Yours Cruelly, Elvira

Cassandra Complex

Yours Cruelly, Elvira -
Memoirs Of The
Mistress Of The Dark
by Cassandra Peterson
Hachette Books ISBN: 9780306874352

Wow, what a great book. I just want to give a quick shout out here to one of those rare autobiographies that come along every now and again that remind you that there are some nice people around in this world who, you know, haven’t let the gruelling pressures of the hardships they’ve somehow had to endure turn them into complete monsters. This is just such a tome and, given that Cassandra Peterson... aka Elvira - Mistress Of The Dark... has been pretty much co-writing her own material for decades, it really shouldn’t come as any surprise that she’s managed to write a memoir as  burdened with the weight of some heavy experiences and revelations as this one is, in a witty, poignant and vastly interesting manner. And to somehow make it an absolute hoot of an entertaining book, to boot!

I first became aware of ‘Elvira’, I think, around about 1988, when I was twenty years old. I saw the movie poster being advertised in some magazine (or possibly comic... or both) and instantly, somehow, recognised the iconic ‘boobs n’ hair’ image of someone who looked like either Vampira or Vampirella (or a thrilling combination of both) being burned at the stake. Now, the IMDB doesn’t list the movie as getting a theatrical release in the UK and, while I know I had it on good old trusty VHS at the time (since upgraded twice now to both DVD and Blu Ray editions), I’m pretty sure I did see it at my local cinema over here at the time (a cinema which is, alas, now a Tesco but, still, good times were had).

It was a film which nobody seemed to have heard of at the time, which I introduced a few people to, who then also became staunch supporters of the legendary lady. I met her once and got a photo signed by her in the 90s, or possibly just into the next decade, at the old London Film And Comic Con, back in the days when it was good and not many people went (which probably explains why she never returned to do it again... I didn’t have to wade through a huge queue of pre-booked visitors to meet her at that point). I also remember buying vinyl record albums of her at around the same time and reading comics too, including a black and white, biographical comic which started off highlighting how she got scarred by life-threatening boiling water burns as a very young child (not even two years old yet, I think?).

The full story of that accident and just how lucky she was to survive it due to various things all lining up at once is almost a forewarning of the way things seemed to have happened to her over her life... at least that’s one of the things I took away from this account. She goes on to explain the way things came into being in terms of her career and opportunities much later in the book but, there’s also a lot of dark stuff she went through and she captures a lot of it for the reader as she goes, chapter by chapter, through her life.

And there’s a lot to take in as she goes from tragedy to fortune to tragedy again in small, perfectly formed installments... starting off with a dramatic opening when she is on her honeymoon and getting the call to audition for the role of a certain little ‘Horror Hostess’ for a TV station before flashing back through her memoirs, catching up with this moment a little over half the way through the book and after a bunch of amazing and, sometimes gruelling, stories.

Lots of great stuff here to unpack including her relationship with her parents and siblings, her early obsession with horror films and her love, as a young girl, of building those old Aurora model kits of Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy etc  (remember those?), her times as a ‘virgin groupie’ meeting various big bands and the bizarre time she hung out with Jimi Hendrix... to her obsessions with Elvis (who she stayed up talking to for most of a night when she was working as a showgirl in Las Vegas... a conversation which changed the course of her life), Ann Margaret, The Beatles and eventually landing her way to the role that made her fame and fortune.

On the way there are stars who were nice to her (I might mention Liza Minelli) and those who weren’t ultimately all that pleasant (I might mention Frank Sinatra and Tom Jones). And I love the way she humanises some of the celebrity people she meets by initially teasing them into the text by just their first names, so you take in what good deeds they might have done (or not), before she suddenly hits you with a second name and you realise just who it is she’s talking about. For instance, I’m not going to say who Bobby was, who pinned her boyfriend against his car because he was being abusive to her... you’ll have to read the book yourself to find out who that guy was... but it does give a solid, positive sketch of the man behind the name. I will say, though, that when she was taking acting lessons alongside two students, Lynda and Debra, who fast became friends with her... it gave me a little insight into just how Debra Winger came to be cast as Wonder Girl in Lynda Carter’s hit TV show Wonder Woman (reviewed by me here only last week).

So yeah, there are lots of celebrity stories such as hanging out in Rome in her teens and working as an extra on Fellini’s movies... but there’s also often a downside to these periods of her life, such as fleeing Rome after escaping captivity from some criminals who starved her for three days with not much expectations of surviving the experience.

And, of course, her time promoting her brand image Elvira in various shapes and forms over the years... including, of course, the two wonderful films she made and explaining how she modelled the famous Elvira wig (seriously, it took me years to twig that wasn’t her natural hair... I'm naive) on Ronnie Spector’s hairstyle. I also didn’t realise the number of films and shows various actors don’t put on their CV or, perhaps as importantly these days, the IMDB. For instance, I hadn’t a clue that she appeared as a showgirl in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever. I also need to check out another new collection of memoirs she tips the reader off to, from the lady who road managed her and which is called The Opposite Of Famous, as soon as time and money will allow.

And there’s more... lots more, including of course the now famous revelation, with the publication of this book, that she’s been living with a female lover for the last 20 years who is finally able to support her emotionally in the way her husband never could (it seems to me). So, yeah, Cassandra’s Elvira brand has had a couple of prominent bumps along the way (many of them detailed in this book) but she’s in a very strong place right now, it seems... finally getting something which approximates the happy ending she deserves.

So, if you’ve not been taking notes, I’d have to say that Yours Cruelly, Elvira - Memoirs Of The Mistress Of The Dark is a sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious but certainly informative, candid and entertaining tome... I honestly wish it was twice the size so it didn’t have to end so fast. I’d recommend this one to most people I know in a shot but, for now, until I find out the next project she’s getting involved with, I shall continue to play my iPad simulacra versions of the Elvira pinball machines and gaze up, from time to time, at the shot of her on the wall by my bed, to read the message I asked her to inscribe all those years ago (when I had to remind her it was actually a direct quote from her movie... I think she remembers it better nowadays)... Revenge Is Better Than Christmas!

Happy Halloween, Scooby Doo!

Booby Doo

Happy Halloween, Scooby Doo!
USA 2020 Directed by Maxwell Atoms
Warner Bros DVD Region 1

Warning: Zoinks! There are a few very small spoilers here.

Happy Halloween, Scooby Doo! is the latest Scooby Doo Halloween Special, taking the form of a straight-to-home video format release for this year’s spook season. I’m not sure how much of a bite Halloween has in a world which is living through the first year of the horrors of Covid-19 but I guess people can get more comfort out of made up terrors as a counter to the current, real life ones.

I have to be honest, this film would not have been on my hit list at all if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s also the latest movie featuring Cassandra Peterson as the voice of her famous creation Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark. This was a big selling point for me and was pretty much my only reason for purchasing this. Other guests include Bill Nye playing himself (who is not well known over here in the UK at all, I had to look him up) and Dwight Schultz, who I’m guessing most people will best remember as Murdock in The A Team and Barclay in Star Trek - The Next Generation.

Here, Schultz plays Jonathan Crane, aka The Scarecrow. That’s right, the super villain from Gotham City has escaped from Arkham Asylum and I was fully expecting, after the not bad Scooby Doo & Batman: The Brave And The Bold (reviewed here), a little cameo from the caped crusader himself. Alas, that doesn’t happen but the way the writers use The Scarecrow’s appearance here, as a diversionary tactic to make the audience think that he is the villain of the piece, is kind of an interesting slant. Here, instead of being the main villainous lead, he’s used almost as a Hannibal Lecter character (as he was originally presented). That is to say, he’s the one Velma goes to consult with after she figures out he’s not the one behind a reign of terror caused by monstrous, animated pumpkins which are eating and terrorising people in a small town. And then we get to see a side of Johnathan Crane that I don’t remember seeing before but, I’ll leave it up to the Batman fans out there to figure out if this is a huge deviation from the canon of the DC super villain or not. I thought it was an interesting take on the way this kind of ‘established character’ is used, however.

Elvira is, of course, wonderful... although, it’s fair to say she doesn’t have the best lines in this. I know this is for a child friendly audience but, the character doesn’t seem to be firing on all cylinders in a way although, to be fair, it’s still a pleasure to hear her and she certainly doesn’t do anything to betray the spirit of her famous Elvira personae (I met her at the London Film and Comic Con a couple of decades ago, before it got more successful and crowded... she’s a really nice person).

The story is fine with the usual twists and turns of the regular Scooby Doo’s from yesteryear. The opening credits are nicely done although, I have to say, I was somewhat shocked as to why Shaggy and Scooby were cramming their mouths full of sweets before they’d bothered to take the wrappings off but, after all, it’s a Halloween special I guess. There’s a nice homage to, I don’t know, either Wacky Races or Mad Max 2 and 4 in terms of an overlong ‘pumpkin pursuit’ vehicle chase, which I’ve heard cited as a weakness of this feature but, personally, I didn’t mind it at all. Another referential scene was supposed, it turns out, to be a reference to the first Predator movie but, heck, I assumed it was a Rambo reference so, yeah, I guess my general unfamiliarity with the first Predator film (last time I saw it was the once, on its original cinema release back in 1987) made me miss it.

Another bizarre thing which I felt should have been a reference but, I don’t think it was, was a sound effect I heard used twice which basically matched the same sound effect that you would hear when Steve Austin (as played by Lee Majors) would do anything remotely ‘bionic’ in any episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. However, the use of this sound effect seemed to just be servicing the on screen narrative and, although it would certainly make someone of my generation leap up and take note, it seems to have been used in a genuinely un-ironic manner here. Very strange.

The animation is kind of ropey but it’s not out of place with the early Scooby Doo shows, with the standard Hanna-Barbera ‘xeroxed look’ where the main objects are just moved around almost statically in an uncomplicated manner... although the lighting and colouring is less flat and more interesting in places. Although, the fact that none of the characters had white eyes and, instead, had eyes which blended with their faces, gave me a creepy vibe, for sure. I certainly didn’t love the simplified look to Elivira with the de-emphasising of her boobs but, on the other hand, her final scene with the wig reveal and... all that comes after that... was genuinely bizarre enough that I didn’t feel too cheated by the way the character was handled here. So, yeah, as far as this main, feature cartoon goes, if you’re a Scooby Doo admirer then I’d have to say Happy Halloween, Scooby Doo! is not a bad attempt at a Halloween celebration.

The extras, on the other hand, are strictly for completists only, I guess. When I heard they were three more, 20 minute Scooby Doo Halloween specials from recent years (the 1980s to five years ago), I was quite excited. I kind of stopped watching the TV show a little while ago, in the late 1970s because, frankly, Scrappy Doo and the recorded laughter tracks finally got the better of me. So what these three extras ultimately mean to me is a look into where the show headed after I was done with it. The answer to that seems to be, headed to unwatchable cartoon hell... 

 The first of the three featured, Be Cool, Scooby Doo - Halloween (from 2015), has a nice enough story but the look of the characters is hideous, with everyone looking like they stepped out of a Rugrats cartoon. The second one, the 2002 What’s New Scooby Doo? - A Scooby Doo Halloween, has closer character design to the ones I used to watch in the 1970s (and you can see the whites of their eyes, hoorah) but had a simplistic, childishly simple story and a horrible laughter track. And as for the third one, the 1988 episode of A Pup Named Scooby Doo - Ghost Who’s Coming To Dinner, well... I couldn’t even get through the full opening credits. The whole thing, with all the characters rendered into young, kiddie versions of themselves (even more so than the 2015 episode) was just too much to take and I really felt offended enough by the lows of animated history that these three shows represented, that this third banality was the straw that broke the Great Dane’s back, as far as I’m concerned. So, as far as the DVD goes (why no Blu Ray?), Happy Halloween, Scooby Doo! is certainly worth spending some time with but, don’t look at the bonus cartoons unless you want your childhood memories compromised by the depths to which the show gradually stooped.

Elvira Mistress Of The Dark

Rack 'N’ Roll

Elvira Mistress Of The Dark
USA 1998 Directed by James Signorelli
New World Pictures/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Well this is interesting. I was given this newly restored Arrow Blu Ray of Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark for Christmas and when I looked it up on the IMDB to see when I first saw it here in the UK (late 1988 or whether the UK release wasn’t until the following year) it’s not listed as being released in UK cinemas at all. Well... I can tell you now that this information is false. I saw this movie at what was my local cinema at the time although, I suspect, it probably wasn’t until sometime into 1989 as I seem to remember drooling over the adverts for this in American comics for quite a while before I got the opportunity to see this one for myself. So... surprise, surprise... sometimes the IMDB gets it wrong.

Now I actually met Elvira, aka Cassandra Peterson, maybe around twenty years ago. It was at the London Film And Comic Con they have every summer but that was in the days before it was the heavily attended, joy-killing event it is in its present incarnation. In those days you bought entry tickets on the door and, if you were there half an hour early, you’d more than likely be the first in the queue. And as for seeing the stars themselves... well it must have been slow business for these guests, I guess. There was none of this pre-buying a slot to see the celebrity... you’d just get on the end of the line of... maybe three people... and wait your turn. Nowadays, if Elvira were to return to this country, she’d have her whole day booked out, I’m sure but, those were simpler times. She wasn’t wearing her Elvira make up and I remember her as being a thoughtful and pleasant woman. I asked her if she’d make out the photo she sold to sign to me with the phrase “Revenge is better than Christmas!” and she asked me why. I reminded her that it was a line from her movie (at the time she’d only made one feature film as Elvira... but been in others as a different character and occasionally guested as Elvira in various movies and TV shows like CHIPS and The Fall Guy). I reminded her where in the movie the line was from and her response was something like... “Oh yeah, I remember now.” before dutifully signing the photo and leaving me as star struck as I’m sure I would be today if I ever met her again.

So, a pointless story perhaps but I tell it here to let you know that, despite Elvira not really being a big thing in the UK in terms of actual TV coverage like she was in the US back then... where she was pretty much a cultural phenomenon and still is as far as I’m concerned (just check out her Twitter feed)... I was certainly someone who knew who she was and I was very much aware that there was some kind of hardcore group of die hard fans for her here in the UK too. I used to buy her vinyl records of Halloween horror song collections and I especially liked the odd tracks where she sang on them herself). And I did know some other people who saw this movie in cinemas back in the day and... yeah... it was a very well liked film.

Anyway, getting back to my rewatch of the movie... this thing is still great. It’s not the hard edged horror version of Elvira that you might have been expecting from the figure who is probably one of the most recognised icons of modern American popular culture. This is due to certain studio concessions which, if you watch the fine and quite long, expanded documentary included by Arrow with this release, you’ll find out more about. That being said though, at the risk of making this sound like an American version of a Carry On film (which it kinda is, actually), the film is filled with a lot of sexual jokes and, while not exactly hard edged horror, it does have witches, a haunted house (of sorts), a magical dog and a grotesque and very unfriendly pot monster. And although it’s not a very gory film due to the ratings, there is a scene where the main supernatural villain, played wonderfully by William Morgan Sheppard (who sadly died a few weeks after my friend gave me this Blu Ray), has his forehead caved in with one of Elvira’s thrown high heels before having his hand chopped off. Of course, the hand starts crawling around after Elvira too but... that’s pretty standard stuff.

And, sexy jokes or not, the level of humour in this movie is totally the kind I love. As in they are real groaners.

For example, when Elvira learns that her recently deceased Great Aunt has left her something in her will, she comes out with the clichéd, throwaway but oh so brilliant line... “I didn’t know I had a good aunt, much less a great one.” And this film is just filled with stuff like this coming at you at a rate almost but, not quite, as fast as a Marx Brothers sketch. So when a policeman asks her, “Do you know you were doing 50 in a 25 mile per hour zone?”, her reply of “No but, if you hum it I can fake it.” is all I need to keep me smiling. Or, after hearing an insult from one of the town’s folk on her arrival in their little part of the US, the much quoted line... “Listen sister, if I want your opinion I’ll beat it out of you.” 

And, of course, the expected amount of jokes about her shapely figure are very much all over the film and, frankly, I really don’t mind this stuff in this movie because Cassandra Peterson writes or approves a lot of that material herself, so she’s really not being exploited. So, naturally, I love the line where, after accidentally dropping a cinema sign letter on her head, the romantic lead played by Daniel Greene asks her... “How’s your head?” To which Elvira replies in her quick fire fashion, “Well I haven’t had any complaints yet.”... which has got to be one of my favourite one liners in any movie and, again, if you watch the accompanying documentary, you’ll see there was a lot of talk about whether they should be letting that line into the film or not due to the potential teenage audience.

So what we have here is a fun romp of a movie with a sexually aware undercurrent and the kind of ‘horror’ atmosphere which brings to mind more the old 1960s Roger Corman does Edgar Allan Poe style pictures and, frankly, this works for me. Indeed, I believe they were trying to get Vincent Price for the role of the main villain at one point but, I don’t think they could afford him at the time.

However, the main attraction here is Elvira, aka Cassandra Peterson herself. This horror hostess character she created for television, fending off a bit of an unfair copyright law suit by Maila Nurmi aka Vampira (read my review of a book about her here), is someone who will, I’m sure, be remembered long after she has departed this mortal plain and it’s an absolute pleasure to see her starring in a vehicle made especially for her. She doesn’t break the fourth wall as much as you might think she would (although she does do it a few times) and, asides from the action, cutting dialogue and beautiful performances, the film still has a great deal going for it.

For example, there are some nice fantasy sequences and, after the opening of the movie, a cool moment where the non-diegetic rock song soundtrack accompanying Elvira on her road trip turns back into source music as she joins in with the music which has been playing throughout the montage. So yeah, the director and editors really knew what they were doing and I’m stumped as to why this one did so badly at the box office (although it did extremely well on the highly priced, lucrative rental video circuit when it was released on VHS tape a little later). I would have liked to see her do a few more movies in this series but it was not to be. She did make another Elvira movie, of course.... Elvira’s Haunted Hills... but this was over a decade after this one and it seemed to have an even more lukewarm reception as far as I remember (although, once again, I managed to see it at the cinema and... yeah... I liked this one too).

And there’s not much else for me to say about this one. If you haven’t seen Elvira - Mistress of the Dark but you know who she is and you like the jokes and sexual innuendo coming in thick and fast then this is definitely a nice little film which probably wouldn’t get made in quite the same, almost innocent in some ways, way these days. The new Arrow Blu Ray restoration looks fantastic and the documentary and the odd nice extra rounds off a great package. This one’s definitely worth a watch if you’re a fan of horror tinged comedy and this particular presentation of it by Arrow is absolutely the best version to get. An invaluable addition to anyone’s library of films.

Electric Boogaloo - The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films

Semi Golan

Electric Boogaloo - 
The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films
2014  Australia/USA/Israel/UK
Directed by Mark Hartley
Seen as part of the London Film Festival on Saturday 11th October

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. It’s really unusual to find a documentary film which hasn’t got a very specific agenda being pushed through the movie. Music or a one sided kind of attitude to the selection of footage to fit in with the film makers' ideas of what he or she wants to say is usually the standard for these kinds of affairs. I’m not saying that it’s a particularly bad thing to push an idea through a study of specific angles to push you own ideas, and there’s certainly an art to that, but it’s refreshing to come across the odd one which doesn’t seem to have too much of a personal agenda and so it is with Mark Hartley’s new film Electric Boogaloo - The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. 

The film tells the story of Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus and the meteoric rise and eventual fall of their famous Cannon company, which it seems they bought rather than started from scratch with (something I didn’t realise). I was pleased to see the first screening of this movie in this country (to my knowledge) and there was an introduction followed by a post-screening Q and A with the director which is interesting in light of the seeming lack of specific bias in the movie.

The director told us that, while the project started off as a kind of “hero” project, as he began to delve deeper and uncover more alarming professional behaviour (for want of a better term) from the dynamic duo who were mainly known for trash movies... the film took on a very different shape. That being said, I think the tone is less negative than fun and he does show many a “talking head” real life personality with conflicting reviews. I didn’t personally find the movie that negative and one of the pair’s personal assistants from that time, who happened to be an audience member but who participated a little in the Q & A, took pains to point out that, while a lot of the people who had worked with the pair in the film were quite unflattering in their comments and judgement of the two... Golan rarely, if ever, said something that negative about the people working for them.

The film starts off with a really fun filled opening credits sequence which does set the tone for the piece quite nicely and while there are many a conflicting comment on show in the film, if it could be said that the director had any kind of personal agenda on this film at all, then that would probably be to make a fun film and, given the amount of really terrible movies that got made under the Canon brand, he certainly had a lot of good, laugh inducing material to work with, it has to be said.

The film is basically just put together as talking heads intercut with clips which often support the particular agenda of the person speaking at the time but, as I said, rarely... if ever... takes sides. The talking heads include some great people too, such as Lucinda Dickey, Shabba Doo Quinones, The Boogaloo Shrimp, Franco Nero, Cassandra Peterson, Richard Chamberlain, Martine Beswick, Sybil Danning, Bo Derek, Dolph Lundgren and Alex Winter (I could go on here but it would quickly turn into a list article... and you know I rarely do those).

There are some fascinating stories on hand such as one of my personal favourite Cannon movies Breakdance (aka Breakin’ in pretty much all other countries apart from the UK) but I was very disappointed that Lucinda Dickey and her male leads really didn’t get along in real life. Which is a shame. Now I’ve always loved that first movie but never really took to the second movie, which the title of this movie obviously cribs from... Breakdance 2: Electric Boogaloo (aka Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo). That being said I was kinda pleased that the main stars of the two films also hated the second one... so that makes me feel validated somewhat. It was also good to hear Cassandra Peterson (yeah, that’s right, Elvira -Mistress Of The Dark herself) talk about her complete lack of stunt double when she was working on the King Solomon’s Mines sequel Alan Quatermain And The Lost City Of Gold. It’s not a film I’ve gotten around to seeing yet (it’s on the to watch pile, I bought them both when I found out Elvira was in one of them) but when I do I’ll definitely be watching a particular sequence with a certain amount of insight into safety issues.

There was also a lot of stuff I’d have liked to have heard more of. There were a lot of actors mentioned, for instance, who didn’t have any input into the documentary. Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone and Gene Hackman (for the Superman IV: The Quest For Peace debacle) spring to mind and, when somebody in the audience asked the director who he’d tried to get a hold of during the production of this film to talk about the Golan and Globus partnership, he did say that he’d contacted everyone and pretty much anyone who we don’t see speaking in this documentary declined. Which I think is a little telling?

I personally would have liked to have had a little window onto the nefarious financial practices the two are supposed to have indulged in to keep their company afloat and their productions going... but the director also answered another question fielding this in which he said that there was a lot more on this stuff in the original cut but that he's had to remove it for legal reasons. Which I think also says a lot.

However, there was some pretty great stuff in here and I loved the fact that the director spent some time on Lifeforce (which Hartley admitted to loving himself... something which I heartily approve) and was pleased that, to counter all the negative things people were saying about the two (and with good reason, from what I can understand... somebody I know was afraid this film might lionise Golam and Globus but it certainly doesn’t do that), he also included acclaimed director Franco Zeffirelli saying, whole heartedly, that Golam was the best producer he’d ever had. So that was kind of nice.

At the end of the day, while this film doesn’t penetrate quite as far as I would have liked (which is understandable given some of the comments of the director after the screening) it is one of those kinds of documentary films which makes up for it in sheer entertainment value. The audience I was with were absolutely lapping it up and there was a lot of laughter throughout the screening. According to the director the film is hopefully getting some kind of theatrical release from Metrodome next year and that, of course, will hopefully be followed by a home video version where some of the 45 minutes plus of deleted scenes from the movie might find a place in. If there is I’m hoping there’ll be a section on my other favourite Cannon movie, Cobra, somewhere in there. Either way though, if you’re interested in the history of film, then Electric Boogaloo - The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is another one of those compelling documentaries about a small slice of our cinematic heritage that you should definitely put on your "to watch" list. Great movie.

London Film and Comic Con 2014

The Geek Shall 
Inherit The Earth*

London Film and Comic Con 2014

It was about four years ago, not long after I started writing this blog of reviews, that I first mentioned my affection for the annual London Film and Comic Convention (and you can read that review here). Although I’m sure many of you will call me sad for saying so... it’s basically the highlight of my year. The one Saturday out of the 52 per annum which I plan my summer holidays around so I can make sure I am in London to attend. I’ve been going to this one for something like 8 - 10 years and, without fail, I always manage to do it.

Not this year though, although it wasn’t for want of trying.

Every year I get to the venue about an hour early (the show opens for regular “on the door” tickets at 11am) and either start or join the queue to buy tickets. Usually there’s around 3 - 50 people in front of me and, once they open the doors at 11am, I’m usually in and looking around my favourite stalls of knick knacks. And that’s another point I want to mention, by the way, before I go on to describe what a total fiasco this was this year... I’m not there for the celebrities. The queues for them, once you’ve bought a ticket for their own specific queue, are usually fairly lengthy and take a long time to get through... much too much time for me to be wasting queueing when there are such interesting fantasy themed goods on offer such as replica samurai swords or Buffy The Vampire Slayer knickers. In fact, the only time I queued for a celebrity at the London Film And Comic Con was the first year I started attending the event more regularly... so 8 - 10 years ago... and that was for Elvira herself, Cassandra Peterson. But that was in a time when the individual queues moved pretty fast and I was only waiting for her for about a quarter of an hour.

Last year was no exception to my usual routine but I did notice, after an hour or so, that it was getting very difficult to move around in there. I took a photo from a lounge above the cafe last year and I remember tweeting something along the lines that the organisers really did need to address the fact that the event had kind of outgrown it’s venue. It was never as popular as it was last year and it made the show less enjoyable because the geeks, who shall inherit the earth, no doubt, were out in force. You couldn’t count the number of fezzes, stormtroopers and superheroes on the fingers of any number of hands you and your friends brought with you. The sheer number of people coming to this thing and being crammed into an increasingly inadequate space, in costume or just in civvies like me, was a real problem.

This year, I did my usual thing and got up at a time best left unmentioned to arrive for the queue at Earls Court at 10am. I wasn’t expecting to have literally thousands of people in front of me. The queue, usually a relatively small number of people at best, went right around the building and also did about eight zig zags around the front area... before even getting to the back of the buildings where the main entrance to Earls Court 2 is. It was staggering. The last two times I’d seen anything like this was when I was a young boy in the early 1970s. I remember queuing for many hours to see both a Salvador Dali exhibition at the Tate Gallery (when there was only one Tate Gallery and not a whole fistful ilke there is today) and the Treasures Of Tutankhamen at the British Museum (the real ones, not the replicas which were on show over here lesss than a decade ago).

But, it was still only ten o’clock so I figured I’d still be able to get in by 11am, right? How wrong I was. To say the queue was slow moving would be an understatement. And it only got bigger and bigger after I arrived... snaking back on itself so many times that it was soon literally cascading out into the High Street. This was not good. As the day wore on, many queue companions, people I’d met there that day, had dropped out. Things were getting pretty ugly by 1pm. There was one guy dressed up as Doctor Who and he was shouting at the top of his voice to anyone that would listen that his day had been ruined. Well yeah, we were all victims here, actually, mate. All our days had been ruined and none of us, it would seem, are going to be offered any compensation by the organisers for the £6 - £30 travel costs, depending on where you were coming from, to basically go and stand in a queue all day.

The various queue stewards were bearing the brunt of the complaints quite admirably and they were clearly not to blame for the lack of organisation from the people running the show... but they were really left in the dark, it seems to me, on how to handle the sheer numbers of people out in force this year and, I can hardly blame them for not having an organised response.

I blame the organisers.

If I could see this coming last year... why couldn’t they?

After a while the building became over capacity... that is to say, it was pretty much illegal to let any more people into the place until various people had left. So they just kept closing the doors. Things were getting ugly. It was looking like it would be an unruly but immaculately costumed mob bearing pitchforks and lightsabres at some point. I chatted with various people, some of them cosplayers, some of whom you can see in the photos at the top of this post, and many of them were very patient people and, like me, most of them gave up at some point in the day.

Now the day wasn’t a total loss for me in that I usually get one of the guys who runs a stall at the Camden and Westminster Film Fairs to order in a load of fairly unusual stuff for me, so it’s worth my while going. Halfway through the day he managed to get a break and brought the stuff he’d got in for me out to the queue so I could buy it from him there... so that was really good of him. However, the reports of what was going on in the building were less than encouraging. Apparently, the place was packed to bursting with nobody being able to really get to look at the stalls they wanted to because everywhere it was all at something of a standstill... human traffic jams were all over the place, it seemed. And, when I inquired if business for that day was fairly good for his stall, he basically said that it was terrible. Everyone was there, it would seem, for the celebrities and those that could manage to claw their ways through to the stalls were not buying, by the sound of it. They were blowing all their money on the celebrity photo shoots. Not too encouraging.

So there we all were. An angry bunch of, mostly, humans. To paraphrase a popular sci-fi TV show of the 1970s, we were “a ragtag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest... searching for the entry tills of London Film & Comic Con."

I stuck it out for as long as I felt I was able to in that queue. I’ve had a terrible cold all week and, on top of that, I’ve been getting some problems with my feet which means I can’t be on them for too many hours without getting some chronic pain. So I had someone save my place and I scoped out the rest of the queue. Well it looked like there was at least another couple of hours to go and I wasn’t going to be getting in any time soon... let alone the thousands behind me, poor things. My heart went out to an old lady with a walking stick who must have been in her sixties at the very least. She was on her own and must have been in the queue longer than I had been. Ditto for a blind guy in the queue who only had his guide dog to keep him company... I couldn’t believe they were letting these people queue. These people needed to be fast tracked inside somehow, I think. That was just plain wrong.

At 2.30pm, after I had been queueing for around four and a half hours, I called it a day. Things weren’t getting any better and the human bladder can only last so long in the sweltering heat. I’d not eaten since my breakfast at about 6am and my stomach felt like it was folding in on itself. So I left the queue and gave up this year. I was not best pleased about wasting my entire day on this exercise with no real updates or organisational set up to be able to cope with these numbers. This was a really bad idea.

When I got home I jumped on the message board for the London Film & Comic Con to see what people were saying. It wasn’t exactly a love fest on there and there were some echoes about the bad organisation of the event which pretty much mirrored what I’d been hearing from people in the queue all day. One person on the board tried to defend various issues by saying that people who were in the queue should have planned to bring water with them etc but, seriously, if we knew that it was going to be packed out with at least ten to fifteen times the amount of people who usually show up for these things, then we certainly would have.

Frankly, to end this post with the kind of sentiments that I was hearing from everyone’s mouth in the queues.... the organisation of this event and the lack of a viable, or at least visible, “reflex action” contingency plan to what was, from very early on in the day, a big problem with overcrowding, was a complete joke. This is not how you react to an event like this if more people turn up than you were expecting. It was a travesty and I bet half of the geeks in the queues could have done a much better job at identifying these kinds of problems months before they happened. I’m not at all happy about the way things were handled here... and this definitely wasn’t the highlight of my year in 2014. Which is a real shame.

*I use the term geek in the modern accepted parlance, which I personally don’t accept but am doing so because it suits my title pun. Please remember that the term geek is actually a reference to a carny act of a particular style of performer who would bite the heads off of live chickens. That’s what geek really means. But I’ll let it slide for this post only.