p e n g u i n d e v i l

or that’s how it felt this week, filmwise. Losers abound. Sad, because I had planned on many glories of film watching this week, instead, I managed to putz through a few and that’s about all.

Aside from films there were some highlights… First… I have always thought that the federal government had two good branches: the GAO and the Postal Service. Now, they are joined by a third… Acting on a hint from someone at work I tried out the National Do Not Call Registry… Jesus! We went from about 4-6 “spam” calls a day to… can you believe it, 1 unknown caller in a week and a half! All of the mortgage and car insurance and free vacations, and cable/satellite tv calls just plain stopped. It is almost eerie. It used to seem like the phone rang all day long with little computer voices on the other end. Now it doesn’t ring at all!

The other great discovery is thanks to Thud. After I complained abut all of the spam comments I get here, he suggested that I install Akismet. I did so and in the week since then I have not received a single spam comment (it is claiming to have blocked 349 messages in that time)… Things have really improved in the phone and comment spam department a lot lately.

So those things are all tied up. In terms of everything else though… The family comes home tonight, which I find to be a grand relief. I tried to do some kind of “bachelor” movie watching while they were gone and I really didn’t pull it off..

First up was It Happened Here, something I have been wanting to see for quite a while. A film from 1964 that tells the story of the German occupation of Britain during the Second World War. It isn’t as good as the films of French occupation (Safe Conduct and Army of Shadows come to mind), and they even deal with something that really happened.

I cannot imagine the reception that this movie must have had in the UK on its release in 1964, not even 20 years after the end of WWII, Nazi’s marching about London with their banners and goose steeping must have seemed bit too fresh for some folks. But… It Happened Here is certainly an interesting addition entry in the WWII film canon. The story of a nurse who is evacuated to London as the U.S. back partisans move into her area. She lacks any interest in politics, and in fact, wants to steer clear of it, but once in London she is told that if she wants to work, she needs to join the I.A. (the Immediate Action Organization), the British fascist organization that seems to control everything. This move puts her in a tricky spot, she is now a collaborator and this puts her in opposition with some of her few friends

The black and white photography of Nazis marching in London and German music in the background certainly has the same genuine feel of the old wartime newsreels and is pretty interesting, the rest of the film is actually rather dull. Her going about her business, us hearing a lot of “national socialist” jargon… The films redeeming value is all in the concept. So it is kind of interesting just for that.

nice posters in the waiting room

Motorhead fans? British Collaborators? You be the judge.

And then back in the league of crappy (yet well-known) filmmakers whose “art” I had yet to witness… Recently I tried, and was amply let down by Ulli Lommel, and now I’ve tried the last of the “great” unseen auteurs, Jess Franco. I would have to say that Lommel has been one-upped. While the Ulli movie was terrible, like a non-movie, just filming a bunch of stuff with a camera, the Franco one is a real full-on movie, but maybe the worst yet! The dubbing is so atrocious it makes the movie hard to watch, the acting is so bad is must be on purpose and the script is terrible. A wedding gown model is kidnapped and manhandled for a photographer and then a Peter Lorre look-alike who lives in a combination “Art” gallery and wax museum has “the lamest painting ever made” stolen by a woman dressed as Zorro. She turns out to be one of two spyish ladies who have ugly wigs and talk in an annoying and lame “sultry” manner all of the time. These are the main characters of the film and I could only get 20 minutes into it before turning it off. But that was Two Undercover Angels, which is certainly going into the sell stack. Luckily it only cost me 5 bucks.

Then I finally felt the urge to watch Casshern again, so I broke out my 3 disc bootleg of it and it failed to play. Maybe last time I watched it I used the old region-free? I don’t know. Well, I wasn’t into the notion enough to hook up that old thing, so I just put the movie back.

After all of that, I felt like watching that was bound to be fairly good. So I put in Panic in Year Zero! A nice little apocalyptic piece from 1962. Ray Milland and his family (which includes Frankie Avalon!) load up the trailer and head out of Los Angeles for a family fishing get away. Two hours on the road and they start noticing bright flashes behind them… They feel somewhat concerned so when they find a phone booth (strangely placed on the shoulder of this little road in the middle of nowhere) and call home. After the operator tells them that all the lines to Los Angeles are down, they notice the giant mushroom cloud in the sky. Yes, it’s that day.

What to do next? Well first they first make the odd decision to “go back” but after that becomes a dangerous hassle, Ray’s survivalist instincts come to the fore and off they go on their trip, ruthlessly acquiring any items they need. As he says, when this is all over, “someone will have to rebuild civilization and I want it to be us”. His wife is very concerned with his sudden disregard for everyone else. He actually seems strangely focused and gung ho, destroying bridges so people cant follow them, shooting people, punching people… I’m not trying to give him a bad rap, he does meet some bad folks, a ruthless gang of youths and a gas station owner who has started changing $3.00 a gallon for gas!

It is pretty entertaining, though Ray’s gruff manner is a bit obnoxious and sometimes I forgot about the nuclear aspect, it just seemed like him dragging his family around, paranoid of everyone that they saw.