News clippings

Halifax Barometer

Haligonians are regularly buttonholed by pollsters seeking thier opinions on all kinds of products from political parties to booze.

One of these days surveyors will question local movie audiences as they line up outside a theatre:

“Good afternoon, sir, I’m with Mindless Movie Marketing. We’d like to ask you and your family a few questions. First, are you a regular movie-goer?”

“Yes, we’re typical nuclear family members trying to enliven our tawdry, lower-middle-class existence by taking in a few thrills on Saturday afternoon.”

“Then, as experienced movie fans, why are you taking your 2.8 children to see this show, a cheap imitation of a successful space fantasy with only the barest thread of a plot, poor characterization and almost no violence?”

“Because, I’m a product of the TV generation and can barely read or write. But I am visually sophisticated and so are my illiterate kids.”

“Then you don’t care if the film offers penetrating insights into the dynamics of the human condition through the director’s artistic use of dramatic devices or an actor’s sensitive interpretation of a leading character?”

“No, not particularly. I just like to see lots of action. My kids don’t even care about that. All you have to do is flash a bunch of bright colours and play some rock music. That quietens ’em right down.”

“But what about sex and violence? Don’t you want orgies with whips and midgets?” Or how about somebody’s brains being mashed to a pulp?”

“Well that stuff is okay, but my favourite kind of violence is a bunch of shiny space ships blowing up in all different colours with great, big booming noises.”

“You like mostly colours, eh?”

“Yup. Red, green, blue— as long as they’re bright.”

“What about actors?”

“Only if they’re shiny.”

Most of the actors in Battlestar Galactica are shiny, especially the armour-plated villains. The heroes are chocolate brown or burnt umber, the subdued hues denoting the seriousness of their roles.

Otherwise the whole show might have been filmed through the tail-light lens of a 1957 Cadillac. The film sparkles. Novas glow like splintered rubies against a diamond-studded ebony background. Creamy white space jets with rally stripes and smoking exhausts duel to the death while bloated, filigreed motherships with hulls of steely blue glide silently by. Pilots sweat into oxygen masks, their eyes riveted on fluorescent green instrument panels flashing computerized drawings and terse messages like “situation critical.”

Inside the giant mothership are beautiful girls and handsome men, all clad in jumpsuits, running around and pushing buttons in frenzied panic as shiny alien beings destroy their fleet. Lorne Green gathers his metallic blue tunic with gold piping about him and grits his teeth.

This latest entry into the cosmic western genre is a poor imitation of Star Wars. The acting is putrid for the most part, special effect are always unimaginative and so is the plot, which is basically mankind fighting for its life while girl meets boy and boy meets dog. Still, there’s no violence, unless you include whole planets being blown up, so you can take your 2.8 kids to the matinee without fear of traumatizing them for life.

The Disney show Hot Lead and Cold feet is far better fare if you’re looking for family entertainment. Before the main feature at the Penhorn Mall you’ll meed Thaddeus Toad of Wind in the Willows fame, a classic Disney cartoon short, that I first saw when I was ten years old. It rated four stars in my book then and still does. Toad gets clapped into prison after a romantic affair with one of the first motor cars and his friends conceive a daring raid to prove his innocence.

Unlike their cartoons, Disney films often reek of motherhood and apple pie values. Hot Lead is no exception. A pixi-like Salvation Army preacher with two flaxen-haired children faces a rough and tumble battle with his own twin brother, a rowdy western gunslinger over his rich father’s estate. All ends happily as usual with the gunslinger converted, the town cleaned up and the do-gooder marrying the beautiful school teacher.

In the meantime we are treated to some very competent caricatures of life in a rough frontier town complete with devious plots and shady deals all aimed at undermining the preachers chances to win the contest.

If you’re still looking for family fun, don’t go to Redeemer, the most mindlessly violent bore in years.

The story idea is good. A man gets revenge on his former school mates by inviting them to a high school reunion, locking them inside an abandoned building and exterminating them, one by one, with various imaginative and symbolic methods.

Now comes the stupid part. To achieve some sort of intellectual respectability, the vengeful killer is cast as a psychotic priest whose pulpit pounding ravings on sin provide the rationalization for his six murders. Adding this spiritual mumbo-jumbo to the film soups up the plot a bit and allows the director to fool around with his lights to create a supernatural atmosphere of doom and foreboding but is it’s dishonest. The portrait of a religious fanatic as a potential killer may be a legitimate interpretation but this film only creates a vicious stereotype to be exploited for its thrill value.

Despite the story idea and its numerous opportunities for suspense, the film is boring. One by one the victims die by their own swords or at least the priests’ interpretations of their sins. Except for the painstakingly explicit blood and guts scenes, the show is repetitious.

Victims are shot, stabbed, drowned and burned as the camera fastidiously records every detail including one close-up of a maggot-infested eye. It’s enough to make you swear off meat, church and pretentious movies. Not to mention class reunions.

Nelson Daily News

Norman Johnson wold dearly love to get his hands on the people who abandoned the two dogs he found outside the central truck building Monday.

The hefty SPCA member makes a violent neck-wringing motion with his meaty hands, leaving no doubt about what he would like to do if the offenders were caught.

He found the two female German shepherds outside the building when he came to work Monday. they were so hungry, he says, they were eating mud.

He brought them inside the garage and fed them about a gallon of dog meal. Shortly after, the older dog vomited a mixture of mud and worms that looked like crank case oil on the cement floor.

Both dogs were about eight months old, he says, and probably unspayed. Nobody knows who abandoned them.

Both dogs bore signs of malnutrition and one had a serious case of distemper. They lay quietly on the cement floor licking Mr. Johnson’s hand when he patted them, obviously too ill to stand.

“That’s criminal,” said Mr. Johnson. “They depend so much on a human being.”

City pound keeper Mike Popoff and Mr. Johnson took the two strays to the West Kootenay Animal Hospital that afternoon.

Dr. Hugh Croxall, a veterinarian, said the dogs will be kept alive because they may be needed as evidence in a court case if the former owners are found and charged.

Dr. Croxall says he has to destroy up to five dogs and eight cats per week for the city. He says the problem is one of education and overpopulation throughout North America.

Nelson, he says, “is a good dumping area” for dog owners who don’t want to pay the $5 fee to have their dog put to sleep.

Irresponsible dog owners have a peculiar rationale for abandoning their dogs in a city according to the veterinarian. “Some guy with a soft heart might take it, if the poundkeeper doesn’t destroy it or if it doesn’t get shot, or run over first.

They just seem to want to get rid of their problem but “if you dump a dog out on the road, it hasn’t just gone away— it’s still suffering.”

He says he regularly finds dogs tied to the hospital’s gate. Some of them have been shot, half drowned, run over and had their legs broken, or simply starved.

Though he’s under no legal obligation to take care of a dog because it’s tied to a gate, the pound keeper will catch it anyway, and the hospital destroys strays found in the city.

A healthy dog may last two weeks in the hospital, in the hope that it can be given away as a pet. “But there just aren’t enough houses for all the dogs. Some will have to do without and it’s better for them to be put to sleep.”

Dogs that were pets can’t survive without people, he says.

“I despair of trying to educate these guys who say it’s wrong to tie up a dog or spay it — that it should be free. You’re interfering with the balance of nature. We protected the dog on one side of the scale, and now they’re overpopulated, but you can’t turn them back.”

Most stray dogs come to the hospital from outside of town, he says, and they get there by a pretty circuitous route.

“Big dogs have big litters.” Some dogs have as many as 12 pups per litter, he says, and the owners take the pups to a shopping centre parking lot and give them away.

“So some innocent kid takes a dog home with him and the kids’ father takes it down to the dump and leaves it there.”

“You very rarely find the real offender, he says. That’s the one who gives the dog away.

Education, and limiting the number of animals is the only to to do it,’ he says. “You can’t solve the problem by dealing with the cats and dogs.”