Chopping Mall
Chopping Mall was my first blog, which I started way back in 2009. It was dedicated exlcusively to ridiculous and terrible films, which I watched a lot of back then. (So much time, so little work!)
I’ve resuced the posts from oblivion, to be preserved here for …uh… whatever.
It’s a pretty clunky process getting them out of blogspot (XML export, eww) and into here, so there may be a few formatting issues.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
“I’m just out for a good time. The rest is propaganda”
This one’s a classic. Re-watched it yesterday and can strongly recommend it to anyone. A film of life in 1960s industrial Nottingham, lead character Arthur is a hard-working factory labourer, tied to his lathe all week and heading to the pubs for boozing and womanising at the weekends. The story’s fun, but this is mostly a fab picture of how life was ‘back in the day’.
From Arthur’s pints of stout and 14 pound wage to the stiff policeman who “don’t want no trouble here” and everyone going to the pub on a saturday night with their aunties and mothers, this shows a very different world.
As if to demonstrate, the censors were apparently unhappy about the film’s suggestion of extra-marital sex. Did we see the naughty adulterers (adulterists?) at it? A sweaty-scene? A flash of leg? Oh no, they merely wake up in the same bed. This film was somewhat naughty in its day, though nowadays we wouldn’t bat an eyelid.
And look out for the title of Arctic Monkeys’ first album, “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not”, they lifted it from this film.
No Man's Land: Rise of the Reeker
Stumbled across this fairly lame action/horror attempt on zone horror. Starts as a fairly tame sherriff vs. robbers film, turns into a fairly tame sherriff and robbers vs. monster film and then descends into a confusing ‘what-the-hell-just-happened?’ film. So not great then.
The only part that is truly wonderful is the sequence where the characters discover the invisible wall (yes, seriously…) that’s trapping them in this haunted little bit of desert. One guy plays out the full Parisian Street-mime repetoir, feeling the invisible wall, leaning on it, pressing his face against it and finally running headlong into it.
His performance is only bettered by the guy who drives his car head on into the invisible wall. Not only is it one of the better moments of the film but he also loses half his head doing it. Which has got to be good, no?
Last half-hour’s quite fun. The rest is pants.
Trailer here: