One of the longest running independent video stores in Carlow is having a huge clear out sale at the miniute, with all VHS before 2001 going for 2 squids. Amidst shelves and shelves of video nasties from the eighties I managed to find a copy of Strike! A 1988 comedy about what what happen if anyone from Hollywood was to make a film of the Miner's strike. Alexi Sayle was involved in it, apparently he was in some sort of Albanian supporting communist party in the 1980's.

It's middling funny, with a local miner turned script writer having his script taken up by the producers of a stream of horror cum-fests who need to change their PR image if they are ever going to escape the limits a market governed by sex starved 16 year olds. His script ends up getting butchered, and he is faced with a moral dilemna of taking the Hollywood dosh or not. He does, leading to Meryl Streep's casting as Scragill's wife and Al Pacino hamming up Scargill as Scarface. In the film within a film that is the premise of the movie we are greeted with a hilarious scene of Scargill wipeing himself down with a fresh can of Bud from a fridge stocked to the max with them. Jerry the director comments "wouldn't it be great if Scargill took a load of drugs and had a great time?" After a bunch of rotund, coal faced miner militants rape Scargills wife and cause the collaspe of the scag heap with their pesky strike, its up to Scargill on his Harley to save Britain from a thousand militants who have broken into the dynamite store and are headed to Sellafield.

Can Scargill stop the local militants blowing up Sellafield? Its either nuclear power or coal - which side are you on?

Labels: Film, Politics