I Hope You Appreciate This -

For I Am Doing Serious Research Here
Yes, this involves watching a cheesy black-and-white sci-fi horror film, but it's still serious research in my mind*.  And yes, it is "The Earth Dies Screaming", which I have been prating about for some time now, because I can.  It's only 62 minutes long, so it doesn't overstay it's welcome, and is obviously done on shoestring; and people think well enough of it that it scores 5.9 over at IMDB.

Attack of the Nazi robots!

     I intend to get some screenshots if I can, so I can make some hair-splittingly pedantic points, because - as you should surely know by now! - Your Humble Squire likes nothing more than to parse a thing into a million pieces, and then sit back and enjoy telling you how clever he is.
     Well, first of all, let's take a look at the allegations that you can see traffic moving in the background of the last scene, as our heroes take off in an airliner.  Art?

     I think those boxy blurs beneath the credits might be cars, but the camera pans so fast that there's really no way to tell what they are, so the sneering critics (me included) are on shaky ground.  Given that we are at an airport, these may be distant abstruse Airport Structures Of No Obvious Utility To We, The Public.

Case in point, wouldn't you say?

     Let us return to the beginning of the film, where we see an extremely realistic train crash, where a steam locomotive and a string of coaches end up in bits; no pathetic model work here, this is all full-scale carnage.  Art?

    The problem?  There is simply NO WAY the film-makers could have afforded a stunt like this!  Bear in mind that you never see more than two of the 'Spacemen' at any one time, because they didn't have the time or budget to create more than that; that's the milieu we're working with here.  So, Conrad's Suspicion Gland went into Highly Active Mode, and - O! what do we have here?

Located!

     This is a silent film from 1929, where the makers were allowed to have a locomotive and carriages roll down an incline, hit a lorry and then crash, wrecking everything.  Art?

Seem familiar?

     So, score one for Your Pedantic Hair-Splitter.  There is also another crash scene at the film's beginning, where they are establishing the People Dropping Dead syndrome**.  Art?

     Conrad suspects that this is lifted from "Village of the Damned", which came out a few years earlier, though there's no quick or easy way to confirm my thesis, and I'm a tad reluctant to do More Serious Research when I could be watching Season Three of "The Expanse".  Take it as read.  And <begins Episode One of Season Three>
     Okay, motley, you have a dreadful choice to make - sweet or salty popcorn?

A very old joke

I Know I Said "No More Vikings" But -
Just a little bit more.  Way back when I was a lot smaller, both in height and breadth, I was the proud possessor of a novel collection called <short fanfare> "Viking Saga", by Henry Treece.  Art?

The very article

     I loved those books; I read and re-read them so frequently I can still remember snatches of dialogue and plot, and it's got to have been at least 40 years since I last read them.  In the first novel, "Viking's Dawn", we meet Harald Sigurdson as a young man, embarking on his first voyage as a callow youth.  "The Road To Miklagard" is about his adventures getting to, and residing in, the city of Byzantium ("Miklagard" to Vikings), before making his way back home.  And in "Viking's Sunset" he endures his last voyage, ending up in South Canada - Treece had been inspired about this work when a friend told him of a Viking longship's prow that had been discovered on the shores of South C.

"Elegaic" is the word, I believe

     Hmmm.  I wonder - what kind of price is this collection going for on Abebooks?  Should I yield to temptation?

     Okay, definitely no more Vikings!

BOOJUM! Reviews Films
Because we have a bit of a backlog, and my fertile/febrile/festering (delete where applicable) brain never stops working, so!  Once again, I caution you not to expect anything along the lines of a conventional film review, because if you want that, you are not only in the wrong desert, you're on the wrong planet in the wrong solar system.
     Let the torment begin.
"The Aeronauts": So - this is not an update of the old French television series about Mirage jet pilots?  Or, seeing that it seems to feature hot-air balloons, a prequel?  Hmmm.  A Frenchman constructed a hot air balloon, the end.  Forgive me, it seems to lack drama.  Or - perhaps they utilise dangerously unstable radioactive isotopes to create the heat and a one-in-a-million accident transforms the balloon crew into crime-fighting superheroes?

CAUTION!  Unsafe seating arrangements present

"See": Going by the colour palette, which is all dark blues and purples and all-out blacks, I judge this is not going to be a light or frothy comedy, especially since we see - forgive me - the surly and truculent visage of Jason Momoa staring out at us.
     Ah!  Obviously this is a religious drama about the development of the Catholic Church over time in all it's myriad bits and pieces <thinks> and it will have a central character who resides in the -

Holy See!

     Do you see what I did there?  That's the - O you do.
     Not sure where Jason fits in here.  I suppose we shall just have to wait and
"His Dark Materials": Conrad unsure about this one and what the target audience is.  There seems to be a intelligent polar bear in costume and some miscellaneous people, and is that a stoat? 
     Aha, got it!  It's a biography of Edvard Munch, that Nork artist responsible for one of the most iconic Twentieth Century images ever.  Art?

The end result of incredibly bleak, long, bleak, dark, cold, bleak, lonely Norwegian winters

     "The Scream" as it is aptly titled, and you can make up your own stories about it, except to sat that since it came out in 1893, those are probably not sinister CIA assassins in the background.
     So, yes, a biography, focussing on where Ol' Ted got his paints and brushes from.

An airship?  More aeronauts!

     Of course, I could be over-thinking this ...


     And with that, gentle readers (both of you) we are gone!



*  I can explain away anything this way.
**  Note the entire lack of that "Screaming" thing