Death Race 2000 (1975)

It is the distant future, the Year Two-thousand. The US is an autocratic state with an alleged enemy in France, and a nation has an obsession with the Death Race, a coast-to-coast rally where pedestrians, zealots, onlookers and even one's pit crew are fair game for vehicular carnage and point-scoring along the way. Race favourite is the shady Frankenstein, a patchwork man in black who is close friend with Mister Pesident, and wants to get closer still...

I've been thinking about watching this movie for years on curiosity value alone, and now I have - job done. And do you know what? I really enjoyed it!

I'm sure that a lot of this is down to timing. Twenty years ago I'd likely have taken this film in as a dated piece of seventies tat, much as I did Rollerball or The Omega Man. Ten years ago I'd have been a little more forgiving, but now, with my extracurricular activities involving kitbashing model cars into Mad Max-styled vehicles of pedestrian destruction, its time seems finally annointed. What a movie. Also, teenage me was an idiot. I might be edging towards the actual 100 points in Death Race's arcane scoring system, but I'd like to think I know the value of a decent Roger Corman movie.

But teenaged me was also a comic reader, and in particular a 2000AD reader. The DNA of 2000AD is all through this movie - future dystopias? Check. Ultraviolence and amoral heroes? Check. It's long been said that the initial look of Judge Dredd was based on the image of Frankenstein on the movie's poster; how satisfying then for a fan of the comic and films to see Dredd's spiritual godfather beating several layers of unholy crap out of Sylvester Stallone - Awesome! I swear that this is more a comic brought to life courtesy of Corman than the likes of Fantastic Four or Battle Beyond the Stars, and it seems fitting that the comic sequel was the work of 2000AD's Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill, when their previous creation Marshall Law bears more than a passing resemblance to David Carradine's Frankenstein. 

There's just a real anti-authoritarian, gonzo vibe throughout that transcends the occasional performances, the low low budget, and the small cast. in places it is outlandishly violent, but it is by and large he violence of cartoons, and it shares the gleeful twisted humour of Mills and Wagner's best works. The themed cars and outlandish identities (Nerothe Hero, Machine Gun Joe, Matilda the Hun) are fun, the design work a little bonkers - especially Stallone's gangster suit pinstriped helmet, and although the cast is perhaps a little too white-bread, it serves its female characters pretty well, and I must admit I felt quite sorry for Calamity Jane's lonely three-point-tun into oblivion when her time came. Plus, not knowing the twist in the story meant that I was quite taken in by Frankenstein's concluding gambit.

Time's been rather kind to this film, making the movie's more outlandish plot points almost self-fulfilling in real life, from the Fox-style cynical TV coverage, the vilification of France as the enemy of 'Amurrikkin freedom', and even the President accusing a foreign power of sabotaging the telephone network has to be the Seventies equivalent of cyber-terrorism.

So yeah, a big thunbs up from me, and a nice wee birthday present for me over the weekend as I contemplate getting closer to the age when I too might be wheeled wheezing out into the street in front of a hospital, perhaps to meet my maker under the wheels of an oncoming novelty cat-shaped death machine or something. In the mean-time I rather fancy catching this again, perhaps in a double-bill with Rollerball.

A Box of Progs

My trip down south coincides with the clearing of my Dad's place, and with it (somewhat inevitably), some rediscoveries of old, long-thought disappeared treasures. I've found quite a few now, but chief among them has to be my collection of early 2000ADs. Hooray!!! Every home visit for maybe the last ten years has been frustrated by me not being able to find two large cardboard boxes of issues (or 'progs' to use the magazine's own futuristic vernacular), but this month with what seemed the last ever attempt to find them by hand, they let their hidden presence be known.

As expected, and then some more, these boxes have turned out to be as much a time capsule as my own juvenilia. A friend once went into a virtual state of mourning after our flat was burgled and he lost his entire music cassette collection; his reasoning being that among those often redundant and patchy collections of albums and dubs he could name the times he first heard certain songs, the places he'd visited or the mood he was in. The act of consuming media is a weird two-way street sometimes; it seems to me that the more vivid or visceral the experience of reading or listening, watching... is, the more that experience takes in and 'records' other experience around it as an unconscious contextual backdrop. And so in that regard I've memories of when I first read in the pages of my progs the series Helltrekkers, discovered the histories of the various 80s ABC Warriors,  got into Slaine (on a train, as it turned out), followed Dredd and Anderson through the City of the Damned, had my mind blown by the likes of Pat Mills and Kev O'Neill in Nemesis the Warlock and Metalzoic. It's all there, and flowers like fireworks in my brain when I open those pages again after twenty-five to thirty years of simply getting on with life. It's remarkable.

My boxed progs are only part of my collection - it's not complete, but may now number over a thousand, and the process of integrating these old issues (I've only brought up around thirty so far) with my collection here will be a slow but interesting one. I've been selective with the ones I've brought up - two boxes, one of my earliest progs (I think Prog 180 might be the oldest of them?), and another of a selected run comprising the aforementioned Helltrekkers, some of Bryan Talbot's stint on Nemesis, and all of Metalzoic (on which I'll post soon). Of course, the issues I left behind will eventually make their way here (fingers crossed). In them is the end of my 80s infatuation with 2000AD, petering out somewhere past Prog 500 and, as it seemed to me, the end of the magazine's early golden age and its short transformation from adventure comic for boys into ephemeral accessory of the Acid House set. I did reacquaint myself with 2000AD during my Uni years, and those progs are also at home, but the prospect of having all of these issues together at last (still incomplete, I must stress) is an exciting one. Happy times and places in every issue, and, of course, the stuff of Jetsam.

Doodle a Day: 16/10/2013

Another quick biro job: the 'Hammerheads', weird, lrgely mute primitive creatures of wood and bone who rose out of the Everglades to destroy the world of men, or something.

I was sixteen or seventeen when I created these guys, putting them in a comic strip that lasted all of one A3 page before I lost the thread of where I was going - presumably something great;y inspired by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neil's Nemesis the Warlock, I'd say.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 2009

"London is a country coming down from its trip. We are sixty days from the end of this decade and there's gonna be a lot of refugees. They'll be going round the town shoutin' 'Bring Out Your Dead'."

Rounding out Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's most recent LoEG series is the final chapter in the Century trilogy, set a mere four years ago in our time, a more recognisable world in parts, and that's a problem for me. But first, a recap. When last we encountered the core surviving League (Alan Quatermain, Mina Murray, Orlando), it was 1969, and the above prophecy of Withnail and I's fried hippy Danny (not featured in that strip - boo) has rapidly and unexpectedly taken form. Oliver Haddo's Moonchild is slipped into the world, and the League is once again rendered impotent and separate from one another for thirty quite years.

So, apparently, nothing of import ever happened to the ex-members of the League in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties? Which is interesting. Mina by the opening of 2009 is, as she was left at the end of 1969, in a sanitarium, Alan completes his League circle and retreats to a vagrant, narcotic denial of his existence, and Orlando continues his/her doomed existential holding pattern, signing up to fight for Queen and country in far-off places. Only when Moore analogue Prospero intrudes to literally push the narrative into second gear does Orlando find her purpose and the rags of the League reassemble themselves.

I have to say that to me 2009 is the most frustrating of the series, particularly for its references which play either as being outside of my familiar zone (I haven't, to my shame, yet watched The Wire or The Thick Of It, but apparently neither has Moore) or too far into them; once you've seen one fanfic where the current Doctor and companion turn up in the background then you've really seen the lot. I've a British friend who is to this day unable to bring himself to critically assess Britpop because for him 1994-1997 is still too recent history. I feel much the same with 2009 - it's playing Where's Wally with contemporary culture, and in the age of the Internet and fan fiction, DeviantArt and the like, it's not novel.here more than anywhere else Moore's magpie tendancies show the master up - his recent griping about a small screen adaptation of the original League series (yes, it will most likely miss the point and be awful, but then again it might not

There's less of an element of literary discovery this time around because of that overfamiliarity, so I found it less fun. I also feel some sadness at the easy surrender Moore seems to have made to Twentieth-century media - heroes and villains of literature in this trilogy have been usurped by those of cinema and TV, meaning Kev O'Neill's previously imaginative recreations of the formerly described now becomes a duty of caricature. It's a role he fills like a pro, of course, but he's also better than this.  It's disappointing also to see Moore, whose version of the Doctor in the Doctor Who Weekly strips had such a profound impact on the modern era of the show, reduce the character's role of that of a walk-on. Add Torchwood and Ashes to Ashes and the box-ticking seems all the more obvious.  By the time we get to the inevitable reveal of the Antichr- sorry, Moonchild himself the novelty is sort of spent - a twisted vision of a boy magician ubiquitous in books, films and all manner of visual merchandising? It's painting one's self into a corner. The two highlights I took from 2009 were returns to already-established or covered characters - the various Jimmy Bonds and Andrew Norton. I will concede the final Deus Ex Machina is fantastic, however - almost matching Black Dossier's WTF Golliwog moment for bravado and genuine surprise. But getting there was not half as much fun. League's immortals have long become burned-out monsters, with only one expendable member remaining to meet their demise here. If this is the last we'll see of the current League then perhaps it's for the best.

I did wonder while reading 2009 what the point of an aside to Janni Nemo and her terrorist offspring might have been, given they have no significant role in the main story. Fortunately there's a spin-off recently out, Nemo - Heart of Ice, which is filling in some pieces rather neatly.