I’ve owned “The Big Sleep” forever, and read the novel umpty-ump times.

And I’ve always been confused by the plot.

It didn’t matter.

I dug out the DVD the other night and realized there was an unreleased, earlier version on the flip side of the disc.

Maybe I watched it before, but if I did, I didn’t remember it.

According to a comparison between the unreleased and released versions, the changes were made — mostly — in order to beef up Lauren Bacall’s scenes with Humphrey Bogart.

In particular, they cheesed a scene with Bacall in a weird veil, for no apparent reason.

But the big change is a long scene in the district attorney’s office. It’s not the most exciting thing in the world, but it does go a long way toward making the story more comprehensible.

It’s worth a look

 

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This was in late November. Deer season, hence the orange clothing. The brookies were sluggish and responded best to the more garish offerings — the squirmy worm in particular. I was using a Cabelas 6 1/2 foot, 4 weight glass rod, which are typically about $69 plus shipping and as such an incredible deal. I also have the 7 foot 5 weight and just ordered the 5 foot 9 inch 3 weight. All are three piece rods.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the plus side, the Housatonic River Trout Management Area is running a little below 200 cubic feet per second, which means the wading angler can get to a lot of spots normally accessible only by boat.

But the low flows, combined with the unusually warm and sunny weather, mean the water temperature is getting into the 70s by mid-day.

So while it’s a lot of fun to go out and catch the feisty rainbows the state stocked a couple weeks back, they take a fair bit of reviving, as I found out on Sunday, Sept. 24.

It might be best to give the trout a rest until this hot spell breaks.

 

Drop everything and find “Naked As Nature Intended,” a 1961 nudist film by the immortal Harrison Marks.

It has cows, ducks, Stonehenge, girls in Capri pants and the Famous Lorna Doone coach.

Personally, seeing Pam, Jackie and the gang encounter the Famous Lorna Doone coach is a real highlight of my career as a important and influential film critic.

The one thing this flick is a little light on is nekkidity.

But hey — we get to see Tintagel! (The legendary castle of King Arthur, you oaf.)

 

Amazon Prime, aka The Eternal Wellspring of Utter Crap, for some reason was pushing something called “Space Boobs in Space,” which looked like it might be okay, if redundant.

As opposed to “Space Boobs in Arkansas,” I mean.

Well, it’s an appallingly amateurish mess that appears to have been shot on someone’s phone.

If you can make it past the 10-minute mark you win the Gunga Din Award.

“Space Boobs in Space” is not to be confused with “Space Babes in Space,” which I think is a porn flick.

 

The Housatonic River in Northwest Connecticut had just gotten down to a wadeable level in the trouty areas in the week before the Memorial Day weekend.

Then, naturally, it rained.

In these circs. the wading angler can a) fish somewhere else b) take up another hobby c) try the stretch of the river between the dam above the Great Falls and the Falls Village hydropower facility.

Whatever is slopping over the dam is the flow. That in turn means that warmwater species can be found in the scoured out pools and runs — smallmouth bass, bluegill and what some insist are crappies and others maintain are rock bass. All I know is they are green and have bassy mouths and panfish bodies.

The footing is on smooth rock and pretty treacherous. The other day I watched casual hikers, one after another, slip and slide around. I tried to warn them. They didn’t listen.

Hardly anyone fishes here, let alone prowls the falls armed with a Tenkara rod. The competition, if any, comes from Latino guys up from Danbury and using enormous salt-water spinning rods. They tend to kill everything they catch, but they don’t catch much.

They’re cheerful and always curious about what I am doing. I try to explain it’s probably not a good idea to eat fish from this river — who wants to be the guy who grills up the one smallie that somehow ingested a chunk of PCB?

But they don’t speak much English, and my Spanish is slightly less than rudimentary.

And so the long day wears on.

So I spent the better part of a week exploring this area. I found the Lagoon of the Lost and a pool with some stranded fish in it.

I tried to catch them but they were busy setting the world record for spookiness.

I found some beer cans.

I tried a three-fly rig of Stimulator, Cahill nymph and isonychia nymph on a jig hook — on an eight-foot Tenkara rod — and it worked.

As did Momma’s Bathrobe (aka the mop fly), poppers, streamers, bushy dry flies, anything with rubber legs, and Wooly Buggers.

You could fish this river, anywhere on it, with nothing but brown Woolies in various sizes and permutations and catch something every day.

Because in the final analysis, you never really know what’s on the other end of the line around here.

“Savage Weekend” is an extremely tedious exploitation film made for about $38 in 1979. Apart from four breasts, there isn’t much here except for William Sanderson as “Otis.”

Sanderson plays the same role he always does, except usually his character is named “Cooter.”

Death by hanging, hat pin, electrocution, blunt force trauma and chain saw. Bulletin: People in upstate New York are violent goobers who listen to Jeezus radio and don’t like gay guys in their bars. Frolicking in the fields, which in the age of Lyme disease is probably a thing of the past. Long soliloquies by Cooter in a graveyard. Boat-building.

Boring. No coils. Not even Mystery Science Theater could save this.

Clockwise from top left: Gay guy mops up goobers in bar, says “Not for nothing was I brought up in the South Bronx;” Bad guy with machete trying to kill goober as Cooter approaches with chain saw; sleazy guy with cute girl in bulrushes, giving the scene a slightly Biblical feel; tempting fate by getting nekkid in a field that is probably full of ticks.

“Mystery Science Theater” is back on Netflix, and it’s pretty much the same routine as before.

That is, some very amusing commentary on bad movies and some highly irritating set pieces involving space ships and evil aliens.

The series opens with a real oddity, the 1961 “Reptilicus.” It’s the only example I know of of that rarest of genres, the “Giant Monster Destroys City — in Denmark” movie.

Priceless observations on aquariums, armaments, acidic green slime, sweat, professors, electric eels, and cheese.

Three coils.

 

Here is the Hobo and his shotgun

 

Amazon Prime, aka The Mother Lode of Crap™, has the immortal Rutger Hauer in a 2011 straight-to-video piece of futuristic shlock called “Hobo With a Shotgun.”

Rutger is the Hobo. There’s the Drake, the criminal boss of Fuck Town and his two sadistic sons, Slick and Ivan; there’s Abby, the hooker with a heart of gold; and there are two guys dressed like scrapyard knights of yore called the Plague, for some reason.

So the boys irritate the Hobo who gets a magic shotgun that never ever requires reloading and starts cleaning up the town but the cops are corrupt too so that’s a problem and there’s some plot and lots of blood and pretty much everybody dies and if they don’t die they lose important parts of their personal bodies.

Here are Slick (right) and Ivan. You can see why you might want to shoot them.

 

Academy Award nomination for Rutger Hauer, when he says to the blood-soaked hooker, “Lemme walk you home.”

Death by barbed-wire noose. Death by hanging with spear gun assist (times three). Death by being shot in the nads by a hobo with a shotgun and then trapped in a burning school bus — in retaliation for trapping children in a burning school bus. Glass-eating. Shamefully wasteful cocaine use.

Here’s Abby, before the bad guys do icky things to her

And because this is a Canadian flick, ice skates take on sinister significance.

It’s an absolutely dreadful film with gallons of gore and lots of screaming and a lot of sideways hand-held camera shots.

These guys are called The Plague. It is never explained and nobody gives a shit.

“Hobo with a Shotgun” has no redeeming qualities except one — it’s short.

So I give it a heartfelt two coils for getting the job done, not taking too long about it, and providing for Rutger Hauer’s old age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Truly successful exploitation flicks don’t have a ton of plot, and “Mad Doctor Of Blood Island” is chock-full of scenes that have only the most tenuous connection.

Such as they all happen on the same island.

The movie does have some of the best gibberish chanting music I’ve encountered this side of a good Satan movie.

There’s a native dance sequence that owes more to Burbank than Borneo, but hey, a girl in a grass skirt is a girl in a grass skirt.

The in-shot zoom, very popular in the 1960s, is employed to great if slightly nauseating effect here, with incessant and rapid zooming used about as often as scary music.

Fuzzy and/or green zombies, nekkid girls running through the jungle, a green blood cult and the best in late 1960s leisure wear.

Even the dubbing is competent.

So settle in for an excellent 90 minutes of cheesy goodness.

Three coils.