The Collector

The Ultimate In Diabolism

‘Die, Monster, Die!’ is terribly slow for an hour, before bursting into life with a bizarre and over the top finale. Loosely based on the H.P Lovecraft story ‘The Colour Out Of Space’ , it begins with an American scientist arriving in Arkham, here transplanted from the original New England to the shires in England. He gets the usual sub-zero welcome from a series of suspicious locals who shudder when he mentions that he is on his way to the old Whitley place, and refuse to give him directions.  He makes his own way there, finding a large stately home set on a ‘blasted heath’, i.e. an eerie burned wood with a huge crater. Clearly, something interesting has happened here – shame no-one wants to talk about it.

The scientist, Reinhart (played by unhappy Hollywood hanger on Nick Adams) is visiting his fiancée, Susan, but, as usual, the in-laws are a bit odd.  Dad is Boris Karloff, hostile, angry, secretive and prone to zooming around in his wheelchair after midnight. Mum is slowly dying of some disfiguring disease, and spends her days hidden behind a curtain. On meeting her prospective son in law she gives him such useful some advice – to get out, now, and take Susan with him – naturally, he decides to stick around for a bit.

What follows is a mix of haunted house film and weird sci fi, i.e. there are rubber bats on string and skeletons on gibbets but there is also a big chunk of radioactive meteorite that is making everyone mental and ill, as well as a greenhouse full of massive tomatoes, killer plants and a horrible menagerie of mutated animals (‘it's like a zoo – in hell’).

In an unexpectedly energetic finale, Karloff falls across the meteorite and turns into a silver foil covered radioactive killing machine. It’s pretty cool, especially when Reinhart starts throwing axes at him. The meteorite is smashed, the house burns down, the in-laws die and the young lovers escape to start what will almost certainly be a married life lived in the shadow of the horribly tragic and fucked up way they got together. H.P Lovecraft would have liked that.  

Die, Monster, Die!

Room For One

Mining can be a depressing, deadly business, and in 'Room For One' (1976) the National Coal Board take their private information films into 'Seventh Seal' territory.

Old King Coal

In this 1948 National Coal Board animation by Jules Pinschewer, the industry promotes itself by making up its own mythology in which King Coal is roused from his underground kingdom by calls from the surface for more energy. The benevolent King provides it, and Britain marches forward, as one, powered and warmed by his regal lantern. It's ace.

Inhuman Activity

Premium Bonds were described by The Archbishop Of Canterbury on their launch in 1957 as 'a cold, solitary, mechanical, uncompanionable, inhuman activity'*.

Electronic Random Number Indicating Equipment was invented to make the draw, and this was anthromorphosised (is there such a word?) to the catchier, friendlier and less cold, solitary and mechanical sounding ERNIE (above).

ERNIE picked the winners from his home in Lytham St Annes, taking a whopping fifty two days to complete the task. He used to receive cards and letters and poems from his public, who hoped that their flattering words might sway his machine logic to let them scoop the top prize of £1,000. Retired in 1972, ERNIE 1 now lives in the Science Museum, and is in a relationship with the Oramics Machine.

Above is ERNIE 2, who started work in 1973. Considerably quicker than his predecessor (he could complete the draw in under seven hours) he was pretty cool with his print outs and Data 70 type font, and still received his share of fan mail and marriage proposals.



Meet ERNIE 3, who took over the role in 1988. There's something 'Hi De Hi' about him and it was at this stage that his grip on the public consciousness began to slip. They even stopped announcing the results on telly.

Finally, say hello to ERNIE 4, the current model, installed in 2004. It processes a draw in two and a half hours. Nobody sends it as much as an e-mail these days, we're all too sophisticated for that now, although despite extra stiff competition from various lotteries and Foxy fucking Bingo** there are still twenty three million people regularly checking to see if their numbers have come up. The top prize is now a million pounds.

*  The Archbishop in question was Geoffrey Fisher, a Freemason / Head Teacher who presided over the Coronation and was portrayed in ex-pupil Roald Dahl's autobiography as a santicimonious hypocrite who viciously beat children as often as he could. Inhuman activity, indeed.

* * Note to Foxy Bingo. Please stop sending me e-mails, it doesn't matter how much money you give me to get started, I simply don't want to dob my virtual dibber anywhere on your tawdry site.

Credit Union

  

A faded but nonetheless wonderful title sequence from the days when the Encyclopaedia Britannica used to make fascinating television documentaries, not to mention actual Encyclopedias (instead of just having an online presence). Title sequences are great, aren't they? Well, the good ones are. The great ones are amazing.

It's A Small World

Fred Slaymakers Wonder Village,
Wannock Gardens,
Polegate, Sussex.

Good to see the Creator at the centre (and a bit off to the top left, respectively) of his own little Universe.In Sussex, God wears a beret. Fred Slaymaker spent ten years building the village out of concrete and rubbish: it includes coal scuttles, bin lids, tea trays, ashtrays, corks, bottle tops and bits of bike. So when does a model village become Outsider Art?'. I suppose the first time someone looks at a discarded cigar tube and thinks 'that would make a nice miniature chimney'.

I noticed that Fred included a travelling fair in his vision although, of course, it doesn't travel anywhere. The fair is a recurring feature in these tiny idealised towns: all the fun, permanently.

TV minus 50

I've very much been enjoying Friend of The Island Ivan Kirby's new blog, TV minus 50. Brilliantly, Ivan is looking at what was on telly in 1963 and blogging about it. It sounds very simple, and it is, which makes it incredibly addictive. It's also superbly executed and very well written, and you need to go there now.

You Die Laughing

The only collaboration between British horror giants Hammer and US exploitation genius William Castle, ‘The Old Dark House’ is not quite as good as the sum of its parts, but provides an eccentric and occasionally amusing stab at a macabre black comedy with a great cast and some cheap but genuine laughs.

When American car salesman Tom Penderel is asked by his intense and enigmatic housemate Caspar to deliver a sports car to his ancestral seat in Dartmoor, Femm House, he inadvertantly wanders into a very strange situation indeed. Femm House is almost exactly as an American would expect it to be – old, dark, leaky, cold, and populated with a load of bonkers elderly upper class maniacs, the sort who build arks in their back garden. Unfortunately for Tom, he arrives on the night when family members start dying – murdered at the rate of one an hour by an unknown assailant who is clearly looking to thin out the opposition to inheriting the enormous fortune bequeathed by a piratical ancestor.

Often collapsing into farce, ‘The Old Dark House’ suffers from the same problem as 99% of horror comedies in that it is neither funny enough, nor horrific enough. That said, it’s pleasantly knock-about, and the cast have a lot of fun with their bizarre roles.

Robert Morley, Mervyn Johns, Joyce Grenfell and Danny Green play the older Femms, with Janette Scott, Fenella Fielding and Peter Bull (in a dual role) as the younger generation. Special consideration should be given to Fenella Fielding, who is stupidly sexy as the sinister Morgiana. Fielding could have had a long horror career if she’d taken her tongue out of cheek, but she is too twinkly and knowing to convince as a real threat – although she looks like she could have your trousers off in seconds. I like her.

Castle and Hammer didn’t join forces again, unfortunately, so ‘The Old Dark House’ remains a quaint, camp curio – not massively successful, but an interesting change of pace.

The Old Dark House

Carry On Creepy

I have an aversion to farce. I don’t like people running around and hiding in cupboards; I don’t like mugging and pulling faces; I don’t like plots that hang on things that make no sense and could be immediately resolved if everyone just stopped running around, hiding in cupboards, mugging and pulling faces and just calmed the fuck down for a nano-second. That said, I like ‘What A Carve Up!’ and that’s pretty much what happens all the way through it.

The idea is extremely straightforward, really, a disparate band of British character actors gather at a creepy old mansion for the reading of a will and, while there, they start getting knocked off one by one. It’s fairly predictable, and the stars are Carry On stalwarts Sid James and Kenneth Connor, which makes for a distinctly down to earth affair, although they are ably supported by horror genii Donald Pleasence and Michael Gough and by the rather tasty Shirley Eaton.

Kenneth Connor fascinates me. His hair is ridiculously curly but also very delicate: it’s like a gossamer afro, an aurora of frizz. He's such an unlikely lead, comedy or not, and he could only really have been a film star in England, maybe Italy. I always liked it in ‘Carry On’ films when he’d sing: the big, warm, expressive voice coming out of his little, frigid, awkward body.

Sid James is a crumpled legend, and it’s interesting that here he plays Connor’s friend and ‘legal advisor’ as a close companion to the Sidney Balmoral James character who spent his life advising (and ripping off) Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock (Hancock had just sacked James as he was concerned that they had become a double act). His character is called 'Sid', of course: it's difficult to think of him as anything else, really, although I did once see him in a film playing an Italian, but can't remember any other details.    

Okay-ish, not bad, easy to watch (just as well given the amount of times it’s been shown on telly), I sort of like it, certainly don’t dislike it. I wouldn’t write a book about it, though, no matter how post modern I was feeling.   

What A Carve Up!