Anno Dracula

Ripping Yarns

Anno Dracula
by Kim Newman
Titan Books
ISBN: 9781803361864
Signed 30th Anniversary Edition
including new Anno Dracula short, 
The Chances Of Anything 
Coming From Mars

Warning: A kind of spoiler... but not really.

So it’s been about 30 years since I last read Kim Newman’s masterwork Anno Dracula. I only read it the once but it became one of my favourite books, being one of the first I’d read where various literary and real life characters collide in a fictional confection of some substance. A year or two after, remember that this was in the days before the internet really took hold and people couldn’t find out about things like new release books unless they saw them in a bookshop, I stumbled on a second-hand hardback copy of his sequel, The Bloody Red Baron. A year or two later, again, while holidaying in Llandudno, I discovered in a remaindered bookshop his third and, for a good long while ‘final’, Anno Dracula tome - a new hardback copy of Dracula Cha Cha Cha. They were all brilliant and all told tales, set in a different decade, of an alternative history of the world after Dracula had in fact ‘won’ at the end of Bram Stoker’s novel, seduced and married Queen Victoria and created a London... and world... where vampires and ‘warms’* lived in a dubious harmony. 

When Newman started writing new Anno Dracula books, not all that long ago, I decided to buy the new annotated editions with the extras and go through all of them again. But I was stalled until the announcement of his new 30th anniversary edition, signed by the author in hardback with red sprayed page edges and attached cloth bookmark. I certainly couldn’t resist and bought all the Anno Dracula tomes I could find.

This one hooks the reader in straight away. It’s not really a spoiler to say that it deals with Jack The Ripper’s reign of terror in London and that, from the very first chapter, the reader is made aware of the identity of The Ripper... so stop reading now if you really don’t want to know but, honestly, it’s not a whodunnit, so it’s revealed straight away. Revealed, as it happens, in a ‘cover version’ of a famous, fictional murder by Jack The Ripper, that of Lulu Schön in Wedekind’s Pandoras Box (more famously remembered these days as the role which made Louise Brooks a household name... I saw Joanne Whalley play the part on stage in the 1990s and she also did a good job with it). In this alternate riff on the final scene of that play, Lulu is a vampire prostitute and Jack The Ripper, known at this point as Silver Knife, because he is cutting up vampire girls and you can’t do any damage without silver, kills her and goes back to his sanatorium. For it is revealed straight away that this is what has become of Bram Stoker’s character Jack Seward.

The rest of the book is about Charles Beauregard of the famed Diogenes Club (from Sherlock Holmes, the club still being run by brother Mycroft), given the task of finding the killer as Jack takes out his real life victims one by one... as his way of getting back at Dracula for what he did. Aiding him are the Si Fan, lead by Fu Manchu and his daughter from Limehouse and, the long lived ‘captured at 16 year old’ vampire heroine of this and a few of the other Anno Dracula novels, Geneviève Dieudonné. Not to be confused with Kim Newman’s other vampire character of the same description written under a pen name, also called Geneviève Dieudonné, from his Warhammer books (yeah, it gets kinda confusing). 

And it’s great stuff which, despite the number of references to other literary characters and events, is very much its own story... and an extremely well written one at that. As writer Neil Gaiman says in his introduction to this new, deluxe edition (honestly, who’d have thought it would come to a deluxe edition... nobody had heard of it when I first read it and it seemed to almost flounder in obscurity), the window dressing never gets in the way of the story. 

But such brilliant window dressing. Lots of the usual suspects turned up either named as such... like Dr. Jekyll, Mr, Hyde, Dr. Moreau, Colonel Sebastian Moran (accomplice of one Professor Moriarty, if you remember your Conan Doyle), Varney The Vampire and even, Count Orlok, the iconic ‘bootleg Dracula’ from the 1922 movie Nosferatu, who is put in charge of the Tower Of London after certain events take place in this book. Those who aren’t actually named are certainly alluded to, perhaps due to copyright restrictions... so there will be no doubt just who you are reading about when it comes to characters like Dr. Fu Manchu, for example or, in one wonderful moment where the costume and speech of a character makes the reference quite clear, a temporally displaced version of Carl Kolchak. 

There’s also some interesting characters from real life, too numerous to mention but a special shout out to Florence Stoker (husband of Bram... who has himself been sent to the notorious English concentration camp Devil’s Dyke, along with such anti-vampire factions as Sherlock Holmes) and also to John Merrick, The Elephant Man and his own part in the novel’s finale. 

The descriptions of the lifestyle and feeding rituals of the various vampire characters are well done, especially when Charles’ fiance is ‘turned’ and the politics of the piece, witnessed by such people on the street as vampire Inspector Lestrade, are actually quite chilling and do, it seems to me, reflect politics in ‘not so Great anymore Britain’ even more now than they did when the novel was first published, three decades ago. 

However, it’s also filled with a lot of humour and jokes, as you can probably tell from my vague descriptions, not least of which when an armadillo turns up in Dracula’s Buckingham Palace near the end of the novel, mirroring the armadillo seen briefly near the start of Universal’s 1931 version of Dracula (that completely popped me out of the novel and got me chuckling, I can tell you). Also, the great thing about re-reading this 30 years on is... I get more of the references now. Such as Genevieve being pursued by an elder, hopping vampire from the movie Mr. Vampire (a film I still have yet to see but, my understanding is I will become acquainted with it soon, probably before this review goes up even).** 

And, it has to be said, it’s got an absolutely brilliant ending (which has completely thrown me into confusion as I just started reading Mr. Newman’s relatively new comic book sequel to the tale in terms of setting... more on that when that review goes up and I may have more clarity by the end of it) and it’s followed by the author’s annotations on certain ‘spot the reference’ antics throughout the novel (although, as he admits himself, certainly not all of them). 

As if this wasn’t enough, this edition also includes a new story set in 1899... The Chances Of Anything Coming From Mars. This is told first person by the vampire version of Colonel Sebastian Moran and deals with he and various other characters, such as Professor Challenger, as they go to deal with... as you might expect from the title... the arrival of a martian fleet in Woking. In this alternate version of H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds, the martians certainly don’t die from the common cold as they do in the original novel, but I won’t spoil the twists and turns of this one here. But, once again there are various misplaced pop culture references such as, during a description of speculations about the martians, ones which look like “pygmies wearing roman helmets”... so yeah, Marvin The Martian from the old Warner Brothers cartoons finally gets a look in too. And there’s also an excellent gag which is a literary equivalent of the comically timed ‘excised scenes’ from Grindhouse put into effect. Really wonderful stuff.

As is the whole darned book, which I’ve rattled on about enough for now, I think. Anno Dracula is still one of my favourite novels and an absolutely brilliant read. Definitely give this new edition a go if you’ve not read it before and keep an eye out on the blog in the, relatively, near future as I read and re-read myself through the entire series. 

*Warm blooded, non-vampires.

**That dates when I wrote this somewhat... my review of Mr. Vampire can be found here. 

The League Of Extraordinary Gentleman Vol 1

Victorian Justice League

The League Of
Extraordinary Gentleman Vol 1
by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
America’s Best Comics
ISBN  9781563898587

Okay... so very behind the times but I’m finally catching up with the first collected edition of Volume 1 of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and, this is the story the film was purported to be based on... I’ll get to that in a minute, in no uncertain terms.

My first observation, which gave me a chuckle, is that the publishers of the book are called America’s Finest Comics which... well, I think it says it all when you realise that the story is written by the great Alan Moore, the famous English author and drawn by the great, again English, comic book illustrator Kevin O’Neill. Both of these talents are one of a kind geniuses hailing from the UK.

Indeed Moore is, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest writer in comics of all time... nobody else even comes close (except for Neil Gaiman, perhaps... but not that close). Many films have been made of his properties and he’s tried to distance himself from the movie ‘adaptations’ as much as possible, going so far as to have his name removed from the credits of various big budget versions. His greatest work though is, curiously, untouched by Hollywoodland... namely The Ballad Of Halo Jones for 2000AD, which I still count as the single greatest piece of literature ever written, comic book or otherwise.

Kevin O’ Neill I also discovered from those early issues of 2000AD back in the day, drawing such strips as Nemesis The Warlock, among many others. His style is certainly unique and, well he passed away in 2022 and is very much missed.

Now then, I always quite liked the movie version of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen but, golly, having now read the original story on which it’s said to be based, I have to say I’m very unhappy about the way the movie turned out. It’s nothing like. It doesn’t have the breadth of the original tale in any way, shape or form. It’s like the writers of the film just threw a few related characters together (some of them and certainly not all the same ones or even with the same personalities) and did their own thing.

Take Allan Quatermain, for example. Depicted as an old man as Sean Connery was when he played him for sure but, the movie version didn’t have him spending all his time fighting off his addiction to drugs and so on. Some of the characters are also similar but, not quite the same. For instance, the Mr. Hyde version of Dr. Jeykll is an abomination, using quite shocking swear words and basically ‘hulking out’ whenever an unstoppable and violent force is needed (like a wookie, good at tearing people’s arms off). Then there’s Mina Murray... it won’t take you long to realise that, before her divorce, she was Mina Harker from Bram Stoker’s Dracula... and since she was bitten she has, as far as this first volume is concerned, hypnotic persuasion. The Invisible Man is a bit of a villain but working with the group too... though not worrying about brutally killing innocent bystanders to help himself to things. And Captain Nemo, of course, who the film kind of got right, actually.... to an extent.

But it’s the depth of the other appearances too, in this world of 1898, as the group work together to wrest stolen Cavorite... yes that’s right, as invented by Dr. Cavor in H. G. Well’s The First Men In The Moon to aid space travel... from the fiendish Dr. Fu Manchu in the Limehouse region of London, where he builds a big war airship harnessing the Cavorite to bomb London. However, when ‘the league’ do finally get it back for the British Secret Service, they find out they were not working for whom they thought and were, in fact, working for Professor Moriarty, for his own fiendish schemes (there’s a lovely set of panels detailing how he survived the altercation with Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls).

So the league are, once again, on their way to retrieve the Cavorite and foil Moriarty’s plans... not realising that Moriarty was put in place as the Napoleon of Crime by the British Government itself, for reasons which might actually make some sense, if you’re as cynical as I am.

And on the way they meet a wealth of characters from popular literature of the time that had me lapping up this story and it’s lovely artwork with much joy. For instance, Edgar Allan Poe’s original detective character C. Auguste Dupin meets the league and puts them on the trail to recruit the Jekyll and Hyde character, who he thinks is a return of the monkey killer from The Murders In The Rue Morgue. They even, at some point, have to stay the night in a boarding school run by a certain Miss Rosa Coote from visceral Victorian BDSM tale Miss Coote’s Confessions, from the underground magazine The Pearl (among others... which started me on a course to sympathy with that particular lifestyle at a fairly young age... well, if the grown ups would leave notorious and bloody Victorian pornography around then, what do you expect?).

There’s even an appearance by the gang of the Artful Dodger at some point, who seems to be running the gang of pickpockets after the death of Bill Sikes in Dicken’s Oliver Twist.

But enough... I don’t want to spoil everything other than to say I thoroughly enjoyed the first volume of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and I’m looking forward to reading the next one in the series, which I believe will make good on those shooting flares heading towards Earth from the planet Mars, which are mentioned in this one. What are the chances, eh?

Tales Of The Shadowmen 18 - Eminences Grises

The Shadows Strike

Tales Of The Shadowmen 18
Eminences Grises
edited by Jean Marc & Randy Lofficier
Black Coat Press
ISBN 9781649321039

After an unplanned absence on my part of a few years, I once again resume my reading of the Lofficiers’ Tales Of The Shadowmen series for their Black Coat Press imprint... only to find that the final, extra thick volume published last Christmas (which I’ll catch up to soon enough, that one is volume 20) is the final one in what has been a hit and miss but always fun series of collections.

A very short review by me of Tales Of The Shadowmen 18 - Eminences Grises because, it has to be said that this volume, for me, was definitely more miss than hit. If you are unfamiliar with these collections, they are basically short stories by a series of writers of all nationalities using various pop culture characters, many from the pulp literature of 19th and 20th century France but many from other countries and other eras too... mixing the heroes and villains (as they often are) together and bringing them new adventures. So, for example, an early volume brought a short description of what happened when Barbarella kidnapped Captain Kirk.

There are certain characters who tend to come up more than once a volume too.. such a Countess Caligriosto, Josephine Balsamo, Rouletabille, Arsène Lupin and Fantômas and this one is no exception. For example, the first story in this collection, Tim Newton Anderson’s Thirty Pieces Of Gold, sees the inclusion of Rouletabille, Inspector Juve, Fantômas and Arsène Lupin, all trying to put one over on each other. Fascinax also appears in more than one story, the first where he is employed as a supernatural agent to foil the plans of the famous filmic character Dr. Phibes (as played by Vincent Price in the two movies) and then, in a second one where the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge is trying to get help because he has accidentally created a child serial killer who strikes at Christmas every year due to his younger self wishing this as a child, when in possession of The Monkey’s Paw.

Perhaps my favourite story is one in which several Jules Verne characters intersect, namely Martin Gately’s Young Robur Over Africa, which shows the younger version of Verne’s Robur The Conqueror (another character played by Vincent Price on film in an adaptation of the second Robur novel, Master Of The World) accidentally travelling to a future where he is intent on stopping a world war. Another one, The Power of Countess Cagliostro by Rick Lai deals with a trio of female agents coming to blows with the Shaw Brothers’ running villain Pai Mei (who some only know from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume Two) by way of The Man with a Harmonica, Charles Bronson’s character in Sergio Leone’s masterpiece movie Once Upon A Time In The West.

Other delights show SPECTRE and their leader Blofeld being outwitted by the 1960s Jean Marais movie incarnation of Fantômas, another where the likes of Fu Manchu and various other Sax Rohmer characters are outsmarted by both Madam Atomos and Sumuru (yet another Rohmer creation)... and another featuring the version of Erik, The Phantom Of The Opera, from Kim Newman’s Angels Of Music stories (which I reviewed here and which, of course, is a mash up of the opera ghost with Charlie’s Angels, itself being an expansion of some stories involving those characters from stories in this very publication’s earlier volumes). And, of course, a title such as Angel and Hopkirk (Deceased) by Randy Lofficier speaks for itself.

And yes I had a good enough time with Tales Of The Shadowmen 18 - Eminences Grises and am looking forward to the next two volumes, even though this one seemed a little duller than many others. I shall certainly miss the very large hole left in modern literature by the ending of the series but Black Coat Press are always worth checking out because they do a great service in reprinting and reinventing just these kinds of characters for modern, French and English speaking audiences. So yeah, I’ll report back when I read the next one.

The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard

Necro Crom Icon

The Cthulhu Stories
of Robert E. Howard
Edited by Paul Di Filippo
Word Fire Press ISBN:  9781680570984

If you are into H. P. Lovecraft you’ll know that his most famous legacy, a common thread running through many of his stories recalling ancient, tentacle, aggressive God-like creatures known in its various guises as Chtulhu... was not just something that Lovecraft wrote himself. He freely gave friends and correspondents licence to also reference this, sometimes somewhat tenuous thematic tentacle, in their own writings... often published in similar pulp magazines as Lovecraft’s own tales. So you had people like August Derleth and, I believe, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber. One of these writers and pen pals was the late, great Robert E. Howard, who would be best remembered for his tales of his Cimmerian barbarian Conan, not to mention such characters as Solomon Kane and Kull The Conqueror. And it’s some of his stories which feature, rather tenuously I should add, in terms of this selection at least (I hear there are many other examples of his tales with Cthulhu elements) in the volume The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard, which was published a couple of years ago.

Now, I am mostly only familiar with Howard's Conan and Kane stories so I was very pleased to have this. As it is, there is a lot of stuff in here which I find oblique in terms of accessing even the sometimes hard to pin down Cthulhu element of Lovecraft’s tales and I have to warn you that if you are expecting horror stories full of madness and creeping dread... well, there are a few of those but there are also a lot of other things which are less likely to make you think of one of Lovecraft’s slithering horrors. For instance, I’d read one of the tales in this tome before... a Kull story called The Shadow Kingdom, in an equally unlikely tome for it to be collected in... a complete Conan in Weird Tales collection (reviewed here). The most this and, a fair amount of the other twelve tales joining it in this collection, has in common with the spirit of Cthulhu is maybe a brief reference to an ancient alien race, perhaps originating from the stars. Some of the stories will make more pointed references to Lovecraft creations such as Dagon and the demonic book known as The Necronomicon and, yeah, others have almost no tenuous grip on the subject at hand, it seemed to me. There are, however, a few tales which are absolutely fitting  in with the spirit and atmosphere of the tales and, as you would expect, Howard has his own way of doing things...

The editor makes the point, in his introduction, that Howard’s version of this ‘horror brand’ is less likely to result in the descent into madness for his main protagonists... Howard being someone who would have his characters meet the lurking dread in a less passive and more heroic manner. Indeed, by way of an example, there is a ‘round robin’ collaborative story near to the end of this volume which was issued as a challenge to some writers from Fantasy Magazine. The story is called The Challenge From Beyond and it’s started off by C. L. Moore and the writers A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long all add excerpts of the story as a chain to bring it to a conclusion...

It’s interesting to note that the authors of the piece really don’t do too much to hide their own style and although the story certainly gets from point A to B, the small chapters all seem to have a different energy to them. Once Moore has set things up and Merritt further has the main character’s mind transformed through the power of a well worn, black stone cube... we get to Lovecraft’s section where the whole thing is turned to absolute bleak terror and a fate worse than death for the main protagonist as he finds his mind swapped across the cosmos with an alien creature, with absolutely no hope of returning to his body. But then Howard comes in and suddenly, the hero is pretty happy with his lot because he is in an alien body with a human thinking mind and, taking just a shard of rock, overpowers the various aliens on their own world and becomes their God. So, yeah, not a passive madness but a conquering spirit for sure. What really annoyed me about this story, however, is that the year before I read a book called The Complete Fiction of H. P Lovecraft (reviewed here) and this tale certainly wasn’t included... how the heck is that complete then?

And it’s a hit and miss affair, as you would expect but there are certainly some things of note. For instance, Howard uses a black, monolithic stone to run a common thread between some of his unrelated tales and there’s more than one story in here which has people transformed from his present day in the 1930s and back to ancient times to have an adventure, before returning to their modern day guise. One of these is actually, although people may want to argue with me on this (and I don’t care), a Conan story. People Of The Dark was written a month or so before the first of Howard’s more widely acknowledged Conan tales and tells of a man who, on his way to murder a rival in love with a pistol, gets magically transported back to ancient times at the same location and spins a tale which is a metaphor for the one going on simultaneously in the 1930s. Granted it’s all told from the first person but much if it is told by the barbarian character Conan who also, of course, invokes his God Crom. So, frankly, I don’t know why this isn’t included in collections of the Conan stories just because it’s considered by some a prototype (perhaps even by Howard himself) because it seems pretty plain to me.

And talking of Conan, there’s even reference in another story in here, again set in more contemporary times to when it was written, where the black ring of one Thoth-amon is invoked. So, yeah, there are Conan references in these tales as well as the Lovecraftian mentions.

Now, in the 1970s, I remember there were one or more story collections which were basically tales of different Howard characters that were transformed, by unscrupulous publishers who shall not be named here, by changing the character and location names to ones found in the Conan tales and reprinted as Conan stories. I believe the story in this collection entitled The Gods of Bal-Sagoth may indeed have been a victim of this practice at some point over the decades... and possibly more than one of the tales in this story may have been further transformed, perhaps.

There are some other tales which almost seem like dry runs for Conan stories by Howard here too... as you might expect. More than one story included here is a little close in structure or idea to existing Conan tales which may have come later and, certainly, the tale here entitled Worms Of The Earth, which tells a tale of Bran Mak Morn, the king of the Picts... and his vengeance unleashed on certain agents of the Roman army, seemed to me to bear a striking structural similarity, in a much simpler and less round about form, to Howard’s one and only Conan novel, The Hour Of The Dragon, if I’m not mistaken. I can see where he may have built on the idea at play in this tale.

My favourite story in this collection, however, has little to do with Cthulhu. It’s called Skull Face and it’s obviously been ‘inspired’ by Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories, if Fu Manchu was called Skull Face and was a hideous, resurrected Egyptian sorcerer mummy. Starting in the opium dens of Limehouse, the main protagonist actually starts off as a henchman, of sorts, owing the titular character the debt of his life but, soon, the beauty of an oriental girl and the heroism of another character inspire him to attempt to kick his hashish habit and team up against the atrophied but powerful, demonic wizard. It’s one of the longer stories in this volume but certainly the jewel in the crown, as far as I’m concerned. Although, I did find it interesting that, in another story called The Fire Of Asshurbanipal, the two adventurous heroes have to avoid looking at a demonic manifestation causing destruction around them to their enemies, much like the climax of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

And that’s about it from me on this one. The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard is a handsome tome with a beautiful cover (on the hardback at least) depicting a Cthulhu terror and, on the wraparound, a man fleeing for his life as it doggedly pursues him. The tales are not all nearly Cthulhu enough, for my liking, for the tome to use such a title but, it doesn’t really matter all that much as it’s a fine collection and Howard is as good a writer when he’s telling tales that don’t involve his famous Cimmerian, as when he’s depicting the Hyborian Age. Definitely worth a read and some space on your bookshelf if you are a Robert E. Howard fan, for sure.

Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings

The Bride
Of Xu Wenwu

Shang-Chi And The
Legend Of The Ten Rings
USA/Australia 2021
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton
Marvel Studios

Warning: This has all the spoilers
so don’t read if you don’t want to know.

Okay... be patient and let me get this out of my system because this is nothing new for the way Marvel have been treating their rich source of characters in their film franchises. Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings is, allegedly, based on the old Marvel Shang-Chi, Master Of Kung Fu comic books. Now, it was never a title I read back in the 1970s but I do at least remember the one, very important thing about the character and it is this... Shang-Chi’s father in the comics was none other than Sax Rohmer’s embodiment of the ‘yellow peril’, Dr. Fu Manchu. This is something Marvel retconned, for some reason, at some point in the 21st Century incarnation of the comics but, come on... Marvel movies are owned by Disney now. Surely they could have afforded to pay the copyright to retain the infamous master villain for their new movie (who, incidentally, also doesn’t share the name of his father from the rebooted version of the comics either... go figure). Honestly, I am sick to death of Marvel not treating their characters with the respect they deserve. Not having Fu Manchu in this movie is as much of a crime against filmanity as when they excluded Doc Savage and the Amazing Five from the movie ‘adaptation’ of The Rocketeer. I mean, what is going on here? What a travesty! And just to rub it in, they’ve got one of the most respected Asian actors of our time, Tony Leung, in the role of the father and have named the character... wait for it... Xu Wenwu. Presumably because it rhymes with Fu Manchu. I mean... come on!

And you know what... I am so tempted to just end my review right there before I even get started with the conclusion that, once again, Marvel have screwed their own characters and not done right by them, not to mention completely disrespecting the audience who pay money to go and see movies based on comic book characters they love... only to see them in homogenised and commercialised forms because they presumably think this will bring them more money in. Personally, I think money is a terrible thing to measure success by and use to grant access to the continued production of an art form but... that’s why they call it the movie business I guess.

However, since the film isn’t absolutely terrible, I’ll now give a brief review because, although it’s not the slice of comic book genius I’d been misled into thinking it would be (honestly, it’s not the worst but I would say it’s maybe somewhere within the bottom three or four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies), it does have some entertaining sequences midst other, more draggy and dull scenes, to be sure.

Okay, so the plot is really simple. Simu Liu plays Shang-Chi and Awkwafina plays his best friend Katy. When his 1000 year old conqueror father and master of the Ten Rings comes to retrieve the amulets belonging to Shang-Chi and his sister, to free someone who he thinks is his dead wife from a dark portal guarded in a hidden village... Shang-Chi, Katy and his sister team up with his auntie, played by acting legend Michelle Yeoh, to try to stop his father from unleashing an evil, soul sucking force into the world. And... I wish I could say the story was more complex than that or had more twists and turns (especially since the movie runs for over two hours)... but it doesn’t.

It does have a lot of nice action set pieces though... not as fast or furious as I would have expected from a film which is presumably trying to match some of the classic Asian Kung-Fu based movies but... although this stuff was like a dialled back version of it, well it wasn’t too shabby in places. The most interesting fight scenes took place on a bus and then on scaffolding outside a big tower block and they were pretty good. However, that being said, they both take place in the first half of the movie and so, yeah, as much as they do try and pack a lot of action in, the climax of the movie does feel like a bit of a damp squib, it has to be said.

But there is some nice humour and also various references to some of the previous MCU films and also a few characters turning up from earlier parts of the franchise. This is where it gets properly spoilery people... you were warned. So we have Benedict Wong returning as Doctor Strange’s sidekick Wong, in a few scenes and it was nice seeing him again. We also have Ben Kingsley returning as Trevor Slattery, the Liverpudlian actor who was hired to be the face of The Mandarin in Iron Man 3 and the spin off short from that, All Hail The King. He gets some good moments where he mostly manages to win back some dignity, although the conversation about Planet Of The Apes, which shows how stupid he is, has to be one of the highlights of the film. Plus there’s a Black Widow (not the famous one) and The Abomination (played by Tim Roth... reprising the role from The Incredible Hulk and tying this into his re-emergence in next year’s She-Hulk TV show). There are also a couple of important characters in one of the end credits scenes.

So, okay, there are two end credits scenes in this one... one mid-credits and another end credits. Now, I really didn’t understand what the heck the final post-credit scene was trying to say but the mid-credits scene, set soon after Shang-Chi and Katy go to Wong’s Greenwich Village headquarters, has a couple of big characters. One is Brie Larson reprising her role as Captain Marvel and the other is Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner... which really had me baffled because... he is playing Bruce Banner, not the new hybrid version of the Hulk that he became in Avengers End Game. Now, we know this scene is post-End Game because, a) he is already friendly with Captain Marvel and b) he still has his arm in a sling from performing his Infinity Gauntlet snap in that movie. However, since we have not been given any insight that he can change back from the smarter Professor Hulk version of his character... and since we know from the trailers from the She-Hulk TV show that he very much is still the new version of his character... I have to ask what the heck is going on here? This makes no sense... and once again Marvel has lost my interest in the continuity stakes. I hope this gets addressed at some point but... what are the odds, right?

And that’s really all I have to say in this overly long review of an overly long movie. Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings is not terrible but it’s not great either. All the actors hold up really well, a lot of the sets and lighting are colourful, there are dragons and cute creatures but, ultimately, in between the bursts of humour and action, it does get a bit dull and ploddy and could maybe have benefited from being around 45 minutes to an hour lighter, I thought. I guess I have to look forward to The Eternals next but... so far, in terms of reportage from my friends, I haven’t heard anything good about it.