We're always seeing the phrase "this film will change your life!" in reviews, billings and - most suspect of all - promotional material for the latest 'classic' cinematic endeavour. It's a cliche, a meangingless piece of verbal fluff, fair enough, we understand that. But still it gets our goat every time we see it. Now, we love films, but the idea of them actually changing your
life has always seemed a bit suspect to our unromantically pragmatic
minds, so we got to thinking of instances where watching a film has
actually, empirically, had a direct influence on how we lived
thereafter. In most cases, we found that the films were not quite
the ones we expected, and that said influence was fleeting at best.
So here's our list of films which really did change our lives,
albeit only for a few hours immediately after seeing them.
TEN FILMS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOR A FEW HOURS IMMEDIATELY AFTER SEEING THEM
BAD TASTE
It is not a regular occurrence for us to feel the pangs of nausea
whilst watching a film - God knows we've sat through enough Norman
Bloody Wisdom to have developed a cast iron gut - but every now and
then something creeps on to the screen that affects us in a
stomachal way, if only for a limited time. One such instance came
when as young impressionable filmic types we stumbled into the local
Azad and emerged clutching a copy of Peter Jackson's magnum opus Bad
Taste not knowing really what to expect. On first viewing we could
take the scooping-the-brains-from-the-head-and-eating-them bit. We
handled the chainsaw-through-the-body-to-the-bottom-"I've been
reborn!" sequence quite well. Even PJ's (formerly) trademark
slightly-out-of-focus-shaky-handheld-poor-sound technique couldn't
faze us. However, the scene that involved an alien spewing cream
coloured bumpy puke copiously into a bowl and then it being passed
around everyone else for them to drink from was too much. What made
it worse was that the substance being egressed into the bowl was
quite clearly cold rice pudding which, on the face of it, you would
think would make it easier to deal with. But all it did was allow us
to associate in our minds extra-terrestrial vomit with the taste of
full cream Ambrosia. We didn't eat tinned rice for quite some time.
Of course, after Jackson made Bad Taste, our careers diverged from
each other quite severely - it led him to eventually be one of the
world's biggest and most successful film-makers, whilst it led us to
once get a welcome titter in a temp job in a call centre when we
noticed the phone turret bore, on the labels on the extension lines
down the side, the legends `The PM' `The Queen' `The Boys' etc. What
a guy.
BMX BANDITS
We don't know why BMXs were so phenomenally popular for a few years.
Perhaps it was something to do with the almost total impracticality
of the things as "proper" bikes - with no gears, scaling even
moderate hills was universally regarded as "a bugger". Ah, but there
were the stunts! Which, admittedly, only one jug-eared kid at any
given school could actually do with competence, but that wasn't the
point. BMXs were glamourous. They were in films! Like ET! And BMX
Bandits, a canny piece of consumer flattery that allied the timeless
kids-catch-crims premise of the Children's Film Foundation to the
ideal hideously overpriced product. Wanting to be just like intrepid
Aussies David Argue and Angelo D'Angelo (names that resonate down
the decades, for sure) several of Filmguide's mates sought exciting
urban (well, suburban) locations through which to pedal like idiot
clowns in pursuit of imaginary thugs in Minder t-shirts. Funnily
enough, the powers that be weren't that taken with the idea of
playing host to our crimestopping heroics. The shopping mall (well,
centre) proved impenetrable. The multi-storey was too revolting to
bother with. And as for the famous BMXs-down-the-waterslide scene,
well, we don't think they even had waterslides round our way at the
time, and the municipal pool staff were disappointingly steadfast in
their "no bikes" policy (even if we gave the tyres a good run
through the footbath beforehand). If the local council had been
given a part in Nicole Kidman's finest hour, it would have been a
much shorter film.
THE EXORCIST
There's really nothing dafter than watching a film as a puppy and
deciding, upon watching one's favourite character do their highly
entertaining thing; "Yes! That's the job for me!" So it must be
terribly alarming for anxious parents to have their child watch a
seemingly harmless piece of fluff like, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark
only to have them say, "That's it! I want to be a Nazi!" `cos if
they don't snap out of it sharpish they'll be goose-stepping their
Playmobil men round a big multi-coloured Lego concentration camp
before you can say Rorschach. The best the hapless elders can hope
for is that another film will come along and steal away the thought
from their heads and replace it with another one. So, suddenly they
watch Star Wars and before you can say `Galactic Empire' the nipper
is shouting, "Yes! Now I *really* want to be a Nazi! They look
great!" Or possibly something more constructive. So it was that one
of Creamguide (films)' parents looked on in horror as, having
watched minor but lengthy Vatican romp The Shoes of the Fisherman,
their boy (upon seeing the many delights of `60s Rome and Leo McKern
stuffed to the gills and smoking a reflective cheroot dressed as a
Cardinal) spake thus: "I wouldn't mean being a priest". Much
consternation followed (the internal proviso `As long as I get to be
Pope' remained unsaid) but the image was speedily dispelled when,
only a few days later whilst staying over at a friend's house the
same junior idiot saw his first showing of The Exorcist and
thought, "Fuck that for laugh!". Ah, the power of the movies.
POLICE ACADEMY
You can't tell kids, can you? How many people, affecting a studiedly
bewildered indignation at the success of Adam Sandler and those two
brothers who do films about sperm, went apeshit over the original
zany mindnumber? Hands up. We certainly did, and the main reason was
of course Michael Winslow and his astounding cupped-hands
noisemaking antics, which we fervently imitated with an almost manic
obsession for a very brief period after seeing the original. "This
is going to be my *job* when I grow up!" we would cry, which was
later modulated to "Maybe we could get on the Wide Awake Club talent
slot", and a few hours later still to the rather more
pragmatic "When's tea ready then?" Fortunately, nobody was stupid
enough to imitate Bobcat Goldthwaite. Small mercies...
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
We don't know what children get up to in the playgrounds these days,
but we bet they don't play Cowboys & Indians or Soldiers. The demise
of such traditional folly is probably indicative of some great
sociological shift in society, but to us it is indicative mostly of
the first stirrings of the grip of Star Wars on the youth of a
generation (or two) of schoolboys. According to the oft-expressed
views of popular contemporary bullshitters, Star Wars has been the
main staple of conversation amongst male children since about 1953,
but those of us who were actually paying any attention at the time
are well aware that it wasn't until the appearance of The Empire
Strikes Back that the whole thing chucked off in earnest. In our own
little universe, which was not that long ago and not terribly far
away, no-one even had any Star Wars toys to speak of since these
were only accrued at birthdays and Christmas and that doesn't really
allow for much mass consumption. How the whole thing first crashed
into our break times was when it began to replace the aforementioned
C&I and Soldiers as the made-up game of choice in the playground.
However, despite the allure of many and varied plays on words for
those cast as Han Solo, or the innumerable puns on the name
Skywalker, the possibilities were a bit limited (no bullets, no
tanks, no funny accents) it all lasted about a fortnight and the Old
West and Third Reich once again asserted themselves as the dominant
genres in the yard.
HOLIDAY ON THE BUSES
At least Star Wars lent itself to playground tournament conversion,
however scrappy. The mania for recreating silver screen action on
tarmac, however, led to some truly bizarre choices - how the hell
did one "play" Ferris Bueller's Day Off, or Nine to Five? God knows,
but we did. Nothing, however, topped that fateful afternoon when a
group of us gathered in the school grounds with our imaginations
freshly fired by last night's ITV showing of Holiday On the Buses.
The basic premise seemed sound enough - the bike shed would be
the "depot", our trusty BMXs would be the "buses", and so forth.
Then it was realised that driving about in buses accounts for less
than one tenth of the film. Fortunately, the raison d'etre of the
film - middle-aged farts leering at girls - wasn't something that
occurred to us to replicate. In fact, the all-male nature of the
cast made the divvying up of parts a nightmare. Everyone wanted to
be Blakey, natch. There were about three Regs and a couple of Stans,
and a smattering of that Wilfrid Brambell character. No-one would
touch the role of Arthur with a bargepole. As this unwieldy rock
opera of a game progressed, the focus was switched, courtesy of the
British weather, indoors, and the idea started that maybe we could
somehow break into the school kitchen to replicate the food fight
scene. Naturally, juvenile crime lords not being among our number,
this came to nowt, and the realisation dawned on us that, unless we
could somehow get hold of some petrol to blow up one of the bogs, we
might as well give up and go home. You know how people annoyingly
end anecdotes with a smug "You couldn't make it up!"? Well,
imaginatively bankrupt pre-pubescents that we were, we really
*couldn't* make it up. Now, Boys in Blue, that was a different
matter...
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO VILENESS FATS?
There's such a thing as trying too hard. As eager film students we
were yet to learn that vital lesson, so we made do for a while with
merely embodying it. Given the chance to "review" a film from the
library over the weekend (ie. watch it, then copy out some
intractable structuralist bumf from a textbook, inserting the name
of the film where necessary), we alighted upon the abovementioned
gem, which had the twin virtues of being a) the most showy-offy
obscure title we'd ever seen, and b) only half an hour long. So,
come Sunday night, with no-one else in the house, we finally got
down to it. For anyone who hasn't seen this film, it's a largely
silent affair made in the early 1970s by American arthouse band The
Residents, shot, winningly, on murky old black-and-white reel-to-
reel videotape, with angular, expressionist sets and costumes made
out of balsa and papier mache, with the "plot" concerning a fairy-
tale small town, some midgets in hats, and malevolent shopping
trolleys with drills on the front. The overall effect is like
stumbling across an early episode of Play School from some hideous
other dimension, an atmosphere enhanced by a soundtrack that sounds
like the eerie plinky-plonk stuff churned out by schools' programmes
like Music Time, if they were populated entirely with children who
had just come back from fighting the First World War. Watching all
this, alone, on a windy night in Wrexham, genuinely put the wind up
us for the first time since we wore short trousers as a rule. People
go on about Eraserhead being "chilling", but it's Carry On Cabby
compared with this lot. From then on we gravitated towards the more
forgiving shores of Amicus for our late night spinetinglings. And
the "review"? A flat C, we're afraid.
WAR GAMES
Fewer things are more dispiriting than watching a film with an
exciting plot that involves a practice or activity you assure
yourself you can master, only to have one go at it, find it hugely
difficult and then immediately give up. So when the world was first
introduced to the top-quality cutting edge entertainment of War
Games you can rest assured that the following day the nation was
abuzz with youngsters trying to hack into the Pentagon with their
C64s and Speccys. From what the juvenile throng could gather from a
plot that was more than a little vague on how Broderick & Co
achieved their own dastardly ends, it seemed to mostly involve using
a computer in a bedroom to get into top secret places and thence
fannying about with missiles. How this was achieved was never (quite
sensibly) discussed in any meaningful sense. It did involve putting
the phone into a funny sort of rubber socket for no adequately
explained reason but beyond that, no real clue. So for a couple of
hours (although admittedly not all at once) a nation was involved in
trying to work out how to use various Sinclair products for
nefarious, world-changing ends before chucking it in and getting
stuck back into Manic Miner. Presumably the pasty-faced Herberts who
continue to build upon their delusional superior air by meeting in
damp tents and swapping various royal phone numbers probably did
start their descent into interminable loneliness and body odour here
but their limited numbers are a testament to not only the loose
grasp of emerging technology on the part of the writers of War Games
but also the chronic fecklessness and ever decreasing attention span
of `80s youth. And for that we can all be grateful.
THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN
"A new peak in horror!" Our lives had been building up to this for
weeks. "You know the melting Nazis in Raiders?" asked our mate. We
did, of course. "Well, my brother's got a film on video that's like
that ALL THE WAY THROUGH!" Well, what were we waiting for? "He's
lent it out at the moment. To some big lads." So, we wait. And wait.
Juvenile minds being the feverish things they are, the fantasy of
the film assumes immense proportions of importance. And why not? A
melting man! For ninety whole minutes! This is what celluloid was
invented for, surely? Then comes the fateful day. "I've nicked it
out of his wardrobe!" On with the tape. And, to be fair, at first
it's great, being decidedly low on plot (astronaut returns from
Saturn, almost immediately starts melting for some reason, goes on a
gory killing spree - er, that's it) and the effects, for a cheapo
cheapo affair, rather good as it goes, with a nice rubbery-waxy head
that gradually reduces to a wobbly animatronic skull candle thing
with bulging eyeball, courtesy the great Rick Baker. Problem was, as
we swiftly found out, a one-trick pony's a one-trick pony. Horror of
horrors, it starts getting a little dull. Oh, some more of his
cheek's fallen away. And now he's got no ears. Tum-ti-tum... The
obligatory topless bird briefly enlivens proceedings, and there's
plenty of good old research institute banks of lights and dials, but
other than that, a life lesson was being taught here - less is more.
Get what you wish for, and you'll be sorely disappointed. Chastened,
we mulled over this weighty revelation and its implications for our
young lives. At least we did until we saw our mate at school the
next day. "My brother's got this film where there's these people in
South America and they eat each other's guts FOR THE WHOLE FILM!"
The cosmic ballet continues.
DRAGONSLAYER
We tried to learn Latin for about three days then chucked it. O
tempora! O mores!
