RIFLE RANGE BOY

The 10th Victim (La Decima Vittima, Italian; 1965) Director: Elio Petri Riding high on her fame as Honey Ryder, 1962 Dr No's Bond Girl, as the Ultimate Bikini Goddess, Ursula Andress continued making movies banking on her sex symbol status. She also appeared in the 1967 Bond spoof 'Casino Royale' as Vesper Lynd, whose grave we saw in 'No Time to Die'. In between, this Swiss vixen also found time to act in this B-grade Italian movie.  'The 10th Victim' is a futuristic movie set in the 21st century, where the world enjoys peace as society has managed to put a stop to wars. Man's predilection for violence is curbed by having society-sanctioned killing. Each person has the opportunity to kill ten people in a computer-drawn programme named 'The Big Hunt'. In five of the hunts, the selected play hunter and the other five, he plays the hunted. The hunter is given all information about his target but not the hunted. The hunted is clueless about who the a...

Radio Bikini (1988, Documentary) In the interest of science they say.... The above is a trailer of a series nuclear bomb blasts (2 of them) in Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean in the summer of 1946. I saw the full version of it over the Sundance channel recently. And it left a bad after taste.  After the success of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US and its allies decided that there was a dire need to learn more about this deadly weapon, hence was born Operation Crossroads to test the catastrophic effects of the A-bomb. The film starts with the actual footage of transmission of propaganda radio from Bikini Atoll. it paints a very cheery picture of the army and the locals gaily enjoying the sea, sun and the outdoors. The visitors managed to convince the Bikinian leader, Kilon Bauno, to coax his people to uproot themselves from their homeland to the Marshall Islands for the purpose of the experiment. The inhabitants never ever returned home to...

Back in 1976, I remember reading about a serial killer in a Sunday newspaper. Somehow, the story got stuck with me. Over the years, I have been periodically coming across this person's escapades (misadventures) in the dailies. I think it felt exciting and got stuck on to most people's grey matter because of the inclusion of the prefix 'bikini'! Now, with Google, every piece of information on this notorious psychopath is just at the tip of everyone's fingertip. A few years ago, I visited one of the friends I know (not too many friends I have, anyway), whose wife had just delivered a baby boy a few days before that. I almost choked on the cordial drink that he cordially offered to me when he said, “We named him Sabhraj. What do you think?” I answered, “Fine! Nice name.” not wanting to be a wet blanket. I was just chuckled to myself and hoped that he never found out that he named his son after a serial killer! (A little bit too late to change as the child’s name had ...