Current mood:	busy
Entry tags:	fantastic films weekend

I took the decision on Saturday to go and see the Make-up Ladies in the museum foyer rather than braving the stairs to TV Heaven. One of them kindly slashed my wrist for me:



... and Debi got taught to do her own stab wound. And then it was time for Horror Express.

What can I say about Horror Express that hasn't been said a thousand times before? I firmly believe it is the best film ever made. It was wonderful watching the reactions of innerbrat and purple_pen, who hadn't seen it before. It was glorious hearing all the familiar classic lines (My God! It's the Baggage Man! Monster? But we're BRITISH! and of course the wonderful exchange Miss Jones, I shall need your assistance Well, at your age,I'm not surprised! *shocked*With an autopsy! *cheerfully excited*Oh, well, that's different!). It's the film that has everything a genre fan could ever want. It's got Cushing 'n' Lee. It's got a mad monk. It's got sci-fi, and victorian trains, and hairy-handed monsters, and boiled eyeballs, and brain pudding and Zombie Kojak. It's got amazing facial hair and silly hats galore. It's got the worst chat-up line ever. It's got a whistlable theme tune. Iy even has reasonable gender balance, given that it's a seventies horror film. If you haven't seen it before, get the DVD. And if you haven't seen it on the big screen before, come to the FFW next year, because Tony knows he'll get lynched if he doesn't show it.

The Giant Spider Invasion was an enjoyable slice of silly monster hokum, starring Della Street from Perry Mason as a lady scientist, lots of lovely Mexican RedKnee Tarantulas, and a huge, hilarious, animatronic spider. It did exactly what it said on the tin.

Screentalk with Michael Armstrong (excerpts on Youtube here) was pretty interesting, apart from the fact that I kept looking at him and thinking this is what po8crg is going to look like in 30 years' time. It was followed by a screening of his film Mark of the Devil, which... well, I didn't enjoy much. Aside from the discovery that Udo Keir was stunningly gorgeous in his youth, the film offered little in the way of revelations. Yes, people torture each other in horribly nasty ways. Yes, mob mentality makes people do stupid things. But I don't necessarily need to see an unrelenting exposé of these practises on film.

Which brings me on to Birdemic: Shock and Terror... And the reason this blog post has taken me two days to contemplate before writing it is because Birdemic: Shock and Terror is, without question, the worst film I have ever seen. Not in a so-bad-it's-good way. Not in an ironic way. Not in a funny way. It's a masterclass in how not to make a film. The script was awful, the acting was atrocious, the sound editing was abysmal, the lighting was ridiculous, the direction was pedestrian and clichéd, the characters were not even one dimensional, and the special effects were only special in the sense of special school (and I say that as a person with a diagnosed mental illness). It made the films of Ed Wood look filled with Kubrickian attention to detail. It made me nostalgic for the Citizen Kane-like storytelling and subtlety of Timeslash. If you are a connoisseur of truly bad films, you should see this if only so that you can see how bad a truly bad film can be. But don't say I didn't warn you how truly, utterly terrible it is.

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