Gangsters

'Gangsters’ is a weird show that, over time got weirder and weirder. Starting off as a ‘Play For Today’ before becoming two (very different) series, it is ostensibly about the murky world of organised crime in Birmingham, but also works as a treatise on race, society and the nature and conventions of drama itself. If that sounds heavy, don’t worry, it does it all in a tongue in cheek, often bizarre way. Oh, and a lot of the acting is abysmal.

 Maurice Colbourne plays John Kline, a former SAS man who is the archetypal tough, good man in a rough, bad situation, inexorably caught between rival underworld groups that are characterised by both their particular line in crime and their ethnicity. There are the Asian gangsters, who specialise in human traffic, illegal immigration and extortion; black gangsters who concentrate on drugs and prostitution and, over-seeing the whole bun fight, there are white gangsters, who sit back and take the lion’s share of the profits. The initial play was straightforward enough, a quirky but basically conventional drama that, apart from the racial diversity, and Brummie setting, could have starred Jimmy Cagney.

The two series that followed, however, go to strange places, eventually ending up somewhere between post-modernism and disappearing up its own exhaust pipe. In Series One, Kline battles to keep a nightclub open, keep the Law happy and play opposing criminal factions off against each other. He also falls in love with a posh junkie and part time prostitute. It’s far from conventional, but has structure and an element of realism, albeit a reality that could quite easily be imagined. Heavily stylised, the characters are many and mad as hatters, a multi-racial rainbow of thugs, twisters, bullies, bastards and undercover Pakistanis.

‘Gangsters’, in all its incarnations, is, like so many flawed things, absolutely fascinating, and far more interesting retrospectively than any number of tighter, tauter, straight crime dramas. Yes, it can get on your nerves, but it provokes a reaction, and that is assuredly a very good thing.

And Another Thing...

I should have mentioned this before, really, but I am now the proud co-owner of another blog called THE PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC WORLD OF TOMIT with my friend and colleague Fearlono. Please pay us a visit, there's good stuff there that will evolve into even better stuff shortly.

More Interesting People

The Monster Club, Part Two (Or Is It Three?)

Story two is ‘The Vampires’. It’s played for laughs, which is never good in films like this, but the central idea is quite interesting in the way it places the supernatural into a banal, everyday setting. 

Basically, it’s about a family where the father happens to be a cape wearing, slick backed hair Transylvanian vampire. His wife and son are fully supportive of this, and live a fairly ordinary life, aside from the fact that Dad is under constant threat from a gang of bowler hatted bureaucrats (Anthony Valentine, Neil McCarthy and leader Donald Pleasence) who want to bang a stake into him. 

It’s a nice idea to combine suburbia with vampirism (Dad’s trips out for blood are treated as if he were commuting to work), but the relentlessly smug execution soon becomes very tiresome. If it’s funny, it’s funny, you don’t have to leave gaps for laughter or keep mugging to the camera. Yes, I mean you, Donald. 

Finally, we come to ‘The Ghouls’. Ostensibly the scariest of the stories, it features a secluded village of ghouls in crisis because, after hundreds of years, they have finally run out of corpses to eat. When a film director (Stuart Whitman, sucking in his gut a la Robert Mitchum) turns up scouting for locations, he quickly finds himself in very deep shit. The story is too busy and confusing to really grip you, although the mass of ravenous villagers pressing in does evoke some mild claustrophobia. In Italian hands, it would have been grisly and gory and oppressively unpleasant, in British hands it just looks like the queue for the lunch van and, no matter what else you try and do, having a crowd of ghouls with Nana from ‘The Royle Family’ in it is never going to be terrifying.

In the end analysis, for all its faults (B.A Robertson), ‘The Monster Club’ is the last of its brilliant kind and is worthy of respect if not adulation. It ends with the revelation that man is the most monstrous monster of all and two iconic figures dancing and making tits of themselves. And I like that in a film, I really do.

Interesting People

‘The Monster Club’ was the last in Amicus’ superlative series of horror portmanteau films, neatly putting a full stop to their most productive decade with its release in 1980. I’ll start by saying that I don’t like it as much as their other films in the same line but, even so, I like it well enough. It’s main issue for me is that the stories are simply not strong enough – nor are they aren’t particularly well-executed. There’s also not enough of them. Oh, and the music, by The Pretty Things and B.A Robertson among others, is fucking awful. On the plus side, Vincent Price is in it, which almost makes up for B.A Robertson but not quite. Actually, it in no way makes up for B.A Robertson.

The stories are all from the Welsh writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes, a horror author I’m not overly familiar with but who seems to be well regarded by people who are familiar with him. The linking sequences, in which the writer himself (played by John Carradine, his poor hands gnarled by arthritis) is introduced to the delights of a disco for supernatural beings by vampire Vincent Price has a fair few amusing moments - and some cold sweat ones. If you have ever wanted to see two elderly horror stalwarts awkwardly grooving to cod-reggae, before copping off with a couple of fat birds, however, then this is the film for you.

Story one is ‘The Shadmock’. According to Chetwynd-Hayes, a Shadmock is a fairly low grade monster, a bit of a mongrel. It’s one defining feature is that it can emit a piercing whistle in times of stress, and the whistle is powerful enough to kill.

 

Our Shadmock is a bit of a nerdy fellow who lives in a big house with nothing but loads of money to keep him company. When a ‘normal’ young woman comes into his life he dares to dream that they could marry and that his solitude could be over. She’s just after the cash, of course, so when he finds her robbing the safe on their wedding night he whistles at her and melts her face.

Atmospheric in parts, especially the ballroom dancing and plastic masks of the wedding reception, this story is probably the best of the three, although it delivers little in the way of real chills. The main issue for me is that I kept thinking that most of the Shadmock’s problems were of his own making: he has plenty of readies, a great big house, so why not get himself a decent haircut and a sun bed? Put a Hawaiian shirt on, for fuck’s sake, buy a helicopter, get a big telly and a little dog. And open a window, let some fresh air in. Then, when you’ve done all that, go out and get a girlfriend – and aim up, so get a vampire or something, or at least a Vamgoo (a vampire-ghoul cross). That's what I did, anyway.

PART TWO TOMORROW!

The Monster Club

 

Interesting Postcards

The Royal Family,

Madam Tussauds,

London.

Judging from the presence of Captain Mark Phillips and Fergie, this tableau dates somewhere between 1986 and 1992. For me, the key note is that the likenesses aren't particularly good, especially The Queen and Prince Philip who, after all, had been around long enough to get right. My beloved Louis Tussauds in Great Yarmouth managed a similar effect on much less money. 

In a huge Island of Terror coup, we have managed to track down a copy of the very same postcard that, up until 2002 (when he lost it on the night bus) was in the possession of Prince Edward. 

World Of Wax

 

More from the 'World Of Wax'. This figure of Queen Elizabeth I is so realistic it even mirrors her habit of only having a good wash every few months.

Hairy Britain

Some nice electronics on this 1973 adult education film, and loads of hair. NOT pubic.

Sixty Second Nightmare

Everything about this advert creeps me out. Who'd have thought 'trousers that move with you' could be so sinister? Or is it the 'Rosemary's Baby' type music that someone coked up ad exec thought an appropriate musical accompaniment?

Watch the way the male model smoothes his flowing moustache: he means us harm, real harm - and if he ever gets out of that terrifying Giorgio de Chirico world he's been exiled to, we're all in the shit - unless we can get him to stand near a naked flame...

The White Owl

Some title cards from the 1922 silent documentary 'The White Owl'. People used to talk funny back then. You know, in sentences and stuff.