A LIKELY STORY

206 pages, the upshot of which is: the Hebrew God Yahweh was an astronaut who happened upon our Earth and got into a pissing contest with the resident God, Elohim. Yahweh wasn't very popular, so he created his own separate race to worship him: the Jews. And that's why anti-semitism is such a big problem. And it's all in The Bible, if you know where to look, and Marc Dem knows where to look, because he's got a massive brain and is an incredibly sensitive and perceptive person who is ABSOLUTELY NOT against the people of Israel. 

We read this shit so you don't have to. Well, we skim it. We skim shit. There's the motto if we ever get a TOMTIT coat of arms. 

HOW SAVAGE ARE YOU?

‘Brutes and Savages’ is a mondo film, so you’ll know what to expect: dusky foreign breasts and repulsive animal cruelty.

The clearly Italian ‘Arthur Davis’ leads an expedition into Africa and South America to document the primitive rites of the indigenous people, the titular brutes and savages. His modus operandi is to tip up to a remote village and ask for the head man’s permission to film some notorious ritual that the tribe are famous for. When the chief refuses (perhaps because he is frightened of Arthur’s salmon safari suit) Arthur makes the culturally insensitive decision to go ahead and film it anyway, at which point we cut to some faked footage that goes on for ages. Don’t worry though:  ‘all scenes, whether actual or simulated, represents actual truth’.

This truth includes a turtle having its throat cut, a goat being decapitated, a llama having its heart removed and numerous scenes of birds and animals killing and eating each other. 

Oh, and a monkey gets put on a fire. 

The whole thing peaks very early on, with a bizarre sequence in which African tribesmen are forced to wade through a river as part of their initiation into manhood. Using stock footage, blatant re-enactment and a series of unconvincing models, the film makers stage a fatal crocodile attack, including jump cuts to footage featuring a different man battling a plastic croc in what looks like a California swimming pool. It’s pathetic, especially the fake hands and fake head stuffed in the fake reptiles fake mouth. Worryingly for the viewer, this is the highlight of the film, and there is still an hour and fifteen minutes left to run.

It's a long haul to the end, although we do get to see men simulate sex with llamas and get a sneak peek at South America’s most important collection of ‘erotic pottery’ (Arthur takes great pleasure in pointing out the penises). Mostly, however, it’s quite boring, interspersed with uneasy moments of graphic nastiness. On the plus side, the music is by Riz Ortalini, and is excellent, although sadly unavailable at present, which is just fucking typical. 

In the end analysis, the narrator (the recently deceased Richard Johnson, slumming it to the extent that he is virtually a homeless, meth addicted derelict) asks if these ‘brutes and savages’ are really any worse than us so-called sophisticates. Is slowly sawing out the throat of a turtle any different to killing a chicken? Does having deep freezes and TVs make us better people? Aren’t we all really brutes and savages at heart?

He’s got a point.

But, unfortunately, he chose to make it in this film.

ANTS IN PANTS

Alan Landsburg served as executive producer on ‘Ants! It Happened At Lakewood Manor’, one of three creepy crawly creature features that he worked on in 1976 / 77 (the others were ‘The Savage Bees’ and ‘Tarantula: Deadly Cargo’ – yes, we know bees aren’t really creepy crawlies under normal circumstances, but these are SAVAGE, so all bets are off). 

The ever canny Landsburg then wrote a book called ‘The Insects Are Coming’ about the mini-beast threat, citing the three films that he’d just made as evidence. We really miss that guy.  

In ‘Ants!’*, the construction of a casino next to an old family hotel unearths a colony of mutated ants who are immune to normal insecticides and really pissed off at being disturbed. Equipped with a poisonous bite and, of course, strength in numbers, the ants proceed to swarm over people and, by sheer tenacity, toxic mandibles and the liberal use of slow motion, manage to overcome their much larger human enemies. 

Hairy building site manager Robert Foxworth does his best to stop the attack by tearing up their nest with a bulldozer but, funnily enough, this just makes it worse. Much worse.

The film follows an almost hypnotically soothing pattern: characters are introduced, we are shown close ups of ants doing stuff, we get to know the characters, they are killed by ants. For a story set on a building site it’s not exactly ground breaking (yes, that is clever wording, thanks), but it’s compelling viewing, especially when they try and combat the ant invasion by digging a trench around the building, filling it with petrol and setting it alight.  

    

In the end, the surviving protagonists are reduced to hiding at the very top of the hotel, holding what look like enormous joints in their mouths and hoping that the ants will be pacified by the smoke until they can be rescued. It all seems a bit pathetic, really – they’re only fucking ants, after all.  

* We’ll dispense with the somewhat superfluous suffix now – Lakewood Manor is a made up place, so who cares what happened there? If it was, say, ‘Ants! It happened at Disneyland’, it would be a different matter.)

TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE; AN INFINITE NUMBER OF HEADS IS PREFERABLE

Further to the post below, it's worth pointing out that TOMTIT has been conducting experimental psychical research for some nine years now, at enormous cost and with inconclusive results. 

On the plus side, people have stopped dying, and this has led to enormous reductions in our waste disposal bill. On the negative side, there are still far too many nose-bleeds, ear-bleeds and eye-bleeds happening, and poor Fearlono has been in two irreversible comas. 

This kid doesn't look too happy, granted, but then he's a selfish little twerp. The discomfort he is going through on a daily basis isn't for his benefit, it's for all mankind. Do e-mail us if you'd like to sponsor him. Does six quid a month sound reasonable?

Our Bible is John L. Randall’s 'Parapsychology and The Nature of Life'. We’ve never read it, but the cover is great and it is subtitled ‘A Scientific Appraisal’ ,so it’s bound to be spot on. Sure, there could have been an infinite number of heads in the illustration but that’s hardly John L. Randall’s fault, unless he did the illustration in which case it is. 

The chapter titles are brilliant: The Descent of Man; Life In The Test Tube; The Existential Vacuum; Psi In The Space Age; Mechanism In The Melting Pot and many, many, many others.

Top secret work in our soundproof science dungeon continues, and we will not give up until we find irrefutable and incontrovertible proof of our theory that everyone is sort of psychic. But then you probably already knew that.

We feel we’re on the verge of a breakthrough. We have done for ages. 

THE MONKEY'S PAW

It's an all too familiar scenario: you're walking along, minding your own business, completely unaware of the huge, hairy hand which is extending behind you. 

Suddenly, the hand grabs you - encloses you - lifts you - shakes you about - and there's nothing you can do apart from hang on and hope that you don't get crushed or smashed or popped into its owners mouth and eaten alive. 

After a while, the hand releases you. You might land softly, you might crash to the ground in a heap of broken bones - the hairy hand doesn't care - it didn't put you down, it simply let you go.

Yes, you're right, this scene from 'The Mighty Peking Man' (1977) is JUST LIKE LIFE. Good luck with your own hairy hands, people.

ANIMAL OSCARS

There are a number of reasons to write about Robert Clouse’s 1977 film ‘The Pack’, not least the fact that is an excellent, suspenseful film that keeps the viewer entertained for all of its ninety eight minutes. It’s also unusual, and we like that, and it reminds us of the sort of thing Guy N. Smith might come up with if he had a load of cash and a course of subtle injections. The big thing for us, however, is that it features the greatest ever acting performance by a dog. 

Completely ignored by the Academy, this dog is absolutely superb and, as screen villains go, makes Alan Rickman look like the jumped up am-drammer that he is. This dog is better than 90% of human actors: he is the Robert Ryan of dog villains, seething with hatred and danger and rage. We don’t know what they were taunting him with, but we are glad that we are not it. Actually, this dog is so good that we expect that he didn’t need to be poked with anything, he simply had long conversations with the director about his character’s motivation, then made lots of detailed notes in the margin of his script before squaring his shoulders and going out and giving the performance of a lifetime.

The story is simple, but nicely set up. Joe Don Baker, the immovable object, is on remote Seal Island with around half a dozen other permanent residents and a party of tourists. JDB is the conservation warden, a former Alaskan fisherman (i.e. very tough) who was initially sent to the island 'to study prawns'. The island is a popular destination for holiday makers who, unforgivably, often buy dogs to bring on their vacation, only to abandon them as they jump on the weekly ferry for their homes in the city (something seems not quite right about that bit but we went with it and everything was okay). 

The abandoned and bitter and hungry dogs have formed a pack and, under the charismatic leadership of the greatest dog actor in the world, are now ready to mount a challenge to the humans, who they want very dead very much – partly because they hate them for their cruelty and partly, of course, because humans are extremely tasty.

The film unfolds slowly and deliberately, but from the first glimpse of the canine Laurence Olivier, teeth bared furiously, you know that this is all going to end in an almighty battle, and it does, as the surviving humans rally under Joe Don Baker to keep themselves alive until the next ferry comes, and the pack lay siege, desperate to take their revenge and have their favourite dinner. 

There are some illogical bits (JDB batters the top dog thespian with the butt of his rifle, despite it being easier to shoot him; a woman on the run from the dogs takes shelter in a barn full of dog shit and is then surprised when the pack come home and tear her to bits) but none of that matters AT ALL. The film is good, the tension is high, the setting is marvellous and, yes, the lead dog is a bona fide genius - and he doesn’t even get a credit. Dirty, delicious human bastards. 

...

Genuinely good animal actors are few and far between, of course. Toto was okay, but his role mainly involved trotting from one predesignated point to another and jumping up. We thought Babe was marvellous, until we found out he was a robot. Digby* wasn’t big at all, and so poor at expressions that the director combed his hair down over his lifeless eyes. 

Aside from our unnamed mongrel genius, the only ever truly great animal actor we can think of is Cheeta from the ‘Tarzan’ films. 

There is a persistent rumour that most of Cheeta’s acting was facilitated by rubbing peanut butter on his gums and letting him smoke opium but, even when he isn’t chattering and licking his lips, he presents us with a fully rounded character, a mischievous force of nature, as best displayed in this unforgettable vignette from the ridiculously enjoyable ‘Tarzan’s New York Adventure’ (1942).

We particularly likes it when he talcs his arse. Good luck with that powder puff, Jane.

* We are slightly obsessed with Digby, The Biggest Dog In The World and, inexplicably, we're also quite angry with him.

ON THE ROAD

In the mid-seventies, an ill-defined patch of nothing roughly located between Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda became an unexpected geographic celebrity, a notorious place where no man, boat or aeroplane was safe, where things just disappeared, never to return. Was the cause natural, unnatural or supernatural? Was it perhaps extra-terrestrial? And what was a bare faced Galen from ‘Planet Of The Apes’ doing there? 

In the ‘The Fantastic Journey’ pilot, a group of eggheads (and the lead boffin’s son) are out innocently doing science in this so-called Bermuda Triangle when an ominous green cloud engulfs their boat. After some swirly effects, the party find themselves shipwrecked, trapped on a bizarre and mysterious island where all sorts of wildlife and all sorts of people from all sorts of times and places and planets co-exist. Within about twenty minutes, for instance, our shipwrecked protagonists have met a chilled out new age Doctor from the 23rd century, as well as tangled with a group of angry 18th century pirates, led by a man who looks like Ian McShane, only younger and smaller. 

 

The series that followed built on this premise, but only ran for nine episodes, so left a number of unanswered questions and under-developed concepts in the wake of its premature cancellation. What is clear is that the bizarre and mysterious island had an endless supply of lurex, as almost everyone seems to be wearing it (especially the men, resulting in some distracting and unpleasant lumps and bumps in the crotchal region). 

Most of the original characters were supposedly ‘returned to their own time’ (i.e. fired) after the pilot, leaving a core crew of the hippy future guy, the scientist’s son, the black Doctor (mainly there for fighting and shouting ‘right on’) and, as they went along, a foxy half alien, half Atlantean telepath miniskirt lady and her psychic cat and, best of all, shifty, waspish Roddy McDowall as a shifty, waspish scientist who, in the end, despite wearing all black, turns out to be a bit of a sweetheart. 

This motley crew traipse around day after day in the same clothes looking for a way home. The separate parts of the island are reached via flashing laser portals which instantly transport the traveller to their next stop, although it isn’t clear if they are travelling through time as well as space. Either way, on this ‘fantastic journey’, they encounter lots of people from the future, several robots and some green faced Hispanic looking people in a series of silly scenarios that tick the boxes in terms of sci fi television cliché (hey, there’s a society ruled by sinister kids; a society ruled by an evil tyrant; a society ruled by sexy women and evil tyrant Joan Collins, etc.) as well as traditional drama staples like haunted houses and doomed romances. 

 

The following scene is from an episode in which our travellers happen across an enormous but totally deserted fairground. Unabashed by just how incredibly creepy that is, and undeterred by the fact that, wherever they go, people want to kill them, they amble happily over to the site in search of fun. As they approach, all the lights go on and the music starts and the Merry-Go-round goes merrily round and all that and STILL they don't run away. To be honest, they deserve the quasi-mythological, hairy, cosmic horror that comes next...

If anyone can explain where the thunder and lightning at the end comes from, we'd be very grateful.

The whole programme is as daft as daft can be, and extremely enjoyable, especially when those wonderful analogue synths kick in. Cheap and shoddy, occasionally laughable, the show nevertheless has a sense of (mostly unfulfilled) mystery, a feeling that anything could happen because all the clocks are broken and the maps are wrong. Thirty years later, someone will throw loads of money at this concept and call it ‘Lost’. 

Interestingly, after a blaze of publicity and some best selling books, it was very quickly proved that stories about the Devil's Triangle were just that, stories, and the supporting evidence mere invention, urban legend, i.e. statistically, that area of sea is no more dangerous than any other area of sea, and most incidents occurring there had quite prosaic explanations. Human nature is such, however, that people still believe in the various fraudulent claims made about The Triangle, and there are many who remain wary and frightened of it, although much of this may be down to Barry Manilow’s terrifying 1981 hit single of the same name*. 

*The Wikipedia entry for this song is worth quoting in full:"Bermuda Triangle" is a song by Barry Manilow, from his album Barry. Released as a single in 1981, it reached number 15 in the UK charts, and number 16 in Germany.The song features tonicizations, the cycle of fifths and a brief modulation to the tonic minor, which represents Manilow 'losing his woman'.