The Swarm and Crap Cinema's Greatest Quote

"Are you endowing these bees with human motives? Like saving their fellow bees from captivity, or seeking revenge on Mankind?"

"I always credit my enemy, no matter what he may be, with equal intelligence."

So responds Richard Widmark as General Thalius Slater (wasn't he in the Burton "planet of the Apes"?) to Michael Caine, as they and a host of other big star names from the 70s - Ricahrd Chamberlain! Katherine Ross! Slim Pickens! - fight to keep their heads above a mighty, buzzing, nuclear power station destroying tide of AFRICAN KILLER BEES.

"Burn you motherbuzzers!!!!"

It isn't easy, because these bees can kill you with just 6 stings, and if you don't die, agonising hallucinating madness awaits.

Butch Cassidy seems a long time ago, eh Katharine

 Of course, Widmark being the usual military idiot wants to take the shock and awe option, bombing, spraying, and immolating the bees out of existence, but Caine dissuades him with a memorable, ballbusting ecological lecture, delivered in the loudest yell Caine ever used in his career. Blowing bloody doors off has nothing on it.

That is the point, general! The honey bee is vital to the environment! Every year in america, they pollinate six billion dollars worth of crops! If you kill the bee, you're gonna kill the crop! If you kill the plants, you'll kill the people! No! No, general! There will be no air drop, until we know exactly, what we are dropping, and where, and how! Excuse me!

Of course, they are both right. Caine lures the bees offshore using some sort of sonic gizmo, where Widmark is finally able to deploy his napalm on the pollinating apid psychopaths. But not before most of the stars die, all the extras die - best scene; an old teacher screaming as her kids are agonisingly exstingulated - and Henry Fonda overdoses himself with bee venom in a fruitless attempt to find an antidote.

AAARRGGGHHHHH

Doctor Kildare's bedside manner comes in for criticism

This mega camp Irwin Allen disaster (in all senses) classic was shown last night on BBC4. Iplayer while you can and give yourself a treat.

I Love the Silurians!

The Horror Channel's Doctor Who repeats have been an absolute godsend for me; wallpaper TV I can write to without ever. having to concentrate too hard. All of the Pertwee and Baker era storylines knock the modern era into one of those "cocked hat" things - whatever is a cocked hat FFS - and the fact that most episodes appear to have been dug out of a bog make it easier to ignore, or indeed enjoy, the daft costumes, sets, and rubber suited monsters.

So. Doctor Who and the Silurians. I knew what the Siluruans were, roughly (things to get confused with the Sea Devils) and I knew they were among the best loved monsters. But I had never seen their 1970 story until now.

It is, or rather they are, fantastic.

The thing is with these Silurians is that they are not really monsters at all. They may be up to no good, but it is only initially in reasonable self preservation...their leader even has a sense of burbling charm...no mere evil green blobs on wheels, these fellows. Their high intelligence shines through.

Achh, who am I trying to fool? The charm is in the daft turd brown rubber suits; the fluttering eyelashes; the aforementioned burbly voices that make them sound like "The Fifth Element" Mondushawan on acid; they have a funny stumbling walk as if their arms have been strapped by their sides while their amphiboid heads bob back and forth; they have a light in their foreheads which have a duel purpose of killing people and moving coffin like hibernacula around; their faces are silly, and as ever when they do have a plan to hatch for the usual earthling killing purposes, it is far too long winded and complicated for it ever to work, especially when they set it out to the Doctor beforeheand in the tradition of every movie bad guy.

I love them, for every single on of those reasons, and more.

FX and FX2 - The Deadly Y-Fronts of Illusion

I managed to pick up both of these very 80s thrillers - with a loose element of sci-fi - at Oxfam over the weekend for not much money, and was looking forward to watching both of them. Neither of them seem to crop up on UK television much these days.

I was initially stunned to see Lalo Schiffrin's name turnv up in the credits, but the super heavy 1986 analogue synthesizer tunes won't appeal to "Bullit" fans.

The plot of "FX: Murder by Illusion" is actually pretty clever - special effects genius Bryan Brown (THE Australian actor in the 80s, apart from Mel Gibson who wasn't actually Australian) is hired to fake the assasination of mob boss Jerry Orback (Law and Order ahoy!) so he can join the witness protection programme. But the good guys turn out to be not so good, and Bryan finds himself fighting for his life as innocent passers by, and his girlfriend, are iced in the crossfire.

None of this is as alarming as the two standout scenes in the movie; the first when we are treated to a glimpse of Brown in his white Y fronts of a morning, and a second where he descends upon a bad guy like one of those flying squirrels.

Luckily, he overcomes these nightmarish visions to win the day, with the aid of some classic analogue FX tricks and chubby Brian Dennehy, playing the same sort of lumbering cop he played in the Skorpions favourite film, "Gorky Park". Both end up waltzing off into the sunset with 15 million dollars of mob money amid some jarring tourist film of Switzerland.

Onto FX2 "The Deadly Art of Illusion", and we find Brown still battling corrupt cops AND District Attorneys in league with the Mafia as an FX stunt to trap a sex killer goes wrong and the father of his girlfriend's child - hello Rachel Ticotin from Total Recall! The money, and moustache having all ran out for Dennehy, he teams up with Brown again to see off the bad guys with the aid of a terrifying movement micking robot clown, and an early sighting of virtual reality in the cinema.

Dan Brown must have written the bit of the script dealing with stolen Vatican gold medallions

 

 

The films are horrifically dated now, although there are less rolled up jacket sleeves and big hair on view than you'd expect. I found them an entertaining afternoon, but I shant be reaching to the back of the DVD shelf to watch them again any time soon.

 

I have no wish to see the robot clown again, let alone those Y-fronts...

 



The Unknown Villain - Boy Number 6 Kazuo Kiriyama

Battle Royale is a movie probably little known outside of fans of Manga and those "Tartan Asia Extreme" DVDs, and hence its chief antagonist does not have the reputation he deserves.

He is Boy Number 6, Kazuo Kiriyama.

Nothing behind the eyes

The Manga apparently gives him a complex backstory, that he is an intellectually superior child that had been rendered essentially sociopathic by an accident in the womb that caused to all intents and purposes a partial lobotomy.

The film just presents him as a blank "transfer student" who's first act one the game the commences - the game being the teens fight to the death until only one remains scenario pinched by The Hunger Games - is to be able to kill a gang of 6 heavily armed opponents with a paper fan.

Throughout the film he kills without mercy, using his movie standard M10 with everlasting magazines to kill boy and girl alike without making a sound. The only utterance he ever makes is when he makes an  inhuman cough into the megaphone used by two girls in a failed attempt to unite the students, before using it to broadcast a dying girl's death rattle to the whole of Battle Royale island.

The face of death

He is a killer far above any campy Bond villain or lumbering Michael Myers, and it is time he was recognised as such.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08.10.14