Snow News is Bad News (For the UK, at least)

Woke up this morning and found we’d been gifted with a light dusting of snow, rekindling the strange fascination that the British have with the fluffy white stuff.

Great Barr – Where the snow lay roundabout, deep and crisp and even

It’s has become somewhat the cliché to state that with the first sign of snow, the country grinds to a halt. Even so, to employ yet another tired cliché, there’s no smoke without fire, and it’s been proved time and again that the slightest dusting does indeed bring things to a standstill.

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Bronx Warriors, Exterminators and Turkey Shoots

Funny how something completely innocuous can spark seemingly the most insignificant of memories. For instance, this week over at LateMag.com, there was a plug for the forthcoming release of Enzo G. Castellari’s 1980′s schlock-fest, The Bronx Warriors trilogy.

Now, Castellari isn’t a name that’ll be familiar to everyone, but for fans of the Spaghetti Western or cult Italian exploitation cinema, his is a name mentioned with a certain amount of reverence, usually in suitably hushed tones… Probably.

Okay, he made a few decent Spaghetti Westerns, including the revisionist Keoma – I’m not one to let an awful soundtrack ruin my enjoyment – but let’s not get dragged away from the original point. Today is not, after all, Enzo G. Castellari day.

It’s more these Bronx Warriors films – The Bronx Warriors, Escape From the Bronx, and The New Barbarians, in turn low-rent rip-offs of Walter Hill’s The Warriors, John Carpenter’s Escape From New York and George Miller’s Mad Max 2 – and more importantly what they signify. Well, what they signify to me.

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