According to Smash Hits, Elvis Presley made about three million films, all of which were called either Elvis Has A Kiss-Up In Hawaii or Elvis Says It's Swinging, Pops. And, if you watched BBC1 during the school holidays, didn't you just know it.
Presumably as much on account of their cheapness and indeed sheer volume as it was due to tweedy old shirts behind desks thinking that Elvis was what 'young people' liked, Double Trouble, Fun In Acapulco, Girls! Girls! Girls!
and all two thousand nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety seven others of them, some of which Elvis probably didn't even realise he'd actually made, rolled round again and again and again alongside Why Don't You...?, The Monkees, King Of The Rocket Men and all of the other decidedly convenient holiday morning entertainment staples. Oh and Play Chess.
You'd be forgiven for assuming that youngsters came to resent this hip-swivelling intrusion into the schedules where the cheap swines could at least have put on Help!... It's The Hair Bear Bunch! or something, but actually they proved quite popular; hardly surprising when you consider that the movies had the same sort of combination of pop-fuelled hi-jinks and exotic retro allure as The Monkees and The Banana Splits. They were of course especially prevalent around the Christmas holidays, to the extend that an entire generation now associate sleigh bells and tinsel with a glorious technicolor Elvis in a loud Hawaiian shirt even by Hawaiian shirt standards being comforted by some youngsters on the stairs after momentarily losing the girl of his dreams.
There was, however, one very notable exception to this. Jailhouse Rock never seemed to find its way into these repeat seasons, presumably due to a combination of its black and white nature (not that this ever stopped them flinging out endless Edgar Kennedy 'shorts' nobody asked for), the slightly violent theme underpinning the storyline, and the fact that it was somehow seen as more serious and 'worthy', and the preserve of brow-furrowed Whistle Test spin-off 'Rock Goes To The Movies' theme nights. As absurd as it may sound, you usually had to ask to 'stay up' to watch Elvis Presley's most famous film.
Now, however, you can just roll up to the cinema to see it. Jailhouse Rock is a staggering sixty years old - although, weirdly, now seeming far less culturally remote than it did back when Elvis films were a school holidays staple - and to mark this occasion has just been re-released in a restored and staggeringly high quality print which makes those crumbly photocopy-esque bits of footage they used to use in things like The Rock'n'Roll Years feel like they came from another film entirely. What's more, you can get an authentic flavour of those tabloid-alarming dancing-in-the-aisles times by watching it in a packed auditorium full of so many over-excited first-time-around Elvis fans that you start to worry that you're about to see a re-enactment of Monty Python's 'Hell's Grannies' sketch; fortunately there were no vicious gangs of Keep Left signs to go with them, but at least they might keep bloody quiet during the film.
Jailhouse Rock is a film that stands up far better than anyone might not unreasonably have expected it to. It may well have been a quick production-line effort rushed out to cash in on the international success of someone who said 'well' a lot whilst TV cameras studiously avoided showing anything south of his shirt buttons, but those are just the literal specifics of its circumstances. It's tightly directed with convincing sets, is underpinned with a rock-solid script where the numerous musical numbers actually form part of the storyline (and for different reasons each time too), and despite essentially playing an even more exaggerated version of his stage persona at the time, Elvis acquits himself well as an actor, to the extent that you sometimes lose sight of the fact that you're actually watching an Elvis Presley vehicle rather than simply a good film from the time. It's also worth considering the fact that it runs to an economical yet packed ninety minutes, and that the main plot is set up in less than three minutes; something to bear in mind the next time you're covertly looking at your watch while waiting for the latest film that everyone says you 'have to see' to actually get started.
There were funnier, weirder and more socially aware pop movies to come. There was a brutally effective inversion of the upbeat music biz shenanigans it explores in Slade In Flame, which is in many respects a much more interesting film. And there was Mrs. Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter, which people still think you're making up if you try explaining it to them. Jailhouse Rock, however, remains a potent and effective - and surprisingly mature - effort from the very dawn of both pop music and youth cinema which probably few at the time would have expected anyone to care about even six years later, let alone sixty. Yeah, see you at the re-release of The Wayward Bus, then.
Of course, Elvis wasn't alone in those schedules, and there was also a similarly unending procession of George Formby films on hand for the schedulers to fill time with. It's no wonder Play Chess seemed so comparatively tolerable.
If you've enjoyed this article, you can find lots more about old films and early pop music in Not On Your Telly, which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.
A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick's controversial (not least with the author himself) 1971 big-screen version of Anthony Burgess' acclaimed novel, had caused a vivid furore on its release, and by the end of the decade had been withdrawn from UK distribution at the director's request. There have been wild stories of threats and protests outside the Kubrick family home from 'anti-violence' protesters, though it's also worth remembering that the film was used as a political football by moralising blowhards like pretty much no other before or since; including, to Burgess' great frustration, one James Wilson Vincent Savile. What an excellent arbiter of socially responsible behaviour he turned out to be. Anyway, whatever the reason, withdraw it Kubrick certainly did, and with home entertainment still really only in its infancy, this meant that - for UK audiences at least - A Clockwork Orange pretty much disappeared off the face of the planet.
As you can imagine, this made A Clockwork Orange a very intriguing prospect indeed to any self-respecting young student of the weird and lurid corners of cinema history. Surreally stylised and futuristic photos in books about 'Sci-Fi Films' were a nagging reminder of its tantalising unavailability. It stood almost alone as a movie that had been a huge hit one minute then basically erased from history the next, while older cousins and more verbose rock journalists hinted at a secret knowledge of it that you weren't allowed to share. Even the row about its content and suitability seemed more exciting than it maybe should have warranted. The fact that even if it had been available, I would have been too young to actually see A Clockwork Orange was neither here nor there - I was as obsessed with it as others were with A Nightmare On Elm Street or Predator. I read the book, I listened to the fantastic soundtrack album, I even cut out and kept a Guardian article about the RSC's stage adaptation starring Phil Daniels as Alex. There was just one small but significant flaw with this fanaticism - I hadn't actually seen the film itself.
There were rumours, of course, that it was widely available on 'pirate', but it always seemed to command the sort of sums of money that you didn't particularly want to be handing over to shifty teenagers on street corners, especially when you'd already seen the woeful quality of some of their more easily affordable wares. And so it was that, long after I'd seen Twisted Nerve, Peeping Tom, The Magic Christian, Supervixens, Cannibal Apocalyse, Vampyros Lesbos, The Trip, Monte Carlo Or Bust!, Psychomania, 200 Motels, Two-Lane Blacktop, Every Home Should Have One, The Rise And Rise Of Michael Rimmer and many other tantalisingly elusive doodles in the margin of cinema history, A Clockwork Orange remained my one big Halliwell-troubling box to tick. Yet despite the occasional frowning in a newspaper article accompanied by a badly-cropped version of that photo of Alex at the wheel of a car, it was still nowhere nearer becoming available.
Then, one day, a rumour began to circulate amongst members of a local Cinema Club that they were going to stage a secret - and not even remotely Kubrick-approved - screening of an under-the-counter print of the film to mark their tenth anniversary. Whether they ever actually intended to or not nobody really knows, as some ingrate prat promptly leaked the story to an illiterate muck-raking grief-porn-peddling chip-on-regional-shoulder local newspaper, who went predictably condemnatory crazy with the story - no prizes for guessing which photo they used to accompany it - prompting the cinema to issue a strenuous denial that they'd ever even considered it. Was this all a clever double-bluff, though? Was it worth running the risk of missing out on an actual chance to see it, and subsequently having to administer a self-kicking worthy of Alex and his Droogs? There was only one way to find out - to turn up on the supposed date and time and see if they were actually showing it away from prying smudgy-newsprint eyes.
As it turned out, I wasn't the only one who'd had that idea. A sizeable crowd had gathered outside the suspiciously darkened venue, made up primarily of studenty types holding cineaste-friendly impromptu discussions, nervy-looking lone gentlemen with an apparent disdain for washing their raincoats, and a small army of people in boiler suits and bowler hats. Oh, and a reporter, who was pleasingly blanked by everyone she attempted to speak to. As the night set in, the weather got colder, and it became increasingly obvious to anyone with a shred of sense that there was nobody actually inside the building, the Droogs seized their moment. A flurry of brolly-rapping on the determinedly shut doors and shouts to the effect of "but the slovo did viddy that the film would be on all horrorshow" did nothing to change the situation, so they started to indulge in in-character jostling of fellow would-be patrons instead. Once they began to loudly decry the arrival of 'the millicents', it really was time to give up and go home.
So, that's how effective banning films really is in terms of preventing copycat violence. Of course, there was also the time someone threw a full carton of Kia Ora at my head, but that's another story. And I actually saw the film that time too.
You can find more about my quest to see elusive films from the odder corners of movie history in Not On Your Telly, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.
Late in 1970, when progressive rock was still relatively new and exciting and its key practitioners weren't above having a laugh (or indeed composing something short enough to go on a 7" single), Pink Floyd were hard at work on that most radical and indeed progressive of concepts - a song that would take up the entire side of an album and stretch the available studio technology to its limit. They had of course been building up to this for some time - from the nine minutes and forty one seconds of Syd Barrett-led space-riffing that made up Interstellar Overdrive to the previous year's side-long instrumental suite Atom Heart Mother - and indeed would go on to take the idea further and expand the 'concept' to a whole album, but the technically demanding epic that they had variously labelled 'Nothing - Parts 1-24', 'Son Of Nothing' and 'Return Of The Son Of Nothing' marked a real turning point. Unfortunately, this turning point involved everyone else turning into a humourless cul-de-sac where 'real' musicianship was prized above all else and frivolity was to be avoided at all costs. Possibly not what they had envisaged when providing a wry commentary on some bacon frying onstage the year before.
Late in 1996, things were starting to get all serious and heavyweight and stoneyfaced yet again, with the likes of The Verve and Kula Shaker and even makeweights like Embrace reminding us all at every given opportunity that their music 'meant' something more substantial than silly frivolous Britpop, and the laugh-a-minute likes of Trainspotting and Our Friends In The North doing much the same for visual entertainment. Leading the charge were, inevitably, Oasis, though much like a certain other Knebworth-favouring outfit once upon a time, maybe that wasn't what Noel Gallagher had in mind back when he was composing witty throwaways like Married With Children. Suffice it to say that the mood suddenly became very much stop-that-laughing-at-the-back fact-times-importance-equals-news mister-carpark-has-been-kind-enough-to-come-here-this-afternoon-all-the-way-from-nottingham, and even the most hardended disliker of Play Away-esque novelty gurners Space must have winced at the Select review dismissing their album Tin Can Alley or whatever it was called alongside a cartoon of The Bloke From Space in a Hawaiian shirt taking a photo of himself on a 'fun camera' set against giant Rushmore-esque stone faces of Richard Ashcroft and 'Thom' Yorke. Perhaps it's no coincidence, then, that the volume of Cult Fiction that sought to take a snapshot of this era - and followed on from the infectiously light-hearted This Is The Return Of Cult Fiction - should have adopted the mantle This Is... Son Of Cult Fiction.
Yes, only halfway through the entire series, the titular '...' that everyone automatically associates with Cult Fiction finally puts in an appearance. And... there's not really very much more to say about that, so let's take a look instead at the other more obvious visual re-routings. Gone are the jaunty retro flashes and judicious use of whitespace and pale colours that had defined both This Is The Return Of Cult Fiction and This Is Easy (and even arguably, to an extent, the original This Is Cult Fiction itself), replaced by moodier shades of blue with appropriately gritty decorative pattern, Action Movie-friendly fonts, and a whopping great cover illustration of a psychedelically-decorated cross between The Mystery Machine and the Fisher Price Daredevil Sports Van. Something about all this would seem to suggest that we're not exactly in for an album's worth of flute-heavy seventies sitcom themes, hamfistedly faded out or otherwise.
Yes, it's 'serious' film music for 'serious' film fans, and pretty much the same for the handful of 'allowed' TV shows, nearly all the way here, with no psychedelic spies, wide-tied crooners or surrealist animated dogs on hand to frighten people. The rough, tough outdoorsy vibe is almost overpowering, and there's very little room left for anyone who's turned up hoping for a bit more safari-jacketed fun. This is, on face value, the compilation equivalent of Paul Weller's contemporaneous bit of ridiculousness Woodcutter's Son. But it's also a Cult Fiction compilation, so we're almost certainly in for the odd surprise or two.
This Is... Son Of Cult Fiction kicks off in fine style with Quadrophenia's dynamic curtain-raiser The Real Me, sounding so punchy and loud that you feel like jumping onto a scooter in front of some back-projected London streets and shouting "BOLLOCKS! FUCK OFF!" at some rockers, followed by the dynamic collision of Loungecore and hard rock in CCS' one-time Top Of The Pops-introducing cover of Whole Lotta Love, but it all goes very rapidly downhill. Well, not downhill so much as off-script. Film and TV-associated the opening tracks may well be, but they are both 'proper' songs that predated their use in a soundtrack capacity, and, well, that's what the bulk of this compilation is composed of. There are very few hard-to-find gems previously hidden away in title sequences or beneath film dialogue here, just a collection of admittedly very good pop and rock songs that happened to later show up on soundtracks that anyone could have got hold of and stuck together on a tape easily enough. What's more, it's all very much leaning towards the bluesy stoner-friendly hard-rock gentlemen-welcome-to-the-second-base-mobile end of the scale, with the likes of All Right Now, Born To Be Wild, Smoke On The Water and Be-Bop-A-Lula queueing up to give you the impression that you've inadvertently picked up one of those point-missing late seventies The Old Grey Whistle Test spin-off compilations by mistake. Throw in a Trainspotting-referencing Lust For Life and it's all starting to sound a bit like what the most boneheaded of 'New Lads' circa 1995 would put onto the student union jukebox on a loop to show them namby pamby Blur fans wots wot uh hur hur hur.
Meanwhile, the actual from-the-original-soundtrack selections start off well with the theme from The A-Team, complete with oft-omitted Hannibal-dressed-as-a-crocodile middle eight, but quickly lose their way to the extent that it's actually a challenge to listen towards the end. Echo And The Bunnymen's bafflingly overlauded banda copier facsimile of People Are Strange from The Lost Boys and Urge Overkill's still-overexposed sub-Crash Test Dummies Strepsil-averse twang through Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon are skip button-friendly enough, but out in the furthest reaches you'll find such endlessly listenable fare as Duelling Banjos from Deliverance, the theme from Northern Exposure (so devoid of melody that it makes those of The Cosby Show and St. Elsewhere look like lost Gershwin tone poems), and John Williams arpeggiating his way through Cavatina, included here on account of its The Deer Hunter credentials though surely it would have been more saleable to the album's target audience on the basis of its contemporaneous adoption as the 'The Gallery' music in Take Hart. True, the theme from M*A*S*H (as performed by, of course, 'The M*A*S*H') is on board to add an upbeat note (well, relatively speaking), but when the most musical selection in this long procession of album-closing atmospherics is that Calling You song from Bagdad Cafe, you know it's set to be something of a slog. In fairness it all just about works in the context of the compilation's 'mood', but the last album's sign-off was the theme from Roobarb. All of this 'serious' business can sod off and frown to itself in the corner, frankly.
Fortunately - and indeed precisely why this prolonged downbeat ending works in the context of the album as a whole - there are a couple of brighter passages earlier on. There's a refreshing run of mid-sixties sourced psych-tinged selections midway through, taking in White Rabbit, Venus In Furs, Louie Louie, Green Onions and Herbie Hancock's Deee-Lite sampled Bring Down The Birds from Blow-Up (which is a convenient point at which to mention the nameless NME hack who, while sneering at a James Taylor Quartet album in a wince-inducing 'look at me I'm controversial' fashion around this time, scoffed of their cover of the main theme from Blow-Up that "halfway through they decide to start playing Groove Is In The Heart for some reason"), though the lone unwelcome feature of the previous Cult Fiction album makes an equally unwelcome reappearance here. Presumably for space-saving reasons, the compilers have opted for the shorter edit of The Monkees' The Porpoise Song from the actual Head soundtrack album, which is more of an audio collage than a collection of songs, meaning that we get the abrupt police siren-drenched fade in while the glorious extended coda is completely missing, and it's literally not half the song it should be. Still, it must have been worth it to get the Northern Exposure theme squeezed on there.
Meanwhile, if you've been paying attention, you'll already be aware that the greatest strength of the Cult Fiction series was that the compilers were always prepared to go just that little bit further and include rarities and obscurities that were wowing fans of the genre or scene and deserved wider exposure, and happily This Is... Son Of Cult Fiction is no exception. Not only do we get Warren Zevon's decidedly odd (though not that odd when you know about his former musical escapades as half of Lyme & Cybelle) slice of late seventies soft-rock Werewolves Of London, which like Brown-Eyed Girl, I Believe In Miracles and The Whole Of The Moon is one of those records whose enduring popularity far outstrips its actual success at the time, there's also the sexually aggressive sitar groover The Lions And The Cucumber by Vampyros Sound Inc., drawn from the soundtrack of deeply hallucinogenic early seventies Spanish horror/soft porn crossover Vampyros Lesbos, which like many films of a similar vintage, origin and persuasion had recently become a cult favourite with UK viewers on account of their Sunday night appearances in stray German sattelite channels (a phenomenon that you can read more about here). In case you were wondering, Vampyros Lesbos is set on a party island that hides a secret society of nubile young lady vampires desperate for a bit of girl-on-girl B Negative-siphoning action. And if you're thinking that sounds like the plot of an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer only with more shagging, or indeed like the plot of an episode of Torchwood only with less shagging, you'd be exactly right. By the end of the year Quentin Tarantino would have reused the track in Jackie Brown, but this compilation came out nearly twelve months earlier and, in effect, the Cult Fiction compilers had outdone the very person they were originally inspired to emulate. Stitch that, 'Trackspotting'.
Yet for all of its isolated shortcomings, it has to be said that This Is... Son Of Cult Fiction hangs together incredibly well as an album. Though the preponderance of well-known rock classics makes it by far the least interesting of the series, this is actually a strength from a listening point of view, starting off as a superbly judged bit of air-punching anthemic fun before taking a turn in a weirder - and ultimately bleak and haunting - direction. Meanwhile, Pink Floyd's follow-up to the album that nearly had 'The Return Of The Son Of Nothing' on it, as the history books know only too well, built on their experiments in a direction that saw it unexpectedly become purportedly the biggest selling album of all time. The follow up to This Is... Son Of Cult Fiction, however, didn't...
If only Quentin Tarantino had known what he was starting.
Think back, if you will, to a time before cinema's Jimmy Dimmick was a millionaire megastar director who prefers to spend most of his time making the same film again and again but with different hats interspersed with getting a bit shirty on What The Papers Say, and when he was, quite simply, potentially the most exciting movie-maker ever. He was someone who - not unlike certain figures in the independent music scene around that time - appeared to have seen the good, the bad and the just plain weird in any and every area of 'underground' cinema from the forties onwards, and had decided that the time had come to put a nice new shirt on it and send it 'overground'. At a time when the concept of postmodernism itself was the stuff of postmodernity, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, True Romance and Natural Born Killers arrived like a pop cultural call to arms (well, maybe not Natural Born Killers), simultaneously pointing the way into cinema's future and into the more weird and wonderful (though mostly just plain weird) corridors of its past.
Part of the reason for this, of course, was his revolutionary approach to soundtracks; ignoring the tradition of the Oscar-courting original orchestral score in favour of employing a similar sort of pop culture archaeology to his visuals, which was probably more inspired by American Graffiti than by any Polish art film with a stop-motion goose tapdancing to a slowed-down-then-speeded-up version of The Night Has A Thousand Eyes, and using the parade of non-stop half-remembered hits to actually emphasise something about the characters or setting; the tacky seventies pop radio sounds in Reservoir Dogs, for example, give an indefinable extra sense of definition to the sharp-suited career criminals addicted to oldies stations, while the sparse and trebly forgotten pre-Beatles chart smashes in Pulp Fiction do much to underscore the empty fringe-of-society netherworlds in which its various protagonists variously operate. Hardly surprising, then, that both films should have inspired soundtrack albums that bothered the upper reaches of the chart for years on end, to the extent that it's now impossible to venture into a charity shop without spotting one or the other of them. And then there's True Romance with its tongue-in-cheek reuse of existing film scores, and the blues-hollerin'-driven original script of Natural Born Killers. By the time of Kill Bill he really was just playing back-of-the-bargain-bin Top Trumps, though.
Needless to say, those top-selling soundtrack albums inspired a brief but prolific outburst of me-too soundtrack albums, and indeed me-too themed soundtrack compilations, all of which spectacularly missed the point of why those Tarantino efforts had been so popular in the first place (and of course Trackspotting, which missed the point of just about everything ever). Most of these efforts, as you can imagine, or indeed may well have been trying to forget, simply bolted together a couple of blatant borrows from Tarantino and Tarantino-affiliated (seriously, remember when we were supposed to regard Killing Zoe and Threesome as somehow relevant?) soundtracks with a handful of de facto Britpop-era hits and some seventies rock stuff that Loaded had said it was OK to like, which is why you'll now find them all lurking in their hundreds in the 58 CDs For £1 section at That's Entertainment.
There was one album, however - well, series of albums to be strictly accurate - that somehow managed to get this least get-right-able of approaches right, and would then subsequently go off on all manner of obscure and esoteric tangents that would have caused all those people whooping at Stuck In The Middle With You at the student union to shudder like they'd been forced to watch a single minute of The Magic Fountain on a loop for forty eight hours. It started off with both feet planted firmly in Tarantino-land, yet six volumes later it had taken in Count Indigo, Bardo, the 'wrong' Magic Roundabout, and plenty more besides. And, what do you know, they all still stand up well today. So join us, if you will, as we take an album-by-album relisten to... the Cult Fiction series! Beginning with...
This Is... Cult Fiction (1995)
As the Pulp Fiction-riffing title suggests - though as we shall see, within a very short time 'Cult Fiction' seemed almost to become an original name in its own right - this inaugural offering came very much in the slipstream of the initial outbreak of Tarantino-mania; something that was in turn very much reflected in the cover art, featuring as it does a stocking'n'suspendered and unfeasibly-chested blonde in a bleak motel having recently discarded a wine glass and the world's smallest record. Meanwhile, lord alone knows that that TV show's supposed to be. Doubtless this was intended as some sort of non-copyright-troubling homage to Uma Thurman's iconic pose from the Pulp Fiction poster, only commissioned from an artist that was briefed to not
to watch the film, nor to learn anything at all whatsoever about what might
possibly happen in it. If anything, it's closer to being a homage to the cover of Tony Hancock's favoured page-turner Lady Don't Fall Backwards, although sadly you won't find Spying Tonight anywhere on this tracklisting.
Needless to say, said Hancock-deficient tracklisting leans very heavily towards the Tarantino-weighted end of the scale, and yet somehow, rather than seeming like yet another cash-in stroke rip-off, it manages to hit all the right notes and throws in a few impressive suprises to boot. The opening double whammy of film-openers Little Green Bag and Misirlou still sounds amazing, the over-familiar but still great Stuck In The Middle With You rubs shoulders with the lesser-heard Jungle Boogie and You Never Can Tell, and the compilers have also found room for Rumble, the menacing crumbly-toned Link Wray instrumental that was inexplicably left off the Pulp Fiction soundtrack album in favour of Maria McKee whistling about a sodding dress for twelve years.
As you might well be deducing from that rather left-field inclusion (well, relatively), the compilers of This Is... Cult Fiction seem to have been keen - as would rapidly become a trademark of theirs - to put that extra bit of effort in and come up with something that would both warrant and withstand repeated listening; no mean feat when you consider that many of the similar efforts it was jostling for space with in the HMV Soundtracks rack were a slog to get through even just the once. The only problem is, when you've exhausted the Tarantino soundtracks and incorporated as much of them as you feasibly can without your target audience feeling royally ripped off, where do you go next?
And this is where This Is... Cult Fiction starts to get interesting. Initially they seem to have opted to reach for the nearest recent films with similar (if far lesser) 'cult' credentials, meaning that we get Bjork's still-astonishing theme from Young Americans and the original Lalo Schifrin version of Mission Impossible (as opposed to that miserable angle-grinding reworking by Larry Mullen and a bin, which was virtually inescapable at the time but thankfully barely heard now), though on the less appealing side we also get Here Comes The Hotstepper from Pret A Porter, a film that the media appeared to decide appealed to the 'Tarantino set' without actually canvassing any of them for their opinion on the matter, and - stetching the definition of 'recent' slightly - the never-entertaining Blue Velvet by Bobby Vinton. The latter had in fact been a barely explicable Twin Peaks-affiliated reissued top ten hit late in 1990 (and that's not the last that we'll be hearing from Dale Cooper and company), and indeed room is made for a couple of further then-recent Revived 45 chart-vaulters; Perez Prado's Guaglione, as featured in the first of several thousand Guinness adverts that apparently 'everyone' thought was amazing apart from anyone at all that you actually knew, and the similarly beer-propelled We Have All The Time In The World by Louis Armstrong.
The latter's James Bond associations provides a convenient route in for the James Bond Theme, here in one of its later elaborated-up John Barry re-recordings rather than the twisted beat boom twangings of the original (though - spoiler alert - that's something we may well end up touching on at some point in the future), and while there aren't really that many big name big screen big themed spies or detectives worthy of a place alongside him on such a commercially minded compilation, there are nonetheless many of a more televisual persuasion who are eminently suitable for the task, and indeed that's the next major port of musical call. Laurie Johnson's single version of The Avengers is joined by a couple of judiciously chosen top-drawer covers, The Les Reed Brass' take on The Saint and The Bob Leaper Orchestra's frantic rattle through Danger Man (which was then also doing a stint as the theme music for Mark Radcliffe's 'Graveyard Shift' Radio 1 show - which you can read all about in my book Fun At One), while from across the 'pond' come the barnstorming original black-and-white-era arrangement of The Man From UNCLE and, rather less impressively, a pedestrian trot through Hawaii Five-O by a struggling post-psychedelia The Ventures, twanging politely through an arrangement that does neither them nor the tune any favours.
Then there's a bit of a lurch forward into seventies urban funk hipness, with Theme From Shaft (which, weirdly, sounds like an inferior re-recorded version even though it isn't), The Harder They Come, the overquoted monologue-enhanced All The Animals Come Out At Night from Taxi Driver, and - letting the urban funk quotient down slightly - Everybody's Talkin' from Midnight Cowboy, as then recently pushed back into the charts by The Beautiful South though anyone with even the slightest bit of sense should prefer this reading by indie nearly-men Moose. And once again there's some small screen contemporaries for this lot, with a reading of The Sweeney by the dreaded Power Pack Orchestra (an eighties studio ensemble that specialised in microscopically close approximations of original film and TV themes, virtually indistinguishable from the genuine article but just about mechanical and workmanlike enough to be detectable, which in a way is actually worse than a ludicrously inauthentic bash-it-out-after-lunch job), and the throw-some-notes-at-the-wall funk-jazz of The Streets Of San Francisco, a show that has blithely ignored repeated attempts to artificially build up any kind of cult following around it. Meanwhile, from completely the other end of the seventies comes Francis Monkman's alarming theme from The Long Good Friday, a suitably nasty-sounding reminder of the days when library music started to get just that bit unsettlingly antiseptic in a slap-bass-and-sequencer reflection of the dockland redevelopments that the in-character Bob Hoskins so despised.
And that's just about it, apart from three notable fishes out of big-poster-bought-from-the-Student-Union water. An all-too-familiar four-note twang signifies it's time for Twin Peaks, a show which has since disappeared from the 'cult' map in a manner that you really wouldn't have predicted from the endless conversations about the latest 'clues' back in 1990 (most of them conducted by people who claimed not to understand The Prisoner when it showed up on Channel 4 a couple of years later), Great Big Giant Of The Cinema Horson Welles shows up to show these young upstarts how it's done with the beatnikky bongo freakout from the start of A Touch Of Evil, and then... there's... Joe 90. Yes, Joe 90. The least marketable of any Gerry Anderson show (and yes, that does include The Secret Service), and with about as much in stylistic and thematic common with anything else on the album as Here Come The Double Deckers. And yet Barry Gray's spectacular transistory Hammond and speaker-rattling guitar theme music is quite simply the best track on here by a very long distance indeed. Yes, Sam Loover and company may lack the cult credentials of the collar-turned-up sax-accompanied types that make up the bulk of the rest of This Is... Cult Fiction - let's face it, they even lack the cult credentials of a country-yowling Supermarionation cowboy with an oversized head - but end up showing them all by virtue of having the best theme music. Even if it does appear here with the dreaded 'wow' intact (if you have no idea what that might possibly mean, have a look at this highly amusing rant on the very tape-warbling subject).
One place that you won't find the Joe 90 theme though, 'wow'-equipped or otherwise, is on the little-known American edition of This Is... Cult Fiction, a heavily truncated affair in the tradition of the early Now That's What I Call Music CDs that dispenses with the less hoagie-scoffing friendly selections in favour of... well, a lot of tracks that we'll be coming back to in the near future. And to know what did show up on those future volumes, well, you'd need to have a police box that travelled in time or something. Or be Belgian.
Yet one thing that the American edition does do is highlight just how diverse, even within its own narrow and limited self-imposed parameters, This Is... Cult Fiction really is. Rather than stick to entirely safe and predictable choices, there's at least an attempt to suggest to people who had bought it on the back of Pumpkin and Honeybunny's jabbering that there's a lot more out there that they might like, from gritty urban gangland thrillers to sub-psychedelic sixties private eyes to, well, Joe 90. Whether this actually had any effect is another question, but it's a question better suited to future instalments. For now, it's worth highlighting just how well this seemingly all over the place selection of soundtrack excerpts hangs together, disregarding what 'fits' in a humourless berk HERNing on a forum sense and concentrating on what 'fits' musically and indeed as just stuff you might be into. Something that The Tarantino Connection never quite managed.
So, that was This Is... Cult Fiction, a relatively by-the-book yet eminently listenable compilation that by ignoring its original theme developed a whole new theme of its own, and which, whether by accident or design (and it was probably a bit of both), managed to avoid falling into the usual small-minded post-Tarantino 'YER LIKE THIS' trap, and took the time and trouble to say 'ACTUALLY YER MIGHT QUITE LIKE THIS AS WELL'. Though when it came to a second volume, they changed what yer might quite like completely...
Every so often, you'll find a newspaper or magazine feature charting the Mojo-approved Official History Of The Pop VideoTM. With a bit of variance to allow for frowning over the record sales of whoever's proving quite popular at the moment, it normally runs somewhere along these lines: the pop video was invented by The Beatles when they started doing music that was too complicated to perform live, and then invented again by Queen in 1974, and then it took off but also declined with the arrival of MTV. With the exception of one wildcard entry by an 'influential' indie band, the accompanying lists of Best Ever Pop Videos are essentially always more or less the same, although none of the corresponding lists of Worst Ever Pop Videos ever point out that the actual literal worst pop video of all time is November Rain by Guns'n'Roses, a parade of pomposity, pretentiousness and heavy-handed 'symbolism' so mind-numbingly interminable that Slash actually GOES FOR A WALK in the middle of it, and which ends with Axl Rose springing back and forth in what can only be a tribute to that animated rabbit trying to pull a carrot out of the ground in Rainbow.
One thing that they can all agree on, however, is that the eighties was the evolutionary high watermark of the pop video, when everyone blew vast amounts of money on exhiliarating big budget high concept mini-movies that epitomised the perfection of mid-eighties pop except that they also epitomised the imperfection of mid-eighties pop, and that The Smiths reacted against this by refusing to make any pop videos ever apart from all the ones that they actually did. And once they get onto that subject, the same old examples get trotted out again and again and again. There's The Wild Boys, Duran Duran's homage to Channel 4's Ghosts In The Machine, in which a robot head of Lloyd from Byker Grove headbutts a computer or something while Simon Le Bon goes round on a big water wheel. There's Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer, a song-ruining parade of animated click-ting stamps literalism tailor made for clip show representation of a year that everyone knows should only be signposted by Phil Cool drinking Citrus Spring. There's Reet Petite, the Claymated springboard for an unexpected three-hit Jackie Wilson mini-revival, which causes clip show talking heads to perform an elaborate retronostalgic variation on the Charleston when they chuckle that they found it funny, then frown that they also found it offensively caricatured, then chuckle that they found it funny again, all the while utterly oblivious that it was first made as an interstitial for the BBC arts show Arena. And then there's Thriller, in which Michael Jackson effects a terrifying transformation into Barry Grant from Brookside.
What you will never find in any of these articles, however, is the cold harsh truth that the most hilariously awful videos of the eighties were a combination of attempts by visually unarresting mainstream artists to look 'stylish', and clip-interpolating rock ballad big budget film themes. And the most hilariously awful of all were those that were a literal combination of the two. If you want evidence of this, look no futher than Phil Collins' Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now).
Like all big hit movie themes of the eighties, Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now) was the credit-propping pop ditty from a film that nobody seems to have seen despite latterday ubiquity in the hallowed everyone-else-in-school-was-allowed-to-stay-up-but-you timeslot. As far as anyone can make out it's got something to do with a love triangle and Jeff Bridges being framed for a crime he didn't commit except he did or whatever it is; frankly, as it was a contemporary of Spies Like Us, nobody should even be in the least bit interested.
As you can imagine, the accompanying video features an endless parade of clips from the overlong popcorn-challenger, most of them seeming to involve little more than people turning their heads slowly sideways. As you can also imagine, these are interspersed with Phil Collins doing some piano-free power ballad miming to camera. What elevates this above the competition, though - and even above Peter Cetera looking askance at some clips from The Karate Kid Part II through sliding doors, which takes some elevating above - is how they introduce the nation's favourite Mel Smith/Eddy Shah/Bob Hoskins-alike into proceedings; the camera zooms in on some sort of Aztec mask featured in the movie, which promptly starts miming his part. No, really.
We then get a dissolve into his face as he stands in front of a luminescent waterfall, which gradually changes colour from red to green to blue, presumably as some sort of love triangle-evoking symbolism, and leaving him looking like Max Headroom as reimagined by whoever designed the wrapper for Terry's Bitz. The mask sporadically recurs but fails to do any more miming - so you could be forgiven for thinking you'd imagined it - Phil slides in and out of frame like a 'comedy' Roland Rat-plugging TV-am ad break card, and a procession of thuds and wallops from the film accompany the inter-verse drum thudding.
But that's not all. For the finally overwrought chorus repetition, Phil changes location to what appears to be the actual literal studio floor from BBC Daytime quiz show Turnabout, which then in turn appears to threaten to turn into the opening titles of The Tripods. All you really need is a cameo from 'Belouis' 'Some' and that'd be the entire eighties right there.
What any of this has to do with any of the film is something of a mystery, and judging from the look of the clips included here, a mystery it can frankly remain. What it does tell us, though, is that if you want a real flavour of an art form, even something as trivial and ephemeral as the pop video, you have to look slightly further afield than the usual accepted facts and figures. You'll find the most ludicrous of stuff in the most unlikely of places, like in bafflingly thrown-together film advertising thinly disguised as chart fodder, and we haven't even started on movie-plugging promo antics by Starship, Chesney Hawkes or 'Dinners' yet.
And anyway, this is the best pop video ever made...
Sometimes, when you start poking around in the increasingly daunting 'Drafts' folder (well, it's technically not a folder, but you get the point) and its seemingly endless roll call of unfinished and long-abandoned post ideas, it's surprising what you can find in there. For example, I've just stumbled across this long-forgotten doodle in the margin with the gobbledygook title You Can't Judge A Videtalker By Its Blurb (actually taken from Patsy Kensit-starring Nadsat-esque-spouting eighties Children's ITV sci-fi comedy Luna), which appears to have been driving towards making some kind of point about so-called 'Video Nasties'. It would have started, it seems, with a memory-searing childhood visit to the local video shop, with its sensory-assault-launching wall full of uncertified low-budget horror films with alarming cover art:
"One of these was of course the famously revolting cover to Cannibal Holocaust, so ridiculously over-the-top and retina-assaultingly rendered that it almost crosses a line into acceptability. The others that really seared themselves into my mind, however, were ones that you don't hear so much about now. The woman-grabbing photo on the cover of Don't Answer The Phone, for example, which made me feel in nauseous in a way I didn't really understand at the time, or the more traditional Granada Horror Film Slot Continuity Slide-style iconography of White Cannibal Queen, which it has to be admitted was not a million miles away from the 'Scary Picture' in Look Around You. Above all of these in the sleepless night stakes, however, was the priest cowering behind a giant crucifix on the cover of The Bogeyman. What's that? You've never heard of The Bogeyman? Well, that's hardly surprising. It came and went in cinemas with apparently nobody even noticing, and if it wasn't for its very brief spell at the top of the rental charts back at the dawn of home video, it's likely nobody would ever have noticed it; even when the tabloids were scrabbling around for a reader-enraging list of depravities in leading 'Nasties', all they could find to remark upon in this lower-rung post-Exorcist Hollywood underachiever was a telekinetically-driven scissor attack. It's about as dreary as early eighties mainstream attempts at doing mid-budget horror got, and that's no mean feat, especially when it's up against the likes of Dead And Buried. Yes, I did eventually actually see The Bogeyman, when I was a good deal older and indeed a good deal more interested in the obscurer corners of popular culture (oh, alright, rubbishy old films), and was quite surprised to find that it didn't exactly match up to the quakes of terror that had reverberated outwards from that hapless rental shop shelf"
Then there was a gap and the following fragment:
"So you can't judge a book by its cover but you can judge the idea by signifiers[...] the same way that I can make a fairly informed judgement about Lark Rise To Candleford or the eighteen millionth series of Shooting Stars"
...and that was it. Whatever point it was driving towards is now lost to posterity, alongside whatever would have gone in the blank posts headed 'Song 2 b-sides' and 'Adam Diment book in charity shop'. I did briefly consider reworking it into something about how, despite what people being paid to write columns with an eye on their next TV outing might say, it's perfectly acceptable to be opposed to the fundamental idea of Benefits Street without needing to watch it to form a value judgement about its actual content, but despite having a corking title (Can You Tell Me How To Get, How To Get Rid Of Benefits Street?) this was abandoned when Phil Norman did his superlative piece on much the same subject, and anyway, loads of people were sobbing "boo hoo hoo your opinions is giving me earrrrr infection can't you stop having opinions do more about Hardly Hare please ps i should win stuff by watching", so that was that, really, and 'malcolm tucker rant?' would never find its way into this post. Apart from just there of course.
Anyway, there was no conclusion planned out in the original half-post apart from the word 'conclusion', so let's just leave it there. I wonder who the real cannibals are?
Some musings from the archives about a couple of occasions on which
I managed to really, really annoy people by
writing something throwaway, inconsequential and trivial that you'd never have
predicted that anyone would possibly take exception to, whilst deliberate
attempts to provoke and rabble-rouse usually went by without any reaction at
all. And this was all before THAT Stewart Lee review as well... incidentally I
won't be re-running the 'Diana and IT Crowd pieces' mentioned below, because
they were both rubbish.
"I wish to protest most strongly about everything" - Henry Root, Park Walk, West Brompton
If you're going to write stuff then sometimes - as recent less-than
overjoyed reactions to the Diana and IT Crowd pieces on here have
testified - you're going to upset people. Whether you mean to or not.
Over the years I have accidentally managed to enrage TV's Dave Gorman,
a mad American who owns the supposed 'literary rights' to Graham
Chapman, some jerk out of an early nineties pop duo who lasted for
about five minutes and had literally half a hit, any number of ruralist
pluralists, and countless 'man in the street' readers besides.
There was, for example, the person who took bile-spitting objection to a
few throwaway observations about amusingly shoddy lyrics, fuming
"have you never heard of POETRY or METAPHOR?". Or the cheerful and
obviously well-balanced individual who took exception to some slightly frivolous (and, erm, patently appreciative) stuff about the glam-rocking likes of Flintlock and Sailor and sent in the following charming missive:
"You are a bitchy frilly little venting sod aren't you? Your site is more a rubbish bin with a used tampon
in it than a paintbox. Angry at everyone
because you've never achieved anything in life? Besides all the femme
hysteria you get your facts all
wrong, and that's the most disturbing and misleading aspect of your website. Don't write about the seventies without
consulting facts. Disgusted with you"
What's more, the piece that instigated such ire appeared on a site that once provoked someone to send a terse email reading simply "more paragraphs, less green". Disgusted with myself.
So disgusted in fact that as an act of atonement, I will now outline a five-point plan of how to avoid recieving furious and badly-punctuated borderline threats in response to absolutely nothing from the sort of people who shouldn't even be trusted with the ability to read, let alone to
hand out the scissors:
1. Don't Say Anything Less Than Complimentary About Silent Cinema
Lord alone knows why, but claiming nothing more provocative than a
complete lack of interest in the soundless antics of Charlie Chaplin and his slow-laugh chums always provokes a flood of extremely long and irritated emails; striking back in their hundreds, albeit very slowly. You have to feel sorry for these people though - after all, it's no wonder they're angry when they're so regularly whacked on the head by unwittingly-rotated planks of shoulder-mounted wood that they've seen being carried towards them five minutes in advance of the impact.
2. Don't Play Devil's Advocate About Doctor Who
The majority of fans of Doctor Who are sensitive souls, and don't particularly appreciate any boat-rocking over widely-held majority opinions on the series. Suggest that The Underwater Menace is good and not rubbish like you thought, speak up for the Sylvester McCoy era, or point out that Tom Baker was occasionally phoning in his performance, and they'll come down on you like a ton of falling bits of scenery from a Colin Baker story. Worse still, the days when fans would have to spend several months typing out their own fanzine in order to argue back are long gone, and The Great Disgruntled can be online and calling you a 'congenital idiot' within minutes.
3. Don't Make Any Criticisms Of Chris Morris
To dispense with the witticisms for a second (much like Chris Morris has done himself for the past decade, ho ho), there are too many people out there who see Chris Morris not as a rather funny bloke who has made plenty of worthwhile 'points' with his humour and a couple of meandering and on occasion dangerous and stupid ones besides, but as some kind of religious visionary whose every utterance must be accepted as law. So if you're out to argue that you didn't enjoy one of his works, you're on to a loser from the outset. Considered expressions of genuine dismay at the hateful and poorly-focused Brass Eye Special, for example, were brushed aside with comments like "it was the satire that had to be made!", "you just didn't get it!", "what are you, a Daily Mail reader?", and, of course, "Morris is a godlike genius, I think you'll find, and essentially what he was trying to do was...". Similarly, lukewarm reviews of My Wrongs #Ohwhogivesaflyingfuck found themselves dismissed 'invalid' on account of containing a sentence calling the Brass Eye Special 'poor', or worse still, getting two numbers in the title the wrong way round. Pointing out that Nathan Barley was relevant to about three people in London and had no sodding jokes in anyway met with cries of "too close to home eh? ;) u just dont like it because u ARE nathan barley!! :)" and what have you. That said, when the same review causes perrennial indie no-hoper Momus to sneer at you for mentioning The Housemartins, you're clearly doing something right.
4. Don't Mention Britpop
Do you remember Britpop? That period between roughly 1992-1996 when Blur, Suede, Pulp and Elastica made some genuinely thrilling records, Paul Weller made some records, and just for the tiniest fraction of a second, it really did feel like so-called 'alternative' culture was about to take on the mainstream and win? Well, whatever you do, never mention this anywhere. Because if you do, you will be inundated by communications from angry shouting individuals pointing out how there were other people making records too you know, how it was all a load of media hype and never actually happened, and how grunge remained really really really popular despite what the weedy girly indie kid geeks might try to tell you with their short washed hair and (spit) trainers. This goes beyond mere expressions of personal distaste for the bands themselves (despite the fact that an expression of distaste for Elastica is pretty much a scientific paradox), and into a risible insistence that because someone didn't experience an era or subculture a certain way, nobody else in the world could possibly have done so, almost like some kind of Stalinist attempt to rewrite history to ensure that Eddie Vedder was victorious. In other words it's like, erm, Britpop never happened!
5. Don't Say You Liked Doctor Who And The Idiot's Lantern
Strap yourself in for a rundown of ten Christmas movies you definitely shouldn't be circling in the double Radio Times...
A Hobo's Christmas (1987) "The best thing about Christmas is family..."
Boxcar-hopping vagabond decides completely out of the blue to seek out the family he abandoned twenty five years ago for a life of two hours of pushin' broom for an eight by twelve four bit room, and discover the true meaning of Christmas by meeting the grandchildren he's never met. His family, however, have some reservations. You're laughing already, aren't you?
WHERE YOU'RE LIKELY TO FIND IT: 15th December, Five, kicking off an afternoon of you shouting about how they start showing Christmas Films too early.
Christmas Comes To Willow Creek (1987) "If ever a town needed a Christmas miracle..."
Rights-troubling reunion of former Hazzardian Dukes Tom Wopat and John Schneider as a pair of good ol' boys never meaning no copyright infringement, who ensure long-haul delivery of a surprise for the whole town, through a perilous route and via a series of capers that in no way resemble the erstwhile exploits of Bo and Luke. But is it canon?
WHERE YOU'RE LIKELY TO FIND IT: 17th December, BBC1, already halfway through when you get home from your school's final half-day of term.
Santa Claus (1959) "An enchanting world of make believe"
Jaw-dropping Latin American-sourced action adventure in which Santa takes on a present-sabotaging Devil, like some lost episode of Futurama with visuals somewhere between The Singing Ringing Tree and one of the more migrane-inducing Video Nasties. Only nowhere near as entertaining as any of that sounds.
WHERE YOU'RE LIKELY TO FIND IT: BBC4, 20th December, as part of some 11pm 'ironic films' season.
Yes Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus (1991) "She wanted to know... He needed to know"
Charles Bronson does the honours in a movie based on the original letter, in the tale real-life hardbitten hack Francis Pharcellus Church and his self-finding quest to answer a youngster's query about whether there really is a Santa or mummy and daddy were just very bad liars. Lord Leveson would take a dim view of his conclusion.
WHERE YOU'RE LIKELY TO FIND IT: 21st December, Film 4, two hours after the film you actually wanted to see finished.
The Christmas Star (1986) "Two kids made a believer out of him"
Post-Lou Grant Ed Asner takes the lead in undistinguished Disney offering as escaped counterfeiter Horace McNickle, whose cop-evading tactics lead to him - you guessed it - being mistaken for Santa by some nosey local youngsters. Foiling of 'real' criminals, moral-bending child-assisted recovery of loot, and discovery of the 'true meaning' of Christmas ensue.
WHERE YOU'RE LIKELY TO FIND IT: 22nd December, Five, 3pm sharp.
Silent Night Deadly Night (1984) "He knows when you've been naughty..."
Franchise initiating Halloween-for-figgy-pudding-scoffers stalk'n'slash ridiculousness about an axe-wielding Santa-suited madman who gets pushed over the edge when he is forced to work as a last-minute grotto-dweller in a local store. Highly banned in the home video era and not at all copied from the virtually identical made-a-couple-of-years-beforehand Christmas Evil, honest.
WHERE YOU'RE LIKELY TO FIND IT: Christmas Party, manky VHS someone got from their 'brother's mate', after you've failed to pull.
Christmas On Division Street (1991) "The story of a friendship born on the streets of America"
The Wonder Years alumnus Fred Savage tries his hardest to shake off did-they-actually-watch-the-show-then squeaky clean image as a wealthy youngster who takes it upon himself to perform charitable acts for neighbourhood hustlers and ne'er-do-wells, with violence and 'language' aplenty. Looks like Kevin Arnold really was man enough to come down to the streets with Omar.
WHERE YOU'RE LIKELY TO FIND IT: 22nd December, ITV, just after you've rolled in hammered from the work Christmas do and are in no fit state to comprehend it.
The Christmas Martian (1971) "Christmas with a friend from space"
French-Canadian goose-ahoy snow-sodden oddity in which discovery of green footprints in the snow (no, us neither) leads to two children being enticed into a spaceship by a chocolate-proferring alien (who has apparently stolen Martin Degville's face mask thing), and subsequent pitchfork-waving fumings of parents who don't 'get' him. Where do you get your crazy ideas from, Mr Spielberg?
WHERE YOU'RE LIKELY TO FIND IT: Christmas Day, ITV, whatever time you've been told is 'too early' to open your presents.
The Christmas Tree (1969) "There's a feeling that cannot be put into words... it's been put on film"
Proto-eco-thriller get-knotted-Doomwatch Cold War blub-coercing tearjerker with William Holden as a heartless billionaire whose son becomes livid-blue-spot-festoonedly ill after swimming near a downed fighter plane which was, oh the irony, atomically armed by one of his subsidiaries. Atonement-fuelled quest for the perfect conifer is the upshot.
WHERE YOU'RE LIKELY TO FIND IT: 27th December, ITV, while everyone's out at the sales.
Santa With Muscles (1996) "He knows if you've been bad or good..."
A not-remotely-typecast Hulk Hogan stars as a bodybuilding billionaire on the run from the police, who discovers the true meaning of Christmas after adopting a Santa suit as 'disguise', hitting his head and developing amnesia, and believing himself to be the genuine article. Oh, and he saves an orphanage too. Well, you were waiting for that.
WHERE YOU'RE LIKELY TO FIND IT: strip-scheduled across Sky channels for the whole of Christmas. That's not a joke either. We're really going to benefit from losing the licence fee, aren't we?
In 1984, the Video Recordings Act came into force, requiring all home video titles released in the UK to have a certificate from the British Board Of Film Classification. This also had the very much intended effect of more or less outlawing a number of films that had been released prior to the VRA to a wave of public unease. Some of these were obvious candidates for 'banned' status. Others - and there were over seventy of them - were more puzzling, and it was hard to see why Leon Brittan and company felt they posed such a threat to the moral fabric of society. Here, then, are ten of the least likely inclusions on the bafflingly snowballing list of 'Video Nasties,' all of them long since re-released uncut to little public concern or indeed interest...
Possession (1981)
Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani in Cannes-lauded arty psychosexual melodrama about a woman who thinks she might be having an affair with an extra-terrestrial octopus thing. Very much the sort of film that 'makes you think,' mainly about how exactly penetration would have been achieved.
The Funhouse (1981)
Tobe Hooper-helmed conventional-as-they-come scarefest about a group of teenagers trapped inside a low-rent carnival attraction with a carny-conscious madman. Trailered prior to cinema showings of E.T.shortly before elevation to 'Nasty' status.
The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue (1974)
Lake District-set eco-parable in which zombies run up against characters called George and Edna. Resultant 'Hammer House Of Horror' vibe distinctly at odds with the concept of Depraving & Corrupting.
I Miss You, Hugs & Kisses (1978)
Elke Sommer in Canadian-sourced loosely 'true-life crime'-inspired melodrama with dubious honour of being The Video Nasty Everyone Always Forgets. Barely out of TV Movie territory to be honest.
Visiting Hours (1982)
William Shatner heads a Twentieth Century Fox-bankrolled cast in search of a serial killer targeting a hospital-bound intended victim. Shown uncut by ITV only a few years after the 'Nasties' furore.
Contamination (1981)
Italian 'in space, nobody can hear you plagiarise' rip-off of Alien, only with the cunning twist of taking place on Earth; nobody would ever suspect a thing. Now reclassified as a '15'.
Blood Feast (1963)
Campy schlock-pioneering Herschell Gordon Lewis silliness about a caterer possessed by the spirit of an Egyptian goddess with a 'thing' for ridiculously over-the-top gore. Even the notorious tongue-pulling scene isn't that convincing.
Dead & Buried (1981)
Glossy Lorimar-esque 'Hollywood Does Zombies' blandness with requisite quota of big name stars (including stars of the likes of Dynasty, Blue Thunder and St Elsewhere) and screenwriters. Surprising anyone actually noticed it.
The Burning (1981)
Miramax, Thorn EMI, Rick Wakeman, Jason Alexander, Holly Hunter, Handmade Films, virtual carbon copy of Friday The 13th. Not exactly what you'd call cheap and nasty, but 'Nasty' it was, due to the accidental release of a hastily-withdrawn uncut version.
The Witch Who Came From The Sea (1976)
Society For Cutting Up Men-friendly genre-free strangeness about a woman who mutilates brutal males, with the aid of solarised flare lenses and some clown make-up. Possibly too eye-hurting to have caused much distress.
