Top 15 Films of 2025

 

Fifteen Favourite 
First Release Films of 2025

Now then, more than the usual caveats apply to my list this year... 

My father got very sick in September and then passed away at the end of October. Consequently, the blog was shut down for over a month and, another knock on effect was that I haven’t, so far, been able to get to the cinema since September. So I’ve missed loads of potential films which might well have made it into my top ten and perhaps even my number one spot (though, that movie is pretty much ‘in the bag’, so to speak). This perhaps also partially explains why this year’s list is only 15 films as opposed to last year’s 30.

So possible contenders I didn’t see were... Now You See Me Now You Don’t, Good Boy, The Running Man and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Along with a whole host of others I’ve probably forgotten about. So please bear with me on this stuff. Also, the list is pretty much all American movies again... it’s not that I didn’t see many foreign language films, just that I didn’t really rate the ones I saw as being special enough to make the list so... yeah, it is what it is, I’m afraid. 

Anyway, here’s the list with the usual link to the full review on the title... so just click each title to get to the review. Please remember, the UK release dates on some of these are for this year, although at least one of them was 2024 in the US. In ascending order they are...

15. A Working Man
Just scraping into my top fifteen is this trusty, tried formula action flick to the tune of  ‘Jason Statham goes up to eleven on the bad guys!’. A more serious brand of The Stath this time around and it keeps me going until The Beekeeper 2 gets released. 

14. Novocaine
Absolute silliness with a ‘what if the ‘no pain’ villain from The World Is Not Enough used his powers for good in a mild mannered way’ kind of premise. There’s absolutely no way the main protagonist could actually survive what happens to him in this film but, I dunno, Hollywoodland seems to think that not feeling pain is somehow synonymous with not having the lasting effects of the accompanying injury. Still, unbridled silliness does count for a lot so, on the list it goes. 

13. Ballerina
What if John Wick was a hot female? Well, here’s the answer, where she’s somehow shoehorned into a gap between John Wick films which, once Keanu shows up, makes no sense in terms of the continuity. Still, since when did that spoil my appetite for a sexy woman jumping around and beating everybody up (well, okay, a few times but not here, I can forgive it somewhat). 

12. Nobody 2
Okay, so this wasn’t nearly as good as the first movie but, it’s just nice catching up with the main protagonist and also seeing a little more of his wife in action for this one.

11. Jurassic World Rebirth
If you’d have told me a year ago a Jurassic World movie would be on my top fifteen list, well... let’s just say that nobody had any right, after the fiasco of the last three movies, to expect anything decent from this one at all but, nope, this was a much more fun movie than I’d expected. Completely took me by surprise.

10. Superman
Okay, I hate the fact that the DC cinematic universe has already been rebooted and it just makes no sense to me after all that hard work of the previous films in the series. However, I didn’t hate this and, well, in a word... Krypto. A live action movie with Superman’s dog (even though the reveal at the end shows it’s not actually his dog) was always going to hit big with me. I can live with it... so far.

9. The Last Showgirl
Finally, people are taking Pamela Anderson seriously as an actress... and good for her. This heartbreaking portrait of a woman trying to keep herself afloat is amazing and the great Dave Bautista is equally fantastic as her leading man. 

8. Bridget Jones - Mad About The Boy
Well, I loved the first movie when it came out all those years ago but was left rather lukewarm by the two sequels. This one, however, brings Bridget back with a bang and it’s a satisfying conclusion to the franchise, for sure. 

7. Drop 
Okay, a clichéd old plot is this time set mostly in a restaurant. I wasn’t expecting a lot from this tired old premise but, honestly, it was so well filmed and performed that it won me over in no time. The Bear McCreary score helped a lot too.

6. M3GAN 2.0
Wow, a sequel to one of the most popular horror movies in years completely underperformed at the box office and was almost universally hated. I guess I’m out of tune with the times again because, although I loved the first one, I also thought this was a great move to keep the franchise fresh. They ditched the horror and turned it into M3GAN meets Mission Impossible meets Charlie’s Angels. Worked for me... loved it.

5. Tornado 
Well, I certainly didn’t expect to have ‘Scottish female samurai movie’ on my ‘top films which somehow managed to get released in UK cinemas’ Bingo card but, here it is and it was truly wonderful.

4. The Long Walk
Read this over 40 years ago and wondered why nobody had made a movie of it. Well, it’s finally here and it’s a pretty intense take on the original Stephen King (or rather Richard Bachman) novel. The ending is, I believe, not what it seems... and is all the better for it.

3. Presence
Steven Soderbergh brought out two films in UK cinemas this year, both within six weeks of each other. And they both made my top three! With one of them snagging my number one spot, no less. This one is him doing something slightly different with what could have been a traditional ghost story.

2. The Phoenician Scheme
And once again, Wes Anderson brings out a movie which shows why he’s one of the greatest of the living American directors. Another brilliant, funny and witty movie with some wonderfully fun performances. 

1. Black Bag
Soderbergh’s second film of the year is his take on the cold war spy novel as popularised by such writers and John Le Carre and Len Deighton back in the 1960s. Indeed, his main protagonist here is named George (presumably after George Smiley) and wears Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer NHS glasses. So a film which very much wears its influences on its sleeve but then takes us into more intimate territory. An absolutely fantastic piece of cinema.

Lady Reporter aka The Blonde Fury

 

Blonde Fury Road

Lady Reporter 
aka The Blonde Fury
aka Shi jie da shai
Hong Kong/USA 1989 Directed by Hoi Mang
Golden Harvest/88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Next up in my Cynthia Rothrock watch is Lady Reporter, or The Blonde Fury as it is known in some territories. It’s noted for being the first (and quite possibly the last) Hong Kong action film to have a US actor receiving top billing... so that’s really something. 

This one has Madam Rothrock playing an FBI operative named Cindy, summoned to Hong Kong to go undercover as a female photojournalist... at a paper whom they suspect are printing forged bank notes. So she stays with her friend Judy (payed by Elisabeth Lee), whose father is the prosecutor trying to put the mob boss organising the counterfeiting behind bars. Well, the reporter job only lasts one day as she quickly confirms that the faked money is being printed at the newspaper (but can’t yet prove it... it all ends in a fight after day one, as you would expect from this kind of movie). So, it has to be said, since she’s only a reporter for about ten minutes of the film, the Lady Reporter title is maybe much less of a fit than The Blonde Fury Rothrock becomes, when she’s kicking bad guy ass in this. 

Other stand out actors in this one include Siu-Ho Chin, Hoi Mang and Roy Chiao (who many may remember as the Chinese mob boss of 1935 Shanghai in the opening scenes of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom).They’re all pretty good in this and quite entertaining in their own ways. 

Now, if you’re not used to watching these kinds of early to late 80s Hong Kong action vehicles, I should probably shout out again that the humour in these is quite broad and often slapstick. This one is no exception although, I would have to say it’s a little less annoying here than in most of these movies... so this one may be a good jumping on point for some. One point that did make me laugh is when, after the prosecutor, played by Chiao, has gone mad through a nefarious deed of the villain but is kidnapped back from hospital by Cindy and her friends to fake a photo shoot of his having regained his senses so he can prosecute the villain again, they glue eyes over the sleeping patient’s eyelids and hold up his limbs to make it look like he’s awake. At the end of the scene we pan around to another wall where it becomes obvious that the eyes have been cut out of a poster of Bruce Lee. 

The action scenes and choreography are great in this, as you would expect and, like the majority of movies shot there, the actors and actresses were certainly not discouraged from performing their own stunts on these things. Luckily, a hard working talent like Cynthia Rothrock manages to pull it off and make it look relatively easy. Some highlights would be where, in the middle of a fight, she lands on top of a ladder and then turns it around while balancing on it to reface her opponent... and another wonderful moment where she ‘Donald ‘O `Connor’s’ it, running midair around the two walls of a corner to carry on her fight... similar to O’ Connor’s gravity defying moments performing Make ‘Em Laugh in Singin’ In The Rain except... here she’s doing it in high heels. There’s even an action scene where the main part of the fighting takes place up and down some bamboo scaffolding work which, made me wonder if this film was part of the ‘inspiration’ for a similar fight in Marvel’s relatively recent movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (reviewed by me here). 

My understanding is that in the scene where she was required to jump off a second story building and land on boxes while holding a fake baby... and then filming it again from a slightly lower height so she could be seen landing on her heels... it all took its toll on the actress for those two days of filming and a doctor gave her a load of pills because, in his opinion, she’d ‘jumbled up’ her internal organs.

Whichever way you cut it though, Lady Reporter aka The Blonde Fury is a pretty entertaining slice of Hong Kong action where Rothrock truly gets to shine, as much as an actress as she is a martial arts performer, I would say. I quite liked this one and even the droopy, synth-pop influenced soundtrack in parts didn’t distract me from the quality of the final product, despite the many noted continuity errors which occurred from reshoots. This certainly won’t be the last of this lady’s films I’ll be reviewing for the blog. 

Buck Privates

Private Parts

Buck Privates
USA 1941 
Directed by Arthur Lubin
Universal/Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Following on from the box office failure of One Night In The Tropics (reviewed here) but, also marking the success and popularity of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in their joint movie debut in that film (although, it turns out, not quite in Lou's case... more on that in a silent Laurel & Hardy review coming to the blog), they were signed to at least two more pictures and Buck Privates was the first of many where they were the main draw. Having said that, there are a couple of other characters who are also there to provide a kind of romantic rivalry in the film and who share the limelight with the two comedians.

Bud and Lou play two illegal street salesmen who run away from a police sergeant and join the line in a cinema for cover. They’re both too stupid to realise it’s a line for ‘peacetime recruitment’ for a year’s national service, to get people trained up as soldiers ‘just in case’ America entered the war... and so end up recruited themselves. Also recruited is a millionaire playboy portrayed by Lee Bowman and his ex-servant and main romantic competitor, played by Alan Curtis. Both of these mostly loathe each other and are both after the same army gal, played by Jane Frazee and, when the camera isn’t concentrating on various Abbott and Costello routines worked into the story, the rivalry between these two is shown as quite cut throat and nasty, until the rich playboy saves the life of his ex-employee and they both do their company proud in an army game at the finish of the movie.

So, yeah, it’s all the kinds of gags you would expect from this kind of ‘little people joining up for a greater cause’ movie but, of course, in terms of American movies, it would have been one of their earlier ones so, at the time, it wouldn’t have seemed quite to formula. Indeed, the movie was a huge hit, making more money than any other Universal picture had made up until that point. 

The comedy is mostly good stuff... some of the physical stuff is really creaky and there’s a hell of a lot of ad libbing going on (for instance, a drill routine was supposed to last three minutes but went on for over five, because all the ad libs from the boys were kept in) but the fast dialogue shenanigans, many once again based on ways Abbot could con money out of Costello, are all great and very witty. There’s also an early appearance of a boxing match that Costello gets conned into fighting which, if I remember rightly, was revisited in various ways by the duo over the years. 

Interjected among the comedy is the story of the rivalry between the two other male leads and, some really great song and dance numbers including The Andrews Sisters. This was the first of a few collaborations they filmed with Bud and Lou and they got a few big hit singles out of this one, including the tremendous Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy Of Company B, of course. 

A couple of things to mention here too. Firstly, keep an eye out for the cook who features prominently with Lou in a musical scene in the army kitchen tent... it’s none other than Shemp Howard of The Three Stooges fame. Secondly, that long drill scene (which I have to say, was not exactly a highlight of the picture for me) was something that the Japanese used to show their soldiers during the war, to demonstrate just how stupid the American soldiers were. Hmmm... a somewhat back handed compliment I guess. 

And, like I said, Buck Privates really did the business at the box office and the prints were at a shortage and in demand from cinemas. In fact, it delayed the production of the next Abbott and Costello film, also directed by Lubin (who did a number of these and was given a $5000 bonus by the company after this one proved so successful), because the studio wanted to give it a bigger budget and restyle it to a bigger picture. So I guess that’ll be the third film coming up in this beautifully restored Abbott And Costello - The Universal Collection Blu Ray set so... I’ll get onto that one soon. 

True Detective - Night Country

Native Tongue

True Detective - 
Night Country
Season 4
HBO 2024
6 episodes

Warning: Some spoilers

After a strong opening with a supernatural atmosphere where a herd of deer are startled, True Detective - Night Country, shows itself as being more of a reboot than a continuation at first, although there are some marked references going back to the characters in the first season of the show (reviewed by me here). The opening also has strong similarities to John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing (reviewed here) as the whole thing is set in the fictional town of Ennis in Alaska, when a research team all go suddenly missing, after a big fright glimpsed at the start of the story. Also, to lend itself to the definite supernatural shenanigans going on, the whole thing is set from mid December through to early January, in the part of the year where the whole town is forever night. So, yeah, you won’t be seeing much daylight in this show other than the occasional flashback. 

And that’s another thing which marks this show out from the predecessors… it’s not being told in a fractured time narrative in any way, although there is a sense of looking back to a prior case. 

Enter Police Detective Liz Danvers played by Jodie Foster. When she finds the tongue of an old murder victim in the research station while everyone is missing, she realises it links up with a case with her old partner, now working for a different branch. That doesn’t stop that ex-partner, Evangeline Navarro, played by Kali Reis, from joining the investigation to try and help figure out how the two cases are related. Helping Danvers is her newish young sidekick Detective Peter Prior, played by Finn Bennett. Also among the cast are two actors who feel like they’ve been a bit wasted here. The great Christopher Eccleston plays an outranking superior officer who is not really on board with Danvers investigation but, it’s more like a series of cameos (he doesn’t even appear in the last, slightly extended episode).

And then there’s also Fiona Shaw as a native to the area, Rose Aguineau. Now I think this actress is great, especially after seeing her as the authority figure in Killing Eve (reviewed here, here,  here and here) but, again she’s more of a cameo, ‘five minutes and you’re done’, presence in each episode. That being said, her character, who knows the history and folklore of the area, is at least a more significant person and is even the one who, at the end of the first episode… and with the help of the spirit of her dead husband… finds the frozen bodies of the dead scientists, half mutilated and naked in the snow. 

Well, not all dead because, when the cops are trying to remove the bodies from the ice, one of the guy’s arms cracks off and that’s when we find out there was one survivor… when he starts screaming at this. And asides from the occasional goriness (head shot squibs are getting much better), there is much more an emphasis on the supernatural as accepted by the majority of the population there (except Danvers, naturally, who has to be confronted by it several times before she starts to accept things), giving this season a very different, horror movie vibe. But it’s also shot through with, often black, humour… for instance, after a retort is made to Peter about the way he does everything for Danvers, he finds himself asking, “Who’s Mrs. Robinson?”

So there’s a slow creeping dread going on throughout the entire show and, juxtaposed with the more realistic procedural story which the characters are wrapped up in, it makes for an interesting mix. And it’s well acted, especially by Kali Reis but also, of course, by Foster. In fact, Danvers is a deliberately unlikeable character and so it took me a while before I could start warming to her, as Foster brings out the person beneath the surface as the story continues 

That being said, all of the detectives on the case seem to be missing the one obvious question, filled with mystery, which I picked up on from a screen saver at the research centre early on in the first episode. If this place is supposed to have a highly advanced research team, why the heck are they watching films on a DVD player rather than a Blu Ray player? It makes no sense!

The ending is… ambiguous. A, mostly, human intervention reason for the deaths of all the scientists is given but there’s also room left for unexplained elements which could have… and probably did… contribute to the deaths. Even the final fate of Evangeline Navarro is left open to interpretation… is she in the final shot with Danvers or did she kill herself and then rejoined Danvers as her spirit (as seems to happen a lot in Ennis, it seems… the dead rarely seem to be resting). And, yeah, overall I liked this season, written and directed by a new show runner. I think Night Country and the first season rank the highest in my experience of True Detective, for sure. 

But, of course, like everyone else, I’m wondering when the next cast will be coming along for a sixth season. Well… rumours are I’m going to have to wait ’til 2027 to see the next story so, yeah, I’ll keep my eye on that, for sure.

Asylum

Taking Over

Asylum
UK 1972 
Directed by Roy Ward Baker
Amicus/Second Sight  Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers in this one. 

Asylum is the next movie in my watch of the old Amicus portmanteau horror films. Dating from 1972 this has four main story segments which include, if you go by the end credits of the print itself, Frozen Fear, The Weird Taylor, Lucy Comes To Stay and Mannikins Of Horror. All of these are written by Robert Bloch (although it’s suspected the first segment may have been more than inspired by a Clark Ashton Smith story) and the spelling of the Mannikins of the last story seems wrong. Modern sources tell me the last story is actually Mannequins Of Horror but, looking at the different spelling uses and the slightly different meanings attributed to each spelling, I think it’s much more likely that the fourth story is actually called Manikins Of Horror. This is not to say that no mannequins appear in the movie, as you’ll see as you read further but, specifically in the fourth segment, they seem to be manikins rather than mannequins.

Indeed, the idea of some kind of reanimated figure seems to be predominant in three of the four shorts in this one. The linking material in this one is of a young psychiatrist, played by Robert Powell, who drives to an old manor house acting as an Asylum, seeking a position there. His car ride over the opening credits is scored with a booming version of Mussorgsky’s Night On Bare Mountain. The current assistant, Dr. Rutherford, as played by Patrick Magee, tasks him with finding the identity of the former head of the place, one Dr. Star, who has gone mad and is, we are told, one of the four patients Rutherford wants Powell’s Dr. Martin to interview. If he can pick out from the four personalities just which one is a blind for the former head of the facility, he can have the job. 

So off Martin goes with the orderly, played by Catweazel himself, yup, Geoffrey Bayldon, to listen to the little horror and thriller stories so he can work out which is the real doctor. It’s at this point that I suspect, even before we meet any of the unlikely candidates, that most people will see the obvious twist ending of the piece coming so, yeah, I won’t say anything further but I thought it was pretty self-evident.

So the first segment, Frozen Fear, is told through the recollections of Bonnie, played by Barbara Parkins. She is having an affair with a character played by Richard Todd, who decides to take his wife, played by Sylvia Sims, permanently out of the equation. So he orders a new freezer for the cellar, bashes her in the head and disposes of the body by slicing her up into six segments (head, arms, legs, torso) and, curiously, wrapping each body part up in brown paper and string before disposing of it all in the new freezer. However, when the brown paper head escapes the freezer and starts rolling around on its own... you know something’s up. When Bonnie arrives on the scene, she finds Todd’s body in the freezer, from where one brown paper covered, severed arm has strangled him... and then she is attacked in the cellar by various bits of his wifes scattered body. It’s silly but hugely entertaining and the brown peper covered limbs give an unusual feel to this kind of material, for sure. 

The next segment, The Weird Tailor, is about a tailor played by Barry Morse, who is threatened with being thrown out of his shop for late payment of the rent by his landlord. Then, however, he gets a customer in the form of Peter Cushing, who wants the tailor to make a special suit for him, to the tune of £200. The conditions are that it has to be made of a certain, special material brought by Cushing’s character and the suit must only be worked on between midnight and 5am each day. Now, we know there’s something up with the material when Morse pricks his finger and it magically absorbs his blood but, he continues working on it and, when he delivers it to Cushing, finds that it’s a special suit to bring life back to Cushing’s long dead son. A special spell suit the client has learned to make from an arcane book of black magic which, given writer Robert Bloch’s long standing friendships in his life, is an obvious homage to H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, I’m pretty sure. Cushing has no money, it turns out and, in a struggle, Morse accidentally kills him. He returns home and tells his wife to burn the suit but, instead, she dresses up their store mannequin with it. And, yes, as you’d expect, the store mannequin comes to life and tries to strangle Morse, who is now obviously driven insane. 

The third segment, Lucy Comes To Stay, stars young Charlotte Rampling as Lucy, who has returned home from a ‘special’ hospital and is being more or less imprisoned by her brother in her house as a form of recovery. It’s not long, however, before Lucy’s friend, played by Britt Ekland, comes to spring her from her house and lures away the nurse on an elabourate ruse. Murderous shenanigans ensue but I think most people would have figured out the real identity of Lucy’s friend when she first enters the narrative so, alas, no surprises here.

The fourth and final segment, the incorrectly spelled Mannikins Of Horror, is more a quick prelude and stars Herbert Lom as a former doctor who has made various miniature, robot like manekins of former colleagues and one of himself. This leads directly into the bookends with Dr. Martin who is about to return to London, no longer wanting the job, when the last manekin, made to resemble Lom himself and with his own brain willed inside the tiny brain inside the model*, gets into the office downstairs and stabs Magee’s character dead with a scalpel to the back of the brain. Dr. Martin crushes the manekin, it’s tiny internal organs leaking onto the floor and, this has the effect of also crushing Herbert Lom’s character in the upstairs room. Then the real Dr. Star is revealed, another murder is committed and the film ends as a cycle with another doctor arriving for an interview to join the asylum.

And it’s a nicely done, mostly fun but unsurprising set of small horror and thriller yarns. Director Baker livens things up with some nice shot set ups (such as when a taxi cab pulls up and is viewed from the other side of a big arch in the street) and some nice camera movement ideas. One is where, instead of just following the action down, for instance, when Charlotte Rampling goes to look for something in a drawer, he pans down and zooms simultaneously to take us right into the drawer from looking at her in the shot. 

He moves the camera quite a lot actually, and there are some nice moments where he uses it to highest effect. For example, when Morse and Cushing are locked in a struggle, the camera movements, while still smooth, are short twisty turning movements resembling something similar to a hand-held camera shot and throwing the chaos of movement into the scene to depict the feeling of the fight. And when Robert Powell slowly drifts upstairs to meet the patients, he stops to look at a fair few black and white engravings depicting scenes of mental illness through the ages... something which is enhanced by Baker’s continually roving camera panning up and around and sometimes spinning 360 degrees around in the frame as it takes in the content of the black and white engravings... or they might be etchings, come to think of it.

All in all, Asylum is nicely acted, written with a certain tongue in cheek feeling and has some nice music by Douglas Gamley, although there seems to be more ‘classical’ needle drop in this one than there is original composition, it has to be said. And, yeah, there are absolutely no surprises in this one and it can hardly be called all that scary, either but, the stories have a certain charm of their own... it’s well shot and I had fun with it. Not the best of the horror anthologies I’ve seen put out by Amicus but... it’s certainly not the worst of them either. A decent watch and Second Sight’s Blu Ray transfer is excellent, accompanied by some extras worth having although, I have to say, like a lot of this label’s releases, the price is a bit steep for what it is. I would have liked to have seen Indicator tackle the Amicus portmanteau horror movies in a more price friendly boxed collection, it has to be said. 

*Since watching and writing this, the great Severin Films have also relelased their own edition of the movie and, although I was tempted, I didn't double dip in this case. I did, however, buy their new pin badge based on the film which is a wonderfully crafted likeness of the Charles Gray manikin with a little front door which actually opens on the badge itself, revealing the grim, brainy matter inside the chest cavity. The height of fashion accessories for sure. 

The War Between The Land And The Sea

Hydro-whovia

The War Between 
The Land And The Sea
BBC1 Five Episodes
September 7-21 2025

Warning: Water logged spoilers washing in on the tide.

Okay... I have to admit that I was expecting the worst from this much heralded Doctor Who spin off. Not least since Disney have pulled the main show and are waiting until next year until they bother airing this one to the rest of the world. And yes, there are a few things which aren’t that great about The War Between The Land And The Sea and, yes, it might be said they didn’t really land the ending but, the thing is...

Well, this five episode mini series is a bit of a corker, in all honesty.

But let’s get the Water Buffalo in the room out of the way first because, it was my biggest stumbling block here and, while I can see a certain necessity to doing this if you want to express greater emotions with your non-human characters, well... just leave the original creations alone and pick something else. So... yeah, The Sea Devils, one of my favourite monsters from the Jon Pertwee era (and practically having all credibility destroyed by lack of budget during the Peter Davidson era of the show... and looking more like their old selves again fairly recently in the Jodie Whitaker era)... have once more been redesigned. So they’re much more like the new Silurians (who also, really didn’t need to be redesigned from their classic look) and, yeah, I can’t take the redesign seriously, in all honesty. 

To somewhat compensate for this, the Sea Devils have now been given a new name, Homo Aqua... which really doesn’t do much for me, to be honest. 

Okay, so we have Russel Tovey playing Barclay Pierre-Dupont, a very low level member of UNIT (various regular UNIT characters from the main show are also in this mini series) who accidentally gets picked by Homo Aqua to be the human negotiator at the table for talks, as the aquatic race come out to the humans and want our species to stop mucking around with their water and their fish families. Of course, the fish lady negotiator, called Salt and played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, falls in love with Barclay and, while there is a cold war going on with the underwater race as negotiations take place... we have a kind of inverted remake of The Little Mermaid, effectively... but with a bit of borrowing at the end from... wait, I’ll get there in a minute. 

And, despite some overly political correctness terms getting in the way again (please stop doing this, it ruined the main show), it’s really well written. I’m sure I can’t have been the first or last person to point out that, if the main show had been written as well as this was for the last few years then Doctor Who surely wouldn’t be facing the uncertain future it’s threatened with at the moment.  And it doesn’t hurt that Tovey’s, possibly overly vulnerable, performance and Mbatha-Raw’s confident warrior are absolutely brilliant together. In terms of the acting this one was great and, not forgetting Jemma Redgrave’s brilliant revival of her Kate Lethbridge-Stewart character (who gets a mid-end credits scene to herself in the last episode, stick around for it).

Other brilliant scenes include the ‘destructive rain of returned plastics from the oceans’ set piece, where mankind literally get everything thrown back at them, world wide, in a deluge of plastic death. And the shots of the gazillions of dead Homo Aqua floating to the surface of the world’s oceans is a sobering sequence too. 

Admittedly, the show is a little over preachy (no really, you dont always have to push the metaphor to the nth degree, we get it and didn’t need this show to point it all out) but all in all, I had a really great time with this one. 

Well... at least for the first four episodes. 

The fourth left it at a point where I was seriously doubting they could stick the landing on the ending and, yeah, when it came to the fifth episode, it kinda doesn’t work. Things are left unsaid about the way a certain virus was spread amongst the oceanic occupants and the last five minutes are a serious side swipe, seemingly lifted from Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape Of Water, it seems to me, with only one slight difference to the mechanics of the ending. 

So, yeah, the ending didn’t sit well with me on this one, for sure but... getting there was a lot of fun and, despite there being... and perhaps because of this...  there were hardly any action sequences in the entire show, I really thought quite a lot of it. Better than where the main show has been for the last few years, at any rate. And it’s got a nice score by Lorne Balfe to boot too so, I’m hoping that will be hitting compact disc before long. The War Between The Land And The Sea is one to watch, despite the irritating verbal mentions of The Doctor every now and again, to kind of remind people what they are watching. 

Merry Christmas 2025

Merry Christmas
to all my readers!

Above are the three colour variant Christmas cards I designed last year and at this link is this year’s Annual Cryptic Movie Quiz (right here) if you find yourself with any time to play.

Below are links to the majority of my Christmas themed blogs over the years, again if you find yourself with any downtime on your hands. I shall hopefully be back here over the next day or two with a review of the new Doctor Who spin-offf The War Between The Land And The Sea... until then, have a good one.

 

Books & Comics  

Alvin And His Pals In Merry Christmas Dell Giant

Carfax House

A Charlie Brown Christmas - The Making Of A Tradition

Christmas And Other Horrors

Christmas At Fontaine’s

A Christmas Clue 

A Christmas Ghost Story

The Christmas Cracker Killer 

The Christmas Jigsaw Murders

The Christmas Murder Game

Christmas With The Super-Heroes 

Crimson Snow

Dark Side Of Christmas, The 

A DC Universe Christmas

Ghosts Of Christmas Past

Giant SuperHero Holiday Grab Bag

Horror For Christmas

It’s A Wonderful Life Book, The 

Murder On The Christmas Express 

Mystery In White

Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer - DC Limited Collector’s Edition

The Santa Klaus Murder

The Stupidest Angel


Christmas Movies

The Advent Calendar

Anna And The Apocalypse

Batman Returns

Christmas Bloody Christmas

A Christmas Horror Story

Deathcember

Demonic Christmas Tree (aka The Killer Tree) 

Die Hard/Die Hard 2 Double Bill

Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas

Everly

The Green Knight

Gremlins Double Bill

It’s A Wonderful Knife

It’s A Wonderful Life

Krampus

Rare Exports - A Christmas Tale

Red One

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians

Santa Jaws

Scrooged

Silent Bite

Silent Night (2021) 

Silent Night (2023)

Sint

Tales From The Crypt

Violent Night  

 

 TV

The Box Of Delights 

Guardians Of The Galaxy Holiday Special

Doctor Who Christmas Specials

Doctor Who - A Christmas Carol

Doctor Who - The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe

Doctor Who - The Snowmen

Doctor Who - The Time Of The Doctor

Doctor Who - Last Christmas

Doctor Who - The Husbands Of River Song

Doctor Who - The Return Of Doctor Mysterio

Doctor Who - Twice Upon A Time (2017)

The Church On Ruby Road

Joy To The World


Bonus

23 Favourite Childhood Toys

Greatest Christmas Music

John McCLane VS George Bailey Grudge Match

Annual Cryptic Movie Quiz 2025

Christmas Quizwoz 2025

Well, I’ve had a really bad end to the year but, nevertheless, welcome to this year’s Cryptic Movie Quiz for the festive period.

How you play...

Check out the grid above and you’ll see spaces for 14 movie titles running horizontally and, below this intro, are the cryptic clues to assist you in working out what these ‘non-Christmas’ movie titles are. To help out, I’ve filled in a line of letters vertically downwards spelling out MERRY CHRISTMAS... so you have a letter in its correct position for each of the titles. Please don’t forget to click on the grid to see a larger version of it and maybe print it off to help yourself.

Email your answers to me at nuts4r2@hotmail.com by the end of January 9th 2025 to get your entries in. A few days after that, I’ll stick up the name of the winner (or winners, if it’s a tie or a group effort), along with all the answers, here on my blog. No prizes, it’s just for fun but, if you like solving puzzles and have some down time during the Christmas break, maybe you’d like to give it a go.

By way of an example, here’s a question from last year’s quiz, followed by the answer...

Example question:
Jazz legend Fitzgerald goes to see a men’s hair stylist.

Example answer:
A men’s hair stylist is a barber. The jazz legend is Ella Fitzgerald so, put them together and you get... Barberella.

Or just check out the January solution pages from the last few years to get a feel for how to put these things together (you often have to make spelling adjustments for the puntastic nature of the solutions). If you keep checking back in the comments section below, I will probably put the odd extra clue down there every now and again to help you out throughout the Christmas period.

Full marks are rarely scored by pretty much anyone so... if you’re feeling a bit stuck, there’s still everything to play for. Some people have won it with less than half the grid correct. So send me what you’ve got anyway.

I hope you enjoy playing. Make sure you have lots of fun this Christmas period... once again, drink responsibly and play irresponsibly. Here are the questions.

1. Egyptian corpse owns technical equipment

2. What you give people for Christmas.

3. A central stage for spherical objects used in sports.

4. The pride of lions’ fierce vocals are just over 19 decibels.

5. Suffering a disease in which a high temperature is a prominent symptom, on an evening at the weekend.

6. A non X-rated firebird was polished up for the plan.

7. Burglar belonging to the father of a kind of sack.

8. A choice between two indefinite articles.

9. A dagger of frozen water.

10. A musical composition made out of soup.

11. The incorrect legwear.

12. The specific nomenclature of a prickly stemmed flower.

13. Bond villain’s tool for accessing his front door.

14. Equine’s wing plumage.

Christmas With The Super-Heroes C43

Santa’s Super Helpers

Christmas With The Super-Heroes 
DC Limited Collectors Edition C43
DC
ISBN 761942387284

I recently reviewed one of the new treasury sized facsimile editions of the various DC treasuries which have ben released over this last year (my understanding is that their next two releases will be the two Spider-Man VS Superman Marvel crossovers, which I still have from the 1970s but, I look forward to getting new foil cover variants). Their December release is yet another I didn’t have as a kid although, I have talked about two of the stories here as they were reprinted in A DC Universe Christmas (reviewed here) but, it’s nice to read them at the size they were reprinted at during the 1970s (both those tales are from the 1940s).

The first of those two starts off this volume and is an untitled Superman story. This is where he shows a spoiled, rich kid those worse off than him at Christmas and also gets involved in a scheme of two villains trying to sabotage Christmas at the North Pole, coming to both Santa and Lois Lane’s rescue. And it’s a nice, positive tale which re-enforces childrens’ ideas of Santa Claus and also sees the last son of Krypton replacing the gassed and unconscious reindeer, by transporting Santa on his sled on Christmas Eve. 

The Second story here, which is a really great and moving one, is The Silent Night Of The Batman, where Batman is approached by the spirit of the season as a hallucination of Commissioner Gordon and his fellow cops. While Batman is convinced to stay with them at the police station and sing Christmas carols with them, we see various crimes and tragedies taking place, with absolutely no dialogue... and then right themselves to a series of positive resolutions, all without the intervention of The Batman. It’s actually a pretty heart warming sequence of pages, relying solely on the artwork of both the great Neal Adams and industry veteran Dick Giordano. 

Then we have a short story from House Of Mystery called Night Prowler. It’s a three page quickie which doesn’t actually contain any horror, just a sense of threat before the obvious identity of said night prowler is revealed to one of the characters... it works really well. 

Next up is the first of the usual activity pages which were the blessing/curse of the treasury editions put out by DC. It’s a double page spread of 8 circular artworks of various DC characters and a Christmas message from each entitled Christmas Greetings From The Super-Heroes. 

Then the second of those stories I’d already read comes in and it’s the brilliant, untitled  1940s Wonder Woman tale where it’s all narrated from the point of view of a friendly Christmas tree, who helps Wonder Woman out by giving her the information necessary to save the lives of a family and find a Nazi base. Luckily, Diana Prince is able to talk tree speak and, obviously, saves the day. 

After that we have Santa’s Scrambled Super List wordsearch, which invites you to find a load of super-heroes hidden in the grid, along with the names of a few of the creators too.

Then we get the last strip in theis selection, The Sandman in Santa Fronts For The Mob. This is the 1970s version of The Sandman and his sidekick, both in yellow super-hero costumes and not really remembered by many comic book readers these days (is my guess). But it’s a nice story about a bunch of criminals using a shop Santa, played by a heavy weight boxer, to cover up for their crimes... but, of course, when the boxer finds out what’s going on, he saves The Sandman’s life and helps him break up the racket. 

After that we have a two page spread highlighting the lyrics of six Christmas carols called Sing Along with the Super-Heroes and then a maze page called Santa’s Super-Deliveries… where you have to find Santa’s route to each of the characters waiting in the maze for their presents. 

On the inside back cover we have Season’s Greetings From The DC Editors, with drawings of them and a little bit of promotional blurb for each and, on the back cover we have, not a cut out diorama this time but just a nice holiday scene. 

And that’s me done with Christmas With The Super-Heroes - DC Limited Collectors Edition C43, I think. I really enjoyed reading this one and, it has to be said, none of the tales were in any way a let down. Just good, wholesome holiday reading for kids and ‘young at heart’ adults alike. And a nice addition to the treasury shelf, it has to be said. 

The Christmas Clue

 

Clue Dilligence 

The Christmas Clue
by Nicola Upson
Faber
ISBN: 9780571395026 

 Warning: Very mild spoilers.

Well this was a nice surprise. 

The Christmas Clue is a new novel by Nicola Upson (not one from her regular series of mystery novels, apparently) and the second of my December Christmas reads of 2025. 

I discovered this one by accident on an Amazon recommendation and, with a tag line like “A Christmas murder mystery featuring the real life couple who invented Cluedo.”, there was no way I was going to miss out on this one. We’ve played Cluedo in my family for years (my mum is a big fan) but I never really consciously registered it as being invented in the UK. I just assumed the US release of the game, the drably named Clue, was the original but, no, this was invented by a sweet couple, Anthony and Elva Pratt, during the Second World War and based on a murder mystery party they attended, one of many, at a hotel where Anthony used to play piano and, along with Elva, make up murder mystery games for the guests. 

The game was finally released for the general public in December 1949, under the name Cluedo (an early title used for the board game was Murder At Tudor Close, relating to the incident which inspired it) as a play on words on using clues in a game which was a twist on Ludo. Apparently Ludo wasn’t a thing in the US so, when it was released there shortly after, it was changed to Clue. 

The book starts off at the home of Anthony and Elva on Christmas Day in 1949 and got into my good books straight away by having Anthony whistling The Harry Lime Theme, from The Third Man which came out in UK cinemas a few months before the opening of this story. The Pratts unwrap their complementary copy of a Cluedo set and start to play and, from there, the story flashes back fictionally to the events that inspired it, staying in the Christmas of 1943 for the rest of the novel… when the Pratt’s were invited to reconnect with the Tudor Hotel for Christmas and provide more piano and another murder game.

However, on their way, the Pratt’s stop in the local village to pick up a box of cigars from Miss Silver’s sweet shop and, it’s there that they discover Miss Silver’s body in the back room with her head caved in. After talking with two members of the local police, the two go on to their engagement where more murder shenanigans are afoot, forcing them to first come up with an impromptu murder game idea that would later evolve into Cluedo… and also go into sleuth mode themselves to find out what really is going on here.

It’s a wonderful book and a joyful Christmas comfort read, I would say. Also, there’s an impressive twist half way through which, although I did consider this possibility from early on in the narrative, did actually take me by surprise when the writer went through with it so, yeah, it ticked all the good boxes for me. The central protagonists are well portrayed and are such a nice couple that you will be rooting for them from the start. And, of course, there are a number of characters who you can see might easily translate into ‘playing pieces’ later on. Such as Colonel Coleman who might translate into Colonel Mustard in the game (is it a British thing to relate the name Coleman to mustard?). Or, for example, Reverend Teal.

All in all, although it’s a quick read (the book just whizzes by) I really enjoyed this one and especially Upson’s skill at sketching out the character’s reactions to the war into which Britain has been plunged and the way in which it clouds the lives of the characters who, in turn, muster up the strength to just get on with it. So, yeah, another recommendation from me is The Christmas Clue… I might have to try some of Miss Upson’s other novels on for size now.

The Box Of Delights

A Load Of Scrobblers

The Box Of Delights
Directed by Renny Rye
BBC Six Episodes November - December 1984

I was 16 years old when The Box Of Delights aired for the first time on British television. Which might explain why I didn’t take to the show after seeing the first episode and then ignored it for the rest of its run. I was much more interested in watching things like Battle Of The Planets, Monkey and my precious Flash Gordon serials. It was, for its time though, the most expensive children’s TV production to date, mixing live action and animated effects in a way that, to my then young eyes, didn’t even look good in the early 1980s but still, people responded to it well and it was much loved and popular enough that, a few decades later, it aired again. It was then that my mother and father watched it (I stayed away again) and they both enjoyed it. So much so, in fact, that in time for it’s 40th Anniversary Blu Ray bells and whistles release, my dad bought it for my mum so, alas, in Christmas 2024 I finally caught up to the thing and… what do you know? I’m even less impressed with it now, truth be told. 

A staple of BBC radio plays over the decades, it’s based on John Masefield’s book and set contemporaneously to when it was written, in 1935. It stars Devin Stanfield as schoolboy hero Kay Harker, who gets caught up with a box of delights carried by an old man, played in three episodes here by the great Patrick Troughton, using magical forces so that he, his brother and their friends can fight off a scheme by the villainous Abner Brown, played by Robert Stephens. Brown needs said box to increase his own dark, magical arts.

Now the performances are all fine, the special effects somewhat clunky (though certainly serviceable enough and light years ahead of contemporary science fiction programmes like Doctor Who and Blake’s Seven at the time) and, although I can see that many people find it a charming watch, I have to say I still find it quite dull. It’s not exactly pacey at all and, apart from a nice score by Roger Limb of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, I can’t find much that I’d personally recommend in it. Now, it jumps around a bit and assumes a certain knowledge of the characters in their relationships to each other but this is explained by the fact that the book was a sequel to an earlier, magical Kay Harker novel by the same writer. However, two things especially got to me as elements I found either curious or annoying. 

One is the fact that when various children get abducted by the gang of bad guys… or scrobbled in the vernacular of the writing (I’m guessing that comes directly from the source novel)… then nobody really seems to mind. A kid goes missing for a night or two and it’s all, “Oh, I’m sure they’re fine, they’re just doing something.” This tale comes with awful parenting skills from any of the adults in the story, it seemed to me.

Secondly, the box can do very little. When he asks what it does, Kay is told it can make you go swift and it can make you go small. Plus other things completely undescribed or demonstrated, other than at the start, when a projection of a phoenix is glimpsed in a fireplace. And then when the box is brought into action, Kay does indeed either shrink to hide and stealth about, go swift by flying to escape his captors or, when they’re really pushing the boat out (as opposed to shrinking it), a less than subtle combination of the two… and that’s about it. I’m probably quite jaded then in perhaps admitting that I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. 

And that’s me done with The Box Of Delights, I’m afraid. Not something I’m anxious to visit again anytime soon but, at least it had some nice music. It is a well loved British children’s TV phenomenon though so, don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.

The Christmas Cracker Killer

 

Merry Fishmas 

The Christmas Cracker Killer 
by Alexandra Benedict 
Simon and Schuster
ISBN 9781398532212

The Christmas Cracker Killer is the newest and, by my reckoning, fourth of Alexandra Benedict’s Christmas murder mysteries. I was getting worried last year when no new Christmas tome was forthcoming from her but, here’s the latest installment and, with no shame at all, I’d have to say that, yes, it’s a bit of a cracker. 

Like the previous volumes by Benedict, it starts off with a section detailing the games of hidden things in the book. These include a ‘prize’ for the first person to find the anagram within the chapter heading letters, ten of the central character’s (and author’s) favourite punk songs hidden in the text, the anagrams of Christmas movies hidden in the wordage, the hidden favourite books set in hotels and, lastly, ten of the BBC ghost story titles from over the years. 

Also like the three previous tomes, which comprised The Christmas Murder Game (reviewed here), Murder On The Christmas Express (reviewed here) and The Christmas Jigsaw Murders (reviewed here), the book references back to at least one of the other novels in this shared universe. So in this case we have a call back to Murder On The Christmas Express fairly early on. Also, though, this is the first of her Christmas novels to bring back the main protagonist and a couple of accompanying characters from a previous book to fulfil the same function here. So we have the crossword puzzle setting, 80 plus year old Edie, star of The Christmas Jigsaw Murders, her 90 plus year old lesbian lover Riga and her nephew/adopted son, Sean, the police inspector. 

This is also the second novel I’ve read this year (which includes the Wild Cards mosaic novel House Rules, reviewed here) to be set in a large house with guests stranded on an island... in this case a newly opening hotel. Riga has won a prize of a Christmas holiday there, along with Edie and Sean, as part of a press/blog/publicity event to open the hotel. And. of course, once everyone is settled there and the various other characters are set up… that’s when the murders start happening. The time frame of the entire book, bar the epilogue, takes place on the 24th and 25th of December and, of course, inclement weather and other acts of sabotage scupper any way of getting off the island again. So it’s up to Edie, with the help of Sean (who seems to have mellowed to her crime solving machinations… as circumstances would require) to try and unmask the murderer by solving various clues and trying to find out just what makes said ‘envoy of death’ tick.

And, I have to say (and I always seem to say this every time I read a novel by this writer), this is my favourite of her Christmas novels yet. It’s so well written and it feels like a real progression over the others in the way its put together too. I mean, it takes over a hundred pages before the first murder is committed… because the various characters are being built up so well that the reader can just lose themselves in the scenario. But once the murders start happening…. well, like I said, it’s all compressed into a short time frame so they come thick and fast. As do some of the ‘almost murders’ but, yeah, I’m not spoiling that here. 

Like a good old giallo, there are so many valid suspects as the author whittles down the various guests and staff that it’s almost impossible to figure out the real identity of the killer (and Benedict’s pronoun game is once again strong and annoying but effective in this respect). I will only say I got it ‘half right’ and so, of course, I’m delighted that I didn’t see the full picture until the timely reveal. Even with joyful clues and hints such as… “No one was reliable these days. Not staff, not friends, not family and certainly not narrators.” The prose has a poetic bent to it which sits just right with the subject matter and flows into the consciousness without getting in the way of the intent of the novel. 

And it also has... fortune fishes!  

It’s funny, I haven’t had a fortune fish in a Christmas Cracker in a long time but this year... well, every year I design my own Christmas cards and this year I bought over a hundred fortune fish to stick onto the special section I put on the back of each card. But they’re also part of the killer’s modus operandi in this novel too so… that made me happy. I thought people had forgotten all about them. 

So that’s me done with The Christmas Cracker Killer, I think. Once again, the new Alexandra Benedict Christmas novel is also the best thing I’ve read from her… which is a pretty good batting average as far as I’m concerned. A wonderful read for the month of December and an absolute joy from cover to cover. A strong recommendation from me here. 

The Plague Of The Zombies

When Push 
Comes To Shovel

The Plague Of The Zombies
UK 1966
Directed by John Gilling  
Hammer/Studio Canal 
Blu Ray Zone B

Well it’s been a while since I last watched this one and, yeah, it’s still a real cracker of a film, for sure.

I first saw The Plague Of The Zombies in my very early teens, projected at my school film club for all the kiddies to see (somehow, the janitor never got into any kind of trouble for showing 10 year olds films like Death Race 2000... a screening I sadly missed out on at the time). My earliest memories of this are that it was in black and white but, it’s obviously been shot in colour so my memories must have been more muddied than the print Studio Canal had to work with (to varying degrees of success... yeah, I’ll get into that in a minute).

The film, set in the 1860s, tells the story of distinguished medical professor Sir James Forbes, played with relish by the great André Morrell (who was, perhaps, my favourite of the TV incarnations of Professor Quatermass in the original, serialised version of Quatermass And The Pit, reviewed here) and his daughter Sylvia (played by Diane Clare). They are summoned from London to a small community in Cornwall to help out Forbes’ former medical student, Dr. Peter Thompson (played by Brook Williams), who has set up a practice there with his wife, a friend of Sylvia’s, named Alice (played by the great Jacqueline Pearce, who would of course grow up to be the scourge of the galaxy as Servalan in Blake’s 7). 

There is a curious disease, of sorts, sweeping the village and killing off people unexpectedly... but the audience has already been clued in that it’s good old proper Haitian voodoo zombies and, once you meet the local squire, Hamilton, played wonderfully by John Carson with his sideburns sharpened up into razor-like points, you know he is the one responsible for bringing this practice back to Cornwall, by the tell tale symbol on the ring on his finger. He lives in his old country home which also served as the grounds and headquarters for SPECTRE at the opening of the movie version of From Russia With Love (reviewed by me here). And if you were in any doubt as to his status as lead villain, he surrounds himself with some local thugs who assert their collective British villainy by going fox hunting and, at one point, trying to gang rape Sylvia. 

But Forbes is on the case and, once he knows that the squire has allowed no autopsies on the bodies of any of the strange victims, he finds that the bodies are no longer in their coffins and so he also enlists the aid of the local Police Sergeant Swift, played by Hammer favourite Michael Ripper (is it really a Hammer film if Michael Ripper isn’t in it?). After a few walking corpses have been sighted in the vicinity and Alice is killed (and flung at Sylvia by a cackling zombie), Forbes consults the local priest who seems to have a library full of books about witchcraft and voodoo (because, of course). His theories  are confirmed when Alice rises from her exhumed coffin and tries to kill him, prompting him to decapitate her with a shovel in one stroke (trimmed by the English censors at the time in, presumably, lost footage... when he originally took about four shovel strikes). It turns out, of course, that Squire Hamilton has been killing and reanimating people as zombies to use as cheap labour for his old, abandoned tin mines. Justice arrives in the form of Forbes and Thompson and we are left with a typical Hammer film ending from this period, no epilogue... just a sudden ending with the heroes glumly watching the tin mines burn and wallowing in their sudden, Pyrrhic victory. 

And it’s a great movie. The zombies themselves predate the modern zombies kickstarted by George A Romero two years later in Night Of The Living Dead and are almost a cross breed of the brainwashed victims of Haitian zombies in earlier films and the ones to come... being that these specimens, with their white contact lenses and greyed skin, do bear more than a passing resemblance to some of those in Romero’s later ground breaking movie. And, of course, it also destroys the notion that Romero invented the kind of zombie that would tear itself from the under the soil and up into the open. For my money, the first movie to actually do that may have been one of the 1940s Universal Mummy sequels (I forget which one) but, in a strangely placed dream sequence, we see the pasty faced, dark rimmed with blank eyes undead rising out from the earth in the local graveyard... so, yeah, I suspect Romero might well have seen and been influenced by this movie in particular. 

Perhaps my one slight criticism of the film is that it seems like it’s been trimmed a little, possibly at the script stage, in that Morrell’s character seems to be jumping to just the right deductions before he has the necessary knowledge to make a judgement call. I suspect a few minor scenes of expository dialogue, such as more knowledge about the circumstances in which his daughter cut her hand (thus allowing the squire to make off with some of her blood to use on a voodoo doll), would have helped curtail those kinds of leaps. But it doesn’t really spoil my appreciation of the movie, which is that it’s pretty well made and a darn good yarn at that. 

What did spoil my appreciation of it a little, is the restoration on this relatively recent Studio Canal Blu Ray, which seems to be more than a trifle enthusiastic in its treatment of the many ‘day for night’ scenes, which appear to be presented way too bright than they ever have before... but I won’t get in to that argument here because, I believe there have been a fair few feuds about this and a few of their other releases in regards to this aspect online before... I just wish that someone like the Indicator label (aka Powerhouse Films) had been allowed to do a proper restoration instead. I’ve come to think of Studio Canal more and more like they’re the bad guys in recent years, blocking UK releases of some nice restorations and then leaving certain films either unreleased or in less prestigious versions over here in the UK. Which is a sad state of affairs for lovers of film but, there you have it. 

All in all, though, if you’ve never seen The Plague Of The Zombies before and you are a lover of Hammer horror, this is definitely one of their better movies and it certainly won’t be the last time I revisit this one. Much to be recommended here.

House Of Mystery C23

Miss Terry’s Abode

House Of Mystery 
DC Limited Collector’s Edition C23
DC

Please note this review was originally supposed to go up on 31st October but then unforseen circumstances meant I never got to post it. So, sorry it's late but, here you go...

2025 has had a really hard end of year for me so far with, I suspect, worse to follow (you’ll see the effect of that on this blog at some point, no doubt but, I have no plans to stop writing this thing permanently any time soon). However, one thing which has delighted me is DC’s latest round of facsimile editions of their past comics, which has included their old, large format, card bound treasury editions of the 1970s, the DC Limited Collector’s Editions. These have been unleashed, one or two a month (though, sadly, now slowing down in rapidity) and, asides from price and cover variants (and some new ones they’ve also added to their large format library), these are pretty much identical to the ones I was buying in the 1970s (and I wish Marvel would also get in on the act with their old treasury editions).

I’m happy to say that the majority of the ones they have released so far are ones I never actually had as a kid (so my old selection of these titles has come in for a bit of an expansion) and, in all but one case (which I regret because I missed it’s original release and was left with the only variant they had left), I plumped for the foil edition covers which present us with a shiny metal version of those comics of yesteryear. The only real problem is the price. In the 70s they were at the extremely prohibitive price of 50p. Very few people could afford to buy these on anything like a regular basis... and nowadays they’re around £18 so... yeah.

I was delighted to find that, for the Halloween season, they have released this edition, C23 from 1973, which is a collection of stories sourcing back to 1960s and early 1970s from House of Mystery, a title I never read in its original incarnation (I’ll get to it at some point, okay?). And the caretakers of the titular ‘house’ are, of course, Cain and Abel, who were later appropriated by Neil Gaiman for his The Sandman comics (and who also appeared in the TV show, reviewed by me here). This one has a number of great writers and artist’s contributions to these ‘twist in the tale’ horror stories, such as Neal Adams, Gil Kane and Sergio Aragones. 

The stories included are as follows...

The House of Gargoyles tells the tale of an old ex-sculptor who murders and steals the designs for two gargoyles that follow him (once he’s sculpted them) and perch on the house where he has come to hide, eventually flying off with him to exact bloody vengeance for his actions. 

Secret of the Egyptian House tells the tale of an Egyptian beauty who is turned into a cat... resembling the cat god whose shrine she attends...and abducted by a wicked, magical ‘suitor’ called Konassos, until she finally turns the tables on him. The afterword of the tale exactly conveys the spirit of these stories and why I like them... “That’s what ol’ Konassos gets for trying to whisker away!”

Widows Walk is the tale of a rich young widow who exacts her revenge on her no good husband and condemns him to a watery grave until, after her death, the ghostly galleon and its crew rise from the depths to return home. 

My Name Is Kane is a metatextual story about the artist Gil Kane, who also does the artwork of this piece, which portrays him in a very bad light. He eventually falls into his own artwork to run afoul of the mercy of hack editors, writers and inkers.

Alex Toth’s The Devil’s Doorway is a tale of a demonic mirror bought at an auction which, it turns out, was the only thing not exorcised from a once troubled house. Fans of films like Oculus (reviewed here) and The Conjuring - Last Rites (reviewed here) might want to check this one out for the obvious similarities.

The Poster Plague is a wonderful piece of Sergio Aragones nonsense where a plot to use out of date posters pasted around a university is an attempt to distract from the one poster which actually is a warning... Klop Is Coming. Without giving too much away, the onomatopoeic ending of this is absolutely brilliant and right up my street. 

Lastly we have Nightmare, a tale of a statue of Pan which comes ot life to play with a lonely rich girl... and the trouble it gets her into. It’s got a nicely touching ending on this one. 

And that’s it apart from the usual treasury diversions such as a running set of features called Cain’s Games Room, with games with squares which really date it (and are a little bit risqué nowadays but not for the tougher kids of the 1970s) such as landing on squares with captions like... “Your blind date will think you’re a dog”, “You are drafted” and “Your father found it”.  Also some stand alone Aragones cartoons, a skit on how to draw a Haunted House (again by Aragones), a pin up of your peerless host (Cain), a behind the scenes look at the various creators (with photos and illustrations) and, on the back, the inevitable cut out and stick 3D diorama.

All in all, C23 - House Of Mystery is a well entertaining volume full of clichéd but fun stories and some wonderful artwork etc. Although, for the price paid nowadays, I’m much less tempted to cut out and build the diorama, truth be told.