2010 – The Year We Make Contact

I'm going to commit a few, unforgiveable, burn-me-at-the-stakes heresies here.

This is another of the sequels that is better than the original.

“How can you say that” you ask, as you stack the wood up and soak it in oil. “How can this workmanlike picture starring hammy old scrotum Roy Schneider be better than Kubrick's mindblowing spectacle.”

The truth is, very easily. Everyone likes 2001, because it is Kubrick, because it has got some spectacular visuals, but because IT IS A FILM YOU MUST LIKE IN ORDER TO LOOK INFORMED – AND OF COURSE, COOL.

This is bullshit. Hardly anyone really likes hard sci fi, and this movie is leaden with it. The film essentially boils down to:

Act 1 – Monkey's throw sticks at each other (witness opening of Star Wars Holiday Special for similar Simian grunting fun). For ages.

Act 2 – Endlessly praised match cut leads into hours of boring space ship stuff set to music by proto Nazis. The most noteworthy event here is a man visiting a toilet upside down.

Act 3 – Two very wooden astronauts do very dull things while watching themselves on “BBC12”. Computer eventually gets so fed up it kills everyone until its building block brain is removed.

Act 4 – Man goes down cool space tunnel while eerie Ligeti music plays; eventually he meets an older version of himself with a face covered in plasticene.

The End.

2010 has some cool spaceships, fantastic sequences involving aero braking around Jupiter, a bit of action, some hard sci fi elements that aren't as dry as dust, Helen Mirren, and John Lithgow playing a homosexual space engineer – this element of his character however is excised from the movie, although it is explicit in the book. OK it also has terrible voiceover exposition from Schneider, a horrible hokey cold war plot, and Helen Mirren doing a terrible Russian accent even though she is Russian while other members of the cast opt for Mr Chekov style “Nuklee-ar Wessels” tomfoolery.

But at least things happen!!! It doesn't bore the arse off you. 2001 is the world's most boring film ever, making Solaris look like Toy Story, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

And what other sci fi film can boast having a future Queens of the Stone Age keyboard player in the cast?

The young Natasha Scheider in 2010

And here with QOTSA for "Lullabies to Paralyse"

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.04.14

Lair of the White Worm

This is a mid 80s British Horror film, appearing the same sort of time Lifeforce was made, and dated by the fact that Amanda Donohoe as the posh leading lady flashes a CD Player as a sign of her status. Based on a Bram Stoker novel of the same title, it thus takes a gothic setting and injects yuppie-nalia into the mix.

It's a silly film in many ways, featuring a young pre fame Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi, but the whole film is dominated by Amanda Donohoe.

These specs win all the prizes of ever

 Ludicrously oversexed, prone to showing hitchhikers round her mansion in bra, panties and thigh high boots, as well as the lady of the manor she is the priestess of an ancient snake worshipping cult, devoted to feeding young virgins to the Dionin, a snake slash dragon creature in the anglo saxon tradition.

There is a storyline, concerning archaeologist Capaldi's investigations in the vicinity of Donohoe's huge pied-a-terre, but it's a Ken Russel movie and thus always likely to throw plot aside in favour of lurid visuals and gratuitous nudity. The special effects around the Dionin creature itself are terrible, but there are some fantastic make up jobs lavished upon Ms Donohoe, and her OTT IN CAPITALS performance makes it an entertaining watch.

How has she lured this spotty hitchhiker to his doom?

What to do when a Poet Uses the Word “Desolate” Too Many Times

Poets have suddenly sprung out of the earth everywhere, like one of those American towns where annoying chripy crickets emerge every 17 years in order to eat all the leaves, and leave dessicated insectoid corpses rotting all over the ground for months afterwards.

Poets are hard to avoid. A truly dedicated poet can insist on trying to make you read their latest work in any social situation, and if you claim you are awaiting a phone call from a girlfriend in Guatemala that can only be made in that time window, they will roll up their sonnet and try and stuff it down your eye socket directly into your brain.

Avoid that, and they will follow you home and hide under your bed, and read it out as you sleep, subliminally imprinting your brain with pretentious imagery as you dream.

A favoured word of peripapatetic pub poets is “Desolate”. Every couplet mentions it, and every stanza that doesn't mention it has an air of desolation about it anyway. Relationships are desolate. Loneliness is desolate. Friendships involve a profound sense of desolation, and mental health is as desolate as the surface of the moon after a nuclear war.

Frankly, everything is far too fucking desolate.

But I have a suggestion. The next time a poet offers me a tract that features too much of this “D-Word” I will have them transported to the most barren desert in the universe, under a sun that blazes with so little mercy it would happily incinerate a starving child who had just watched their mother murdered. There they will write “Desolate” in the sand with a stick a thousand times in words one mile long.

And if they fail to complete that task within a year, a goat headed demon god from hell will appear, and give them an enema of burning sand.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22.02.14

CINEMA - Super 8 Scores a 7. And a Bit

Finally got to watch Super 8, having bought it originally as a present for the folks and having had to wait for a discretely decent interval before spiriting it back to my place alongside some onions.

After about half an hour, it was pretty obvious I was watching Super Close Encounters of the Extra Terrestrial Cloverfield Kind - there were so many Spielberg identifiers in there it was hard to see where JJ Abrams could have put his own imprint on the movie. Cute child - check. Cute child who lost their mother to an unfortunate crushing incident - check. Cute child gets kidnapped by alien - check. Lashings of sentimentality - check check check check.

Finally, Abrams own DNA gets a look in. A monster that looks pretty much the same as the Cloverfield one. But for all the movie's obvious derivations, it has a lot of charm. The framing device, the kids of the cast shooting their own zombie apocalypse movie on the titular Super 8 camera, is a fantastic one and it also bears noting that the finished product you see over the end credits is better than Planet Terror by a mile.

The young cast - Joel Courtney, Riley Griffiths and the tons-better-than-her-sister Elle Fanning - are great too, and the fact that the creature is given more depth than either a building crushing giant prawn, or a finger glowing be-good moralist, adds a dimension to the film other creature flicks lack.

In short, it's not amazing, but it is a highly watchable film, and I whiled away a happy sofa bound couple of hours watching it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/08/2013

Splice - A Cronenberg Movie Like Cronenberg Used to Make

Although I have it on DVD, I haven't seen Splice in a while, so it was a pleasure to watch science out of control versus people, interspersed with watching out of control people versus science.

The documentary about the woman who tried to block life saving radiotherapy for her son "Neon" because she wanted to use crazed alternative therapies instead, was on Channel 4 and was equally compelling viewing.

Splice itself, directed by Vicenzo Natali who had showed what could be done with a one room set and a ton of imagination in "Cube" is another spin on the Frankenstein story, with scientists starting off with good intentions corrupted by the scope of their breakthrough. Their creation in this case being a doe eyed, model faced, bunny legged creature called "Dren".

Which always makes me giggle, "dren" meaning "crap" in Farscape speak.

Dren's creators, an ambitious and ever watchable Sarah Polley, and a geeky Adrian Brody, are forced to take their creation to a remote farm after the launch of a previous gene splicing experiment goes bloodily wrong at a media event. And here their attempts to get to Dren to express her human, feminine side over the rest of her varied animal componentry go disastrously wrong after when she seduces Brody, and kills her pet cat to boot.

And after that, things get seriously weird when we throw some transgendering into the ring, and a rape scene that disturbs more than Straw Dogs ever did.

"Splice" is essentially a Cronenberg body horror type movie, taking elements from "The Fly" and mixing in some "Jurassic Park" as well as Dren's genetics fly out of the control of her maker's. Some of the music is even reminiscent of Howard Shore's Cronenberg scores. It ought to be a B movie, by a director who has never really made it to the A's, but the performances of Polley, Brody, and in particular that of Delphine Chaneac as the disturbingly attractive Dren, make it rather more than that.

And it's a story which in a world where our drive for genetically improved food, drugs, and indeed children becomes more urgent, really resonates.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14/08/2013

The Extreme Sinus Problems of Outland

Just been fortunate to find a DVD copy of Peter Hyam's "Outland" for next to no money in the usual shop of ill repute.

Set in a drug addled mining colony on Jupiter's moon Io, it features an excellent Sean Connery in what is essentially a sci-fi update of "High Noon"; a lone white hat surrounded by corruption and having to take on the bad guys unaided.

Making use of the same blue collar vibe as Alien, with added lashings of the ever amusing "music of the future" and oily PVC clad space pole dancers, it's a pretty decent film. But the standout memory for the young me, seeing this movie as a thirteen year old kid or so, are the exploding heads.

People have drug freak outs in Outland. They think their working spacesuits have spiders in them, and they take their helmets off in a panic. Exposed to the vacuum, they undergo a troublesome cerebral expansion...

The fun doesn't stop there of course, and entering a depressurising airlock without a spacesuit is seen to cause major gastric issues.

When the bad guys arrive, despite being alone, Sean Connery is of course well up to the task. This David Crosby lookalike falls foul of the cunning of 007 and a chain smoking comic relief Doctoress.

The special effects, consisting of what appear to be inflateable footballs with crude faces stuck on them, are of course laughable now, as is the science - you don't blow up like Mr Creosote when exposed to a vacuum. But to a teenager, it was damn scary to imagine the panic, the fear, the terror of feeling your face, and eyes, and skin, and tissue, expand out into the unforgiving cold of space and rip you to shreds in a lengthy burst of stretchy agony.

Brrrr. Shivers...

CINEMA - Krell Wonders - The Forbidden Planet

At one point in this classic, vivid piece of science fiction film making, the id-ally challenged Doctor Morbius asks of strong chinned space captain Leslie Neilson "Would you like to see some more Krell Wonders?"

"Hell yes!" he replies, or words to that effect, and off they go to explore more chambers of inconceivable alien other wordliness.

"Hell yes!" I always say too, whenever I see the film.

Promo Poster that doesn't at all reflect the real atmosphere of the film

The child in me never gets to see enough of the Krell; their enormous, mysterious city with its electronically burbling  giant resistors and massive pill shaped "things" moving up and down for no apparent purpose; and the Krell themselves, entities we never know anything about other than the fact they need great broad pentagonal doors and were destroyed utterly by the same psycho-physical terror that Morbius is manifesting.

Yes I know that in terms of the purity of cinema, less is more, and don't reveal your monster blah blah, but my inner child always feels cheated by the lack of actual Krell. And as for their city, well, what else was there apart from the eye searing power source and the great echoing caverns of electricial switching mechanisms? Where did they live? What were their transport systems? Leisure? Agriculture?

The "electronic tonalities" of Louis and Bebe Barron, the first time a film had had such a score, add to the futuristic gloss of the whole production, and leaves you wanting so much more. I love the movie, and I still wonder what the krell world was still concealing from us, when it finally detonated its monsters of the id for good.

BOOKS - Charles Stross - "Singularity Sky"

I've been meaning to write up my thoughts on this sci fi work for a couple of weeks; a book that kept me happily entertained as I sat reading it in a pub with a couple of excellent pints of Reverend James.

The work, although like so much I read seeming to owe a little or lot to Banks' Culture novels - the "Gods in the Machine" characters seem to bear a resemblance to Culture sublimed races perhaps, and the grossly inhuman yet fully sentient and realised alien species reminded me of the fauna found in Banks - throws in Steampunk and retrotech elements to create a universe very much of its own devising.

The main thrust of the novel is the effect, 200 years in the future, of a non-incorporeal seemingly vastly superior race called The Festival on a planet where a sort of Tsarist elite rule over the peasant society. In return for entertaining anecdotes, the Festival offer the peasantry cornucopia technology that can create absoloutely anything, thus triggering an accelerated communist revolution that goes from village Soviets to a techono-overkill situation in a matter of days.

Meanwhile, the regime in charge of the planet, send out a battlefleet that although with a structure like that that fought in the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, is equipped with faster than light technology with the potential to affect the past. This attracts the interest of a number of parties, who send out agents to "monitor" these efforts...

I enjoyed the novel. It doesn't have the complexity or richness of a Culture novel, but is correspondingly more human and a lot easier to get into. Stross is also exploring our contemporary issues in this work, like freedom of information, the problems and benefits of high techonlogy, and the nature of tyranny, benign or otherwise. There is a follow up I'd like to read, and I would recommend the book to the fan of intelligent sci fi. Especially in the pub with a beer!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 09/06/13

Gene Simmons, Tom Selleck, and the Acid Spiders of Runaway

Runaway is a film little seen on the small screen these days, and I've never come across it in all my charity shop and market stall rummages either.

And before you ask, finding it on the internet is cheating!

It's a film that sticks in the memory though. Because of Tom Selleck playing a near future cop trying to establish why people's formerly docile domestic housekeeping robots have gone suddenly rogue? No, I'm guessing that at the time Tom was still kicking himself for not being able to take the Indiana Jones gig when it was right under his nose, and was trying to make up for it by appearing in unsuccessful movies like this one, or the X rated Indy movie Lassiter.

Could it be that the villain of the film, dastardly manufacturer of microchips that turns droids into killers is none other than Gene Simmons of Kiss? No, he makes a reasonably effective villain, if a little monotone and his tongue undeployed.

The reason the movie is memorable is, like The Black Hole with its terrifying bowel churning robot Maximillian, that the movie is stolen by a robot. Or rather robots, and unlike the powerful hovering Maximillian with his whirling blades, these robots are small, eight legged and yet just as frightening.

These robot spiders have a seriously unpleasant, double threat. Not only do they inject their victims with acid to cause agonising pain, as is happening to Mr Simmons here;

they then explode.

They have a sinister, vibrating motion, coupled with an ability to jump like mechanical fleas onto walls next to the quivering necks of their victims...

...before plunging their acid dripping needles into the vulnerable flesh.

The film isn't an out and out turkey, it is watchable and although it never made Selleck into a major action star like he must have been hoping, he does a decent job. But to an 11 year old boy, as I was, the performances and the script just don't register.

What makes the impact is the thought of having killer robot spiders inject agonising, burning acid into your neck, a thought sufficient to make you go to sleep with a pillow over your head for a fair few nights!

Words copyright Bloody Mulberry 04/05/2013

Doctor Parnassus and Lily Cole

I watched this movie again this afternoon, in a state of total enjoyment while never quite understanding what the film is about. Which is fair enough, because 1) I'm no superbright student of cinema and 2) I'm not sure Terry Gilliam knew either after Heath Ledger died.

The "Alt Ledger" sequences (Depp, Law, Farrell) do look, understandably, rather rushed. Especially Johnny Depp's sequence through the mirror

It doesn't stop the film from being a highly wonderful piece of cinema just for being there. It just is, and I'm a huge fan of movies like that. It looks amazing, sounds amazing, and is wonderfully cast.

"Wonderfully Cast"? Yes it is. Not for Heath Ledger, who actually with his floating point accent is probably the weakest thing in the movie (HERESY!!!!), but for Christopher Plummer, Andrew Garfield, Verne Troyer and Tom Waits. But especially, Lily Cole.

She can act, for sure, but most importantly she really does look like the sort of god-beautiful-given gift an immortal might spawn as the result of a pact with a particularly suave devil.

I love this film, but she makes me adore it, and if that makes me shallow, then by all means, take a paddle in me.

Alien 3 is better than Aliens

Alien 3 is better than Aliens. End of.

Better cast of decent british actual acting talent and the tall bloke from Casualty who has just had his ear bitten off. The setting is more atmospheric, the characterisation deeper, and despite Fincher's production problems, it has a sense of style way above the KY dripping big gun techno porn of Cameron's vision.

And it has Chales Dance in it. I've liked Charles Dance ever since the wonderfully daft White Mischief, where he was shot by Joss Ackland and then masturbated upon by a middle aged ukulele strumming posh woman from the Kenyan Happy Valley set.

As for the rest of the reasons, it is best if I just list them as a procession of "No" bullet points, that will definitively illustrate for you why Alien 3 is better than Aliens.

NO irritating child NO actually rubbish subtexts about motherhood et al NO silly picture of an aged Ripley daughter that looks like it was ultrasounded in the womb of a tree NO stupid trainers that go over the ankle with velcro fasteners NO suits with turned up lapels NO scary corporate Rosa Klebb lesbian NO lines of dialogue that are flagged as a radical new symbol of female empowerment that aren't NO NO NO Bill Paxton rapping NO director's cut featuring Captain Hollister from Red Dwarf in an LV426 set that looks crummy when lit NO director's cut with Sentry Guns NO "Don't be gone long Ellen" NO silly giggle names like "Spunkmeyer" NO shot of Lance Henriksen in a tube that gives me nightmares NO heterosexual bromance between a crop haired latino and a guy last seen in a recurring role in Murder She Wrote. And above all NO NO NO over-rating by male critics who want to look like they were in at the beginning of some kind of female emancipation movement in world cinema.

Have a nice, dark, set on a prison planet that was originally a monastery kind of day.

Danny Boyle's Sunshine

Sunshine has always been one of my favourite films, yet Danny Boyle was so put off by the response it got he announced he was never going to touch the sci fi genre again, and Prof (Then Doctor) Brian Cox who worked as a science advisor on the film before his current TV omniescence jokes about what a complete box office disaster it was.

I can't understand why, and yet I can understand why.

The film itself suffers from an attack of schizophrenia about 2/3 of the way through. Prior to that it had been a work of hard sci fi, with lots of lovingly constrcuted shots of technologically non far fetched spacecraft heading towards a vivid, beautiful and active sun; a sun that acts as a major character in the film, a sun that causes some of our intrepid group of scientists and astronauts to undergo a kind of solar psychosis.

Then the Icarus 2, the spacecraft on a vital mission to save humanity by launching a manhattan sized nucelar device into a faltering sun, docks with its predecessor, and the film lurches awakwardly into slasher mode - Mark Strong with a growly voice and a bad case of psoriasis rampages around with vibrating knives and an artistic sense of how to pose murdered botanists. You never see the maniac in any other than a hyperactive blurred fashion, which I always assume was done to hide dodgy make up work. It really doesn't work as horror or science fiction, and this combined with its hard sci fi credentials ensured its box office doom.

Yet there is so much to enjoy about the film, I'd happily watch it again and again - this piece is prompted by two viewings last night. The cast, including Boyle's favourite actor of the period Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans and Hiryoki Sanada, is great; the music by John Murphy and Underworlde is stunning; and finally the celstial spectacle mindblowing with a huge sun burning its way into the minds of the characters and the viewers and a simple, affecting scene of the crew watching a transit of Mercury that has become one of my favourite shots in cinema.

I'd recommend this film for late night viewing with a strong rum and coke - turn the lights out, and the sound up, and let its beauty wash all over you.

Iain M. Banks - Fearsum Endjinn

Well, have just finished readingh this, my 5th Iain M. Banks novel, and delivered it back to the sad green trolleys where library books go when they get returned.

It's not one of his Culture novels, being an earthbound story with a side serving what might be called "Virtual Reality", but shares a lot of their characteristics - separate storylines featuring three or four main characters that gradually come together for the finale; an interest in aritificial means of mind expansion, and an initial threat to humanity from a rather vague source ultimately secondary to the threats its appearance pre-empts.

As ever, it is a brilliant, vibrant read, if a real headache to get into at first because of the phonetic text style speak one of the characters employs, but ultimately as with every other Banks sci fi work I've read, it has one major frustration. The ending is just a colossal anti climax that doesn't really seem to resolve anything.

It's maddening! The journey is always amazing and engrossing, but always far more interesting than the destination. I suppose that vague threats generate woolly endings, but it always disappointing from such a wonderful writer.

John Wyndham - The Outward Urge

As a follow up to what I said of Asimov, and the similar "clunk-tech" sci fi writing of the 50s, I find myself writing about John Wayndham's - "The Outward Urge" - a novel essentially compirisng four novellas linked down through a family's timeline about how a putative conquest of space might work. It's another sci fi novel
I'm reading in my breaks to get myself away from the soul destroying work environment.

It is written in collaboration with a proper scientist of the time (says the blurb, although the Lucas Parkes mentioned turns out to be a pseudonym for Wyndham himself for stylistic reasons) and purports to be a serious exploration of how the nuts and bolts, and politics, of space exploration might develop through time, seen through the eyes of Britain in 1959.

"Don't expect another Day of the Triffids" warns the back cover write up, and indeed, nothing could be further from the walking plants action stingathon of that classic work. This book is a dry as dust, stiff upper lip hard sci fi work, a work of girders and inflatable domes, grind, toil, and cold war missiles.

It is a hard read. Not because of anything technical, or high concept language or anything like that, but because frankly it is so very boring. The characters are cardboard cut outs of heroic english conventionality given to the gin and pipe smoking cliches of the time, the peril isn't very exciting; and the book seems to read like a less imaginative version of Arthur C. Clarke early works written ten years earlier.

But it isn't just the writing style that's the problem. The idea that Britain would be building massive space stations in the 90s, and later landing on the moon in competition with the Russians and the Americans, must have seemed ludicrous, if patriotic, even in the late 1950s as Sputnik and Explorer were already bleeping their way through near space. The idea that space would be used essentially as a launch site for nukes might have reflected the worries of the time, but the missiles themselves, which as described sound like space borne steam engines, seem like something from Verne and a bit low tech even for HG Wells.

I wish us Brits were up there in Space, but this far fetched piece of speculation must have seemed so dated even then. It also goes to prove that what I said about living the low tech imagination of 50s sci fi, does not always hold true!

Ray Bradbury - The Silver Locusts

This shift, I've been getting through my elegant, silver be-covered 1960s paperback of The Silver Locusts, a 1950 Ray Bradbury novel that seems to have been collated out of a serial, or collection of short stories, from Pulps like Amazing Stories.

I've not finished it yet, it is hard to get a proper reading stint in when you're surrounded by loud folk whose idea of a cultural decision is whether to watch "Top Gear" on Dave or Dave Ja Vu. But after a sticky start where the rather "folksy" language somewhat bogged me down, I've found myself drawn deeper and deeper into the story by the dreamlike construction and western pioneer fairytale atmosphere.

The chapter where someone constructs "The House of Usher" on Mars, and populates it with double bluff calling robot doppelgangers, is an absolute standalone standout. The Martians themselves, in contrast with the zippered green suits and antennae creatures of the sci fi of the times, are never truly revealed in themselves - they exist only as delusions of loss and desire in the humans that see them.

Think of the alien manifestations in Carl Sagan's "Contact", and The Gelf of Red Dwarf, and no doubt many more besides, and you think of the apparent influence of this tale. I couldn't also help but think of the reports of UFO encounters described as "High Strangeness", which again this novel seems to predict compared with the friendly Adamski "Nordic" Extraterrestrials, or on the other hand the terrifying Hopkinsville Goblins found in reports of the time.

Better known in the US as The Martian Chronicles, a big budget TV miniseries was made that I've never seen, but attracted derisory reviews. I hope to track it down soon.

The Decadent Future - The Hunger Games, and The Fifth Element

It struck me, just before a lampost nearly did, as I cycled to work this morning, how much the capital city sequences of the "The Hunger Games" reminded me of the fabulous Besson and Gaulthier (oh yeah, and Moebius I think) created world of The Fifth Element...

I rewatched The Hunger Games over the weekend, and got stuck into the reasonably generous DVD extras, a rare thing on a plain old DVD these days. The powers that be want us to shell out for our extras on all The Blu Rays no-one seems to be buying. For all its origins as a piece of (horror word) "Young Adult" fiction , the film does end up being highly watchable yarn, thanks to a strong performance by Jennifer Lawrence.

And yes, I know it's a rip off of Battle Royale. Matters not.

So yes, at first that Effie Whatever person appears, and she's got fantastic shoes on, and a wig, and look, she keeps re-appearing in differently coloured wigs, and now Katniss and her drippy pal are in the big city, and everyone is dressed in these Regency inspired futuristic outfits or whatever, and it's all contrasted with the homey peasantness of the naieve kids, and also the gleaming holographic technology.

And yes, it reminds me of the Fifth Element, where the opression is more corporate than fascistic, yet the folks still live in super high rise squalor in apartments so cramped the shower occupies the same space as the fridge; yet folk dress in highly stylised parodies of fashions of many periods, and the entire aesthetically glorious world seems to be entirely populated by models.

There's a story to tell here I think, the comparison just begs to be made. Unfortunately, it isn't me to tell it. I love the idea of writing about film, but I just don't have the language. I want to write about the style and look of the film, but when trying to describe the wigs as I did above, I couldn't think of the right word. Restoration? Georgian? Ah, just go with Regency. That's probably close enough. I could use the word dystopia but it would probably just cause me dyspepsia as I tried to explain properly why it was a dystopia.

And then, actually trying to criticise one above the other, how can I do that without really knowing what the respective directors and designers were trying to state with their visions of the decadent future, and whether they achieved their goals or not. I haven't got any notes either, if I'd known I was going to be seized with the desire to write properly, I should have sat assiduously with notebook and biro making all the oh so logical and pertinent points I was going to make about both films.

I didn't. I was just taken heavily with the notion of writing about this idea as my hands cracked and dripped blood as I wandered upset amongst the endless racks and boxes, seeing the pen as the means of escape, but not knowing quite how to go about it...I love the Fifth Element more, and it looks far better, but why? *shrugs* I can't really explain it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 28/01/2013

I'd trade my Glave for a Krull DVD

Krull is a very underrated film, I find. It crops up in sad unwanted corners, like the 5* channel on a sunday afternoon, confined to the 19th century syphillitic lunatic asylum of the media while inferior product gets it on on the proper channels.

Sad.

Krull, is of course a typical and utterly banal revival fantasy swashbuckler of the early 1980s - see also The Sword and the Sorceror, Conan, Ladyhawke etc - featuring the never seen again Ken Marshall, an uncharismatic pretty boy who at least isn't wearing a girls skirt like Tom Cruise in Legend; and also the English, but dubbed by American Lindsay Crouse, Lysette Antony who was seen to best advantage not wearing very much in the Depeche Mode video for "I Feel You."

The plot is of the typical "Rescue the princess from evil fascist lizard being" variety, with the usual "Oh no, our primary method of finding the princess has failed what can we do" "Well we can follow this extremely dangerous alternative that probably won;t work but just might even though it seemingly bears no relevance to our problem" "OK then" obstacle.

In the way, are snake brained Barabarellan leathermen called Slayers, who's reptile brain escapes are always censored out of matinee showings much to many a bloodthirsty child's disappointment. They have laser staffs (rather like the Gou'ald in Stargate) which happily can only fire once before they revert to a stabbier use. They serve "The Beast" who lives in a tormentier version of Howl's Moving Castle and who consists of a badly designed creature mixed in with close up library shots of an Iguana.

Yes, it's derivative, and silly, with mystically daft weapon, horrible comic relief and annoying basin haircut child - many of the rules of "How to be an Evil Overlord" have clearly been lifted from this film. But, it has a great strength, a fantastic UK and Irish supporting cast - ALun Armstrong, Liam Neeson, Robbie Coltrane, Freddie Jones, Francesca Annis an, err, Tucker Jenkins from Grange Hill. Their character banterings and bickerings make the film, and indeed save it from the more wooden leads, while "Carry On's" Bernard Bresslaw gets the more lumbering philosophical dialogue to show off his proper acting aspirations.

You can guess if it all ends happily or not! It doesn't for me, because Ive wanted to find it on DVD for ages. Yes, it's on TV all the bloody time, BUT I WANT IT FOR REAL DAMMIT. And I can't.

The Taste of Literature

When I talk of taste, I'm not talking of "Jolly ho, I've such excellent taste in literature" or "People are developing a taste for fantasy in the light of Game of Thrones" or even "What the hell are you talking about, people have and always will have a taste for fantasy".

No, I'm actually talking about, well, a form of synaesthesia, that strange ability that some "people" have for seeing sounds, or hearing colours, or feeling tastes. That sort of thing. I've developed my own version of it.

I now have a taste for words. Words leave a taste on my tongue.

Whenever I think of the word "literature" I get this strange, large, flat, slightly tangy, slightly bitter, taste spreading all over the back of my tongue, feeling like it is filling my mouth from side to side, like a piece of lemon soaked rice paper. Thinking about not words, but the construction of words, the writing of letters, drops drizzle lime onto the back of my throat.

Like a literal word soup is rising out of my throat; not in a nasty, vomity way, but an enjoyment of the construction of letters, one after the other, the gap after a group of them then more.

Reading Clive James fourth chapter of his life story "The North Face of Soho" brings on the same feeling - not the actual act of reading it, but the thought of reading it. The taste is there when I think of "Blue pencilling" "Slugs of hot metal" "adjusting the balance of a line".

What makes it all even more bizarre is that this must indicate a subconscious desire to do all this, and BE a proper writer slash journalist slash essayist slashy "Man of Letters" because the actuality is that everything I write is straight out of the neurons in my head, 6 rounds rapid fire...

It's like sucking a lemon after slugging tequila.

A hard shot of words...

To Write Like Ballard

More of an influence than Burroughs on me to be honest, although I have nothing in common with either of them, having neither shot my wife in the head nor been brough up in a Japanese Internment Camp. Formative years, a negative blank of non distinguishment, life the same as most others, fishing village to small town, nothing shot up, brains not blown out.

No Nova Mob graced my upbringing.

I like natural diasters, winds gutting the earth to the mantle, rains and humidity drowning the earth and leaving everyone counting back along their cervical vertebrae to a primieval jurassic park, primitive nervous system like the crocodile's bleeding up into a future where sophistication hinders not helps.

It appeals, as does sitting under endless rain under a tarpaulin with only rum and tea for company, grey clouds lowering to face level, and if the idea of fucking a cailipered cripple appeals not, I wish I could have thought of it as he did. Fuckholes lined in jagged metal; he saw it, I didn't. I can't.

Again I dream of having that power in my pen or the tips of my fingers; a dream, but a good dream, no? We'll see how it turns out, hammer the keyboard till you bleed, and let the words come