Merry Christmas!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

From everyone at Island of Terror, i.e. me.

Don't Open Till Christmas

Right. Wow. Okay. 'Don't Open Till Christmas' looks like it was made on the hoof with borrowed equipment in about two days. The script is full of holes; scenes are either too short, too long or missing entirely; the performances are inept; the settings a succession of deserted alleys, rented halls, borrowed flats and a couple of London landmarks after the tourists have pissed off home. But where else can you see Father Christmas get his cock cut off?

Written by exploitation serial offender Derek Ford, this tawdry concoction was directed by Edmund Purdom, a British actor of the fifties who was once a household name without ever really being in anything successful. Purdom is an awful director, the sort who points his camera at the New Scotland Yard sign to establish where we are and that it is day, then holds the shot for a very long time before arbitarily cutting to an office that is clearly not New Scotland Yard and, somehow, it's now night.

As well as 'directing' Purdom also stars as the police inspector trying to track down a psycho who really has it in for blokes in Santa suits. One gets knifed, one gets speared through the mouth, one selling chestnuts has his face pressed against the hot plate then is garroted and left to catch fire. Eyes are detached, arteries spurt, guts drop out and, yes, cocks get cut off. It's a hoot. When the killer is asked just why he hates men dressed up like Saint Nick he simply replies 'because they remind me of Christmas'. Fair enough, Sir, you're free to go.

Other notable elements include a look at how the London Dungeon used to look in the olden days, the usually sexy Caroline Munro and her awful band performing a really shitty song, and lots of snatched / stolen footage of Londoners getting ready for Xmas. It's cheap, it's gory, it's sexist, it's trashy - it's recommended.     

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

A Recommendation For Christmas

Last Christmas, instead of giving you my heart, I had a bit of a rant about the bloody BBC and the madness of their policy towards archive material, specifically around the unavailability of the seminal 'A Ghost Story for Christmas' series.

This year, I'm happy to announce that these incredible programmes are now all available on a number of DVD's, or as one reasonably priced box set. Can you guess what I'm getting for Christmas, apart from pissed on Martini?

A Ghost Story For Xmas: Stigma

I don't understand the BBC. In the sixties and seventies they went about wiping their archive so that they could use the tapes again, depriving licence payers of some priceless shows, now presumed lost for ever in favour of The Queen's Speech and golf.

Then, in more enlightened times, they realised their mistake and scuttled all over the world trying to buy back missing episodes sold to less short-sighted broadcasting corporations, turning up old Dr Who episodes in Hong Kong and Nigeria and making out it was some sort of triumph for Auntie, which I suppose it was in terms of revenue from video and DVD releases.

Now, despite the digital revolution, despite the growth of 'on demand' broadcasting, despite the falling production costs of DVD's, despite having not one, not two, but four television channels at their disposal, they still sit impassively on the bulk of what's left of their archive, occasionally sneaking bits out here and there in bite sized nano seasons, usually cut up into unsatisfying chunks and interspersed with inane commentary from some halfwitted talking head.

When they occasionally do happen across the right thing, like broadcasting the brilliant 'Ghost Story For Christmas' series at Christmas, and even commissioning a couple of not bad new episodes, they then have second thoughts after a couple of years and stop showing the old episodes entirely, licensing a random one for an expensive DVD release and throwing the rest back into the dark.

So arseholes to the BBC, here's an IOT-TV 'Ghost Story For Christmas' presentation, 'Stigma' by Clive Exton, originally broadcast thirty four years ago on December 28th, 1977. A rare modern day story, I think it's one of the most chilling of all the tales - no M.R James, no period costume, no ghosts, just a baleful ancient horror, a bloody comeuppance and Peter Bowles.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!