And now the fettling starts!
For a while now I’ve wanted to take all the reviews featured on this website and REALLY go to town on them. I thought it would be fun to take them apart and forensically nail every typo, poor joke and badly written sentence. In a comedy way, you understand. I thought it would add an interesting spin on the site if the reviews were all littered with footnotes explaining how poor they were.
But then I decided against it, as it was probably a less clever idea than I thought, the work involved would be incredible, and the results limited (to say the least). And would anyone get the joke? Probably not. I’m sure you’re wondering what I’m on about, just reading the above.
But I did think I could do it in a more limited way. Which is one of the reasons why I moved the site to a new provider where I could edit it at my leisure, in real time. And have a blog to explain it all.
This blog, the one you’re reading.
To set up the site, I gave every review a quick once-over, and actually ended up making some quite huge changes. But in the limited timeframe I gave myself, I was never going to spot every supposedly ironic comment about the physical attributes of the female stars. Some slipped through, along with some bizarre references, badly thought-out jokes and poor prose. Not to mention the hanging prepositions there were so many of.
(Clever joke, that)
Anyway that work starts now.
Finally having a website that is readable on a phone screen has helped. I’ve been able to surf through my own reviews in quiet moments this week, and have spotted the occasional howler.
One review that slipped through the net was of gothic shocker “And Now The Screaming Starts!”.
I am in the process of editing it into some semblance of normality now, as I write this. And as I go, I shall endeavour to explain my thinking. If it’s at all amusing or informative, let me know. If you’re still wondering what on earth I’m on about, let me know. If you love me, let me go. If the North wind doth blow… oh, I dunno.
Let us begin…
“Basically”
Why start a review with the word “basically”? That’s going for a start. Basic on what level? Who am I talking to?
“Basically a gory, shock-filled rip-off of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (with added daft hats, acres of heaving bosom, tight trousers, shiny boots and more daft hats)”
So, we’re getting rid of the first word. But who says this film has got anything to do with the classic book-and-film Rebecca? I’d probably recently seen the older film and was trying to be clever. Okay, so we have a young wife being brought home by a husband, and spooky shenanigans commence. But it’s a flimsy link, and an even flimsier premise to start a review with. There certainly are a lot of daft hats involved though. And although I can’t deny the acres of heaving bosom on show, we’re better than that these days, aren’t we? Aren’t we? Yes, Chris, we are.
“Amicus’s ~~And Now The Screaming Startswas the studio’s only attempt at a full-on, full-length period horror. And, true to the company’s utter hopelessness at doing anything (other than portmanteau films) properly, back in 1971 it was already hopelessly out of time.”
First comment – what’s this (~~) all about? I must have seen it written like that somewhere and decided two squiggly lines was the way to go, title-wise. But for some reason I missed the important bit. Whither the exclamation mark? The whole point of an exclamation mark is to be visible, and make the sentence they’re attached to more forceful. So leaving it out seems an oddly blind choice. And you may have noticed the lack of a space between “Starts” and “was”. This happened a lot in the original website. It’s because if you italicise a word (for example the title of a film) in HTML, it puts an odd space after the word. So I took it out. And when I pasted the old HTML into a new document, the space vanished. Clear? No, I didn’t think so, either. In fact, in my bid to clarify things here, it feels like I’m making it more complex. Do I need to go into detail about what HTML is, or how you italicise words when hard-coding websites? Yes, fact fans – the original website was completely done in hand-coded HTML, by me. I was young and stupid, and I had a lot of time on my hands…
But anyway, let’s roll back a bit, here. Because I’m rather taking the audience for granted in this segment. What is an Amicus? You’re supposed to be a journalist, Chris. Not everyone will understand this. It needs context. And was this famous British film company (see? Context!) actually hopeless? Their track record might say otherwise. Film companies don’t stay in business if they are hopeless at making films. You know what is hopeless? Using the words “hopelessness” and “hopelessly” in the same sentence.
Let’s move on.
“it still must have looked totally out of place next to The Wicker Man.”
I have no idea what this statement means. I think I was trying to get across the idea that people weren’t making Gothic horrors in the early 70s. But they were, and they were still popular at this point. So all the above has been consigned to the bin. Utterly pointless, space-filling rubbish, all very much off the top of my young head and informed by half-remembered “facts” culled from a variety of dodgy sources.
The space-filling aspect is clear in the very next line:
“These days, of course, the film can be seen as a minor classic”
Talk about immediately back-tracking… So, Amicus weren’t exactly hopeless, were they? What on earth is the audience supposed to glean from this review? Have an opinion and stick to it, me-from-20-years-ago! Now, that’s a great use of an exclamation mark.
“the whole film is required to stand or fall on Beacham’s central role, and given the opportunity to star (in most genre films she’s the concerned sister-type) she’s quite a revelation. She looks gorgeous, as well - liberated from the bad-wig-and-shapeless-nightgown ensemble of Dracula AD1972, there’s much to admire and it’s not surprising that the ghost at the centre of the family curse takes a shine to her, eyes or no eyes.”
Urgh. The “creepy uncle” approach to film reviewing so beloved by absolutely no-one ever. “Gorgeous”? Let’s concentrate on her performance, shall we? (More of that later, Jeezus) “There’s much to admire”? Although it is clear that this blatant sexism is a set-up for a joke about the ghost with no eyes. That doesn’t make it right, though.
Now, in my considered opinion, much of the rest of the review stands up. Within the low standards set by this website, anyway. The reviews are supposed to be lighthearted and funny. This one fairly gallops through the plot, with a few droll asides. I like the breakdown of the deaths. I can always remember someone telling me once that they’d felt drawn to tracking down the then-pretty-rare Craze because of my review, which made it sound utterly hilarious. Which of course it is. My favourite line in that review is when it describes the activities of Jack Palance as “jumps-out-of-cupboards-at”. A phrase that is still making me smile, in fact.
“Eye, eye, that’s handy” is a pretty obvious joke… but it needs to be said. No-one ever accused me of being subtle. And there really are a lot of instances where someone’s about to spill the beans and gets killed before they can finish their sentence.
I’m not sure why I described Patrick Magee as “voted British horror’s favourite seedy doctor three years in a row 70,71,72”, I can only assume I’d seen him in a couple of films by that point and thought I was being clever. Another aside… when I started writing this website I was not an expert in film history. 20 years on, I’m still not (although I do at least know who Denis Price is these days). So you’ll see supposedly informed statements like these crop up from time to time. I just hope none of them made their way into better thought-through essays…
I’ve decided to leave in the reference to the “student rugby club party” – it sort-of works as a description of what is a reliable staple of films from that time… supposed debauchery being shown as what looks like quite an average night in the pub.
But then we get to the end, and we have this pearler, now also in the bin:
“It can be a bit slow in places, but there’s much to recommend this film - not least Beacham’s chest, I mean performance.”
This was the last line, which I’ve removed from the review without causing any problems at all, showing how utterly extraneous it was. Now, in this case I know what I was getting at here – it’s a reference to an old Monty Python routine. But why? Why would I do this? Why denigrate Ms Beacham’s performance by saying her chest was the most important bit? It’s so FHM. It’s things like this I want to excise from the site. Once when I was interviewing Madeleine Smith at an event, a creepy bloke sidled up to us and proceeded to allude to the Hammer actor exactly what he liked to do whilst watching her films. It was clear she got a lot of this kind of cack-handed “compliment”, and she treated him with a calm dignity he really didn’t deserve. It got me thinking, even at the time, “wow, am I like that?”
I know I’m not, but I don’t want people thinking I might be, even if everything on this site is written very much with tongue firmly in cheek.
So, this review has been fettled, and others will be fettled. The site will remain a work-in-progress. In some cases, I want to go the other way, as well – things got a bit po-faced at times, and the reviews suffer when they’re not funny. Anyone can string together a precis of a film they’ve just watched. These days they’re ALL available for anyone to see, so no-one wants to read an arid account of what happens in the film. The point of the reviews on this site are to poke fun and invite others to join in on the joke. If we can all have a bit of a laugh and enjoy some fantastic old films, I’ll be happy.
