All Slights Deserved

Well, it finally happened: I got to see a Johannes Roberts film at my local cinema. If somebody had told me this when I sat shaking my head in dismay at the singular incompetence of Sanitarium I wouldn't have credited it. Hopefully it's not the end of the journey but he appears to have arrived somewhere. Storage 24 is a nuts and bolts sci-fi exploitation movie. The premise is a simple one: a US cargo plane has crashed somewhere in London, possibly shot down, for reasons unknown. Part of the wreckage has landed in the grounds of the titular secure storage warehouse, including a mysterious container which has broken open, releasing a nasty monster which seeks refuge in the building. It also causes a power failure, meaning that those who happen to venture inside - including Noel Clarke, the girlfriend he's just acrimoniously split from and attendant friends - find themselves trapped in there with the beast. We've seen it all many times before of course, from T...

A few days back in reviewing Seven Green Bottles you may recall I mentioned that the school I attended in Epsom some twenty-odd years ago was mainly populated with straight, middle-class kids largely incapable of any malice or criminality. That was the way it seemed; yet watching today's film I recalled an incident that made the national headlines years after I'd left. One of my old P.E. teachers found himself on the receiving end of a series of abusive telephone calls, including death threats, from two of the boys at the school. The teacher was forced into early retirement from the stress whilst, bizarrely, the boys were for a time allowed to return. It took the intervention of the Education Secretary before their parents agreed to move them to different schools. Such stories aren't unusual these days of course and there have been far more extreme cases. A schoolteacher's life can be a grim and unrewarding one, faced with pupils who can scarcely conceal their co...