THE SECRET WOMAN. (2026) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE SECRET WOMAN. (2026)

DIRECTED BY BARBARA TOPSOE-ROTHENBORG.

STARRING NATALIE WOLFSBERG MADUENO, CLAES BANG AND PAL SVERRE HAGEN.

BASED ON THE NOVEL BY ANNA EKBERG.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

My God. Danish actor and musician Claes Bang is a truly magnificent specimen of manhood. He first came to my personal attention in 2020 as Dracula in the three-part serial of the same name by the BBC.

It was a very odd adaptation of Bram Stoker’s famous book, and apparently only ‘loosely-based’ on the 1897 masterpiece. I didn’t care, however, as Claes Bang was charismatic, devastatingly handsome and even briefly naked in it.

He was around fifty-three at the time, the absolute perfect age for a man. Sure, you might have to take a couple of Viagra if you want to be able to ‘go all night,’ but you’re a mature man by then, experienced, worldly-wise and able to find your way around a woman’s body without the aid of Google Maps…

Now Claes is fifty-nine (swoon!) and taking the male lead in The Secret Woman, a two-hour-long Netflix film that has just dropped on the popular streaming service. He’s by far the most watchable character in it, and even easier on the eye than the undoubtedly beautiful Norwegian and Danish scenery on view.

Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. Louise is a woman with amnesia living on a Norwegian island and running a coffee-shop. She’s just gotten engaged to her hipster writer boyfriend Joachim when her world is turned upside-down for the second time since she rocked up in Norway with amnesia two years ago.

She discovers that she has a husband, Edmund (the divine Claes Bang), in Denmark, a young son called Alexander and a shipping empire bequeathed to her by her deceased father. She hops over to Denmark and sees them for herself. Bloody hell, Claes Bang for a husband and a shipping empire of my very own? You wouldn’t have to ask me twice.

Edmund seems charming and tender, the perfect husband. His mother Caroline, who lives with them, is kindly and warm-hearted towards her newly-found daughter-in-law Louise, whose real name turns out to be Helene, and Caroline has been a good granny to Alexander in his mummy’s absence.

Helene is enchanted by her little boy, so much so that seeing him prompts her to remember her pet name for him, Duckling. This seems to kick-start the process of her gradually and slowly regaining her memory, but will the things she remembers be good things, or will she find that she’s back in the very place she was attempting to escape…?

It’s important to note that handsome hubby Edmund and his devoted mumsie Caroline have gotten super-rich by latching onto Helene. It’s her company Edmund manages and it’s her childhood home, a magnificent mansion complete with its own lake and forest, which they now comfortably occupy. They’d presumably be nobodies if Edmund hadn’t got lucky and married Helene, an heiress.

A sweet and compliant Helene is welcome and safe in the family mansion, but a feisty Helene whose memory is slowly returning and who is fighting to find out the truth about what really happened to her may be problematic for Edmund.

He can control her to an extent with lies and gaslighting, drugs, physical violence and even marital rape while she’s under the influence of said drugs, but Helene is stubborn and refuses to go under. A well-behaved woman rarely makes history…

Plus, hipster boyfriend Joachim is on the case too, doing a bit of amateur sleuthing to find out the real truth behind Louise/Helene’s departure from her seemingly perfect life and what subsequently happened.

Seems like the police might want to do a bit of investigating themselves but nope, it’s all hands in pockets, whistling and looking the other way for the boys in blue for some reason.

Edmund’s treatment of Helene is similar to the way the characters played by Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney are treated by the husband in last Christmas’s smash hit movie, The Housemaid. Gaslighting, being locked up for days at a time, druggings, scary mothers-in-law with helmets of frosted blonde hair, coercive control that’s off the charts, it’s horrible.

I know it’s ‘not all men’ but it’s enough men that it’s a problem. It’s not only in these slick television dramas or films, either. You just have to go online or read the papers or watch the evening news to know that it’s an epidemic in today’s society and it’s bloody depressing.

Enough social commentary, anyway, and back to my main reason both for watching this film and writing this review. Claes Bang is a devilishly, criminally handsome man. I want him to divorce his wife and marry me.

My God, he’s something else. I hope he starts acting in more mainstream stuff, as it’s really bad form for Denmark to keep this hot slice of beefcake all to themselves. Never mind the tins of butter cookies and Little Mermaid keyrings and bottle openers, this guy is Denmark’s greatest export. Over and out…

WHISTLE (2025) BY LINWOOD BARCLAY. BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

WHISTLE (2025) BY LINWOOD BARCLAY.

BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I never usually buy what I call man-thrillers, because they bore me to tears, frankly, with all the technology stuff in them that men love so much and the clipped, terse dialogue because men writers all seem to think Ernest Hemingway is the pinnacle of man-writing.

I’m not saying he’s not, but when I signed to a publisher a few years ago, I was told that that type of Hemingway-esque writing is fine for a man-thriller but has no place in contemporary women’s fiction.

Fair enough, but I genuinely bought this Linwood Barclay book (supernatural horror rather than a thriller, a change of pace for the writer) because of the cover.

It has a picture of a house on it, a house that’s a dead ringer for the Bates Motel house, even down to the curved staircase of steps winding down to the ground below and the silhouette of a man in one of the upper windows.

The house is stark black against a yellow background and the blurb revealed the book to contain a writer as the lead character. I was sold. I love when writers write about writers and writing. I feel an affinity for them when they do that.

It’s the same with Netflix. My kids (adults now) always groan when we’re scrolling and I stop on something with a writer in it, regardless of what language it’s in, because they know I’m going to want to watch it. Lol. She who holds the remote gets to pick…

Anyway, the writer in Whistle is called Annie Blunt. She’s a children’s author who also illustrates her own books. Hang on a minute here. I thought only celebrities were allowed to write children’s books? I hope she got permission from the correct authority.

Poor Annie suffers two tragedies in quick succession: the death of her husband, and the death of a child who gets a dangerous idea into his head after reading one of her books. Awkward, eh…?

Anyway, she moves for the summer to the house on the cover of the book, the Bates Motel house lookalike, in upstate New York, to try to come to terms with her troubles. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that living in a house that’s the spitting image of the Bates Motel house is surely a bad omen for the future…

She has her small son Charlie with her and her agent has kindly filled one room with expensive art supplies in case she should feel like knocking out a new best-selling children’s book while she’s there. Agents! Always with an eye to the main chance.

Little Charlie becomes obsessed with an old train set he finds in the shed. Some weird stuff starts happening around the old Blunt homestead and Annie thinks she can trace its beginnings to Charlie’s activation of the trains.

Let’s go back a few years now to 2001, a couple of months after 9/11. In a small town called Lucknow, Chief of Police Harry Cook (Chief Cook and bottle-washer, gettit? Barclay makes this joke himself in the book!) is trying to figure out why several ordinary men have gone missing recently from the town.

When one of the men turns up dead, the state of the corpse tells Harry that he has an even bigger problem on his hands than he thought he did.

Also, a string of horrible misadventures happening to the local townspeople all seem to have one common denominator: everyone they’ve happened to has all purchased a train set from the new shop in town that seemed to suddenly spring up overnight…

Edwin Nabler, aka Mr. Choo-Choo, owner of the train shop, is a masterclass in characterisation. He reminds me of Dr. Julian Karswell as played by Niall MacGinnis in superb British film, Night of the Demon (1957).

Plumpish, balding, no longer in the first flush of youth. Kind to children, doesn’t mind entertaining them for a bit. Genial and smiling and outwardly pleasant, until you cross him. The smile disappears, and you get a glimpse of the sinister monster that lurks beneath.

The book is extremely well written and Barclay is an expert at ‘show, not tell.’ He’s also clearly a huge horror fan and loves the movie Psycho. I’ve told you already about the great cover but the fate of Finnegan Sproule in the book is highly evocative of the death of Milton Arbogast in Psycho, plus, their names! Unforgettable, lol.

Another movie he’s watched and probably loves is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, as the book features a process I would call ‘the Mike Teevee effect.’ ‘Hey, Maw, look at me! I’m the first person in the world to be sent by television!’

He’s also clearly a big Stephen King fan and I think SK himself may have actually read the first draft of Whistle for Barclay, which is amazing. The book marks a change in direction for Barclay who normally writes man-thrillers, but this book is a proper horror and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I hope you get to read it too.

THIS HOUSE IS HAUNTED. (2013) BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THIS HOUSE IS HAUNTED. (2013)

BY JOHN BOYNE.

BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I enjoyed this ghost story by Irish writer John Boyne. It’s a good spooky read, short enough at just under three hundred pages and easy to read and follow. I must be straight with you, though, and admit that it’s not entirely without its flaws.

It’s set in the England of 1867 and told in the first person from the viewpoint of a twenty-one-year-old female by the name of Eliza Caine. She lives in Dickensian London with her widowed father (her mother died when she was nine), with whom she has such a good and close relationship that I declare I was quite envious of it.

Her father is a devoted studier of insects- an entomologist- who works in a museum. Eliza herself works as a school-teacher in the same school in which she herself was educated. Her ‘small girls’ mean the world to her.

At the start of the novel she loses her beloved father, giving rise to perhaps one of the best opening sentences in modern literature: ‘I blame Charles Dickens for the death of my father.’ If you want to know how, exactly, you’ll have to read the book…!

Reduced circumstances in the aftermath of her father’s demise lead Eliza to take a job in the county of Norfolk, at an isolated mansion called Gaudlin Hall.

She is to be governess to two young children, Isabella and Eustace. Immediately Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, later filmed as The Innocents, will spring to mind.

Isabella, the older child, is self-possessed, knowing beyond her years, mocking and rather haughty. Eustace is a little pet to whom Eliza immediately becomes attached. There seem to be no parents present, and no staff except for the elusive Mrs. Livermore and Heckling, the crude and unpleasant gardener, coachman and general handyman.

Eliza is horrified to learn that she is the sixth governess the children have had this year. What’s worse, four of the previous incumbents all died under shocking circumstances, and the fifth, the woman who placed the advertisement which resulted in Eliza’s being given the job, has made good her escape.

There are so many questions to which Eliza desperately needs answers. Where are the children’s parents? Who or what is killing governesses in Gaudlin Hall? Why is Mrs. Livermore so keen to avoid Eliza? Who or what is the malevolent presence that makes itself known before Eliza even crosses the threshold of Gaudlin?

Mr. Raisin, the lawyer for Gaudlin Hall to whom Eliza is clearly attracted, is reluctant to provide these answers. Trying to worm information out of him is like pulling teeth. His clerk, Mr. Cratchett (even Eliza is surprised at his name!), a proper Uriah Heep, is not exactly helpful either.

So, will Eliza survive the many onslaughts the malignant presence at Gaudlin Hall makes on her person? Will she ever find out who it is, and why it does the things it does?

What about the second presence, the kindly one who smells of cinnamon-infused tobacco, as if we couldn’t work out in a heartbeat who it is? So many questions, but will Eliza get the answers she needs before she runs out of time…?

I love all the references to Charles Dickens in this book. I didn’t say that Eliza lived in Dickensian London for nothing, you know! Both Eliza and her father are big fans of the writer’s, and even go to see him give a public reading of one of his most famous ghost stories.

No, not A Christmas Carol, though it gets a mention! ‘Marley was dead to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that.’ No, it’s actually the sublime short story The Signalman, which in 1976 aired on the BBC as part of the supernatural anthology series, A Ghost Story for Christmas. ‘Halloa down there…!’

I find it fascinating that this superb short story was filmed for television one hundred and ten years after Dickens wrote it. Television wouldn’t be invented for several more decades and Dickens probably wouldn’t have believed you if you told him about it in 1866…

I love the descriptions of London in the fog, that good old pea-souper fog that was probably the result of pollution from all the businesses that operated in the Industrial Revolution and the birth of machines.

Gaudlin Hall is also an interesting spooky setting that might call to mind other films like Burnt Offerings, The Changeling and, more recently, The Woman in Black.

I was disappointed by the book’s ending, about which I can’t say too much for fear of spoilers. I was genuinely expecting there to be a justifiable reason for the attacks by the supernatural presence, something along the lines of what happens in The Adventures of the Sussex Vampire. This is the Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle that was first published in The Strand Magazine in 1924. But no. Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar…

I like all the references to women’s ‘place’ in Victorian society. Eliza takes great pains to let us know that she is ‘unattractive,’ therefore will have to work for her living as no man will want to marry her. Also, she is not wealthy and no longer has her father to protect her. In the absence of a husband, she will have to work to support herself.

Another bar to her acquisition of a husband might be that Eliza is probably more outspoken and questioning of men’s ‘wisdom’ than a more submissive woman might be. She scandalises the men in the story- Mr. Raisin, Mr. Cratchett, Heckling the gardener, the Reverend Deacons- with her refusal to take no for an answer.

She’s also determined, resilient and with vast reserves of courage. Maybe she has a future as a suffragette, or in social reform? There are references in the book to capital punishment and the dire conditions in both womens’ and mens’ prisons. Plenty of work to be done in these areas, for sure…

Anyway, enjoy the book if you come across it, as it is an interesting ghost story, even if it does feel a little unfinished and you’re constantly waiting for an explanation of Santina Westerley’s bizarre behaviour. Child abuse, which also gets a mention here, would have been an acceptable reason, but no, that’s your lot. And speaking of which…

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN. (1974) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN. (1974)

BASED ON THE BOOK OF THE SAME NAME BY IAN FLEMING.

DISTRIBUTED BY UNITED ARTISTS.

PRODUCTION COMPANY: EON PRODUCTIONS.

DIRECTED BY GUY HAMILTON.

STARRING ROGER MOORE, CHRISTOPHER LEE, BRITT EKLAND, MAUD ADAMS AND HERVE VILLECHAIZE.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

‘Oh, James…!’

This James Bond outing actually received several poor reviews back in the day, and was apparently even responsible for rumours concerning a possible discontinuation of the whole series of films.

It’s my personal favourite, however, due entirely to the presence of Christopher Lee, writer Ian Fleming’s cousin, as Francisco Scaramanga, one of the most memorable of the Bond villains. Well, it’s hard to forget a villain with a ‘superfluous papilla,’ or ‘supernumerary,’ also known as a third, nipple…!

Roger Moore is an excellent James Bond, the posh British superspy and Her Majesty’s top assassin, with a ‘licence to kill,’ or should that be a ‘licence to thrill’…?

No, wait, it’s definitely only a ‘licence to kill,’ lol. You’d need a separate licence if you wanted to thrill as well. It’s a whole separate government department…

My own top three James Bonds would be Roger Moore in third place, Sean Connery in second and Irishman Pierce Brosnan in the top spot. He played Ian Fleming’s hero in four films between 1995 and 2002, and blended suave sophistication with a dry wit and superb comic timing.

He was also Remington Steele. ‘That’s right, Marge, I was,’ his character reminds us in a brilliant Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons entitled House of Whacks.

Anyway, I was mostly watching this one for Christopher Lee’s performance (ten out of ten, by the way) as the titular ‘man with the golden gun,’ and equally golden personalised bullets, but I’ll see if I can manage to synopsise the plot for you as well.

James Bond is on the hunt here for Christopher Lee’s aforementioned villain, Scaramanga, he of the superfluous nipple. I greatly appreciated the lovely footage of CL coming out of the sea in just his shorts, but it’s always a bit of a jolt to see that third nip…!

Scaramanga is a trained assassin, like Bond, but, unlike Bond, he gets a million dollars a hit. This enables him to live a life of privacy and luxury on a fabulous island in the Red Chinese waters.

Living with him are his endlessly resourceful dwarf assistant Nick Nack (in the film he’s called a midget!) and his unhappy frightened girlfriend Andrea Anders, played by the sizzling Swedish actress and model, Maud Adams.

The main reason for finding Scaramanga, aside from the fact that Bond thinks Scaramanga wants to kill him, is because the pesky villain’s come into possession of a device called the Solar Agitator which is of immense significance in light of the ongoing energy crisis, but don’t ask me how. It’s, like, a science thing.

Bond’s search takes him to exotic locations in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Scaramanga’s gorgeous island. There are kung fu battles, some fabulous settings and stunts involving both a flying car and a regular car that turns over in mid-air which is apparently a very difficult and elaborate stunt to do. I don’t drive so I wouldn’t know.

My favourite site/sight in the whole scene is the wreck of the RMS Queen Elizabeth in Hong Kong Harbour, capsized with the weight of the water used to put out a fire on board in 1972. Shipwrecks fascinate me, and this one is spectacular.

It’s no longer there, of course, having been deemed an obstruction and partially scrapped on site starting in 1974, the year this film was made. But what a magnificent, eerie sight/site it makes, and what a fantastic idea to set an important scene there!

Bond regulars who reprise ongoing roles include Bernard Lee as M, the head of MI6, Lois Maxwell as his secretary, Miss Moneypenny, and Desmond Llewelyn as Q, the head of MI6’s technical department.

I loved seeing James Cossins here as Colthorpe, MI6’s armaments expert. He is equally well known, if not more so, for playing the irritable diner in Fawlty Towers whom Basil Fawlty mistakes for the dreaded health inspector. ‘Outboard motors…?!’

He also portrays the poor guy giving a Public Relations course in Some Mothers do ‘ave ’em whom Frank Spencer drives to distraction with his well-intentioned idiocy.

Clifton James, whose character Sheriff J.W. Pepper from Louisiana appeared in Bond film Live and Let Die (1973), is here again as the hella racist sheriff who’s taking a holiday with his missus. The scene where an adorable baby heffalump nudges him into a canal was apparently not written into the script but happened organically…!

Will I be called ‘size-ist’ or worse if I say that Herve Villechaize is thoroughly adorable as Nick Nack, Scaramanga’s pint-sized butler and ‘fixer’? I just think he’s so cute the way his widdle leggies dangle from the oversized chair at the controls in his employer’s funhouse…!

Now to the wimmins. Maud Adams is a bit colourless, in my humble opinion, as Scaramanga’s girlfriend Andrea, but she’s suitably submissive to Bond as she begs him to help her escape her cruel lover, even to the point of acquiescing to being slapped around in high-handed Bond fashion. She’s even keener to get him into bed, the Swedish hussy, as is the frustrated Miss Moneypenny back at base…

Britt Ekland as Mary Goodnight, MI6 operative, is a tiny bit wooden in the old acting department but top-notch in the hair-tossing department and the bikini-wearing department. I’d venture to say that she’s not terribly good at her job but is positively golden in the waiting-around-for-weeks-on-end-for-James-Bond-to-ride-the-hole-off-her stakes.

I always think Swedish hotty Britt’s best role is as Willow, the landlord’s daughter, in The Wicker Man (1973). Here, she’s the living embodiment of the goddess Aphrodite, just made for love and sexual shenanigans.

I also think that the womaniser James Bond is both a sexual opportunist and a pleasure-delayer. Look at the way he keeps Goodnight waiting for that all-consuming sexual encounter.

Does he do this so that by the time he eventually gets around to ‘polling’ her she’s gagging for it, or because he himself gets a kick out of deferring his own pleasure to a later time…? Who knows?

Scottish singer Lulu sings the surprisingly smutty theme tune. Speaking of smut, some of the dialogue, though amusing, is clunky as hell. Example: James Bond on the phone to M while he’s making love to Mary Goodnight: ‘She’s just coming, sir…!’ I mean, come on. The exact same joke was used in 1980’s Private Benjamin, starring Goldie Hawn, by the way.

I believe there’s a move afoot to have someone like Cynthia Erivo or Ellen Page (both wimmins!) play James Bond when they next breathe life into the surely by now flagging franchise.

This would be an abomination. James Bond is not a wimmins, he’s a man who rides wimmins and treats them like they’re there for his own personal use and pleasure. What’s more, the wimmins all know this and are jolly grateful for it, so there.

James Bond is not ‘woke.’ He is a man’s man and it would be a disservice to the creator of the books to portray him any other way. Either show him as he was written or don’t show him at all.

By all means cut out the casual racism, but I think the sexism should remain, for the most part. We wimmins have little enough to titillate us nowadays without Hollywood turning James Bond into a soy-latte-sipping, farmers’-market-going, protest-flag-waving preferred-pronoun-using lefty wally, lol.

Well, y’all can call me anything you like, but don’t ever call me politically correct. ‘I said what I said…’

THE LAST HOUSE. (2026) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE LAST HOUSE. (2026)

DIRECTED BY LOUIS LETERRIER.

WRITTEN BY MATTHEW ROBINSON.

STARRING GRETA LEE AND WAGNER MOURA.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

This Netflix film which I spent my Saturday night on is a mix of sci-fi, horror, family and adventure. I only watch family and adventure-type movies at Christmas, so there was a point during my viewing of this film where I actually thought I was wasting my time on a kids’ movie. They lured me in with their horror movie title.

I stuck it out, though, because I wanted to see how it ended. I’d like to say I wasn’t disappointed, but I’m still on the fence about the whole thing.

The film starts promisingly enough. A very annoying family of two parents called Ann and Jason, a pre-teen boy, Graham and a girl under ten named Ruth, try to head out to buy a Christmas tree one morning. They discover to their shock that they’re sealed into their house. The Internet is down so no phone calls or Zoom calls either.

A peep across the street reveals that everyone else on the road is in the same boat. But don’t worry, folks, everyone has whiteboards, giant sheets of white cardboard and magic markers with which to communicate. Yaaaay…! Wasn’t it lucky they’d stocked up on those?

It looks like it’s the unusually high rainfall that’s somehow created the barriers around each house, the barriers preventing the home-owners from leaving their properties. Unlikely as it sounds, this is what’s happening.

What’s worse, there are ‘creatures’ out there in the rain that are a definite danger to the people in the houses. But, if the creatures have personally sealed the humans into their houses like sardines in tins, how come they find it so difficult to get them out of their houses when it’s time to eat them, if that’s what they do? Here be plotholes, yarr…

The first couple of weeks, the trapped family act like they’re on an unexpected break from the daily routine, like it’s the COVID times again or something. You half expect them to start baking banana bread and keeping themselves active with Joe Wicks’s online exercise tutorials.

Their upbeat jollity is completely unbelievable. They’ve been sealed- sealed- inside their fucking house, they don’t know by whom or by what and they don’t know how long it’s going to go on for. Don’t they realise the predicament they’re in…?

I’d be petrified, hysterical, screaming and crying and tearing my hair out. They’re watching Air Force One and listening to records by The Cure. Until the lecky finally runs out, that is. Then reality hits in a big way…

They work out that they have about two months’ worth of food in the house. But the enforced lockdown goes on for much longer than that. When the words ‘Five Years Later’ come on the screen, my credulity is thoroughly stretched.

We’re meant to believe they’ve survived five years in their house by growing vegetables indoors and rigging up some kind of water reclamation service. Dad has also grown a ratty beard as well as fashioned an animal trap for catching dinner.

It’s quite horrible to see so many beautiful woodland animals get caught in it; seemingly every animal from the Disney version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is queuing up to get mangled in the home-made trap and dragged up the side of the house and down the chimney, the one part of the house the dopey creatures didn’t think to seal.

The death of their beloved Golden Labrador Cassidy is the saddest scene in the film. The humans themselves apparently don’t get sick until after they’ve broken the five-year barrier in the house.

Then the hunt is on for the five-year-old antibiotics Ann is certain must be in her long-dead neighbours’ house. What makes her think those’ll even work, if they in fact even exist?

The creatures, when we finally see them, are actually quite cool and very Lovecraftian and tentacle-y. The world outside, which has been abandoned to the animals and birds for the last five years, is an overgrown, lush nature reserve. As if we needed any further reminders that we’re the ones who are screwing up the planet…

Would I recommend this movie? For a one-time watch, maybe, if you don’t mind giving up nearly two hours of your one wild and precious life to see it through to the end. The characters are annoying beyond belief though, so be warned.

I nearly gave up at one point when I noticed it only had a 12s certificate (the parents have a ‘sex drawer’ and smoke a joint together at one point), but I guess it was my strong sense of stick-to-it-iveness that made me finish the damn thing. I hate leaving things unfinished. Movies, books, conversations, arguments, Black Forest Gateaux, bottles with wine in them…

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. (1972) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. (1972)

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY WES CRAVEN.

MUSIC BY STEPHEN CHAPIN AND DAVID ALEXANDER HESS.

STARRING SANDRA PEABODY, LUCY GRANTHAM, DAVID ALEXANDER HESS, FRED LINCOLN, MARK SHEFFLER, JERAMIE RAIN AND MARTIN KOVE.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

Wes Craven’s directorial debut is one of the original ‘video nasties’ that caused such a furore in the ‘Seventies. Half the viewing population lapped them up because they were exciting and new and really pushed the boundaries cinematically.

The other half protested that such uncensored high levels of sex and violence were deeply damaging to the human psyche and that they encouraged children and young people in particular to be violent themselves.

The moral panic around these movies (I Spit on your Grave, Zombie Flesh-Eaters, Driller Killer, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, The Evil Dead, Cannibal Holocaust and others) caused the Video Recordings Act to be passed in Britain in 1984.

This effectively subjected videos to the same system of classification that was already in place to censor regular films and television programmes.

Teacher and moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse was very vocal on the subject of the ‘video nasties,’ though she’d begun her fight against declining standards and values in British life and the rise of the so-called permissive society long before then.

The Last House on the Left is a rape-and-revenge movie, in the same way as, say, I Spit on your Grave (1978), although it’s not the raped woman taking the revenge in TLHOTL but the woman’s parents.

Mari Collingwood is a beautiful young American woman planning to celebrate her seventeenth birthday with her friend Phyllis Stone by going to a concert. Blood Lust are playing, and they’re so cute…!

The poignant scenes of the two girls together in the woods chatting about the concert show us clearly that here are two lovely young women on the very cusp of life.

They have it all ahead of them: love, friendship, university, foreign travel, a career, a husband and babies, a home of their own and whatever else life might have to offer. This makes what follows all the more tragic and unfair.

The two young women have the terrible misfortune on their night out to run into a gang of psychopathic, ultra-violent escaped criminals on the run.

Krug Stillo is the ringleader, a misogynistic rapist (is there any other kind?) and an abusive father to his teenaged son Junior, a pathetic drug addict. Weasel is a Peeping Tom and stab-happy sex offender.

Sadie, the sole female, is as sadistic as her male counterparts. She’d put you in mind of Shawnee Smith’s character in The Stand (1994 mini-series). She’d be the kind of woman who’d clap and laugh with delight at the sight of another female being brutalized by a male. She’d most likely even join in…

You can imagine what foul things are perpetrated on the two captive women. I think my own DVD version must be one of the censored ones, as it doesn’t contain the extended rape scenes whose existence I’ve heard of.

There are definitely scenes missing also, such as two scenes of lesbian rape: one in which the two captured women are forced to ‘make out’ with each other, and another in which Mari is violated by Sadie. I told you Sadie was trouble…

The scenes of horror and sexual assault are frequently accompanied by brilliantly inappropriate upbeat music, and it’s worth noting that David Alexander Hess, aka Krug Stillo, was partly responsible for the excellent music score.

The most harrowing scenes are also intermingled with expertly placed ones of comic relief, as the small town’s two bumbling cops attempt to solve the mystery of the missing Mari Collingwood. The scene with the toothless Ada and her chickens is genuinely hilarious.

The younger of the two cops is played by Martin Kove. He’s most famous for acting in the series of The Karate Kid movies, but I’ll personally never forget him for baring his magnificent hairy chest in the opening credits of a certain little drama serial called Cagney and Lacey (1982-1988), in which he played handsome cop Victor Isbecki.

Mari’s parents play a pivotal role in the film. They’re the ‘revenge’ part of ‘rape and revenge.’ I really liked Weasel’s dream in which he’s subjected to medical terror by Mari’s parents (Mari’s dad is a doctor.). That could really have been an interesting way to go but, alas, it was only a dream…

Mari’s mum is a top-tier stay-at-home housewife and hostess. Look at the hospitality she offers the escaped criminals. Fresh towels in their rooms, bacon and eggs in the morning! Give me some of that, lol.

It must be a point of honour with her not to be found wanting as a hostess, even when the ‘guests’ are her daughter’s killers and rapists. Now that’s a housewife…

Mari’s dad is an odd one. His hobbies include sex with his wife- his actual wife!- and hanging round the kitchen watching his wife bake their daughter a birthday cake. You’d think he’d be out boozing or playing golf with his mates or off shagging his secretary or something. Doing normal man stuff, in other words.

Also, there’s a mad conversation at the start of the film in which Dad stares openly at his daughter’s breasts and says, ‘No bra, Mari? What’s all this? I can see your nipples!’

Mari’s response is to laugh it off and tell her old man he’s just being a big square, but I think the more common response would be to die of shame and embarrassment if your dad ever started talking to you openly about your tits, no?

TLHOTL is actually a really good film. The same can also be said for a large number of the ‘video nasties’ of the ‘Seventies and ‘Eighties. Yes, there’s blood and guts and gore galore but mature adults should have the choice to watch this kind of thing if they so wish. And Wes Craven’s directorial debut is a great place to start if you want to dip your toe, so to speak. Enjoy…

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978): REVISITED. BY SANDRA HARRIS.

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978): REVISITED.

BY SANDRA HARRIS.

Wow. This is such a genuinely harrowing film that I can’t re-watch it without being ‘harrowed’ all over again. I first watched it a good few years ago now, and a recent re-visiting left me pretty much as shocked, outraged and upset as when I saw it before.

Not because the writer and director Meir Zarchi dared to make such a ‘disgusting’ film, by the way, but because of the behaviour of the male protagonists towards the lone female in their midst.

The film tells the story of a beautiful young woman writer from New York called Jennifer Hills, who rents a house in the Connecticut countryside one summer to realise her dream of writing a full-length novel.

She attracts the attention of the hick town’s gas station manager, Johnny, his two unemployed mates Stanley and Andy and the mentally retarded shop delivery man, Matthew, whom they permit to tag along with them because he amuses them. Nice guys, right?

In some of the most disturbing scenes in cinema history, the four men brutally rape and beat Jennifer, then stalk and hunt her through the woods and rape her again, only to put her through a third ordeal when she finally makes it back to her rented house.

These men completely rob Jennifer of all agency. They overpower, humiliate, deride and batter her, then, to add insult to injury, they insult her part-written novel and tear it physically into little pieces.

Firstly, I was aghast at the notion that Andy, a hick so ‘hicky’ he wears his dungarees with nothing underneath, could read. He looks like the kind of hick who has sex with his sister as a matter of course and laughs like this: a-hyuk-yuk-yuk.

Secondly, I was outraged on Jennifer’s behalf. I wanted to scream at the men, don’t you know how hard it is to write anything? How long it takes? How soul-destroying it is when it gets rejected, and how hard it is to keep going despite little or no encouragement? How dare you fucking creeps be so dismissive of her laudable efforts?

Whoops. The writer in me just slipped out there…

The second half of the movie sees Jennifer regain her power and her agency by exacting a revenge on her rapists as brutal as the assaults they’ve perpetrated on her.

She proves herself to be a remarkably resourceful, resilient and determined young woman as she bides her time, allows herself to heal physically (the mental and emotional scars will last forever) and even tries to put her poor sundered novel back together.

I cried like a baby when I saw her back at the typewriter, tapping away. As a woman writer who will allow almost anything to lure her away from the drudgery of sitting down at the table to write (everything from a funny animal video on Twitter to a text on my phone, sometimes even cleaning: yes, goddammit, cleaning!), I heartily commend her hard work and stick-to-it-iveness.

The film poster (featuring the rear view of actress Demi Moore) says the following: ‘This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned five men beyond recognition… but no jury in America would ever convict her!’ I’m not so sure about that.

Today, we’re living in a kind of Bizarre-o World in which up is down, black is white, words equal violence, men are women, right is wrong and it’s better to ‘be kind’ than have basic common sense and a grip on reality. I can’t help wondering how that legal case might pan out nowadays.

I’m thinking Jennifer might be sent to prison for life and the poor men offered counselling and financial remuneration for the awful things the nasty woman tried to do to them. Oh, and Jennifer would of course be sent for re-(N)education and taught to ‘be kind’ to the poor vulnerable marginalised men she so grievously bullied…

Seriously, though, the four rapists (not five as the poster claims?) have a contempt for women that you can see from space. Johnny, the gas station manager and leader of the gang, believes he has a God-given right to enjoy her body because of the way she ‘flaunts’ her legs at him (simply by standing and walking) at his place of business.

Johnny is so arrogant, entitled and egotistical that, even after he and his mates have utterly brutalised this young woman, he willingly gets in her car and goes off with her because he thinks he’s so gosh-darned irresistible that she can’t help but desire intimate relations with him again.

Men like Johnny have no respect for women. They see them as tits and a fanny, receptacles for the male organ. They think that all women really want and deserve is to be fucked violently and slapped around, and maybe abused verbally while you’re at it. Any female endeavours, such as Jennifer’s writing, are to be ridiculed and dismissed.

Before you start, yes, of course I know that it’s not all men. I know men exist who would never dream of doing what these four men in this film do. But sadly, even in 2026, there are still men who think like the rapists think, that women are just ‘uppity bitches’ and ‘cunts who need taking down a peg or two.’

Camille Keaton is phenomenal in her role as Jennifer. She manages to be both vulnerable and tough as old boots while never losing her femininity and humanity. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I greatly admire Jennifer’s ability to come back fighting from her horrific ordeal.

Camille ended up married to the director of the film, which might have been great for them but it probably wasn’t so good for the woman who was the director’s wife at the time the film was made, the same poor woman who typed up his handwritten script every night on the very typewriter we see Jennifer using in the film…

Strangely, there’s a scene in ISOYG which srikes me as quite erotic, even though it’s not otherwise an erotic film. It’s the one in which a naked Jennifer is putting up her hair prior to getting in the bath with Johnny, who thinks he’s in for a sexy treat. (He’s not.)

She has gorgeous, endlessly long brown hair and she’s taking time and effort to put the coils and strands of it up carefully with pins. It’s the kind of old-fashioned putting up of hair that was probably more common in the old days when women routinely had longer hair, and the kind of thing you probably don’t see much of in films or in real life nowadays, like the rolling up or down of silk stockings on smooth legs or the attaching of suspenders to a garter belt.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed my updated reflections on the ‘video-nasty’ to end all ‘video-nasties.’ By the way, I’ve used two ‘Simpsons’ references in this piece, both perfectly cromulent additions to the English language. I wonder if you can spot them…?

MADAME BOVARY BY GUSTAVE FLAUBERT. BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

MADAME BOVARY: A NOVEL BY GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

Madame Bovary, published in 1856/7, is a magnificent book, the debut novel of French writer Gustave Flaubert. I read it in college donkeys’ years ago and liked it, and always intended to re-read it.

I finally got around to it this month because I found a really gorgeous copy in a charity shop, one that had the French and English translations side by side in the one book.

I’m so happy I found this particular copy as it was a real incentive to re-read this brilliant story, written in the style known as ‘realism’ for the way it deals with ordinary things in a straightforward way, avoiding high-faluting grandiosity and exaggeration and the like.

Probably for this reason, I found it really easy to read, which is a definite plus. If you think a book, particularly a classic, is going to be heavy going, it can be off-putting, to say the least. Happily, this is not the case with Madame Bovary.

It’s the tragic story of Emma Bovary, the beautiful daughter of a country farmer in mid-nineteenth century France. Can you imagine? No Internet, no electricity, no planes, trains or automobiles, no Tinder, no social media, none of the things we take so much for granted today.

I can’t decide if that sounds great or terrifying. It might be nice for a break but we’d probably get mad anxiety and FOMO (fear of missing out) after a while and be itching to get back on social media to see what’s been going on in Love Island or the World Cup in our absence…!

Anyway, Emma is only seventeen when she marries Charles Bovary, a country doctor and a recent widow. Emma is at first delighted to find herself married and she enjoys playing house for a bit.

Eventually Emma, a dreamer of a girl whose head has been turned by romantic novels, realises that, far from being the big adventure she thought it would be, marriage is really only exchanging one prison for another. That’s the danger of letting women read, folks…

It’s ironic that so many young girls used to think that leaving their father’s home to go and get married was the solution to their boredom, their frustrations, their dissatisfaction with living within the constraints of what their parents and society demanded of them.

Usually, what society demanded of women back then was to be quiet and passive children and then grow up to be quiet and passive wives and mothers, at all times subjugating their own needs to the needs of others, namely their husbands, children and any elderly relatives they might have had to care for as well.

Luckily for Emma, her husband Charles is a weak man. He’s head over heels in love with his pretty young wife and is more than prepared to let her walk all over him in her dainty little buttoned boots. Some men would pay good brass for that kind of thing, you know…

An invite to the fabulous home of some local nobility leaves Emma more than ever unhappy with her own life. She falls into a depressed state that causes Charles to worry incessantly, resulting in him deciding to move them to a different town. Sadly for Charles, it’s a case of same shit, different town…

Emma is fed up that they don’t move in exalted social circles. Fed up that the main person they see all the time is Charles’s pal and fellow medical-type person, the local pharmacist Monsieur Homais, a self-serving and social-climbing weasel of a man.

Emma deals with her dissatisfaction by taking two lovers, though not at the same time! Leon Dupuis is a young, impressionable law clerk who finds Emma irresistible. They also have a shared interest in art, literature and music.

Rodolphe Boulanger is a rich older man with a lovely big house for whom Emma, who gives him her all, is only the latest in a string of mistresses. Yes, Emma is certainly one of the prettiest, but even so, for him she represents only an exciting bit of extra-marital nooky.

Emma throws herself into both affairs with complete and absolute abandon. She’s in love with love, and she lives for her lovers, neglecting both her hubby, their daughter Berthe and her reputation in the process.

Reminds me of that scene in Gone With the Wind, when Scarlett discusses the wicked Rhett Butler with another girl at the Wilkes’s party:

‘No, but she was ruined just the same…!’

Both affairs end disastrously. First, though, they become almost as mundane and trivial and ordinary (quelle horreur!) as marriage itself. Emma desperately tries to keep them going but eventually even she herself can see that her big romantic dream is in tatters.

This leaves her mental health literally hanging on by a thread. To add insult to injury, she is in debt to the tune of thousands and thousands of francs to local merchant Monsieur Lhereux.

He very cleverly encourages her to buy all kinds of fripperies, frills and furbelows from him to cope with the overwhelming boredom of her life, the life of the wife of a country medic. All this is done behind Charles’s back. Emma signs away everything of value in hers and Charles’s home to Lhereux, the cunning slug of a man.

Now it’s time to pay the piper and Emma has literally nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The way she chooses to deal with it is horrific and very hard to stomach. Is this the end of Madame Bovary…?

Believe it or not, there’s such a thing as ‘Madame Bovary Syndrome.’ Here’s what the Internet has to say about it:

‘Madame Bovary Syndrome (or bovarism) describes a state of chronic romantic dissatisfaction. People with this condition measure their real-life relationships against unrealistic, idealized fantasies often found in novels or movies. When everyday reality inevitably falls short, it leads to deep unhappiness, impulsivity, and escapist behavior.’

‘… everyday reality inevitably falls short…’ No shit, Sherlock.

So now you know! I hope you get the chance to read this wonderful book. Allowing for the old-fashioned outfits, customs and dialogue, Flaubert might be talking about a woman of today, his characterisation of Emma is so well done.

David Lean’s magnificent 1970 film, Ryan’s Daughter, is loosely based on Flaubert’s book. It’s about an Irish married woman who pays dearly for an affair with a handsome, troubled British officer in the aftermath of Ireland’s Easter Rising.

Now that I’ve finally re-read Madame Bovary, next on my list of classics to read for the first time is Leo Tolstoy’s similarly-themed Anna Karenina. This is a longer, denser read and is apparently a deeply complex and multi-layered work, so I might have more trouble with this one.

Wish me luck!