Fear and loathing in the the US today

(Image by tammyatWTI via Pixabay)

Mick Deacon, the Brit who is temporarily in the US to see his girlfriend and who has featured in a few of my recent blogs, is trying to get back to the UK – with little success so far. He writes:

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I currently have no flight back. My March flight was cancelled and I am just sat here, waiting for British Airways to answer the phone. 

Last week, on the anniversary of the 6th January attack on the Capitol, I was watching some political lady talking about the insurrection. It sounded absolutely terrifying. 

You just can’t believe what people will do for Trump. It’s like a cult. Intelligent people indoctrinated by his hate and sense of superiority. The man has the figure of a beach ball and a face that looks like a flame blower who didn’t realise which way the wind was blowing. 

Mick’s girlfriend prepares breakfast for him…

I just find it so concerning what’s happening here. There are some very nice friendly people here. I’ve seen some stunning countryside, listened to fabulous music and eaten fabulous food and enjoyed watching football matches (which has never happened in England). 

But there is a feeling of fear from the guns, the pressure people are under, the poverty and mental health problems.

Friends here don’t watch the news because they don’t want to know. I travelled blissfully unaware before; I would always read situations and was never stupid so I never hit a spot of trouble. 

I know the media is not to be trusted but I wonder would you love your country if you knew about a quieter, safer one? It’s where we grow up, our culture, familiarity. Would you be so patriotic if you were suddenly taken to a place that wasn’t so expensive, without so much gun crime? Would you turn round and think Wow! Why did I put up with that for so long? 

Yesterday there was a story on the news about a car valet worker who was shot when asking for payment from the guest. Apparently there was a heated conversation and the guest shot and killed the valet person and tried to imply it was self defence. 

It really made me realise something.

I had been told before if you see trouble – arguments, whatever – Do not try to help – Run… and call for help only when you are out of the area. 

This was from a man who spoke to me when I was walking the dog when I first came here.

Mick’s girlfriend drives to the local shops…

What I realise from the news is that many people here are in a constant fear/attack mode not knowing if they will get shot. 

So people shoot first and think later over what is often something trivial. 

Arguments quickly escalate. 

There are also people who have no patience who try to blame it on the melting pot of violence, when they have committed a crime.

So I am sat here, waiting for British Airways to answer the phone. 

Comedian Lewis Schaffer got attacked, ‘cold cocked’, and had his nose broken

On Sunday night, London-based American comic Lewis Schaffer was attacked, scarred and got his nose broken.

Last night (Tuesday) I asked him via Skype what happened.

Lewis Schaffer talked from home on Skype last night, two days after he was attacked in London

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JOHN: God! You look terrible.

LEWIS: Do I look muscly?

JOHN: Strangely, yes. So what happened? You were cycling along the road on Sunday night…

LEWIS: I was cycling along. I was going down Gipsy Hill (in South London). It’s very steep; it’s really steep. It’s fast and I’m being very conscious of what I’m doing. And this woman driving a car got very close to me and my bicycle wobbled and I thought I was going to die.

It was a white Fiat 500; a small but newish car. It happened halfway down the hill. They sped off ahead. I didn’t pursue them, but I caught up with them at the bottom of the hill, cos this is London: it’s gonna be congested. You can’t make an escape in London. You can’t have a chase scene filmed in London, because someone’s gonna get caught in traffic.

JOHN: And you had an argument with her.

LEWIS: I didn’t have an argument. I was telling her off. I said: “Hey! What are you doing? You almost killed me!”

She gets out of the car and says: “Oh! You were swerving!”

Another woman gets out of the car and this dude gets out of the car and they have to hold him back and he gets very very angry. He gets super angry. He’s a young kid, whatever. 

They’re screaming at me saying: “You were weaving! You were doing this! You were doing that!”

I said: “I wasn’t weaving! You almost killed me! You don’t want to kill somebody!”

And they were holding this guy back. He was a young kid.

JOHN: How old? 18? 19?

LEWIS: I dunno. He could have been like maybe 15 years old. But, at my age, everybody looks young.

Then he gets back in the car. I thought everything was alright. Then he gets out of the car again – he must’ve gotten something in the car possibly – I dunno what he did – he might have picked up something – it’s all a blur – I got hit in the head – He hit me in the head. I thought he had picked up a stone but I had turned away from him and he hits me right in the face. Breaks my nose. I didn’t even have a chance to protect myself. 

It wasn’t like a fight or anything. He just kinda like cold-cocked me.

JOHN: Cold cocked you?

LEWIS: Sucker punched.

JOHN: Cold cocked?

LEWIS: You never heard that phrase?

JOHN: No. I was brought up a Presbyterian.

LEWIS: Wait… Here… online… here it is… It means to knock someone out, typically with a blow to the head. To cold cock.

JOHN: There was only one punch?

LEWIS: Only one punch. Possibly they did other things. People said I was kicked in the stomach.

JOHN: You were knocked out?

LEWIS: I must have been knocked out for a second. I might have been unconscious for a bit. By the time I get up, he’s back in the car and I’m covered in blood. Like literally. Blood is pouring out of me. I’m looking at him and saying: “What the fuck have you done?”

I’m bleeding and I’m taking the blood and I just start throwing the blood at the car. They got back in the car. They’re about to drive off and I’m throwing blood at them. It was weird, really.

I’m saying: “Look what you’ve done! Look what you’ve done!” And I’m just throwing blood all over the car. This beautiful white Fiat 500 car.

“God! You look terrible” … “Do I look muscly?”

JOHN: And then what happens?

LEWIS: They drive off.

JOHN: And you don’t follow them?

LEWIS: No. I’m bleeding. I’m bleeding.

I was thinking to myself: You know what? At least they’re going to have to spend some time to clean up the car! They’ve punched me in the face, but I’m punishing them!

People around me are saying: “We got it on film! We got it on the CCTV!” 

There’s like 5 or 10 or 15 people there who’ve seen it.

They say: “We’ve got it on TV. Sit down.” They come out. They’re bringing…

It’s just an amazing act of generosity from the people in the neighbourhood saying: “That was outrageous! I can’t believe that happened!”

Three of them brought packets of ice for me to put on my nose. They were just so helpful all these people. They called the ambulance. They called the police.

JOHN: And the car’s already gone off…

LEWIS: Yes, but they got the licence plate number and the next day the guy was arrested.

JOHN: And you got taken to A&E at King’s College Hospital in Denmark Hill…

LEWIS: I’ve got a huge gash in my nose and I’m dripping blood all over everything. They ask me all these questions and I say: “I’m alright; I’m alright,” so, instead of treating me instantly, they put me in ‘Urgent Care’, which is not so urgent I found out.

JOHN: How long did it take to see you?

LEWIS: Six hours. 

JOHN: And eventually you had seven stitches. What happens with a broken nose? Do they leave it to mend itself?

LEWIS: Well, the doctor said: “Wait a week to see if we need to re-set the nose.”

JOHN: You must be on major pain-killers.

LEWIS: The only pain-killers they give you are paracetamol.

JOHN: And you’re OK?

LEWIS: I’m not OK. What am I supposed to do about it? And I feel really, really psychologically bad.

JOHN: Psychologically bad is good for your schtick. Are you in agony?

LEWIS: I’m in agony, yes. My face is killing me. And I’ve got a broken tooth.

JOHN: And tomorrow, you’re getting up at 4.00am because you’re appearing in a major movie. Are you allowed to say the name of the production?

LEWIS: No.

JOHN: But it’s a major Hollywood feature film.

LEWIS: Major, major, major, major, major. Big studio thing with hundreds of extras.

JOHN: And it doesn’t matter you’ve got your nose broken?

LEWIS: It might matter. I’m really concerned. I’m gonna have to put on make-up.

JOHN: What time did you get punched on Sunday?

LEWIS: About six at night, after the Crystal Palace game. I’ll tell you something, John… To go see Crystal Palace and then to get into a fight and then to spend six hours in A&E at a hospital – Now I feel I really belong. How much more British could I be?

Lewis Schaffer shortly after the attack…

There were these four times I sort of remember with guns pointed at me

Sometimes a question comes out of thin air, no context, no cause.

Yesterday someone asked me: “Has anyone ever pointed a gun at you?”

I have no idea how that got into their mind.

And nor, I am told, do they.

I am a fairly placid person but the strange thing is, yes.

Four times.

But not this century.

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Albanian soldier, 1979

The first time was in 1979 when I was wandering in a wood on a hillside just outside Titograd (now Podgorica) in what was then Yugoslavia (now Montenegro). Or it might have been just outside Durrës in Albania.

The strange thing is I now can’t remember which country it was in.

I was just wandering through the wood – somewhere – when I heard a sharp CRCK-CRCK. It was the sound of a rifle being cocked; the sound, as I understand it, of the bullet going into the chamber.

I looked up, startled, and there was a young soldier sitting up on the branch of a tree by the trunk. He was equally startled, looking down, pointing the barrel of the rifle at me.

We stared at each other for maybe half a second, maybe a full second, then I continued walking and he continued to look at me as I passed.

I think maybe he had been dozing, half asleep in the tree, and he woke up, startled, when he heard me below. I have no idea why he was up in a tree.

Understated posters in Bible-intimidated Leningrad in 1985

The next time was at the airport in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in 1985. I had a beard at the time and someone surmised later that they thought I might be religious – the Orthodox Church and all that. The guy was just officious, I guess, trying to show he was enthusiastic in his duty of protecting the USSR against outside anti-Soviet Western pollution.

The officer had two obviously junior men in hats with him. They took their handguns out and vaguely waved them at me to shoo me into a back office. The Soviets never cared much about their PR image with tourists, but I never saw border guardy people waving guns around any other time. I think maybe they had watched too many American movies.

The officer got me to open my suitcase and, with pretty limited English, just kept asking me: “Books? Books? You have books?” All I could imagine afterwards was that he thought I was smuggling in Bibles to destroy Lenin’s Socialist Paradise.

Syrian checkpoint by a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Beirut, 1993

The next time was in 1993 when I was in Beirut and the Syrian Army was still present there with roadblocks and sandbagged gun positions at intersections.

Some (again young and officious) soldiers took exception to me taking photographs on the coast and, with their AK47s and no English language, shepherded me into a building where a rather laid-back Syrian Intelligence officer was brought in – it seemed rather unwillingly – to ask me questions. ‘Interrogate’ seems too excessive a word to use.

He seemed to be unconvinced I was a major threat to Syrian military rule, soon realised I was not an Israeli spy and started chatting about the time he had spent in the United States, the frequency of Israeli jets flying over Southern Lebanon and the perceived though unlikely threat of an Israeli seaborne attack on Beirut.

With polite apologies, he confiscated the two rolls of film in my two cameras and I was left trying to remember if there were shots of Hezbollah flags and the Airport Road on them and/or what else.

I was mildly worried because, on that trip to Beirut, I had tried to get into Syria to see Palmyra and had been refused entry – it seemed because my passport said I was a writer. I had previously got into Albania in 1979 and North Korea in 1986 with “writer” so I was not quite sure why the Syrians had taken so agin it.

He had a bit of an attitude …

The fourth time I had a gun pointed at me was in South London round 1998 or 1999.

He said it was a joke, but I think it was more that he had a bit of an attitude problem and an inferiority complex.

What have I learned?

Always be aware what is in the trees in Balkan woods and forests.

South London can potentially be as dangerous as Beirut… but not really.

And I still can’t remember which actual bloody country that bloke in the tree was in.

Punchlines: comics getting beaten up

Yesterday, someone drew my attention to a copy of The Stage dated 26th April 1990. One article was headlined:

ARTISTS FEAR HECKLERS’ REVENGE

and started:

“Alarmed entertainers fear violence from rowdy club audiences may be on the increase after a series of ugly scenes which have put artists at risk on stage.”

Apparently comedian Paul Ramone had got a black eye and swollen nose after being head-butted by a member of his audience during a gig in Twickenham.

Manchester hypnotist Paul Nyles claimed he had had to abandon his act after 15 minutes when an audience member bit through his microphone cable. There were no details of what happened to the heckler when he did this.

Comedians getting beaten-up seems to be a non-uncommon phenomenon although biting through the microphone cable to stop an act is uncommon.

Off the top of my head, I remember three Edinburgh Fringe stories. One is told in Malcolm Hardee’s autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake:

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Cognito maybe forgot Ricky Grover is an ex-boxer

An excellent performer called Ian Cognito was there and he was very drunk, as is his wont. When he’s drunk, he gets aggressive. Part of his Italian upbringing, I think. 

Ricky Grover had worked with him before, so said hello to him and Cognito grabbed him by his collar and said: 

“You’re a fat cunt!” 

Ricky doesn’t mind that sort of thing at all. He’s used to it.

So, not getting a reaction, Cognito continued: 

“You’re a fat cunt and you’re not funny!” 

Ricky still didn’t react, so Cognito added: 

“And your wife’s a fat cunt as well!”

This upset Ricky, because he’s one of those traditional people.

“Did you mean that?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Ian Cognito said.

“Can you repeat it?” Ricky asked.

Cognito said: “Your wife’s a fat cunt”. 

And, with one blow, Ricky just knocked him out. Unconscious. Displaced his jaw a bit. The lot. Ricky’s a professional, so he knows exactly where to hit someone.

Standing three or four yards away was Jon Thoday, who runs the Avalon agency. I looked over at Jon and said: 

“Oh, have you go that £500 you owe me?”

Funnily enough, the cheque arrived in the post about two days later.

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Police said Ian Fox suffered “a small cut to his nose”

In 2012, comedian Ian Fox was randomly attacked in the street during the Edinburgh Fringe. The local police, who allegedly knew quite a lot about beating people up, told the Edinburgh Evening News: “The victim suffered a small cut to his nose during the incident,” but Ian’s face looked more like he had had an argument with a rhinoceros.

And, of course, most infamously, in 2013, comedy performer Ellis got beaten up in an Edinburgh street by an irate member of the public who was annoyed by Ellis & Rose’s appearance in Jimmy Savile: The Punch & Judy Show.

Comic Ellis claimed he suffered for his art (Photograph by Lewis Schaffer)

Except it never happened. In fact, Ellis had repeatedly hit himself in the face with the blunt end of a milk whisk so he could tell the being-beaten-up story to get publicity for Ellis & Rose’s Fringe show. When the blunt end of a milk whisk did not have the required effect, his comedy partner Rose punched him four times in the face to give him the required black eye. For this, they won a Malcolm Hardee Comedy Award.

To me, the most bizarre part of the 1990 Stage article, though, was a paragraph towards the end which said:

“Alternative comedian Malcolm Hardee, who was knocked unconscious by a heckler at a Glasgow club, claims attacks are on the increase because comedy has become more aggressive.”

That this had happened to Malcolm seemed very unlikely – although admittedly Malcolm’s Tunnel Club had to become membership only after beer glasses were thrown at Clarence & Joy Pickles (Adam Wide & Babs Sutton) during their act.

Throwing beer glasses at acts was not uncommon at the Tunnel but, on this occasion (when Malcolm was NOT the compere) a glass hit Babs Sutton in the face and drew blood, after which several acts refused to play the Tunnel unless Malcolm reined-in his audience a bit.

Malcolm Hardee – a comedian not unacquainted with alcohol

Anyway… Malcolm Hardee being knocked unconscious by a heckler at a Glasgow club sounded unlikely, so, yesterday, I asked Malcolm’s chum Martin Soan.

“This sounds unlikely,” I said. “Have you heard this story? Did he make it up?”

Malcolm making-up stories was not unheard-of, but Martin said surprisingly:

“Yes I do remember this. It is true after a fashion. The heckler sort-of pushed Malcolm in a friendly sort of way. Malcolm had drunk 13 pints of beer and some buckets of rum-and-coke and sort-of fell asleep for a bit… Talking of which, I had a knife pulled on me… twice. Once at the Old Tiger’s Head in Lee and once on the Glastonbury stage.”

Comedy can be a dangerous business.

Comedians punched and headbutted in the street at the Edinburgh Fringe

Ian Fox in Edinburgh earlier today

Before I left Edinburgh this evening, I had a drink with comedian-writer-photographer Ian Fox  who was attacked in the street on Wednesday night.

When I was with him today, he got a phone call from the police.

“It was around 11.30 at night and I was coming up that curved street Candlemakers Row, just before you get to the statue of Greyfriars Bobby,” he told me. “There were loads of people walking about, because the Tattoo had just finished.”

Throughout the Edinburgh Fringe, Ian has been taking nighttime photos of Edinburgh between around 10.00pm and midnight.

“I’d taken a photo in the Cowgate,” he told me, “ but put my camera away because there isn’t anything else to take photos of until you get to Bristo Square. The camera was round my neck, but underneath my top, so they didn’t see it. But it wasn’t a mugging.

“Some students were arsing about on the left hand side of the road, kicking a traffic cone about, so I crossed over the road to avoid them. I was in the road and only vaguely aware there were people walking down the other footpath then, as soon as the guy got level with me, he just hit me. He was wearing a ring, which is what cut me.

“I hit the ground, mainly out of surprise, then I heard another guy say: He’s gone down. I think the first guy had passed me, the second guy then hit me and I think the first guy had turned  to watch, because he knew what was about to happen and then he was celebrating the fact I’d gone down.

“When I heard him say He’s gone down! I thought to myself This probably isn’t the best place to be because I’ll get a kicking when I’m down on the ground. I’d quite like it if this was over now. So I stood up and turned around and walked to Greyfriars Bobby’s Bar.

“There was a chef outside. I thought he must have seen the whole thing, but he later told the police he hadn’t seen anything. I asked him if he could help me. He took about three seconds to make a decision on that. He obviously just thought it was drunks fighting but then I think he could tell from the way I was dressed and the way I was speaking that I wasn’t drunk.

“So I went into Bobby’s Bar and the waitress in there took over; she started handing me all the blue papery stuff to soak up the blood.  They phoned the police and the paramedics, because they were worried about how much blood was coming out of me. My cheek was bleeding; my nose was bleeding; so there was a lot of blood.

“The woman in there told me they’d just refused service to two blokes because they were very loud and very aggressive so the chances are it was these two blokes who had just got refused who walked outside and clocked the first person they saw.

“From the way they had been moving, I think they were on speed or something. They were on something, they’d had a skinful and the adrenaline buzz of hitting someone was the next thing they were after.

“The police said they hoped the cameras inside Bobby’s Bar had got a clear shot of them coming through the door, but that phone call I just got was the police saying it turned out the CCTV inside Greyfriars Bobby’s Bar has not been working since the 12th of August. The police said they’re now going to look at the Council’s CCTV in the street. But I’ve had a look three times and I can’t see a camera around there. I’m guessing somebody who behaves like that has probably done it before so would not do it near cameras.”

“You had another check-up today, didn’t you?” I asked.

Ian Fox with his mending eye in Edinburgh earlier today

“Yes, at the specialist Facial Injury unit in Livingston at 9 o’clock this morning,” said Ian. “It turned out everyone was given a 9 o’clock appointment, so it was first come, first served.”

“Livingston?” I said. “That’s miles away! That’s about 15 miles away!”

“It still counts as Edinburgh,” Ian said, “because it’s got an EH postcode.”

“Good job you brought your car up here,” I said. “You might easily not have done.”

“They told me I don’t need any further treatment,” said Ian, “but I may have a permanent scar beside my nose and the nurse advised me to avoid being punched in the face for a few months.”

“She didn’t,” I said.

“She did,” said Ian. “and I’m sure that’s very good advice.”

“I imagine the police won’t do anything about it,” I told him. “Did you read that blog of mine a couple of days ago, where a comedian had his computer stolen and he told the police where it was from the Apple GPS positioning and they wouldn’t do anything about it?”

“Well,” Ian said, “a deli I go into every day here… The guy there told me he had an incident a while back where one of his fridges wasn’t working and he called a repair man from an advert in the paper. The guy came and gave him a ridiculously high quote, so he said No.

“A couple of hours later, the cafe owner goes to the bank. Whilst he’s away, the repair man comes back, tells the girls behind the counter he’s there to fix the fridge, moves the fridges, hacks all the wiring at the back, tells the girls the griddle’s broken and says he needs to take it away for repair and leaves with the griddle.

“The cafe owner comes back, finds all the fridges are knackered and the griddle’s missing. So it’s criminal damage and theft. He rings the police, gives them the phone number of the advert and tells them this is the bloke who has done it – the girls have given a description of the guy… That was five months ago and he hasn’t heard anything since.

“He says he opens at 7.00am in the morning and has trouble with drunks coming in and, in the past, he’s tried to get the police to come and shift them and they won’t do it.”

“I love Edinburgh,” I said, “and it’s physically beautiful, but it’s a tough town under the surface. I’m surprised more comedians don’t have problems.”

“Seymour Mace got head-butted outside the ScotMid in Nicolson Street in 2009,” Ian told me.

“Was that unmotivated as well?” I asked.

“Exactly the same thing as me,” Ian said. “Except he got headbutted instead of punched. Never even saw them. Though headbutting seems a lot more personal, somehow.”

“More Glaswegian,” I suggested.

“Seymour had a black eye for a week,” Ian said, “and he was doing a children’s show, so he had to explain to the children that he’d hit his head on a door. You can’t tell children there are random nutters out there in Edinburgh who will just headbutt you for no reason.”

Nazis from the dark side of the Moon and ultra film violence from Indonesia

Prince Charles Cinema: home of lateral thinking marketing

London would be a duller place if the Prince Charles Cinema did not exist.

A few weeks ago, the management were asking what their market position was. I said I thought the cinema filled a gap between the mainstream and art house cinemas. In among some cult commercial films, the Prince Charles screens movies the National Film Theatre seldom if ever shows.

The Prince Charles screens cult, schlock, under-the-radar and often extraordinarily quirky movies. Amid special events like Sing-a-long-a-Grease, the Bugsy Malone Sing-Along, Swear-Along-With-South-Park and a screening of ‘The Die Hard Trilogy’ (they are not including Die Hard 4.0 because they say it is not a ‘real’ Die Hard film…. they will soon be screening the little-heard-of Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie and God Bless America (with free hot dogs) as well as an all-night marathon of Friday the 13th Parts I-VIII.

They also yesterday screened two films extraordinary even by their standards – Iron Sky and The Raid both of which, I suspect, have been held back by titles less vivid than they should be. Iron Sky should, I think, really have been called Nazis From The Dark Side of The Moon… or Space Nazis… because the plot runs thus:

Iron Sky: Nazis are not a waste of space

In 1945, some Nazis escaped to the Moon, where they built a giant secret base in the shape of a swastika. Since then, they have been watching us and waiting for the right time to mount an invasion of Earth in their meteor-towing zeppelin-shaped spacecraft and take their revenge. The date is now 2018 and the time is right…

Admittedly I got in for free, but THAT is a movie I would pay good money to see and the strange thing about it is that the visuals and the special effects are excellent, as are the sound, the direction and the acting. And the acting is difficult to pull off, because all the lines are (quite rightly) delivered totally straight-faced, so the acting style has to be in that difficult region between realistic and slightly stylised cartoon – If you have a central Negro character whom the Nazis turn white and a sequence in which the vacuum of space pulls off a female Nazi’s clothes yet she is still somehow able to breathe, there is a credibility risk unless you have everything spot-on.

They get away with lines like (I paraphrase):

“I was black but now I’m white. I went to the dark side of the Moon but now I’m back. And the space Nazis are coming!”

(To a taxi driver) “Take us upState – We need to get back to the Moon”

and

“The Nazis are the only guys the US managed to beat in a fair fight”

Alright, the last line is not actually so odd; it is the truth (if you exclude the British in 1776).

Iron Sky has its faults – it would be a much better film with less ponderous, less Wagnerian music – oddly from Slovenian avant-garde group Laibach – but it is 93 minutes long and never less than interesting.

It is good clean Nazi fun and has a fair stab at satire with a cynical political PR lady who sees the benefits of having a Nazi invasion of Earth and a not-too-far-removed-from-reality Sarah Palin type female US President in 2018 who says: “All Presidents who start a war in their first term get re-elected”.

With an unsurprisingly complicated production history, it is basically a Finnish film with English and German dialogue (sub-titled) which was shot for an estimated 7.5 million Euros in Australia, Finland, Germany and New York and partly financed by ‘crowd funding’ from fan investors.

Iron Sky is well worth seeing on the big screen – something that is highly unlikely in the UK now, as distributors Revolver are putting it straight to DVD.

The Raid: wall-to-wall high-rise violence

The Raid is another film championed by the Prince Charles Cinema though, unlike Iron Sky, it did get a decent UK release.

It is a visceral, staggeringly-violent Indonesian action film directed by Welsh film-maker Gareth Evans (allegedly only 27-years-old) with jaw-dropping martial arts sequences.

I am no martial arts aficionado, but the action is amazing – it showcases the unknown-to-me Indonesian martial art of Pencak Silat.

The movie won the Midnight Madness Award at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival and that sounds a pretty well-titled award.

The plot is token – more a MacGuffin than a plot.

A less-than-elite SWAT team mount an attack on the strangely run-down Jakarta tower block base of a crime lord who has rented rooms in the block out to the city’s most dangerous murderers, killers and gangsters… and, inexplicably, to one ordinary good guy and his pregnant wife.

Running 101 minutes, it could usefully have about 10 minutes trimmed off it, but it is astonishingly gripping throughout, especially given that it is simply wall-to-wall violence. Very well edited and with vivid Dolby Stereo, it is like being in a firefight. You have no idea what is going to happen next.

And the violence is relentless.

There are a couple of half-hearted attempts to give the movie depth and a late attempt to create personal sympathy with one of the characters, but this is pointless.

Watching it reminded me of the original reviews of Reservoir Dogs, which said that film was mindlessly violent, staggeringly bloody and was simply violence for the sake of violence.

Reservoir Dogs was not.

The Raid is.

And I loved it.

Director Gareth Evans could be the new Quentin Tarantino.

Uniquely different. That is what you get at the Prince Charles Cinema.

Nazis from the Dark Side of the Moon for 93 minutes and mindless martial art violence from Indonesia for 101 minutes.

Now that is what I call entertainment.