The Terminator – Blood and Porridge

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

May 28, 2024June 7, 2024

The writer on the edge of forever

From wikipedia.org / © Pip R. Lagenta

I’ve just discovered that yesterday, May 27^th, would have been the 90^th birthday of writer Harlan Ellison. I don’t know if nowadays I’d describe Ellison as one of my all-time favourite writers, but he was certainly a massive influence on me when I was growing up and trying to write stuff myself. Here’s an updated version of something I wrote about him in 2018, just after he’d passed away at the age of 84.

Harlan Ellison was often categorised as a science-fiction writer, although he once memorably warned anyone who called him a science-fiction writer that he would come to their house and ‘nail’ their ‘pet’s head to a coffee table’. In his lifetime the Cleveland-born Ellison authored some 1800 stories, scripts, reviews, articles and opinion pieces, but it’s as a short story writer that he was best known. In fact, when he was in his prime, from the 1960s to 1980s, he was responsible for some of the boldest and most exhilarating short stories I’d yet come across. He seemed to push both his imagination and his writing energies to the very limit.

Describing his stories is difficult, but the nearest comparison I can think of is the fiction of Ray Bradbury. However, Ellison’s work also had counter-cultural and radical political tones that encompassed both the idealism of the 1960s’ civil rights movement and Summer of Love and the cynicism and despair that came with the Vietnam War and, in the 1970s, Watergate. His short stories frequently contained a palpable anger too. Yes, Ellison had a lot of anger in him. More on that in a minute.

By focusing on his short stories, I don’t wish to denigrate his occasional novels. Indeed, I’d rank 1961’s Spider Kiss alongside Iain Banks’ Espedair Street (1987) and John Niven’s Kill Your Friends (2008) as one of the best rock ‘n’ roll novels ever.

Ellison wasn’t a big name in the UK but in the 1970s – perfectly timed for my development as a teenager – Britain’s Pan Books brought out editions of several of his short story collections, like The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1969), Approaching Oblivion (1974) and Deathbird Stories (1975). All had gorgeously psychedelic covers by (I think) the artist Bob Layzell. It’s fair to say that my 14 or 15-year-old mind was blown by them.

© Pan Books

I also loved how Ellison prefaced each story with a short essay describing how it had come into being. These pieces gave insight not only into his combative personality but also into the rich life-experiences he’d had, or claimed to have had. Before establishing himself as a writer he’d been, among other things, a truck driver transporting nitro-glycerine, a hired gun and a tuna fisherman. This inspired me when I was a budding writer to try my hand at different jobs and build up my experiences, though the stuff I ended up doing – stacking shelves in Sainsbury’s, working in a shoe warehouse, serving as a warden at Aberdeen Youth Hostel – was rather less glamorous than the items on Ellison’s CV.

Some of his work also appeared on television, although TV was a medium he generally had a low opinion of. In a 2013 interview he accused it and other modern forms of entertainment and communication of having “reduced society to such a trivial, crippled form that it is beyond my notice.”

For instance, he scripted the 1967 Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever, which has Captain Kirk, Mr Spock and Dr McCoy catapulted back in time to 1930s America and confronted with an agonising time-travel-related moral dilemma. Do they intervene in an accident and prevent the death of a woman called Edith Keeler who (despite being played by Joan Collins) is a noble political activist dedicated to peace, pacifism and public service and with whom, predictably, William Shatner’s horn-dog Captain Kirk has fallen in love; or do they let her die, which means her political movement won’t gain power in the USA, delay her country’s entry into World War II and allow the Nazis to become masters of humanity, which will happen otherwise?

Thanks to its inventive and thought-provoking spin on time travel, The City… is the best episode of the original series of Star Trek. In fact, as I don’t like any of the later TV incarnations of Star Trek, I’d say it’s the best Star Trek episode, full stop. Ellison, however, was unimpressed with how the show’s producer Gene Rodenberry and his writing staff rewrote his script and watered down some of its themes and was never slow to sound off about it afterwards. It may be significant that his later short story How’s the Night Life on Cissalda? (1977) features William Shatner attempting to make love to a revolting-looking alien creature. Shatner’s toupee falls off in the process.

© Desilu Productions

More time-travelling figures in the Ellison-penned episodes Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier that he wrote for the TV anthology show The Outer Limits (1963-65). Years later, he was incensed at what he saw as plagiarism of elements of his Soldier script by James Cameron while he was making the first Terminator movie in 1984. Ellison threatened to sue and got a payment of 65-70,000 dollars from Cameron’s financiers and an acknowledgement on The Terminator’s credits. By 2014 Ellison had mellowed to the point where he could see the funny side of it. He played himself in an episode of The Simpsons in which he gets into an argument with Milhouse Van Houten. When Millhouse comments, “I wish someone would have come from the future and warned me not to talk to you,” Ellison grabs him by the throat and screams, “That’s my idea!”

In fact, Ellison was highly litigious. After discovering his writing, I found an interview with him in an American magazine called Future Life where he talked about suing Paramount Television for stealing an idea of his, about a robot policeman and a human one who are partnered together, and turning it into a TV show called Future Cop (1976-78). “We’re going to nail their asses to the barn door!” he declared in the interview. Later, when I was playing rugby for my school and while we were trying to psych ourselves up against our opponents, I inadvertently let slip with Ellison’s phrase: “We’re going to nail their asses to the barn door!” I exclaimed. That earned me some strange looks from my teammates. Nailing asses to barn doors was not part of the common vernacular on south-of-Scotland rugby pitches.

I can honestly say that for a period when I was a teenager, Harlan Ellison, with his mind-bending fiction, his braggadocio, his adventurous backstory and his take-no-shit-from-anyone attitude was the person I wanted to be. Of course, as I grew older and became less impressionable and more mature, and learned more about Ellison, that changed. I began to appreciate that Ellison’s persona involved a fair bit of self-mythologizing, egotism and unwarranted bloody-mindedness. When Stephen King observed that he knew one writer who was convinced that Ellison was the reincarnation of Jonathan Swift and another writer who referred to him as a ‘son-of-a-bitch’, I found myself in sympathy with both viewpoints.

And by the time I read a profile of him in a non-fiction book called Dream Makers (1980), written by Charles Platt, I was disappointed but somehow unsurprised to encounter a character rather too driven by vanity and rather too desperate to impress. Ellison and Platt later fell out badly, violently it’s said, though not as far as I know about the Dream Makers profile.

Also falling out with Ellison was the late English writer Christopher Priest, who took issue with Ellison’s editorship of the Dangerous Visions series of science fiction anthologies in the early 1970s. There was supposed to be a third volume in the series but for reasons known only to Ellison himself it never appeared, leaving a lot of commissioned stories in limbo and depriving a lot of authors of potential earnings. This seems hypocritical of Ellison, considering how famously touchy he was about payment for his own work – he’s said to have once mailed a wayward publisher ‘213 bricks’ and a ‘dead gopher’ as a protest. Priest even wrote a short, investigative book about Dangerous Visions 3’s non-appearance, inevitably entitled The Book on the Edge of Forever (1994). Priest’s website notes how an anonymous review of his book on Amazon, headlined Mean-Spirited Jealousy and giving it one star, “bears all the hallmarks of Mr Ellison’s own unmistakable style: florid overstatement and a fog of half-truths intended to cloud the issue. Well worth a visit to witness the great man in action, a rare sight!”

© Fantagraphics Books

And although Ellison was a vocal supporter of the USA’s Equal Rights Amendment, much of that good work was undone in 2006 when he groped the writer Connie Willis onstage at an awards ceremony. I’ve seen a clip of the incident and am inclined to think Ellison believed he was indulging in some harmless japery, but that’s not to say he wasn’t massively disrespectful towards Willis and didn’t make a colossal arse of himself. He also did himself no favours when, after he’d issued an apology – one commentator described it as something that “could only loosely be construed by a chimpanzee whacked on smack as an apology” – and after Willis hadn’t acknowledged it, he ranted abusively about her on his official message board.

Still, as I came to know the artist’s failings, and revised my opinion of him, I focused more on the quality of the art itself. And with Ellison, some of that art was amazing. Here’s a list of ten of his short stories that bowled me over when I read them.

Delusion for a Dragon Slayer (1966). An unremarkable little man suddenly finds his soul transplanted into the body of a Conan-the-Barbarian-type swordsman in a blood-and-thunder fantasy land. What follows is a merciless dissection of the inadequacies of the nerdy males who read sword-and-sorcery stories. I actually write sword-and-sorcery stories, so I’m allowed to make sweeping generalisations like that.

Pretty Maggie Money Eyes (1967). This sad, haunting story is about a woman’s spirit inhabiting a Las Vegas slot machine and the down-on-his-luck gambler whom she – possibly – takes pity on.

© LQ / Jaf Productions

A Boy and His Dog (1969). A post-apocalyptic satire that’s a spot-on blend of anarchy and irreverence, featuring as its main character a young hoodlum and an intelligent, telepathic and sarcastic canine. It was filmed in 1975 by L.Q. Jones, with a youthful Don Johnson in the lead (human) role. Though the movie version isn’t perfect, it still holds up better than a lot of other, more portentous sci-fi films made in the same decade.

Along the Scenic Route (1969). A biting analysis of the relationship between Americans and their cars, Scenic Route details how a couple out for a leisurely drive end up competing in a lethal demolition derby. It prefigures a lot of ‘dystopian-vehicle’ movies like Death Race 2000 (1975) and the Mad Max ones.

One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1970). Another of Ellison’s time-travel tales, this grippingly melancholic one is about a man going back in time and befriending his younger self while he’s a bullied, insecure child.

Bleeding Stones (1973). This is quite simply a story that made my jaw drop with its combination of brutality, blasphemy and surrealism.

© Pan Books

Hindsight: 480 Seconds (1973). End-of-the-world stories are a dime-a-dozen in science fiction, but the brilliantly simple yet elegiac concept behind this one has always stayed with me. It’s about a poet who volunteers to stay on an about-to-be-destroyed earth after the rest of humanity have been evacuated, so that he can provide a commentary on his planet’s dying minutes.

I’m Looking for Kadak (1974). This Kurt-Vonnegut-meets-Woody-Allen-type comedy is about the tribulations facing a group of blue, eleven-armed aliens on a far-flung planet who’ve converted to Judaism. The minyan – quorum – for communal Jewish worship is ten, and they want to sit shiva, i.e., conduct the rituals of mourning for a departed friend. The problem is that there’s now only nine of them on the planet. So the hero sets off on an epic quest to find a long-lost Jew, Kadak, in the hope he’ll serve as the tenth.

Shatterday (1975). In this unsettling tale, a man accidentally phones his own apartment one evening and finds himself talking to himself. In fact, this other self is a sinister doppelganger who’s appeared from nowhere and is planning to usurp him from his existence.

Count the Clock That Tells the Time (1979). Taking its title from a sonnet by William Shakespeare, this describes how a lethargic never-do-well gets trapped in a weird, ghostly netherworld. It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of wasting time and frittering your life away – something you couldn’t accuse the famously prolific Ellison of doing.

So, thank you for the entertainment and the inspiration, Mr E. May you rest in un-cantankerous and non-litigious peace.

© Pan Books

September 26, 2023September 26, 2023

Now expose it to garlic, holy water and sunlight

From wikipedia.org / © Eva Rinaldi

A while ago on this blog, I conducted the following thought-experiment. Imagine that current trends result in the world becoming a globally-warmed, war-ravaged hellhole inhabited by only a few surviving remnants of humanity. But those remnants somehow manage to lay their hands on a time machine and realise they can send an assassin back in time, in the manner of the James Cameron / Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Terminator (1984). Who would they have their assassin target in, say, the late 20^th century to change the course of history and prevent the world from turning into crap?

As I mused at the time, “The young Donald Trump? The young Vladimir Putin…? Neither. I suspect those guys would be considered small beer compared to the one the time-travelling assassin from the future would really go after… Rupert Murdoch.”

Wizened 92-year-old media mogul Murdoch was recently in the news because he announced his decision to step down as head of News Corp and the Fox Corporation in favour of his son Lachlan. Murdoch certainly looks his age, but it sometimes felt like he was going to live forever and keep running his media empire forever. Regular nocturnal blood-meals sucked from the throats of helpless victims are evidently good for the constitution. That said, lately, the old monster had begun to look a little vulnerable, both in his business dealings and in his personal life.

April this year saw his Fox News network fork out nearly 790 million dollars to settle a lawsuit brought against it by the voting-equipment company Dominion. This was after the network told outrageous porkies about the company switching votes in the 2020 US presidential election so that Donald Trump wouldn’t win it. Among the guff peddled by Fox was the claim that the company was owned by Venezuelans and had experience of swinging elections for the late Hugo Chavez.

Meanwhile, though old Rupe had once wooed the ladies with confident charm, like an extremely shrivelled George Clooney, he’s also looked less sure-footed on the romantic front recently. In 2022, he ended his fourth marriage, to Jerry Hall, by unchivalrously sending her an email to inform her that she’d been dumped. Hall was unsurprisingly miffed, as during the Covid-19 pandemic she’d gone out of her way to ensure her aged husband stayed isolated and avoided getting the virus, which for someone of his years would probably have been a death sentence. Earlier this year, he announced his engagement to former radio host Ann Lesley Smith, but this lasted just two weeks. That’s even shorter than a Liz Truss premiership. Apparently, Murdoch started to panic at Smith’s loopy evangelical-Christian pronouncements, which included the assertion that Tucker Carlson was ‘a messenger from God.’

But you can’t keep an old horn-dog down. Rupe is currently engaged again, this time to Elena Zhukova, who was once married to the Russian billionaire – don’t mention the ‘O’ word – Alexander Zhukova. At this rate, Murdoch will have got himself betrothed 16 more times before he reaches treble-figures.

© Prana Film / Film Arts Guild

Now that Murdoch has stepped back from the media-controlling activities that have kept him busy for the past 71 years, ever since the age of 21 when he inherited an Adelaide newspaper, the News, from his dad, what legacy does he leave? If he had a shred of conscience, morality and decency – which of course he doesn’t have, which makes this an academic statement – he’d surely howl in despair and incarcerate himself in a Trappist monastery for the rest of his days to do penance for his multiple sins. Or just top himself. Murdoch’s media operations have, over decades, caused massive harm to the well-being of humanity.

He pushed the rapacious neoliberal agenda of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, with its credo that greed is good, the market should be worshipped and the financial safety nets and infrastructure that held societies together, and looked after their most vulnerable members, weren’t worth bothering about. Thatcher said it all when she declared in 1987, “There is no such thing as society.” His outlets have gone to great lengths to ignore and discredit the overwhelming scientific evidence that manmade climate change is happening and poses a terrifying threat to our civilisation’s future. In Australia, a country that’s already baking and burning as the climate catastrophe unfolds, Murdoch newspapers like the Australian and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph cheer-led right-wing moon-howler Tony Abbott into power in 2013 – Abbott once dismissed climate change as ‘absolute crap’. And in the USA, Murdoch has used Fox News to build up a vast, paranoid, delusional, far-right-wing ecosystem whereby millions of gullible people now accept the lies of Donald Trump as gospel truth. Fox could very well see to it that Trump wins the presidency again in 2024. At which point, the world’s biggest superpower will make the transition into authoritarianism.

Murdoch is truly the man with the reverse-Midas touch. Everything he sticks his finger in turns into manure. Yet this never seems to stop him generating huge amounts of money, so he’s happy. No wonder his son James, that rare thing indeed, a Murdoch with a conscience, quit the board of News Corp in 2020, sickened by the horrors his old man had empowered.

In the UK, Murdoch has long exerted his toxic influence through the swathe of national newspapers he owns: the Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, Sun and Sun on Sunday. His reign of terror began when he acquired the Sun in 1969. The history of that particular tabloid since then, when it hasn’t devoted itself to gleeful, lowest-common-denominator stupidity with headlines like ‘WEREWOLF SEIZED IN SOUTHEND’ and ‘FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER’, has been an unrelenting saga of horribleness.

In the 1980s, when the Sun was under the stewardship of the repugnant Kelvin MacKenzie, it revelled in homophobia and gloated over the AIDS epidemic, which it dubbed the ‘gay plague’ and insinuated straight people had nothing to worry about. It catered for the ‘dirty mac’ brigade with its ‘page three’ girls, at least one of whom, Samantha Fox, was only 16 when it displayed her topless. And it lied through its teeth about the behaviour of Liverpool football fans at the 1988 Hillsborough Disaster, to cover up the failings of the police that day. That led an embargo of the Sun in Merseyside, which is still in force now. If only the British population generally treated the rag with the same contempt that the Scousers do. (I also admired the attitude of the late playwright Dennis Potter, whom the Sun dubbed ‘Old Flaky’ on account of his crippling psoriasis. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he named his cancer ‘Rupert’.)

More recently, the Sun provided a platform for Katie Hopkins, someone even more repellent than MacKenzie, who likened migrants to ‘cockroaches’ and advocated the use of gunboats to stop them. And its incessant abuse of the European Union, European countries and European people (‘frogs’ and ‘krauts’ to a man and woman) climaxed with the newspaper’s enthusiastic support for Brexit – ‘BELEAVE IN BRITAIN’, its front page declared on the day of the referendum in 2016. It was no surprise that Murdoch welcomed Brexit, regardless of the economic, diplomatic and reputational damage it inflicted on the UK. He famously commented that while he could impose his will on one country’s leader, at No 10 Downing Street, he wasn’t powerful enough to do that with the combined force of 28 countries’ leaders, in Brussels.

From dailysabah.com / © Sun

Meanwhile, during the noughties, the Sun’s sister paper, the News of the World, under the editorship of flame-haired gorgon Rebakah Brooks, was so determinedly on the sniff for a good story that it hacked into the phones of, among others, murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, dead British soldiers and victims of the 2005 London bombings. This proved too much for even its ghoulish proprietor and he axed the News of the World in 2011. Mind you, he soon replaced it with the Sun on Sunday, so not much changed.

With the Sun leading the way, Britain’s other, supposedly more ‘respectable’ right-wing newspapers – the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express – happily dived into the same midden of lies, slander and xenophobia, with the result that over the past half-century the popular press in Britain has done much to cheapen public discourse, making it shrill, prurient, mean-spirited and pig-ignorant. Murdoch can also take credit for inspiring the birth, or spawning, of alleged news channel GB News in 2021, which clearly wanted to become the British equivalent of his ghastly Fox News. The conspiracy theories it peddled about the Covid-19 pandemic and Covid-19 vaccines, often voiced by that havering bawbag Neil Oliver, mirror the work Fox News did in the USA to make people resistant to vaccinating themselves against the virus. The fact that Murdoch was one of the first people on the planet to get the vaccine, yet he happily let his media outlets promote scepticism of it among their audience – who tended to be older and more at risk from Covid-19 – shows his ethics are non-existent.

Sadly, in Britain, non-Conservative politicians are so frightened of Murdoch’s newspapers that they feel obliged to cosy up to him. In the late 1990s, Labour Party leader Tony Blair got so thick with Murdoch that he became godfather to one of Murdoch’s kids. In return, the Sun displayed the front-page headline ‘THE SUN BACKS BLAIR’ prior to the 1997 general election that saw him win power. Murdoch’s newspapers subsequently supported Blair during his participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an operation founded on lies and resulting in disaster. I have no doubt that Keir Starmer, the current Labour Party leader, and basically Tony-Blair-lite, will prostate himself before Murdoch in a similar, craven manner.

Though the Nosferatu-esque Murdoch is no longer at the helm of the media empire he’s built, he’s made it clear that he still intends to exert influence from the sidelines. And his son Lachlan is such a piece of work it sounds like that empire will conduct its business with even more malevolence in the future. The fact that Lachlan has just appointed Tony ‘climate-change-is-crap’ Abbott to the Fox board doesn’t bode well.

When Murdoch informed his employees of his decision to step down, he told them to “make the most of this great opportunity to improve the world we live in.” Really, Rupe? Improve? You did nothing to improve the world. Rather, your shitty news outlets helped turn it into a sewer.

© Prana Film / Film Arts Guild

October 31, 2021November 1, 2021

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2021

From unsplash.com / © Nicola Gambetti

It’s Halloween today and as usual I thought I’d celebrate the occasion by displaying ten of the most interesting pieces of macabre art I’ve come across in the past year.

And what better way to start than with this illustration by the Italian-born, American-reared artist Joseph Mugnaini for Ray Bradbury’s 1972 fantasy novel The Halloween Tree? Never having read that novel, I don’t know what the winged, cadaverous, hooked-nosed figure represents, but he makes an elegant and cosmically weird image.

In these art-themed Halloween posts I usually include something featuring skeletons, as a nod to the festival that comes immediately after Halloween – Mexico’s skeleton-obsessed Dia de Muertos, the Day of the Dead, at the start of November. This year’s skeletal number is by Vincent Van Gogh, no less. Known as Skeleton with a Lit Cigarette in its Mouth, it now resides in Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. The museum’s website describes it as “a juvenile joke”, painted by Van Gogh “in early 1886, while studying at the art academy in Antwerp… Drawing skeletons was a standard exercise at the academy, but painting them was not part of the curriculum. He must have made this painting at some other time, between or after his lessons.” I find the painting discombobulating, not just because of the cigarette or, indeed, the revelation that Van Gogh, associated with intensity and misery in most people’s minds, actually had a sense of humour. No, it’s more that the skeleton is such a complex assemblage, of corners, ridges, crenels, shelves and slats. It’s almost machine-like – slightly reminiscent of the lethal, metal endoskeleton that pops up at the climax of The Terminator (1982).

From vangoghmuseum.nl/en

Going further back in time, I have to say I love this depiction of a devil, which occupies the front side of the right-hand panel in the triptych Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation. It was painted in the 1480s by the German-born, Bruges-based artist Hans Memling and is now on display in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg. It’s the merriment with which the little fellow is dancing, on top of those sinners suffering in eternal hellfire, that gets me. Why, he’s practically riverdancing.

From musees.strasbourg.eu

Now for a devil from a different culture and different part of the world. This bloated, pustular apparition is what’s known as a ta-awi, a Philippine ogre / demon. I happened across it on Cryptid Wiki, which describes the beast as “a large hideous humanoid from Philippine mythology.” It “raids villages and devours people alive, but doesn’t eat their eyeballs because it can’t digest them for some reason.” All I can determine about the artist is that his name is Isaiah Paul and he has a page on deviantart.com here.

Less in-your-face and more ambiguous – the figure depicted may not even be supernatural, but just an odd person who likes to immerse herself among water lilies – is this painting, which I believe is called Hidden Things and is by modern-day Welsh artist Kim Myatt. In fact, I’d say it evokes the subtle strangeness of the fiction of Robert Aickman.

© Kim Myatt

In 1980, when I was both a spotty adolescent and an aspiring writer, the first stories I ever submitted were to a handsome little magazine called Fantasy Tales. (The stories weren’t accepted, but the editors were kind enough to write back and offer me advice like “When you’re typing, try leaving a space after commas and full stops,” or “It’s probably not a good idea to have six single-sentence paragraphs in a row.”) What made Fantasy Tales so visually appealing was that it featured the artwork of Lancastrian Jim Pitts, whose exquisitely detailed and atmospheric illustrations, often in black-and-white, recalled the great artists of the 1930s and 1940s pulp-fiction magazines such as Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok. Here’s a gothic and vampirical item that Pitts did for issue four of the magazine Dark Horizons.

© Jim Pitts

Another English illustrator I remember fondly from my youth is Les Edwards, whose work adorned the covers of paperbacks like Karl Edward Wagner’s Bloodstone (1975) and Robert Holdstock’s novelisation of the movie Legend of the Werewolf (1975). I like Edwards’ work for being unpretentious and upfront – you certainly knew what sort of book you were getting when you saw his art on the cover – but also for its precision and colour. This piece is called The Shade and achieves a chill despite its graveyard scene being pictured in daylight. There’s a suggestion of mist creeping ominously in from the distant trees and the stone angel in the foreground adds to the discomfort.

A third illustrator whose work was familiar to me in my teenage years was the American science fiction and fantasy artist Rowena Morrill, who sadly died in February this year. Morrill blazed a trail as a rare thing in 1970s paperback illustration – a woman. Her work graced the covers of the first collections of stories by H.P. Lovecraft that I managed to lay my hands on, The Dunwich Horror (1978) and The Colour Out of Space (1978). Her depictions of Lovecraft’s ‘Elder Gods’ as amalgamations of bits of wildly-different creatures may not be how most people imagine Cthulhu and company nowadays, i.e., with lots of tentacles, but they’re grotesquely and baroquely weird. Here’s the picture that adorned The Dunwich Horror.

I’ve seen the Czech artist Jindra Capek described online as a ‘children’s book illustrator’. Hmm. I don’t know if the following picture, showing a hungry ghoul-type creature (though one civilised enough to be wearing what looks like a pair of boxer shorts) taking a bite out of a newly-dug-up corpse, is what you’d expect to see in the pages of a children’s book. Come to think of it, though, my ten-year-old self would have been delighted by it.

One sort of image I’ve always found unsettling is that of an insect, or general creepy-crawly, sporting the facial features of a human being. I’m thinking of David Hedison in The Fly (1958), playing a hapless scientist whose experiments with teleportation go astray and end up grafting his head onto the bug of the title; or the scuttling, insectoid, human-faced aliens in The Zanti Misfits, the famous 1963 episode of the TV anthology show The Outer Limits. Needless to say, I find this item disturbing. It’s by the Belgian artist Henri Lievens, who in his lifetime created the covers for more than 200 books. Entitled L’Araignee, its lady-faced spider is icky-looking but also, with those large doe eyes, worryingly fetching. The lurid blue and black palette heightens its effect.

From unquietthings.com

And that’s it for another year. Happy Halloween!

December 27, 2020

So un-macho

An extremely right-wing author and essayist recently caused an uproar by saying something offensive on social media. That’s hardly news these days. Anyway, impelled by morbid curiosity, I checked out said author and essayist’s blog. No, I’m not going to provide a link to it because the dribbling jackanapes has already received enough free publicity. One remark on that blog caught my eye and made me think, though. It was a description of President, soon-to-be ex-President, Donald Trump as ‘the alpha-male of alpha-males’.

Let me get this straight. Donald Trump is not only an alpha-male, but is the most alpha-male going? You’ve got to be kidding.

The last four years and, indeed, most of the past 74 years that Trump has been on the planet are peppered with instances that show him to be not so much an alpha-male as an alpha-wuss. Indeed, the past month-and-a-half since the US presidential election, when Joe Biden handed Trump his arse on a plate by massively winning both the popular vote and the electoral college, has shown him to be even more pathetic than normal.

Seeing Trump react to defeat with a display of whiny, shrieky, stamping-his-little-feet, waving-his-little-fists, chucking-his-toys-out-of-the-pram petulance doesn’t make me think of some muscled, lantern-jawed, bare-chested, testosterone-oozing specimen of maleness swaggering his way through a Hollywood action movie. Rather, it makes me think of the obnoxious Violet Elizabeth Bott, the lisping little girl in Richmal Crompton’s William books (1922-70) who, when anyone refused to let her have her way, would threaten: “I’ll thcream and thcream and thcream till I’m thick!” Or of Veruca Salt, the monstrously spoilt little girl in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), who proved so unbearable that Willie Wonka’s squirrels ended up throwing her down a garbage chute to the factory’s incinerator.

Ironically, the right-wing dingbats who support Trump often lament the decline of good old-fashioned masculine values, thanks to, as they see it, assaults in recent decades by feminists, liberals, socialists, gay rights activists, trans activists, etc. In fact, if you look at the best-known embodiments of traditional masculine values, as portrayed on the cinema screen, you’ll see that their hero Trump displays none of those values himself. He falls laughably short in comparison. Imagine how he’d react and behave if he were in the shoes of Hollywood’s most famous macho-men during their most famous movies.

Take Bruce Willis, for example – an actor who’s well-known for his conservative leanings but who hasn’t, despite scurrilous rumours, shown much enthusiasm for Trump. As Detective John McClane in Die Hard (1988), Willis attends a Christmas party being held in a skyscraper by the company that employs his estranged wife. There’s an unwanted festive surprise when a gang of German terrorists show up, seize the building and hold the partygoers hostage. McClane, who blames the company for his marriage’s break-up and wasn’t feeling comfortable at the party, nonetheless ducks into the nearest ventilation shaft and spends the film crawling around and picking off the terrorists one by one until order has been restored. You couldn’t imagine Trump selflessly doing any of that. Actually, someone of his orange bulk would manage to crawl about two inches along the ventilation shaft before getting stuck.

No, Trump, the self-proclaimed master of ‘the art of the deal’, would be more like the character of Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner). Ellis is a sleazy company executive who thinks he can bargain with the terrorists and get them to agree to a plan to lure McClane out of hiding. “Hey babe, I negotiate million dollar deals for breakfast!” he brags in Trumpian fashion. “I think I can handle this Eurotrash!” Too late does the hapless Ellis realise that the terrorists have been stringing him along and don’t intend to honour their side of the bargain. Inevitably, their leader, Vladimir Putin… sorry, Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) puts a bullet through his head.

Or take Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who’s publicly dissed Trump for his appalling record on the environment. In Schwarzenegger’s most famous role, as the reprogrammed-to-be-good Terminator in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Schwarzenegger realises at the movie’s finale that the central processing unit in his head is the last remaining piece of technology that might enable the machines to take over the world. So, nobly, he decides he has to be destroyed for the good of humanity and asks Sarah and John Connor (Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong) to lower him into a vat of molten metal. Could you imagine Trump being so self-sacrificing? “I am NOT going in that vat of molten metal! There’s no CPU in my head! That’s fake news! This is the most corrupt decision in the history of my country! This never happened to Obama…!” And so on.

Probably Trump would prefer to model himself on the bad Terminator played by Schwarzenegger in the first Terminator movie (1984), since that character has traits that the Gross Orange One admires: zero empathy, total ruthlessness, no qualms about using its arsenal of heavy-duty weaponry to blow away anything that defies it. However, with Trump as the Terminator, the movie would last five minutes. The Trump-Terminator arrives in 1984 Los Angeles… Naked, it approaches a group of street-punks (including good old Bill Paxton, who exclaims, “This guy’s a couple of cans short of a six-pack!”)… Then the street-punks beat it to death.

Who else? Clint Eastwood, yet another Hollywood Republican who’s been muted about Trump (and in 2020 promised to support Mike Bloomberg if he became the Democrats’ presidential candidate)? Eastwood built up his iconic macho persona during Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy in the 1960s. Not only was he The Man with No Name, but he was a man of few words. He’d squint, keep his jaws clamped around a cigar and unnerve his opponents with a contemptuous silence. You couldn’t imagine a brash, loud gobshite like Trump, someone whose mouth is five minutes ahead of his brain, doing that.

In fact, Eastwood in his other most famous role, as Detective Harry Callaghan, aka Dirty Harry, offers advice in Magnum Force (1973) that Trump would have been wise to heed: “Man’s got to know his limitations.”

John Wayne? In Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1966), Wayne plays a town sheriff who’s loyal to and protective of his staff – Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan in the earlier film, Robert Mitchum, James Caan and Arthur Hunicutt in the later. Even when Mitchum develops a severe alcohol problem in El Dorado, Wayne puts up with his drunken bullshit and does his best to straighten the guy out. It’s impossible to imagine the same of Trump, whose four-year tenure in the White House has seen a parade of cringing and crooked underlings being recruited and then, the moment they displease their master, being dumped again. The loyal-only-to-himself Trump would have pointed a finger at Mitchum and sneered, “You’re fired!”

Steve McQueen? McQueen’s most famous role was as the prisoner of war Hilts in The Great Escape (1963), which would have earned him Trump’s disgust immediately. As he once notoriously declared of John McCain, “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like heroes who weren’t captured!” In fact, McQueen breaks out of the POW camp in Escape but then gets recaptured when his motorbike fails to clear a barbed wire fence on the Swiss border, which I suppose makes him a double loser in Trump’s eyes.

In fact, Trump is devoid of the qualities I recognised in the masculine icons with whom I grew up: being loyal, being selfless, doing the right thing, playing fair, saying only things that are worth saying, sticking up for the underdog, being magnanimous in victory, being graceful in defeat. Then again, this is unsurprising when you see the Neanderthals who support him signalling their masculinity by gathering in mobs outside state legislative buildings, clad in combat fatigues and totting automatic rifles, to protest the implementation of safety measures against Covid-19. These would-be warriors are too wimpy to countenance wearing small pieces of cloth over their mouths and nostrils to protect their fellow citizens. Clearly, their notions of masculinity have nothing to do with the qualities I’ve listed above. Rather, they’re all to do with intimidating, bullying and hurting people.

If that’s what masculinity is about, I’ll be glad to see the back of it. And I’ll be especially glad to see the back of its biggest proponent, the one in the White House – who on January 20^th goes from being the alpha-male to being the alpha-fail.