Nope

Nope Way Out

Nope
USA/Japan/Canada 2022
Directed by Jordan Peel
Universal Pictures

Warning: Ever so slight spoilers.

Regular readers of my blog may remember that I’ve not been that impressed with the cinematic CV of Jordan Peel so far, at least in terms of his big hit Get Out (reviewed here) and his admittedly better follow up movie Us (reviewed here). It has to be said that both movies I mentioned here are very well put together and have some great performances in them... they just didn’t happen to do much for me, for the most part (although I thought the music in Us was pretty good). With Nope, well, since UFOs and aliens are something of a trigger for me, I was kinda hoping to say that I’ve finally seen a Jordan Peel movie that I really liked but... nope.

That being said, it’s quite entertaining, telling the story of a family of Hollywood ranchers, brother and sister, who fall on hard times after their father is killed by falling debris, his head penetrated by a falling coin near the start of the movie. The surviving family are brother and sister OJ (who tends to wear orange clothing throughout the film... like Orange Juice I guess), played by the always watchable Daniel Kaluuya and his sister Emerald (more often than not dressed in green), played by Keke Palmer. The family are said to be descended from the jockey who rode a horse photographed by Muybridge, doing his thing to study movement (and to win a bet), way back when.

Also thrown into the mix are the successful proprietor of a nearby ranch called Jupe (played by Steven Yeun), a local electronics store employee called Angel (played by Brandon Perea) and an old school Hollywood director of photography called Antlers Holst (played by Michael Wincott) who, armed with his hand cranked camera, fulfils an important plot point at a certain part of the film. The story involves a UFO or, something like it, which has been ‘stealing’ horses on the ranch. One of the things I did like about the main characters is, instead of them trying to work out how to make contact or react in awe and wonder etc, they just want to be the first to properly photograph it so that they can gain money and fame from getting a clean shot of the thing. The stakes are upped once they know just what they are dealing with, following a certain event which takes place just under an hour from the end of the movie.

And, yeah, like Peel’s other movies, it’s well shot, flows together nicely, has some great performances but, for me, it just didn’t feel that engaging (although I loved the old Hollywood stuff and the parody old style cowboy music used for some sections). One of the problems for me, though, was with certain story points. The film makes a point about building up Jupe’s character for instance, with a real humdinger of a back story from when he was the child star of a hit TV show as a kid. But, although there may have been some metaphor involved in its inclusion, I couldn’t really make out why we were delving into his back story, especially when it’s made clear (again, just under an hour before the end of the story) that his character isn’t as significant as we once thought. I just couldn’t see the point of it. Now, I’m no fan of the Chekhov’s Gun principle of writing, where everything has to mean something or connect the dots but, I did feel that since we were asked to observe the background of an incident involving this character multiple times and fairly in depth, that it might have had more of an impact on the story, maybe?

Also, the threat which the main protagonists are facing and the way in which they try to deal with it... didn’t make a heck of a lot of sense to me. I’m guessing you need to know more about how to tame a horse or break it in (trying not to give too much away here) but, yeah, I didn’t really know what was going on after a certain point, it has to be said.

But, I did have a certain amount of fun with it and I certainly found the film somewhat interesting and entertaining so, yeah, it kept me quiet for a couple of hours, I guess. Nope was a minor movie for me and certainly not Peel’s best of the few I’ve seen but it is quite watchable and I’m sure some people will love it. Not my cup of tea but I’m still looking forward to the day when Jordan Peel manages to totally blow me away. He’s bound to do this at some point, surely... I live in hope, not nope.

Life

Life Lesions

Life
USA 2017
Directed by Daniel Espinosa
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Mild spoiler allusions about the end of the movie at the end of this review.

Hmmmm.... okay. When I first saw the trailer for Life a few weeks ago at the cinema my first thoughts were... “How come I’ve not heard anything about this movie before now? Were they trying to keep it a secret?” Which is not good, really, I would have thought, when you’re trying to publicise a new Hollywood movie. My follow up thoughts were along the lines that the movie looked like a pretty close rip-off of ALIEN but with nods to the ‘reality’ of films like Gravity (reviewed here) and with a few famous people in it. Strangely enough, when I got to the cinema and saw the thing, I soon realised I was watching a fairly close rip-off of ALIEN but with nods to the ‘reality’ of films like Gravity and with a few famous people in it. Woah, deja vu.

I guess with a film like Life you can at least say that it does what it says on the tin in regards to the minimal amount of marketing I saw and, I’m quite happy to report that it’s really not a terrible movie. On the contrary, it’s quite suspenseful and intense in a few sequences and that’s just what a scary movie, or at least something trying to be a scary movie, should be, right? Alas, it also has some problems too but let me just concentrate on the good stuff first...

That good stuff would be the central performances of the actors and actresses - Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Olga Dihovichnaya, Hiroyuki Sanada and Ariyon Bakare. They all do good work here and another plus sign for the movie is they are able to interact with an environment that looks pretty good on film. All the antigravity stuff works fine and looks credible.

The film’s alien ‘actor’ is also good. Named Calvin, it’s not the straight ‘homage’ to ALIEN that a lot of the movie ends up being and, although it basically looks like Flubber, it kinda works. Especially when it gets inside characters and causes damage from the inside... so the camera can linger on all that internal blood escaping through the mouth and floating around... which is kinda okay, although the first time it’s properly done it goes on forever and maybe outstays its welcome as an effect fairly promptly in the movie.

Jon Ekstrand’s score is equally good and appropriate to the action, helping the film create the tone it needs when it best needs it. I am awaiting a physical CD release which is not scheduled until May and I can only keep my fingers crossed that it doesn’t get cancelled due to critical or box office reaction to the film... which I believe has been fairly poor.

Okay... so that’s it for the good stuff.

My real problem with this was that the editing and sequence of events didn’t get enough coverage for me to be able to properly tell what was going on in certain scenes. For instance, I watched a character die and then 5 or 10 minutes later he was back without any kind of fanfare, just wounded. I had no clue but obviously the other characters did. Also, at one point, and I suspect this error may have occurred due to scenes getting chopped in the final edit (although I’ve no way of knowing so don’t quote me on that), I counted that there were, in fact, two aliens because there was no way the same alien could have been hiding where it does without being seen (or travelling through locked doors if I’m remembering correctly). So I assumed there were two of them to deal with after a certain point in the movie when, it turns out... no, there was just one. I think the way this was put together could have stood being made a lot clearer at certain points.

Thirdly... remember Star Trek - The Motion Picture (reviewed here)? Special effects like the ones seen in that film were still relatively new and the producers overcompensated for that by throwing in loads of ‘vanity shots’ of the effects, highlighted just to show them off in what are probably some of the more boring moments of any of the Star Trek movies. It was like the people behind the camera were saying “We spent a lot of money on these shots and you’re damn well going to enjoy them!”. Alas, I felt Life suffered from a similar, if not quite as extreme, propensity to linger on various effect shots which, frankly, I was not interested in and which slow down the movie... in this case, slowing it down in a negative way. The effects were great but I didn’t really need them shoved into my face at close range and that’s kind of how I felt certain things were being handled here, frankly.

Okay, lastly, the film has an ending which most people are going to see coming at least five minutes, if not more, before the film actually catches up to it. It was pretty obvious although, I have to say, it was a pretty nice ending and it almost makes the film suddenly feel like it’s been adapted from one of those old EC horror comics which got into so much trouble in the 1950s. It’s silly and schlocky but it’s also a kinda fun stab at an ending and... that’s almost a requiem description for the entire film, in some ways. A kinda fun stab at a movie which, maybe, is a bit obvious and doesn’t quite make it in some ways.

Life isn’t in danger of blowing anyone away, for sure, but it is a kinda entertaining horror movie, for the most part. It won’t make you think and it won’t haunt you afterwards and, like I said, it has some problems. However, if you are into sci-fi horror films it’s not that much worse than a lot of ‘straight-to-home-video’ releases of the 1980s and, as I’m sure you’re aware if you are into watching film, some of those can be a lot of fun. A not bad time at the cinema and I may even grab this one on Blu Ray once it’s done the rounds and drops below a fiver. There’s still plenty of room for ‘space horror’ in my life.

Hybrid (aka Super Hybrid)

Calmer Car-melion

Hybrid (aka Super Hybrid)
USA/Germany 2010 Directed by  Eric Valette
Koch Media Dual Blu Ray Zone B 

Okay... so this was kind of a cheap buy for me. £2.50 at the local computer exchange for a film I’d never even heard of but which promised to be something in the vein of Stephen King’s Christine or the brilliant ‘demonically possessed vehicle movie’ The Car (which I reviewed here). While the film isn’t as good or interesting as either of these two works, by a long shot, I wasn’t too disappointed with Hybrid and I think if certain elements could have been fixed (or had enough time spent on them), it could have been a truly great little genre movie.

The film starts off with a standard series of nicely edited and montaged panoramic shots of a city but one of the things I liked about this opening was the illusion of fragmentation on the score by Thomas Schobel and Martin Tillman, who manage to give the sound a disturbing, disjointed feel while still being absolutely dead on with the rhythm of the piece. Unfortunately, I have to say that this was really the only point where the film actually managed to impress me and it becomes an exercise in fairly competent, solid but ultimately unremarkable story telling after this point. Which is a shame because I feel the premise has such potential.

The film starts off proper when two people are lured into a car with an open door. They decide to steal it but, once inside, they realise they have made a mistake when the car eats them. A short while later, the same car has a road accident and is towed into a garage for repair. It’s in this multilevel garage that the rest of the film takes place, after first setting up the main female lead Tilda, played by Shannon Beckner, and her abusive boyfriend.

When Tilda gets to the garage to start her shift, we meet her boss Ray, played by Oded Fehr, and a load of other characters who seem to have the words ‘monster fodder’ written in invisible lettering on their foreheads. And, yes, it’s not long before one of them, a guy called Hector, falls afoul of the car and its bloody legacy of doom. The car in itself can change into any colour or model it likes and can self repair at will... except for in those moments where it doesn’t quite suit the dramatic situation, to be fair. Seeing as it can do this, one wonders why it’s in this garage in the first place but if it wasn’t in a confined area, then we wouldn’t be able to see it fulfil its aforementioned ‘bloody legacy of doom’, I guess.

So we have the usual tensions between the characters with Oded Fehr, who I had only seen play heroic roles before in The Mummy and Resident Evil franchises, set up as the main human bad guy of the story. He’s the one who, through his own trickery and willingness to exploit the situation once he’s realised that his employees are to be believed and they are all being hunted by a killer car, is the one you want to see finished off first. Given this, I was actually surprised at how long this character lasts throughout the running time (but I’m not going to give you any spoilers here folks).

As it turns out, the reason the killer car is able to do all this running over, maiming and eating of people is because it’s actually just a bunch of snakes inside. Well... okay... it’s not actually. That’s just what the hum drum special effects look like in certain sequences in this movie when they are trying to illustrate the ‘alien’ness of the car. In actual fact, it’s more like some kind of tentacled Cthulhu creature hatched from the pen of H. P. Lovecraft that has learned to perfectly imitate various motor vehicles with its chameleon-like stealth capabilities. When we finally see the thing revealed it’s not all that terrifying, to be honest, but I guess it’s not really trying to be, on some level.

Anyway, the film trundles along with the group of night workers in the multi-story garage barricaded in with the killer vehicle, for reasons I won’t go into here, and although the script is quite bad and the acting somewhat ropey in places, I thought it had all the right ingredients of being a perfect ‘late night around someone’s house with a few cocktails’ horror movie, to be honest. However, as I was watching it, with the director not quite managing to ratchet up the tension to the desired kilometres per hour, I couldn’t help thinking what a perfect movie it could have been in the hands of someone like John Carpenter or if George A. Romero had directed this thing. Not that the director does a bad job here... I just think certain story and dialogue elements could have been written better.

The film has all the genre cliches you would expect in it, for example. The lead female character who has a tainted reputation, due to a crazy past, which destroys her credibility when she is trying to get people to believe there is a hostile, alien, self-driven car on the loose in the garage. The guy who gets in the wrong car because it’s imitating the ‘safe’ car, which you are just waiting to happen at some point. The inevitable person who runs afoul of the trap that the humans have built to try and destroy the car, etc. Yep, all these and more come to pass and, to be perfectly honest, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that they do. However, the script is quite ‘by the numbers’ in this genre check box kind of way and there’s some incredibly atrocious dialogue for the artists to get through. Nothing is really done to exploit these kind of much loved clichés and raise the bar on them a little.

For instance, when Oded Fehr’s character finally starts to believe his staff about the exact nature of their four wheeled catastrophe, in that it’s a shape shifter, he replies quite straight faced... “You mean like one of those robots from outer space?” Um... what? Does this make any sense people? Is it a veiled reference to the Transformers movies maybe? I dunno, your guess is as good as mine on this one but it’s moments like these, and some of the pacing issues, which firmly place this film in the ‘flawed but relatively entertaining category’ as opposed to the ‘genre masterpiece of weird horror’ category the premise clearly deserves to belong to. Which is a great shame, to be honest.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this movie. Possibly a great thing to screen late on a Friday night with a group of friends when you are all equally sozzled but not quite in the ‘instant classic’ category I was kinda hoping for on this one. Certainly not the best killer car movie I’ve ever seen but for £2.50 for the Blu Ray, I’m really quite happy that I’ve seen it. Not a big recommend from me but if you’re a fan of horror in general, it’s something comfortable and non-challenging to while away an hour and a half with. Definitely a good item if you’re doing an all-night, home video movie marathon and you want something you can half snooze to. Worth a quick look but don’t expect any signs of unsung genius.

Storage 24

Store Wars

Storage 24
2012 UK
Directed by Johannes Roberts
Unstoppable BluRay Region B

I was kinda desperate to see this movie when it first came out at the cinema... but it was only around for a very brief run, from what I can remember. There was no way I could make an opportunity to see it in the two days I might have had a shot at catching it at that time... even if I’d have known it had already come out. Luckily, the second hand DVD exchange shop in Soho came to my rescue and I was able to pick up this Blu Ray for £4. So that’s handy, then.

I quite like the work of Noel Clarke... who starred, produced, came up with the story and wrote an early draft of this screenplay, from what I can understand. I especially liked his movie 4,3,2,1, which you can find reviewed here. Storage 24 is his take on the whole sci-fi/horror cross-over genre and, although I found it quite entertaining, I think it also has a few problems, if I’m going to be fair.

The film involves some people in a 24 hour storage for hire place in Battersea (I’ve seen a lot of these kinds of places popped up in various locations over the years) and involves a group of friends and acquaintances who are helping Noel Clarke’s character Charlie, and his latest ex-girlfriend Shelley (played by Antonia Campbell-Hughes), go through their joint stuff in storage and sort it out. However, a plane crash in London has caused the storage facility to go into full lock-down mode, with shutters which are only temporarily repaired and reopened to let a couple of the main characters into the storage facility before... yeah, you guessed it, locking down on them again.

As it happens, this storage place is not a good place to be at the moment because a hungry alien behemoth was in a crate in the crashed plane and it has now promptly escaped and is busy using the film’s main location as an “all the humans you can eat” buffet... and that’s the plot. And it’s an okay set up, to be fair. A nice way of getting all your creature fodder together in a confined space so your lead monster can pick them all off while they react to their new situation and work through their personal issues as they are now forced to become heros and villains to each other.

So far so good. Let’s have a look then. Okay, so the good things about this movie are...

Well the performances are mostly pretty good. Noel Clarke is someone who I would expect to turn in a good showing but most of the supporting cast are pretty cool too. Not all of them, to be sure, but that might be more to do with some of the lines of dialogue given to some of them rather than the actors themselves.

You also have some nice little nods to the history of the genre, with some very specific shout outs to the ALIEN franchise in particular. For instance, there’s the engineer who is called in to get the doors working and who then goes down into the dark basement wearing a cap which is the dead spit for the one Harry Dean Stanton wears in Ridley Scott’s original classic. So you know full well what’s going to happen to him.

And this films very own version of an air vent scene, as Charlie and his friend Mark (played by Colin O'Donoghue) are trying to get into various storage bays to tool up with some weapons whilst simultaneously avoiding the nasty beastie hunting them. That’s a pretty nicely photographed sequence actually and, although obviously another nod to ALIEN, it also put me in mind of the  sequence with Sean Connery stuck in the air ducts in Dr. No (reviewed here)... but with much different sound design.

Now I heard a criticism from a friend of mine who said the monster in this lets the film down. I’d disagree with that to a certain extent. I think the make up, prosthetics, CGI or however this one is done is all fine. I think what lets the film down in regards to the monster is that it’s just too damn well lit. Most horror directors know the advantage of only showing little bits of the monster for most of the key scare scenes because, no matter how good or physically scary your monster is, it’s nowhere near as threatening as what your own imagination fills in on the blanks between shots. I think I could have done with seeing a lot less of this guy as the film progressed and would have preferred some seriously groggier lighting during some sequences.

The other thing I think lets this film down to a certain extent is the pacing. Now I’m all for horror movies to be very slowly paced and with nothing much happening apart from the key scare moments... but this one seems to be lingering too long in certain sequences and, although I was personally surprised that this leisurely pace wasn’t working during the first half of the movie, it... well... it just wasn’t. Can’t quite put my finger on why but I felt that certain of the scenes just needed to be a little punchier. Maybe more cross cutting between places might have helped... it just felt too drawn out in certain scenes and my mind went wandering when I should have been more fearful of what was coming next. If you look at a movie like The Descent, for example, they may employ cheap shock tactics in a lot of it but the timing and pacing are absolutely spot on and it’s become a modern horror classic because it just does what it does so well. Here, I dunno... maybe the editing is at fault? Whatever the problem... it is too protracted during sequences and that, ironically, loses the suspense and anticipation when it should have been highlighting it, I feel.

But there’s some nice quirky stuff going on too. A sequence where the monster is somewhat taken aback by a “woofing” mechanical dog in a toy container, for example, or the fact that some of the character arcs don’t quite go in the way you’re necessarily expecting them too (which is always a good thing). There’s also the final shot which shows something I’d already thought of about what’s happening in London outside of the storage facility during the running time, but i’d dismissed it as a real possibility. However, the last shot definitely changes the playing field for our “heroes” in this one and it’s nice that they ended on this idea. It could have been worse.

Ultimately then... for me... Storage 24 is more of a comfort horror movie. Something you screen during a horror all nighter if you want to give your audience a little break from the intensity for a while. If you’re into these kinds of movies then there isn’t really a great deal to complain about here and it’s certainly not going to be a waste of your time to give this one a spin when you get a chance... before you drop it into storage.

Under The Skin

Skin And Bare It

Under The Skin
2014 UK
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Under The Skin is one of those films that exists in a certain space in cinema which allows you to bring your own baggage with you and create your own interpretations of what is going on within the material as it’s presented to you, to a certain degree. Films like this have a special, almost “Holy” place in cinema and they also tend to divide audiences quite heavily... at least that's what I usually observe. I saw two new cinema releases this weekend and both of these films had this kind of interpretive quality to them. However, the other one I saw failed in its intent spectacularly, in my opinion, because the message which I brought to/took from it seemed to be way less than the sum of its parts and the frames were, typically for the director of this other movie, crowded with ideas and details but... it all just felt like a lot of chaos for very little reward or insight at the end of it. I’ll get to all that in my review of that film when I write it. Check back here in a day or two for that one.

As far as Under The Skin goes, I think the qualities I just highlighted worked so well because the action of the characters and the space in which the actors performed them was, mostly, calm and tranquil, allowing the experience to very slowly let you explore what you think you are seeing in the movie. So much so, in fact, that some of the key sequences were deliberately uncluttered in what I personally believe were the language of metaphor rather than actual reality... although the film's director did have a tendency to keep upending my deductions of such matters as I was watching and, in one quite spectacular sequence, where a man’s internal organs, muscles and bones are very quickly extracted from his body, leaving only his skin floating around, I was forced to even question the nature of those similar scenes I had been viewing.

The always watchable Scarlett Johansson plays an alien creature who “wears” the skin of other people and uses this as a disguise, drifting from peron to person and place to place as a, for want of a better term, predator. She is not necessarily a sexual predator (I haven’t read the original novel on which this was based and, having seen this, now wish I had before I saw the movie, actually) but she uses the language, both minimally verbal and physically, of human sexuality to pick up her prey. She then devours them in a what I can only assume, in spite of a couple of sequences bordering on the cheerful art of the non sequitur for me, is a metaphor for the storage and consumption of human beings (represented by a black room with somebody undressing and following the disrobing Johansson, then slowly sinking step by step into a bizarre and dreamlike liquid storage state, before being eaten later).

The film, I am glad to say, was very minimal in dialogue throughout, which I prefer as I still tend to see cinema as a visually dominant form of art (although, bearing in mind my love of scoring, I really shouldn’t still feel this way). To ignore the music and sound design of this film, however, which at times become almost interchangeable as an ambient noise, probably created purely by the composer,  slowly creeps into the realm of sinister and unsettling music... would be a big mistake. While not technically atonal, the score still has the kind of power to both make you feel less at ease in places... it’s always pushed to the front of the sound mix in the “eating” sequences... and to tell you what’s coming next with an almost leitmotif style running through it, even though thematically it seems almost as alien as this film’s central character.

Starting off with Johansson discovering and practicing human vocalisations, which make important the world of sound to a certain extent, the character of the alien takes on a journey through the film where, if read one way, “she” becomes more humanistic as she is, perhaps, polluted by the sometimes troubled souls with whom she comes into contact. The director cannily punctuates the long stretches of calm, stealth and exploration which characterises the majority of the movie, with occasional stabs of sound and sometimes action which shock by their highlights in isolation, the way that somebody like Tarkovsky or Bergman may have chosen to highlight something within the overall consuming style of one of their works, perhaps. A sudden lively burst of conversation, a violent mob or a hardcore, aggressively lit dance club are all thrown into the mix as the main protagonist/antagonist, depending on how much you can identify with her, goes about her daily/nightly business. The visceral shock of these moments, which hit you like a muffled, comfortably wrapped, crash to your senses amidst a barren, meandering journey allows you, the audience, as a human spectator, to empathise with the way the character is able to handle these sudden changes in tempo and, if you’re like me, come closer to her viewpoint. Which I’m guessing was the director’s plan?

The film is adult in nature, at least in terms of there being tonnes of nudity and allusions to sexuality, but lit quite muddily in places... which lifts what could have been a gaudy, exploitative entertainment (and there’s nothing wrong with that) into something much more restrained and expressive of the kind of existence depicted here. Interestingly, because of the underlying nature of the creature’s easy target of human sexuality, and the kinds of people “she” has to plunder to sustain her on this planet (although there’s no real indication she is of extra-terrestrial origin, to be honest), the irony is that we learn as much, probably more, about the nature of the human condition from Johansson’s journey through it, than we do of the origin of her species and her purpose here other than just existing and eating. Again, I may or may not get more of that equation from the novel. And, of course, the irony is that she, too, seems to be growing to a new relationship with her encounters with humanity... and her final fate, which I certainly won’t reveal here, is a symptom of the naivety of not approaching such a changeable and unpredictable species such as humanity without a certain amount of caution and distrust.

Under The Skin is, I have to say, a film which I couldn’t fully comprehend on my first viewing, mainly due to the fact that I was trying to apply a certain logic to the visual metaphor and its final conclusions with certain characters. For example, the lack of the central character’s blindness to the condition of another character she encounters, said everything about her alien outlook but the final fate of this character seemed at odds with what I’d seen before, unless you see Johansson’s slow descent as one of empathy rather than consumption of something that didn’t agree with her digestive system (as I was initially taking this for as I watched).

I went into the cinema thinking that this would be a kind of female-centric version of Nicholas Roeg’s movie adaptation The Man Who Fell To Earth (reviewed here) and, although the films are as different as chalk and cheese, the otherworldliness of the central characters and the way they are depicted without any judgements made by the roving “camera eye” is certainly something which the two films have in common. Under The Skin would certainly go well as the second part of a double feature with Roeg’s classic, for sure.

At times inscrutable, at times simplistic but always emotionally engaging, Under The Skin is probably one of the better films you’ll see in a cinema environment this year... so if you are a lover of the art form of film then it would probably not be something you’d consider missing. Certainly, in my case, it’ll probably lead to harder things... like multiple viewings and reading the original novel by Michel Faber. So catch this one if you can.

IT! The Terror From Beyond Space

It!’s Alive

IT! The Terror From Beyond Space
1958 USA
Directed by Edward L. Cahn
MGM Midnite Movies DVD Region 1 

A manned mission to Mars meets with tragedy at the hands of... well, a martian. The only survivor from the initial mission is under suspicion and another spaceship, crewed by seven people, is sent to Mars to bring him home to Earth for a court martial and a firing squad. Nobody believes his story and thinks the man killed his entire crew... until they realise a murderous alien creature has stowed away on their spaceship for the return flight back to Earth and has started picking off the crew one by one and then pulling them into the ventilation shafts where it’s been hiding. Hmm... yeah, this does sound familiar doesn’t it.

You know, I really do like Ridley Scotts ALIEN but, like other famous scientifiction extravaganzas such as Star Wars, it’s really easy to see where he, or at least his writers, got the basic story ideas to glue together in their own inimitable fashion... pulled right from science fiction short story writer Jerome Bixby’s own screenplay for this movie. And, just as famously, from Mario Bava’s excellent sci-fi horror movie Planet Of The Vampires... in which the crew of a ship take a look around a starship stranded on a planet and find a large, dead skeletal alien pilot still on board. That the ship in Bava’s film used music as a control device would not resurface in the movies of Ridley Scott until Prometheus, of course.

Anyway, IT! The Terror From Beyond Space is a movie I’ve been waiting to get around to watching for over 30 years, and I’m finally glad I got to see it because it’s actually a lot less unintentionally funny than I thought it would be and is a nicely crafted sci-fi, “creature on the loose” style thriller, actually. Writer Bixby’s work was of the calibre that he even wrote a few episodes of the original Star Trek TV show and I think that’s kind of pertinent here because this does work as much as an ensemble piece of sorts as anything else and it does, to some extent, have the feel of one of those classic 1960s Star Trek episodes.

The acting is pretty solid for the time and, looking at the cast, I couldn’t tell you any of their names (except one which I’ll get to in a minute because I hadn’t realised he was in it until the end credits) but these are all faces you’ve seen dozens of times in movies and in gazillions of episodes of old TV shows over the years. The kind of relied upon actors who get called in to pretty much all the TV shows of their day and play a different character in one episode a year for them (once everyone’s forgotten them from the last time around). So no star names but all solid, reliable and confident performances from jobbing actors who were rarely out of work. Confident enough that they will have you fearful of a “not so realistic” man in an alien monster suit who is rampaging a few floors down from them.

And it turns out that the “man in a suit” alien is none other than Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan, old Western hand and star of one of my favourite serials of the 30s, Undersea Kingdom! Which is basically a Flash Gordon serial rip off but, hey, it’s one of the better ones (asides from a few little factors... hmmm, I should review that serial some day). It’s nice to see the guy working but I felt a bit disappointed that the Atlantean robot busting Corrigan had been relegated to such a role, where you don’t even know it’s him unless you are told. Bit of a come down. Mind you, one of his early roles was as the orangapoid Buster Crabbe fought in the original Flash Gordon serial... so at least he had some kind of grounding in his kind of “acting”.

There’s some unintentional comedy in the form of some massive 1950s sexism near the start of the movie in a scene reminiscent of the dining sequence in Ridley Scott’s ALIEN, where the crew of the ship are all eating together. It’s kind of telling of the times that the only two of the crew who aren’t having their supper are the two female crew members. Why? Because they’re busy clearing the plates away and making meals for the men. This stuff is comedy gold but I’d better not say too much about it. It is, however, an interesting indication of the prevalent attitudes of the time.

The film itself is very short and comprises scenes of the crew slowly being chased up, level by level, in their rocket ship by the titular monster, who wants to eat them. The monster is kinda done quite well in the earlier scenes, mostly stalking and killing as silhouette shadows on the wall in the way that films did so well then... however, the director certainly doesn’t balk at showing the monster as often as required and when you get a closer look at it, well it’s nice but not in any way impressive as something that could really be alive and is, perhaps, a little less skillfully designed than the kind of monsters that were coming out of studios like Universal at the time. The Creature From The Black Lagoon make-up, for example, would have been hard to top even from the company that spawned him... and that certainly proves to be the case here, I’m afraid. The monster in this one’s expression of savage anger can easily turn to comedy if you are not in the mood for it, to be honest.

It’s also an interesting film in that it leaves a few plot threads dangling at the end. One of the crew members is trapped on a level with the creature and is asked to hide in the airlock at one point while the crew attempt to extract all the air from the ship... however, the guys face plate on his helmet is broken and we’re not enlightened as to whether he survived at the end of the movie or not. Also, at least one of the crew members, probably two, is infected by the creature with a condition which is very much like leukemia, which needs treating with blood (which you just know is going to be stored on the same level as the creature) and, although he gets the blood, you don’t really know if he and his sick companion are going to make it to earth or, whether the leukemia is in any way treatable or not. It’s something which is just ignored after its usefulness as a dramatic device to throw the humans back into the mix again with the creature has been fulfilled, but glossing over it as a minor detail didn’t really leave me satisfied as to the outcome, to be honest. Then again, of course, this movie is set in the far, far, far future of... um... 1973. So maybe by the time we get to that far flung year they’ll have developed a cure for leukemia. Who knows? Oh, wait.

But the film is effective enough and also has a charming B-movie style score to it by iconic composers Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter (which is available from Monstrous Movie Music here). It all adds to the fun of the piece and the score CD is well recommended by me, as is the movie which is one I’ll definitely pick up to watch again in a couple of years. Maybe as a Christmas holiday double bill movie or something. Anyway, for any fans of fifties horror/sci-fi movies, this movie is grade A fun and you won’t want to miss out on it. So sit back, relax and watch it while the women folk do the dishes (as the film tells us this is obviously the way things are meant to be).

Dark Skies

Dark Grey

Dark Skies
USA 2013
Directed by Scott Stewart
Playing at cinemas now.

Non-warning: 
Any spoilers in here are those which are already in the trailer. 

It was well over twenty years ago that I first heard of Whitley Streiber in something other than the context of his early career as a horror writer. I read a report, I think online, about him having been seen going around the area he lived in and spending a small fortune buying all kinds of alarm equipment and firearms etc to make his home as unbreachable as he could to any kind of hostile invaders. The article took a slightly patronising tone, reminded people that he’d just written the “autobiographical” novel Communion, and metaphorically patting him on the arm as if to say, “There, there. We believe you.”

The thing is, and the thing that stuck in my mind when I read that small snippet of an article, was that, well why would you go out of your way spending all that money and taking all that time to fix up and install all these different devices, if you didn’t at least believe something was out to get you?

So I read the book and saw the movie and, frankly, what I read in the book chilled me to the marrow. And so, a few years before TV shows like The X Files and, um, Dark Skies, popularised this kind of stuff big time, I started doing some research in my spare time on the subject myself. I got the librarians at the place where I worked to get out inter-library loans on various of the more respected accounts of the phenomenon of... well...alien abduction, and began to really read up on it.

About the same time, a British guy named Nick Pope was working for the Ministry Of Defence and was assigned the task of investigating various UFO related reports which had piled up over the years and ascertaining if any of them had any interest or, indeed, posed a threat to the military. My understanding is that Pope didn’t believe in such hogwash and went at it with a very cynical attitude. The attitude didn’t last too long though because he found that a small percentage of the things he investigated really didn’t have any explanation, from what I gather, other than what he was trying to debunk, and he resigned and the MOD shut the project down. He carries on investigatng, somewhat less cynically, in a private capacity today, from what I can gather.

And, again, around the same time, someone came to work at the same place as me for a while and one of his previous jobs had been air traffic control. He “believed” totally and said after the kinds of things that you routinely see and get reported in that job, you have to sign the official secrets act.

So I carried on reading and two things came out of my personal research into extraterrestrial visitors.

One of the things I noticed is that the people who firmly believe this stuff and investigate it do tend to be the most cynical people going. They distrust everything but solid evidence and, sometimes, that evidence is there to be found (and ignored or covered up by any kind of government sanctioned body).

Secondly, I believed this stuff so much, because the cases made from various methods of research were so airtight, to be honest, that I had about three years of sleepless nights (that’s okay, I was younger and could handle that... but it was fear that kept me awake). I mostly, deliberately stay away from this kind of stuff now. I believe the matching accounts of groups of people on crowded streets (mayors, police officers and passers by) who all collectively witnessed single incidents of the most amazing and unbelievable kind and all independently reported these things... as much as I believe the aliens can be categorised and identified by most people involved in these encounters, even those who have come from small tribes cut off from the rest of the planet and who are “totally” unpolluted by anything happening in Western culture. They all draw the same drawings.

So yeah, I leave that stuff alone now because, frankly, I’m getting on now and I need my sleep.

And that’s exactly why competently put together movies like this one called Dark Skies (which has no ties with the similarly themed TV show from a couple of decades ago) work so well on me.

Now I saw a trailer for this movie and it looked pretty much like a standard haunted house meets Greys scare movie, Greys being a specific and most widely seen alien type (if you believe that kind of thing, but that’s exactly why they’re mined so much in modern popular culture). Well I have to say, this movie does pretty much everything as advertised. There are no twists, just scary visitations from our little grey friends (Zeta Reticulans, for the record) interwoven with a few other phenomena to spice up the scare factor and neatly summarised by the “Van-Helsing-but-only-in-an-advisory-capacity” alien researcher played so credibly by the always watchable J.K. Simmons.

The whole film is full of standard scare tactics and cliché ridden horror tropes but, that’s okay, because it is really all quite well put together and it certainly had my heart beating faster (but then again, as I have taken time to explain here, I’m prone to that kind of extra-terrestrial implied threat anyway). The music, by composer Joseph Bishara, is well put together and delivers all the modern atonal nightmarish quality you’d need in a score like this, sci-fi’d up with a bit of subsonic synthesizery stuff which kicks in when required. The direction and shot design are all pretty much adequate/competent and the performances are all fine too.

The writing is a bit patchwork in its sources, to be truthful, and the obvious attempt at misdirecting you away from the actual target of the extraterrestrial antagonists is both obvious and quickly guessed, so the ending is of no real surprise and it really could have done without the “beat you over the head with stuff you were more than aware of at the time” flashbacks in the little epilogue sequence... although the very last 30 seconds or so was a nice touch.

But, all said and done, the film is still quite scary (it veers from various research accounts at times to quite deliberately justify why it is trying to scare the audience at one point) and certainly, although nowhere near the best film made on this kind of subject material, it does still manage to be quite grippng and suspensful througout a fair few of the set pieces, despite the number of familiar “horror moments” which are piled on. So, yeah, if you like this kind of stuff then you certainly shouldn’t find yourself too dissapointed in this one. It’s a scary night out at the pictures.

And if you find yourself dweling on the dubious nature of the story and the presence of a malevalent extra terrestrial force on earth which "first" appeared on the scene during the age of science, ask yourself this... Why are elves, pixies, faeries and whatever other small creatures always popping up in various countries’ cultural mythologies?

And why do churches have gargoyles?

Prometheus

Top row: Prometheus promotional posters.  Bottom row: Splash panel from the original Heavy Metal comic album of ALIEN (left) and the discovery of the "original" spcae jockey in Mario Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (right).





The Girl With The Alien Tattoo


Prometheus USA  2012
Directed by Sir Ridley Scott
Playing at UK cinemas now

Warning: Yeah, there are marginal spoilers in here.

Hmmm... this really is going to be a bit of a mixed bag of a review, methinks.

Before going into this properly, though, it’s probably useful to you to know how I feel about the six previous ALIEN movies so you can gauge how I compare to your own opinions of these films and judge this review on that basis.

I never got to see the first ALIEN film at the cinema in 1979, the year it came out (although I certainly made up for that years later). I was too young at 11 years old to successfully sneak into an X certificate movie... so I had to stay with my nan while my parents went out for a very rare cinema trip to see it. They came back with glowing reports which further fuelled my desire to see it. I did however have the Heavy Metal comics adaptation of the movie to read (plus the making of book) and, believe me, that comic strip was far more vivid and violent than the on-screen counterpart. When I did get to see the movie just a few years later, the chest burster scene seemed extremely tame to my teenage brain and I wondered what all the fuss was about in terms of any violent content, considering the version depicted in said comic book was an absolute gore-fest! And since comic strip adaptations of films are often done from the scripts while the movie is still being shot, it also included scenes in it which I wouldn’t see on screen until they started to put deleted scenes on videos and DVD (Sir Ridley brought out his “new” cut of the movie with these sequences put back in but to the detriment of the movie since he also took out a load of stuff to speed up the action for... well... for the MTV generation). When I did see it, of course, although it was a lot tamer than I could have possibly imagined, it easily became on of my favourite sci-fi movies. The “atmosphere of the everyday” that Scott had created in meticulous detail was worth the price of admission alone. And of course, H. R. Giger’s designs and Goldsmith’s score were the cherry and icing on the biomechanical cake.

When ALIENS arrived at cinemas in 1986, we were all geared up for it and it kinda worked because it wasn’t trying to imitate the atmosphere of the original movie. Now, I have to go on record here that I found Cameron’s entry in the series to be the weakest of the four solo outings of the ALIEN species... but I don’t mean to say it’s not a good entry. It is. All the initial solo ALIEN movies are quality products and it’s a shame that Cameron had to cut this one down for its initial release as the scenes he added back later lost their impact due to knowledge of the way the scenes were going to play out. It’s a marvellous film, easily Cameron’s masterpiece... just the weakest of the initial four. Lifted quite a lot by James Horner’s score... back in the day when everybody my age thought he was an original and “the new hope” of the soundtrack composing community... as opposed to what he’s revealed himself to be over the years.

When Alien 3 (or Alien Cubed as it quickly became known) was released, there seemed to be a big backlash against the movie... although a lot of people, myself included, really loved the finished product. Sure it has big problems, not least of which is a completely redesigned “dog” version of the ALIEN which doesn’t match up to any of the “man in suit” close up shots. This is a film where communication with the second unit and effects guys seems to have gotten the better of Fincher... but still, the rich gothic atmosphere supported and enhanced by Goldenthal’s absolutely superb pseudo-religious scoring is everything in this movie and lifts it to the heavens despite its flawed nature. It also features the death of the main character of the initial series, Ellen Ripley, who sacrifices her life to kill the creature as it jumps from her chest... bit of a dramatic ending on this one.

And then we have the celebrated French director Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection, in which Ripley returns as a superpowered Alien-hybrid clone of herself and much continental quirkiness is afoot. Good movie, very bad, flawed new ALIEN design for the ending which, it has to be said, looks more like Casper The Friendly Ghost than something which is supposedly the spawn of something created by Giger (and I don’t think Giger was anywhere near this production, so that kinda explains it). Still, I liked this movie a lot (obviously better than Cameron’s entry) and John Frizzel’s score, which is almost like John Barry filtered through the ALIEN universe style, was another good piece of scoring. I was just waiting for the studio to follow this movie up with The Adventures Of Ripley-clone on Earth!

However, rather than continue the series in this manner, the studio decided to go the way of the Universal Pictures monster rallies of the 1940s (a sure sign that studios have lost faith in the ability of their solo characters to pull in crowds on their own) by making a “double sequel” movie to both the Alien and Predator franchises. AVP: Alien Vs Predator is actually quite a fun film (and certainly my favourite of the lamentable Predator movies) but seriously screws up continuity with the series. I can just about justify the Aliens appearing on Earth hundreds of years before they’re discovered in the future, for example, because their appearance then could have been the reason why the shadowy Weyland-Yutani corporation had an interest in pursuing them in the future, but the fact that they killed off Lance Henrikson in the present day, when we already know he turns up as exactly the same “real life” version of the character at the end of Alien 3, is a real clunker and I don’t understand why they allowed this to happen. The movie is quite fun and watchable though, supported by a competent score which doesn’t really let the side down... which doesn’t make what happened next any less of a bitter pill to swallow...

What happened next was the incredibly awful Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem which was not just the worst ALIEN or Predator movie in the collective franchises... it was also a bad film in general. This movie manages to take the classic ALIEN creatures and dilute them down to nothing by putting them slap bang in the middle of what seems to be a teen-slasher movie. Seriously, the ALIEN is nothing more than a roving serial killer to bring out all the tired old genre tropes which kiddie audiences seem to be so comfortable with. A truly dreadful end to the series and a true insult to Giger and Scott’s original creation... it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. The only good thing about it was up and coming composer Brian Tyler’s exemplary score, which was way more than the visuals he was given to work with deserved.

So now you know how I feel about the last six movies in the franchise, I suppose I’d better get on with reviewing the prequel, I guess.

If you’re on the same wavelength as me, you’ll probably twig that I hold Scott’s initial ALIEN (especially in its original cut) up as being the absolute best in the series... that much hasn’t changed after seeing Prometheus, I’m afraid. Scott goes back to the original “scene of the crime” of his first film by having a team of Earth archeologists, looking for the origins of man, finding the original “space jockey” ship... plus some biological weapons they were creating, plus a space jockey himself who is not the peaceful saviour that the central protagonists had hoped him to be.

The film starts off with one of these aliens (who look like an old bald headed humanoid from one of the earliest episodes of the original Star Trek) taking some kind of biochemical cocktail which destroys his DNA (in a “penetrating” close up shot that Dario Argento will just love when he sees it as it could almost have been lifted from one of his films) and disintegrates him into a big river... I think this must be what brings these specific aliens their initial downfall, but I’m just guessing as it’s really not made implicit in the film. The first thing I thought when watching this first scene though was... What is this? Star Trek 5?

I thought both this sequence and the next one, where the team of Archaeologists in Scotland fronted by Doctor Elizabeth Shaw (Any Pertwee era Doctor Who fans here guess why I was pulled out of the movie when I first heard this character name?), as played by the original Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Noomi Rapace, find another artefact depicting a specific star map where the human race is supposed to go ... were quite pedestrian in the way they’d been handled and not what I’d expect from a director with Sir Ridley’s usually impeccable visual taste. Also, although this plot point makes a great hook, it seems to be unlikely that the “space jockeys” have, as yet, visited Earth (if I’m interpreting the story correctly), so what the "buggery-F" these little constellation maps dotted throughout human history are having any business being here is anybody’s guess... again, it doesn’t seem to have been made implicit in the final cut of the movie.

Okay, so I had problems with the first ten minutes but from here on in the film was a flawed but thoroughly interesting ride. Scott’s rich visual style resurfaces after the first ten minutes or so and we’re treated to an absolutely beautiful sequence where the android Dave is alone on the ship (watching over the crew in suspended animation) and it’s very reminiscent (and almost equally as strong) as Kubrik’s sequence of another famous “sci-fi” Dave watching over a crew in suspended animation in 2001: A Space Odyssey... Fassbinder is excellent in it and so is Peter O’Toole... I’ll not elabourate if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Go see it for yourself.

When the crew awake and go to the planet, the horror/sci-fi movie starts proper and there are thrill and spills and an almost unbearable tension as Sir Ridley stretches out the suspense... you know something bad is going to happen... and he knows you know, so he’s obviously going to play to that. He does it very well and you cant fault him for delivering a very entertaining “screen excitement” as they used to say back in the day. Visually rich, brilliant performances all round and a definite recommendation of a night out at the cinema from me...

However...

It’s a bit of a flawed masterpiece in my opinion and I know that will probably rub some people up the wrong way. If you’re doing comparisons to the original ALIEN, for example, the acting is strong but the original had relative unknowns and Prometheus is filled with famous actors. It tries to be an ensemble piece but, even though it’s filled with big names... in addition to Fassbender and Rapace there are Idris Elba, Guy Pierce and Charlize Theron (I was a bit upset her character name wasn’t ALIEN Wuornos to be honest) who are also in the mix... Fassbender and Rapace’s characters definitely dominated the show here. It was very much their movie and they seemed to be the characters showcased more than the others... although, as I said before, all the performances were exemplary.

Another problem I had with it was the tone. There were some sequences of the movie, especially those involving Idris Elba, which could have been wrenched directly from the first film in in terms of the almost haphazard, naturalistic, “caught moments” way they had been shot. Just like a proper 70s movie! But these were juxtaposed and cross cut with more set piece motivated sequences, much less reminiscent of that style. It just about kind of worked but I felt it diluted the power of a lot of those shots and I would have liked it to be more like the shooting style of the original ALIEN all the way through... but that’s just a personal preference I guess.

The other thing was... well look. The way I described it to a friend was this...

“The first ten minutes of the movie are rubbish... as are the last twenty minutes or so. All the stuff between this is really excellent.”

And that’s how I feel. I’ve explained my reaction to the first ten minutes but the reason I didn’t think much of the last twenty was because... well... there’s an absolutely brilliant stand out scene where Noomi Rapace is in a small medical container with a “creature”. I don’t want to give away too much about what happens in this scene, other than to say that it is a) incredible in it’s execution and suspense and b) something you wouldn’t expect one of the characters involved to recover from... let alone run around doing run, jump, survive and get half beaten up scenes when the character is obviously in such a frail state. Dr. Liz Shaw, I don’t care how pumped full of futuristic space drugs you are... I don’t buy you, as a human being, being able to handle anything else that happens after this point in this movie. It just stretches the credibility too much and it was at this moment I failed to hold my “suspension of disbelief” for Scott. The rest of the movie, though nice to look at, stopped packing any punch for me and I was disappointed... especially at the tagged on, final revelation where baby royalty makes her first appearance (years in our future, thus rendering the Alien/Predator films even less a part of the same series). Talking of which... didn’t the crew of the Nostromo in ALIEN find the original “space jockey” in the chair with its ribs exploded outwards to indicate a chest burster had gotten to it... have a think about that when you go and see this movie. Did Sir Ridley even watch his original film again before rolling cameras on this one?

The film has a fifteen rating but I think it could have gotten away with a 12A. There’s very little, if any, blood in this movie and there’s certainly nothing as frightening or strong as the scenes that play out in Scott’s original masterpiece. There’s a lot of suspense in it and he really knows how to ratchet up the tension (his suspense dial goes up to eleven)... but when the denouement of each of each of these set pieces come, they seem to be somewhat underwhelming, I thought, and in the end I concluded that the movie was something considerably less than it’s glittery, shining parts.

Also, Scott came under a lot of flack after the first one for a lot of it being a kind of reworking of Mario Bava’s Planet Of The Vampires, so I thought he’d have avoided any obvious material for comparison this time around. Not so. Maybe his writers were working against him a little on this but fans of Bava’s original will certainly enjoy the, even more, blatant references in this one. I won’t give too much away but lets just say that the aliens in both movies share a musical interest.

Talking about music... the score sounds good in places and rather humdrum in others. I’d need to hear it away from the movie to make a proper judgement on it but I must say I wasn’t best amused when one of Jerry Goldsmith’s original themes for the series was subverted and used to recreate it as as a new leitmotif signature of the Weyland-Yutani company. Not worth doing, either, in my opinion.

All in all, though, a really nice looking movie... but I think it was a mistake trying to tie this into the original ALIEN franchise in general... and when I say mistake I mean a cold-blooded bid for money off the back of the old series by the suits at Fox... that’s what I mean. Not that I can blame Scott and co for going for the cash... just wish they’d have left it alone and introduced an entirely new set of creature (which in some ways they kinda did I suppose, in a Cthulhuesque kind of way). Certainly worth some of your time and money because it’s quite astonishing to look at in places (the projected, running “space jockeys” are particularly unnerving) but don’t go in their expecting something as cool as ALIEN... if you do you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

Doctor Who: The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe

It’s In The Trees! It’s coming...

Doctor Who: The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe

Airdate: December 25th 2011. UK. BBC1

Warning: Little spoilers which will grow on you and turn into bigger spoilers as you follow them through the word forest of this review...

Oh good grief. You know, whenever I don’t like a movie or a show I find it much easier to find enough things to say about it (read “complain about it” methinks) to turn it into a sizeable article. So fair warning up front kiddies... this is going to be one short review!

Okay... so I was fairly easy on last years Christmas special (compared to most of the comments I was getting back about it from friends and family) but I did acknowledge that, while it wasn’t the worst one they’d done... it certainly was in that same league of some of the more dissapointing episodes. Now I don’t get the time or opportunity on Christmas Day to watch Doctor Who but I usually end up watching it with the family on Boxing Day.

So, post-party last night, I trod fairly tentatively on Twitter expecting the usual round of Doctor Who spoilers and was susrprised that nobody had found anything passionate or interesting to say about it. In fact, once the episode had started, I couldn’t find any comments about that eposode at all, even after it had finished. This was somewhat unusual and from what I would guess is... it wasn’t that well liked.

This suspicion was further compounded when I rang a friend who had seen it this morning and he reported back to me that... it was “alright” but not great and it made a mockery of its own timelines somewhat. Okay then, thought I, I can handle another bad Doctor Who episode at Christmas... after all, I figured... I had survived watching all the episodes of Torchwood: Miracle Day without actually causing myself physical harm to distract me from the pain of bad scripting... and Doctor Who should at least have some good scoring on it to distract me. So I inevitably took the plunge today and watched The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe... and here’s what I thought of it.

Well... I must say, that was a really brilliant and heartwarming episode which was everything like a Christmas special should be. It was solidly written, had some good performances and was really nicely lit... most of it seemed to have been lit or designed with blue (TARDIS blue?) in mind which is not usually a good look when pitching against flesh tones but, hey, it worked really well here I thought (although you wouldn't be able to tell from the images above).

The Doctor was without his regular companions until the last couple of minutes and this worked in Matt Smith’s favour as he didn’t have the distraction of the red-headed firebrand who is Amy Pond to draw the eye away from The Doctor. Matt Smith is an absolutely brilliant actor and without Amy around The Doctor takes full command of the screen.

The story starts during the Second World War as one of the lead characters is “widowed” by the seeming death of her husband... although it has to be said that, because you don’t actually see his final fate, you don’t actually believe he’s dead and the story does kind of tip its hat at that point I’m afraid... still, knowing how it’s all going to end right from the start has never hurt these stories much before and, as anything, it’s about the journey of getting to that conclusion that counts. This journey is mostly set in a forest of the future on one of the two Androzani planets featured in Peter Davison’s final story as The Fifth Doctor, The Caves Of Androzani. I don’t want to spoil too much of what happens but there are references to Narnia and Tolkien and some nice comical work featuring Bill Bailey as the Captain of a “military unit” which all make watching this one a treat.

The timeline isn’t actually screwed up in this one (which makes a change)... and makes perfect sense when the final fate of the World War 2 pilot is revealed. This does, of course, make the title of the piece something of a misnomer... but let’s be charitable. It’s all for the sake of a cheap parody of an episode title and... it is Christmas after all.

My only real grumble with this one is when Murray Gold’s score (partially new and partially tracked in from pieces written for previous episodes... as is the standard practice for modern Doctor Who scoring, it seems) had what sounded very much like a two second musical sting from one of the first two ALIEN movies tracked in to highlight a jump when The Doctor and one of his Christmas companions start their walk in the forest. I don’t know if it was an original Jerry Goldsmith sting from ALIEN or one of Jimmy Horner’s “carbon copies” from ALIENS... but it did pop me out of the story somewhat, hearing a familiar piece of scoring (like all those old cues from the show always do) and I wondered why they actually needed that specific sting in there rather than one written by the always excellent Mr. Gold. Perhaps it was to musically highlight an ALIEN reference that I just didn’t get... but somehow I don’t think so.

Either way, musical anomolies aside, this has got to be one of the best Christmas specials since... well, since The Next Doctor and it’s definitely one I look forward to watching this time next year when the, hopefully reoccurring DVD set of the next series, is released. Talking of which... just what is happening with the next series? There was no trailer for one like in recent years. Do we get one next year or not? About time Auntie Beeb made an announcement, don’t you think?