Disaster recognition protocols

The other day I wrote a post here about my favourite disaster movies and in the distance there was a faint sound of howling. It turned out that this was my friend 5olly, esteemed film blogger and vegetablist. For some time he'd been planning to make the top 100 disaster movies his next film blog project and was worried that I was about to ruin everything. I was, of course, but not in the way he'd expected. As ever, my plans for ruining everything were more broad.

The key problem, he explained, was that unlike many other shitter genres of films, it's very hard to come by a definitive list of the best disaster movies. Indeed, opinion is divided as to exactly what constitutes a disaster movie and what doesn't. In order to help society, then, we decided to try and come up with a definitive list of the criteria required for a movie to be a disaster. This is essentially the minutes of that meeting, only with less swearing. Or more. Who knows?

1. A disaster must happen in your disaster movie

This may seem fairly self-evident but it rules a lot of wannabe movies out. Post-apocalyptic films where the key is survival, for instance, fall at this first hurdle, unless there are a series of subsequent disasters depicted in the plot. Having a disaster is pretty much essential for a disaster movie, and the bigger the better. It's also best to not be too coy about your disaster. A bit of build-up adds to the dramatic tension but it's always a mistake to wait too long, because:

2. The disaster must be the only reason for making your movie into a movie

Life's mundanity must be to the fore in the early stages of your disaster movie. There should be no reason whatsoever for turning the stories we see unfold into a movie, other than a disaster happening. You shouldn't make an intriguing espionage thriller and then put a tornado in it, essentially.

3. In another set of circumstances, your disaster may not have happened

By this I mean that it is important that things could have gone another way. That plane could have landed and a merry Christmas been had by all. The tsunami could have missed your farmyard and not played havoc with your insurance premiums. The tantalising prospect of what might have been must hang heavily over your story. If possible, at least one of your characters should have been only days away from retirement.

This, of course, rules out completely monumental disasters where every single thing on the planet is destroyed. In the cases of films like that, the audience will always be left wondering if they story they'd been watching up to that point was really the most interesting thing happening that you could have showed them. SO:

4. Some characters must survive your disaster

A movie must have a beginning, a middle and an end. A disaster movie must have a beginning, a disaster and an aftermath. This aftermath will struggle to hold the audience's attention unless there are some characters walking around in it. It goes without saying that these characters probably ought to include some that we'd already met. What kind of state they are in is entirely up to you: teeth, no teeth, arms fallen off or fused to a passing cow. Go nuts.

5. Your disaster must be made-up but not fanciful

This is where a lot of aspiring disaster movies fall down. Science fiction walks a very fine line: if the film is based on a disaster which, given all we know, could possibly happen then OK. Asteroid strikes or nuclear wars have not yet afflicted us, at least not since the dawning of Sight and Sound Magazine, however, it is well-established that they could and boffins with lots of furrows on their brow and pens in their pockets have considered their outcomes and effects in serious scientific papers. But ones based on pseudoscience, alien invasions, zombie plagues or monsters are on rather shakier ground. It's not that they could not happen - anything COULD happen, I suppose - but it's hard to see them as anything other than sci-fi monster movies or horror films. Of course, come the day that the dead rise, aliens invade and they are particularly angry, or a load of Godzillas and Mothras make merry all over Tokyo, then generic reclassification will of course be the first order of business.

Case study: 1998, a good year for asteroids

Maybe it was a case of pre-millennium tension but in the years leading up to 2000 the summer blockbuster movie became increasingly fixated with the annihilation of all we hold dear. In 1998 the dish of the day was shit dropping out of space onto middle America's well-manicured lawns. In Armageddon, a rogue asteroid works its way through all the space junk to threaten Earth with inevitable extinction unless a ragtag group of scientists, miners and alcoholics can land a spaceship on the object and blow it to bits. In Deep Impact, meanwhile, a vast comet is discovered by an amateur astronomer and will invariably extinct us all right up unless NASA can pull a fast one. Two films released in the same year, dealing with a very similar problem and an almost identical solution. However, one of them is a disaster film and the other is not. This is not even due to the application of one of my more arcane and absurd points, but because of a more fundamental one. Namely, of the two films only one - Deep Impact - actually has a disaster in it. Armageddon sees the get out of jail card played successfully just in time, thus becoming what can only be described as a near-disaster movie. Which are better for biodiversity but much worse for people trying to make a list of disaster movies.

Which is what I have done. Collaborating with 5olly, we have come up with that rarest of beasts, a top 100 list of disaster movies. The tentative plan is to make this a project for 2013, watching and reviewing all these titles in order to document our twitching collapse into complete paranoid psychosis. And here it is, in order of their rating on IMDb.com - with sequels expunged as far as possible and in the case of movies based on real-life disasters, only the top-rated or best known one is included. Sorry, A Night To Remember. Any suggestions for any we might have missed will be welcome, because we don't want to have to watch Titanic. It is rubbish.

The 5ollymund Official Top 100 Disaster Movies

Fail-Safe
Special Bulletin
Threads
Airplane!
When The Wind Blows
Titanic
Variola Vera
On The Beach
San Francisco
The Hurricane
The Andromeda Strain
The Day the Earth Caught Fire
Colossus: The Forbin Project
The Poseidon Adventure
Testament
By Dawn's Early Light
Perfect Sense
The World, the Flesh and the Devil
The Day After
Miracle Mile
Alive
The Towering Inferno
When Worlds Collide
Panic in Year Zero!
Contagion
Deluge
Zero Hour!
Backdraft
Blindness
Airport
Outbreak
The Last Voyage
Where Have All the People Gone
The Perfect Storm
The Day After Tomorrow
Back from Eternity
The Devil at 4 O'Clock
The Cassandra Crossing
Virus
The Night the Bridge Fell Down
Night of the Comet
Right at Your Door
Knowing
End of the World
The Hindenburg
Gray Lady Down
Twister
Carriers
The Crowded Sky
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Crack in the World
No Blade of Grass
Rollercoaster
St. Helens
Deep Impact
Doomsday
World Trade Center
Epidemic
The Peacemaker
2012
Crash Landing
This Is Not a Test
Earthquake
Impulse
Dante's Peak
Hard Rain
Tidal Wave
The Night the World Exploded
Daylight
Japan Sinks
Night of the Twisters
The Big Bus
Chain Reaction
Volcano
Cold Harvest
The Core
Krakatoa, East of Java
The Happening
Damnation Alley
Flood!
Fire!
Meteor
Flood
Locusts
Countdown: The Sky's on Fire
Tornado!
Atomic Train
Hurricane
When Time Ran Out...
The Day the Sky Exploded
Avalanche
The Swarm
Def-Con 4
A Sound of Thunder
Atomic Twister
Earthstorm
Scorcher
The Last Patrol
City on Fire
Doomsday Machine

There goes the neighbourhood

Some people may tell you that the best zombie film ever made is not Night of the Living Dead but I'm afraid that these people are deeply misguided. While Living Dead is not the first film that deals with the problems of the undead (many people sing the praises of I Walked With A Zombie but don't be taken in, it is interminable), it is undeniably the one which set the agenda for all the films that followed it. Night of the Living Dead is so responsible for the creation of its genre, in fact, that it's almost sacrilegious when any of the hundreds of films that have followed deviate too far from its basic tenets.

Just in case you are currently saving up all your loose change and stockpiling liver in a bin bag in order to make your own zombie film, Night of the Living Keith, here are what I consider to be its most fundamental teachings.

1. Undead ratio is important

The fact of the matter is, no matter how many of your friends you can get to dress up like Zandra Rhodes, zombies don't carry a story. For that you need your un-undead characters. Night of the Living Dead gets this key area right. Whilst the entire premise of the body of the film is that the protagonists are stuck in a house completely surrounded by zombies, it is within the house that we stay. It creates an atmosphere incomparable to those zombie films which are just a non-stop slew of zombie action. Those films thrive on terror, sudden acts of unexpected horror. Suspense is a lot more sophisticated. Whilst it relies on terror, it adds to it and makes it mean something. So consider that before you start pouring corn syrup on your mum's church slacks.

2. Pace yourselves

Suspense is the key to a good horror film. So take your time. There's no need to kill off all of your cast immediately because we all know that they will be eventually. So let's get to find out about some of the hopes and dreams that will be quashed as a result first. The other pacing note is, and I can't stress this enough, zombies should never run. Slow, grinding, inevitability and the building of layers of claustrophobia and hysteria is the key to a successful zombie film, not a load of people legging it about with their chin off.

3. Social commentary is always welcome

The zombie films of George A. Romero are notable for the wider points about society and social problems that they make, in amongst the Hell's Angels being eaten. Sometimes these were even done accidentally: the pioneering casting decision to make the leading protagonist in Night of the Living Dead black was taken for strictly meritocratic reasons: Duane Jones gave the best audition for the part. But ever since it has been looked upon by commentators and critics as one of the best film exploration of the civil rights struggle in 1960s America. Zombie zombie zombie teeth jugular blood spurt murder zombie films are all very well and good for a brief frightener, but they are unlikely to stay with you. And it's the ones that stay with you that will help you remember all of the handy survival hints that could come in so handy one day.

4. Punch hysterical women in the face

It's the only way they'll learn.

5. Children are little shits and will be the death of you

True dat.

It can't happen here: on the power of disaster movies

Bees! Terrorists! Floods! SARS! Monsters! The elderly! Life is a dangerous place to be but what makes it preferable to the alternative is disaster movies.

Disaster is one of those film genres which can be distinguished thus: there has never been a disaster film, there are only disaster movies. But each is such a finely crafted opera of hysteria and catastrophe that not even Sight and Sound magazine could complain. Normally, cinema works on a very strict moral code. Bad things never befall good people and children and people with dogs. But in the disaster movie, all bets are off. Fred Astaire can be burned alive in a tower block, Steve Gutenberg's hair can fall out and Olivia De Havilland can be stung to death by bees. Nothing you do can save you from the wrathful vengeance of nature, or greed, or the worst excesses of humanity, or bees. In some of my favourite disaster movies, no-one is left alive at all and the Earth left to adjust to this cataclysmic event as best it can, but how it goes about doing so is not addressed. It's a sobering prospect for anyone familiar with the basic tenets of narrative structure, with Steve Gutenberg or the behavioural patterns of bees.

Disaster movies are interesting, too, because there's no guarantee that the events that take place can't ultimately conspire to smite your ass. Most days we all get up and try and stave off indigestion, death and bees long enough to make it to bedtime: it's all very humdrum and routine. But some days there are people who find themselves on fire, or in the wrong place at the wrong time during a terrorist attack or a natural disaster, or as collateral during the final climactic battle in the war between atomic bees and space wasps. There's no guarantees that, just by watching a film where a monstrous pre-historic sloth rampages through downtown Pittsburgh, you have achieved any kind of immunity.

So, I suppose there are two main reasons to relish disaster movies. Firstly, you never feel more alive than you do when you're watching someone else have their face chewed off by a doberman or falling out of a cable car in forlorn pursuit of their last Rolo. But secondly, it's a useful place to pick up tips. Do you know where you'd go during a zombie plague, tsunami or beetastrophe? That's right: upstairs. And I learnt all of that from watching disaster movies. Being someone who finds it difficult to learn any new skill without doing, disaster movies are as close as I can get without there being a snake biting my glans at 30,000 feet.

Today, then, I'm going to look at the main types of disaster movie and share some of the key lessons that they have taught me. You might want to print this post out later and then paste it to the wall of your inner sanctuary. Next to the bucket for shitting in.

MAN-MADE

Human beings are a bunch of idiots. They are greedy, self-serving and beholden to contrary ideologies. Even when they try to be helpful, they drop a load of water onto sodium metal and accidentally destroy half of Denver. The majority of man-made disaster films revolve around these topics, usually involving transportation or buildings. Terrorism is also a popular subject, although after September 11th 2001, American film producers decided that it was actually quite a serious subject after all and started to use it more sparingly.

Atomic Train: Rob Lowe saves the world, then doesn't

And how does one go about making any situation worse? Put an atomic bomb in it! A prime example here is the monumental TV movie Atomic Train, which touches on most of the classic man-made disaster film staples: greed, corruption, cutting corners, transportation gone awry, human relationship problems being put into sharp perspective and atomic bombs. Bees, mercifully, were absent but even so most of Denver copped one right in the flue, despite the best efforts of Rob Lowe.

So what can we learn from man-made disaster movies? Well, first, regulations exist for a reason. You may save yourselves a few thousand dollars in fees but if you sneak a decommissioned Soviet nuke onto a locomotive disguised as chemicals, half of Denver will be blown up. Secondly, things can always be worse in your life, so even if you are stuck in a disastrous marriage or demeaning career, just suck it up you loser. You'll be looking back to these days with enormous fondness once the atom bees arrive.

BIOLOGICAL

Biological includes animals, monsters and their perky but microscopic cousins, diseases. Some disaster movies successfully combine both: Outbreak, for instance, features a gruesome pandemic sparked by a manky monkey which leaves even Renee Russo unable to keep her insides from coming outside. Bees and birds and other swarming things also feature heavily, although we are still awaiting a disaster movie featuring a particularly malicious shoal of fish.

Biological disaster movies have also given the world the most important and best (i.e worst) disaster movie ever made: The Swarm, in which a deluge of African killer bees lay siege to an all-star cast, leading to some magnificently hysterical acting from Michael Caine, hallucinatory huge bees haunting everyone's nightmares and the large-scale destruction of Houston.

JIM LOVELL: Houston, we have a problem.
NASA MISSION CONTROL: Is it bees? Because frankly we've got a problem and it's bees.

The Swarm: believe it or not, this film is EVEN BETTER than this looks

What we can learn from biological disaster movies is that human beings are all idiots. Human concerns are all to blame for massing bees, rage-filled birds or drug-resistant strains of monkey rot. No good can come of it and all we can do is give thanks to the people who do their best to save us from ourselves, then rail against their voice being ignored but then do their best to save us all anyway. Or stay on shift even though people are hocking up bits of their lung on your shoe, as in Plague City: SARS in Toronto.

NATURAL

Natural disaster films are always popular: earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires and tidal waves can all really ruin your day and fling your cows about the joint. These are particularly beloved of anyone making really apocalyptic disaster films, such as 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow.

The Day After Tomorrow: the dreariest apocalypse ever imagined by man

But even notwithstanding the fact that human beings are largely powerless to contain the fury of nature anyway, these films like to really rub it in by blaming us anyway. Environmentalism is usually the leading boot that gets stuck in when we're down and on fire, but greed and corruption can also be covered - often with a karmic alignment bent. So if there's anything you can learn from natural disaster movies it is that you should always recycle, turn your TV off and not just leave it on standby and don't touch up kids.

SCIENCE-FICTION

Science fiction is something of a misnomer here, as these films actually deal with science FACT. However, the incidents of cosmic madness that these films depict unfolding are almost exclusively so cataclysmic that they haven't happened yet, or at least not for a sufficiently long time that humans have evolved sufficiently to make films about it with kick-ass special effects.

Deep Impact: possibly Morgan Freeman's fault

One particular device popular here is to make the President of the United States black. It gives films an other-worldly feel. It teaches us all that, while this can happen, it's statistically rare enough that it would be deeply counter-productive to invest too much emotional energy in worrying about it in your day-to-day life. However, then the damn fool Americans elected Barack Obama, which had the duel effects of effectively halving Morgan Freeman's earning power and also emphasising the fact that all bets are off.

What we can learn from these films is that when your number's up, you've had it. So keep smiling, carry an umbrella and come election day, always vote for middle class white males.

Now please, don't have nightmares. I almost invariably will, but there's no need for you to as well.

Watching horror with a dog

This week I have begun a two-and-a-half week stint looking after my girlfriend's dog. This dog is a dog and therefore he is quite difficult to explain things to, or to reason with. As a result, he has been somewhat clingy. He is currently sitting on my leg. When he isn't he dogs my footsteps. Probably because, as I have mentioned previously, he is a dog.

The problem is, it's making my life rather difficult as a number of my best laid plans have had to be abandoned. All I have to show for the last two days is a blog post about Jack the Ripper films which only 42 people have so far read and a cold. Also, my leg smells a bit like dog. Today, then, I thought I'd make a virtue of this situation and at least get another post out of it. This will represent a 200% increase in my productivity since Wednesday and is a step in the right direction. A dog.

My plan is, I'm going to watch three British horror films from the 1960s and 1970s, which I have never seen before, with the dog and see what happens. I am very aware that it is this kind of hard-hitting journalism that keeps you all coming back.

LEGEND OF THE WEREWOLF (1975)

Much like this dog, this film has a good pedigree: directed by Freddie Francis, starring Peter Cushing and written by Anthony Hinds, it's a Hammer Horror Holy Trinity. The plot summary on Wikipedia, too, is irresistible:

"A boy that has been raised by wolves is displayed as a circus freak. Then he grows up, becomes a zookeeper and falls in love with a prostitute. His jealousy brings out his wolf side, changing him into a werewolf so that he can kill her clients."

But this film is a risk. This dog does not take kindly to other furry things. On Wednesday night he spacked out at the sight of a camel on QI. And that was a camel. It is very possibly a portent of worse things to come, much like letting a man raised by wolves be the keeper at your zoo.

I needn't have worried, though. The dog had no interest in this film whatsoever. He was more taken by the soluble paracetamol that I was taking for a sinus headache, which some genius had made aniseed flavour in order to send dogs wild with jealous yearning. But I quite liked the film. I liked the magnificently smarmy filthy old head zookeeper (played by Ron Moody) and I particularly enjoyed the innovative WEREWOLF VISION. Otherwise known as sticking a red filter over the camera. I enjoyed, too, Peter Cushing's role as the forensic pathologist. In his determination to look past the easy solutions in order to find the truth, his character put me in mind of my beloved Quincy - if you can imagine that instead of fucking a string of airline stewardesses on a boat in Los Angeles, Quincy hung around 19th Century Parisian knocking shops looking for werewolves.

The werewolf: responsible for more Paris deaths than emphysema and syphilis combined

Where it perhaps fell down is that I suspect it aims at making a commentary on the destructiveness of male sexual jealousy. But it's hard to take things much past face value, having already suspended enough disbelief to buy into the main protagonist being a wolf boy found and displayed by circus Gypsies, eventually becoming urbane and socialised enough to get a job at a Paris zoo, albeit Paris' mankiest, most sordid, Albert Steptoe zoo ever. The overall effect, then, is merely a tale of the damaging effect of lycanthropy on the rumpy-pumpy sector of the free market economy, normally an area of sustained growth.

The dog, meanwhile, just wanted to play with his ball. It was a handy reminder to carry a rubber ball with you at all time, with one eye to being able to fend off any werewolf attacks as and when they occur.

FEAR IN THE NIGHT (1972)

At this stage I took the dog for a walk but, not finding any werewolves, it was time for another film. This time, Judy Gleeson plays a woman who gets a job working at a boarding school, only to start to be terrorised by a one-armed man. This film was immediately more up the dog's street and he happily barked along with the opening title sequence, which featured a schoolboy choir singing.

The dog was not particularly interested in this perilous scenario, however. He went to sleep once and then barked at a carpet van.  Maybe it was the effect of the walk. I suggest it's more likely to be the effect of the film, which drags on a bit. When there's a one-armed maniac on the loose, the simple fact of the matter is I want him to be more prevalent in the overall narrative of the film.

Peter Cushing in Fear in the Night: having a variety of problems

Nevertheless, it did have Peter Cushing in it, who couldn't have been unwatchable if he tried. If there were only one reason why I find British horror films of the 1960s and 1970s so compelling (there isn't), it would be because the likelihood of an appearance by Peter Cushing is very high. The dog, seemingly, is less impressed by such things and went off into the kitchen to find something to sniff.

THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR (1968)

Handsome young men everywhere are being sucked dry of their juices by a cryptozoological demon which has overtones of case of The Owlman of Mawnan, only less shit. Peter Cushing is again in attendance, making everyone wonder if perhaps it's more than a coincidence that all this death, terror and mutilation should follow him about. And whilst it may not have captured the imagination of the dog, any film whose opening titles read "Guest star: Roy Hudd" is a force to be reckoned with.

The Blood Beast Terror, hushed up by the mainstream press

The actual explanation for all of these goings on is more straightforward. Etymologist Dr. Mallinger's daughter Claire turns into a blood-sucking weremoth during a full moon and preys on the village males, whilst her father tries to genetically engineer her a mate. As any father would, and does. It's something of a far-fetched premise and I suspect a lot of it was designed merely with one eye on creating set pieces filled with gore and monsters. Although this may be a cynical view. This film could have more to say than The Battleship Potemkin. Which would make this film better than The Battleship Potemkin because The Battleship Potemkin has ZERO weremoths. Most things do. Weremoths don't actually exist. If they did, lightbulb sales would plummet as fast as blackout curtain sales would soar. Weremoths. Ultimately, this film isn't better than The Battleship Potemkin, which I think says it all. The dog didn't like it much, either.

So, as with yesterday, what have we learned? Nothing. Except that werewolves are better than weremoths and Joan Collins is a cow.

Jack the Ripper's identity revealed

Who was Jack the Ripper? History has made him (N.B. for the sake of ease, common sense and overwhelming statistical probability, I will be referring to the perpetrator of the 1888 Whitechapel murders as a male throughout, although I am in full agreement with all feminists that women can be psychotic prostitute-killing maniacs too) into a monster, but the simple fact is that he was made of skin and bone and regularly visited by the all-too-human desire to eviscerate whores like everyone else. He had a face, he had hopes and dreams, he had at least one knee and maybe more. Putting a name to that man eluded the police at the time. It was only in the 20th Century and the birth of the silver screen that the greatest mystery in the annals of crime could begin to be solved.

Five Jack the Rippers, yesterday

Because the Jack the Ripper case has spawned countless film adaptations, almost all of them helpfully providing us with a definitive answer as to his identity. For some reason, so-called "serious" historians have ignored this vital resource, but I am not a "serious" historian so I do not. We all know that films can teach us a great deal. Forrest Gump, for example, taught me a lot about the nature of the self, of anger and whether or not Tom Hanks is a bag of shite.

Today, I look at some of these crucial pieces of evidence in order to be able to exclusively reveal to you, my long-suffering readers, the name of the most notorious murderer of them all.

THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG (1927)
MAN IN THE ATTIC (1953)

The Lodger (1927): "Good evening, madam, may I please use your shitter?"

Most Jack the Ripper films are based around a handful of stories. The most common of these is The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes. This story was itself inspired by a number of urban legends that circulated around the time of the Whitechapel murders regarding the unusual and unsanitary habits of the tenants of any number of paranoid, curtain-twitching, nosey old moo east-end landladies.

Jack the Ripper's Bedroom by W.R. Sickert,
a striking confession of guilt made by an
innocent party

One of them, the Finsbury Street lodger, was identified as G. Wenworth Bell Smith, a knock-kneed Canadian gent with an unfortunate habit of turning up after murders had taken place with blood on his shirt. Another, the Batty Street lodger, is suspected of being the deeply eccentric American quack doctor, determined pickler of wombs and red hot Ripper-suspect Francis Tumblety. A third was a veterinary student in Mornington Crescent, whose landlady told the next occupant of the room - the impressionist painter Walter Sickert - was definitely the culprit. It inspired the Ripper-obsessed Sickert to paint Jack the Ripper's Bedroom, which itself later helped the dazzlingly misguided American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell to finger Sickert as Jack the Ripper in the early part of this century.

These two films are both based on Lowndes' rendering of this tale, although the two have different endings. Lowndes' lodger is a idiosyncratic young gentleman of peculiar habits who keeps rather odd hours, largely thanks to his "research", and who has no great love of the paintings of young women on the walls of his room.

The Lodger is a silent film made by Alfred Hitchcock which is now justifiably considered the first true example of Hitchcockian cinema. Alas, the first feature-length telling of a story based on Jack the Ripper does not reveal the killer's identity: the titular lodger (played by the actual real-life Ivor Novello) in fact being the brother of The Avenger's first victim, his absences from the house at the time of the murders explained by the fact he is out walking the streets trying to capture the culprit. Man in the Attic, however, is much more forthcoming with the truth, THE TRUTH. Here, the titular Man in the Attic's (played, in an unlikely twist, by Western stalwart Jack Palance on horseback with a six-shooter) absences at suspicious times and the fact he frequently burns his clothing in the kitchen sink are explained by his job as a medical researcher and also all those prostitutes and showgirls that he is killing. Jack the Ripper was Jack Palance. We should have guessed, the clue was that they had the same name: Jack.

A STUDY IN TERROR (1966)
MURDER BY DECREE (1979)
FROM HELL (2001)

The second-most popular avenue for Jack the Ripper fiction is the avenging aristocrat story. Here, a libertine member of a family of high social standing - usually, but not always, royalty - will have married a prostitute, presumably with a view to getting a discount. The crazed defenders of the family name will then carry out a series of retributive ritualised murders in order to protect their legacy. Masonic plots are common here, as are top hats.

A Study in Terror is the film which finally gets Sherlock Holmes on the case. It was about time, too. It is also my favourite film adaptation of the Jack the Ripper case, for a number of excellent reasons. Firstly, it's got Jack the Ripper AND Sherlock Holmes in it which frankly should be enough on its own. But it keeps on giving: secondly it is shot in magnificently lush British horror film of the 1960s style, all gaudy technicolour, period costume, high-camp acting and gleefully nasty make-up and special effects. Thirdly, it is perhaps the Jack the Ripper film which keeps closest to the actual facts of the case.

The greatest loss yet to Western culture

But fourthly and most importantly, it features Barbara Windsor as Annie Chapman, the second canonical (but third in this particular incidence) victim of The Rip. This is a monumental piece of casting, principally as it comes heavy with ideas of the greatest film never made, Carry On Ripping.

The cast list of Carry On Ripping would have been as follows:

JACK THE RIPPER: Sid James
SIR CHARLES WARREN: Kenneth Williams
INSPECTOR ABBERLINE: Jim Dale
CHIEF INSPECTOR LITTLECHILD: Kenneth Connor
GEORGE LUSK: Peter Butterworth
POLLY NICHOLS: Angela Douglas
ANNIE CHAPMAN: Hattie Jacques
ELIZABETH STRIDE: Fenella Fielding
CATHERINE EDDOWES: Joan Sims
MARY KELLY: Barbara Windsor
DOCTOR BAGSTER-PHILLIPS: Charles Hawtrey
QUEEN VICTORIA: Bernard Bresslaw

It's best that you don't think about this too hard, I find: the poignancy of the fact that it will never be almost too much to bear.

In A Study in Terror, Jack the Ripper is finally revealed to be Lord Carfax, the avenging younger brother of an aristocratic family. He decided to eliminate prostitutes one at a time until the his offending sister-in-law finally felt his wrath. But, after Carfax's demise, Holmes reveals that no public good would be served by the revelation of his identity. If all of this still isn't selling the film to you, just take a look at the poster. BIFF! BANG! AIEEE! Are any three other words in the English language more evocative of the Autumn of Terror?

From Hell, based on the graphic novel written by Alan Moore, focuses on the traditional royal plot: the son of the Prince of Wales catches syph off of a manky old brass - as well as marrying her in secret and fathering a child - so the Queen's private physician Sir William Gull sets out to dispatch all the witnesses according to Masonic rites. This is probably the glossiest and most Hollywood of all the Ripper-based films, starring Johnny Depp as the skagged-up-to-the-gills Inspector George Abberline and Heather Graham (or Ivver Gruyumm, as she would have pronounced it in the film) as his love interest Mary Kelly. A prostitute. Do these people never learn?

From Hell reveals Jack the Ripper to be the Tony Award-winning actor Sir Ian Holm. This seems fundamentally more unlikely than John Fraser's Lord Carfax. Perhaps it even explains why Mr. Fraser has never been made a knight of the realm.

The Venn diagram of these two films meets in Murder by Decree, a 1979 film where the royal/Masonic plot is investigated by Holmes and Watson. The film itself lacks the excitement of the other two, but the cast is arguably far superior. Holmes and Watson are played by Christopher Plummer and James "James Mason" Mason, with John Gielgud, Donald Sutherland and Genevieve Bujold also featuring. The Holmesian role of Police Inspector Lestrade is essayed in both films by Frank Finlay. Two films, thirteen years apart, one set of facial expressions.

HANDS OF THE RIPPER (1971)
JACK THE RIPPER (1976)
TIME AFTER TIME (1979)

Thankfully, there is still room in the Jack the Ripper film canon for another type of storyline: batshit crazy crazy shit. This is perhaps the most exciting and compelling area of them all. They deviate from the traditional scripts and explanations to explore more dark, illogical and shit crazy bats areas of the case and of the human psyche.

Johannes der Rippenhausen

Jack the Ripper is a German-Swiss film of 1976 where a general practitioner, haunted by his mother's vaginal indiscretions when he was a child, makes amends by killing prostitutes. There is considerable sexual content to this film, Doctor Orloff (played by Klaus Kinski who, by virtue of being the leading man in a film called Jack the Ripper, is Jack the Ripper) usually choosing to undress and hump the tits off (literally, in one case) his quarry before dispatching them to the beyond. For the purposes of body disposal, the criminal uses the botanical gardens and river, an unusual choice and one that proves to be his downfall when it turns out that his knackers are allergic to root powder.

But it is the attendant cast of characters which really give this film the edge in the preposterousness stakes: an old blind man with a sense of smell that would put a bloodhound to shame, a griping old fishwife and a mercenary fisherman with a big hooter (played by the splendidly-named Herbert Fux) being the standouts amongst them.

Hands of the Ripper, meanwhile, is Hammer Studios foray into the subject and it takes a typically daft, camp and wonderful approach as the Ripper's daughter, Angharad Rees, sets about her father's old beat with gusto having witnessed him murder her mother as a child. With Rees getting all wide-eyed and murdery every time she is kissed, can Freudian psychoanalysis save London in time? It's not quite as magnificent a premise as the title promises - Hammer, after all, have frequently thought nothing of having actual disembodied hands roam around the place to really mess up someone's day - but it's not half bad. It is particularly blessed to have Eric Porter cast as the psychiatrist, Porter being a man who distinguishes any batshit crazy film with a certain pointy-bearded, bulging-eyed gravitas. A selection of immaculate period sets, bright orange-red baked bean juice blood, gristly special effects, seances and dazzling overacting across the board make for eighty minutes of superior entertainment.

The hands of the Hands of the Ripper's hands, ripping

As an extra twist, the Ripper's daughter - a deeply traumatised young woman - has ended up as a prostitute herself, which makes her deep-seated psychological loathing of whores fraught with complications, but none that can't be solved by impailing Dora Bryan to a door with a fire poker. Her possession by the spirit of her father provides her with great strength, although whether or not her hands take on the other physical properties of man hands - hair, anchor tattoos, etc - is not directly addressed aside from a brief glimpse of some Ripping stigmata, also present on her father's hand on the fateful night and which look not dissimilar to spilt ketchup.

It's a film that, arguably like psychoanalysis itself, offers more questions than answers. Could Jack the Ripper himself have been under psychic possession when he committed his crimes? Could Jack the Ripper have been in Poldark? Like so much in this mysterious case, we may never know. The fun, as always, is in the speculation.

Meanwhile, in 1979's Time After Time, Jack the Ripper has used a time machine to transport himself to modern-day San Francisco. The time machine was the must-have gadget for Victorian gentlemen. It is also a continuation of the ongoing theme in film representations of Jack the Ripper: that the killer was upper crust, or at the very least a man of means. Means sufficient to acquire himself a time machine, at least. Everyone back then had one, to such an extent that it was a wonder there were any men in Victorian Britain at all. However, as a result, it's not all plain sailing for the Ripper, who has H.G.Wells hot on his heels. It's one of those marvellous things: a completely preposterous idea, done well. In many ways, it's what cinema should be about. Cinema should certainly have Jack the Ripper in the future, as frequently as possible. The only problem is their casting - David Warner as Jack the Ripper feels strangely off. I'm willing to suspect Ivor Novello or point the finger at Angharad Rees, but David Warner? I'm still reeling from his decapitation in The Omen and there's only so much that time travel can do.

David Warner in Time After Time - not fooling anyone

So, in conclusion, what have we learned? Nothing. Nothing at all. But it's probably safe to leave your wife with David Warner.

Film problems

I like films. You probably know this already. However, I have recently discovered a shop which sells second-hand DVDs for the price of a rental and it has significantly increased my intake. Herein lies a problem, because what I am discovering is that I can't watch more than three films in a 24 hour period without my brain consolidating their plotlines into one, giant, thing.

Back in the day, there was a phenomenon called scholastic synthesis. This describes the way in which accepted Aristotelean philosophy and Biblical teachings became so interwoven with the thinking on science and nature that they essentially became one and the same thing. I suppose this film thing is the modern equivalent. But like all modern equivalents, it is far more spiritually enriching and likely to boost your overall level of intelligence.

I watch a staggeringly intellectually stimulating array of films. I'm pretty much a one-man renaissance. In the last five days, I have watched all of the following: Bowfinger, Southland Tales, Ted (I went to the cinema and everything, and have as such also absorbed the condensed storylines of a number of trailers, too), The Producers, Four Lions, The Hunger Games and Zombieland. Also, to further boost my credentials to assume the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge in the near future, I am currently watching Volcano.

I know what happened in all of these films. Not one single part of any of them has passed me by. Apart from pretty much all of Southland Tales, which confused me in the extreme but it had The Rock in it and I refuse to believe he would let me down. For the life of me, though, I couldn't with any confidence tell you which bit was in which film.

I mean, I'm fairly sure that the bloke out of Flash Gordon doing coke with a teddy bear was in Ted, but who's to say definitively that it wasn't also a running theme in a number of other productions? Did Ted run the London Marathon? I'm pretty sure that was in Four Lions, which also featured Sean William Scott selling screenplays to a zombie who lived up a tree in France. But who's to know? And does it really matter?

None of it is particularly a worry unless I'm playing Trivial Pursuit, after all. But now this is giving way to a greater concern: I think I'm starting to lose the thread of exactly which parts happened in real life and which didn't. I am quickly discovering that the problem with films - every volcanic eruptin', fissure in space-time rippin', sentient stoner teddy bear creatin', post apocalyptic reality TV show killin', alien invadin' moment of them - is: they're too compellingly realistic.

And I am very concerned.

The trouble with introducing alien fauna into ecosystems unable to cope with them

As the sad and embittered regular readers of this shit will know, I am a big fan of 1950s science-fiction films. Particularly the ones with monsters in them. Because monsters are a peril we all must face at some point in our lives, or perhaps not.

So I was excited to note that Film4 had a film on this morning called 20 Million Miles to Earth. It had no write up in the Radio Times except to say it was a sci-fi horror and it was made in 1957. I like those odds. Upon looking it up on IMDb, I read the following:

The first U.S. spaceship to Venus crash-lands off the coast of Sicily on its return trip. A dangerous, lizard-like creature comes with it and quickly grows gigantic.

I love those odds.

So yeah, I watched it. How could I not? How could anyone not? Maybe it was the old Chewits adverts from the 1980s making me love monster films. But I actually suspect the root cause of my love of 1950s science-fiction films is that they are all strongly allegorical fables about the danger of progress, of the cold war and of the nuclear arms race. In many ways they were a coping mechanism for people, a way to help adjust to the new realities of the world and the scientific, philosophical and ideological challenges that, whether we liked it or not, everyone had to face. Plus they had spaceships and monsters and that in them.

Fresh from the Tiber to your ass

20 Million Miles to Earth is a little different in that regard. Spaceships and monsters were, thankfully, present and correct. But there's no real message in the film, save for its magnificently vague final line: " Why is it always, always, so costly for man to move from the present to the future?"

As questions go, this isn't the most hard-hitting one that the Cold War threw forward. Progress comes in many forms. Just go to Lakeland. There's spray-on cooking oil and things for opening cans that five years ago you could never even have dreamed of, but it's unlikely that the cost of these great leaps forward can be measured in human lives. Perhaps a little of the meaning was more culturally implicit and understood at the time the film was released. After all, it came out in the same year that the Soviets launched Sputnik. Could we be meddling in forces we don't understand? Was the nascent space race inherently bad? Were giant lizards an inevitable consequence of man's insatiable quest for knowledge and discovery?

But I'm not even sure if that is the case. I rather think I may be searching for reasons and justifications where there are none, which rather smacks of historical revisionism. But what can I say? I have a Media Studies 'A' level.

The spaceships and monsters are the best part. There's no doubt about that. The hokier the effects the better, too. But the shortcomings of the special effects technology available at the time can always be circumvented with skilful editing and good acting. Unfortunately, in 20 Million Miles to Earth both of these things suck. They suck balls. Smelly balls. Luckily, the monster effects were done by the great Ray Harryhausen and his revolutionary stop-motion animation techniques. Thanks to this, it's no exaggeration to say that the monster in the film was by far and away its best actor and his only line in it is "waaaaurgh".

Sigmund Freud would take his family on mushroom gathering expeditions during family holidays during which he would institute prizes for the best and second-best mushrooms found. Were these criteria to be applied to the acting in this film, the prize for second-best would go to an elephant in Rome Zoo. But everyone else: thanks for playing. We (probably) couldn't have done it without you.

Which is not to say that there was nothing to learn from this film. It's just that the lessons were more straightforward than one might have expected of a feature from this era. There is an awful lot that anyone watching can find out Venus, Italy and monsters. I found out loads. Here is a summary of my new-found wisdom.

1. Creatures from Venus eat sulphur
They can't get enough of that shit. He passed through a well-stocked Sicilian farmyard, passing by cows, pigs, sheep and horses (additional note: creatures from Venus are not French) in order to get to a few bags of sulphur. He even passed up the chance of a bag of grain. Delicious, delicious grain.

2. Creatures from Venus are "only ferocious if provoked"
This is something of a concern to me. Big green lizards of almost unfettered growth being ferocious at any stage is really no great help to anyone. If you provoked me, I'd probably get miffed after a little while. Ferocity would probably follow but not for a good few hours. Not so on Venus, where it's like a light switch. I'm not sure Venus and I would get along.

3. Elephants don't like creatures from Venus
Most of the sentient beings that encountered the alien vistor in the film reacted with admirable equanimity. But the elephant wasn't having any of it. The elephant, it seems, is ferocious even when not provoked. Good to know, should Venus ever become a problem.

4. The US Army are surprisingly accommodating to the press
Anyone still wondering if perhaps the Roswell incident was a big cover-up need only look as far as this film. Here the US military attaché gave a full, frank and blow-by-blow account of the entire sorry tale so far to the assembled press corps. It is an important lesson in the fact that the US government aren't going to lie to us about the presence of extra-terrestrial life, be it a small alien in New Mexico or a 100-foot high lizard from Venus. Although admittedly the latter would be harder to hush up completely for any significant length of time, especially if it ate the Pope.

5. The greed of Italian children will be the ruin of us all
The lizard's cocoon was in a hermetically sealed jar which washed up on the coast. And if only the first person who found it hadn't been a child whose phenomenal greed and addiction to American western films were his only motivating factors then the lizard may never have walked among us. But it was, and it did.  On the plus side, he did get 200 lire for his troubles (which is approximately eight pence) and with this he bought a cowboy hat. His subsequent admission of this to the US military earned him a further half-million lire, none of which positive re-enforcement seems particularly likely to help encourage him to stick to the right moral path in future. He was going to buy a horse with it, while tanks blasted several new holes in the Colosseum.

6. Venus is 20 million miles from Earth
I'm not sure about the veracity of this fact. I should probably check it before it ruins my chances of success in any future games of Trivial Pursuit. (In fact, at its nearest point to us, Venus is 23.6 million miles from Earth. It's unlikely NASA would be as slapdash as this in any future Venus missions).

7. Creatures from Venus have a bifurcated tail
Forked jobbies. Like a snake's tongue.

8. The water in the river Tiber makes creatures from Venus grow massive
This may not be a fact which is completely set in stone, as there were a number of problems with scale throughout the film. Sometimes the creature was the size of a man, only to be dwarfed by a passing chicken in the next scene. The Tiber certainly seemed to have a marked effect on it, though. So be careful before using it to fill your bidet or else your trousers won't fit.

9. Creatures from Venus have neither a heart or lungs
Frankly, I'm starting to wonder about these facts.

It goes without saying that I am now a bloody expert on Venutian fauna, the ethical implications of interplanetary space travel and the greed of Sicilian fishermen's children and am therefore available to answer any questions you may have about any of the issues raised in this post.

Cleaning shit off a wall with a toothbrush

The other evening my girlfriend put on one of her films, but despite my initial fears I did not die. The early signs were not good. It had Alan Arkin in it as an eccentrically curmudgeonly grandfather, which raised my fears that this film might prove to be heartwarming, or even worse, life-affirming. Oh no.

But luckily, Sunshine Cleaning was actually pretty good. I enjoyed it. The reason I enjoyed it so much is because it did that thing that so very few films do these days: realism. People are scared of realism in films. This is because realism is boring and drags on seemingly unceasingly. But just because something is boring, doesn't mean it can't be interesting. What I liked about Sunshine Cleaning is that it was just a story. No great message or theme particularly, just a story. Some stuff that takes place. Like life, things happened and, like life, they weren't resolved in their entirity within 91 minutes. No-one blew up or got hooked into a gritty smack battle or won any great battles or galloped about on a horse taking pot shots at vikings. In fact, a lot of the issues that the film addressed - bereavement, self-employment, emotional detachment, standards of business practice, the failings of the education system, social status, lesbianism - are only ever really skirted around, leaving the majority of the conclusions to the viewer's imagination.

I like this. It feels like we stuck our nose into someone else's business for an hour and a half and now we get to dream up what happened next. Every viewer does. I rather enjoy that. In my film, Emily Blunt drives around the southern United States on a lesbionic voyage of sexual discovery, while the other one gets married to the one armed man who works in the bleach shop and they have lots of moustachioed one-armed children. Alan Arkin makes some sort of bold business move and ends up having to sell a kidney. It was a good film, my one.

More films should be ultimately pointless and just drift past, causing the viewer to daydream. Who knows who Darth Vader could have been if they hadn't shot that particular fox and revealed everything? He could have ended up on a lesbionic voyage of sexual discovery in New Mexico, or selling a fibreglass shark to Alan Arkin. Maybe that bloke only had one arm because of a Light Sabre accident?

Amy Adams, that was the name of the other one.

The Earth Stood Still, Again

People with reasonably decent memories or post-traumatic stress disorder will remember that in January I held forth on the subject of the classic 1950s sci-fi film The Day The Earth Stood Still and reached the potentially fearsome conclusion that I didn't like it much. However, now all bets are off because I am watching the almost definitely a good idea 2008 remake.

It's at the the early stages so far but the all the indications so far point to the frightening reality that the film's star, Keanu Reeves, is not going to be essaying the part of Gort - the eight-foot tall solid titanium robot who barely ever moves and is completely mute. If only Gort had had a cut-glass English accent, eh?

So far it's a very different film altogether. As with all modern films, it follows the now standard dictate that a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end but almost never in that order, with a weather eye on pissing me off. The film started in the mountains of India in 1927 with a bearded Keanu Reeves (he's almost definitely not going to be Gort is he? Bugger.) before jumping ahead to the modern day scientific community. Presumably Keanu Reeves, now 110 years of age, is going to lay some truths on the finest minds in astro physics, nuclear physics and civil engineering.

Gallingly, none of this is very likely to happen. On the plus side, a space rocket is about to crash land into Manhattan, an exciting film scenario but an eventuality which, if it ever happened in real life, would result in a war on Jupiter.

I am not sold on film remakes at all. If they are good remakes then they are, by their very definition, pointless. If they are bad remakes then all that they will do is hasten everyone's inevitable demise, as blood pressure skyrockets. The best that you can hope for is to aim at insane, camp, schlocky crap. The vaulting ambition of the modern day screenwriter, there.

Gort, a noted shit

Still, at least this particular remake isn't taking it scene-by-scene as some offenders in this category have done. A pointless, scene-by-scene remake of a film with Keanu Reeves in it and he doesn't even play Gort would be too much to bear. And as a film, it's not been so bad so far. Keanu Reeves has been largely absent and an opening credit sequence mention of John Cleese has mercifully so far proved to be a false alarm.

Perhaps he's going to be playing Gort.

But in this day and age of interwebs and wireless doohickeys and almost completely rampant piracy, it's damn near impossible to justify the remake of any film. Any impressionable youth worth his salt will just go and find the original on Netflix (yeah, right) or on a torrent site and watch that instead. And all the CGI Gorts in the world, mercifully inaccurate threats of John Cleese and performances considerably less restrained and dignified than that of Michael Rennie by Keanu Reeves will never be able to save it. Its $80 million dollar budget would have been better spent on saving the world from itself (this is, after all, the overall message of both films) or, even better, manufacturing us a real Gort.

Ain't no god damn preachy sumbitch aliens going to mess with our planet once we've got a fuckin' Gort.

Never dissect gossamer

Having discussed this topic yesterday on Twitter, I know it to be a divisive one, but this is my blog so I am in charge and am going to argue it regardless. Psychoanalysis of cultural whatsits. I don't like it. I'm OK as long as people are just studying the thing - the film or book or album or picture or whatever - but there seems to be this irresistible temptation to use your assessment of that work as a jumping-off point to try and make great statements about the being and mindset of the person who made it. I reserve particular bile for people who write record reviews and take the lyrics line by line, trying to shoehorn them in to the overarching plot of the personal and private lives of the songwriter in question, which are already festooned around the news and glossy magazines.

Frankly, I don't care. What I care about is the thing. I believe it is damaging, in fact, to know too much about how anything was made. A song, for instance, could mean something different to anyone who hears it, but once the story of its inspiration becomes known then the risk is that only that particular reading of it becomes possible. So I try and avoid finding out about what motivated an artist, a writer, a singer or a film director wherever I can. What matters to me is the end product, not the process. We all know that it is the grit that irritates the oyster that produces the pearl, but at the end of the day you don't try and make a big splash at social functions by wearing a grit necklace.

I raise this point because one, it KEEPS ME AWAKE AT NIGHT WITH TEETH-GNARLING FURY, but that also two, it has given me a way in to discuss a film that I've been wanting to write about all through my Flim 2012 series but haven't yet worked out a way to do it.

As I said, I generally try and avoid finding out about the creative process. I am more interested in the creation itself. During the discussion of this I had on Twitter yesterday, my friend Lolly - who regular Dotfans may well remember from her guest posts last year on this actual site - asked me, "so unless whoever made the thing you are looking at is there to tell you about it, you think "nice" or "not nice" and move on?". Without wishing to explode all of your ideas about me as a great culture vulture, that is in fact a pretty accurate summary of my feelings on the matter, yes. Come the time that I do find out about how something came together, I generally try to not let it effect my view of the finished object, and instead merely serve as a little companion to it.

It usually works, thanks in no small part to my mule-headed stubbornness and relentless lack of imagination. However, there is one very notable exception to this, and it still hurts me every single bloody day. JFK.

JFK is pretty much a film which could have been designed entirely for me. Based on real historical events, pregnant with drama and filled with conspiracy. It's everything I could ever have possibly wanted! Time was when I used to be able to watch it at any time of the day or night and always be guaranteed to get something good out of it. However, films like this live and die on historical accuracy, and there was an incident.

In 2003, for the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, there were a series of documentaries about the subject. One of them set out to reclaim the facts of the case from the JFK juggernaut. It began a fairly galling but nevertheless necessary transformation in me from JFK conspiracy nut to reasonable young man. With the help of that film and the interworldwidewebnet I discovered that JFK had fired an amalgamated porridge of 30 years of all available conspiratorial thinking - a hodgepodge of the plausible, the unlikely and the completely insane - through a prism of film drama, rather than being a hand-on-heart piece of accuracy and a call for justice. If only William of Ockham had been the director of JFK then none of this would have happened. For those of you less familiar with the case than me, essentially what I am saying is: that no matter how tempting and shocking and glamorous it is to believe that the Cuban Mafia shot JFK from the grassy knoll whilst disguised as Marilyn Monroe, the reality of the situation is that it just didn't go down that way.

The film itself remains the same. It is a terrific film, too. But I just can't feel the same way about it any more. A little bit of knowledge has shunted it into the fantasy genre, with all the rest of the wizards and warlocks and people with all-over body hair. In November next year, of course, it will be the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. Maybe the time will be right then for a new paradigm-exploding documentary which will prove that JFK was gospel truth after all. But sadly, it will by now need to do a lot of convincing me.

The old truism that it is better to print the myth may have been the death knell for print journalism, but generally it has served cinema so well. Except, it seems, in this case which is such a shame. I understand why Oliver Stone did it the way he did, and there is no denying that the story he tells is a magnificent one. But it aims so much higher than that and nowadays I always feel a little let down.

My own film: Lee Harvey Oswald: Portrait of a Nutter, opens on 29th June this year.

Scrag ends

On Thursday (you must remember it, surely?) I wrote about portmanteau horror films and assembled my ultimate portmanteau film from my five favourite stories. Today, I get even more creative and tell you about my dream portmanteau horror film and everything that it would (will) contain. Don't think you are safe from me actually writing this, because you're probably not (you probably are).

FILM TITLE: Barn of Nightmares

FRAMING SEQUENCE: five people interested in buying a barn descend on the property at the time appointed by their barn agent. Whilst they're waiting for the barn agent to arrive, they tell each other about the dream they had last night.

STORY ONE: Very Safe Sex
A man who is down on his luck with women meets a mysterious hooded stranger in a pub. The stranger sells him an enchanted packet of three. The prophylactics make him irresistible to women. But when he puts on the first condom, it makes his willy fall off into the Thames where it is eaten by a cod who immediately becomes irresistible to women. Vengeful, he starts to chain-eat fish and chips, laughing maniacally, until one day he chokes to death on a condom in one of his battered cods. His corpse immediately becomes irresistible to women.

STORY TWO: Head in the Sand
A family's pet ostrich discovers a portal in time and space in the attic floor. When the ostrich puts its head into the hole, it finds itself in Revolutionary Paris, 1790. Guillotined on suspicion of being bourgeois, the headless ostrich destroys the family home and all the family members one by one, believing them to be Cardinal Richelieu.

STORY THREE: Laughter in the Basement
A woman who buys her first house in the countryside find the entire cast of an unsuccessful 1970s situation comedy continuing to live out their lives in character, complete with a studio audience, in her basement. Slowly she gets involved in the plotline, as the comedy slowly morphs into a gritty Scottish detective drama with horrific consequences.

STORY FOUR: Jackdaw the Ripper
A husband and wife inherit a fortune from a long-lost great uncle's will, on the condition they look after his pet jackdaw until it dies. A spate of gruesome murders in the village, however - coupled with family tree research revealing that the great uncle was one of the key police suspects in the Jack the Ripper case - make the couple believe that the jackdaw is responsible. They set out to stop him.

STORY FIVE: Fucking Awful Garage
A man opens his garage and it's full of zombies and werewolves and Draculas and all that.

TWIST ENDING: The barn wasn't actually for sale. When they look down, the agent has stolen all their trousers.

Sorry.

Odds and ends

I have touched on portmanteau horror films here before, so let me assure you that I am only doing it again due to my profound belief in and dedication to them and also because I never have any new ideas. Today's and tomorrow's posts about HORROR and WOLVES have also been partly inspired (i.e. nicked) from Megan's awesome love-in for The Wolf Man at the weekend. Read her blog. Do it!

Why does the portmanteau format lend itself so well to the horror film genre? Well, principally because, I think, there's only so much meat on any horrific bone. The best spooky tales are usually short, told around the campfire or as bedtime stories to a nephew you don't particularly like. One has to remember that the classic horror films - Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolf Man and their ilk - are usually little over an hour long, and even they are mostly censor-friendly drawing room discussions about morality and vol-au-vents.

A certain amount of that is necessary, of course: it establishes mood and an air of normality. Modern day horror films forget about that and just go straight to the horror. Horror, horror, horror, blood, spurt, murder, scream, horror horror horror. Keeping your actual scaries short and to the point has been forgotten by a lot of filmmakers recently. Forgotten, too, is that figurative or imagined horrors are actually far more effective than watching a man have his knees cut off with a Flymo.

The portmanteau horror is perfect in this regard. Often the segments are no more than 20 minutes duration, building towards a climax which is fundamentally more in the viewer's mind than on the screen. This has the double-barrelled benefit of leaving an imprint on the viewer's mind as well as pleasing the studio accountant. A bloke who used to be a baddie in a James Bond film being approached by two hairy hands. Fade to black.

This week I have been watching portmanteau horrors - mainly those of Amicus Productions, the fabulously schlocky British company run out of a shed by two American film writers and producers in the 1960s and 1970s, who specialised in the genre - until nothing I saw any more looked normal to me. I had to eat my dinner with a long handled spoon, lest the peas gained consciousness twixt plate and mouth. Then the idea struck me. I should do a blog post about my favourite portmanteau horror films!

This is a daft idea, as I should actually do that for Chop's Top Fives, which specialises in such things. So instead I decided to pick my five favourite segments and assemble what would be to my mind the ULTIMATE PORTMANTEAU HORROR FILM. Oh mamma.

This is already the ultimate portmanteau horror film, if I'm honest with you.

Story 1: ...and All Through The House (from Tales From The Crypt (1972))
Joan Collins, as a total bitch, thinks nothing of murdering her husband by running him through with a sword on Christmas Eve while their daughter sleeps upstairs. Gathering his magnificently orange blood in a sherry glass, she stages the thing to look like an accident whilst also admiring his life insurance policy and listening to Christmas carols on the radio. But! This programme was interrupted to reveal that a homicidal maniac had escaped from prison dressed as Father Christmas. Actually he looks like Frankenstein's monster after a night on the Stella dressed as Father Christmas. The inevitable ensues.

I find this one particularly effective as it plays right into several of my most enduring fears, namely escaped homicidal maniacs and also strangers appearing at the window at night. If you're not afraid of these two things, I think you are brainwrong.

Story 2: Creeping Vine (from Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1964))
Alan "Fluff" Freeman's young family return from holiday to find a particularly aggressive (and sentient) vine has taken root in their garden. Having resisted all attempts to be dug up, it then emphasises its claims to the house by killing Fluff's pet dog and also a Ministry of Agriculture scientist sent to investigate. Eventually, the family find themselves trapped in their house, entombed entirely by the greenery.

I have picked this story not for its particular scariness or for its brilliance, but for its effect on my imagination. I first saw this film aged about 15, and I can honestly say I have not seen a bramble, a vine or a piece of bindweed since without thinking about it. It makes me the most particular, ferocious and unrelenting gardener since Agent Orange.

Story 3: Wish You Were Here (from Tales From The Crypt (1972))
Another pick from my favourite portmanteau of them all. A wealthy, if ruthless, businessman loses everything including his life. Luckily his wife is on hand with an enchanted statue and three wishes, which she uses to particularly gormless effect.

This choice is a nod to the more traditional horror themes. Most portmanteau films feature at least one of the old horror film faithfuls - vampires, werewolves, zombies - but none of them feature in my list. However, this reworking of the old tale of the monkey's paw and its three wishes is a good replacement. I particularly love the scene where the man catches a glimpse of the grim reaper (riding a motorcycle) in his rear-view mirror.

Story 4: Drawn and Quartered (from The Vault of Horror (1973))
Tom Baker, well cast as a mad artist, finds that his art dealer, agent and a noted art critic (art critics festoon portmanteau horrors) have conspired to devalue his art so they might buy it cheap and then sell it dear whilst he is in Haiti. Haiti, people, Haiti. So, Tom tootles off to the nearest hut to "purchase some voodoo". Painting his own voodoo portraits, he then extracts his revenge on the wrongdoers back in London, with fairly scant regard for his propensity to paint self-portraits until it's rather too late.

This story has everything. Voodoo. Tom Baker saying the word "voodoo". Splendidly-OTT acting. Gory scenes - a man chopping his hands off with a paper-trimming guillotine being a particular highlight - and some more figurative scenes of horror left to the viewer's own imagination. Jackpot!

HELLO HUGO

Story 5: Ventriloquist's Dummy (from Dead of Night (1945))
Michael Redgrave plays a particularly gifted ventriloquist with a perhaps rather-too-sentient dummy. That dummy is always getting him into scrapes. Not least when he ends up shooting and wounding a fellow ventriloquist and being sent to prison. When he gets a visit from an old friend (the kind with a wooden head), all kinds of psychological fun and games commence!

No portmanteau collection could be without this story, the most famous from the film that is the grandpappy of the entire genre. The acting is first rate and the story memorable enough that it's fair to say it's probably accountable for the majority of phobias of ventriloquist's dummies that have followed it.

* * *

(Special mention: Poetic Justice (from Tales from the Crypt (1972))
Peter Cushing plays a man who the local residents association think is bringing down the tone and value of the neighbourhood, so begin to oust him by a regiment whispering campaigns, bullying and psychological torture. Following his suicide, a year to the day, Zombie Cushing has his revenge.


This is perhaps the most powerful story in any portmanteau horror that I know of. So powerful, in fact, that I could never include it in my ultimate film compilation. Peter Cushing was the godfather of portmanteau horror stars, and his performance is magnificent. Magnificent to the point you're more likely to cry than scream. Especially once you remember that Cushing was reeling from his wife's death at the time the film was made and is playing a lonely widower. It tears your heart out. Which, given the turn of events later in the tale, is pretty ironic.)