new horrors

At the London Film Festival I saw Black Rock, a horror film scripted by 'mumblecore' hero Mark Duplass. The Duplass brothers previously subverted the genre quite effectively in Baghead, but this effort, directed by Katie Aselton, who also stars - struggles to achieve the giddy heights of generic. Three not-quite-convincing and vaguely irritating young women are hunted down by two ex-soldiers on a remote island. This doesn't make them any more convincing or any less irritating - quite the reverse in fact. As for the soldiers, they were supposedly drummed out of the forces for committing atrocities in Iraq, but after a while you start to wonder if it wasn't for sheer incompetence. Finally, the only way I could get any fun out of this was by re-imagining it as Sex In The City 3: The Reckoning, which improved it no end.

Elsewhere in the festival more interesting variations on the horror film could be found in Dead Europe and Neighbouring Sounds, both of which blurred the line between the socio-political and the horrific. In the former, an Australian photographer visits Europe against the advice of his Greek family, who warn of a curse. By 'a curse', they appear to mean 'certain past events they were involved in that they don't wish to be reminded of.' Europe does indeed seem to be festering under some sort of curse, otherwise known as its own history and politics, and, haunted by actual or notional ghosts, our hero finally comes a cropper in Budapest. But wait up, you say, this film is about an Australian passing judgement on European civilization? Well yes, there are some implausibilities, but mostly this is gripping. Moistly this is gripping, I nearly wrote there.

Somewhat overlong but ably choreographed and very striking, Neighbouring Sounds is a Brazilian social drama which uses tics and flourishes from the horror film to portray the daily life of a middle-class community and the demons that hold it in thrall. The director used to live in Essex. Maybe that's where he got the idea, but we're not talking real demons here - more, fears. For real demons we need to go to Citadel, whose director Ciaran Foy draws on his own experience of overcoming agoraphobia (brought on by being attacked as an 18-year old) to create a fable involving a foul-mouthed priest (James Cosmo) and demonic hoodies. Since Aneurin Barnard's hero is agoraphobic and therefore scared of things that aren't there (as well as all the things that, in a horror film, are) this lays it on a bit thick, and seems forever poised on the brink of absurdity, without, however, quite toppling off. It even has a happy ending, displaying a splendidly robust solution to social malaise (blow up the hoodie-occupied tower blocks!) which is also in line with current Tory policy. I think.

self-awareness

Confirming my thesis that nostalgia becomes increasingly indiscriminate as you grow older, there is a tendency now for films that would have been (indeed, were) dismissed without a backward glance in the 70's or 80's to be lovingly restored and reissued on DVD to cash in on the 'Grindhouse' boom - here, for example, is The Day Time Ended (1979) from Eighty Eight Films ('Classic movies treated with respect') starring Jim Davis, who used to be Jock Ewing in Dallas.

It is a thing of naive and faintly eerie charm, in which a family headed by the grizzled Davis repair to their desert homestead to be assailed by a bewildering variety of phenomena, including stop-motion animated monsters, a miniature spaceship and a little green man doing ballet. Eventually, Davis comes to the conclusion that 'a space-time warp' is responsible, though he admits that neither he nor anyone else really knows what that is.

Though the family no longer seem able to return to the world they know, a kind of happy ending emerges simply from the daughter's funny feeling that everything is going to be alright. As they wander off into what looks like a backdrop from the original Star Trek (in fact, a matte painting of a 'city of light and crystal' by Jim Danforth) Jim Davis concludes that 'maybe this was all meant to be.' The End.

Maybe this was all meant to be. It's one of those moments in film where you are privileged to hear the authentic voice of the scriptwriter. You picture him furiously wondering how the fuck am I going to explain all this? then, after a few more brandies/snorts of coke, having an epiphany: I know! 'Maybe it was meant to be...'

My favourite moment of this kind is from a film called The Blood Beast Terror, an ill-advised yet (to me) strangely compelling farrago from 1967 about a woman who turns into a giant bloodsucking moth, a creature which it is clearly beyond the abilities or budget of the film makers to evoke. At the climax Peter Cushing ends the creature's reign of terror by the simple expedient of lighting a small bonfire, towards which the moth (looking, in a brief shot, like a duster thrown past the camera) is instinctively attracted, only to perish in the flames. At this point PC Glynn Edwards (later Dave the barman in Minder) turns to Inspector Peter Cushing to say: 'They'll never believe this at the yard, sir.'

To which Cushing replies in a world-weary tone, anguished eyes staring out into the night: 'They'll never believe it anywhere.' So we see that the film is haunted less by the titular blood beast, than by a horrified awareness of its own fate.

In a Thai film called In April The Following Year There Was A Fire, seen at this year's London Film Festival, a character bumps into a film crew making a film called (you guessed it) In April The Following Year There Was A Fire. He is told that this is an 'indie movie', likely to appear in international film festivals, with a DVD release if they are lucky. Here is a film that knows its audience - not a very large one. Even in NFT3, a small screen, there was plenty of room to stretch out. It's as if nobody wants to see a meandering Thai art film.

I'm quite a fan of Thai movie director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but I don't like to talk about it. Partly, that's because of the name, which is very difficult to say or spell, but also it's his films. You can't describe them without making them seem interminably boring - yet aimless and obscure as they might seem on the surface to be, there's something mysteriously fascinating about them. IATFYTWAF is not one of his films, yet it seems to owe something to him. There is the same emphasis on randomness (highlights include: the grooming of a horse). But just because AW gets away with it, that doesn't mean everyone can, and this didn't always work for me. It wasn't until the end that I understood that it was actually about something - the director's mother, who died. It was about her in the very specialised sense that she is barely mentioned at all. It's about her absence.

Having realised this, I felt that maybe I had missed something, and should see it again. That's how these art movies get you - with Taken 2, you'd just figure you'd made a mistake. And it may be that I should have just given in and let the film take me, as it were. It was just that there seemed a thin line between that and falling asleep.

The new AW film, Mekong Hotel, was actually showing at the festival on the same day, but in Hackney. I wonder what it says about me that I'm quite happy to be transported to Thailand in the movies, but won't visit Hackney in real life...

Jim'll Fix You

What about that Jimmy Savile then? Who would have thought that creepy, bizarre-looking man would be a some kind of pervert? I was shocked - if only by the fact that he was heterosexual. I took all the leching over girls on TOTP to be mere bluff, but it seems I was wrong.

Truth to tell, I can't call myself disillusioned. Rather, it seems to me that a well-known grotesque has just become significantly grotesquer. In other people's minds he seems to have undergone a remarkably rapid transformation from track-suited saint to gibbering fiend creeping through hospital corridors. They've taken away his headstone and even changed his name (I'm convinced it used to have two l's). Soon they'll be disinterring his body and using it for landfill. If he's really dead, that is, and not an immortal monster. From the coverage, it's beginning to look that way.

A CESSPIT, blares the Daily Mail. They are talking about the BBC, which covered up Savile's evil - they suggest that Leveson should look into it ('but don't hold your breath', they add - bad advice, surely, when it's a cesspit you're investigating). Apparently, it wasn't just Savile - you could hardly open a door in Broadcasting House without uncovering a DJ slavering over a terrified schoolgirl. If that was the BBC, imagine what ITV must have been like! No wonder my parents didn't encourage me to watch it as a child.
 
It's hard to listen to Radio 2 these days without being assailed by images of what Ken Bruce might be doing to Sally Traffic. Such is the hysteria that has erupted over this subject that it's difficult to prevent being sucked into it myself, and ringing Jeremy Vine's show to relate my recently recovered memories of an extended sex ordeal at the hands - and not just the hands - of Simon Bates. What's to stop me? Only the fact that Bates is still alive, and may contradict my story.

Of course it's terrible, all this abuse, but it's worth remembering that it was a different world in the 70's. Perving over schoolgirls wasn't called 'paedophilia' then, it was called 'male heterosexuality'. Except it wasn't called that because they didn't bother to define it. They just got on with it, and anyone who objected was burned as a witch. (As I remember.)

I'm reserving judgement till the film comes out. Let's hope it will be ready in time for next year's Frightfest.

recent events from the social calendar

There was a hog roast in Ingrave (this was several weeks ago). The Mother's Union had a cake stall and the vicar sang I Will Survive. An elderly black guy took to the mike to sing Please Release Me, inadvertently bringing back memories of Nelson Mandela in the days of his incarceration. Mat invented 'manly snakebite', consisting of real ale and scrumpy mixed. He wondered if there was a 'manly' substitute for blackcurrant. 'Crème de cassis', I suggested, but apparently this was not manly enough. Not that Mat was manly enough to actually drink the stuff or even assemble a pint of it. He was looking round for volunteers.

Ross was there, and it did seem to be the ideal occasion for him to take up drinking again – a perfect middle England setting, a lot of eminently offendable people, and an available microphone. He had already mistaken the Mother's Union for the WI. They hate that. However, he did not take the opportunity, his thoughts no doubt on his upcoming nuptials, which transpired this weekend.

It was a very good wedding, though given the formality of Ross' usual attire, his suit was a bit of a let-down. Under the circumstances, nothing short of a suit of armour would really have been special enough, though at least Christine made the effort to dress up. Nor did Ross take this opportunity to fall off the wagon, and neither his speech nor the first dance were anywhere near as pornographic as he had led me to believe they would be. But overall, it was a delightful day, and if, on our table, there was a move to fill the guest book with rather picky criticisms – off-centre table decorations, misplaced spoons – that was because everything else was going so smoothly. Mat was perturbed that his full name on the place card had been spelled with only one 't', though readers of the guest book may have had trouble decoding his obscure reference to a 'missing letter', which sounded like a subplot from Downton Abbey. Dave bemoaned the non-appearance of cheese, until its arrival at buffet-time forced him to hurriedly retract his statement.

Really the whole thing went like a dream, though at one point the lights, briefly, went out. 'Has anyone been murdered?', Ross asked. Nobody said they had – a sure sign of a successful wedding day.

Who Shot JKR?

Dallas is back, and I have been casting half an eye over it. It was, after all, a big part of my childhood - a boring part, yes, but as you get older you find that nostalgia grows increasingly indiscriminate. Good to see that Patrick Duffy actually looks better than he did back in the day, though his acting hasn't improved any. Just as well there's a new handsome young buck to play his son Christopher - Jesse Metcalfe, radiant in his blandness. He and Bobby are anxious to explore new energy sources, though at one point a character warns Christopher that 'oil is in your blood', a line that - like a lot of what goes on in this series - strikes you as both absurd yet somehow inevitable. JR is still around, aroused from some catatonic state half-way through the first show like Dracula revived by a dribble of virgin's blood - though here it's the scent of oil that has awoken him. His son has been drilling for oil in Bobby's back garden without Bobby knowing - well, it's a big garden. It has to be said that JR's eyebrows are extraordinarily impressive, almost seeming to demand a series of their own.

The show has a clunky way with technology, as if it were only pretending to be set in the present day. In the early stages, there is a lot of fuss over a mysterious e-mail to Christopher's fiancee, purporting to be from Christopher himself wanting to call off the wedding. Everyone's talking about 'the e-mail'. Who sent the e-mail? If this is their version of 'Who shot JR?', I think they might need to try harder.

Meanwhile, we are reassured to learn that the Oil Baron's Ball is still going. Only now it looks like the MTV Awards.

It may be that TV is playing it safe by trading on past glories, but look what happens when it tries to be 'ground-breaking'. I had the misfortune to catch some of The Audience on C4 before my overwhelming urge to throw a brick at the screen encouraged me to switch it off. In this programme a person with a problem is pursued by 'the audience', a group of fifty random people who try to help them solve it. In this episode it was a farmer, and it took only a brief glance at the screen to diagnose his problem - he had a load of random people following him about trying to tell him what he should do.

Visually, it's inelegant - they might just as well tie a dead sheep to him. However, dead sheep aren't able to cry and pontificate and go on and on about how their lives have been transformed by this experience. Hang on - their lives? What about the guy they're meant to be helping? And what about me? I thought I was the audience. What about my needs?

But I suppose this is the future of TV: the show that watches itself, so you don't have to. What a relief! Time to pick up a book, then - and guess what, Harry Potter's got a new one out, a bit like the old ones but without the magic and with more self-harm and swearing. Jan Moir in the Daily Mail said it was 'socialist propaganda'. Mind you, the Mail thinks that about more or less everything. Even Mein Kampf.

In the novel, set in a village called 'Pagford' (yes, it's difficult thinking up good place names, isn't it?) a Hindu family move into the old vicarage and are subjected to racial abuse. Ms Moir felt that this was unlikely, so it was amusing to read, further on in the paper, that a vicar had banned yoga classes because they were 'too Hindu'.

You have to feel sorry for JKR don't you? Write something similiar to HP and everyone will sneer; write something different and no-one will buy it. And by 'no-one' I mean only half of the civilized world. However, if you do want an adult novel with 'magic', there are plenty of other options out there - try Chris Adrian's The Great Night, for example.