Pcinemadelic - It's Swingin', Dad!

We jet to 'sixties Britain for today's double feature, and again, the soundtracks are more worthy of your time than the movies.

Main feature is Up The Junction, a socially-conscious kitchen-sink drama. Those IMDB keywords again prove invaluable: abortion, bare-chested male, class differences. It's a good movie if any of those issues punch your ticket, or if you feel like harshing your mellow just for kicks, but psychonauts seeking the cheap lava-lamp thrills so treasured here at Th' House o' Foam© are going to be grievous disappoint.

The soundtrack is a surprise - Manfred Mann take a step outside their format and turn in a thing of beauty. I don't like to copy-paste text here, but the Allmusic review gets it absolutely right for once: "One of the great soundtracks of the 1960s ... Manfred Mann shed their pop skin and evolve into a fucking awesome jazz outfit ... title song, a flipped-out alternative to Good Vibrations, is one of their finest pieces ever, and fuck you, FalseMemoryFoam@, editing this quote ..."

The version presented here has swell bonus tracks to take you even further Up The Junction! Hoo boy!

Supporting our main feature is the lower-budget, much more interesting The Touchables, which spookily shares a plot with 3 In The Attic, lensed the same year [already featured in Pcinemadelic - Ed.]. Co-written by acid-head David Cammell, who also scripted Performance and The Man Who Fell To Earth. IMDB keywords: sexploitation, gangster, erotic, bare-chested male bondage. Again with the bare chest already! Strange that groovy dolly-birds doesn't make the list. The soundtrack features the dreamy title theme by Nirvana familiar from their All Of Us album, and big input from Ken Thorne. Who he? Very interesting guy. Composed incidental music for The Monkees' Head, Donovan's Brother Sun, Sister Moon [both buried deep here in th' Foam - Ed.] and uncredited, the Fabnesses Help! What a relentlessly tedious movie that was.

The Touchables is worse in every way than Up The Junction, and all the better for it, featuring BDSM-lite scenes in a groovy transparent dome built for the movie. Don't look for it - it's not there any more.