MICHAEL ARMSTRONG: THE SCREENPLAYS: THE MAZE. (1968) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

MICHAEL ARMSTRONG: THE SCREENPLAYS.

THE MAZE. (1968)

PUBLISHED IN 2019 BY PAPER DRAGON PRODUCTIONS.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Michael Armstrong is creating history by being the first film-maker to publish his entire screenwriting output. With the original uncut screenplays in print for the first time ever and peppered with a mixture of wildly entertaining anecdotes, astounding behind-the-scenes revelations, creative and educational insights and brutal ‘no holds barred’ honesty, these books are guaranteed to provide a completely new kind of reading experience while offering a unique insight into the movie industry. Starting from his first professional screenplay written in 1960 when he was only fifteen and which he subsequently directed in 1968, the books will ultimately encompass a career that has spanned over fifty years. The books will include not only those screenplays which made it onto a cinema screen but, for the first time ever, all those that didn’t- and the reasons why…’

http://www.michaelarmstrong.co.uk/publications

http://www.paperdragonproductions.com

Screen-writer, actor and director Michael Armstrong has written some absolutely cracking horror screenplays. Some were made into films, such as THE DARK (1960), MARK OF THE DEVIL (1970) and HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS (1982).

This last film, as well as being a rollicking great horror romp, has the distinction of being the only film in the history of cinema to star horror legends Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and John Carradine all together.

Some of his other screenplays, for one reason and another (showbusiness is a fickle and fluctuating mistress!), never made it onto the big screen, unfortunately for the public. These include the fantastic GHOST TOWN (1969), a comedy Western; BEELZEBUB (1984), the story of a haunted computer that would have made a terrific ‘Eighties horror movie; DEATH MASQUE (1988) and OUIJA-BOARD (1989).

Directors have been making films about ouija-boards for the last couple of decades now, but Michael Armstrong was one of the first, if not the first, to realise the potential of the humble ouija-board to be the subject of a major horror film.

Now, on to- or should I say into- THE MAZE (1968), a screenplay cut in the same mould as the excellent BEELZEBUB, GHOST TOWN and the aforementioned OUIJA-BOARD. I enjoyed it every bit as much as the screenplays of Michael’s (I can call him that; we’re great pals…!) that came before and after. I bet you guys can’t guess what it’s about, lol…

I’ll be kind and give you tons of clues. First off, we have a handsome young celebrity footballer fella called Bob Harding. Bob’s agent tells him one day that he’s positively got to go to this classy shindig on some dude’s private island, because the press will be there and a ton of other celebrities as well (‘-movie stars, pop, fashion- it’s a media coup!’), and this will be the perfect opportunity for Bob to grab some quick easy publicity.

What can Bob do but say yes? When he’s picked up at a Maltese airport by a handsome young Greek chappie called Alexis, who works for the island-owning millionaire, the pair have the following rather disturbing exchange:

Bob: This island we’re going to- I tried finding it on the map but it didn’t seem to exist. Does it have a name?

Alexis: No name. It isn’t on the map.

Bob: So, how far is it off the mainland?

Alexis: Far enough. Dr. Seresion likes privacy.

Okay. A mysterious island that’s not on any map, miles from anywhere, owned by some creepy-sounding doctor dude? (Remember THE ISLAND OF DR. HIBBERT from THE SIMPSONS?) I’d have turned the boat round and headed for home at this point, but dopey Bob has seemingly never watched that episode of THE SIMPSONS, lol.

Once on the island, he’s chauffeured by Alexis and Maurits, another hot Greek dude, to the magnificent palace of Dr. Seresion. The palace stands in beautiful, idyllic grounds with the following amenities: flower, rock and water gardens; tennis courts; croquet lawns; swimming pools and other sporting facilities; two theatres- one open-air, a butterfly house, a maze and a pagoda. See how the maze just sneaked in there, all innocent-like? Heh-heh-heh.

The rather sinister Dr. Seresion greets Bob and his other celebrity guests with the following speech. I’ve put in capital letters the sentence I feel to be the most portentous. The guests don’t seem to notice the undercurrents of menace running through the welcome speech, but then maybe I’ve seen more horror films than these guys have:

‘So, it is as fellow members of Mankind that I shall welcome you to my island. MAY YOUR YOUTH AND YOUR ENERGIES FILL IT WITH THE LIFE IT HAS SORELY CRAVED OVER THE YEARS. For that I welcome you- and wish you an enjoyable and fulfilling stay here.’

The guests include Bob, an obnoxiously brash and pushy journalist called Rowena and her photographer Mike, a young pop star called Brian who’s sweet on Rowena (unfortunately for him; she’s a total bitch!), a young heart-throb actor by the name of Simon and a ravishing young actress, Jenny Raine, who confounds expectations by not leaping into bed with every male starlet who looks at her twice. A woman of principles, eh? Curiouser and curiouser…

The press, as personified by Rowena, don’t come off very well in the screenplay at all. Here’s what Jenny thinks of Rowena and her ilk:

‘That’s what Ro and the rest of her species offer us: instant celebrity- ‘Be nice to me, do what I want, say what I want you to say and, if I feel like it, I’ll make you into a sexual icon to be worshipped and adored by millions.’

Jenny, a thoughtful and insightful woman, has this to say on the subject of her and Bob’s so-called ‘celebrity’:

‘And there we all are- society’s golden calves with more money than sense- hiding behind giant egos frightened someone’ll suddenly find out we’re not really divine at all… just pathetically mundane like everyone else.’

She’s rather an extraordinary woman, is this Jenny. I certainly hope she makes it to the end of the story. Some people don’t, you know, because there’s a serial killer loose on the Island of Dr. Hibbert (sorry!) who seems to be hell-bent on bumping off the famous guests.

But why? And who is it? And is it anything to do with the sound of underground drumming that’s been bothering some of the guests? Are The Rolling Stones secreted somewhere on the island, giving impromptu concerts to the moles and the fishes?

There’s also the titular maze, of course, ‘enormously tall, perfectly trimmed hedges eerily floodlit in the darkness.’ Nothing bad could ever happen in a maze, I hear you say. Don’t you believe it. There was a maze in THE SHINING, wasn’t there? The maze on the island seems to have almost a sentience about it, like it’s a living, breathing thing. Let’s hope that it never gets… gulp… hungry… and… eeek… needs f-f-f-feeding! Yikes, Scoob, let’s get outta here…!

Guests are disappearing and no-one is exactly sure where or why. An enormous shrine to the mother of Dr. Seresion, the mother he never knew, is discovered in a fabulous pagoda on the island. Dr. Seresion maintains ‘the island has no secrets’ but, the deeper you get into both the book and the island, the more you are disinclined to believe him.

Alex and Maurits, ‘Dr. Seresion’s creatures,’ who ‘grovel to do his bidding’ but don’t have humps and a snaggle-tooth apiece, haha, are at pains to reassure the guests that everything on the island is all nice and normal, but surely even the more cerebrally challenged among their number can read the writing on the wall…?

Now, I don’t want to give you any spoilers, but I’ve decided to share one maze-related passage with you which I found particularly frightening and atmospheric:

His head is surrounded by leaves on four sides

As he endeavours to breathe through the encompassing foliage-

One arm becomes twisted behind his back,

As the leaves press around his body

Like the tightening coils of a large snake-

Pathetically he struggles to free his legs-

Arms…

And still they continue to press in on him…

Slowly squeezing…

And crushing his body…

Compressing it…

And smothering his face…

Blocking his ability to breathe in or out…

The leaves are inside his mouth-

Twigs slowly skewering into his eyeballs-

Piercing into his ears-

Trickles of blood…

Seep through the tightly packed leaves…

I won’t go any further with this passage, but it’s the stuff of nightmares. The maze stands silently in the moonlight. All is quiet. Yeah well, all is quiet now, sure, but there are times when it’s all go in there, trust me.

The ending is truly terrifying. Stephen King himself couldn’t have done a better job. It’s put me right off going into mazes, anyway. Not that I’ve been in many. In point of fact, I’ve been in none, and I’m not too sure if we have any here in Dublin, but even if we did, I wouldn’t be tempted anywhere near them. Too leafy for me…

So here you are giving shelter to the local looney. All terribly Hitchcock and noire. So, now what? Do you both get handcuffed together and run around the windswept countryside trying to learn the secret of the thirty-nine hedges?

Come to bleed me some more, daddy dearest?

The maze!- I know what’s at the centre!

I have to be kept alive… for the maze.

It’s coming for us! It’s coming!-

THE MAZE, E.VERY N.IGHT S.OMETHING A.WFUL and ROBIN HOOD (see illustration) by Michael Armstrong are available to buy now from:

http://www.michaelarmstrong.co.uk/publications

http://www.paperdragonproductions.com

MICHAEL ARMSTRONG: THE SCREENPLAYS. E.VERY N.IGHT S.OMETHING A.WFUL. (1972) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

MICHAEL ARMSTRONG: THE SCREENPLAYS.

‘E.VERY N.IGHT S.OMETHING A.WFUL.’ (1972)

PUBLISHED IN 2019 BY PAPER DRAGON PRODUCTIONS.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Michael Armstrong is creating history by being the first film-maker to publish his entire screenwriting output. With the original uncut screenplays in print for the first time ever and peppered with a mixture of wildly entertaining anecdotes, astounding behind-the-scenes revelations, creative and educational insights and brutal ‘no holds barred’ honesty, these books are guaranteed to provide a completely new kind of reading experience while offering a unique insight into the movie industry. Starting from his first professional screenplay written in 1960 when he was only fifteen and which he subsequently directed in 1968, the books will ultimately encompass a career that has spanned over fifty years. The books will include not only those screenplays which made it onto a cinema screen but, for the first time ever, all those that didn’t- and the reasons why…’

http://www.michaelarmstrong.co.uk/publications

http://www.paperdragonproductions.com

You may have heard me mention this up-and-coming young fella before, this Michael Armstrong fella whose career as a film director and screenwriter is currently being immortalised in the form of some of the most beautiful books I’ve ever owned, books of all the screenplays he’s ever written, and he’s written a lot of screenplays. His productivity over the years puts most other writers to shame, and writers hate being put to shame, you can take that from me…! It makes us edgy, and we’re on edge enough of the time as it is.

Whether they were made into films or not, the screenplays are all being transformed into gorgeous books by Michael’s publishers, Paper Dragon Productions, and they really are the perfect present for film buffs of all ages. Well, not exactly all ages, lol. Some of ’em are a little blue…! Here are the films for which he’s penned the screenplays:

THE DARK- 1960.

THE IMAGE- 1964. Starring David Bowie in his first screen appearance.

THE HUNT- 1965.

MARK OF THE DEVIL- 1970.

THE SEX THIEF- 1973.

ESKIMO NELL- 1974. A riotous sex comedy starring beloved English actor Roy Kinnear and a young and handsome Michael Armstrong himself.

IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU- 1975.

THREE FOR ALL- 1975.

ADVENTURES OF A TAXI DRIVER #2- 1975.

ADVENTURES OF A PRIVATE EYE- 1976.

THE BLACK PANTHER- 1976. The story of Donald Neilson, the British armed robber, kidnapper and murderer who abducted wealthy British teenager Lesley Whittle in 1975.

HOME BEFORE MIDNIGHT- 1979.

SCREAMTIME- 1981.

HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS- 1982. The only film in the history of cinema to star horror legends Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and John Carradine all together.

LIFEFORCE- 1983.

Impressed much…? Thought so, heh-heh-heh. Now to E.VERY N.IGHT S.OMETHING A.WFUL, the title of which you’ll see contains the acronym ENSA. What was ENSA? There’s a definition in the book’s Glossary Of References which will do perfectly nicely for our purposes, and here it is:

ENTERTAINMENTS NATIONAL SERVICE ASSOCIATION: Popularly known as ENSA; it was an organisation set up in 1939 by Basil Dean and Leslie Henson to provide entertainment for British Armed Forces personnel during World War Two. Infamously, quality of the shows varied considerably due to an insufficient number of good professional artistes to accommodate the number of shows required by the troops spread out fighting across Europe. As a consequence, ENSA became inundated by substandard acts and eager untalented amateur performers to such an extent that the troops created the acronym E.N.S.A. as ”Every Night Something Awful…!”

In other words, you’d be praying for a Bob Hope, a Marlene Dietrich, a Vera Lynn or a Glenn Miller, but you’d end up with some bozo playing the spoons. Still, I’m sure every act, no matter how amateur, gave it their very best shot and I’d personally maintain that any entertainment, however dodgy, is better than none at all. There was a bloody war on, after all. What right did anyone have to be picky…?

‘E.VERY N.IGHT S.OMETHING A.WFUL’ (1972) is the hilarious story of one such company of wartime entertainers. Headed by flaming queen Ivor Short, they’re putting on a variety show for the lads called ‘Red, White And Blue,’ whether the troops want them to or not, and it’s bound to be Fab. U. Lous, darling. (Channelled my best Craig Revel Horwood from Strictly there…!) Or is it…? I think you already know the answer to that, readers.

There’s a really funny bit in the beginning where someone’s travelling to a top secret army camp in the New Forest and needs to ask directions from a local farmer and the farmer says: ‘But if it be the secret army camp you’re after?- That’s along there- about half a mile. You can’t miss it. You’ll see their sentries hiding behind the trees.’ So much for army confidentiality, anyway.

French heart-throb and international singing star Pierre Lamorisse, the main attraction of Red, White And Blue, is aghast to find that the English soldiers in this ‘top secret’ army camp don’t even have real weapons. I just have to include here the genuinely funny exchange between Pierre and one of the soldiers:

Soldier: Sorry, sir, I didn’t recognise you. I wouldn’t wander too far away, if I was you- just in case one of us mistakes you for an invasion force in the darkness.

Pierre: Oh yes… thank you. I wouldn’t want to get shot.

Soldier: Oh, no fear of that, sir. We ‘aven’t got real rifles- and even if we had, we ‘aven’t any bullets for ’em. No, all the real stuff’s over with our boys abroad. (He holds up his ‘rifle’ to show Pierre.) Not bad, is it? Looks like the real thing from a distance. Yeah, they’re makin’ ’em at Pinewood Studios; churnin’ ’em out, they are- tanks an’ all.

(Pierre stares at him in complete amazement.)

Pierre: Tanks?

Soldier: Only the outsides, mind you. Yeah. Make ’em out of hardboard, they do… spot of paint- looks all right from a long way off. Get a few ‘undred of ’em wheelin’ about on the cliffs makes old Jerry think twice about invadin’.

Pierre: But if they do invade, what will you fight them with?

Soldier: Well… we could always bash ’em over the ‘ead with one of these. They’re good and solid. You feel that. (He hands Pierre the ‘rifle’ to feel the weight.)

Pierre: It’s just wood.

Soldier: Yeah, but feel the quality. That’s good quality wood, that is. Jerry gets one of them round his mush, he’ll soon give up, I can tell you. Anyway, best be gettin’ back to my rounds. Can’t be too careful, you know. There’s spies everywhere, so we’re told. Been a right pleasure talking to you, sir. Have a nice night.

(And moves off as Pierre quickly calls after him:)

Pierre: Excuse me-?

(The soldier returns, so that Pierre can hand him back his ‘rifle.’ The soldier gives a rueful grin.)

Soldier: I’m always forgetting where I put it.

Talk about a Carry On…! However did England win this war anyway…?

Anyway, the company of entertainers includes the above-mentioned Pierre; Ginger, an attractive singer and femme fatale with a string of broken relationships behind her who just might be the perfect woman for Pierre, if they both but knew it; Bertie Rich, a jaded comedian who feels more dead than alive; Marilyn, a faded blonde bombshell whom Michael Armstrong envisoned being played by Diana Dors if the script had been made into a film (excellent choice, by the way); Constance, an older married lady with a theatrical repertoire, who never realises when she’s boring people (she also never uses the Horne when she’s performing); and Madam Merlin, aka Priscilla Clipthorpe, a lady magician (or should that be magicienne?) who never travels without her two bunny wabbits. It’s a motley crew but a good one.

Here’s what happens when French Pierre questions why he has to wear an Arabian Nights costume:

Pierre: Ivor, this is stupid. Why do I have to wear this?

Ivor: It’s part of a themed medley, sweetie: an exotic Arabian Nights fantasy… Ginger’s Scheherazade, I’m the cruel Sultan, the girls are my wives, Jack’s the Golden Slave and you’re a singing eunuch.

Pierre: Eunuch? What is that? I don’t get it.

Ivor: Neither did they, petal.

Bah-dum-tish, lol. This company of elite entertainers must travel abroad to a top secret destination (so secret not even the ship’s crew know where they’re going!) to dazzle their fighting boys abroad with their expertise and chutzpah. I love when Ivor says to Sally: Take it from the top again- and Sally dear, do try to make her sound more like an innocent young virgin and less like Gracie Fields? Heh-heh-heh. Lovely woman, Gracie Fields. Immensely talented.

Here’s what Bertie tells Madam Merlin to describe his feelings of jadedness and ennui:

Forgive me, dear girl, but after you’ve died in front of as many audiences as I have, you eventually cease to regard yourself as a living being anymore. Then: Actually, it was on the eve of my fiftieth birthday that I realised I was dead. Had been for some time, in fact. Just never really noticed it before.

Poor Bertie. And they say that showbusiness is glamorous… The main thing is that the show must go on, as the old showbiz motto goes. But can the show really go on when the troupe is in Rome but their band and props have somehow ended up in Norway? And why does everyone burst out laughing when Constance bursts forth with the song, O, for the wings of a dove?

What prompts Ivor the director to say: I know, to most people, I’m just a funny old queen but even funny old queens have feelings? There are some really touching moments amongst the comedy and quickfire one-liners which Michael Armstrong fires off with the ease of someone doing something they find really easy, lol. Good metaphors are not always readily available, even to a quicksilver brain like mine own. Michael Armstrong would probably have found a good one.

The troupe at least have each other, but what about the troops? Note the rather clever play on words there. Here’s the exchange between a sergeant and a young lieutenant when the ENSA party bus hoves into view of a little European village, where a garrison of soldiers is stationed like a sitting duck:

Sergeant: Think it could be some kind of enemy trick, sir?

Young Lieutenant: Worse, Sergeant. I think it’s ENSA…!

Sergeant: Oh, my God! Better warn the men, sir.

Young Lieutenant: Quite. Carry on, Sergeant.

Carry On, indeed…! All joking aside, folks, on page 192, you’ll find a scene that’ll show you the true worth of ENSA (popular as it may be to poke fun at them) to exhausted, demoralised soldiers far from home who just want to see their families again. I cried buckets at this scene, and you will too.

Can Pierre get to the root of Ginger’s commitment phobia and seeming inability to be faithful to one man? On page 236, he finally nails it. Will Marilyn get her man, or will she retreat gracefully from the arena so that the dreamily swoonsome Fabio can be with the woman he really loves? No woman’s that generous and big-hearted, surely? By the way, do you guys know what the words MINAS TERRESTRAS mean, because ENSA sure don’t…! And finally:

‘And here we have it!… A spectacular musical revue called Red, White & Blue… Ivor Short and Company: Jack Adair, Ginger Lawrence, Sally Meadows, Bertie Rich, Marilyn Turner, Constance Blythe with Speciality Madam Merlin and special guest star, Pierre Lamorisse. Acting understudy and ASM, Edith Nightingale. Band: Billy Rainbow & His Big Band. Touring Company- Category B.’

E.VERY N.IGHT S.OMETHING A.WFUL, in addition to THE MAZE and ROBIN HOOD, is available to buy now from Michael Armstrong’s website and his publishers, Paper Dragon Productions. Don’t waste any time. Go get ’em!

http://www.michaelarmstrong.co.uk/publications

http://www.paperdragonproductions.com

By the way, Sherlock Holmes had his Irene Adler and Mr. Spode from Bertie Wooster his ‘Eulalie.’ If you ever want to see a grown man cry like a little girl, you have but to whisper one word into Michael Armstrong’s shell-like… Ryman…

See you guys next time!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

HOLOCAUST. (1978) THE TV MINI-SERIES REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

HOLOCAUST. (1978) CREATED AND WRITTEN BY GERALD GREEN. DIRECTED BY MARVIN J. CHOMSKY.

STARRING MERYL STREEP, JAMES WOODS, MICHAEL MORIARTY, FRITZ WEAVER, ROSEMARY HARRIS, JOSEPH BOTTOMS, MARIUS GORING, TOM BELL, IAN HOLM, CYRIL SHAPS, ANTHONY HAYGARTH, SAM WANAMAKER AND DAVID WARNER.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This magnificent television dramatisation of some of history’s darkest and most shameful events clocks in at a whopping four hundred and forty six minutes, or five easily digestible ninety minute blocks.

It’s the story of two fictional families in wartime Germany, the Weiss family and the Dorf family, and how they were both affected by Hitler’s coming to power in Germany, his anti-Jewish laws and his World War that laid waste to most of Europe.

The Weiss family are Jewish, and the Dorfs are not, and therein lies the reason why the lives of two such ordinary German families could have run along such divergent lines in the exact same time period, intersecting nonetheless in places during times of the most dreadful stress and terror.

Let’s get right down to business. Joseph and Berta Weiss are a typical German couple for the time, wealthy, cultured, civilised and decent people who love their children, Karl, Anna and Rudi, and want only the best for them.

When we meet them first, the Weisses are celebrating the mixed marriage (already frowned upon by the Nazis unofficially; soon to be outlawed in Germany by law) of their eldest son Karl, an artist (James Woods) to Inga Helms (Meryl Streep), a beautiful German Christian woman.

Every time Hitler and his Nazis, whom the Weisses are too genteel to call thugs and barbarians outright, lay down another anti-Jewish law, Joseph and Berta tell themselves that it won’t go on for much longer, that, after all, they’re Germans too, aren’t they, and Hitler couldn’t really mean them to be banished from their own country like lepers, could he…?

Berta’s Jewish Pops, a delightful old ex-soldier who proudly displays the Iron Cross he won for fighting for his country (Germany) in World War One, thinks that Germany isn’t stupid enough and cruel enough to treat her loyal German war veterans, regardless of their religion, like vermin. He finds out differently on the black, black night that history refers to as ‘Kristallnacht,’ or ‘The Night Of Broken Glass…’

Berta and Joseph leave it too late to flee Germany. This is partly down to Berta, a classical pianist and a gentle, peace-loving kind-hearted woman, who keeps stubbornly reiterating that she’s German, they’re all Germans, and this is their country too. Why should they up sticks and leave Germany to those jack-booted, black-suited thugs, the Nazis?

By the time her beloved husband, a doctor who’d go to any lengths to help someone in need, is deported to Poland to what eventually becomes the Warsaw Ghetto, Berta realises her mistake. They should all have read the signs and fled Germany when they had the chance…

Her son Karl has been arrested purely on the grounds of being Jewish and sent to Buchenwald, a concentration camp. Her daughter Anna has already suffered a terrible fate at the hands of the Nazis, and even Berta, her mother, doesn’t know just how terrible it is. Berta’s youngest son Rudi has run off to join the partisans, although his mother hasn’t a clue where he is or what he’s doing. She mightn’t ever even see him again.

Rudi, by the way, is a great character. No way is he going meekly like a lamb to the slaughter, as he sees his fellow Jews doing. He’s going to fight those bastard Nazis, and he’ll damn well make sure he takes as many of them down with him as we can. It’s good to have fighters like him and Uncle Sasha and Uncle Moses in a film that touches painfully on the awkward subject of Jewish apathy in the face of Nazi hostilities.

Inga is having to submit to being raped repeatedly by a Nazi in order to get her letters through to Karl in Buchenwald and, when Karl finds out what she’s had to endure to contact him, the ungrateful bastard turns against her. She even gets herself sent to Theresienstadt later on to be near him (he’s working here in their artist’s studio, believe it or not), but he still isn’t grateful for all her sacrifices. I’d leave him to rot where he is, seriously.

Erik Dorf is a handsome young lawyer and father of two who is looking for work. He joins the Nazi party because he needs a job, and also because his fanatical wife Marta is extremely ambitious for him and she thinks that ‘the Party’ is the way to go for their little family.

Erik doesn’t feel like he’s cut out to swagger about in a fancy Nazi uniform, pushing people about, but he gets used to it remarkably quickly. He quickly rises through the ranks after becoming invaluable to Reinhard Heydrich (David Warner doesn’t look much like this young blond god!), the man tasked with carrying out Hitler’s ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.’

Erik’s involvement in ‘Kristallnacht’ earns him a promotion. Before too much time has elapsed, he’s Major Dorf, with a sort of travelling commission as part of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate. His job seems to be speeding up the killing process and making the camps more efficient as death factories.

We see him assisting Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, with the introduction of Zyklon B, the pesticide used to gas millions of Jews. We see him attending a demonstration of the gas in action (‘Fantastic, utterly fantastic! It’s like a scene from Dante’s Inferno.’), against real people, and we can tell he hasn’t the stomach for it. Is this because he feels that what he’s doing is inherently wrong, or because he’s simply squeamish?

From time to time, we get the impression that Erik Dorf knows he’s going to hell for what he and his precious ‘Party’ have done, and yet there are other times when he can stand and impassively watch an atrocity taking place without batting an eyelid, such as when he’s a witness to the murder of 30,000 Jews at Babi Yar in the Ukraine in 1941. He’s fascinated at the way in which they passively go to their deaths, but I guess we’d all be the same if a bunch of guys were pointing machine-guns at us.

He constantly parrots the Nazi and SS mantra, that he’s only following orders, orders from above, orders from the highest office in the land. Does he really believe that it’s okay to murder women and children though, just on the basis that he’s ‘following orders?’ Does he really believe that blindly following orders justifies the massacres he constantly oversees?

Sometimes it looks like there’s a flicker of remorse behind his dead fish eyes but then, at other times, he’s a blank, a robot, an automaton. He’s the most important character in the show, in my opinion, because he helps us to see the logic, if you can call it that, behind the actions of the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

And, no matter what Dorf tries to make out after it’s all over, he’s a perpetrator. Even his wife, who makes her husband join the Nazi Party so she won’t have to stand in line at the butchers’ for the best cuts of meat any more, is a perpetrator. She makes Erik turn away Dr. Weiss when he comes to them for help when Karl has been arrested and incarcerated in Buchenwald. Goddammit, she’s nearly as much of a perpetrator as he is.

The mini-series does an excellent job of portraying the different situations that arose during the time of the Holocaust. We see the concentration camps, the Sonderkommando (the work details of Jewish prisoners who attended the gassings and afterwards burned the bodies in the crematoria) and the actual killing machinery. We see the Warsaw ghetto and the brave men who tried to defend it at the end. (Uncle Moses, you ROCK, and so does that old Rabbi who’s with you at the end!!!)

We see the Jewish Council (or Judenrat), of which Dr. Joseph Weiss is a member, having to select six thousand people a day to go on the dreaded transportations out of the ghetto to the death camps. We actually see the Jews on these transportations being bullshitted by the Nazis regarding this so-called ‘resettlement in the East.’ It’s not so bad, it’s only a work camp, and families can stay together, see? A wonderful new life awaits everyone in the East, now all aboard…

We see the Jews chosen by the Nazis to ‘police’ the ghettos, and we know how they too end up. ‘Don’t worry, Dr. Weiss, it’ll be my turn soon enough…’ We see the smuggling of food that went on in the ghetto even though the Nazis forbade it, but without the smugglers, even more people would have died in the gutters of starvation, a horrible slow death that no-one deserves.

We see the liquidation of the ghettos and how it was achieved, albeit with much bloodshed on both sides. We also see the Nazis’ T4 Euthanasia Programme (of the sick, the old and the disabled) in action, even though we might feel better for never having seen it at all.

We see Rudi taking part in the Sobibor concentration camp uprising and escape in October 1943, and his brother Karl being tortured by the Nazis over paintings he does in Theresienstadt that accurately represent the various desperate situations in the concentration camps, instead of the nice happy paintings commissioned by the Nazis.

We see how Theresienstadt in Prague was used as the ‘model’ concentration camp, trotted out whenever the International Committee of the Red Cross (the ICRC) wanted to send a few inspectors in. ‘Oh, we didn’t see any signs of any maltreatment,’ they invariably said when they’d completed their inspections there.

Well, d’uh! That’s what the Nazis wanted them to think. They went to a lot of trouble, with their fake coffee shops and their fake post office and their fake bank and their fake happy healthy prisoners, to make sure that the ICRC thought just what they wanted them to think.

The Jews are getting on grand here, the ICRC always said after a visit. They never seemed to question the right of the Nazis to imprison the Jews in the first place, but never mind. As long as they never saw any signs of maltreatment when they inspected the camps, well, I guess that’s all right then…

Tom Bell is utterly odious here as Adolf Eichmann, the number-cruncher of the entire Holocaust, and Ian Holm (Bilbo Baggins to you!) almost unrecognisable as Himmler, the third point of the ‘Final Solution’ triumvirate that had Eichmann and Heydrich as the other two points.

The assassination of Heydrich takes place off-screen, ditto the murder of a German bureaucrat/diplomat called Ernst Vom Rath by the Jewish Herschel Grynszpan, that prompted the shattering events of ‘Kristallnacht.’ 

Two one-off members of the cast of ‘Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em,’ starring Michael Crawford as the hapless Frank Spencer, can be seen in HOLOCAUST in small but important roles. See if you can guess which two…!

The whole mini-series is pretty much faultless. James Woods as Karl Weiss is a terrible husband- frankly Inga would be better off with that fat Nazi (a ‘fatzi?’) Heinz Mueller- but other than that I’ve no complaints. Top-notch viewing, recommended viewing in fact for students of the Holocaust. It certainly proves the point that, for bad men to triumph, all it takes is for good folks to do nothing…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE. (2019) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE. (2019) A FILM BY DOCUMENTARIAN JOE BERLINER.

BASED ON THE BOOK ‘THE PHANTOM PRINCE: MY LIFE WITH TED BUNDY’ BY ELIZABETH KENDALL.

STARRING ZAC EFRON, LILY COLLINS, KAYA SCODELARIO, HALEY JOEL OSMENT AND JOHN MALKOVICH.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘HACKSAW…’

‘What happened to her head…?’

‘Don’t wag your finger at me, young man!’

This film gets my seal of approval. What qualifies me to judge whether it’s any good? Well, you know the Milhouse Van Houten quote from THE SIMPSONS, ‘I knew the dog before he came to school?’ That’s me, lol. I was swotting up on Ted Bundy back in the mid-‘Noughties, long before the Cult Of Ted was experiencing its current magnificent rebirth, back when I was going through my ‘serial killer’ phase. Reading up on ’em, that is, not being one!

I read everything I could get my hands on about Ted, including his girlfriend Liz Kendall’s little book, ‘THE PHANTOM PRINCE.’ This was back when the book was out of print and hard to find. Now, given the wave of Ted-mania sweeping anew across the globe thanks to this film, I expect the books’s been re-printed in its billions with Zac Efron as Ted on the cover.

I also expect that Liz Kendall has penned a foreword, an afterword and an epilogue, just as crime writer Ann Rule regularly updated her famous book about Ted, THE STRANGER BESIDE ME, to include the ten-year appeals process and Ted’s eventual execution at the hands of the good folk at Florida State Penitentiary. If she hasn’t, well, then, I expect someone else has.

Now that we’ve established my credentials as an avid reader of Ted-lit, let’s talk about the film. It’s not really a film about the murders Ted committed, as Liz was unaware of these until quite late in the day. It’s a film about Liz’s life and relationship with Ted, as is the book, and charts their joint experiences from their first ever meeting in a Seattle college bar in 1969 to Ted’s execution for murder in 1989.

Liz couldn’t believe her luck, basically, that someone as handsome and charismatic as law student Ted should take an interest in her, a lowly office worker and single mother to a little girl. But Ted was interested, very interested indeed, and pretty soon the three of them, Ted, Liz and Liz’s daughter Molly (in the book she’s Tina) were a tight, compact little family unit.

Quite soon into the film, we start hearing about the disappearances and murders of attractive young women from Washington, Seattle, Utah, Oregon and Colorado, all the different places in which Ted has been living, in other words.

The women mostly all look alike, young, slim and pretty with long brown straight hair parted in the middle, but in the film we don’t hear about this, or whom Ted is really striking at when he picks up and destroys these virtual clones of each other.

Liz is as horrified as anyone else when Ted is arrested for these terrible crimes. In the book, she talks about his penchant for petty crime, for stealing and for unexplained disappearances of his own that she feels a bit ‘hinky’ about, as the Americans call it, but in the film it looks pretty much like it’s the first she’s hearing about Ted’s possible involvement in murder.

Zac Efron as Ted is superb. He’s captured the look, the charm and the charisma of the real Ted exactly. There’s even an uncanny physical resemblance between the two men when Efron is all ‘Ted-ded up’ in the wool cardigan with the heavy ‘Seventies lapels, or the tight yellow sweater Ted wore to the police line-up in which kidnap victim Carol Da Ronch recognised him out of several other men as ‘Officer Roseland.’ This being, of course, the phoney police officer who’d attempted to abduct her from the Fashion Place Shopping Mall on the pretext that her car had been broken into.

Let’s talk about Liz for a minute. Well played by Lily Collins, daughter of musician Phil Collins, she’s basically a mess from the time the news breaks about Ted to the end of the film. She smokes, she drinks, she hides herself away from life, her friends, and Ted, and her concentration at work suffers too. Well, it’s a lot to have going on, by anyone’s standards.

In the film, we see Liz trying to break away from Ted, trying to break up with him, even, but his protestations of undying love, fidelity and devotion are hard to say no to. Some of his letters to her are published in the book and he really, really had a way with words. She would have had to be superhuman not to be affected by his promises and metaphors.

The murders are not really depicted here, more alluded to, as it’s Liz’s story more than anyone else’s. We see her freaking out, understandably, each time Ted escapes from custody- twice he does this- and worrying herself sick in case he turns up on her doorstep. She even starts a relationship with a work colleague who seems to really care about her, but Ted keeps getting in the way. Every time she thinks she’s free and clear, up pops Ted.

I didn’t like the Carol Anne Boone character at all, the pushy woman who marries Ted in court and gives birth to his daughter while he’s still in prison. Not many people probably will, as she really seems to have blinkers on where Ted is concerned.

Even if she were faced with absolute irrefutable proof of his crimes, I genuinely don’t think it would have mattered to her. She wanted Ted and she set out to get him and she did get him, for what he was worth.

I daresay that even the most horrific crime scene photos and a signed confession from Ted himself, signed in his own blood, wouldn’t have made any difference to her ‘love’ for him. Why did I just apostrophise the word ‘love?’ No, of course I don’t doubt that she loved him. It’s just that the love of a woman for a man who kills women is a funny kind of love, isn’t it?

What this film really does well, whether or not it intends to, is to show how the groupie culture grew up around one of history’s most notorious serial killers. I think its main achievement will be to introduce a handsome young charismatic Ted to a new adoring generation of Ted-lovers, and they won’t care who he killed, raped or battered any more than the groupies from the ‘Seventies cared. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I think we know the answer to that.

My God, there’s real-life footage in the film of ‘Seventies groupies ooh-ing and aah-ing over Ted and saying things like, oh, a man that good-looking and intelligent couldn’t possibly be a KILLER…! It’s obvious that they’d date him in a shot if they had the chance.

They sat in the sweltering courtroom day after day, just waiting for a grin or a wink from Ted. Ted, of course, grandstanded and played to the gallery every chance he got, proving again and again the old adage that he who represents himself has a fool for a client.

I’m torn between thinking that these groupies are all just naïve fan-girls and wanting to elbow my way to the head of the Ted-love queue myself. It’s such a dichotomy. Why do women love men who kill, rape or beat women? I’m not qualified to answer that, but there are apparently whole books devoted to the subject. Maybe one of them has the answer to the sixty-four billion dollar question.

John Malkovich is good here as Judge Edward ‘Bless your heart’ Cowart, the guy who had no choice but to impose the death penalty on Ted after he was found guilty of the Chi Omega killings in Tallahassee, Florida in January 1978, during his second and last ever escape. (Florida State Penitentiary were adamant that Ted would not escape from THEIR facility…!) He’s the guy whose summing-up gave us the film’s rather clunky title, by the way.

Cowart was also the guy who rather strangely told Ted to ‘take care of yourself, pardner’ after he’d sentenced him to death. Tears flow down Ted’s cheeks as Cowart says that he, Ted, could have made a great attorney and that he’d love to have had Ted practising law in front of him but ‘you went a different way, pardner.’ Cowart comments on the shocking waste of human life he’d observed during the trial, and one gets the distinct feeling that he was including the ‘shocking waste’ of Ted’s own life as well.

The film shows clearly that Ted could have saved himself from the electric chair if he’d wanted to, by merely pleading guilty to the Chi Omega murders and attempted murders and the murder of twelve-year-old Kimberley Leach. Why he didn’t just plead guilty to save himself, I don’t know. Everyone knew he was guilty. Maybe he just couldn’t bear to have the world’s good opinion of him as a lovely young man altered.

In the film, we see the exact moment when Ted shows Liz his guilt for the first time. It’s a truly chilling moment. This is a terrific film, but it should probably come with a health warning for women, who are gravely in danger of falling under Ted’s spell when they view Zac Efron’s performance. Seeing his perfect ass in two nude shots won’t exactly help to put them off either, I’m afraid.

Another generation of groupies will emerge, as I said earlier. That will probably be the main long-term effect of this film. No doubt the egotistical Ted would be delighted to see how far his charisma, his power over people, over women, is able to stretch. I surely am the greatest trick in shoe-leather, he’s probably thinking right now from wherever he is.

A full thirty years after he was put to death in ‘Old Sparky,’ here we all are, still talking and thinking about him and wondering what makes him tick. Liz, I’m sure, was never able to forget him. She has her place in history now, anyway. I wonder what she feels about that…?

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

MEET VICTORIA… MY DREAM DOLL!!!

Purchased in a charity shop last week for only a few shillings, this is the Victorian-style doll I’ve wanted to own my whole life…! Sandra Harris.

 

HAMMER’S ‘DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE.’ (1968) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE. (1968) BASED ON CHARACTERS CREATED BY BRAM STOKER. DIRECTED BY FREDDIE FRANCIS. PRODUCED BY AIDA YOUNG. SCREENPLAY BY JOHN ELDER.

STARRING CHRISTOPHER LEE, RUPERT DAVIES, MARION MATHIE, GEORGE A. COOPER, MICHAEL RIPPER, BARRY ANDREWS, EWAN HOOPER, NORMAN BACON, BARBARA EWING AND VERONICA CARLSON.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is a stunning addition to the Hammer Dracula canon. It’s the third in the series to feature Christopher Lee as the Count, coming after DRACULA (1958) and DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1965). Christopher Lee is in excellent form as the titular Dracula, or ‘the fanged undead,’ as he’s rather pithily described in the promotional material.

Very fine form indeed, especially considering he’s supposed to have spent the last several years frozen under the icy-cold waters that flow near his castle in the mountains. Still looking very good too, just waiting for a clumsy man of the cloth to lose his footing, crack the ice, under which Dracula slumbers uneasily, with his bonce and bleed his blood on to the sleeping vampire’s lips.

The first half hour is truly magnificent and super-exciting. A little village in the Hammer-created ‘Mitt-Europe’ that Hammer do so well has had its church horribly desecrated by Dracula. The Prince of Darkness has chosen to ravish and murder a beautiful and busty young woman in its little bell-tower, leading to one of the most spectacular ‘reveals’ of a victim’s blood-drained cadaver in the studio’s history.

A visiting Monsignor, name of Ernest Mueller, responsible for all the churches in the area, is distressed to see that a shadow cast by the vampire’s castle, even though the vampire himself is supposed to be dead, is preventing the superstitious locals from attending church services. Any excuse not to go to Mass, eh?

The Monsignor decides to climb up to the castle himself, reluctantly accompanied by the parish priest who will soon be enslaved by Dracula and forced to work as his lackey, and exorcise the damned place once and for all.

Dracula, however, accidentally revived by the terrified parish priest, is more than pissed off to discover that his home has been befouled by the Monsignor and his shimmering golden cross.

He determines to seek revenge against the poor old Monsignor, for which purpose the action moves to the Monsignor’s sweet little home village of Keinenberg, a picturesque wee place surrounded by the mountains.

The Monsignor lives very comfortably indeed there with his brother’s widow, a fine figure of a woman called Anna who does everything for him except warm his bed, and her beautiful daughter Maria, the Monsignor’s niece.

A less worthy man than the Monsignor might be tempted to take advantage and enjoy a little mother-daughter action, but the Monsignor’s motives are as pure as the driven snow. Even while his buxom sister-in-law is kneeling at his feet putting on his slippers when he arrives home after a hard day’s exorcising, not once, seemingly, does he feel the urge to say: ‘Um, while you’re down there, Anna…!’

Played by Hammer’s latest discovery of the time, the ravishing blonde-haired Veronica Carlson, Maria first bounces charmingly on to the screen dressed in a gorgeous dusky pink dress complete with Little Red Riding Hood cloak.

She’s looking for her boyfriend Paul, a college student, so she can bring him to dinner to meet her mother and uncle, the Monsignor. And where else would she look for him but in Max’s public-house, where he pulls pints and is training to be a pastry chef under the not-so-watchful eye of the endlessly good-humoured Max?

Max is played by Hammer stalwart Michael Ripper, who surely, more than anyone else living or dead, was born to pull pints in a Hammer-created ‘Mitt-European’ alehouse, Gawd bless ‘is little ‘eart.

The getting-to-know-you dinner at the Monsignor’s house goes tits-up, and Paul is ordered out of the house on the grounds that he has the audacity to admit to his girlfriend’s uncle that he’s an atheist, goddammit, but never mind all that for now.

The Monsignor and his family have bigger problems than the curly-headed, happy-go-lucky Paul, who actively encourages his goody-two-shoes girlfriend to visit him at night via the surprisingly dizzy rooftops of Keinenberg, if you can believe that. No true gentleman would ever permit his girlfriend to do such a dangerous thing, especially when she’s lacking in, shall we say, a little blood…? What an ungallant cad he is.

Anyway, Dracula has found the perfect way to get back at the Monsignor, and that’s through his lovely niece Maria. Maria’s seduction by the Count is not as knee-tremblingly sexy as Melissa Stribling’s in the 1958 DRACULA, but it’s a nice little scene nonetheless.

It involves open bedroom windows, pleasant terraces overlooking the mountains and another mesmerised woman walking hesitantly backwards towards her bed, while gazing up the whole time into red bloodshot eyes, like a rabbit fascinated by the snake that’s poised to pounce on it.

Dracula’s other girlfriend here, Max’s busty brunette barmaid Zena, has a bit more chutzpah and oomph, if you get me, than the rather prissy Maria, but Dracula treats poor Zena appallingly. Which only makes women like me fancy him all the more, heh-heh-heh. Women in these Dracula films are here for two reasons only, to be used and abused, and to damn well be the eye candy while they’re doing it, lol. Ah well, it’s nice, at least, to know where you stand.

Poor Maria gets dragged from pillar to post as well by the Count, in her bare feet and white nightie to boot, but at least Dracula doesn’t try to bury her alive like he does Melissa Stribling in the 1958 film.

It’s up to Paul, the not-very-swotty college student and would-be pastry chef, to save not only Maria from the evil clutches of Dracula, but the village of Keinenberg as well. Is the curly-headed one up to the task…?

In this film, a neat little addition to the folklore surrounding the fanged undead is included, in the form of a caveat that decrees that you can’t just stake Dracula through the heart and he’ll obligingly die. You’ve got to mumble Latin words from the Bible over him as well, or he won’t croak. Now I wonder where on God’s green earth we can find a padre to do the necessary at this hour of the night…?

I love the scene where Zena is being chased through the forest at night, by the mysterious black coach with the four black horses with the black plumes on their heads. Such a fearsome carriage could only belong to one man. The poor horses seem to get whipped a lot by the Count in this film, but I’m fairly certain that it’s only pretend-whipping, lol. I love George A. Cooper as the landlord of the tavern in the village with the cursed church, by the way. He’s a terrific actor.

This is a gorgeous-looking film. The forty-six-year-old Christopher Lee is still very much engaged in the series, and it really shows. (He was at his sexiest in his forties and fifties, and even his sixties, if you ask me.) Some people say that he zoned out a bit towards the end but I don’t know. Down in the murky, leaky basement of Max’s tavern (it’s a good job that Max never seems to go down there!), the centre of operations where his black coffin rests imposingly on blocks of wood, he’s very much the master of all he surveys.

He’s magnificent here as the Count, and his two chosen concubines, Zena and Maria, are très easy on the eye as well. Michael Ripper is behind the bar in the tavern, dispensing homespun wisdom along with the ale and sausage rolls and meat pies. God’s in his heaven, and all’s well with the world of Hammer.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956) and IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958): A DOUBLE BILL OF B-MOVIE REVIEWS BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956) AND IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE. (1958) A DOUBLE BILL OF SCI-FI B-MOVIE REVIEWS BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I watched this pair of little beauts back-to-back and they seemed to go really well together. Both black-and-white, they each feature a beefcake ‘Fifties male, complete with pointy-bosomed female counterpart (in a supporting role in every sense of the word, of course!), whose job it is to save the world (EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS) or the crew of his spaceship (IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE) from perils posed by creatures from Outer Space, and of course it wouldn’t be a spoiler to say that they each do a bang-up job.

The excellent stop-motion animation special effects in EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS were done by stop-motion animator extraordinaire Ray Harryhausen of JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS fame. (Also CLASH OF THE TITANS, ONE MILLION YEARS B.C., IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA, 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH, among others!)

When you see his name attached, you know the effects are going to be of top quality and in fact they are. When those naughty flying saucers are crashing into the various government buildings and monuments, you can tell by the way they’re crumbling to the ground that it’s the work of a certain Mr. RH. You guys know who I mean, right?

The film was inspired by the bestselling non-fiction book FLYING SAUCERS FROM OUTER SPACE by a chap called Major Donald Keyhoe. It features a newly-married husband and wife team (who haven’t even had time to consummate their marriage yet, I might add!)  battling against aliens in real, honest-to-goodness flying saucers that come in just the shapes and sizes we normally imagine them to so do.

The Saucer People attack the compound in which Dr. Russell Marvin- the beefcake- and his jiggly-bosomed missus Carol- as his secretary, of course!- are working on the American Space Programme. The Saucer People, to give them their due, hadn’t wanted to attack Skyhook, the base for the project, but it seems that the message saying that they wanted to come in peace was mislaid or misinterpreted somehow or reached the Earthlings too late.

This kind of incompetence is clearly the work of Dr. Marvin’s new wife-cum-secretary. He needs to put the dizzy wench over his knee and beat some efficiency into her with the flat of his hand, which I believe was perfectly legal and, in fact, encouraged, back in those days. She’ll certainly think twice before failing to correctly and swiftly interpret a message from Outer Space in the future, the wasp-waisted little hussy. Love the aliens’ metallic suits and the protective force field, by the way.

Anyway, talk about ‘take us to your leader…!’ After picking Carol’s Dad’s brains (quite literally), the aliens coolly announce that they want the Marvins to organise a conference of world leaders so that the aliens can negotiate their occupation-slash-takeover of Earth. Flamin’ cheek!

It’s up to the sex-starved Dr. Russell and his missus then to nobly and unselfishly delay their wedding night (and they’re so hot ‘n’ horny too!) so that they can figure out a way to stop these power-mad aliens from taking over the planet. It’s actually surprisingly easy to do. Putting the kybosh on the aliens, I mean. World leaders, take note for future reference, lol.

IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE is great fun altogether. It might even have been the inspiration for the screenplay of Ridley Scott’s phenomenally famous ALIEN film. A handsome captain of a space expedition to Mars is accused of murdering his crew members for a few lousy old tins of spam and kidney beans. (How come nothing nice ever comes in tins?) When you see the film, you’ll understand what I mean.

Anyway, this fella, this Colonel Edward Carruthers, claims that his fellow crew members were murdered by an Alien Life Form. A load of old poppycock and balderdash, right? Well, we’ll see, won’t we?

Now he’s being brought home to Earth from Mars by a new crew (well, he broke his old one, lol!), and he’s being watched constantly so that this new crew can find out if he was telling the truth about what happened to the last lot.

They very quickly discover that the beefy Carruthers was being straight up about the Alien Life Form. It seems like something rather nasty has managed to stow away on their dinky little nuclear-powered spaceship (it’s 1973 in the film, by the way) and It has every intention of doing to this crew what It did to the last.

It’s a somewhat vampiric creature, as it stays alive by absorbing the vital bodily fluids of its victims and leaves them as a dried-out shell, rather like what Imhotep the Mummy does to his victims in the first two terrific films in THE MUMMY series by Stephen Sommers. Sucking out their essence and so on. It’s a pretty icky business and the end result ain’t particularly photogenic.

In fact, the film was originally known as IT! THE VAMPIRE FROM BEYOND SPACE. The film-makers were right to change it, as audiences would have been expecting their vampire to be a suave, black-caped neck-biter with a sexy Hungarian accent and piercing eyes, and that would have been a different film altogether.

In fact, on exiting the movie theatres back in the day, there might even have been cries of: ‘There was no bleedin’ vampire in that fuckin’ film!’ and there would just have been too much confusion all round.

I personally think that the Creature here is cuddly and adorable, and that he looks like a cross between THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and Ray Harryhausen’s own marvellous handiwork in 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH. He’s violent and mean-minded, sure, but he’s a very misunderstood alien being. I think I could change him. Tame him. Save him. It’d take some time but I think I could do it. Then maybe he could save me, lol.

The beefy Carruthers, also misunderstood and accused of a crime he didn’t commit, does a lot of lovey-dovey hand-holding here with crew member Ann Anderson, who’s supposed to be the gal of the spaceship’s new boss, Colonel Ben Van Heusen. Ben is a dreamboat too, but maybe he doesn’t hold hands and gaze soulfully into a gal’s eyes the way Carruthers does.

By the way, if you think you recognise crew member Eric Royce, you’re right. The actor Dabbs Greer spent many years as the Reverend Alden in the super-popular television series, LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE. (Did anyone else fancy Almanzo Wilder, or was it just me?) Dabbs Greer also played supporting roles in a bazillion other films and television series and he lived to be a respectable ninety, which is the age I’m expecting to live to myself.

I don’t know how I know this. I just have this very clear vision of myself at ninety, still quaffing wine and churning out books no-one reads every year, and still egotistically expecting everyone to agree with every word out of my denture-filled mouth or I’ll put ’em on my Enemies List. That list is getting awfully long. At some stage, we’re almost certainly gonna need a bigger boat…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor