The Eight Year Old who Saw Halloween 2

When I was very young, I always enjoyed going to stay with my father because he had, GASP, a VHS video recorder. We didn’t have one of those at home…

This large beast, a top loader of sturdy build, possibly made by Sanyo, sat next to the television, and spent much of its time being used to record episodes of Dallas – as boring to me then as it is now – and far more excitingly play rented films from the wonderful “Gogglebox” – a pair of shops based in Altrincham and Sale that had tabletop Space Invaders, the latest movies to rent, and also an under the counter stock of pirated films just out at the cinema.

I saw ET in that manner.

And also, I saw a number of fairly grim horror movies. “The Exterminator” sticks in the memory for the mincing machine scene, made ludicrous in retrospect by the fact that the meat packing mobster survived despite having gone through the machine in its entirety.

And then there was Halloween 2. I hadn’t seen the first movie, so had no idea what was going on at all, other than the fact that a scary man was wandering around very slowly killing people in horrifying ways. I remember the “duh….duh-duh…” music that accompanied his relentless footsteps. I remember a throat being cut in all its crimsonly graphic glory. But that was nothing compared to two other death scenes.

The first was a case of mistaken identity. On the part of the victim, rather than Mr Myers himself, who having slain the boyfriend in silhouette, took his place behind his busty naked nurse ladyfriend. Who had no idea that Myers had turned up the temperature of the hot-tub to boiling point.

She got the idea pretty quickly though, as Myers dunked her face in the water a few times, and we heard her deafening screams as the camera showed the flesh being scalded off her face in loving close-up. Over and over again he boiled her; over and over again we saw her increasingly ravaged face.

One big whole world of shudders.

In the other memorable scene, another nurse – the hospital setting being well stocked with pretty nurses for slaughter purposes – goes into the doctor’s office. Can he help explain all the mutilations that seem to be occurring? But no, she turns his swivel chair around when he fails to respond, and sees the hypodermic needle embedded in his right eye, the eye socket pooled with blood.

She screams and retreats. But as she does so, we see Myers in his iconic mask emerge from the shadows and grab her around the throat. Again in highly detailed close-up, we see Myers deploy another hypo, moving it in slowly towards the side of her eye with that sort of pleasure-less relentlessness that typifies his character.

And as I screwed up my child eyes in sympathy, the needle went in through the side of her occipital cavity, through the bone and into the eyeball itself.

I never figured whether the poor woman died of this violation in itself, or whether she was injected with something to kill her. It didn’t and doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is why was an 8 year old watching this in the first place? Although thrilled to be watching films like this, it still left some images scarrred onto my childish brain. All I can say, I was always attracted to the dark, macabre and diseased as a child. Didin't harm me. But others wondered if it would.

Cue the video nasties debate a few months later.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 31/10/2013

What "Really" Lies Within?

My hometown, like many others, is full of strange little old brick buildings that seem little used, and never have any visitors going in or out.

The old bowling green pavilion. Various perma-locked old public toilets. Outhouses on the edge of public parks. Car park attendant shelters no longer used since automation - the old man in the orange flashed donkey jacket kicked out onto the street to slowly strave to death while being taunted and urinated upon by passers-by in favour of non-functional ticket machines swallowing nickel coins for no sticky paper prize.

By the cemetery, a plot of land with a brick structure stands next to undistinguished housing, a “For Sale” sign flapping in heavier breezes. Still there. Still undeveloped.

They must still be standing for a reason, otherwise greedy councils would flatten them – every tiny little space has a value. I wonder why. Who really controls them. What really are they used for. What “really” lies within?

They are obviously control rooms, observation posts, and the likes. The forces that would infiltrate our society and act for powers beyond our solar system – in one case, within it – use the apparently unused old buildings for their own nefarious purpose. The perma-closed public lavatory, for example, is run by human-cultivating carnivores from Tau Ceti, who monitor the vital signs of folk walking past, and pounce on those with the nourishing characteristics required.

Seeing as they like meat rich in ethanol, the mortality statistics of street drinkers are explained.

The worm-men of Triton, our only solar system based visitors, live in bowling green pavilions all over the United Kingdom. They are secretly digging our our richest and most fertile soils from underneath the surface, and exporting them back to the homeworld to wriggle in. Soon, they will no loger be able to conceal their activities, as our huge tracts of our farmland will cave in on itself, and we will begin to starve.

Parkland outhouses are home to mutants from a waterless world monitoring our political instability, awaiting a time to pounce when we are at our weakest. Empty houses house the empty skulls of the watchers of Vega, living cameras with no thoughts of their own, they seek to collectivise all. These mindless space communists have fascist rivals, the disused telephone exhange dwelling Maggotoids of Mizar, and even as they vivisect the homeless, the Vegans seek to start a war with them.

A war that will kill us all in the process, even if they don't kill us first. So remember, watch those funny little buildings. Ignore them at your, and our, peril.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 28/10/2013

The Magic Book

In every library there is a magic book. You just have to find it.

It’s different in every library. It might be a book on new styles of management in one, a camping guide in a second and a large print copy of a Jackie Collins in another.

Its magic properties vary too. Sometimes nothing happens other than all the text in every other book in the library turning dark green. Sometimes it transports you to another library where the magic book begins with the same first letter as the one you touched. It could make you a Prince or even a King of the land that you live in, or it may turn you into a rat.

The method of magical activation is never constants. Touching the book’s spine may be enough to invoke the power of wizardry, but in other cases you may have to lick page 39. In general, the more powerful the magic invoked, the more extreme the method of initiating the spell. There is a book in the University of Ougadougou that makes 85 golden cows out of nothing if you slam your genitals between pages 283 and 284 of the manuscript – Volume 15 of the Encyclopaedia of Bacteria. All spells found in romance works are activated by pressing your nipple to every instance of the word “the” on the blurb on the inside cover.

It is always fun to watch people look for magic books. Especially the most dedicated of seekers.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26/10/13

Raw with Frustration

When you have a head full of knowledge, can you fill it with any more?

I’m writing in a panic. I’m panicking because I’m being unproductive. I thought the way to become productive again would be to write about panicking about unproductive. There is so much in the world I want to know about. Is it an OCD, Tourette or more Apsergic trait? I don’t know.

I’m also in a panic because I don’t know how to make use of the knowledge I have in a way that could actually make my life better – the more I know, the more it upsets me that I’m not doing anything with it. The knowledge I’ve gained in my life seems more and more useless, as my days fill with moving boxes for very little money, and my nights fill with frustration.

There is a lot I can give to the world, rather than freak show displays of tics in the street and a non-ending stream of cynicism. I write, but I’m giving myself away for free to very few people. Sometimes that seems like a very good idea mind you, the thought of being a latter day Emperor Norton appeals very much, throwing ideas around in the open air like the philosophers outside the Library of Alexandria. But I don’t want to live in poverty either!

I will keep throwing myself against the wall until I stick.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26/10/2013

A Mind Full of Spaceships

My mind was always full of spaceships. To contradict Arcade Fire, it was always a place where all spaceships went.

My mind first became full of spaceships aged about 5 or 6 at infants school. Buck Rogers had appeared on television, and I was thrilled with those wonderful twin pronged starfighters with their exciting double fin at the back that I could never draw at the right angle. Meanwhile, my parents met for the first time, and my now stepfather played me Jeff Wayne’s “War of the Worlds” through headphones to keep me out of the way while he made dinner for my mum.

I thought it was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard.

After that, although I couldn’t draw for toffee, let alone a curly wurly from the swimming pool sweet machine, any piece of paper I could find was filled with crudely drawn Martian tripods destroying everything. Meanwhile Buck flew overhead lasering unidentified craft out of the universe.

The Blakes 7 “Liberator” cruised through deep space, the “ball” at the back always drawn with green felt tip.

My head was then filled with technical specs for spaceships that were either taken from television, or real life, so that a Gemini capsule from the 60s could be spiced up with guns and an engine capable of “Standard by 9”. Salyut 6 acted as a base for a cast of heroic space fighters, who piloted their Firefox craft from a sort of spoked wheel arrangement of docking hubs around the Soviet era space station.

Rival and incompatible technologies were conflated together and I told endless mental stories about the whole thing. I still do, although the characters have long since been transplanted into a 50s retro tech environment flying early jets like the Meteor, Vampire and the Messerschmitt 262. My heroes also spend rather less time being threatened with the tesla-coil filled “Evaporation Chamber” from Buster Crabbe era Flash Gordon, a fate that to my childhood mind was the grimmest imaginable.

I wish my mind was still full of spaceships, and the desire to draw them, no matter how badly. But, the Tourette brain grows older, and it becomes full of the far less exciting, but far more terrible, trials of modern life.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/10/2013

The Beauty of Soviet Space Art

Beautiful? That is a very strange way of speaking of Soviet Art. You normally associate words like "utilitarian" or perhaps "propagandist" about the imagery of the Soviet Union; it is after all designed to unite and uplift the masses, and get the manufacture of tractor parts and beetroot production in line with the latest five year plan. Or something.

The fact is it is far more beautiful than that.

Yes, it serves a purpose. It shows the superiority of the Soviet Union over the rest of the world; it shows the superiority of the men, women and even dogs of that nation. These are heroic figures, in heroic poses, who are somehow still portrayed as doing their all for the Motherland and not themselves. But the colours are vivid and lush, the retro space technology something to drool over, and the art itself is far less bombastic than other forms of Soviet propaganda with its giant Lenins and Peasants of Progress.

There is a tremendous feeling of exploration, and of pushing back frontiers. There is the blackness of space, and these people and vehicles bringing life, light and colour to it. I think it is wonderful.

A general piece of Soviet Space Programme promotion

The heroic, and tragic, Laika aboard Sputnik 2

The all time hero Gargarin of Vostok 1 commemorated

Still an all time heroine in Russia, Valentina Tereshkova

Soyuz 10 mission badge

My all time favourite: Soyuz 18 mission badge

The late 70s - Soyuz 26 / Salyut 6 stamp

Mention must also be made of the great Soviet cosmonaut artist Alexei Leonov. He made the first walk in space aboard Voskhod 2, showing considerable presence of mind to save his life in the process. He made many paintings of space subjects, including the one below, "Near the Moon", which inspired the famous shot from 2001 A Space Odyssey, although Kubrick made it vertical for aesthetic reasons.

Cosmonaut Leonov's "Near the Moon", inspiration for 2001

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23/10/2013

The Wonder of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World

I may have written about this TV series and book before, but really, I don't care. If I have, whatever sentiment I expressed at the time hasn't changed, so please accept my consistency over time, if not my memory.

I've been re-reading my small hardback copy of the book endlessly at work, and before that, I used to read it religiously every time I went to stay at my father's when I was young, scaring myself by reading it late at night, but unable not to and save myself some nightmares in the process. And further back, I remember seeing the TV series when it first appeared, and always having to turn my head away at the last second to avoid the Skull of Doom's terrifying gaze.

I had started to reading about UFOs at a similar sort of time, and was already a confirmed astronomy nut, 7 years old. But a scaredy cat one, the paradoxical stargazer uneasy in the dark. They all spoke of a world that opened up far beyond that of a reasonably teasable - if not bullied or utterly miserable by any means - little boy with platinum hair with muddy brown streaks in it, who never really fitted in.

It was a huge world, with no boundaries, inhabited by creatures of a fantastic nature, who unlike the monsters and creatures of the children's stories he found so, well, childish, there was a possiblity that they might exist. The Yeti maybe a far fetched thing to believe in, but it is still a far more likely thing to exist than a bad tempered troll beneath a bridge.

The Patterson Bigfoot film scared me witless, the film I saw for the first time on this television programme, the familiar jaunty man in a gorilla suit lolloping across the forest. The child me saw the still close up of the "creature's" face staring at the camera, out of the screen, and it made my heart judder.

There was the Alma, the Loch Ness Monster and the other wonderfully named water monsters Ogopogo, Manipogo, Champ, and Caddy. There was Loy's Ape, the Pgymy Elephant, the King Cheetah, the Giant Octopus, the Giant Squid. Many viewers may have been introduced to Fort and Forteana, and more scientific mysteries were covered, based around the rhyme and reason behind ancient sites like Stonehenge, Newgrange, the Nazca lines and the Chalk figures of the South Downs.

All these stories delivered with a slightly scary Gordon Honeycomb narration.



 Some of these creatures, like the Giant Squid and the beautiful (thanks to a mutation) King Cheetah, are now known to exist. This does not subtract from their near-fantastic nature.

And so, as I sat in a works canteen with rain lashing on windows, the grey endless outside, the grown up me read of these wonderful and strange entities and occurences, and it filled my brain with knowledge and transported me away. I wish the book were ten times longer.

Three Blades???!!! The Sword and the Sorcerer

“Um, I don’t think this film is really suitable” said the soft dad, the former failed labour candidate for the town, as his two children and I watched “The Sword and the Sorcerer”. He evidently thought it was a Disney fantasy romp, safe for us to watch on his toploading VHS. When he saw the breasts, he realised he was wrong.

I have seen this film essentially twice, on the occasion mentioned above, and again when ITV broadcast it late one night in about 1986 and my folks taped it for me on our FRONTLOADING video recorder.

The plot, which I can’t remember in any case, is entirely irrelevant, featuring the medieval Nazi Titus Cromwell kidnapping heroines to slake his foul desires and engaging a nasty wizard-monster to help his drive for world domination. “Tonight I will make love to you as no other man can” he informs the Princess, before her meaty thump reveals he routinely has to wear an armoured codpiece when seducing wenches. The wizard, he rather stupidly double crosses, and it kills him. Probably.

No, it’s not the storyline that grabs you, essentially yet another in the Conan / Krull / Beastmaster Fantasy boom of the early 80s. It’s the sword. Where the other films had to make do with single bladed weapons, Talon the hero acquires a magical sword that has THREE blades. And not only are these blades capable of slicing other swords in two, they can be fired like bullets into the guts of an enemy at the touch of a button.

"Cease your wrongdoing, or face my triple bladed wrath unleashed!"

How I wanted one when I was a child. Instead, I had to make do with a stick.

The film stands out in others ways. It is full of nudity, with gratuitous visits to the castle brothel aplenty. It is also staggeringly cruel, with the hero crucified at a banquet at one point before freeing himself to stick nails in the faces of the per-usual clueless enemy soldiers. Other scenes feature one of the great characters of Fantasy cinema, the shaven headed palace torturer, as he chews his way through his pain dungeon shouting lines like “These two didn’t have any more to say, so I cut out their tongues” and “Don’t worry little girl, it won’t hurt until I hit the bone.” Classic.

For some reason, I can’t remember the film being shown on British TV for well over twenty years, and the DVD is pricey. Come on Horror or SyFy, get your finger out!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 09/10/2013

The Intergalactic JCB

The thousand different shades of green I can see outside the window are quite breathtaking, as I daydream away over this keyboard wondering when inspiration might find its way in to my fingers.

There are no diggers working away anywhere in my vicinity thank the stars, but for some reason I have a vision of one visible between the birch trees, a savage looking JCB digging up the bowling green, scattering brown earth and burnt umber onto the palette. It shakes its jaws and more lightweight matter is dispersed into the damp atmosphere.

And then it came to me. Instead of having a mere artisan JCB digging in the dirt, could you have a more sophisticated intra dimensional digger, carving its way through space time? Tunnelling like the Eurostar to the galactic destination of your choice?

It would require colossal energy, perhaps akin to that of a Black Hole, perhaps even powered by one, to operate, and would have jaws the size of a medium sized asteroid. Its teeth however are as small as quarks, and move like a quantum chain saw as they slice the fabric of space apart.

The more it digs, the more it sinks into a well in space-time of its own creation, a relativistic jet of super energetic matter indicating where it once sat on the surface of the universe. The navigating entity, man or machine, uses complex multi dimensional spinor mathematics to plot a path through the rent in space, and although the process takes forever relative to the machine, it takes place out of time and thus to observers takes no time at all before it carves its way back to the surface again, at the chosen destination in whichever galaxy, or indeed universe, of choice.

The passengers are now ready to embark in the shuttle vehicle, to fall out of our space, only to re-emerge to here knows when, to see wonders beyond imagination.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 01/10/2013