Paper Mask Online

A few clips from the 1990 film Paper Mask are available online, eg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=329DevoTQps

Here's the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wux-JfYe7G0

It's only a matter of time before some fool uploads the entire travesty. I hate this film. I hate, hate... HATE it. I feel a loathing for it that is so passionate it is almost soul-consuming. Words are simply not adequate to express the vicious and obsessive revulsion that courses through my heart at the mere thought that it once sullied a cinema screen. A brief glimpse of just a single still poisons my system with such a toxic disgust that I am almost incapacitated. As regular HPANWO-readers will know, I am a libertarian and I oppose all forms of censorship... but if I didn't oppose it, I would call for all the existing reels, digital copies and videotapes of Paper Mask to be burnt publicly in the centres of all British towns and cities, and the ashes carried by hospital bed to a grinder where they would be pulverized down to the molecular level; and then buried in a concrete vault five hundred feet underground with warning signs on the ground above in twenty languages and a symbolic non-linguistic code to alert future humans, who may not speak any modern languages, not to risk opening the contaminated chamber beneath, and to let it lie there forever, safely isolated from the environment until the half life of burnt plastic, steel and acetate has expired. I'd also round up the entire cast and crew, right down to the boy in the studio who made the tea, and lock them in the deepest dungeon in merry England until they stop knocking on the door for their bread and water. One critic described it as "underrated". Excuse me? I think it's overated and has been so since the viewer at the front of the queue at the premier passed a single penny over the box office counter.

I wrote an article a while ago called Hospital Porters in the Media detailing my search for some fictional media piece which portrayed Hospital Porters in a positive light and failed, see: http://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/hospital-porters-in-media.html. Paper Mask is a film hardly anybody has heard of, and I'm glad because obscurity has never been more richly deserved. It follows the story of a "lowly"... (UGH!)... Hospital Porter who steals the identity of a doctor and impersonates him. I'm am so utterly sick and tired of Hospital Porters being portrayed as frustrated doctors and nurses, walking round with their heads bowed and their shoulders slumped in shame and low self-esteem. Do I need to say it again? I am very proud to have been able to call myself a Hospital Porter. If events hadn't taken me in a different direction, I'd have been happy to have served the rest of my life in the Hospital Portering Service.

If you're a Hospital Porter or ex-Hospital Porter and you've been effected by the issues raised in this film then help is available from the HPWA. Just send a private message to "Hagbard Celine" on the HPANWO Forum, see Links column; you will need to register as a member first. Don't lose hope. You are not alone. We're here to help you.