Up All Night with American Mary

Normally if I get home late, I sleep the moment I hit the sofa - or bed if I'm lucky - after my late night rum and coke under the stars. I am by inclination both a night owl and a morning lark, a lifestyle that it is always going to very tricksy to maintain, and a normally gruelling work schedule tends to put me into the lark category.

Because only larks have to get up at 530 am to cycle to work in a blue collar dump where hopes and dreams are slowly composted to nothing.

However, I'm on leave at the moment, and found myself last night as insomniac as I used to be when I was 20. I also had two new, well second hand actually, DVDs to watch from the market and decided to do some double ended candle burning to watch them.

"The Wicker Tree" came first, Robin Hardy's sort of follow up to the all time classic "The Wicker Man". I'm sure I've raved about that film often enough on here so I shan't go on about it, suffice to say that it must be rolling in its reputed M3 motorway foundation grave at how bad "The Wicker Tree" is.

Britannia Nicol tried to avoid "doing a Woodward"

Trashy chastity ringed country singer and boyfriend head to Scotland to convert some Pagans, and get caught up in Mayday rituals, with added unfunny comedy tone and breasts from someone who was in Foyle's war and in no way has Willow Magregor's allure. That's it. The film is dreadful, and if it does anything, it shows that the genius of "The Wicker Man" was down to Antony Shaffer's screenplay.

Summer is most definitely not "I-cumin-in"

That over and done with, I was still as awake as a moth on speed, so it was time to deploy "American Mary" on my eyes. As unwatchable at times as "The Wicker Tree", but for entirely different reasons, this film stars Katherine Isabelle, the wonderfully sneery-faced beauty of "Ginger Snaps" fame as a drug rape by her teachers leads her to abandon her medical studies for the world of aesthetic surgical body modification.

The Soska Sister's second film, after "Dead Hooker in a Trunk", the film establishes their brilliance as visualists and conceptualists of a new Cronenbergian Candadian horror, while showing that directing actors, and acting themselves, is not their strong point.

The Soska Sisters need some mods done

With its cast of Burlesque performers and tongue split Vancouver scenesters, the film has a rough and "out-there" tone balanced by the stylish corsets and medical fetish wear of Isabelle as the movie's protagonist. Indeed the movie's most alluring scene, that of Isabelle operating on the twins in black and red scrubs, is incredibly reminiscent of Cronenberg's Dead Ringers with the surgical near-performance art of Jeremy irons as the identical twin surgeons who lose their minds over a woman.

Surgery with style

The film, being what it is, suffers from bouts of awful acting and falls away badly towards its incredibly rushed ending. But the imagination and style behind it is so striking, it inspires you to search the depths of your own mind to see if you can think of anything conceptually better.

And so far, I haven't.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16.09.14

The Plague Man that I am

I can't remember when it started, this increasing set of blotches, scales and scabs advancing up my right ankle. I think once upon a time it was some harmless but distinctive dark splotches about ten years ago. Day followed day followed day, and soon, the area began to itch, a firey insistence to dig jagged nails into the flesh and scratch.

The satisfaction lasted barely seconds before that burning came back. I don't know what the cause was, for once, I never thought it was due to infection by scabies, parasites, noro-viruses seeking to reach my intestine through my skin. I knew it was excema or psoriasis or both, but a form so painful perhaps it had afflicted me from the stars, a passing Andromeda Strain as envisaged by Fred Hoyle, freeze dried alien contaminant blown in, on the space breezes, lodging itself into my bones.

It spread up, over the lumpy bone both up and down, onto foot and calf. It bled raw, no matter how much cream, oil, or coal tar found its way onto it, just like my hands, my horror gouged out hands only not just in winter.

Parts of it turned purple. Parts of it turned green, the unttractive green of the mould you find on bread after a few too many days in a hot sun in a sweating bag. Sometimes it would be hard to move the ankle, the scales of flesh were so dry and thick. In better periods, like now, it merely looks inflamed, witth the occasional eruption where it has bled.

This alien plague, et-excema, extra-excema, can only be controlled by steroids, cortisone, betnovate, the war zone moves up and down the botom of the limb like General Haig's front line in World War 1. But take the steroids away and the alien skin toxin is back in a weeping flash.

It is not just in my head that my body is at war.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 30.04.12