Blake’s 7

Apostrophe Now!

Blake’s 7

Series 1 
January - March 1978
13 episodes

Series 2 
January - April 1979 
13 episodes

BBC Blu Ray Region B

Warning: Some general spoilers.

An unexpected disclaimer: This review was always meant to go up on the blog today and I've had it loaded in for a week or two now, ready to publish. So it's a sad coincidence that I learned two days ago, along with everyone else, of the passing of Michael Keating who delighted so many viewers of this show as the comical and cowardly thief Vila, one of the best characters in the show and one of the few actors who actually saw through all four series. So I guess, inadvertently but no less empathetically, this particular post is also a tribute to the quiet genius of Keating's personification of Vila. He will be much missed and certainly much remembered. 

I hadn’t seen Blake’s 7 since I was a kid, when I used to like the show a fair bit but, in the intervening decades, I’d forgotten why. Now, however, the BBC are... very, very slowly... releasing the four series in Blu Ray sets and, it has to be said, they’re looking pretty good. Now, one of the options (and this is presumably why the releases are taking so long to bring out) is to watch the shows with newly added and augmented special effects... which to me kinda defeats the object entirely of watching the show again. If I want to recapture the show of my youth, which was known to us kids in the playground for having the absolutely cheapest, shoddiest looking effects work, even worse than Doctor Who, then I want to be watching it with the original model work (some of which is actually quite good) and the damned 2D cardboard cutouts of the ships moved about on visible sticks which the BBC tried to pretend were somehow serviceable. 

So that’s what I did.

And I have to say, I didn’t just have an okay time with these first two series... I had an absolute blast. Ten year old me perhaps hadn’t acknowledged just how well written and performed these shows were. Created by Terry Nation (creator of the Daleks), he wrote the majority of the first series episodes and brought in others to help out on the second. And it’s absolutely brilliant science fiction writing. Blake doesn’t assemble his band of rebels against the evil Imperial Federation straight away... it took a few episodes to set up. The world building on this show is incredible and constantly, judging from the first two years, evolving.

Yeah, although this was a family show the BBC didn’t steer away from complex adult issues like faked paedophilia accusations and occasional shots of bloody violence in the show. For instance, when Brian Blessed as a villain is making a nuisance of himself, the crew just teleport him into space and we watch him explode. 

At the end of the first episode, while he is being transported with other prisoners, Blake (played by Gareth Thomas), meets cowardly comic relief thief Vila (played by Michael Keating) and the glamorous but capable Jenna (played by Sally Knivette).  By the end of the second episode he also has the company of the brawny Gan (played by David Jackson) and the brilliantly cold and ruthless Avon (definitely my favourite character after all these years, played crisply by Paul Darrow). Blake and his new crew also steal an advanced alien ship, The Liberator, with a somewhat sophisticated computer called Zen, which they take as another crew member. 

The final team member (until another turns up in the last episode of series one) is Callly, played by Jan Chappell, who joins after a few episodes in. And the numbers and, indeed the title of the show, never made sense  The ship-board computer of their sophisticated and extremely beautiful alien spaceship is named as the seventh crew member but, the other computer crew member at the end of the first series, Orac, means there are technically eight of them by the end of that first year. 

The title logo was a good one too but, for some reason as a kid, I never noticed it was missing the apostrophe it so greatly needs to make any grammatical sense. I shall always call it by its grammatically correct name, though. 

Also during the first season, we gradually have the main villains set up. Jacqueline Pearce as the stunning (and sexually awakening, to a lot of teenagers in the UK at the time, by all accounts) and utterly ruthless Supreme Commander Servalan. Then there was her right arm, Space Commander Travis, played by Stephen Greif. His left arm was artificial with a laser which shot out of the finger and he had a nasty eye patch where Blake had destroyed half his face in years gone by... he was obsessed with hunting and killing Blake. In the second series, Brian Croucher replaces Greif as Travis and, I dunno, he is playing it in a completely different way to the former actor in the part. It’s a bit jarring to tell the truth... we noticed it then and, now we can watch episodes back to back, it’s very noticeable now. 

The thing about Blake’s 7 is... Blake didn’t always win or come out on top. Sometimes he got a little victory, sometimes it was a stalemate and, yeah, sometimes he lost in quite spectacular and damning fashion. And the regular characters were never safe from harm either. The death of Gan a little way into the second series, where he dies trying to hold up a ‘cave in’ to let Blake through... was shocking at the time. Blake’s ‘heavy’, with the limiter chip planted in his head by the Federation so he couldn’t intentionally kill someone, died in much the same way as Athos the musketeer does in the Alexandre Dumas book The Vicomte de Bragelonne (sometimes published as The Man In The Iron Mask) which was one of the sequels to The Three Musketeers. So I always wondered if Terry Nation had Athos in mind when he created the character. 

The teleport effects in the series are crude but quite cute... I always loved the outline of the figures who are being teleported being graphically shown as they ‘beamed down’ to a planet, as much as a distraction to the crude effect as anything else. 

One of the strengths of the new Blu Ray sets put out by the BBC is the wealth of extras. One I remembered very well and I was delighted to see, again, for the first time in so many years, is the segment of Blue Peter where the presenter showed the kiddies how to make a Blake’s 7 teleport bracelet out of a Lucozade bottle and some easily found or reconstructed household objects. The final result looked so good that it seemed obvious that this was indeed the same way the special effects department must have made them at the time. 

And, honestly, I was so surprised at just how good this was. Series One ended up with a vision of the graceful looking starship The Liberator being blown up with Blake and all aboard perishing... until we are reminded at the start of series two that it’s just a vision and also, we see how the vision really comes to play out. The Liberator itself would not be destroyed until, if memory serves, the end of the third series. The second series ends with the crew on their own in their small starship facing off an overwhelming fleet of alien invaders... rolling credits just as they are about to engage. Now, I don’t remember just how this is picked up in series three but I know that Blake and Jenna do not return. Well, Blake does for one episode and for the very last episode at the end of series four, when one of the most traumatic endings the children of the UK were ever subjected to played out... but I’m getting ahead of myself. 

I was absolutely delighted to rediscover Blake’s 7 again on Blu Ray and really wasn’t expecting the writing and performances to be so good after all these years. Keeping my fingers crossed that Series 3 will be released very soon. 

Seoul Station

Seoul Destroying

Seoul Station
South Korea 2016
Directed by Yeon Sang-ho
Studio Canal Blu Ray Zone B

Where to start with Seoul Station. Well, technically it’s a prequel to the live action movie Train To Busan, by the same director, which I reviewed here. Although, I think he started working on this well before that movie, since this one was released only a month after that first film was released (to much success... which I suspect helped get the distribution deal pushed forward to let this one out of the gate). So I reckon that the correct point of view is probably that Train To Busan is actually a live action sequel to the animated movie Seoul Station but, whichever way you say it, since it’s set the day before the events in the other film, it makes it chronologically the first part of the trilogy which ended (to date), with Peninsula (another movie which I’ve not seen but thanks to the price of a fiver in Computer Exchange, I should be watching that one too fairly soon).

Now it’s been ages since I saw that first movie and I can’t remember much about it but, like most zombie movies, it gives no explanation of how the zombie virus actually got started. In this film, you see an infected homeless man pass away in the titular station and then start off the wave of zombies that are already unleashed during the events of that follow up (or whatever you want to call it) movie. 

However, don’t expect to find out what caused the zombie outbreak in the first place because, again like most tales in this genre, although you’re a little closer to ground zero in this movie... you still will be none the wiser as to any explanations for this plague. 

Now, the animation is nice enough and doesn’t look too cheap. Although, if my dad* is to be believed, it’s even worse than a 1970s Filmation cartoon in terms of animation... he bailed on it after a quarter of an hour. It’s... not as bad as 1970s Filmation but, it’s not Disney or Fleischer studios either. It just is what it is and in terms of the art of the ‘cartooning’ on this thing... I didn’t mind it.

But here’s the thing. It has more going for it than just the undead biting people up. It’s character driven... to the point where I thought the first half an hour was relentlessly slow and dull (it gets better) and it has a proper story which included a really neat twist near the end which, I honestly did not see coming. However, due to the way the characters are portrayed, not to mention the consequences of that surprise reveal, which I thought was visually going to be something much different to what it turned out to be... it’s also unrelentingly bleak. Much grimmer than the story portrayed in Train To Busan. Which is perhaps hard to believe given the unstoppable onslaught of people-munching going on throughout that particular movie but, trust me, though it’s not quite as gory as the live action counterpart... it’s vastly more cynical in its outlook. 

The film follows the exploits of a down-on-her-luck young lady who breaks off with her boyfriend, who is trying to pimp her out to pay their rent money. So they are split up and the outbreak leaves them unaware of each other’s locations. Meanwhile, the girl’s father catches up to the boyfriend and threatens him into helping him to find her. Then the zombie pandemic begins and the film cross cuts between the girl and the chaotic experiences she finds herself in... and the boyfriend and father trying to locate her. And it’s... not too terrifying, it has to be said but, like I said, it’s unrelentingly dark. Especially in terms of redeemable characters, for sure. 

My primary criticism of the movie... and this seems to be a more blatant trope of horror films lately, it seems to me... is the unrelenting stupidity of the main protagonists to not keep themselves out of trouble or improve their situation. If you are on the phone to your girlfriend, for example... and she’s just given you her location, you don’t wait on the phone for five minutes to hear how the carnage is playing out on her end of the line... you get in your car and you rescue her pronto, right? Well, apparently not, in the case of these characters, it seems. And, surely, if you are running through buildings, away from zombies who want to eat you... maybe shut a few doors behind you on your way? I mean, the actions of these characters do not endear me to the idea of ever standing beside them if I was ever in a zombie apocalypse. Their choices are just really stupid.

But, it’s an okay film and, that final twist, which makes room for even more bleakness, more than makes up for some of the film’s deficiencies. I mean, yeah, Train To Busan is by far the better, more watchable picture but, I dunno, Seoul Station is so unwavering in its cynical outlook (and has very strong language throughout) that I found the whole experience quite enticing for a while.

But, yeah, that’s me done on Seoul Station and, if you like Train To Busan then you will probably enjoy this one, to some extent. It has so much more going on for it than just being another zombie movie, I reckon. 

 * I wrote this review early last year, when he was still with us. 

The People That Time Forgot

Forget Me Not

The People That Time Forgot
Directed by Kevin Connor
UK/USA 1977
Amicus/AIP
Imprint Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Another near end spoiler.

The third film in Imprint’s wonderful Tales Of Adventure Collection Volume Nine, following on from my favourite in the box, At The Earths Core (you can read a very old DVD review I wrote for that years ago here... be kind) is the direct sequel to The Land That Time Forgot (reviewed here). Namely, The People That Time Forgot, which was actually the very last, uncredited, film co-produced by Amicus studios. And once again, of course, based on the book by Edgar Rice Burroughs (the second of his Caspak trilogy of novels).

This one takes place a few years after the events of the first movie which, if you remember, left Tyler (played by Doug McClure) and Lisa (played by Susan Penhaligon), stranded on the island by the end of the picture. This sequel, which I did see at my local cinema back in 1977, felt a bit of a let down as a kid, mainly I think because I hadn’t seen the first one in the series at the time. And, I have to say that, looking at it now, a film I can barely remember through the intervening  years, it’s not a good movie and certainly inferior to the much more fun first film.

Again, though, it’s a bit of a star studded cast, as four loyal crew members are taken to near the Island from the first film in search of Doug McClure... having received his flask with the message washed up from the sea. Four of them fly a bi-plane above an ice wall and onto Caspak (the name of which, again, gets no mention) and crash there, after an aeroplane and machine gun battle with a pterodactyl takes a turn for the worse. The four are Tyler’s old friend Ben, played by Patrick (son of John) Wayne, photographer Charly, played by the great Sarah Douglas, sporting the same hairstyle as Princess Leia in the first Star Wars movie (although this one beat it out in the UK and it wasn’t a deliberate lift, it would seem), dinosaur expert Norfolk, played by the always watchable Thorley Walters and, as Ben’s fellow American, the great Shane Rimmer.

And from here on it’s shenanigans as the four try to find Tyler, dodging dinosaurs and fighting various species who want to kill them or sacrifice them to their volcano God. Luckily, they stumble upon Ajor, played by the glamourous Dana Gillespie who here, it has to be said, manages to be wearing a costume even more revealing than the one she wore in Hammer’s The Lost Continent (reviewed by me here). And in some ways I have to say ‘thank goodness for that’ because, although it’s not really a good thing to say that Gillespie’s huge assets are a better special effect than any of the dinosaurs (or the matte paintings) here, it does at least give a certain percentage of the film’s audience something interesting to look at when the film is flagging and... yeah, it flags quite a lot. 

And when they do finally catch up with Doug McClure’s Tyler towards the end of the film, after they’ve been captured by a masked race of people who, for some reason best known to the production designers, are all dressed in something very similar to samurai armour and have Dave Prowse as their chief executioner, it’s all for nothing. Not long after finding Lisa has formerly perished at the hands of the leader of these Samurai people (played by Milton Reid, who tried to kill James Bond in a scene in The Spy Who Loved Me, reviewed here), Tyler himself sacrifices his life trying to get his rescuers to safety. They take Ajor with them back to civilisation as the island starts to get all volcanic again. 

And yeah, this is by far the inferior of the two Caspak movies from this period and, although I found John Scott’s score to The People That Time Forgot much more interesting, it doesn’t really save the film. It’s not too badly made as a piece but it does seem like it’s badly paced and, yeah, not enough dinosaurs on the rampage... only Dana’s rampaging bosoms, which are pretty good but not something you can really hang a movie on, no matter how much you can appreciate her performance here. I did like her better in the aforementioned The Lost Continent, it has to be said. Not a recommendation but, it is at least an interesting choice for a sequel and worth watching the once, I reckon. 

Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s

 

Exorcising Demons

Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural 
Paranoia In The 1980s
Edited by Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe
Fab Press/Spectacular Optical
ISBN: 9781903254868

Just a very brief shout out now to a book edited by one of my favourite movie people, Kier-La Janisse... Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s. This one took me out of my comfort zone a little because it’s not exclusively about movies but, I saw it on the Fab Press stall at Bank Holiday FrightFest a couple of years ago and, it being one of the very few books I didn’t already own on the stall and, to boot, a tome I’d been keeping a look out for since it’s first US edition on Kier-La’s Spectacular Optical publishing arm, I thought I’d finally pick it up and give it a go. 

The book is a collection of various essays by a variety of authors, such as Alison Nastasi and the redoubtable Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, on various aspects of the absolute alarm caused by parents and other authority figures who believed the ‘youth of today’ were being attacked/corrupted/coerced/recruited by various devil worshipping organisations/unofficial groups during the 1980s. 

Now, I have to say, 90% of the contents of the book was completely unknown to me and this tome covers a variety of manifestations such as child molestation rings/enthusiastic money grabbing preachers and many other ‘authority figures gone wrong’, sometimes by first hand witnesses of the people and organisations in question. Although there certainly is some overlap with UK slants on the phenomenon, such as the worry, even in this country, about the game Dungeons And Dragons... once again proving that whenever anyone is given a creative outlet which any one group of individuals doesn’t understand, there’s going to be a huge push back by some of the more ignorant of them, as they seem to have a habit of empowering those gullible enough to throw in with their lot. 

So, yeah, I think you get the idea... if you were into heavy metal music, gaming, horror movies and various other stuff... you were going to be targeted as a devil extolling, malevolent presence in somebody’s life. 

The book is full of stuff I’d never heard of such as the Procter And Gamble logo being a manifestation of 666, religious comics, White Metal (or Christian Metal) music, teenage murder, paedophilia rings and so on. Those interested in film will also find some good things to contemplate here... such as an article on horror movies utilising ‘devil worship via computers’ such as Evilspeak and a nice chapter on Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs. There’s also stuff about the Dungeons And Dragons missing person case that inspired the novel and subsequent movie of Mazes And Monsters (which I reviewed here) so, there were some elements familiar to me in the book. But, of course, it’s precisely because a lot of the things covered is stuff I’m not so well acquainted with, that makes it a valuable addition to my book shelves... err... book piles (like I could ever get enough shelves installed). There’s one very interesting chapter, for example, about devil cult books published by Playboy magazine as an imprint, which were deliberately marketed to susceptible female readers while the books actually seemed to favour wanting to show control over women. It’s fascinating stuff, to be sure.

And I’m going to get out of this review now while the getting’s good, I think. So I’ll just leave you with the thought that Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s is, if nothing else (and I’m sure it probably is a lot more to many readers), an entertaining and educational read, throwing light onto subjects which, due to the country I live in more than anything else, were certainly unknown to me in a lot of cases. Definitely worth a read for the inquisitive minded at the very least and, with people like Heller-Nicholas on some of the chapters, you know it’s going to be well researched and written, for sure. 

Thin Ice

Ice And Lows

Thin Ice
USA 2009 Directed by Robert Harmon 
Sony Pictures TV Blu Ray Zone A

The fifth film in Sony’s boxed set of the complete Jesse Stone TV movies (to date) is Thin Ice and it’s a good one. It’s interesting also that, even though the Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone characters and also a couple of characters from Parker’s Spender books are in this, the film is not based on a pre-existing Parker novel, it just uses the characters.

Once again, Tom Selleck plays Paradise police chief Jesse Stone (he also has shares a writing credit on this one... I guess if you spend some time playing a character, you begin to know him) and he’s on thin ice with the members of the town council for not bringing in the cash with parking tickets etc and, instead, actually bringing unwanted attention to the town by solving real crimes. 

Things start strongly on this one as Jesse and his friend, series regular Stephen McHattie playing Boston police chief Captain Healy, are checking something out on a kind of amateur stake out in Boston. Healy gets shot almost to death and Jesse takes one in the arm while they sit in the car... regaining consciousness just in time to put one bullet wound in the fleeing gunman. After making sure Healy is in a relatively stable condition in the hospital, Jesse goes looking for the gunman... while simultaneously being pursued for the incident by Leslie Hope playing an internal affairs officer by the name of... drumroll please... Sydney Greenstreet (no, alas, not that one). During his investigation she, of course, ends up sleeping with Jesse. 

Meanwhile, a mother who has survived the death of her son in a high profile murder case in Mexico has come to paradise because of an anonymous letter she received some years later, telling her that her son is loved. She thinks he was switched and kidnapped but, new regular Rose, played once again by Kathy Baker, is working on this cold case with occasional aid from Jesse and also Suitcase, played again by Kohl Sudduth, who seems to actually be a lot smarter if still a little confused after his awakening from the coma in the last movie (after being shot in the movie before that). 

And it’s a really good one because the way these stories play out are explored in an interesting manner. Such as Greenstreet picking up on the number of people Jesse has killed, directly or indirectly, since the start of his tenure as police chief. Something which I think I mentioned in one of my previous reviews. And, oddly, while this issue is highlighted and brought into question, it’s also the first film in the series where nobody is actually killed violently through his direct involvement, despite the flurry of unexpected violence at the start of the movie. 

Another thing Greenstreet brings up is that Jesse’s MO is to frame people up to get themselves arrested or to produce evidence that they are part of a crime Jesse is working on and, bang on, that’s exactly how he resolves one of the two cases he’s working on in this one.

The other interesting thing about this one is it shows his psychiatrist Dr. Dix, played again by William Devane, as someone who, when he’s not trying to help Jesse out of the bottle (something which he hasn’t yet succeeded in doing), has his own demons he’s struggling with. It’s almost a throw away scene but I’m hoping/expecting they’ll maybe build on that in a future film... of which there are four more left to watch. 

Not much else to say on this one but it’s intriguing that Thin Ice didn’t air on television until two years after it was shot. I suspect that’s because this one leaves it as almost a cliffhanger ending with Jesse suspended from his job without pay until the council can build a case against him to fire him. So I guess we’ll see what happens from here. I hope to find out soon because I’m quite enjoying this film series and I want to see what happens next. 

Bootlace Cinema Volume Two

Boot Suites

Bootlace Cinema Volume Two
by Mark Williams
Tree Frog Publications
ISBN 9798243641975

Following on from the first book in this series (reviewed by me here) and subtitled ‘Collecting All Kinds Of Movies On Super 8’, Mark Williams gives us his first sequel tome, Bootlace Cinema Volume Two and, as did the last one, doing very much what it says on the cover. 

The foreword on this one is by Allan Bryce, a guy who writes amazing editorials I read every month on his two excellent magazines, The Dark Side and Infinity. He’s always witty and charming and he gives his usual spin on this subject, which I know was a hobby of his as I am reading through, little by little, his 1968 diaries through Teams every night to someone in Switzerland. We then get a nice introduction to the book by Williams himself, filling us in about details of his early life when he was, amongst other things, a messenger for the film company CIC in London at one point. And, frankly, anybody who mentions, as he does here, my favourite shop of all time, the sadly now extinct Dark They Were And Golden Eyed, gets an extra gold star. 

The previous volume gave us a lengthy overview of the various companies putting out all these Super 8 digest versions back in the day and, rather than repeat all that (and I’m glad he didn’t, we already have that stuff in the first book), he has a small section devoted to... something that very much took me by surprise. Three new companies, from different countries (including the UK) which have now recently started making these things today for modern and presumably deeply nostalgic collectors of the Super 8 digest versions. Those companies being Dave Film in the US, Dorun Films in the UK and Ultra 8 in Spain.

Then comes a lengthy stand alone section, contributed to by Andy Allard, all about the many and varied films in the Lemon Popsicle series. Now, okay, it’s not my thing and I haven’t (I would say somewhat gladly) seen any of these movies (nor the American remake of the first) but it’s a nice addition for people out there who are as enthralled by this stuff as the author, for sure.

And then we get the same format as the last tome... 

Lots of colour pictures of, not just the box art in various languages but also various trade and commercial adverts of some of the films or packages covered, which in this case is a big look at films alphabetically from Airplane to Yeti. 

So each entry will start with a summary of the main plot of the film followed by, in some cases, some interesting and often informative stories from behind the scenes... and then the technical details of the various Super 8 cut downs which found their way into the market place (including the odd airline versions of the films), not to mention details about censorship cuts and sometimes the lack of, therein. 

And the book has value not just to collectors of these things and for people who want to see the artwork but also because there are some things revealed that somehow had managed to escape me and maybe other film friendly readers too. For instance, I didn’t realise that John Carpenter’s Dark Star wasn’t released in UK cinemas until it had already played on television back in 1977. Or that the first and last days of the shooting of the Charlton Heston disaster vehicle Earthquake were hit by actual earthquakes. 

I also didn’t know that Michael Caine had turned down the role of the serial killer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy or that, on the set of Shout At The Devil, Lee Marvin got into a fist fight with Roger Moore and Moore definitively won, leaving Marvin to comment that “The guy is built like granite, nobody will ever underestimate him again.” 

There are a few mistakes in the book too such as saying the score for Live And Let Die was composed by John Bary (nope, it was George Martin) and, although he says the third Battlestar Galactica film, Conquest Of The Earth was never released in UK cinemas well... all I can say to that is, I definitely saw it at my local cinema and that was in Enfield Town in the early 1980s (and I don’t care what the IMDB says either, it was in my local flea pit on general release and the film was a real head scratcher continuity wise, in the way it didn’t really follow on logically from the first two theatrical releases, for sure). 

I did also take umbrage at his dismissive description of the first two scores in the original Planet Of The Apes series of films, by Jerry Goldsmith and Leonard Rosenman respectively. The Goldsmith score is especially a masterpiece and if you ever get a chance to hear it performed live, definitely get yourself along to that. 

The author also, sadly, confirms the bad news that there seems to be no negative of The Day Of The Triffids in existence. So that long desired Blu Ray upgrade will probably not come to pass anytime soon (or ever, is my guess). 

All in all though, this is a good little book and I especially laughed at the snippet of information that the first film in the Star Trek franchise had been re-christened Star Trek The Slow Motion Picture by discerning critics (yeah, we all thought it at the time... those effects sequences were way too long). So if you liked the first volume of Bootlace Cinema then you should be very much into this, perhaps slightly superior, sequel book and, I heard it on the Twitter grapevine (and I hope this rumour is true because I will be first in line to buy a copy) that there will possibly be a Bootlace Cinema Volume Three at some point in the future. Good stuff and worth more than just a peek between the covers. 

The Blood Beast Terror

Myth Conception

The Blood Beast Terror
Directed by Vernon Sewell
Tigon UK 1968 
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers fluttering into view.

What do you call a female moth?
A myth!
Old pearl of wisdom much admired by the blog author

I have to confess that, even though I’d been pre-warned somewhat as to the general reputation of The Blood Beast Terror, I was expecting it to be a little more engaging than it actually is. This is not to say I didn’t have a little fun with it but, yeah, it’s no surprise now that I just discovered that it’s the film of his that Peter Cushing disliked the most and, it has to be said, as brilliant as he always is, he isn’t really able to save the picture here.

This one is about a ‘mad lepidopterist’ who... and it really doesn’t take the audience long to figure this out... has created a half human/half Death’s Head moth lady, who he says is his daughter (and may well be), as played by Wanda Ventham (who was also in UFO, reviewed here and is the mother of a certain Benedict Cumberbatch). She goes around indiscriminately changing into a big moth, killing various men and draining them of their blood while the lepidopterist Dr. Mallinger, played by Robert Flemyng, is trying to double down on his dubious success by creating her a mate. Just how that is supposed to stop the mass of blood drained victims is anybody’s guess but, yeah, the film doesn’t really cling fervently to the idea of story logic, that’s for sure. 

Luckily for the British public at large, we have Detective Inspector Quennell on the case, played by the great Peter Cushing, messing around with props and finger-raising his way into a solution which brings the truth out. Aiding him is Sergeant Allan, played by the always watchable Glynn Edwards and, also, Quennell's daughter, played by Vanessa Howard. And, of all people, the local  morgue attendant is played by Roy Hudd, bringing the wide eyed comedy relief in a couple of turns which, it transpires, were mostly improvised by himself (which adds fuel to the fire about the state of the screenplay on this one, I might suggest). 

The film looks okay (and is presented in a nice print and transfer from 88 Films) and the director seems to be taking the old Roger Corman trick of leaving doors open on sets to heart because, the various rooms (I suspect most of them aren’t sets at all, instead re-dressed locations) are full of open doors the actors can walk through to give them something to do. Which does indeed, at least give the scenes a sense of depth, which is why Corman used to do it, I believe. 

As far as the main antagonist goes... poor old Wanda. At first I thought she was a were-moth because much is made of the moon being full at one point but, no, she can apparently just flit about and change at will, no matter what the time of day... and the transition effects amount to a bad and very quick dissolve (almost to the point where it’s pretty much a jump cut), from her to the creature. And, honestly, the moth costume is not good. If you think of the Menoptera from the Doctor Who story The Web Planet from three years before this (and reviewed by me here) well, it's a notch below that and it fully feels like the producers just went around to their local fancy dress costume shop. Not a good look. 

And the clues to the solution of these mothical crimes, such as they are, are obvious and infantile to everyone except, for a time, the police investigating the murders.

There was, however, one good moment... a wonderful transition where a character says “I think we’re due a thunderstorm.” This then cuts to someone wobbling a big sheet of metal to give the thunder effect for a play being put on at the lepidopterist’s house. The play itself seems a mash up of the Frankenstein story with Burke and Hare (the subject of the director’s last film, three years from the release of this one, which I reviewed here) and, although it was a good transition, this play within a film goes on way too long for what it is and, yeah, we could really have done without it. At least this much of it, I feel. 

I should probably mention another dubious highlight of the film before I give my final thoughts... and it’s the ridiculous ending. Now, you may not believe this but the film ends when the two detectives rescue a man from Mad Moth Wanda (as I will now, forever, call her) when she’s trying to claim another victim. She flies off, making an easy getaway but, in a stroke of questionable genius, Cushing quickly lights a nearby bonfire and, attracted to the light... I’m not making this up... she flies into the fire and burns to death. I mean, this film gets a big thumbs up from me for having a totally ludicrous ending, at least. This is about as silly as could be hoped for, it has to be said. This is Golden Raspberry Award worthy stuff, for sure. 

The big problem with this film, for me, is that it’s a nice concept. I mean, how can you screw up... or at least dull down... a film about a blood lusting killer moth woman? But, alas, as I was watching I just kept thinking how much better the film would have been if someone at Hammer, or even Amicus, had the project to bring to the screen. Cushing is good in this, as always but, like I said, he’s not able to elevate the picture sufficiently to lift it out of the doldrums. Which is a shame because I really wanted to like The Blood Beast Terror, especially since it was released into UK cinemas in the same month I was born. But there you go... not much more to say. I would certainly watch this again because, there is a certain amount of fun to be had for sure but, it’s not a title I would recommend even to lovers of this period of British horror, truth be told. 

Ahsoka

Gesundheit!

Ahsoka
Streaming August - October 2023
8 episodes

Warning: Spoilers within.

Okay, so of the messed up Star Wars TV shows that Disney has so far put out (and I’ve still not seen them all quite yet), Ahsoka is probably the best and most consistently entertaining one. Now, there’s a lot going on here which I don’t pretend to understand fully because, one thing I’ve not seen is any of the Star Wars animated TV shows (apart from the cartoon feature film which got released theatrically in the UK and I can’t remember much about it). That being said, there are a lot of flashback references to what one assumes are the important parts needed here, just remade into live action variants so... yeah, I think you can mostly get through this without having sampled the animated fayre, to be honest (and I’ve no real desire to finally catch up to the Droids or Ewoks TV shows, which I guess would have to be the first port of call if I was to do it properly). 

This one follows the complicated exploits of Ahsoka, Sabine Wren (a kind of Mandalorian Jedi-in-Training, played by Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and Hera Syndulla (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, no stranger to the fantasy and science fiction genres, for sure). 

Now, apart from wanting to see this before the new Star Wars movie is out soon (or possibly at time of publication of this blog review) the other big draw is, like the appearance by Ahsoka in the ‘almost pretty good’ series The Book Of Boba Fett (reviewed here) and The Mandalorian (reviewed here), the title character is played once again by one of my favourite modern actresses, Rosario Dawson. Now, admittedly it’s hard to see the Rosario for the Lekku here but, well, make up and prosthetics (and CGI) aside, it’s another role which shows the range and diversity of the actress. 

The story is basically a side quest to find an old friend of these characters, Ezra, but in the process, endangering the future of the ‘Empireless’ Star Wars universe by risking the return, as a side effect (or vice versa, actually), of a rather famous bad guy from the Star Wars novels who I had no idea had made it into any of the various TV shows over the years. Now I’ve only ever read, maybe less than 20 Star Wars novels in my life but, one of the three trilogies I read was Timothy Zahn’s sequence of novels which were, when they were being marketed in the early 1990s, being touted as the official sequel to the original Star Wars trilogy of films. And the bad guy in that series, being chased by Luke Skywalker and co, was Grand Admiral Thrawn... who returns, after a stint in some cartoons, in this show. I guess it’s a case of Thrawn but not forgotten. 

Story beats and mechanics aside, it’s a nicely put together show with good chemistry between all the many characters (including David Tennant voicing Ahsoka’s droid Huyang) and some nice cameos by the likes of Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker (who somehow found time to train Ahsoka when he was in the land of the living, before he became Darth Vader) and C3PO. 

I have a few minor complaints about the show but the only one I’ll highlight is my disappointment with the text recap on the first episode. For some reason, the producers have decided to veer away from the one point perspective style scrolling text adopted by the original Star Wars movies and which were an obvious reference to the recaps on some of the 1930s and 1940s Universal theatrical serials, specifically the third and final Flash Gordon serial, Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (reviewed here). That being said, the vision Ahsoka finds herself in during episode five certainly reminded me a little of the aesthetic of the light bridges used in Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars (reviewed here). 

But there were also some really nice things in the show too. Two I’ll highlight are...

The use of violins or, in this case, ‘fiddles’ in the last episode to highlight the antics of four witches... honouring the time old tradition of iterating this kind of orchestration to accompany witches throughout the history of cinema. Indeed, I’d have to say that the scoring on Ahsoka by somebody called Kevin Kiner is much more in keeping with John Williams and George Lucas’ vision of using the kind of writing style of the golden age of Hollywood than any of the other Star Wars shows so far. 

Okay, the other thing is going to throw people who don’t know the rich history of the character but, there’s a ‘blast shield’ Jedi training scene and, yes, I get it, it’s a reference back to the original film (called Star Wars on its first release) when Luke is training in the Millennium Falcon... but it’s, oh, so much more than that and also comments on the title character’s fighting style throughout the series too. 

To explain... at one point during Wren’s training, Ahsoka asks her droid if he’s tried her in the Zatoichi style. As soon as she said that, I knew she was going to stick a helmet on the pupil, effectively blinding her (and there’s more, give me a minute)... 

So Zatoichi is a long running series of films, initially starring Shintaru Katsu, who played the blind masseur/gambler (and greatest swordsman in all of Japan) in 26 movies made between 1962 and 1989, not to mention in a hundred TV episodes in the 1970s and, after Katsu, at least three other Zatoichi films have been made to date (you can read my review of the first Zatoichi film here, with more to follow as I will be returning to that series of films shortly). I’m sure he’ll be back before too long as he gets rebooted for yet another generation. He had a sword cane and, if you want to see what looks like pretty much an exact replica of that sword cane, it’s in this show as the weapons Ahsoka gives herself and Wren to train with in that particular scene. The Zatoichi fighting style with the backwards sweep of the blade is also something which Ahsoka seems to adopt for the show. So I was really pleased with this. 

Of course, this is not the first time Zatoichi has been used in the modern Star Wars franchise. Donnie Yen’s character Chirrut Îmwe in Rogue One was literally a version of Zatoichi himself dropped, into that story and it of course prompted many people on social media at the time to ask why Yen hadn’t officially played Zatoichi in a film. The time will come, is my guess. He’s already played yet another blind killer heavily based on Zatoichi in John Wick 4 (and its soon-to-be spin off, Cane). 

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, that single stroke victory after a Mexican standoff against a light sabre wielding droid is, I believe, a reference to the influential last scene in the Yojimbo sequel Sanjuro (reviews of both those Kurosawa films coming soon to the blog)... so that was another nice touch. 

The series ends on a kind of cliff hanger and I’m seeing the second season is due this year... so yeah, I probably will give that one a go too, as a voluntary thing because I thought this first season of Ahsoka was easily the best of those Star Wars shows I’ve seen so far and, well, there was never a dull minute. I’m now glad I reluctantly gave this one a chance. Maybe I should give Andor a quick look next?

The Enforcer

Tyne To Die

The Enforcer
Directed by James Fargo
USA 1976
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Okay... more spoilers. 

The Enforcer... not to be confused with either the Humphrey Bogart movie of the same name and, nor indeed, the many films which came after this with the exact same title... is the third of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan movies. It’s also easily my favourite one, mainly because his leading co-star in this is just so good and adds a whole other dynamic to the character. 

The film opens with a pre-credits sequence this time around, before going onto the clichéd San Francisco skyline kind of shots you usually get on films of this ilk. Here we see a bunch of ‘terrorists’ (but not really, they’re just in it for the money), who are the main villains of the piece, take out two gas board officials and steal their truck to use for a scene later in the movie. We then, post credits, go into a couple of incidents with Eastwood’s Harry Callahan during his daily patrol, one of which he gets demoted to personnel for, for a few days, before being drafted back into homicide. It’s in personnel that he learns that the mayor is trying to encourage women police officers and he meets and tries to rattle a young female officer who is trying to become an inspector.

When he gets brought back to homicide again, after his partner gets killed investigating a robbery in progress while Harry was cooling his heels in personnel, he finds that the same female officer is his new partner. And this is the movie’s trump card because it manages to deal with inherent sexism in the police force in a positive way... not that we’d had any reason to suspect that Callahan was in any way sexist from the previous movies... but it also gives Clint Eastwood the best co-star he’s ever had (with probably some of the best chemistry too)... 

None other than the, then relatively unknown, Tyne Daly... the great Tyne Daly... plays his new partner Inspector Kate Moore and, boy, does she make an impression in this movie. She does an absolutely fantastic job here as a newcomer to homicide trying to deal with stuff like an autopsy and Harry’s chilly reception but, not only that, she does a great job almost stealing the limelight from Eastwood and credibly working with the actor too, in relatively few scenes (it’s a fairly short movie in the series). We see them create a working relationship which blossoms into a partnership of mutual respect and friendship. So much so that, when she saves Harry’s life for the second time in the movie, during the climactic stalk, chase and shoot finale, she dies from taking a few bullets intended for Harry... and the audience really feels it. Along with Harry of course, who literally blows the body of her killer to bits in the next scene.

So yeah, that unique partnership of Eastwood and Daly, never repeated as far as I can remember, absolutely makes this movie the best of the Dirty Harry films in my book. Once again, Harry has a different catchphrase... this one a sarcastic ‘Marvellous’ every time Inspector Moore does or says something questionable. But, Moore is also given her own catchphrase in this, “Don’t concern yourself Inspector Callahan” which she paraphrases with her last words at the end of the picture.  Now in the previous picture in the series, Magnum Force (reviewed by me here), David Soul was spotted and given the role of Hutch in the hugely successful TV show Starsky And Hutch. Similarly, Tyne Daly does such a good job in this movie it finally led to her hugely successful TV show, as Mary Beth Lacey in Cagney And Lacey, five years later. I like to think of Inspector Moore as a younger, more loose spirited version of Daly’s future signature role. 

Once again, the film is nicely lensed and has some good, creative shot design. One nice touch, for example, is when Harry leaves the hospital room, where his former partner is dying, to go out into the lobby to talk to his boss. As that set of information is conveyed with a conversation between the two men, more information is beings simultaneously given via the big intensive care observation window between the two characters, as we watch Harry’s partner die in the background through the window. 

The music in this one is pretty great too. This is the only Dirty Harry film which doesn’t have a score by composer Lalo Schifrin. I don’t know why but the producers enlisted the help of veteran composer Jerry Fielding instead and, it has to be said, he does an excellent job of keeping the tone of the movies set up by Schifrin. It doesn’t veer too far, I reckon, to the kind of score Schifrin would have provided with the assignment and I’m sure Fielding was probably asked to keep to the same kind of sound scape with his music. It was really nice when, starting in 2004, Donna Schifrin founded record label Aleph primarily to release and showcase her husband’s scores... the Dirty Harry soundtracks finally became commercially available on CD and, even though Schifrin didn’t compose the third, they were nice enough to release Fielding’s score for The Enforcer. So I guess they must have liked it too and it’s a nice thing to do for the fans of this series of movies.

And that’s me done on this third entry in the franchise. The film ends grimly with Harry standing over the corpse of his new partner on Alcatraz island while a helicopter lands to pay the ransom to the kidnappers that Harry has just wiped out. The Enforcer was intended to be the final Dirty Harry film but, seven years later, after a string of box office flops for the actor, he was persuaded to play Harry again. So I’ll be revisiting that one again soon. 

The Mandalorian Season 3

Boba Head Blues

The Mandalorian Season 3
Streaming March - April 2023
8 episodes

Okay, so I’m grudgingly watching the third series of The Mandalorian now because I feel like I should go and see the first new Star Wars movie we’ve had in cinemas for a while, in a couple of weeks. According to a work colleague, I also have to try and watch the woman who sounds like a sneeze series too, before I can fully appreciate the new film. So... yeah, I’ll need to try and catch up to that one too but I’m feeling less than optimistic. And I’m warning you right up front here... this is going to be a fairly short review. 

So, all in all, I thought this third season of the show was somewhat better than the last two, despite the fact that my favourite character hasn’t returned because the overly sensitive people at the nameless channel who are producing this show managed to cancel the actress who was the best thing about the show. But I’m not going in to all that rubbish here.
 
Now, maybe it’s because they’ve lost the 1950s-1970s TV western vibe they nicely had going for it in the previous two series and instead replaced it with an overriding story arc, is why I responded to this one more. Specifically to do with the character played by Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck in the modern reboot of Battlestar Galactica) and that kinda held my interest... it’s a way of keeping a few standalone stories in as side mission quests while constantly referring to the overall arc... a bit similar to the way The X Files finally wrecked themselves, when that overreaching arc needed resolving and outstayed its welcome. 

We have The Mandalorian played, as far as I know, by Pedro Pascal and his Lone Wolf And Cub-style sidekick Grogu, played by a bunch of pixels. I say as far as I know because, as is ‘the way’, Pascal never once shows his face in this series at all and two other actors also play the main character. So... I’m guessing that Pascal only provides the voice here but, I may be wrong.

And it’s entertaining enough, I guess. 

There are a few fair bad things about the show... like the longest and most interesting episode about the sabotaged reintegration of a former imperial clone specialist seeming to have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story other than a quick, plug in reference. Thus rendering it a pointless episode with no real punchline other than some clones, which you really already suspected were out there, being introduced literally as a throwaway moment in the last episode, which was already referred to enough in another episode. So... yeah, the most interesting bit of Star Wars in a while got kinda derailed before it had even got a chance to properly shine. 

Another episode starring Jack Black, musical artist Lizzo and Christopher Lloyd, is kind of like an adrenalised version of Franz Kafka’s The Trial but, rather than stay with that concept, just includes too much action and not enough of the main protagonists tying themselves in knots trying to get past the bureaucratic web. So, yeah. I definitely had some issues... not to mention that Grogu kind of plays a secondary role in these episodes. I wanted to see more of him in action than I was getting in this third series. 

But, for the sake of not being completely negative about the way a certain company has bought and managed to completely neutralise anything that was good about the Star Wars brand... there are a few nice things I’d like to shout out about here. 

So we had the mouse robot from the Death Star using the same sound sample, making yet another appearance here (plus it’s brought some friends). And we also had R5D4 from the original Star Wars movie (later renamed Episode IV - A New Hope for the various 1978 and 1979 re-releases) playing a major role as The Mandalorian’s new droid. I still have my old 1978 action figure of this droid up in my loft and they haven’t changed much about the character (it maybe looks slightly less beat up). 

The other nice thing was Mando (to his friends) working his way through a set of delayed opening shield doors and taking out various troopers as he goes. It was done in a slightly different manner but it was a nice nod to the best of the prequel movies, The Phantom Menace... and it allowed for the same sense of frustrated anticipation in the characters watching from the opposite side of the various shield doors. So that was good stuff. 

And, yeah, sorry but that’s me done for this season. I’m kinda hoping both characters meet their final fates in the new movie (death or whatever), selfishly so I don’t have to sit through another season of this show. The House Of Mouse definitely need to calm their Star Wars output down and desist from watering down the franchise anymore, I feel. Just release a new movie every three to ten years may be a better way of continuing the brand. At least that’s how I’d deal with what they’ve done to it. But, hey, I’m sure they’re making more short term money just milking it dry for now so, yeah, you can tell I’m not that optimistic about the Star Wars franchise these days. This is the way.

Dementia

Good Intense-ions

Dementia
USA 1955 (possibly earlier)
Directed by John Parker
(or possibly Bruno VeSota)
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

Well now. Dementia is a strange film and reminds me of something I wrote myself when I was a teenager (which I tried to get shot three times and when it was finally shot and halfway through the edit, the videocassette tape was physically lost, quite literally fallen off the roof of a car... so a story fated never to be told). 

Anyway, my woes aside, Dementia was not released when it was made because it was, from what I understand, scaring people and was just too surreal for the perceived public consumption. It was continually denied certification in the US and banned for a while in the UK as well, until a few screeings in the 1970s. I believe an interracial dance scene at a jazz club was also something censors were keen to deny people the right to see (with the legendary Shorty Rogers playing jazz in the sequence).  

So, a black and white, surreal and noirish thriller with, I should add, no dialogue. There was another version a few years later, a bastardised version with cut footage (taking account that this original version is already only 56 minutes long), with a different score and added voice over dialogue, called Daughter Of Horror. This cut is also on the BFI Blu Ray but, out of respect for the original, uncompromised version, I have only watched the original, dialogue free version with a score by George Antheil... I might circle back to the other version at some later point because, at one time, it was better known and perhaps the memory of that led to this version being rediscovered. It’s the Daughter Of Horror version which is being watched by a bunch of teenagers in the original 1958 version of The Blob.

Adding to all the confusion, director John Parker is said to have ‘disappeared’ shortly after... or perhaps he never existed in the first place... although his secretary, Adrienne Barrett, plays the main protagonist in this, known as The Gamin. All of the characters have names like this, cyphers for their function, such as The Evil One, Mother, Father and, in the case of the actor who actually claims to have directed at least half of it, Bruno VeSota... The Rich Man.

And it’s an interesting film, for sure.There’s not a lot of plot and its a fairly abstract story but it does tell a tale, of sorts... and it certainly holds the attention. Antheil’s score features a prominent wordless voice and it sounds very much like a theremin or ondes martenot, specifically the theremin used in one of the two films this one strongly reminds me of... Spellbound. I can’t help but think that the director, whoever it was, was significantly  influenced by the Salvador Dali dream sequence in this classic Hitchcock movie and also, very much so, by the score by Miklos Rosza. And, the other film it reminds me of is another Dali work, his co-creation with Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou. Not just in tone but also in specific moments, such as the importance and focus on a specific severed hand at a couple of points in the narrative (such as it is). 

That story being about a half deranged woman who is living in a world where women seem to be used and abused by men and who ends up killing some specific men... both in her past and during the course of the events which are told as graveyard flashbacks to her childhood. 

A few things of note... firstly two of the actors. Dwarf Angelo Rossitto, who is perhaps best known for his role in Tod Browning’s Freaks but also turns up in films by Al Adamson and the like, plays a newspaper seller... which is a profession he also fell back on in real life between acting jobs, from what I can make out. Another interesting and important name is an uncredited night club patron being played by, of all people, Aaron Spelling. Yep, the same Spelling who would become a giant TV mogul in the 1960s and beyond... and into the mid 2000s... you’ll see his name in lots of credits for shows such as Honey West, Starsky And Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, T J Hooker, Fantasy Island, Hart To Hart, Beverly Hills 90210 and oodles more. 

One last thing... lets talk about the nature of censorship. Anyone watching this now will wonder why a film which has been given a 12 rating by the BBFC was once banned for many decades. Well, it’s interesting because there’s a scene where The Gamin is looking in a mirror and she pulls out a switchblade and, after popping the blade out, looks at it almost lovingly, obviously relishing the lethal potential in the blade while smiling to herself. This attitude, to me, is way more frightening and stronger than any gory death a child might stumble on in, say, a gruesome American slasher movie... but the kind of imagery in those are the things which garner them a stupidly high rating. I think little scenes like this make more of an indelible, psychological impact than any kind of strong graphic imagery so, yeah, you have to wonder just why any censorship other than both self-censorship or parental censorship are allowed to exist. It frightens me that censors can wield such power, especially if they let this movie (which, to be fair, features a severed hand) go out with a 12 rating. Preposterous. 

All in all, though, I would say I really quite liked Dementia and think it would be a good one to programme for an all nighter of dark movies, for sure. I will definitely be watching this one again, at some point.