Cat People

I am sure discerning readers are familiar with this;

The most memorable scene, in my view, of many from Quentin Tarantino's superb Inglorious Basterds, backed of course by David Bowie's Cat People.

And that brings us on to the under-rated 1982 remake of "Cat People" which features this scene of, again in my view, equal beauty and greater mystery, in which Natasja Kinski finds out her origins. The backing this time is Moroder's original take on the song "Cat People".

The train shots cannot but help me of the video for "There Goes The Fear" by The Doves.

Cat People. Not a great film, perhaps not even a very good one. But this scene lives with me always. And Mr Bowie is present somehow in both!

Enjoy.

Doomsday

I bought Doomsday a while back, another "off to Cash Converters" £1.50 spent on a DVD, a DVD sold for god only knows what desperate purpose.

Profiting out of misery. That's what me and Cash Converters do.

Anyway, Doomsday is a film that crops us often enough on Sy Fy and I watch out of the corner of my eye, cut price Angelina Jolie  - but more attractive and less haggard - and former Lara Croft Rhona Mitra throwing some eye patched shapes while coping with Bob Hoskins using the same voice he did in thar Paul Hardcastle song that wasn't "19".

"Fink of the maaahney! Imagine what you caaan do wiv it!"

That one.

The film is from the same team that came up with the far superior Dog Soldiers and The Descent, and large chunks of the cast of those two films are lurking about here in minor to middling roles, leaving Mitra, Hoskins, Doctor Bashir from Deep Space 9, concrete voiced professional Scotsman David O'Hara and Malcolm "Mark of Quality Cinema" McDowell upfront. Sean Pertwee also gets to do his trademark dying before half time shtick.

The film is terrible. It is also brilliant. It is a blatant Mad Max rip off, not only of 2, but 3. The acting is bobbins, the script mainly terrible apart from some decent off beat humour and the plot largely an irrelavance compared to the odd, jarring but decently different jolt from chain saw custom buggy mayhem to Excalibur style sword maiming and a lengthy section that seems to exist only for Adrian Lester to show off his martial arts moves.

But to me, the whole sequence in the cannibal emo stadium makes the movie worthwhile; fantastically soundtracked by Adam and the Ants, Fine Young Cannibals (you'll never hear me say that again) and Siouxsie and the Banshees, a mohawked future death punk serves up crispy fried Pertwee to his minions while yelling great stuff about catching, cooking and eating his enemies. Fishnetted pole dancers strut and sway, and a busty lady in a bad tribal facial tattoo does some serious leering.

It ought to be worse than Tina Turner doing her "Welcome to Thunderdome" chain mail bra routine with Angry Anderson not singing the Scott and Charlene wedding song, but it isn't; the sequence works really well. Which makes me wonder, with the brains behind the movie that there were, the film isn't a whole lot better than it is.

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

To Write Like Burroughs

I was drinking alone when the tipsy impudent couple across from me asked me what I was reading.

"The Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs" I said. "He was a repressed homosexual junkie who shot his wife dead by accident"

I thought the best way of explaining the work was like was to leave her to read the Hassan's Rumpus Room Chapter while I went for a cigarette. "You will never speak to me again now".

I smoked my cigarette and wondered how all the alien human anal sex while hanging, rubber dildoes up asses stuff would go down, jism spurting from the page into her bespectacled eyes, as I looked at another girl who was never going to talk to me.

She wasn't shocked, she thought it was all a bit forced. I diasagreed, I thought it was natural as hell, Ballard's Crash, now that is what I call forced and overwritten. I envy the flow of Burroughs words, little though my life will ever be like his.

I wish I could convey that kind of utter liquid, gooey force so effortlessly.

I Broke A Girl's Heart

I needed to try and refire my story writing in a hurry. I've been reading a lot about alien abductions lately. Wonder what goes through their minds?

The bunker

Don't bother with the Aliens Extended Edition. Really. Don't.

Do you know, it took me a long time to see it, until I finally got the Aliens DVD and see all this amazing new footage that my friend at University had been going on about back in 1994. "You should see the Sentry Guns!"

I wouldn't say my heart was pounding when I pressed the play button, but I was shall we say, "Interested."

Ridley Scott doesn't do Director's Cuts. All of his extended editions seem to be introduced with a little clip of his Ginger-Going-On-Greyness sat there in a chipperly avuncular fashion, saying that basically he doesn't do Director's Cuts cos his first cut was the best, but it's nice to see the deleted scenes.

. I can't remember what James Cameron said before this one, but I'm sure it wasn't "These scenes are a crock of shit, I can't believe I wasted the money filming them."

We kick off with a long and tedious "oh for fuck's sake cut to the chase" bit set in the colony on LV426, which is apparently entirely constructed with cheap plastic curtain rails and is populated by a myriad of crap actors of whom Captain Hollister from Red Dwarf is the best known. Cue redneck dad discovering alien ship and returning with a rubber chicken stuck to his face.

We are also treated to seeing Ripley sat on butcher's grass in the space hospital, being given a really really stupid photograph of her dead daughter - looking like Judith Hann off Tomorrow's World" - and doing some unconvincing crying. Or did this happen before? Fuck it I'm doing this from memory, and it doesn't matter anyway.

What else do we have. Oh yes, the much vaunted "Sentry Guns" scenes, along with the silly conversation about "Ant Hives". The Sentry Guns look ok, as models go, but they kill aliens rather too easily - in the manner of the Army of the Dead in The Return of the King - and the aliens they do kill are re-run footage hastily stitched in from what looks like the first marine raid on the cooling towers, but given a sort of fuzziness to make it look a bit different.

Yep, it looks different. And worse, like a Squid Head Star Wars figure being blown up with a firework while having yellow washing up liquid thrown on it. Shot in Super 8 and shown over and over again.

We finish with some "Don't be gone long" twattery, but the worst "Deleted" bit, by a mile, is the dire dire Hudson "rap". Forcing us over and over again to "Check it out" he masturbates over his weaponry like it's the night before Columbine round Dylan Klebold's house, reaching an orgasm with a decisive "Whap" before sticking his hand down his government issue camos for another round of frothy hand fun. "We got nukes, we got knives, we got sharp sticks" he ejaculates, before Apone  - and all of us - fearful of getting another faceful of sticky word come - tell him to "knock it off."

Er, I thought that's what he was doing already. Anyway, stick with the original cut. It does you no harm, and as Sly Stone would say, it might even do you some good.

Booba Lacka Lacka Lacka Booba Lacka Lacka!