Tales Of The Shadowmen 16 - Voire Dire

 

 

If I Were A Richleau

Tales Of The Shadowmen
Volume 16 - Voire Dire
Edited by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier
Black Coat Press ISBN: 978-1612279107

For this very short look at the sixteenth volume in the Tales Of The Shadowmen collections, Voire Dire, I am once again about 16 months late in reviewing it. This is because of the December publication dates which leave me a year behind on these (I like to read them over the Christmas season). And, like all of them, this latest selection of short tales of famous fictional characters teaming up or crossing paths with one another is a bit of a hit and miss affair. For me, this year, it’s rather more of a miss but, well... we all have our favourites.

Of the fourteen stories that make up this year’s anthology, I will single out a few of which I was somewhat entertained by. The Peculiar Cats Of The Sea Of Dreams by Mathew Baugh is something which I would have found dull had it not been for my re-reading of the complete fiction of H. P. Lovecraft last year (reviewed here). I was quite up for it now, though, as a variety of characters are assisted by Randolph Carter in the dream kingdom in which he is known to be found... along with yet another incident with those powerful, battling cats which often come to the aid of their friend.

It’s often the case that I am most entertained by the stories about characters I know nothing of and I don’t know who the main protagonists from at least three sources in Nathan Cabaniss’ story Rage Of Terror are... so perhaps that’s why I enjoyed that one so much. I was, of course, familiar with the main antagonist of that story, as Fantômas makes his first (but by no means his last) appearance in this volume. It was also nice to spot a very young Kojak as a background character rookie cop (given his first lollipop in one of his two throw away appearances here) and also how the tale turned into an alternative origin story for Batman.

There’s a nice Rouletabbille tale by Martin Gately, which serves as a sequel/finale to some others which have appeared sporadically in the Tales Of The Shadowmen series and also a nice futuristic sequel story to one in another volume by Nigel Malcolm where, in a world modelled after Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner, The Nyctalope and Sexton Blake hack wall street and offer an exit from under their foes for the Frankenstein monster and its wife, the replicant Rachel from the aforementioned film. There’s even a nice moment in this tale where we find out the sad, future fate of the source of Doc Savage’s gold.

Captain Nemo appears in two tales... one by Travis Hiltz opposite characters such as Captain Haddock (from the TinTin graphic albums) and the Dread Pirate Roberts (from The Princess Bride?) and another, much more interesting one which kind of breaks the rules of appearing in a volume of these specific collections in that it only features one set of characters. I’m guessing that they needed a story to make up the space for this volume because its also a tale which has been published before in a different collection. This one, by Jean-Pierre Laigle purports to be (and of course it’s not) a formerly unpublished chapter from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and it involves the good captain telling one of his new guests of the time that the Nautilus was teleported by accident out of the ruins of Atlantis and into deep space... and how the Captain managed to get himself, his crew and his vessel back to the safety of the waters of Earth.

There’s an interesting story by Joseph Gibson where The Falcon from the 1940s, set in the 1960s and fully aware of his ‘fictional’ on screen exploits, teams up with his brother, among others, to take on Fantômas but, I was somewhat confused by the whole affair because, though it was somewhat entertaining, it’s also a fact that The Falcon’s older brother met his death in one of the earliest movies and his brother took over. What the George Sanders version is doing still alive to seek the assistance of the Tom Conway version (who was also Sanders brother in real life) is anybody’s guess.

Two more I’ll mention... both somewhat problematic for different reasons.

One of these is the very short story The Replacement by Xavier Mauméjean. In it, Bruce Wayne goes to a meeting with Doc Savage and The Shadow to seek their blessing at the start of his crime fighting career. On the way out from his meeting in the Empire State Building, he bumps into Britt Reid (The Green Hornet) and Kato, who then go up to the 86th Floor for, presumably, a similar meeting and, I have to say, I really didn’t understand the implications of some of the comments made at this meeting.

The last one I’ll specifically mention is The Stone of Solomon by David L. Vineyard. This is an exciting tale of John Silence teaming up with Dennis Wheatley’s Duc de Richleau character but, alas, the regular introduction to the story tips its hat that the version of Richleau present for the majority of the story is not who he seems. Since the reveal at the end of the short is very protracted and teased out, one wonders why the writer should have bothered when we know which character the story is supposed to be about in the tale and that, since he’s not mentoned once in the narrative until the end of the story, it’s obviously him masquerading as Richleau in this one.

And that’s about it for Tales Of The Shadowmen 16 - Voire Dire. More characters abound and cross paths... some of whom I know very little such as Darkman and Gordon Gekko (I’ve not seen their respective movies) and others I am more familiar with such as Arsene Lupin or Anne Rice’s vampire character Lestat. There’s also a very entertaining and thorough version of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Jane Greystoke (formerly Jane Porter before she married Tarzan) and even a couple of relatives of famous characters, such as the sons of Professor Challenger and Robur The Conquerer.

Actually, I guess I was about 50/50 with this volume which, I guess is not a bad batting average considering the number of writers and the considerable number of character appearances and references which are scattered among the tales. Once again, I’ll look forward to receiving what would have been the December 2020 edition this coming Christmas release and hopefully, fingers crossed, get around to sharing my thoughts with you on that one in about a year from now.

Frankenstein

Strickfadenmageddon!

Frankenstein
USA 1931 Directed by James Whale
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Okay so... next up on my Universal Horror rewatch list is James Whale’s Frankenstein, which would eclipse even Tod Browning’s Dracula from the same year and re-enforce the idea that these brand new motion picture spectacles focusing on the, as yet unnamed, genre of ‘horror’ can really bring in a lot of box office take for the studio. So this one was rushed into production with Robert Florey originally scheduled to direct, along with new Dracula star Bela Lugosi as the monster. After some twenty minutes of, sadly lost, test footage of Lugosi in a quite different make up as the monster, the actor turned the job down which, considering what shape the script was in at the time, wasn’t necessarily something you can blame him for but it was certainly a missed opportunity and rocketed Boris Karloff to fame when the final choice of director for the film, James Whale, was brought in and spotted Karloff in the canteen.

After some gruelling evenings of various make up tests with studio monster make up genius Jack Pearce, Karloff was ready. One of Karloff’s contributions to the make-up came by way of a dental bridge in one of his cheeks, which he was able to take out to leave a hollowed out side to his face, something which Pearce accentuated with his brushes. That being said... the haunting make up from this film never looked the same on Karloff in the sequels and one of the contributing factors to that is that, due to his new found fame, popularity and success that this role and others subsequently brought him (in his mid 40s, after already having made over 80 films in Hollywood in minor roles), he was able to afford to get his teeth fixed up properly and so he couldn’t repeat the same trick twice for his subsequent roles as the monster in The Bride Of Frankenstein (1935) and Son Of Frankenstein (1939). Indeed, Karloff’s name wasn’t even included in the opening credits of the first movie as he was just left with a question mark where his name should be as “The Monster........?”, just as Elsa Lanchester would have the same treatment in the opening credits of the first sequel. His name was, however, obviously restored for the end credits... ‘a good cast is worth repeating’ as Universal pictures of that period often used to say at the end. Although the typeface they chose for certain words here use these terrible, sideways versions of the letter ‘s’ which I can never get used to.

The film begins with a mirror of something from another film which people haven’t been able to see for about 88 years and which is now deemed lost to time, alas. I’m talking about the lost footage from the 1931 film Dracula (which I reviewed here) in which Edward Van Sloan, who played Van Helsing, came out and gave little monologue to calm the audience down after the picture had finished. It’s a shame that this footage that has never turned up since the first release but Whale, or his studio bosses, chose to open Frankenstein in exactly the same way. This gives it some continuity in terms of Universal trying to create some horror branding in a way... although they possibly didn’t know it yet. So we once more have Edward Van Sloan, who plays Dr. Waldman in this production, come out from behind some curtains and do a little pre-credits speech to warn the ‘faint of heart’ and sensitive souls in the audience of what they are about to see. Of course, by now and after the roaring success of Dracula, this is as much about showmanship as it is about anything else but it’s a nice moment before we go into some opening titles (where Mary Shelley is billed, unbelievably, as Mrs. Percy B. Shelley) and the film starts proper.

The film opens with the end of a funeral with Henry Frankenstein (not Victor as in the original novel) played by Colin Clive and his hunchbacked assistant Fritz played by Dwight Frye, who was so brilliant as Renfield in Dracula, looking on from behind cover and ready to rob the grave in the aftermath for Henry’s experiments. Clive was, in fact, a direct descendent of Clive of India and even acted in a film four years later about his ancestor although, bizarrely, Ronald Coleman actually played the famous Clive. Colin Clive, however, had his own problems and struggled with alcoholism which would lead to complications and help kill him just six years after he filmed Frankenstein (and two years after he reprised his role for the sequel).

Once the mourners are gone we have Frankenstein and Fritz digging up the body and the whole sequence from the funeral to the finish of the scene is a strangely long and protracted affair, taking time to build the atmosphere over many minutes where the later Universal Horrors of the 1940s, which were admittedly more B movies, were as likely to do this kind of set up with visual shorthand. Thanks to film historian Rudy Behlmer on one of the wonderful commentary tracks provided on this latet Blu Ray Legacy Edition (the other is by Sir Christopher Frayling) for pointing out that, with a statue of death present in the background, we have Henry Frankenstein literally shovelling the soil from the grave (amplified with a microphone hidden below) and, literally, throwing dirt in the face of death, via this tombstone statue. It’s a nice comment on Frankenstein’s target of facing down death and bringing life, albeit in monstrous fashion, into the world and, given the placing of the statue and the obvious choice to literally fling the dirt in this particular direction, I think it’s more than likely that Whale or one of the actors probably introduced this concept on the day of shooting and were more than aware of this visual metaphor they were creating.

Following this scene, as Frankenstein and Fritz are wheeling the corpse home, they come across an executed man (or dummy) on a gibbet and Fritz is told to cut him down to add to the good professor’s stock of cadavers and Frye deliberately plays Fritz as nervous and jumpy in the face of all things to do with death... presumably so that in one of the following sequences, when he drops the jar containing the ‘normal brain’, we believe he really is startled and jumping at his own shadow as a bumping sound causes him to lose grip on the jar.

So we come to that scene and here we meet, for the second time, Edward Van Sloan teaching students in his medical college about human biology and specifically about the difference between a ‘normal’ and ‘criminal’ brain and, this is exactly how his jars containing the two brains are, hilariously, labelled up... ‘Normal Brain’ and ‘Criminal Brain’. After the class has finished, Fritz goes down to take the ‘Normal Brain’ but is startled, smashes it and instead absconds with the ‘Criminal Brain’ as a replacement... thus robbing the obvious innocence of the resulting creature and rendering his actions somewhat more fateful in the final analysis. It should perhaps be pointed out that this scene was not in the original novel and neither was Fritz, who was a character invented for some of the many stage versions of the play, one of which this film, like Dracula before it, was based on as opposed to the first version of the source material. That being said, and again thanks to Behlmer for this piece of info, the distinction between the ‘normal’ and ‘criminal’ brain is not made in the stage plays and is therefore a completely new invention for the film. Which is kind of interesting, I think, given its implications.

Okay, so after this we meet Mae Clark as the future Mrs. Frankenstein and her bizarre love triangle person Victor, played by John Boles, a relationship which is almost completely forgotten about for most of the rest of the movie (there’s a reason for this, I suspect and I’ll get back to it later). They decide, along with Frankenstein’s father played by Frederick Kerr and Edward Van Sloan as young Frankenstein’s former teacher, to go out to Henry’s forbidden lab which Baron Frankenstein, Henry’s father, refers to as being in a windmill. This is kinda interesting because it’s not.. its a big watchtower but it was originally meant to have been a windmill and, when the monster ‘returns home’ with Henry at the end of the movie, it is actually to a windmill. So this was possibly overlooked and left in the script at this point in the filming. It’s also mentioned about Henry Frankenstein’s “insane desire to create life” and it says something, I think, about him and the long line of ‘creation mad’ scientists who came after him because, as I always say, they could have a lot more fun creating life in the old fashioned way.

So the various sets in the watchtower look, to me, like they were recycled from Dracula, including the big staircase that Dracula flung Renfield down at the end and, I think, must have been used and recycled from production to production a lot at Universal. As were the wonderful electric gizmos invented by electrician/hobbyist/tinkerer Kenneth Strickfaden, who would build these things as a hobby and, before he knew it, was doing a lucrative business hiring them out to organisations like Universal for their ‘crazy and sparkly lab equipment’ sets. Certainly they are reused, probably along with half the sets, in the Flash Gordon serials which I so love and cherish. The watchtower interiors also seem to have learned somewhat of a lesson from German Expressionism too, with distorted angles to windows and walls and twisted shadows drawn in with light. It doesn’t get to ‘the full Caligari’ as it were in terms of dominating the screen like it does, quite wonderfully, in Son Of Frankenstein in 1939 but... there’s more than a suggestion of it here and it surely works well to building the almost gothic atmosphere of some of the scenes.

During the creation scene we have lines like “Now I know what it feels like to be God” which were cut in some states and completely removed on later re-releases by the more organised censorship board due to being blasphemous. I'll get onto a consequence of one of the cuts made to this film a little later on.

Karloff’s cadaver, which reanimates at the end of the sequence, has a bandaged up head so the audience are unable to see what the creature looks like yet. When he does enter in another scene shortly after, it’s a really unusual entrance and, though it possibly looks a little clunky by today's standards, it must have been something in terms of an audience in 1931 watching it without having seen much in this newly created genre in the ‘talkies’ before. We hear the sound of Karloff’s footsteps and then cut to a shot of the door frame with Karloff pushing open the door as he walks in backwards. He then slowly turns to camera and we finally get a look at that iconic make-up. Then we have two closer shots of his face cut together in quick succession, getting closer and really putting that visage ‘in the face’ of the audience. And the film is full of interesting staging and editing like this. For example, in an earlier scene where Henry asks his three guests if they really want to go into his laboratory, instead of a long shot of them responding, we get three separate close ups of each one looking to the right of the camera and nodding. A very long and drawn out way of doing things which I don’t think you’d catch being done in the same way nowadays.

Okay so I’m not going through the whole movie blow by blow here and you probably almost certainly know the story but there are some nice shot set ups and ways of doing things like the above dotted throughout the movie. Whale’s fondness for dollying from one room to the next via a cutaway section is in evidence at certain points and there’s a wonderful 'two shot' where Karloff is chasing Frankenstein around the rotating inner mechanism of the windmill and you see both of the actors framed in the little rotating rectangles made by the path of said mechanism, one after the other... almost like the director was trying to remind us of the look of an old Zoetrope.

The chase scenes at the end, around mountains which are definitely shot in an interior set, are both magnificent looking but, alas, also unfortunate in that the cyclorama which depicts the clouds in the sky has a lot of wrinkles on it and these are very noticeable... as if the sky was just wallpaper stuck on and it had dried out and started to peel. Which it kinda was, I guess. Of course, various high definition DVDs and now this Blu Ray have made that more apparent to viewers as the years go on and as our technology gets, in some ways, more refined. Still, if you like the film enough I’m sure you can turn a blind eye to this kind of thing.

What the censors for the subsequent re-release versions a few years later couldn’t turn a blind eye too... in addition to the religious iconigraphy and the blasphemy mentioned earlier, was the shot of Frankenstein’s monster running out of daisies to throw in the lake... so he innocently picks up the young girl he’s playing with and throws her in, accidentally drowning her. And this is a nice thing to show just how stupid censorship is because, sometimes, what you cut out makes things worse. I’ve mentioned this before about when they used to slice out the protracted eye gouging scene in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters (reviewed here) in this country. It’s such a rubbish effect that when you see the splinter of wood slowly poke the eye out, it really doesn’t look real but, when the actual special effect is cut out, what you imagine is much worse than the actual reality. Well the same thing happened with Frankenstein. When the little girl’s demise is cut after the daisy throwing scene and she turns up shown dead later, what the audience imagines could have happened to her is far worse and, of course, is something else which takes away from the childish naivete of the central creature. Did he rape her? Strangle her? What happened? Thankfully we now have a fully restored print of the movie we can enjoy at home.

And that’s about all I have to say about Frankenstein other than, perhaps, two more quick points...

One, that secondary love interest. It’s made even more apparent when Henry leaves his fiance in the ‘care’ of her friend Victor. Frankenstein was meant to die but the studio changed their mind later and an epilogue was shot with a stand in for Colin Clive who is glimpsed in the next room recovering from his wounds. So that’s this additional Victor character done with and he doesn’t turn up, as far as I remember, even once in the sequel.

The other thing I wanted to say was that, when I said Karloff’s make-up was iconic... I meant just that. There were three previous movie productions of the story before this but it’s this one with Karloff in Jack Pearce’s make-up that is the most imitated and best remembered... it’s influence is beyond measure but, think about what the first thing that comes into your head when you hear the name Frankenstein (who was, indeed, named after his creator in the stage version on which this was based). It’s something you don’t forget and also, although the creature was fully articulate in speech in the original novel, it wasn’t until the second movie that the creature got some, basic, speech and intellect shown. Something which was jettisoned again by the time of the next film.

Frankenstein, like the unforgettable monster with its exaggerated walk (half created by built up boots and boards incapacitating joints), is a classic of its kind and if you’ve never seen this movie and some of its sequels then you are missing out. Personally, I think the next two films in the series are even better than this one but it doesn’t diminish the sheer brilliance of this first film and if you’ve not imbibed you should maybe take a look. There’s a reason why we’re all still talking about these classic Universal monsters after all this time.

Tales Of The Shadowmen

The Shadows Know...

Tales Of The Shadowmen
Edited by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier

Okay, so it’s time I try to finally make right something which has been on my mind since not too long after I started this blog review site. Long term, regular readers will probably know of my two Christmas book rituals, which have been celebrated in reviews on this blog every year apart from the last two, when the two authors concerned didn’t write any new books in their respective series. I’m talking about my annual Christmas week tradition of reading first, the newest release from Patricia Cornwell of her latest Scarpetta story, followed by the latest Temperance Brennan mystery, as written by Kathy Reichs. However, there’s actually a third Christmas book reading ritual I have every year and, each year I put off reviewing it because I’m always exactly one book behind in the order of the releases and I always figure I’ll start off with an overview review of the current volumes to date. The reason being that the newest volume in this specific series, which is an annual short story collection called Tales Of The Shadowmen plus whatever the latest volume’s subtitle is, are released in December each year. Shipping being what it is, I always ask for the previous year’s volume the following Christmas. This is still the case and I need to break that cycle soon, I guess.

And this is my way of doing it... by getting the overview out of the way so I can start reviewing the individual volumes as I receive them each year without having to reintroduce the concept of this series in such a detailed way each time.

So, yeah, here we go.

 I discovered these books around about 11 or 12 years ago, I think it was. I’d heard the names of Jean-Marc Lofficier and his wife Randy before because they used to be associated with some Doctor Who guides I used to read back in the 1980s. I think they have handled a lot of different franchised and individual science-fiction and fantasy projects over the years and Black Coat Press, a French imprint with an English translated equivalent, is one of those projects.

So what, or who, are The Shadowmen... well the term originally derives as a collective name for various French characters from past literature who are revived by a number of various writers for these collections... except it’s more than that. So initially, we’re talking about famous characters, some of whom are more familiar to French readers than British ones I suspect... and we’re talking about The Black Coats, Fantomas, Judex, Arsene Lupin, Irma Vep, Josephine Balsamo, The Musketeers, various Jules Verne characters, The Nyctalope, Rouletabille and so on and so forth. However, these characters are, in the parlance of the youngsters of today, mashed up by the various contributing writers of these collections... not just with each other but with many other fictional characters from around the world. So you will have two or more characters from various completely different literature sources, often a lot of heroes or villains and their supporting characters, mixed together in brand new stories.

So yeah, add in to the mix characters like Batman, Sherlock Holmes, Madame Atomos, Harry Dickson, Sâr Dubnotal, Sexton Blake, Bulldog Drummond, Fu Manchu, The Green Hornet, The Shadow (an inspiration for young Bruce Wayne in one tale), Hercule Poirot, King Kong, Solomon Kane, John Carter, the Frankenstein Monster, Nosferatu, various Bond villains, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Babar the Elephant... the list goes on and on. They’re up to volume 15 now already (I just finished reading volume 14) and  there are many different heroes crossing over with each other. Heck, there's even a very short story where Barbarella abducts Captain Kirk in order to have sex with him, if memory serves.

And there’s quite a few writers involved in these... sometimes very famous ones such as Michael Moorcock or Kim Newman. Heck, Kim Newman’s Angels Of Music, which are a kind of 19th Century group of female characters operating as the ‘Charlies Angels’ of their time and run by Eric, The Phantom of The Opera as their Charlie figure, was originally instigated in the pages of a couple of stories from these collections (I believe Mr. Newman’s novel from a year or so ago, detailing their adventures, is an expansion and continuation of these original tales).

Now the possible disappointing thing about these, if you’re new to them, is that these characters don’t all link up in a single continuity like Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold-Newton family tree. So story consequences in one won’t often, unless it’s a continuation of a previous story, spill over into other stories involving some of the same characters. For the most part these are stand alone stories with the odd serialised story (some book length serials are published in sections in consecutive volumes) and mostly should be enjoyed for the flights of fancy they are. Many times a family tree connection is established by a writer but it won’t always hold true for another story. So, for instance, in volume 14 there is a Honey West adventure where she takes on the main arch nemesis from The Wild, Wild West. This makes sense within that tale (where she also meets Gene Roddenberry and Julius Schwartz) because in that particular continuity the writer establishes that both James West from The Wild, Wild West and, also, Herbert West (Lovecraft’s re-animator!) are descendants of hers. That lineage probably won’t be present in any future Honey West tales in the series however, unless it’s one written by the same writer. So, if you can forget the possibility of a bigger, over reaching continuity within the collections, you can get a lot of enjoyment out of them.

Of course, by their very nature, depending on whether the reader finds each writer’s style entertaining or not, all the volumes are a bit hit and miss in their overall make up but, for me at least, they have become more hit than miss as the series of volumes has grown over time.

Actually, a big part of the enjoyment of these things is that the various references and character identities are not always given away up front, from either the writers themselves or from the Lofficier’s, who usually write a brief intro to each story. So it does also become a game of reference spotting a lot of the time and sometimes the amount of references can be quite dense... I remember a story from one of the early volumes mixing up various Spaghetti Western characters with Shaw Brother’s style kung fu action references and it’s sometimes a bit difficult to spot all the different props and people in these tales. Luckily for anybody reading along and playing that kind of game with the text, there is usually a ‘cast list’ for each story given at the end of the book, listing the main characters, supporting characters and references plus the original creator they are credited too. Very useful if you miss out on any. So, for example, I may have realised that the Roger Delgado incarnation of The Master from Doctor Who was taking on Professor Quatermass in one story but, there was probably a lot more going on than at first met the eye and the post story ‘dramatis personae’ can sometimes help clear up the odd references that litter these tales.

So there you have it, you’ve probably got more of a flavour of this ongoing series of books now and, frankly, if you are a fan of period set fantasy, science fiction, horror or crime fiction (or preferably all of those genres) then you’ll probably find at least a few tales in each volume that you’ll have a good time with. I’ve never seen these books sold in even specialist shops like, for instance, Forbidden Planet but you can usually get them from places like Amazon and, of course, the Black Coat Press themselves at http://www.blackcoatpress.com, which is a website which really is worth checking out. If you click on their catalogue link you’ll find a list of intriguing titles (not just Tales Of The Shadow men) where you can get English translations of hitherto rare or out of print science fiction, horror, crime and fantasy which you just can’t get form anywhere else, plus a load of new stuff too. Their new releases are always a bit of an eye opener (and often of stuff I’ve never heard of) so just reading about their release schedule and existing back catalogue can be an education in itself, sometimes.

So there you have it... Tales Of The Shadowmen and Black Coat Press... something you may want to get into if interpenetrating, famous and not so famous characters are your thing. Definitely worth a recommendation and definitely worth a look. And now this ghost of a review is finally committed to reality (at least in the digital realm), I can maybe review Volume 15 with a clear conscience when I get around to reading it. Maybe even before Christmas this time.

The Monster Movies of Universal Studios

Universal Challenge

The Monster Movies
of Universal Studios
by James L. Neibaur
R & L ISBN: 978-1442278165

It’s a surprising but no belittling a factor that, in his introduction to The Monster Movies of Universal Studios, James L. Neibaur quickly explains that he has eschewed various of what I would personally say are still very much candidates for the title in favour of, purely, going through the various classic monster movies from that studio which have seen numerous releases over the past twenty years on DVD and Blu Ray and which are nowadays known to fans of that particular sub-genre as The Legacy Collection. Nothing wrong with this, of course and it certainly provides a service for those who are discovering these films in this fashion for the first time... what it does mean, however, is that films that I would personally also consider part of that loose canon... films such as The Mole People, It Came From Outer Space, Tarantula and The Monolith Monsters... especially in light of the fact of the inclusion within these pages of the Creature From The Black Lagoon cycle (not to mention three of the Abbot And Costello crossover movies), are not covered by this book. That’s okay though... perhaps we’ll get a companion volume at some point.

The book starts off by briefly reminding the reader of the climate that brought about the enthusiastic pursuit and production, originally by Carl Laemmle Jr, of these horror vehicles that assaulted the public in the early to mid 1930s and then once again throughout the 1940s in various spin offs and sequels. The success of each movie (sometimes saving Universal Studios from bankruptcy) and the downward plummeting budgets of these movies during the 1940s is subsequently recorded as each film is looked at in chronological order of release. What we have here is a chapter for each film in the recently released (and rereleased on Blu Ray) Legacy collections... so the Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, Mummy, Invisible Man and Creature From The Black Lagoon characters all have separate entries for each and every movie in their respective cycles lasting maybe 7 or 8 pages per piece. Also included is my personal favourite werewolf movie, Werewolf Of London, along with the somehow non-horror movie She-Wolf Of London (I’ve always puzzled why this psychological thriller is included in these sets since there’s no actual monster in the movie at all) and the three Abbot and Costello films... Meet Frankenstein, Meet The Invisible Man and Meet The Mummy.

Each chapter contains a look at how the cast and crew were selected for the upcoming project, followed by a synopsis of the film and a look at how the film fared both critically and at the box office (often two polar opposites when these things were lurking at the cinema). So, for example, in the section on the first Dracula film, he talks about how it was refined down by various writers from the Balderston reboot of Stokers stage version of the novel (as opposed to the novel, on which hardly any of Dracula’s cinematic excursions have been based on) and also talks about Lugosi’s involvement in acquiring the rights from Stoker’s widow, with his subsequent lobbying and accepting of far less money than his fellow actors to secure the role which he had already made his own on stage. Neibaur goes on to make the point about the way the narrative is focused more on the story of the title character as opposed to adding in more significant back story for some of the supporting characters like Lucy, Mina and Dr. Seward, as a more modern take on the material might pursue.

For each film the author makes comments about the stylistic sensibilities of the movie in regard to placement of camera and general cinematography and, sometimes, brings up some interesting facts or observations that I was unaware of (even though I’ve read and watched a lot of documentary material on these films over the years). For instance, in the case of the original script of Cagliostro, The King Of The Dead, which was revised and evolved until it became The Mummy, I was unaware that in that original script, Cagliostro was a 3000 year old magician who remains alive by injecting himself with nitrates. And it’s also interesting to know just a little more detail in the story behind the original make-up for Werewolf Of London, where make-up artist extraordinaire Jack Pearce and actor Henry Hull clashed on how much the make-up would hide the face of the actor... with Hull going above Pearce in the food chain to get his way via the consequences of the original make up to certain things indicated in the script. It’s also interesting to note that when the studio successfully rebooted a werewolf character via The Wolf Man and its subsequent sequels, Pearce went back to his original make-up designs for Lon Chaney Jrs make-up. By the way, in case you are in any doubt, I most certainly disagree with the author’s insistence that Werewolf Of London is somehow inferior to The Wolf Man... not a bit of it.

Another little gem I don’t think I remembered or, perhaps, didn’t know but which this book brought to light is the fact that Son Of Frankenstein was being written/finished on a day by day basis as it was being shot... so I need to go back to that movie sometime soon and see if I can find any plot points or continuity moments which betray that fact. He also talks about the scene in The Mummy’s Tomb where the couple is ‘making out’ in the car but are disturbed by the sound of the film’s main antagonist going past as being the first time this had happened in the horror genre... I’m not 100% sure on that myself because there are so many films from the silent era which are lost to us but I’m happy to take him at his word until other evidence comes to light. That being said, I suspect that one of the later Mummy movies in this cycle may be the first cinematic instance of a living dead person rising up out of the earth but... I’ll get on to that when I eventually get around to rewatching that movie for this blog.

Another interesting point the author makes is that blending comedy with horror was not a new concept by the time of the 1949 movie Abbot And Costello Meet Frankenstein and his musings on various of the films traces the decline of the monster series', noting which films had lower budgets than each previous, why that was the case (in some instances... like the special effects budget being slashed because more money for effects were needed for a film being shot simultaneously) and also takes note, I believe, of the declining running times as the various films emerged.

He also highlights a lot of the errors in these films such as the horrible continuity problems with the time placements and, sometimes, location settings for The Mummy movies... and its kind of refreshing to hear someone else acknowledging those. He goes on to point out that the footprints in the snow of the presumably naked Claude Rains in The Invisible Man are of shoes and not feet so... yeah, I can’t believe the studio went with that solution, to be honest.

That being said... I believe the author is not above making a few errors himself. For instance, when he talks about the Frankenstein monster as being... “... a legend that most audiences knew due to the popularity of Mary Shelley’s nineteenth-century novel.”... then surely that implies she merely popularised an already existing character, rather than fashion the whole story from clay as I believe is the case. Also, he notes that the stage version of Frankenstein gave The Monster the same name as his creator. Really? I’ve not heard that before and would have thought that, if that were the case and it such a bone of contention for people who love this character... that he is often confused with the scientist who created him... then this would be better known.

However, a few 'possible' errors do not kill a book and, although I knew a lot of the stuff covered here before, much of it gleaned from documentaries and commentary tracks, this book wins out because it is a handy guide to the ‘Universal Legacy’ monsters where all the information is gathered into one place and, also, because there is some stuff I didn’t know about in here and, yeah, that always makes a book invaluable. If you are a stranger to the movies covered in this book then I would definitely cite this tome as being a great starting place to jump on for a flavour of what these movies are all about... although it is, of course, no substitute for watching the actual films themselves. For die hard fans, though, this book is also a nice thing to have on hand to look up the quick, odd fact for when this kind of subject matter comes up in conversation, for sure. The Monster Movies of Universal Studios is a book which belongs on the shelf of any admirer of the genre and a big thank you to the coolest friend who bought me a copy of this one for my birthday. It was much appreciated.

Penny Dreadful Series 3

Lady And The Vamp

Penny Dreadful Series 3
2016 USA Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers.

And so I finally got around to watching Series 3 of Penny Dreadful and I’m happy to say that this third trip, with the surviving characters, is a lot more interesting than I thought it was going to be. At the end of the last season I expressed concerns that the continuation of the show would not be up to the high standards of the previous incarnations due to all the characters splitting up and going their separate ways. However, rather than giving us stand alone episodes of each one, as I’d expected, the majority of the series has each set of characters in scenes all crosscut in the same episodes.

So, as each character has their own adventures we can start to join the dots and see how one part of the story affects another and get a taste of how, when the inevitable reunion of characters happens (to some extent), the people are still very much caught up in one single minded cause. That cause, in this one, being the advent of the ‘end of days’ ushered in by Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) herself. And, I have to say that, beyond my expectations, this one really works well and I enjoyed this third series almost as much as I did the first.

We also have a bevvy of new characters, four of which... Dr. Jekyll, Dracula, Renfield and Dr. Seward... are ripped from the pages of British, gothic literature and a few others who... well, who are not. We have Perdita Weeks as the extremely cool ‘hunter warrioress’ character Catriona Hartdegen... although she’s introduced rather late in the story, almost like the writers are making her ready to become a regular in a fourth series although, as it turns out, a fourth season was not on the cards. We also have Dr. Seward, who has been recast as a lady and who is played by Patti LuPone. She is a problematic character in that she is played by the same actress who played Miss Ives’ witch friend/instructor in Series 2 and, to get around this, the writers have made that former character an ancestor of Dr. Seward. Which means the Vanessa Ives character is obviously a lot older than I’d thought... possibly hundreds of years. I don’t think I realised this when I watched the second season to be honest and, frankly, I'm still not sure how that timeline would work given her relationship with Sir Malcolm. And we have Jessica Barden playing a ‘waif with teeth’ who is rescued from a Victorian ‘torture/snuff’ club by both Billie Piper’s Lily (the Bride of Frankenstein character) and Reeve Carny’s Dorian Grey.

So, yeah, we start off with the various groups split. We have Sir Malcolm, as played by Timothy Dalton, who is about to be brought from his big game hunting in Africa by an Apache who claims to be the spiritual father of Ethan Chandler (aka Lawrence Talbot, the Wolfman)... in an effort to rescue him from his real father (who is played in one episode here by Brian Cox). Meanwhile, Ethan in Texas (as played by the brilliant Josh Hartnett) is rescued from his captors by the leftover witch from last series, played wonderfully by Sarah Greene. They then go on a mission to wreak bloody vengeance on Ethan’s real father but... well, I’m really trying to not get into spoiler territory here. We also have Eva Greene’s Vanessa Ive’s character left on her own in London where, after a period of heavy depression, she makes the acquaintance of the head of the Natural History Museum... but is she also being stalked by a greater menace from her past?

And then we have Victor Frankenstein hooking up with Doctor Jekyll in order to help him perfect a chemical serum which he hopes will relieve mankind of their baser, violent, out of control desires. Of course, we all know where this is going with Jekyll but, alas, it’s another thing which we don’t get to see through to culmination... almost, again, as if the writers were holding it back for a further series. One wonders if the writers knew it would be finished when they started writing this season or if they were as taken aback by the cancellation as the many core fans of the show were.

Finally we have Rory Kinnear’s brilliant reprise as the Frankenstein monster, who is now finally beginning to remember scraps of his former life. There is what is probably a retro but still effective gesture on the part of the writers here where another character from the regular pool, turns out to have memory loss of certain events and, as that character regains it, we find that Frankenstein’s monster and this particular character have a much deeper connection/history than the friendship they have slowly cultivated over the last two seasons. There’s one episode here which features the full, shared history of both characters here and it’s addictive and jaw dropping. Which is just as well, actually, because the Frankenstein monster shares no screen time with any of the other, regular characters in this one except for hiding out of sight of them towards the end of the last episode when... no, if you need to know the rest of that sentence then you need to watch it.

Now, since I knew that this was the last series and had some expectations that the writers knew that too (the last episode does, indeed, finish with the words ‘The End’), I was interested in seeing how one of the regular characters, Miss Ives, would finish up and, I have to say, it wasn’t at all what I expected. I fully expected to see her on her own, with all her friends and colleagues dead by the end of the last episode and she, herself, imprisoned within a straight jacket. This would have been the perfect ending for me here. However, instead of this, admittedly downbeat conclusion to the series, the writers have gone for something less expected and, in my opinion, maybe just a little less interesting but... well, I’m not too disappointed by the end game here. I certainly would have had trouble keeping interest in another series after the final events in this one play out as they have done and it’s an end which certainly, in my opinion, brings things to a sound conclusion... despite the possibilities of new regular characters being an interesting proposition.

And there’s not much more to say about this one, methinks.

Penny Dreadful Series 3 is another slice of moody, twisted gothic literature remade in the new image of the writers and served up with a dark and enhanced flavour, well held together by one of Abel Korzeniowski’s excellent scores. One of the few TV shows I’ve watched over the last year and, if you’re into the kinds of characters and situations explored herein, definitely worth some of your time, I think. 

Penny Dreadful Series 2

Judged Dread

Penny Dreadful Series 2
2015 USA Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Yeah, okay. So this review of
Season 2 will go the ‘spoiler route’.

The second series of Penny Dreadful is something I was especially interested in seeing because, although the little sub-plots involving the Frankenstein monster (played by Rory Kinnear), Dorian Gray (played by Reeve Carny) and Ethan Chandler (as played by Josh Hartnett) all obviously have a much longer course to run, the main story which brings together Chandler, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), Sembene (Danny Sapani) and Dr. Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) was pretty much finished with in the first series.

Now I was told that this second season is much stronger than the first but, although there is much to recommend in this one, I found it to be a little less compelling in places. Certainly the pacing, especially in the last few episodes, seems more than a little sluggish when compared to the previous series and although there is the sex, gore and action which helped make the first run so watchable, there seems to be less of this happening in this one and much more plotting and talking. Not that I mind this at all but I did find it a little duller than the first year, if truth be told.

One of the problems I had was the way in which the writers forged a new plot/danger to ensure our heroes stay together, for the most part, to defeat the latest menace together. After a strong opening which sees Miss Ives and Mr. Chandler attacked in a coach by naked witch creatures, we are eventually treated to a whole load of extra back story about Miss Ives which establishes that she is a practitioner of ‘witchery’ and which gives her a new enemy acting as a representative of ‘the devil’ who is already trying to claim her soul. It seems somehow clumsy to me that this is all brought into play only now, when so little of this has been mentioned after the lengthy examination of her back story in the first series. However, it does at least make use of Helen McCrory as Evelyn Poole, reprising her role from the first series and being given a more personal history with Miss Ives.

A couple of things which were pretty predictable in the first season do come to pass in this...

First and foremost of those being Billie Piper reincarnated from her previous dead character to become Lily... the latest iteration for the Bride Of Frankenstein (or at least the Bride Of Frankenstein’s monster... although not quite). With this performance, her character appears to be one thing but, as we learn later in the season, looks can be deceptive and Lily has a far less passive role in the impact of her life on others than you might at first suspect. The real problem with this character though is that although Billie Piper does an amazing job with her (I wouldn’t expect anything less from the lady in question), she does seem to be suffering from Clark Kent/Superman syndrome throughout the whole production. That is to say, in the DC comics involving Superman we are asked, for some strange reason, to assume that when he is wearing glasses, he is somehow disguised from being mistaken for Superman. This makes no sense, of course...

Similarly, in this incarnation as Lily, the previous version of the character, Brona Croft, is not in any way recognised by anyone other than, perhaps, that there is a strong probability that Dorian Gray does and can see something has happened to her. But only Dorian. Why? Because she’s had her hair dyed blonde... um. What? So, for instance, after having picked out dresses for her, when Miss Ives is asked by Frankenstein to meet his ‘cousin’, she doesn’t immediately say... “Oh, I remember you. You were my current love interest’s girlfriend I met outside the theatre in the first season... how come you’re not still dead?” Instead, she has no idea and goes about her business, Lilly’s golden tresses fooling even this cunning character. Um... yeah, okay.... moving on.

I said in the last interview that Ethan Chandler looked like he was well on the way to becoming another staple of Universal Horror after his werewolvery was finally revealed (or rather confirmed) at the end of the last series. I was, in fact, referring to the character that Lon Chaney Jr made famous as The Wolfman... Lawrence Talbot. Well, in this one the connection is tracked down by an interesting, one armed detective character, who himself seems to be a quick, half hearted nod to Lionel Atwill’s character in the 1939 film Son Of Frankenstein. Turns out Ethan’s Chandler’s real name is 'Ethan Lawrence Talbot'... so, yeah, as far as I know, Hartnett’s only the third person to play this role which, for most of film history, was played almost exclusively by Chaney Jr. Josh Hartnett’s role is more developed as a character in this one, where he’s shifted over from being the ‘hired hand’ to being a friend and protector to Miss Ives. He also makes friends with Sembene... a friendship which has tragic results in a much more traditional kind of problematic manifestation for the Lawrence Talbot character.

So yeah, we have intrigue and mayhem and we finally get to see ‘the portrait’ of Dorian Gray. Only a fleeting glimpse but it’s not done too badly although the character is almost something you feel the writers don’t quite know what to do with yet. He’s been pretty much at the periphery of the other character’s lives for two series now but you at least, at the end of this one, get the impression that he’s going to be thrown into the mix more when the next series hits, due to his unholy alliance with Billie Piper’s Bride of Frankenstein character.

All in all, there was enough to keep me interested in continuing to watch this second series and, once again, I really don’t know where they are going to go from here, being that each set of characters seems to have split up and gone to different parts of the world. The first trailer to the third season looks like none of them are together and I just hope that the series manages to find a credible way to reunite them all again at some point and, hopefully, fairly early on in the season... it’s the chemistry of having all these strong actors and actresses integrating with each other and also having to deal with their own subplots, in my opinion, that is one of the main strengths of the show.

Since I don’t have the fancy channels where programmes like this are broadcast, and I certainly don’t want to be left a the mercy of commercial breaks anyway, it looks like I’ll have to wait until near the end of the year before I’ll be able to catch up with Series 3 of Penny Dreadful but, certainly, this previous season was, at the very least, good enough so that I still want to. Although I think they could have done a little more with the creepy little dolls than they managed here.


My review of Series One can be found here.

Penny Dreadful Series One

Gothensian

Penny Dreadful Series One
2014 USA
Paramount Home Entertainment
Blu Ray Zone B

I’ve been wanting to see Penny Dreadful for a while now. Been patiently waiting for it to show up on some normal channel on television over here but, alas, none of the proper channels without adverts - aka BBC1 and BBC2 - or even their two advert filled rivals, ITV and Channel 4, have screened it. Forget the other channels too... they also run adverts. Luckily, a Christmas gift in the form of a Blu Ray of Series One turned up... so here we go.

I didn’t know much about this show from the start. Two things really. One was the title, which obviously recalls the one penny priced, blood and guts sensational fiction of the Victorian era, the Penny Dreadfuls being perhaps best defined by famous poster boy yarns such as Varney The Vampire and Sweeny Todd. So I knew it would be a ‘mash up’, in modern parlance, of various gothic horror tropes and tales all thrown in together and, this is indeed what it is... the first series incorporating elements of Dracula, Frankenstein and A Portrait Of Dorian Gray... among others.

The other thing I knew was that it had a bloody good cast, including the four main draws for me... Eva Green, Timothy Dalton, Billie Piper and Josh Hartnett. Their co-stars, who I am less familiar with, also, as it happens, give great performances too. So even if an episode is maybe less enthralling than another... you can always count on the quality of the acting to steer you through.

This first series suffers a little, perhaps, from being a touch uneven in places and I wonder if that’s to do with the direction in each episode. Some are full on gems of horror with blood and sex in equal measure and some are more sedate, toned down and perhaps lacking the more prominent ingredients of their Victorian namesakes, it seems to me. The lengths of the episodes tend to vary a little too... some clocking in around 45 minutes while others seem to run almost ten minutes longer. That being said, the atmosphere in each one is quite startlingly intriguing and even the more tamer episodes can be mightily entertaining... athough I thought the initial set up episode was something less than what was being achieved in certain others of the series.

Unfortunately, the shifting tone also runs to the story elements of this one, too. Some things are really obvious and telegraphed from the get go and one wonders why the writers waited until the last episode in this first series to uncover these revelations which the audience must surely have figured out from very early on in the series. For instance, Billy Piper’s lovable Irish prostitute, introduced in the second episode, hooking up with Josh Hartnett’s character after shooting pornographic photographs with Dorian Gray (played by Reeve Carney), is gradually dying of consumption as a feature of her character as soon as she is introduced. One just assumes from the start that Piper’s character is going to die and end up being fodder for another character caught up in the plot, transforming into what many might see as a key legacy character fairly soon after her death and... indeed, the ‘makings’ of this character do indeed start to play out in the last episode of this first season. So I’ve no doubt she’ll be back in a much changed form for the second series.

Similarly, all the way through since he was introduced in the first episode, Hartnett’s character seems to be a set up for something more to come and it was in the second episode where I finally nailed just who... or rather what.. he is. Again, though, his transformation into a very specific and iconic figure is kept back right until the end of the last episode... following on from the similarly ‘not so surprising’ revelations about Billie Piper. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of this character’s ‘hidden’ talent in the next series. It might even be a case, depending on whether they want to go the whole hog with the original character name, that this makes Hartnett only the third person in the history of cinema and television, to play this specific character (a crown which was held as being played by only Lon Chaney Jr until only a few years ago, in fact).

So yeah... there’s that lack of surprise in certain key elements of the script which can’t be gotten away from. I wouldn’t be surprised, also, if something resembling The Mummy comes in to the show at some point soon, either, since there are a lot of references to the Egyptian Book Of The Dead and so on dotted about the early episodes. Something held back for future seasons, alongside some other famous characters, no doubt.

All that being said, the series does still manage to surprise in certain places. The end of the second episode, Séance, for instance, is probably the bloodiest and most shocking in terms of language (when it comes to an amazing scene featuring Eva Green) but the final moments involving Victor Frankenstein (played by Harry Treadaway) and his new creation, who he has been bonding with over the course of the episode, is quite refreshing in terms of completely throwing away what the audience might have thought the purpose of that slow build was and actually caught me off guard. This is a good thing because that hardly ever happens to me and it definitely helped get me hooked from fairly early on in the run of the show.

Another introduction took me completely by surprise too. Most of the established characters from famous fictional sources are introduced in terms of their identity in a fairly sloppy manner, it has to be said, but one of them took me completely unawares. Timothy Dalton’s Sir Malcolm Murray has been promising Frankenstein a consultation with a friend who is an expert on blood and, when David Warner turns up playing this character and his name is revealed... well I didn’t put two and two together until his identity became known. What was even more surprising, given the reverance in which this character is held, is what happens to him a mere episode or two later. I don’t want to spoil the moment if you haven’t seen the show and I don’t neccessarily agree it was the right thing to do, but it certainly came as a slight shock although, in hindsight, the scenes with David Warner directly preceeding these really do kind of spell it out that this ‘incident’ is going to happen soon. I’m just getting old, methinks.

All in all though, the atmosphere and weight of the show, although uneven, is certainly enough to keep me watching. I do find the individual characters interesting and even the Frankenstein monster, played by Rory Kinnear, had my sympathies as the end of the first season drew to a close. It’ll certainly be interesting, though, to see where the main characters, brought together on a quest to find Murray’s daughter, Mina Harker (yeah... that Mina Harker), go from here... since that main plot comes to a close, somewhat, in the last episode. I’m pretty sure some supernatural being, either Egyptian or possibly Indian, may pose a new threat to Dalton’s character and his allies but I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. Since I spent some Christmas money on the second series on Blu Ray, I’m hoping to be able to get to watch these in a month or two. As far as the first season goes, however, it’s not the absolute masterpiece of gothic horror I was hoping for but, with stalwarts like Eva Green and Timothy Dalton in there to prove that you really can’t go wrong with them, I think most fans of this kind of literary entertainment should be delightedly and dreadfully surprised. Worth checking out.

I, Frankenstein

Shelley Babies

I, Frankenstein
2014 USA/Australia
Directed by Stuart Beattie
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Mary Shelley’s famous creation has had a lot of make-overs and facelifts over the nearly 200 years since she penned the original Frankenstein novel and its subsequent revisions and variations (published not long after the original version and revised by Shelley herself). The comic book on which this movie is based, I, Frankenstein, is not one I’ve read but I’m more than familiar with the concept of the Frankenstein monster surviving for decades and becoming embroiled in various adventures involving raising an army or tapped in service to another cause etc... a concept which has been done many times in books and which I read at least one variation of almost every year in the annual Tales Of The Shadowmen volumes.

Being as I was unfamiliar with the specific source material for this adaptation, you might wonder why I was so looking forward to seeing this one.... especially after a fairly uninspiring trailer? Well, two reasons actually...

One is that I really think Aaron Eckhart is one of the great, modern actors. Very underrated and someone who I feel is more than talented enough to be able to carry a movie on his own, if needed. I wanted to see how he performed in the iconic role of the Frankenstein monster and, having now seen that performance, all I can say is he acquitted himself very well with a script that, to be fair, could have been a lot better. He plays this role as convincingly and seriously as he does all his others and you really do have to admire this geezah.

The other reason I wanted to see this is because there’s a line in a trailer which is an iconic reference to the old Hammer film studio. The Gargoyle Queen (yeah, really, don’t ask) proclaims on the promo, “Frankenstein must be destroyed!” Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed was, of course, the fifth in the Hammer Films Frankenstein series, starring Peter Cushing as the titular scientist, from 1969. This got me interested because I thought this film would be a post-modernistic, eclectic ride through the history of the Frankenstein monster in film... alas, I was wrong.

Although the film does contain a fair few audio and visual references to a couple of the 1930s Universal incarnations of the character, this is pretty much the only real nods on show (as far as I could make out) and the Hammer line doesn’t seem to be in the actual film proper. Either an alternate version of the scene was used or quite possibly, two different sound bites were used to create the dialogue in the trailer... either way, it’s not in there and that’s a shame because I was waiting to hear this iconic line throughout the course of the whole picture.

There I was, sitting in the cinema with my 3D glasses on, drumming my fingers all through the movie, thinking to myself... she’s going to say it soon. Any minute now. She’s going to say it... and then the credits rolled. Which says something very basic about my experience of the movie as a whole I think... the fact that the on screen shenanigans weren’t enough to distract me from the anticipation in the sound bite on the trailer probably speaks volumes.

Now, it’s not a terrible movie by a long shot. Most of the performances are good and the mise-en-scene during certain parts of the movie does shine, usually noticeable when there’s less CGI on display... which is unfortunately often the case in an effects heavy film like this. The music is serviceable and the action choreography, while not brilliant, is as competent as the rest of the thing. But the film does feel rather flat and I wasn’t really that invested in any of the characters in the piece. I think the thing that really lets it down is the writing...

The film is mostly set in the present and we’re expected to believe in a world where stone gargoyle angels battle demonic forces and the death of either of the species send them either returning to heaven (in the case of the ludicrously silly looking gargoyles) or back to hell. The world is just something we’re expected to believe in without any real set-up or stakes and, frankly, the whole thing feels ridiculous. People behave in ways which display a lack of intelligence and a blinding acceptance of things as they are and even the little details like the creation of the monster via current supplied by electrical eels seems a little off when you consider the creation scene in the original novel which, if I remember correctly (it’s been many decades since I read it), doesn’t once mention the harnessing of electrical current in relation to the creation of the monster. Yeah, okay, we can only blame iconic Universal horror versions of the thirties and forties for this “character echo” through the years but, well, it just felt a little like the writer was not showing any respect for the original material. Electric eels as a solution is both credible and imaginitive but... besides the point.

Now the general tone of the story arc is good, and it’s a tale about redemption and the unsought journey of Adam (as the Frankenstein monster is named in this) to find a soul... but the horrible gargoyles VS demons backdrop just seems astonishingly bad and, because of this and the fact that sometimes the actors seem to be a bit like they’re trying to find their gravitas and failing miserably, the film didn’t really engage me... at least not in the way I hoped it would. It’s a B-movie, for sure, but not one I will revisit any time soon... although I suspect the passage of time will do wonders for it in terms of nostalgic re-appreciation for future generations. Not a terrible movie but certainly not a great one either and not nearly as much fun as it should have been, to be honest. Only see it if you are a keen 'Frankenstein’s monster' enthusiast.

Saturn 3

My Farah Lady

Saturn 3
1980 UK
Directed by Stanley Donen
ITC  Scream Factory Dual Edition 
BluRay/DVD Regions A & 1

Warning: Some slight spoilers mechanically stalking you.

“There was a wet click and the whole hand fell free and spurting.”

This is a phrase that’s stayed with me for a few decades, since my first exposure to it as a twelve year old back in 1980. I don’t have the book it comes from to hand, it’s probably in the loft these days, but this phrase (or something very close to it) was from the Stephen Gallagher novelisation, taken from Martin Amis’ script, presumably, of a new movie which was about to come out called Saturn 3. 

Now I never, from what I can remember, got to see this at the cinema. It didn’t come near me, from what I can recall, and even if it had come to my local it didn’t matter at my age because it got an AA rating from the BBFC. Not the 15 rating the IMDB claims it had, mind you... the 15 classification wasn’t a rating that was in existence at that time.

So as I was a kid I never got to see it... but the novelisation was all over the playground and it was what people were talking about in school at the time. We didn’t know it was a novelisation, actually. By the time I was 12, I was really growing tired of novelisations and realised them as the leeching, secondary way of making money off a movie that they are. I thought Saturn 3 was an original novel first, which the film had been based on. If I’d have known that the exact reverse was true at the time, I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading it, to be honest.

But I did and it was just the right mix of science fiction coupled with gory horror that some of us young ‘uns at school liked to read. This mania for the movie increased with features in the magazines we would all read, of course. The usual suspects. Starburst, Starlog and Fangoria. The holy trinity to deranged young fans of sci-fi, horror, adventure and intrigue on other worlds.

I remember the novel had a man murdered via wires taut against an airlock opening (ripping him into bits as he is unceremoniously blasted through them), the aforementioned hand lopping, a small dog pulled apart and a decapitation... followed by the murderous robot causing the majority of the trouble in the book wearing the head of his victim over his own mechanical stand-in for a head. It was all very bloody and so, of course, us kids just lapped it up.

When I saw it on TV about five years later, I remember quite liking it but was curious at it not being as bloody as I expected it to be from the novel (which is, it turns out, because it was obviously fairly heavily censored for the TV showings at the time). It was still a far cry from what I would have expected from a director like Stanley Donen, famous for his work on MGM musicals like On The Town, Singin’ In The Rain, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, It’s Always Fair Weather and various other classics. For him to tackle something which is a “space horror” movie is a bit of an eyebrow raiser, perhaps, and the film has suffered a lot of criticism over the years... unfairly so, in my opinion.

I have a couple of criticisms myself, of course,  but they’re hardly make or break and, when I watched the new Scream Factory Blu Ray, which a friend had got me for my birthday earlier this year, I have to say that I really enjoyed myself and was particularly impressed with the very crisp and clean quality of the picture in high definition. In terms of image quality, in fact, Saturn 3 seems to be one of those moves that works noticeably well on this format.

It’s easy to understand why a film like this got made at the time. We were still in the wake of the first Star Wars movie, back when that was its full title and, by then, we also had A L I E N under our collective belts. A sci-fi terror movie must have looked like the box office gold that never quite materialised for it at the cinema. Which is a shame.

The film starts off with one of a series of bad special effects. Pretty much any effects work which shows spaceships flying in space with planets in the background in this movie are absolutely, unbelievably bad, it has to be said. Truly dreadful looking and not even fit to be in a Gerry Anderson TV show from 20 years before this movie was released. The first shot, in this case, is a rip off of the opening shot of Star Wars and it just looks like something out of Blakes 7. It’s very unfortunate.

However, other effects in the movie work extremely well indeed, not least of which is the main Frankenstein’s monster of the piece, Hector the robot. In the 1931 Universal version of Frankenstein, the company “improved” on the original work by having the monster inflicted with a criminal brain... which could be seen, perhaps, as a moral pacifier for audiences at the time. In Saturn 3, we have already seen Harvey Keitel’s character perform a coldly calculated and fiendish murder (the aforementioned airlock killing) and he doesn’t act like a "well person" should. Actually, I love Keitel as an actor but his performance in this seems incredibly wooden. Now that might have been a deliberate ploy to make a comment about the character which isn’t fully explained to us... but it comes over as a bit lacking. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. The robot he constructs, Frankenstein-like in the laboratory, has a quite sizeable brain which is educated via a direct link between Keitel and the robot. So we already have the old Universal theme of a lifeless husk being brought to life with a wrongly developed brain. It’s an old story.

The rest of the movie is an old story too and, it would be true to say, it doesn’t have much in the way of plot development, I suppose. Monster gets ideas above it’s station, falls in love with Farah Fawcett (as we all did from the dominatrix-like, black clad publicity shots in the aforementioned magazines... we would look at them and... erm... look some more), kills his creator figure and then runs amok while the only other two human characters, Farah Fawcett’s Alex and the larger than life Kirk Douglas as Adam, try to outwit Hector and find their way off the moon of Saturn on which they’ve been stationed all these years.

It’s not much of a story and the resolution, once it gets going, is quick and fairly easy... but it’s also a very easy watch. The sets are really just rooms and walkways but they seem to be handsomely lit like the director is delivering one of his famous 50s musicals and the camerawork and editing are very clean and easy on the eye. Farah Fawcett is also very easy on the eye and she actually does a good job, along with Kirk Douglas, who delivers a solid performance and shows just how “in shape” he was for a, then, 64 year old... with his energetic skipping, running and even a naked fight scene.

What little remains of Elmer Bernsteins classic score is pretty good too and it helps ratchet the tension up to 11. I was surprised that a sequence where Adam and Alex are trying to escape from the robot made me jump out of my skin at a certain point. So that pleased me.

The real star of the show is Hector the robot himself though. It’s mostly just a man in a suit, I would guess, but it’s a really nice, skeletal design and the production team have hydraulic tubes filled with blue and orange liquid winding around him to add a bit of colour into the proceedings and, although Hector does hold up the tradition of a relatively slow monster still being able to catch up with you somehow, it is a very threatening presence with a personality all its own.

And that’s Saturn 3. A very enjoyable, low end science-fiction movie which is a pleasure on the eye and, for the first time as far as I can work out, is available on a DVD/Blu Ray format both uncut and in the correct theatrical aspect ratio (I refused to buy the previous US and UK editions because of problems with one or the other). The new Shout Factory presentation has a handful of low quality deleted scenes from the extended network TV version (you sell it by the yard to TV to increase your revenue) and also includes the famous scene which was cut before it was released in cinemas and, I believe, only ever put in the German edition of the movie. This is a scene with Alex and Adam in which Farah Fawcett wears something very domme-like and it’s curious that the scene was cut because pretty much all the publicity photos in all the magazines at the time (and even the trailer) used Farah in this costume to promote the movie with... a scene which, in most countries, was absent from the print). So if you like this movie, at the time of me writing this review, this Shout Factory edition is definitely the one to get. A fun, no brainer of a good time which will be of interest to science fiction movie fans and, possibly, fans of robotics. It’s been a long time since I first saw it but... I had a real blast when revisiting this one.