. Still, it seemed more credible than another western I saw at the same time, The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), which posited Dean Martin and John Wayne as siblings.

Hannie Caulder (1971)

Another western and a rare beast indeed, a British-made western. It’s immeasurably better than other British efforts in the genre, such as Michael Winner’s dreadful Chatto’s Land (1972) or, gulp, Carry On Cowboy (1965). And unlike Bandolero, which had Welch as a damsel in distress, Hannie Caulder has her playing a proactive, implacable female Clint Eastwood-type, seeking revenge on the three outlaw scumbags who raped her and murdered her husband.

© Tigon Films / Paramount Pictures

Admittedly, the tone of Hannie Caulder is badly fractured. The villains who behave so heinously towards Welch in the movie’s early stages are otherwise portrayed as a trio of comic bumblers in the tradition of the Three Stooges, and the humour feels jarring. But if you can get past that, you’ll enjoy a cast that’s even better than the cast of Bandolero. Essaying the villains are legendary character actors Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin and Jack Elam, Robert Culp turns up as a bounty hunter trying to help Welch out, and Northern Irish actor Stephen Boyd, one of Welch’s Fantastic Voyage co-stars, makes a cameo as a mysterious preacher. The fact that Hannie Caulder was made by Tigon Films, a company more famous for its horror movies like Witchfinder General (1968) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), perhaps accounts for producer Tony Tenser casting Christopher Lee as the gunsmith who provides Welch with the customised weapon necessary for taking down her antagonists. There’s even room for Diana Dors, a sex symbol from an earlier era, playing the mistress of a bordello adept at battering obnoxious customers with her frilly umbrella.

Almost inevitably, Hannie Caulder is much-loved by Quentin Tarantino, who cites it as an influence on his Kill Bill movies (2003-4).

The Three / Four Musketeers (1973-74)

This double-movie adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novel was directed by Richard Lester, the man who helmed the two comedic Beatles movies in the 1960s. He’d even, at one point, considered making a film where the Fab Four played the musketeers. The Three and Four Musketeers are laced with many of Lester’s comic touches, often involving his regular collaborator Roy Kinnear, and Spike Milligan, who appears in the first film as Welch’s husband – surely the unlikeliest husband she was ever paired with onscreen. Welch herself shows good comic talent, for example, at the end of The Three Musketeers where she gets knocked over by a jousting dummy. At the same time, the films’ action sequences, orchestrated by the great sword-fight choreographer William Hobbs, look unnervingly realistic. They come across as haphazard, exhausting and, yes, dangerous. With Lester’s humour and Hobbs’ authenticity, then, the films shouldn’t work… But somehow, they do.

In my mind, however, what makes these the best cinematic version of Dumas’ book is the fact that they’re packed with 1970s cinematic icons – Welch as heroine Constance Bonacieux, Michael York as hero d’Artagnan, Faye Dunaway as the villainous Milady, Christopher Lee as the equally villainous Rochefort, Charlton Heston as the equally, equally villainous Cardinal Richelieu, Oliver Reed as the brooding and frankly Oliver Reed-like Athos… And so on. Welch appeared in a few more films afterwards, but none were especially memorable and her time as English-language cinema’s number-one female pin-up had evidently passed. But she could have done much worse than step out of the limelight with the Musketeers movies.

November 20, 2020November 20, 2020

Cinema Peebles-diso

I recently noticed a discussion about the Playhouse Cinema on the Facebook page Auld Peebles, which is a site devoted to pictures, information and simple nostalgic reminiscing about past times in Peebles, my hometown in the Scottish Borders. This inspired me to dig out the following entry, which I’d originally posted on this blog back in 2013. In it, I indulge in some nostalgic reminiscing of my own about my town’s old Art Deco cinema…

The photograph above this entry shows the Art Deco building at number 60 of the High Street in Peebles, my Scottish hometown. The building opened in 1932 as the Playhouse Cinema. Its architect was Alister G. MacDonald, a son of Ramsay MacDonald, who was Britain’s first Labour Party prime minister and served in office in 1924 and from 1929 to 1935. MacDonald Junior designed the cinema with a particularly wide auditorium and with stalls and a balcony that held a total of 802 seats. The name Playhouse was spelt out in a squiggle of neon along the top of its façade, although the roof behind was less glamorous, being made of corrugated iron.

The Playhouse showed films for the next 45 years and for a time, in modest-sized Peebles, it wasn’t even the only cinema. It had to compete against the Empire Cinema on the Bridgegate and the Burgh Hall, further up the High Street, which also showed films. By the 1970s, however, with just about every home in Peebles possessing a television set, only the Playhouse was left and it was struggling, to the point where it’d introduced bingo a couple of nights a week as a way of attracting extra custom.

I became acquainted with the Playhouse at a very late stage in its life. In 1977, when I was eleven, my family moved to a new home just beyond the outskirts of Peebles. The town centre was only 30 minutes’ walk away. Previously we’d lived in a rural part of Northern Ireland and if I wanted to visit a cinema there, I had to talk my parents into driving me several miles to the nearest one and then returning to collect me afterwards. I was movie-crazy and having a cinema on my doorstep, as it seemed at the time, was a wonderful new luxury.

I didn’t see any masterpieces in the Playhouse, but every film I did see seems to be engraved on my memory just because I’d seen it there. For example, there was Earthquake (1974), the big, rumbly disaster movie starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Lorne Greene and George Kennedy. George Kennedy was a portent of doom in 1970s movies, having already appeared in two of the Airport movies (1970 and 75). If his craggy face appeared onscreen, you just knew a destructive earth tremor was going to strike the city or a Boeing 747 was going to fall out of the sky.

It was also in the Playhouse that I had my most disappointing cinematic experience ever, which was seeing Dino De Laurentiis’s 1976 remake of King Kong. I’d really been looking forward to this, as I’d watched the original movie on TV and was desperate to see how they’d update all the fights that King Kong had with the dinosaurs on Skull Island. To my horror, there weren’t any dinosaurs on the 1976 Skull Island, so Kong didn’t have any fights with them. The only battle was an altercation between Kong (played by Rick Baker in a gorilla-costume) and a crap-looking rubbery giant snake. I’d like to think that a young Peter Jackson saw the same movie and shared my feelings of profound disappointment. For that reason, when he remade King Kong in 2005, he made sure his film was choc-a-bloc with dinosaurs.

Sometimes at the Playhouse you got to see a familiar feature of 1970s movie-going, which was a cinematic double bill. Among the two-for-the-price-of-one marvels I was treated to were Carquake (1976) combined with The Giant Spider Invasion (1975). Carquake was little more than a montage of car chases and car crashes and I suspect that the filmmakers had cast David Carradine in the lead role only because his surname started with the word ‘car’. Nonetheless, it seemed like a masterpiece compared with its partner. In The Giant Spider Invasion, the invading giant spiders were played by real-life tarantulas when they were babies, and played by giant wobbly-legged blobs of paper-maché mounted on top of cars when they were adults. One scene showed a tarantula clamber unnoticed into a kitchen blender. Then a character unwittingly blended it with some fruit and took a massive swig from the resulting Vitamin C / pulped-hairy-spider concoction. That was about the most revolting thing I saw in a film until Hugh Grant started making romantic comedies.

But I had barely seven months to enjoy the Playhouse, for on September 10^th, 1977, it went out of business. It would’ve been fitting if the final end-credits to scroll up the Playhouse’s screen had belonged to a film that was memorable – Star Wars (1977), say, which was breaking box-office records at the time. However, the last film shown there was another one about cars, an unremarkable horror film simply entitled The Car (1977). This starred James Brolin and was about a rural American community being terrorised by a deadly, driver-less and demonically possessed automobile. In his non-fiction book Danse Macabre (1981), Stephen King described it as “the sort of movie where you can safely go out for a popcorn refill at certain intervals because you know the car isn’t going to strike again for 10 minutes or so”.

Thereafter the Playhouse was derelict for a time. I seem to remember a report in the local newspaper at one point about it being broken into and vandalised. Then its foyer was converted into a shopping area and it became another High Street retailer. For a while, it served as the premises for Visionhire, a TV shop, which meant that films were being shown on its premises again (at least, when one of the televisions on display was switched on and tuned into a channel broadcasting a film). These days it houses an outlet for the cut-price chemist’s chain, Semi-Chem. Thanks to Alister MacDonald’s Art Deco design, it’s now a listed building and has been given a Grade C status by Historic Scotland. Incidentally, I’m only talking about the building’s front part. As far as I know, most of its back part, containing the 802-seat auditorium, was demolished to make way for a housing development.

Losing the Playhouse in 1977 was a blow for Peebles film-lovers because video cassettes and VCRs were still things of the future. If you didn’t have transport to get to a cinema in another town to see a film on its first release, your only option was to wait a couple of years until it turned up on TV. However, you still had a chance to see films, old and not so old, on a big screen if you were a pupil at Peebles High School. In the wake of the Playhouse’s demise, a teacher there, Dr Mike Kellaway, started up a Film Club and showed movies one evening each week with the school’s assembly hall acting as an auditorium. But Peebles High School’s Film Club is a story for another blog-entry.