Back in April, I complained about Letterboxd deleting one of my reviews without even telling me. Give it a read if you’re interested, I won’t reiterate all my complaints here.1
Well, I’ve been keeping an eye on this, and they’ve now deleted three more of my reviews, as TMDB have entirely deleted three more entries. All of them are Public Information Films. So I thought I might as well preserve the three reviews I wrote here. All three of these PIFs have been on DVDs released by the BFI, which may give you an idea of how stupid it is to delete these entries.
Firstly, Building Sites Bite (1978), which I watched on the 6th March and gave 3 stars out of 5:
“A “lovely” companion piece to Apaches, except that this film has an in-built way of distancing the violence that Apaches doesn’t have: the science fiction wraparound sequence, where our heroes keep sending Ronald to his self-induced doom. Perhaps this was well-advised – some of the gore, particularly from a head injury, is actually more explicit than Apaches.
The two kids playing Jane and Paul, Miranda Hunnisett and Terry Russell, are asked to do some quite complex sardonic dialogue, and they manage it extremely well. There’s also some very amusing class warfare here, as two working class kids terrorise a middle class one. (Or aspirationally middle class, at least.)
Strangely, the film falls apart with its very last segment, where – for some unstated reason – Jane and Paul go into the scenario itself. They also seem to be far more genuinely worried about Ronald – as though they won’t be able to go back and save him this time. This all makes very little sense. What would have made far more sense is if that final scenario had been real, and you have to wonder whether that was the original idea, and then they decided against it.”
Secondly, Drive Carefully Darling (1975), which I watched on the 7th July and gave 4 stars out of 5:
“An absolutely fantastic driving PIF, in the vein of Herman’s Head and Inside Out, featuring John Challis and Colin Baker.
Baker in particular is outstanding, especially during the – spoiler – unpleasant finale. If you were being a dick, you could say this was the best piece of science fiction he ever did.”
Lastly, and by far the most famously, Lonely Water (1973), a classic PIF which Letterboxd and TMDB are absolutely insane for removing. As per Building Sites Bite, I watched this on the 6th March, and gave it a full 5 stars out of 5. I also wrote what I think is a really nice piece on it, which goes a little beyond a standard review:
“Of course it’s incredible, and packs more menace in one and a half minutes than some horror films manage in a full length film.
It does, however, also make me ponder the randomness of what gets to survive and live on in the memory, and what doesn’t. I’m sure this did indeed scare a whole generation of children; but this isn’t my childhood. My childhood was instead scarred by the terrors of Knightmare. And yet Lonely Water managed to get lovely DVD and even Blu-ray releases. With Knightmare, we have to get by with scruffy off-airs. It has never had any kind of commercial release.
We can watch Lonely Water better now than anybody did at the time; Knightmare is forever poorer quality than I experienced as a kid. And yet it was one of the very best television shows ever made.
What gets to live on properly is not a meritocracy. It’s a complex mix of contractual arrangements, the right people being in charge and interested in releasing something at the right time, and dumb luck. Which is always worth remembering once in a while. The history we watch is a kaleidoscope, not a complete bookshelf, no matter how much we would like it to be otherwise.”
I think that’s one of the best little things I’ve written this year. It is absolutely infuriating that it just got deleted, and even worse, deleted silently, without even being told about it. It makes me very cross indeed.
If entires are going to be removed, informing users a) that they’ve done so, and b) why, is literally a bare minimum.
Although note that TMDB seem to have now deleted their entry for Apaches entirely, rather than just reclassified it. ↩