Archive for July 24th, 2009
The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue
Better get back to the car
The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue was an Italian/Spanish originally know as Non Si Deve Profanare Il Sonno Dei Morti (literally ‘Do Not Speak Ill Of The Dead’) and is known as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and Don’t Open The Window in the US.
Made in 1974 it sits, both in content and style, on the border between old school Hammer-type horror of the 60s and the video nasty era of the 80s. There’s plenty of gut-ripping lurid special effects set within something that harks back to an earlier age, plus it’s non-British origins give it a strange, pretty much unique tone. Read the rest of this entry »
RoboCop Rap
Straight Out Of Delta City – The whole film, condensed down to ten mins, in rap form.
Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford
Recently finished Backroom Boys and was a bit disappointed in it to be honest since its been portrayed as the best book on technology in recent years. Admittedly, for the most part, it’s an easy read and there is quite a lot of interest in it – especially the story of the rise of mobile phones – but instead of looking at the hard-core techy bits it mostly dances around the peripheries of its stories looking at the sociological and economic aspects. This is probably why it’s been so highly rated by none-technologists… it’s technology-lite.
When I was a kid I had a poster of Concord on my wall and I always thought it’s one of the sadder aspects of the new century that such an engineering wonder is no longer flying. Spufford’s book has a chapter on Concord… but instead of looking at why is was so ground-breaking in the first place, or the reasons it was stopped from flying so quickly, Spufford concentrates on some economic jiggery-pokery that allowed it to keep going in the 80s. Interesting in itself but I can’t help feeling it’s not the real story.
Fearful Symmetry 
You must be logged in to post a comment.