Inventory (I should be wary)

'Oysters extend to Brentwood' was the headline in the first free paper to be shoved through my new letterbox. Trust me to move nearer the centre of town just as this B-movie scenario starts to unfold. However it turns out they don't mean giant radioactive oysters at all – they are talking about the Oystercard. Also puzzling was the headline above it: 'Please give unwanted presents'. Curious advice, I thought – but they meant give them to charity shops.

Anyway here I am, in the new flat. Do I feel at home yet?, people ask. Now that it's full of boxes, maybe. Initially, I worried that it was a bit scuzzy, but now I realise that this suits the thing that there is about me. Shall we call it 'quirky'? No, let's not. Though the place has its share of quirks –  a kitchen without drawers, a veritable symphony of squeaking doors. There is also a glass ramekin (originally free with some dessert, I imagine) full of rusty screws, but probably every tenancy has one of those.

I am above a salon called Skin Solutions. I am supposed to be letting out my parking spot to them, but they are rarely about when I am. Sometimes, although they are open, the door is locked and there is a notice to say that they are 'downstairs' doing a 'treatment'. What transpires in their basement of horror? - I can hardly imagine. Perhaps I should let them use my parking space in return for their not dissolving the skin from my body. I haven't yet witnessed them dragging the skinless corpses out to the bins at the back. In fact, I haven't got to grips with where the rubbish goes yet at all.

Nor the heating. Apparently, it helps to turn it on. Simpler, and less expensive, to walk around the house in three layers of clothing.

On taking possession of the place I was given an inventory, a lengthy document I was advised to read. It is, however, a gruelling piece of social realism, and I have struggled to get to the end of it. Every screw itemised - the sorry condition of everything unsparingly described ('fair', 'poor', 'scratched', 'cracked') – and photographs too, to really rub your nose in it. I could only manage a few pages, which is no doubt just what they intended, having concealed somewhere within the document a Faberge egg or old master which, when its absence becomes apparent at the end of the tenancy, will result in my being sued for millions. Oh yes, I know how it works.

Film Review Found In An Abandoned Maisonette: Night Of The Bloody Apes

This endearing 1968 Mexican horror film was once banned in this country as a video nasty, perhaps because it uses footage of real open heart surgery. The footage forms a striking contrast with the gore effects on offer in the rest of the film, which display a comparatively shaky grasp of human anatomy. At least this is thematically appropriate given that the film is about a surgeon who decides that the best way to cure his son's leukaemia is to give him the blood of 'a more powerful animal', such as a gorilla. Yes, that should sort it out!

The surgeon's assistant (who calls him 'Master') ventures to suggest that such a transfusion might have catastrophic consequences for the patient (as an employee of NHS Blood And Transplant, I can only agree). The surgeon responds that he is aware of this, and has therefore decided, that instead of a transfusion, he is going to perform a heart transplant from gorilla to man. Oh. OK then.

It doesn't work. Not because the patient dies or anything – how boring would that be? - but because he turns into a hairy-faced muscular psychopath who goes round having sex with women and ripping them to pieces, more or less in that order. This is because the gorilla blood has got into 'the cerebrum' apparently. They make a lot of the cerebrum in this film, although it is not what you'd call a cerebral film.

Despite which, one of its greatest pleasures is the stilted formality of the dubbed dialogue. When the inspector in charge of the investigation declares that he believes the killer to be 'half-human, half-beast', his sceptical superior replies: 'It is more probable that of late you are watching on your television many of these pictures of terror'. Indeed.

There is also a subplot about a masked female wrestler whose relation to the main plotline is somewhat obscure, though she is the inspector's girlfriend and gets to utter the film's last line, summing the situation up with: 'It's unfortunate, really sad.' This is not precisely how I would characterise the murderous sex-and-murder-rampage of a psycho gorilla-man. But what you have to remember is, it's different when you're actually living it. If it happened in your life, you'd probably be the same – 'Yeah, that's a real shame isn't it? Cup of tea?'