TED BUNDY. (2002) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

TED BUNDY. (2002) DIRECTED AND CO-WRITTEN BY MATTHEW BRIGHT.

STARRING MICHAEL REILLY BURKE, BOTI BLISS, TRACEY WALTER AND TOM SAVINI.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Well, out here is the court of Ted! Here, what I say is law!’

I saw this film on video- yes, that’s right, video, lol!- back in 2002, and it scared the living daylights out of me. Since then, I’ve toughened up a lot and I’ve read a lot of the books about American serial killer Ted Bundy, so I’m well able for it nowadays. It’s still a very gruesome watch, mind you.

What I like about this version is that it doesn’t really glamorise Ted and his awful crimes. The more recent film, starring Zac Efron as the man himself, was a drastically sanitised re-telling of Ted’s story– EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE (2019)– and portrayed the brutal woman-killer and rapist as a heart-throb beloved of women everywhere.

This film really shows the ugly side of Ted. Okay, sure, he’s good-looking and well-dressed, although I personally think those daft dicky-bows and checked jackets make him look a bit dorky. All he’s really got to commend him to women is a pretty enough face and the gift of the gab, and that’s all you need with some women.

But here, even in the opening scenes, set in the early 1970s, we see him as the kleptomaniac Peeping Tom and disgusting chronic masturbator that he really was, making those ugly weird gurning faces when he ejaculates or when he looks at himself in the mirror. Was he a narcissist as well? Probably!

His modus operandi is well known by now. We see him chatting up attractive young brunette women smoothly and slickly, often wearing a cast on a ‘busted’ arm so that women will help him to his car with his books or whatever else.

When they’re not looking, he hits them viciously over the head with a tire iron and shoves them in the car. Then he takes them to a deserted place, where he rapes, tortures and murders them. Nice guy, huh? He returns, often several times, to the body ‘dump sites’ to have sex with the rotting corpses, until such time as they’ve become too decomposed for his enjoyment.

We see him putting make-up on a woman’s severed head which he’s brought home and is keeping in his house. Disturbingly, he carries the wrapped body of an unconscious or dead woman out of her house and into his car in front of a passing group of four people and a dog, who apparently don’t see anything strange at all in what he’s doing.

In between the abductions, rapes and brutal murders, he studies law (sporadically), works as a volunteer in a telephone crisis centre (that’s a bit like the Samaritans over here) and checks in with his girlfriend, single parent and student Lee and her young daughter, for a dose of much-need family life. After one murder in particular, he’s starving with the hunger and Lee obligingly cooks a meal for him!

This film doesn’t make Lee (based on Elizabeth Kloepfer) look too good either. In fact, here, she’s a whingy, whiny nightmare who wants to keep tabs on Ted round the clock, but Ted has the wanderlust (he cruises for women constantly in his little Volkswagen Bug) and he just doesn’t operate that way.

She whines at his habit of seeing other women but doesn’t take any decisive action, she asks him what he’s thinking when he’s quiet (a big no-no), she pesters him about meeting his parents when it’s clear there’s some mystery there that he doesn’t want discussed, and she doesn’t question it when she finds a pair of handcuffs in Ted’s car that he says he’s never seen before in his life.

She’s not comfortable about being tied up and asked to play dead when they’re in bed together, but she doesn’t stand up to him because she’s weak and afraid of being on her own. I’m not judging her for that. I’ve done the same thing myself in the not-so-distant past. It’s a very ‘woman’ thing to do, shure.

Anyway, most of Ted’s ‘big moments’ are in here, but with the womens’ names mostly changed. There’s his spectacular abductions of, not one, but two, women from Lake Sammamish State Park on the one day in sunny July, his two escapes from prison, and his horrific attack on the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida, during the second of these escapes.

We see his attempted kidnap of Carol da Ronch (1974) from the Fashion Place Mall, Utah, by the phoney ‘Officer Roseland,’ and one of Ted’s most shameful accomplishments, the abduction and murder of twelve-year-old schoolgirl, Kimberley Leach. Not that the other murders weren’t shameful too, but you know what I mean. A child, a twelve-year-old little girl…

The justice system threw the book at Ted after that. Retribution for his heinous crimes eventually caught up with him on January the twenty-fourth, 1989, when he was executed in the electric chair.

He manages to have sex in prison (bribing the guards was a common practice) and even conceives a child while inside, a daughter, with his new girlfriend and champion, Carol Ann Boone. Although we see the sex, there’s no mention of a child here.

We see the big bold brave Ted bawling like a baby when he has to have his head shaved and his rectum packed with cotton wool prior to talking that last walk to ‘Old Sparky.’ It’s as plain as day that all his pity is for himself, though, and not for the beautiful young women with families and talents and potential whose lives he stole.

What happened to ‘the court of Ted,’ Ted…? A big man around women, he shrinks and shrivels inside himself when he’s dealing with big tough men who are not going to stand any bullshit from him.

Like I said, this film doesn’t glamorise Ted, but instead makes him look like the cowardly weasel he really is. EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE introduced Ted to another generation of young female groupies, but it’s not really the most accurate picture of the man and his crimes. This film from 2002 comes pretty close, I think. Check it out, but be aware that it’ll give you the willies.

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

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE: THE 2018 NETFLIX TV SERIES. ©

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE: THE TELEVISION SERIES. (2018) CREATED AND WRITTEN BY MIKE FLANAGAN. BASED ON THE BOOK BY SHIRLEY JACKSON.

STARRING CARLA GUGINO, TIMOTHY HUTTON, MICHIEL HUISMAN, ELIZABETH ANN REASER, OLIVER JACKSON-COHEN, KATE SIEGEL, VICTORIA PEDRETTI AND ANNABETH GISH.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Whatever walked there, walked alone…’

Wow. This ten-part series makes for excellent television drama, but I suppose we’d better start by saying that it’s not as good as the original film of Shirley Jackson’s superb horror novel; how could it be? But it’s pretty damn good television viewing, even though it wasn’t as scary as I’d been led to believe and there’s an awful lot of talking and repetition in it.

It’s a ghost story, told in a non-linear fashion, so a bit you see in one episode might not make sense at all until another episode repeats the thing and explains it to you. Yes, that might be annoying for some, but the plot is really well written and complex and, even though it seems to have a million things to keep track of and an equal number of loose ends to tie up, it doesn’t do a bad job at all of tying everything up in a nice big bow at the end.

Okay, so it’s the summer of 1992 and the Crain family- the parents, Hugh and Olivia, and their five sprogs Stephen, Shirley, Theodora and twins Luke and Nell, come to live in the titular Hill House to do to it what the Americans call ‘flipping,’ that is, they’re going to do it up a bit and sell it on to make a fortune. That’s the plan, anyway.

But Hill House is haunted to buggery, as we all very well know, and it isn’t long before the house begins to exert its evil supernatural pull over the family Crain. Little Luke has an ‘imaginary’ friend called Abigail, who comes out of the nearby woods to play with him.

He is also haunted by a terrifyingly tall man with a walking stick, who floats a good twelve inches above the ground. His twin, Nell, is tormented by visitations from a scary-sounding someone she calls ‘the Bent-Neck Lady.

Theodora learns that she has a ‘psychic’ touch: if she touches something or someone, she can derive psychic information from it. She takes to wearing gloves every day, however, to prevent this from happening. Well, not everything she learns is necessarily welcome information, so you can’t really blame her, can you?

Dad is severely disturbed by the sounds of scraping, banging and tapping he hears in the basement he’s trying to de-mould, and as for Mom…! Mom probably has a sign tattooed across her forehead that only ghosts can see, a sign saying: ‘Haunt me, please!’

She’s a drippy, hippy-dippy spiritual type to begin with, gliding through the rooms in a succession of fabulous long nighties and robes, with her long dark hair streaming out behind her, but when the house starts to impact on her already fragile-seeming emotional state, she becomes a million times flightier.

She sees dead people and chats away to them as if they’re real, and she’s extremely susceptible to the ghosts’ warped mind games, being highly suggestible when they plant ideas of evil-doing in her increasingly damaged mind.

Something happens in the house in 1992 that sees the family (well, nearly all the family) fleeing for their lives, like the family in THE AMITYVILLE HORROR. The story moves back-and-forth over the ten episodes between the past and the present, and it won’t be until the very last few frames in the very last episode that we discover just what happened in that cursed house that fateful summer.

The Crain siblings are very messed-up adults. It’s pretty obvious that their stay in Hill House has impacted upon them big-time in different ways. One is a funeral director and a control freak. One is a heroin addict. Another is a child psychologist, responsible for working out if children have been sexually or otherwise abused. Her job makes her miserable. It’s a good group so far, isn’t it?

Another of the siblings is a flaky mess whom everyone in the family feels is a suicide waiting to happen, and yet another writes books about hauntings in general and Hill House in particular, books that get their entire family’s back up. I told you it was a good group…!

The siblings haven’t had any answers from their parents, in particular from their father, regarding what exactly happened in Hill House to tear the family apart that summer. Now, their lives are so messed-up and mixed-up that they’re going to need some answers, whether their parents want to give them these answers or not. Why not start by asking what was behind the locked door of the Red Room, for which they never had a key when they lived there…?

There are definitely references in the series to the original book by Shirley Jackson. Two of the sisters are called Theodora and Nell, there’s writing on the wall and banging on the doors, and the weird caretaker couple, the Dudleys, won’t stay on in the house in the night, in the dark, when it’s night, after dark, lol.

Some of the scares are extremely effective; others less so. I’d definitely recommend this Netflix series. It’s good writing and good acting; it’s a bit annoying and confusing in places, full of dreams and fantasies and with all the females in it sporting identical hairstyles, but it’s mostly good scary fun that puts me very much in mind of Stephen King’s THE SHINING.

I believe that Stephen King, master of horror and a huge fan of Shirley Jackson’s book, gives THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, the series, his seal of approval. It has mine too, for what it’s worth, so go forth and watch it and enjoy it, and just make sure the Bent-Neck Lady doesn’t find you alone in the house, in the night, in the dark…

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

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.

SHOAH. (1985) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

SHOAH. (1985) DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY CLAUDE LANZMANN.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

The word ‘Shoah’ means ‘Holocaust.’ SHOAH is French film drector Claude Lanzmann’s masterpiece. I’m sure he did other things in his life besides making SHOAH, but, even if he didn’t, it wouldn’t matter a jot, because SHOAH is so utterly magnificent.

It’s a film in the form of a series of four documentaries, each about two to two-and-a-half hours in length, each containing multi-lingual footage of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Polish witnesses and bystanders and even German perpetrators, by now scattered all over the globe, and the intense, in-depth, wonderfully telling conversations he held with them.

The film took a long time to make (perfection takes time), and was a labour of love by a man who clearly felt a terrible sadness and anger for the hellish injustices the Jews of Europe were forced to endure from 1933-1945.

It’s such a long piece of work that one review could never do it full justice. I’m nervous about attempting it at all, in fact. What I’ve decided to do is to take you through a few paragraphs regarding the speakers who affected me the most, starting with Simon Srebnik, a man with a beautiful singing voice who was made to sing for the SS during his time in the concentration camp known as Chelmno.

The villagers of Chelmno gather round him now, fascinated, saying that they clearly remember his sublime singing. It remains unsaid that they never attempted to rescue him from the clutches of the Nazis, even though he was just a child at the time and should have stirred any parental instincts lodging in the bosoms of the people of the town.

In Treblinka, another concentration camp town (this camp was one of the most feared), villagers would make the throat-slitting sign at the Jews as they chugged by in the cattle trains. We only wanted to warn them, we weren’t jeering at them, they maintain now, but it’s hard to believe.

Claude Lanzmann was brave enough to flip the coin over and speak to some of the perpetrators. Former SS man assigned to Treblinka, Franz Suchomel, ancient and infirm at the time of filming, chats away happily about his time in the camp, informing us knowledgeably that the naked young women forced to ‘queue’ for the gas chamber often voided their bowels in terror while they waited. Because that happens, you know, he adds anecdotally. Oh, we don’t doubt it for a second, Herr Suchomel.

Joseph Oberhauser, a former SS man stationed at Belzec, and now a successful bar owner, refuses to engage with Lanzmann at all with regard to his Nazi past. ‘I have my reasons,’ he confides in a whisper across the counter of his very own bar. Don’t worry your head about it, Herr Oberhauser. We can imagine.

Martha Michelsohn, the wife of a Nazi school-teacher in Chelmno and a very cold fish indeed, recalls how seeing and hearing the Jews’ agony as they were rounded up every day and taken to Chelmno ‘got on her nerves’ after a while. Well, that’s enough to get on anyone’s nerves. We do, of course, sympathise, Frau Michelsohn.

The Polish people of Grabow are filmed saying they knew that the town’s Jews would be killed at Chelmno. Some of them live now in houses forcibly vacated by the Jews, and yet they struggle to remember the names of the folks whose houses they’ve taken. And nowhere do they mention any steps taken by the townspeople to try to prevent their Jewish neighbours from being hauled off to the camps.

Some of the women of Grabow go a step further and say that the Jewish women of their town were lazy and vain and didn’t bother to work in case it ruined their beauty. They were even glad that the ‘Jewesses’ were taken away by the Nazis to the concentration camps, because they’d been competing with the local women for the affections of the Polish men…

In an extremely emotive interview, the Jewish barber Abraham Bomba cuts the hair of a client in his salon while recalling how he was forced to cut the hair of the Jewish women in Treblinka. They cowered in the barber’s chair, naked and terrified, on the very last leg of their journey to the gas chamber, while Abraham tried to relax them and make them feel like they were just getting a nice new haircut before moving into the camp properly.

Rudolf Vrba, handsome, well-dressed, confident, obviously doing well for himself, tells Claude Lanzmann how he and a friend escaped from Auschwitz in April of 1944, after spending the war trying to organise some kind of Resistance effort.

Historian Raul Hilberg, a very learned and likeable man, reads from the diary of Adam Czerniakow, a tragic figure. Once the President of the ‘Jewish Council’ in the Warsaw Ghetto, he committed suicide when he realised that the thousands of Jews the Nazis were forcing him to round up for ‘deportation and resettlement in the East’ were, in fact, being put on a train to the nearest concentration camp and extermination.

The diary, a remarkable document, gives us a clear picture of life in the ghetto. Starvation, typhus, overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, corpses piling up in the street and the constant terror of the Nazi ’round-ups,’ in which pretty much anyone, regardless of age, sex, class or status, could be told to present themselves at the train station first thing in the morning for the infamous ‘deportation and resettlement in the East,’ after which they were rarely, if ever, seen again.

I did not at all like or trust Franz Grassler, a Nazi administrator mentioned in the diary, whose job it was to liaise with the Jewish ghetto officials. He plays down his ‘junior’ role in the Nazi machine, telling Lanzmann that he (the director) is ‘hugely over-estimating’ Grassler’s power or importance in the administration.

Grassler hardly ever visited the ghetto anyway, he claims, because he was afraid of catching the typhus that was rife there, and he didn’t know that the Jews were being systematically murdered either, honest he didn’t.

There’s a beautiful shot of Adam Czerniakow’s headstone in the snow. Some of the images, even of former concentration camps, crematoria and cemeteries, are breath-takingly gorgeous to look at, even though we know full well the evil that was done there.

The stone buildings of Auschwitz in the rain, a graveyard carpeted with a blanket of snow, the burning evening sun exploding in a ball of light over a train station that once conveyed the Jews to their death in the gas chambers. The images are as good as, if not better than, what you’ll see in some art galleries. The cinematography is astoundingly brilliant in every single shot.

Claude Lanzmann is an extraordinarily clever interviewer. He gives all the ‘baddies,’ as we may be forgiven for calling them, all the rope they need to hang themselves. ‘So, you really can’t remember the names of the Jews whose house you’re living in, hahaha, isn’t that hilarious?’

Lulled into a false sense of security, the villagers laugh merrily along with him, while admitting without a trace of shame or guilt that, no, they can’t remember the names at all, or, was it, wait now, were they, by any chance, the So-and-So’s…?

They don’t seem to have a clue how bad they come out looking in all of this. For evil to succeed, all it takes is for good men to stand by and do nothing. Well, they didn’t do nothing, exactly. I mean, they watched, didn’t they? That’s doing something. Isn’t it…?

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

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.

THE ANNIVERSARY. (1968) A BITCHY BLACK COMEDY FROM HAMMER FILMS REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THE ANNIVERSARY. (1968) HAMMER FILM PRODUCTIONS/SEVEN ARTS PRODUCTIONS. BASED ON THE PLAY OF THE SAME NAME BY BILL MCILWRAITH. DIRECTED BY ROY WARD BAKER. PRODUCED BY JIMMY SANGSTER. SCREENPLAY BY JIMMY SANGSTER.

STARRING BETTE DAVIS, JAMES COSSINS, JACK HEDLEY, CHRISTIAN ROBERTS, SHEILA HANCOCK AND ELAINE TAYLOR.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This film is a Hammer black comedy rather than a Hammer horror. Or, to look at it another way, it’s only a horror in the sense that it’s a film about one of the most horrible families you could ever hope to watch on a cinema screen.

I believe the movie was a commercial success, and it’s certainly very well acted (it was a stage play to begin with), but there’s something about it that makes my skin crawl a little bit. Am I in the minority here, or does anyone else feel a little bit uncomfortable watching THE ANNIVERSARY…?

Bette Davis, the grande olde dame of the silver screen, is undoubtedly magnificent here as Mrs. Taggart, a shrewdly manipulative old biddy who rules her family with an iron fist in a glove carved from solid granite.

From her entrance at the top of the stairs in her palatial family home, clad in a fire-engine red dress to match the eye-patch over her damaged left peeper, she steals every single scene she’s a part of and leaves the younger ones standing, though they’re no slouches either in the acting stakes.

Old Ma Taggart’s husband has been as dead as the dodo for a good ten years. Nonetheless, every year on the anniversary of their marriage, Ma gathers her ‘beloved’ family around her for an excruciating, nails-on-a-blackboard-style get-together in which the suspicions, the rivalries and the dislike-verging-on-hatred that simmer inside the individual family members during the year bubble to the surface and spill over into all-out war.

Ma is at the centre of everything that’s rotten about the Taggart family. She controls the family purse strings and, therefore, her three sons. By choosing to remain at the head of the Taggart construction company herself and make her minions dance to her tune, it’s clear she sees herself as the boss of all she surveys. My money, my rules, is how she sees it, and divide and conquer is, seemingly, how she prefers it.

She dispenses insults, barbs and little digs with the same coldly glittering panache with which she might mix you a drink at the family bar. The dialogue is bitchy, quite witty in places and comprises the blackest of black comedy, and the very best lines, of course, all go to the girl with the Bette Davis Eyes, La Davis herself.

Her three sons have all the problems you might expect in a family where the mother is the dominant one, the driving force in their lives. It would be hard for any of them to be truly successful in their lives and happy in their relationships without first getting out from under the thumb of their dreadful mother, whose modus operandi is to ferret out a person’s weak spot and beat them over the head with it until they cry ‘mercy!’

James Cossins (FAWLTY TOWERS, SOME MOTHERS DO ‘AVE ‘EM) plays the eldest son Henry. He seems like a gentle, sweet man, but he so far has been unable to sustain a romantic relationship and probably never will, not while his malicious mumsy continues to manipulate him regarding his cross-dressing and knicker-nicking tendencies.

Ma alternately shields him from the legal repercussions of his crimes (well, stealing women’s knickers off a clothesline is illegal, isn’t it?) and holds it over him and his brothers as a threat. As in: ‘If you won’t do exactly what I want, I’ll hand poor dear Henry over to the police and he can get treatment for his ‘ailments’ in a mental hospital…!’ The auld bitch. How can she threaten poor dear Henry like that? Poor guy doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.

Terry, the middle son, isn’t up to much. Sure, he’s given his old bag of a mother five grandchildren with his wife Karen, but he gets constantly bawled out by Karen for not standing up to Mrs. Taggart. Karen is a relentless nag.

Watch her in CARRY ON CLEO, giving endless grief to her hen-pecked husband Hengist Pod, played by Kenneth Connor, and you can easily imagine her tearing strips out of Terry too. Terry is not his own man. He gets dominated by his overbearing mother and nagged to death by his wife. I don’t think he’s happy.

Tom, the youngest, is a womaniser who brings a different girl to ‘the Anniversary-with-a-capital-A’ every year. This year he’s brought the pretty blonde Shirley to flaunt in his mother’s face.

There are rather dark sexual undertones in this storyline. Ma Taggart is horribly jealous of anyone who grabs her precious youngest son’s attention, and she’s used to dispatching his girlfriends swiftly before they get their claws into Tom and their feet under the Taggart table.

Old Ma Taggart might have some slight bit of difficulty in dislodging this little lady from out of the family tree. Shirley is determined to be Tom’s wife, and, as she’s pregnant, she might just have more of a chance than any of the others did.

She seems to want to dominate Tom in the same way that his mother does, though, and Tom seems to have a bit more gumption than either Henry or Terry, so he may not tolerate this from Shirley. ‘Out of the frying pan…’

Shirley makes the mistake of trying to ‘stand up’ to Mrs. Taggart. This, as the mouthy Karen could have told her, is a terrible road to go down. No woman will ever be good enough for one of Mrs. Taggart’s precious sons. Even the flawed, broken ones, she wants to keep close to her for ever. That’s probably the way she likes ’em best, to be honest with you.

It’s an unhealthy foursome, Ma Taggart and her three sons, like a stinking pulsating mass of something icky from a science fiction movie that needs to be zapped, incinerated and then scraped away the next morning by the council. And what happens on the night of ‘the Anniversary?’ itself? Well, it’s family-only, I’m afraid. No randomers need apply. Mummy wouldn’t like it…

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:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

STRAW DOGS. (1971) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.©

STRAW DOGS. 1971. BASED ON THE BOOK ‘THE SIEGE OF TRENCHER’S FARM’ BY GORDON M. WILLIAMS. DIRECTED BY SAM PECKINPAH. STARRING DUSTIN HOFFMAN AND SUSAN GEORGE.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Jesus. I got ’em all.’

‘Rats is life, Mr. Sumner, sir.’

Every man has a breaking point.

‘They were practically licking my body.’

‘This is where I live. This is me. I will not allow violence against this house.’

This is the kind of film that has the power to disturb you long after you’ve watched it. It’s one of my all-time favourites. It was banned from home viewing for a time, it’s that controversial. David Sumner, masterfully played by Dustin Hoffman, is a mild-mannered American mathematician who relocates with his young wife Amy to the remote Cornish farmhouse near the village of Wakely where Amy grew up.

The secretive, close-mouthed and mysterious locals look askance on them from the get-go. Even though Amy was once one of their own, she went away to America to live and has now returned with a husband so alien to them that he might as well waggle his antennae at them and say ‘nanu-nanu.’

They laugh openly at everything he says and does, and they sneer at him behind his back too, while ‘sir-ring’ him to death in a pseudo-servile fashion to his face. You don’t belong here, they’re telling him with ever sneer, every snipe, every sarcastic remark.

Amy is beautiful, sexy, vibrant, the kind of woman whom mild-mannered mathematicians probably don’t end up with all that often. Unless you’re Professor Frink from THE SIMPSONS, lol. Hoyvin glayvin…!

From the moment she appears on screen, sashaying down the main street of the village, braless in a tight white top with her nipples making a guest appearance of their very own, it’s hard not to take your eyes off her. One immediately gets a strong sense that the weedy little David Sumner has his hands full with her.

Everything about Amy screams exaggerated sexuality. Every man in the village wants to have sex with her, even if they already have, back when she lived there before with her father. (Looking at no-one in particular, Charlie Venner…)

Janice Heddon, a teenage girl from the worst family in the village (her father Tom, played by the superb Peter Vaughan, is nothing but a lawless alcoholic thug), tries to ape Amy’s easy, overt sexuality and it later becomes her downfall.

Amy and David’s marriage is clearly a troubled one. She passive-aggressively tries to provoke him every day into being the kind of man she really wants him to be, ie, a brutal he-man like Charlie Venner, who’s not averse to using his fists on women as well as men, but David Sumner, mild-mannered astral mathematician, won’t rise to the bait, which makes her desperately unhappy.

She flirts with and prick-teases the locals to ease her boredom and her feelings of dissatisfaction with David, and then complains when they react by having a good old stare at her unfettered boobies. She has every man in the village in a right old tizzy over her lustrous blonde locks, huge eyes thickly fringed with dark lashes and slim, sexy figure in mini-skirts and boots.

David and Amy have hired a group of these locals to fix their garage roof for them. They are a motley crew of deviants and inbred-seeming undesirables, as indeed half the population of the village appears to be. Big, blond and brawny Charlie Venner seems to have a past sexual history with Amy. He looks at her as if he’d like to devour her whole. They have considerable chemistry together.

Norman Scutt is just plain sleazy. Chris Cawsey, the giggling rat-catcher, is probably the most repulsive of the bunch. (‘Don’t call me Len, you little prick! I’m a bishop!’) While working on the roof, all four men, including one of Tom Heddon’s sons, watch Amy’s comings and goings intently.

She says they make her uncomfortable but if she’s so uncomfortable, her hubby David points out, and as we mentioned ourselves before, why doesn’t she put on a bra…? You can’t go around without one, he says, and expect that kind not to stare. Hmmm. No comment from me here. I’m just the reviewer, I ain’t here to judge.

The air of threat and menace that underlies the whole first half of the film begins to manifest itself materially with the anonymous killing and stringing up of Amy’s cat. Then David is conned into going with Cawsey, Scutt, Venner and their gigantic friend Philip Riddaway on a duck-shooting expedition. While he’s off pumping our poor feathered friends full of lead, Charlie Venner pays Amy a clandestine visit back at the farmhouse.

He loses no time in exercising his physical and sexual mastery of her. He proceeds to slap her around the place and then rape her brutally. Or does he…? I mean, is it still rape when the woman is saying ‘no’ with her mouth but screaming ‘yes, yes, yeees…!’ with her body? Because that’s what Amy is doing. It’s a hard one to figure out. Is Amy being raped or are she and Charlie simply re-igniting old flames hot enough to barbecue steak on…? You’ll have to watch the film for yourself to decide that one.

What happens next is a lot less ambivalent. Charlie looks up from his sexual endeavours to find himself staring down the barrel of Norman Scutt’s shotgun. Scutt, who has doubled back from the shooting party, motions silently for Charlie to move over and let him, Scutt, have a go at Amy, as it were. The fear and disgust in Amy’s face and voice when she looks up and sees that it is Scutt and not Venner who is having sex with her from behind are undoubtedly genuine.

Hubby David doesn’t find out about the rapes but he fires the men, nonetheless, both for yanking his chain over the whole shooting-party thing and also because they’re just thoroughly unpleasant characters to have knocking around the place. No argument from me there.

We’re getting to end-game now. During the annual church social, local sex-offender Henry Niles accidentally kills a young girl, Janice Hedden, daughter of the friendly neighbourhood violent drunk, Tom Hedden. When David and Amy accidentally run over the fleeing Henry Niles in their car, David brings him back to Trencher’s Farm until he can get hold of the doctor.

An angry and liquored-up mob, led by Venner, Scutt and Cawsey, descend on the farmhouse, baying for the blood of Niles. David won’t hand Niles over to the angry mob. They’ll beat him to death, he tells Amy, who’s all in favour of giving Niles up to the self-styled vigilantes. But David has a conscience. This is not how civilised people behave. He refuses to let the other men dictate to him. When he makes his position clear to them, the gloves come off and the game is most definitely on.

What happens next has to be seen to be believed. Maybe if I tell you that the film is based on a book from 1969 called THE SIEGE OF TRENCHER’S FARM by Gordon M. Williams, you’ll get an idea of where things go from there. (Except for the siege, the film is nothing like the book. The film is a million times more exciting. The book never even had a rape in it!)

Suffice it to say that, after the most unimaginable bloodbath that leaves no fewer than six men dead, the lives of the people of Wakely village may never be the same again. It’s so weird, but Amy spends most of the film urging David to react to things like a man, ie, to lash out when people insult or offend him or his wife. When he finally does what she wants, it’s because he wants to, and for no other reason. Let’s hope she’s finally happy, the spoilt little hussy.

This is such a powerful film that no review could ever really do it justice. I just hope that you won’t take my word for it and that you’ll watch it for yourself as soon as you can. Believe me, it’ll be worth it. As for the whole is she, isn’t she…? question, answers on a postcard, please…

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:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

PUBLIC ENEMY (2002) and ANOTHER PUBLIC ENEMY (2005): 2 KOREAN THRILLERS REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

PUBLIC ENEMY (2002) and ANOTHER PUBLIC ENEMY (2005). DIRECTED BY KANG WOO-SEOK. STARRING SUL KYUNG-GU.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Some people think they can get away with anything. Some people do.’

These two Korean cops-and-robbers thrillers really livened up my lockdown this past week, especially as they were accompanied by the drinking of a nice bottle of sake from the local Asian market and followed each time by the adding of noodles to boiling water. Well, staying in is the new going-out, lol.

Both films star Sul Kyung-Gu as basically the same character, a law enforcer called Kang, but ANOTHER PUBLIC ENEMY isn’t a direct follow-on; it’s more what’s called ‘a disconnected sequel,’ starring many of the same actors but in different roles.

In PUBLIC ENEMY, Detective Kang is a maverick cop. You know, the one who has his own distinctive unorthodox style, but which always yields results, nonetheless. He plays by his own rules. He’s a rogue, a renegade. He goes his own way. Here, Kang is a scruffy, bad-tempered almost-psychopath with a short fuse. He’s corrupt, he takes bribes, he ‘fixes’ evidence. But he gets results. Here, in his own words, is how he gets his results:

‘No money, I beat him. Don’t listen to me, I beat him. His face upsets me, I beat him. There’s about a whole stadium full of guys who got beaten by me.’

Yep, you got it. He hits people. There’s a lot of hitting in the film, and it’s not all done by Kang, either. Kang’s own superiors are equally accustomed to bawling out the rogue detective and walloping him upside-the-head, while underneath harbouring a deep fondness for the loose cannon of a cop whose heart, at least, is in the right place. A lot of the very genuine comedy in the film derives from the slapstick humour and casual knockabout violence.

Anyone, one dark, rainy night, Detective Kang is on a stakeout when he’s- ahem- caught short and urgently needs to do a Number Two. Having no choice but to find a quiet street corner in which to relieve himself, he afterwards encounters a tall, sinister man in an I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER-style rain slicker. They literally run into each other, and Detective Kang gets deliberately slashed across the face with the man’s knife…

Shortly after this fateful night, Kang’s department has to solve the mystery of the fatal stabbing of a rich young businessman’s parents in their home. Kang thinks back to the night of the alfresco poo in the spilling rain and the man in the rain slicker. From this point onwards, two equally matched, equally dogged adversaries, one of whom is, of course, Kang, are locked in a battle for supremacy which neither of them wants to lose. My money’s on Kang, he’s just so damn dogged…!

The way in which Kang pursues his prey in this one is so funny. Imagine the pudgy, out-of-shape Chief Wiggum from THE SIMPSONS puffing and panting alongside a much fitter, jogging criminal, struggling to keep up, yelling intermittently at him ‘Didja do it?,’ and you’ll know where I’m coming from…

In ANOTHER PUBLIC ENEMY, Kang has seemingly risen through the ranks to become a prosecutor. He wears a suit, he’s clean-shaven, he lives for his work. We know even less about his personal life here than we knew about Detective Kang’s from the first film. Kang from the first film was a single dad of two little girls who were being minded by his mum, their granny, because apparently his wife had been stabbed to death. His mum yells at him like he’s a teenager for the hours he keeps.

Kang in the second film has little or no personal life. I don’t think we even see his apartment at any point. There’s an extremely strong bond between him and the men he works with, however, the men who put their lives on the line every day for the sake of justice.

The scene where one of his colleagues is murdered in cold blood after being mistaken for Kang is heart-wrenching. There’s a lot of very strong, powerful emotion in this film, more so than in the first. The first film makes us laugh out loud; the second, cry as if we’ve just sat through the video for Johnny Cash’s HURT on a continual loop for half a day…

In the second film, Kang is hunting down yet another upper class young millionaire type, a Mr. Han Sang-Woo, only this chap is more in the multi-millionaire or even billionaire class. Coincidentally, he’s a chap with whom Kang went to school, a posh little privileged boy who always came out of every scrape smelling like guest-room soap, because that’s how the rich folks roll.

Han’s rich father and older brother have both died under suspicious circumstances, leaving Han in charge of the family Foundation, a multi-billion dollar concern. He’s been selling off various elements of the Foundation, however, and transferring the money to America in what Kang strongly suspects are illegal transfers. When Kang is asked to investigate the accident which put Han’s brother in the coma from which he never wakes up, he does it with the aggravating thoroughness with which he does everything…

This second film is a kind of a moral lesson, about the super-rich and powerful people who think they can commit crimes willy-nilly and get away with it, and the cops who try desperately to bring them to book.

Kang knows that pursuing the rich and powerful ruling class won’t endear him to the higher-ups in the force, but fortunately he’s got a boss as committed as he is to rooting out corruption and murder wherever he sees it, whether the perpetrator is a lowly scumbag drug-dealer or a trust fund baby, born with a silver spoon in his mouth and the unshakeable feeling that the world and everything in it is his own personal playground, just because he’s rich.

These two Korean films are a terrific watch. I’m not sure if there are any more of them out there, which would be fantastic, but at least watch these two Noughties gems and liven up your lockdown. I promise you they’ll do the job…! (Just googled it; there’s a PUBLIC ENEMY RETURNS from 2008!!!)

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:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

CORONAVIRUS: COPING WITH THE BIG LOCKDOWN IN DUBLIN…! BY SANDRA HARRIS.©

CORONAVIRUS: COPING WITH THE BIG LOCKDOWN…!

BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I must admit, yesterday, the first full day of the big lockdown here in Ireland (I’m in Dublin), was a rough day for me. I had a touch of cabin fever (well, more than a touch, I had the whole cabin, log fire, moose head over the fireplace, the log-pile outside the back door, the zombies in the forest getting closer and closer, the works!), having been in the house voluntarily self-isolating since Monday.

Two days is a long time for me to be in, okay? I’d normally be buzzing around the place like a busy bee, taking the son and heir to and from school, doing my bits and pieces of shopping, chewing the fat with shop assistants and neighbours and other local characters, then trying to get some writing done before the school day ends and I have to spend the rest of the day feeding a teenage boy with hollow legs, lol.

Now, of course, the schools are closed, so feeding the Boy has become a full-time job. I’m not kidding, he slinks back into the kitchen after meals, going, are there any snacks? Any snacks? I’ve just fed you a meal so enormous that even Henry the Eighth himself would have difficulty finishing it and you’re looking for snacks? Ye Gods . . . !

My daughter’s work is closed for the duration now as well, thanks to COVID-19, because apparently a bookshop is not an essential service (I thoroughly disagree, by the way!), and the government has ordered all non-essential shops and businesses to close. She’s helping out with the Boy’s ‘distance learning,’ which takes about forty-five minutes a day or as long as his ADHD will allow for.

The pubs, of course, have all been closed for nearly a fortnight now (not that I ever get near them anyway, sadly), and will presumably remain shut until at least mid-to-late April, 2020, which is the absolute earliest the schools will re-open.

All our favourite cafés and restaurants have either closed (McDonalds’ is shut, and they never shut!) for the moment or can only run a takeaway/delivery service. This means that, in the whole of Dublin, or, more correctly, the whole of Ireland, there’s currently nowhere you can go, outside of your own home, to sit with a cup of coffee and a sandwich and watch the world go by for half an hour. This is pretty much an unprecedented situation in a country as sociable as Ireland, and an upsetting one.

So, anyway, getting back to yesterday, I was stressed to the max. Cabin fever, panic about the virus affecting me or my children, panic about getting to the shops and pharmacy for essential supplies, feelings of irritability, loneliness, isolation and even boredom, which was odd considering I have so much to do.

I’m having my trilogy of romantic fiction books published by a traditional publisher starting this summer, but only two of them are written, lol. I still write a film-and-book blog, which means more and more to me as the years go by, and I self-publish my erotic horror fiction and film reviews and erotic poetry with Kindle Direct Publishing, so it’s really not like I’m short of things to do. I guess the virus-worry was getting to me.

We all decided on an early night last night, anyway, so as to bring that awful day to a close, a day in which I’d binged on all the bad news and had grown more agitated and doom-and-gloom-laden with each passing hour. Yes, I snapped at my kids, but don’t worry, the little blighters snapped right back with all the entitlement and confidence of kids born from the ‘Nineties onwards. Don’t forget, they have all the answers, so ask them if you have a question about anything at all . . . !

Today was a much better day in a hundred different ways. The sun continued to shine, as indeed it has all week, and my son and I ventured out this morning to do little jobs while my daughter had a much-needed lie-in, the kind she can’t normally get while the shop where she works is open for business. Every cloud, eh . . .?

The fresh air definitely blew a few coronavirus-encrusted cobwebs away. You simply cannot over-emphasise how much good you can derive from a simple walk in the sunshine. We walked through the park and sat on a bench and watched the daffodils dancing in the breeze. There was life before the coronavirus, I reminded myself, and there will be again.

Everyone we passed was behaving beautifully under the new restrictions and social guidelines. Friends, colleagues and even married couples were all ‘social distancing,’ leaving at least two metres between themselves and everyone else.

It was so heartening to see people actually following and respecting the guidelines laid down by our Health Service Executive, because it’s only by observing these guidelines that we can ever hope to pull ourselves out of this morass in which we’ve found ourselves, through no fault of our own. It depressed me greatly during the week to hear reports of people ignoring the recommendations and flocking in their droves to local beauty spots and other places, but today, at least, everyone we met was playing a blinder.

I felt ridiculously emotional and, yes, grateful as we went into all the shops and businesses we’d normally visit at least once a week, and found all the staff working away cheerfully there as usual, albeit wearing masks and gloves and a further distance away than normal, but still there, still providing us with the goods and services without which we’d be hard put to survive.

I genuinely feel as grateful to these guys (and gals!) as people do to the veterans who fought for their freedom in the two world wars. No exaggeration, but they’re risking their health to bring us a continued service and I want to thank them for it. What I really want is to hug them for it, but in the current climate, that’s maybe not such a great ideal, lol. But I certainly had tears in my eyes, much to my poor son’s bemusement, as we started for home.

“Mammy, are you crying about a writing thing?” he ventured, because that’s apparently the subject I cry about the most.

“No, lovey, I’m just crying because I’m happy today went so well,” I told him, but he still rolled his eyes. Oh, the joys of pandemic parenting!

On the way home, we encountered two community guards of our acquaintance who were patrolling the park, making sure everything was nice and safe for the people using it. Did I feel protected, looked after, as we stopped for a chinwag? You bet I did. And then, before we finally reached home, a neighbour whom I know only slightly did us a stunning and unexpected kindness, which I won’t go into here, but let’s just say it was the icing on the cake of a lovely morning.

Then, when we got home, first my son’s special school and then what I call his ‘Autism service providers,’ the clinical services folks, each got in touch by phone to ask if there was any extra help or support we needed during this stressful time. And then, my lovely editor emailed me a preliminary sketch of the cover for my first traditionally-published book and I loved it! My cup of love and goodwill towards all men literally runneth over right now. I feel blessed.

Yesterday I felt like throwing in the towel. Today I have hope and things look much brighter. That’s the power of fresh air, a little exercise and sunshine and making contact (safely, from a distance of two metres!) with people who care. Tomorrow, I may be back binge-watching the terrifying statistics and biting the heads off loved ones or anyone else who looks crooked at me, but for today, I’m fine. It’s enough.

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:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

 

THE ROYLE FAMILY: ONE OF BRITAIN’S BEST SITCOMS REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THE ROYLE FAMILY. (1998-2000 and 2006-2012.) STARRING CAROLINE AHERNE, CRAIG CASH, SUE JOHNSTON, RICKY TOMLINSON, RALF LITTLE, LIZ SMITH, DOREEN KEOGH, PETER MARTIN, JESSICA HYNES, ANDREW WHYMENT, TOM COURTENAY, HELEN FRASER AND GEOFFREY HUGHES.

THEME MUSIC: HALF THE WORLD AWAY BY OASIS.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is such a genius sitcom. It’s warm, hilariously witty, down-to-earth and the genius part is that it’s based on such a simple premise, ie, a bunch of working-class folks from Manchester sitting round on a family couch in front of the telly, just talking shite-talk to each other.

‘Whatcher ‘ave for your tea, Dave?’ and ‘You’ll never guess who was in’t Chinese last night?’ Stuff like that, the shite-talk we talk with our families and friends every day. It might not be earth-shattering, but it’s the stuff of which everyday life is made up.

Caroline Aherne as Denise Royle is pure comic genius. Denise is lazy in the extreme, which means that she and her work-shy Dad Jim Royle are like two peas in a pod. She chain-smokes and she can sink a pint as well as her dad and her hubby Dave, and she’s not one to let impending marriage and motherhood tie her down. ‘I’ve gotter keep me independence, Mam…!’ (How many times does she palm them kiddies off on ‘er mam and dad…?)

Dave, a removals man and sometimes-disc jockey, is completely under Denise’s thumb. If he has any ambitions in life beyond slouching on the Royles’ couch eating one of Denise’s mam’s bacon butties, he keeps it well hidden. (Well, Denise doesn’t feed him, lol. That’s apparently not part of her remit as Dave’s missus…!)

He enjoys a pint or fifteen of a night, down the Feathers with his main man Jim Royle, and if he should happen to bump into his ex there, Beverly Macca with the great big knockers, well, he’d best keep schtum about it, that’s all, or Our Denise’ll ‘ave his testicles for ping-pong balls. She will an’ all, our Dave…!

Our Mam, or Barbara Royle, is like Marge Simpson from The Simpsons. She medicates her brood with food, an endless assembly line of grub to cork their cryholes, everything from the aforementioned bacon butties to a Christmas dinner big enough to feed all outdoors to a Kit-Kat or a Bounty bar with your cup of char.

She didn’t exactly draw James Bond or Prince Rainier of Monaco in the lottery of marriage, but she seems to be holding up okay under it. She loves her kids and grand-kids and a bit of gossip, but some of her hubby Jim’s grottier habits turn her stomach, and no wonder.

Jim is a character. His armchair in the family living-room is his throne, and from here he holds his court, and holds forth also, on every subject under the sun. And, to every subject under the sun, from having to pay 5p for a plastic carrier bag at the shops to Dave’s dad’s owning a Ford Mondeo, he says ‘My arse…!’ It’s sort of his catch-phrase, if you will. When he opens his wallet, the Queen declares a Bank Holiday, and he’ll have to be buried with his TV remote control, it means that much to him.

Antony Royle, aka Our Ant’ny, is Jim’s son and heir, though you wouldn’t think it, the abuse Jim gives him, calling him gayboy and Lurch from the Addams Family and yeh lazy sod and yeh lazy git and get up there and make yer sodding family a brew…! But Our Ant’ny will grow up to be, of the two Royle offspring, the more successful and dynamic, ending up going to conferences in Congleton and other such high-flying places, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, Jim Royle.

If you enjoyed Big Brother in the 2000s, you’ll love Our Ant’ny’s impersonations of Craig Phillips, the winner of series one of the show, nominating fellow contestant Sada in the diary room scenes. Our Ant’ny’s a big Ali G fan too, and he and his hilariously funny dopey mate Darren, aka Kirk Sutherland from Coronation Street, have great craic outdoing each other with their classic imitations of same. ‘You is da king of the batty men…!’ Yes, indeed, harrumph, harrumph.

Norma Jean Speakman, or Nanna Royle, is a canny old dear. When she practically strips her dear dead friend Elsie’s house of ‘a few bits’ that she has her gimlet eye on after the funeral, you can see why Liz Smith was asked to play Mrs. Dilber in not one but two screen versions of Charles Dickens’s perennial favourite story, A Christmas Carol…! Still, she gives Our Ant’ny three pounds when he goes up to London for the day to be a big music mogul, so she can’t be all bad.

Norma and her son-in-law Jim fight like cat and dog, but they love each other really, as we see in the truly gut-wrenching special episode The Queen of Sheba in which… gasp, sob, sniffle… Nanna Dies. And this is meant to be comedy, lol…! Remember when Nanna asks her daughter Barbara back in 1999 if she (Nanna) is definitely ‘staying over for Minnelium Night…?’ It’s one of my most enduring memories of the late ’90s and early ‘Noughties.

Mary and Joseph (Mary and Joseph, lol!) from next door are always popping in the back door, Irish Mary to swap bits of gossip with Barbara and to ‘have a bit of a sniff around to see if she can smell anything untoward’ after Dave treks dog muck in on his shoe, and the monosyllabic Joe to make such magnificent pronouncements as ‘A little baby…!’ when Denise announces that herself and Dave are expecting a visit from the Stork.

Mary and Joseph’s one child, their daughter Cheryl (not Jesus!), is always unsuccessfully on a diet, always hungry and always stuffing her face. She’s always on the hunt for a bloke too. That time she tries putting an ad in the personals and Lomper from The Full Monty, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and a tie, ends up on the Royle family couch between Cheryl and a practically prone Our Denise so that the Royles can give him the once-over is so pricelessly funny. Uncomfortable is not the word.

My favourite character is Twiggy. A big bear of a man with a heart of pure gold, he can sell you anything in the world your little heart desires, but just give him some time to rob it first, right? He only sees his son Lee when they both end up in the same nick together at the same time and, if there’s any free grub going round at his great mate Jim’s house, you can be sure that Twiggy’ll be first in line. ‘Our Ant’ny, put some bacon under for Twiggy, would you?’

The Royles do Christmas so well. It’s that kind of magical Christmas from the ’90s and the 2000s when mobile phones were still a novelty and shops, horror of horrors, did occasionally close and allow families some time to veg out on the couch together and watch The Snowman while pigging out on turkey sandwiches and Quality Street.

Back then, of course, Quality Street choccies came in a proper tin. A tin, mark you, and none of this plastic tub or even plastic pouch shite. Pouch, my arse…! Sigh. Don’t even get me started on how much our favourite sweets and chocolates have changed since the ’90s.

My two favourite episodes are Christmas ones. One is the one where Emma, Our Ant’ny’s preggers girlfriend, brings her well-to-do parents round to meet the Royles one Crimbo Night, and everyone ends up goggling at the breast implants that Roger (John Henshaw) has bought for his blonde wife, Valerie (Sharon Duce).

Nanna develops quite the girl-crush on Valerie, but she’s really curious to know first if the airline’s advised Valerie if her new titties have been cleared for take-off. Then, when it’s pull-a-cracker time, Nanna was ‘hoping for Valerie’ to be her cracker buddy. It’s just so funny.

Then, finally, there’s my favourite episode of all, the one where Denise goes into labour at Christmas-time and everyone rushes off down the ‘ospital with her. The camera pans round the empty living-room, empty of people but full of Christmas, with the lights and the tree and the cards and the telly and the couch.

That heavenly couch ‘upstairs’ has quite a few Royle behinds settled on it by now, sadly. The wonderful Caroline Aherne, Liz Smith, Doreen Keogh and Geoffrey Hughes are all deceased now. No doubt they’ll be joined by other cast members in the fullness of time. We’ll always have our memories of them, and the three series and four Christmas specials of this magnificent sitcom that captured so brilliantly the essence of the ’90s and the new ‘minnelium.’ All together now: Sitcom, my arse…!

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:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

IN THE BEDROOM. (2001) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

IN THE BEDROOM. (2001) BASED ON THE SHORT STORY ‘KILLINGS’ BY ANDRE DUBUS II. DIRECTED BY TODD FIELD. STARRING TOM WILKINSON, SISSY SPACEK, NICK STAHL, WILLIAM MAPOTHER, WILLIAM WISE AND CELIA WESTON.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I’ve loved this film since I first saw it years ago. It’s a gorgeous film, with just the right amount of pain and suffering in it to please an emotional wreck such as myself, lol. It’s the story of a family torn apart by love, or at least the love of an eighteen-year-old college boy from a well-to-do family for a much older single mother of two who works part-time as a shop-girl. Get the picture? It could be love, but it’s probably mostly just lust. Bloke’s at his sexual peak at that age, isn’t he, so no wonder the older ladies come sniffing around.

Frank Fowler is the handsome young school-leaver in question. He literally has the world at his fingertips. He shows great promise as an architect and he’s going to college in the fall, after one last long lazy hazy summer fishing for lobster on the coast of Maine, where he lives with his parents.

His dad Matt is the local doctor, well-liked and respected by everyone in the community because he’s genuinely a lovely guy, and he worships his son and only child. Frank’s mother Ruth, a choral music teacher at the local school, loves Frank too; after all, he’s her beloved only child as well. She’s not as likeable as her husband, however. She was the hard-ass parent, apparently, while Matt was the soft touch, which is the opposite to how it probably is in most other families.

She’s prickly, touchy, a bit of a cold fish, even, and over the course of the marriage, the doctor and his wife have drifted apart. The lines of communication are, if not exactly shut down, then at least not as open as they might once have been. It’s sad, but it happens. And it’s not irreversible. It can actually be fixed, by that one little word: communication. But you gotta work at it.

The main (Maine, geddit?) problem the Fowlers have at the moment is that Frank has been seeing a local, much older single mother called Natalie, who’s beautiful in a washed-out, faded, tired kind of way that has captivated the youthful Frank, and, let’s be honest here, his old man Matt as well. Matt and his bezzie mate Willis can hardly keep their eyes off Natalie at family gatherings, she’s such a tidy piece of ass.

Natalie comes with complications, however. She has two young sons who are at the age where they need a man to look up to, and they’re already getting dangerously attached to Frank. If/when the young couple break up, as Frank’s mother certainly wants them to do, it will be hard on the two young lads. They do have a father of their own, though, and he’s the biggest fly in Frank and Natalie’s ointment…

Richard Strout is an obnoxious, womanising, beer-swilling yobbo. He even looks the part, with the sleazy little douchebag moustache he wears. He can’t stand that his ex-wife is seeing someone, especially someone to whom Strout clearly feels socially and educationally inferior.

He’s jealous and possessive, and yet he was such a bad husband and unreliable father in the past that Natalie wants nothing to do with him now. So it’s all his own fault he’s in the position he’s in, but people like him will always find someone else to blame for their own shortcomings. In this case, that person is College Boy Frank Fowler…

Frank assures his mum, when pressed, that he and Natalie are just a ‘summer fling’ before he goes off to college in the fall, but Natalie and her boys are already coming to depend on Frank. Someone’s going to get hurt if there’s a break-up. And, if the violent sociopath Richard Strout has his way, someone’s going to get hurt even before there’s a break-up. Can the Fowler family withstand the aftershocks of inviting someone with Natalie’s kind of baggage into their little domain…?

Tom Wilkinson (Gerald from THE FULL MONTY, 1997) does a fantastic job as the father whose heart is broken by the one thing guaranteed to break any father’s heart. It takes guts to take the stand he takes and to do the things he does, and his bitchy, passive-aggressive wife had damned well better stand by him for doing them.

Sissy Spacek (the original Carrie) is superb here also as the mother of Frank. You can tell how much she loathes the idea of her precious baby boy sleeping with the shop-soiled Natalie by the way she’s so passive-aggressively polite to Natalie in person…! There’s no way she thinks Natalie is good enough for her boy.

Matt’s lifelong friends the Grinnells, Katie and Willis, are the perfect example of a big sprawling American family, with their ten or eleven grandchildren and all the photo albums and scrapbooks that record every triumph, every disappointment, every skinned knee and every Prom Night.

That scene where poor Ruth has to listen to Old Ma Grinnell counting her grandchildren while Ruth is having to fake an interest in each one individually is hard and sad to watch, but it happens. Life goes on, and people tend to forget after a while that you’re still nursing a tragedy in your bosom. It’s not their fault. It’s just the way life is.

The Eastern European choral music Ruth is teaching the schoolgirls is beautifully haunting, and the scenery in the film is just gorgeous. Maine is Stephen King country, isn’t it? No wonder he loves it so much. I’d love to go there sometime and wander around and see the things he’s seen and walk in the places where he’s walked. Maybe one day…

By the way, Karen Allen from the INDIANA JONES films has a small role in the film. And the reason the film is called IN THE BEDROOM is lobster-related, of all things. It took me many viewings to work this out for myself, lol, and here I am giving it to you lot for free. Enjoy the film, anyway. I certainly hope you get as much out of it as I did. I’ve watched it many times and it’s lost none of its beauty or poignancy yet.

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:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

ISLAND OF TERROR. (1966) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

ISLAND OF TERROR. (1966) PLANET FILM DISTRIBUTORS LTD. DIRECTED BY TERENCE FISHER. STARRING PETER CUSHING, EDWARD JUDD, NIALL MACGINNIS AND CAROLE GRAY.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THE FURY OF A LIVING CELL- A NEW EXPERIENCE IN DEVOURING HORROR…!

HOW COULD THEY STOP THE DEVOURING DEATH… THAT LIVED BY SUCKING ON LIVING HUMAN BONES…!

This 1960s horror-slash-creature-feature is a proper little curiosity. It stars Peter Cushing as the eminent Dr. Brian Stanley, a medical man who’s called in to help when an isolated little island off the coast of Oireland, of all places (I’m from there, lol!), is experiencing a problem of, shall we say, monster proportions.

It seems that the equally eminent but reclusive Dr. Phillips, who lives in a fabulous mansion on Petrie Island dubbed ‘Wuthering Heights’ by the droll Dr. Stanley, has been trying to find a cure for cancer in his industrial-strength laboratory.

Unfortunately, one of the steps he’s taken has gone horribly wrong and, instead of saving lives, he’s accidentally created a little army of creatures called ‘silicates’ who feed by literally sucking out the bones from their victims’ bodies through puncture holes they inflict themselves. Sounds yummy, right? They leave their prey looking the way Imhotep’s victims do in the brilliant Stephen Sommers’ THE MUMMY movies; all dried up and dessicated, with expressions of sheer horror on their faces. Yuk, lol.

On Dr. Stanley’s team is the dreamy pathologist Dr. David West, who is hopelessly embroiled with spoilt brat Toni Merrill, a millionaire’s daughter who apparently wrapped her Maserati round a tree and broke her leg just to get to meet David. (‘Oh, David darling, I’m so frightened, save me, darling, don’t leave me alone!’ She’s a proper whinger an’ all.)

Well, as he’s a pathologist and deals in death, she could have actually gotten more than she bargained for with her little piece of high jinx and ended up on a slab in his mortuary. The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace…!

I’ve been keen as mustard to meet certain blokes at times in my life as well, but I’ve never gone that far. Toni’s like Tippi Hedren’s character Melanie Daniels in THE BIRDS, another millionaire’s daughter who has nothing better to do with her day than motor on up to Bodega Bay with a pair of lovebirds in the boot for her crush’s little sister, just to get on her crush’s good side. Sad in the extreme, lol.

Anyway, the race is on to kill the pesky silicates before they destroy everyone on the island. Their appearance is rather vacuum-cleaner-like; they even have a long wavy tentacle protruding from their body’s one, erm, hole, that retracts just like the hoover wire and plug when you press the rewind button! Their method is hoover-like also, in that they literally vacuum out the bones through the aforementioned punctures or perforations.

Niall MacGinnis, a magnificent actor and the star of one of the best British horror films ever made, NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957), plays Mr. Campbell, the ‘head of the island,’ the way that Christopher Lee as the charismatic Lord Summerisle is head of the island of Summerisle in that other contender for the title of best British horror film ever made, the superb THE WICKER MAN (1973).

Irish actor Niall MacGinnis is terrific as Mr. Campbell. He’s dressed exactly like a rich Irish landowner in Aran sweater, faded brown corduroy trousers, hat and sheepskin coat, and he’d remind you of one of those millionaire lads whose horses win the Grand National every year. Where there’s muck, there’s brass, mind. A gal could do a lot worse.

I like the character of Peter Argyle too, the gentle, duffle-coated proprietor of the local shop who looks a lot like a young Daniel O’Donnell, the Irish crooner who inspired the character of Eoin McLove in the clerical sitcom FATHER TED. He looks like the kind of chap who’d let a woman come first, if you know what I mean, and who’d say sorry a dozen times when he went to put it in, lol.

The real star of the show for me, apart from the silicates themselves, is Peter Cushing’s immaculate-as-always acting. Just look at his face when the silicates have hold of his wrist. The look of pure terror on his face is testament to his amazing acting skills.

I should probably mention Carole Gray’s fabulous blow-job lips and enormous eyes as well. That scene where she’s looking up at the roof of the car in horror when she hears the eerie, electronic outer-spacey sound of the silicates certainly showcases them to perfection, anyway. I really hope you get to see this film. It’s a proper old gem, so it is. Oh, and the silicates have just reminded me; I need to hoover the gaff before Christmas…!

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:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com