The Box Of Delights

A Load Of Scrobblers

The Box Of Delights
Directed by Renny Rye
BBC Six Episodes November - December 1984

I was 16 years old when The Box Of Delights aired for the first time on British television. Which might explain why I didn’t take to the show after seeing the first episode and then ignored it for the rest of its run. I was much more interested in watching things like Battle Of The Planets, Monkey and my precious Flash Gordon serials. It was, for its time though, the most expensive children’s TV production to date, mixing live action and animated effects in a way that, to my then young eyes, didn’t even look good in the early 1980s but still, people responded to it well and it was much loved and popular enough that, a few decades later, it aired again. It was then that my mother and father watched it (I stayed away again) and they both enjoyed it. So much so, in fact, that in time for it’s 40th Anniversary Blu Ray bells and whistles release, my dad bought it for my mum so, alas, in Christmas 2024 I finally caught up to the thing and… what do you know? I’m even less impressed with it now, truth be told. 

A staple of BBC radio plays over the decades, it’s based on John Masefield’s book and set contemporaneously to when it was written, in 1935. It stars Devin Stanfield as schoolboy hero Kay Harker, who gets caught up with a box of delights carried by an old man, played in three episodes here by the great Patrick Troughton, using magical forces so that he, his brother and their friends can fight off a scheme by the villainous Abner Brown, played by Robert Stephens. Brown needs said box to increase his own dark, magical arts.

Now the performances are all fine, the special effects somewhat clunky (though certainly serviceable enough and light years ahead of contemporary science fiction programmes like Doctor Who and Blake’s Seven at the time) and, although I can see that many people find it a charming watch, I have to say I still find it quite dull. It’s not exactly pacey at all and, apart from a nice score by Roger Limb of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, I can’t find much that I’d personally recommend in it. Now, it jumps around a bit and assumes a certain knowledge of the characters in their relationships to each other but this is explained by the fact that the book was a sequel to an earlier, magical Kay Harker novel by the same writer. However, two things especially got to me as elements I found either curious or annoying. 

One is the fact that when various children get abducted by the gang of bad guys… or scrobbled in the vernacular of the writing (I’m guessing that comes directly from the source novel)… then nobody really seems to mind. A kid goes missing for a night or two and it’s all, “Oh, I’m sure they’re fine, they’re just doing something.” This tale comes with awful parenting skills from any of the adults in the story, it seemed to me.

Secondly, the box can do very little. When he asks what it does, Kay is told it can make you go swift and it can make you go small. Plus other things completely undescribed or demonstrated, other than at the start, when a projection of a phoenix is glimpsed in a fireplace. And then when the box is brought into action, Kay does indeed either shrink to hide and stealth about, go swift by flying to escape his captors or, when they’re really pushing the boat out (as opposed to shrinking it), a less than subtle combination of the two… and that’s about it. I’m probably quite jaded then in perhaps admitting that I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. 

And that’s me done with The Box Of Delights, I’m afraid. Not something I’m anxious to visit again anytime soon but, at least it had some nice music. It is a well loved British children’s TV phenomenon though so, don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.

Scars Of Dracula

 

Bloody Mess

Scars Of Dracula
UK 1970
Directed by Roy Ward Baker  
Hammer/Studio Canal
Blu Ray Zone B

Wow. I wish I could say this Dracula film was as bad as I remember but, truth be told, while I remember thinking how bad it was last time I watched it, I didn’t remember any of the plot details at all. I think it’s so bad I just blanked them out of my mind somehow. Many people believe this is where the decline of the Hammer Dracula films started, with each one being steadily worse as they were released onto an unsuspecting public. Frankly, I think those people are crazy, considering the next film in the series was easily the jewel in Hammer’s Dracula crown and was, itself, followed by two very interesting Dracula movies too.

Now, you could be forgiven for looking at various elements of Scars Of Dracula on paper and thinking, wow, this one looks really interesting and, yeah, it does look interesting and I will go on to call out those points of interest in a minute. Also, it has a very strong cast with Christopher Lee reprising his signature role and with Jenny Hanley as the ‘final girl’ he has to bite. Playing her boyfriend and main minder is a young Dennis Waterman, a role many have said was miscast but, honestly, I think he does just as good a job with his lines and actions as any of the other actors in the cast and he’s certainly not why the film fails to engage. We also have the great Patrick Troughton playing Dracula’s human slave in this one... a part which I still think is beneath him but he does a good turn here. And, of course, Hammer regular Michael Ripper turns up in his third consecutive Dracula movie, with a much more expanded role than he usually gets, I would say.

So it’s still a great surprise, considering all the things it’s got going for it, that it’s a dull as ditchwater, almost plotless affair which even the impeccable acting and James Bernard’s score cannot rescue. The storyline just involves Hanley and Waterman ending up in Castle Dracula looking for his lost brother and bringing on various vampire troubles for themselves. Everything leading up to their confrontations with Dracula and his helper seem to be just so much terrible story padding and, none of it really works. There are though, as I said, a few points of interest but lets get the elephant in the room out of the way first...

The film starts off with Dracula reviving, from powdered blood on his cloak, by a very fake looking (and much used throughout the course of the movie) vampire bat flying over it and dropping fresh blood onto the ‘Dracula residue’. Yes, Dracula is brought back to life by a complete lack of imagination leading into his demise in the previous film, Taste The Blood Of Dracula (reviewed by me here) being played in reverse and, well, the location of his death, which took place in a cathedral of sorts if memory serves, has somehow been relocated to Castle Dracula... don’t ask me how. Since this film was released the same year as the previous entry, they must have thought audiences have a really short memory.

There’s an interesting scene, probably not the first movie to deal with this and the goriness is mostly kept below shot, where Patrick Troughton is seen clearing up after his master’s latest blood feast by sawing up a young lady’s body for easy burial. This was a nice touch and certainly showed something the producers may not have gotten away with in an earlier entry in the franchise (although I'm sure their Frankenstein films must contain something similar).

Another point of interest is the scene where Dracula, who is mostly played more like an English gentleman in this by Lee (probably his most interesting stab at the role, in which he brings a certain parallel humanity to the character), scales the sheer wall of his castle in much the same way that Spider-Man might do it. Although the scene shows his progress up the wall at high speed, it’s a moment which is taken directly from Bram Stoker’s original Dracula novel, albeit with Lee’s incarnation of the un-dead Count looking a lot different from the one that Stoker wrote about.

Finally, Dracula’s death in this is also quite novel... although somehow still quite dull looking in execution. Dennis Waterman pulls a bar of iron off of the top of the castle and throws it into Dracula’s torso like a spear, staking him. However, maybe in this version the stake has to be wooden to be effective because, Dracula just pulls it out again. He then raises the makeshift spear in order to do unto Waterman what has been done to him, when a stray lightning bolt from the raging storm is attracted to the stake in Dracula’s hand as it would be to a lightning rod and, before you know it, Dracula is up in flames and his burning corpse falls from the walls of the castle. So, yeah, an interesting death at least, if poorly realised when away from the page.

And that’s me really done with Scars Of Dracula now. It’s a real mess but, of course, the series would soon redeem itself, at least in my eyes, with the truly wonderful Dracula AD 1972, which I’ve already reviewed on this blog and which you can read just here.

Doctor Who - The Evil Of The Daleks

Victoria Spun

Doctor Who
The Evil Of The Daleks
UK Air date: 20 May - 1 July 1967
Seven Episodes.
BBC Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Exterminating spoilers.

The Evil Of The Daleks was ‘the last in the present series’ of its particular season of Doctor Who back in 1967. After famous actress Pauline Collins turned down the BBCs offer to continue her character from the previous story as a new, regular Doctor Who companion, the script was rewritten to introduce a new addition to the TARDIS crew, Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield. She would join The Doctor (as played by Patrick Troughton) and Jamie (as played by Frazer Hines) after the death of her fictional father towards the end of the seventh and final episode. The next series would start off with the much loved Cyberman story, The Tomb Of The Cybermen.

And, well this is a first time watch for me but, unfortunately, due to the much hated policy of the BBC wiping all their master tapes to reuse sometime after broadcast, this serial suffers largely from the ‘missing presumed wiped’ status in that only the second episode, rediscovered on a copy tape at a car boot sale, has survived... which is a lot better off than most of the Doctor Who serials from before 1971, although I am still optimistic that versions of these will turn up in places like Australia or South Africa, pried from the clutches of the black market private collectors who I believe still have many of them, at some point in the future.

However, unlike the visuals, the BBC retained most (perhaps even all?) of the audio tracks to the stories so, this three disc set gives three viewing options. A third disc is extras (which I haven’t watched yet at time of writing and the second disc is the seven episodes with an animated cartoon in colour to accompany the original audio (goodness knows why anybody would want to see a black & white Doctor Who story in colour but I guess there are some strange people out there). The first disc in the set is the same 7 episodes in glorious monochrome with, if you desire, the option of watching the original surviving episode as part of that mix (for some reason relegated to the extras section). So, obviously, I watched the first black & white animated episode for this review, followed by the surviving episode, followed by the monochrome versions of 3-7. And I’m glad it shows up this way because, in comparison to the actual footage, it really shows up just how bad and limited the animations are, it has to be said.

I’ll declare that, as regular readers may remember, the Patrick Troughton version of The Doctor was my favourite incarnation of the character and this story, had I seen all the original live action versions of the episodes, may well have been one of my favourites. Alas, it has to be said, the combination of the original recordings with less well researched animation really takes all the enjoyment out of things.

The story is simple... the TARDIS is kidnapped from Gatwick Airport and The Doctor and Jamie track it down to an antique shop selling ‘brand new’ Victorian antiques. It turns out that the proprietor is using his own time machine to bring them to the present day (1967) for reasons not totally made clear but with the aim of bringing The Doctor and Jamie back in time to the Victorian era, for the Daleks to use for certain aspects of their plan to instil their race with the human factor (although that’s not the complete version of their plan). He does this because the Daleks have his daughter, Victoria and, of course, once The Doctor and Jamie arrive, the former pretends to work with the Daleks in order to defeat them while Jamie tries to rescue Victoria, unwittingly giving the Dalek’s the ‘human factor’ which is ultimately part of their plan.

And it’s probably nice stuff but it’s hard to tell by only having episode 2 to go on, as far as the visuals go. What I can say... and I know a lot of people like it, including my cousin in Australia... is that the animation is really not very good for a number of reasons. It’s a little flat and lifeless, to be honest. It’s like watching an old 1970s Filmation cartoon where you are on tenterhooks to find out if the animators are going to remember to make one of the characters blink every now and again (if you want to have a good shot at surviving the Weeping Angels then manifest yourself as a 1970s TV cartoon is my best advice). Yes, I know these are brand new state-of-the-art animations and there is obviously a fair amount of artistic expression going on but... well, even that is playing fast and loose with the brief in my opinion. Because, in addition to the lack of emotion on the actors faces which you can’t get just from sound itself (The Doctor comes across as particularly ruthless at some points during the middle section of the serial... you can’t see the worry which was presumably etched into his face in the live action version), the animated sections don’t even seem to be trying to match what originally might have been there.

Now that last statement could easily have been relegated to the ‘sheer conjecture’ department if it were not for the fact that we have the surviving middle episode as a comparison piece... with the top and tail of the cliffhanger in that episode seen as something which should surely be matched in the new animated footage. Alas, it’s clear when you see those moments in comparison that there have been huge liberties with what has been animated as opposed to whatever was originally seen. The angles are completely different and, in the animated version, show details like a person’s face which was clearly not visible on the real version. Also, little details like a Dalek’s arm pointing up instead of, in the original version of the scene, pointing down are also in evidence. 

Not to mention the fact that famous actors in roles, like Windsor Davis, look absolutely nothing like the actors in question... not to mention the bizarre way that the animated version of Victoria looks somehow permanently surprised. And was their really a coat of arms on the wall in the original labelled Whitaker, presumably in homage to the writer of this one being David Whitaker... or was it an in-joke added in only for this new version? And don’t get me started on why the scenes originally broadcast with The Beatles song Paperback Writer playing at the bar have been tracked in with a different song... good grief BBC, this is history, pay the money for the license!

So, as a facsimile stand-in for the original... which is what I would hope the brief here would be, I’m not interested in visual reinterpretation, just accuracy... then the cartoons here are absolute codswallop, it has to be said. And so I’ve not got too much more to add about this Blu Ray release, to be honest. For me, the newly animated cover version of The Evil Of The Daleks gets filed under the heading of ‘interesting’ rather than ‘good’ or ‘entertaining’ it’s sad to say. If you are a fan of Troughton’s Doctor then, obviously its a no-brainer to take a look at this but, yeah, don’t expect a faithful reconstruction of the original story because, as you’ll notice, it’s fairly clear the animators had absolutely no idea as to what was going on in some of the scenes and, yeah, they aren’t the best at improvising, it would seem.

The First Omen

Carlita Sway

The First Omen
Directed by Arkasha Stevenson
USA/Italy/UK/Canada/Serbia 2024
20th Century Fox
UK Theatrical Cut

Warning: Spoilers from 6am on the 6th day of the 6th month.

I don’t know. Like a London Transport bus, you wait ages for a decent nuncentric exploitation/horror movie to play at your local cinema and then two come along at once. The First Omen is a prequel that, I’m pretty sure nobody was crying out for but, what took me by surprise is that it almost gives the slightly superior Immaculate from last month (reviewed here) a run for its money and, while not nearly as good as the original movie The Omen (reviewed along with the sequels and reboot here), it’s still pretty great and is certainly, as far as I’m concerned, far better than any of those sequels and the unneccessary remake, for sure.

Okay, the film starts weirdly as the 20th century Studios logo comes up (except we all know it’s really 20th Century Fox, right?) but it’s the extended version of their fanfare, composed in 1953 by Alfred Newman to indicate that a picture is in the Cinemascope aspect ratio. However, this film is released in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio so, yeah, that popped me out of things right away... I hate it when the music is used incorrectly like that.

However, after that slight misstep, we are introduced to Father Brennan, the character who we know must survive to be in the original film, The Omen. And we understand this is him for a couple of great visual reasons. First up, they’ve made Ralph Ineson, the actor playing the role, look very much like Patrick Troughton (who played the part in the original movie). This one is set in 1971, the same year as the prologue to that movie and a few years before the main action of the original starts so, yeah, they do this quite well. But even before you catch a proper glimpse of the actor, they’re looking down at him from a POV of high up from a church, reminding you of just what happens to that character in The Omen and visually echoing/foreshadowing that sequence in the original where he gets impaled by the metal rod falling from the church steeple.

And, regarding this scene, you certainly know you’re in Omen territory right away because, a precariously hoisted piece of religious art is being clumsily raised up the rickety scaffold of the church and, like the premise of Lemony Snicket’s series of unfortunate events, you know that various, unexpected ‘accidents’ will be dangled in front of you just before they happen and, this is no exception. He goes into the church to talk to a throw away character played by Charles Dance and, you just know that something bad is going to happen when they both go and stand outside, just under where the builders are working.

And then we begin the main action properly... and we’re very much in similar territory to Immaculate in that it involves a young American coming to Rome to become a nun. She is played, quite brilliantly, by Nell Tiger Free, welcomed to the country by a cardinal played by Bill Nighy and is befriended by her new, ‘hedonistic before she takes her vows’ room mate Luz, played by Maria Caballero. Add to this cast the wonderful Sonia Braga (so good in Aquarius, reviewed here) and we have a movie which sings along doing all the right things.

Now, it’s not perfect... there are some clunky things about it. For instance, there’s a red herring of a character called Carlita (played by... well I don’t know... okay IMDB, explain to me what the two actresses listed as Carlita Picture Double means please?) and, while this character certainly features the familiar mark of the beast in a great hiding place, it seemed pretty obvious to me from the start (and quite badly telegraphed, literally by the formulaic visual shorthand that modern American movies tend to fall back on) just who the real mother of Damian from the original trilogy would turn out to be.

The other clunky thing about the movie is the whole extended ending of the film, which I suspect might well have been revised after the original cut. A fake feeling ‘rescue scene’ is added with a typical modern movie ‘have your cake and eat it’ epilogue. And while it’s necessary to see that, ‘oh yeah, Father Brennan did survive after all’ moment (because you can’t lead into the original films without him, once his presence here is established), the film also manages to set up the possibility of a sequel to this one independent from the original trilogy. Which, I have to admit, I quite like the idea of because, well, I really didn’t expect this movie to be so good.

Oh, and about the final line of the movie... it’s really ‘cringe’ as the kids would say. You remember the truly appalling bit at the end of that last, Fantastic 4 movie (reviewed here), where the kids are coming up with a name and realise there are four of them and they are quite fantastic (yeah, I wince even as I type)... well, given the events that preceded this sequence and the fact that the birth of a certain antichrist is accompanied by the score leaning full-on into a souped up arrangement of Jerry Goldsmith’s original opening titles to The Omen... did we really need a final bit of business where Father Brennan says to someone, something along the lines of... “They’ve even given him a name. Damien.” Yeah, really... would never have twigged that one, mate!

But despite these stupid sequences, the movie is absolutely riveting and, yeah, let’s talk about that score for a minute... and that sound design. Mark Korven’s score for the movie is absolutely brilliant, just what the film needs and certainly has a foothold in the 1971 setting of the story... and when he finally brings Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic melody... that works pretty well like it goes hand in hand with what else is going on with the music. And the sound design is really impressive too, with some nice ‘sound standing in for other sounds’ kinds of moments, a little similar to the music replaces scream scene I talked about in my review of Immaculate. Alas, as far as the score goes, there’s no proper CD release once again (the only Omen film not to have one, to date... I have the other five) and some wiley company needs to rectify that sorry state of affairs soon because I would love to give this one a listen.

So, yeah, The First Omen is really well made, has some great acting performances (spoiler... Nell Tiger Free’s breaking waters sequence rivals Claire Sweeney’s birth scene in Immaculate), brings the horror and is just genuinely, despite the clunky bits, a pretty cool film. And now I know what someone on Twitter meant when they said there’s a full on Isabelle Adjani Possession moment in this (reviewed by me here). This one’s an immediate Blu Ray pick up for me when it gets released and, yeah, I think most fans of the original series of movies (it kinda ignores the uncalled for reboot) should embrace this one. 

Doctor Who - The Three Doctors

Real 3D

Doctor Who
The Three Doctors
UK Air date:
December 1972 - January 1973
Four Episodes.
BBC Blu Ray Zone B

And so it came to pass it was time to crack open the Doctor Who Season 10 Blu Ray box set and, the first story in the box is the much loved fan pleaser The Three Doctors. This show must have been a nice Christmas present when the first episode was first broadcast in the holiday period between Christmas and New Year in 1972 and it was the programme’s ten year anniversary story. Of course, only the last three episodes were in it's 10th year and in January... the show itself wouldn’t reach that 10 year marker until November but, nobody seemed to care much and it’s an entertaining story.

This one tells of the Timelords on Gallifrey trying to save themselves and the rest of the universe by teleporting in previous incarnations of The Doctor to help himself fight the threat of the famous, 'missing presumed dead' Timelord Omega, who sacrificed himself many centuries before to give their race the power to master time travel... and who now lives in a black hole of his own making, out for revenge.

This was the first time in the history of the show that two or more incarnations of The Doctor had met each other and, to date, this has only happened four other times (not counting CGI trickery of half glimpsed running feet etc). This marks the first time that Patrick Troughton’s wonderful second Doctor would appear in one of these crossover stories (also his first time in colour) and he would go on to do the same in 1983 and 1985 (although his 1985 appearance, reviewed by me here, is perhaps best left forgotten). Also, because of the failing health of first Doctor William Hartnell, a small ‘limbo’ set was constructed at his home and his few brief scenes, roughly one per episode, were relayed as communications to Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee’s Doctors by video screen... the excuse being that the timelords didn’t have enough energy to fully transport him to rendezvous with the others.

And for an obvious, celebratory gimmick episode it’s actually quite well written, at least in terms of dialogue and the story isn’t too bad either. The show also features the then current Doctor’s companion Jo Grant, played by the inimitable Katy Manning (this would be her last season until she returned for two episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures opposite Matt Smith’s Doctor in the next century), Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge Stewart (played impeccably, as always, by Nicholas Courtney, who again made his swan song in a story from The Sarah Jane Adventures) and also a bigger part than normal for John Levene as Sgt. Benton (this is due to the part originally being earmarked for Frazer Hines to reprise his role as Second Doctor companion Jamie but, alas, he was busy doing Emmerdale Farm at the time... or Emmerdale as it seems to be known as today).

The chemistry between all the players is very strong and the humour coming from the dialogue is great. This one has probably one of my favourite scenes where, at UNIT HQ in the first episode, where the situation is already dire, the Brigadier asks The Doctor if there’s anything he can do to which Pertwee’s Doctor asks him to hand him a carbon rod. When the Brigadier does this, Pertwee uses it to stir his cup of tea... good stuff.

The really good decision the writers made in this was to not have the two primary Doctors, Troughton and Pertwee, who are present for all the episodes... get on with each other all that well. Just because you’re both the same person doesn’t mean you will agree on things and a great source of the humour and entertainment of this story is the constant bickering between the two of them, both put in their place by Hartnell at one point who calls his ‘replacements’ a dandy and a clown. Yep, there’s some good writing here. Such as the explanation of why so much stuff is pulled into the black hole when Omega is just after The Doctor... “Rather like taking a pill with a swig of water.” There’s even a joke reference in this, made by Katy Manning, to The Beatles song, I Am The Walrus.

I also liked the breakaway sets that were whisked away into the ‘quarry’ landscape of the planet in the black hole and the way bits of man made items are scattered about seemingly randomly in surrounding landscape... UNIT HQ even gets completely transported as the cliff hanger ending of one episode.

The special effects, though, are... not great. The electronic jelly that beams everything back to the black hole is a pretty rubbish looking video effect and the iconic gel guard monsters are actually quite awful and unconvincing suit creatures when you see them moving around. Quite disappointing for monsters who were never used again but whom everyone seems to remember (they even made it onto Weetabix cards, if memory serves).

Omega himself, a completely masked up figure, looks fairly impressive, a little like a golden pre-Darth Vader type presence. Alas, camera angles being what they are, especially when restored to Blu Ray, when the creature is revealed to have been eaten away with, as much of a surprise to him as to everybody else, nothing actually inside the suit, the illusion is ruined a little later on when you can clearly see the actors eyes behind the slits in the mask at one point.

About the Blu Ray... the transfer is pretty good but, for some reason the externally shot scenes, especially those at the beginning of the first episode, look fairly blurry and foggy still. I am guessing this is because the cameras weren’t quite in focus, maybe and, bearing in mind the way these episodes would have been received on first broadcast, probably nobody minded much. It wouldn’t look very different on those old TV sets compared to the rest of the footage, which on this new Blu Ray looks very sharp in comparison.

And that’s me about done on The Three Doctors. Omega would return in a different form for a Fifth Doctor story in the 1980s and the other thing that’s very important about this episode is that, as a reward for helping out the Timelords and saving the known universe, The Doctor is gifted with the components and memory needed to be able to control his TARDIS and travel in time again. His exile to Earth, brought in at the very end of the last Troughton episode and designed to make the show cheaper by not having to constantly make unrealistic looking alien sets, was over. Of course, this meant a very reduced role for the Brigadier and the rest of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (as it was in those days.. I’m not having any of this new Unified stuff, thank you very much) officers in the show but they wouldn’t disappear completely... not yet anyway. Overall, one of the more enjoyable stories and a cracking set of scenes with the Second and Third Doctors working together and bickering their way through the story. An entertaining celebration of a series which, I’m sure, had already run far longer than the show’s original producers had expected it to.

Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger

The Tiger Sanction

Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger
UK/USA 1977
Directed by Sam Wannamaker
Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

A few days before I watched this for my review, Peter Mayhew, the actor who played Chewbacca in many of the Star Wars movies, passed away. So I decided to watch Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger in his memory as he plays the’ man in the suit’ for the less fantastical, non-model shots of the Minaton character in this film... literally an automaton of a Minotaur. Alas, when all is said and done, my revisit to this material confirms my remembrance that, despite its status as a classic modern film with many people of my age group (I was 9 when this was released at cinemas)... it’s a truly terrible and forgettable film. Not that there aren’t some nice things about it but, after the brilliance of the film’s predecessors, also by Harryhausen... The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad (reviewed here) and The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad (reviewed here)... it literally does pale in comparison and I was, I’m afraid not for the first time, siting through this movie waiting for it to end.

That being said there are some nice things in it too and at least it gave Harryhausen and producer Charles H. Schneer a chance to recycle some of their unused ideas originally conceived for the previous films in this ‘loose series’. I say loose series because none of the Sinbad films follow on from the previous ones and, once again, the only recurring character is Sinbad himself, always played by a different actor and, in this case, played by one of John Wayne’s sons, Patrick Wayne.

So the plot of the film is the usual one of Sinbad and the princess he currently fancies, Farah, this time around, played by Jane Seymour (who you may remember as Solitaire in Live And Let Die, reviewed here), embarking on a ‘road movie’ as such, filled with fantasy adventures. Here they require the services of a wizard/philosopher, Patrick Troughton, to guide them to Hyperboria in order to restore Farah’s brother Kasim from the spell placed on him which has turned him into a baboon, preventing him from being crowned king. So... yeah... a similar plot to all the others... a villanous magician (this time a woman who hams it up pretty good, played by Margaret Whiting) and a quest for some kind of magical artefact which allows everybody to meet various creatures. Unlike the previous two films, the creatures here are, for the most part, based on real life fossil creatures as opposed to the mythical ones Harryhausen was perhaps better known for. So asides from the Minaton (which is a great but totally wasted character because he never really gets in on the action) and three ghouls... we have a troglodyte (possibly one of Harryhausen’s best animated creations), a giant wasp, a giant walrus, the chess playing baboon and a big sabre toothed tiger from which the film takes its title. And, it has to be said, the whole thing is a spectacularly dull affair and I don’t know why.

The performances are okay and former Doctor Who Patrick Troughton plays the ‘good sorcerer’, with Taryn Power, daughter of Tyrone Power Jr, playing his daughter... who falls in love with the baboon and, strangely enough, still seems to like him after he’s transformed back into a man at the end of the film.

The film is also lifted, somewhat, by the inclusion of a quite good score by Roy Budd. Now it’s not mixed in very clearly in some of the movie and, consequently, doesn’t seem that great when you hear it within the film itself but, as a stand alone listen on CD it’s really quite a good score and, although it’s obviously never going to be as good as Bernard Herrmann’s score for The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad or Dr. Miklos Rosza’s score for The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, it certainly holds up pretty well. There’s even a kind of mini homage (I’m being polite here) to Rosza when the Minaton rowing music, heard at several points in the film, sounds like it was almost lifted directly from Rozsa’s famous rowing music in Ben Hur (reviewed here). He even introduces a heavy, ponderous rhythm and arrangement for the equally ponderous giant walrus, in that specific scene. Roy Budd’s most well remembered musical piece would probably be his title music for the Michael Caine vehicle Get Carter and, I have to say, I usually don’t get along that well with this composer’s work but here he composed a really decent score in a more classical mode with some nice orchestration so, yeah, the music certainly doesn’t let the film down.

Several things do, though, it has to be said.

The whole thing seems strangely less epic, for starters. Although this had the largest budget of any of the Sinbad movies that Harryhausen and Schneer worked on, it looks like a TV movie to me, with cheap looking sets and props and just a general lack of the spectacle and grandeur that you need to live up to the previous ones. Even the matte painting shots are sometimes covered up with rising mist or snow in the hopes, one can only assume, that it will distract you from looking at them too much. And don’t get me started on the big, polystyrene blocks used to ‘resemble’ chunks of ice.

Another thing is that it’s a very dark film. And when I say dark I don’t mean the drama is downbeat and morose... it’s literally dark with at least half the movie, it seems to me, being shot ‘day for night’ with terrible filters muffling the light (but, in that tell-tale way, preserving the strong, daylight shadows of the actors regardless). It’s almost like they were looking to disguise how bad some of the sets are, maybe? Still, at least Indicator have had the good sense and taste to preserve this aspect of the movie on their beautiful new Blu Ray restoration (this is the third film in their truly gorgeous The Sinbad Trilogy set). Some companies, who shall remain nameless, try to fix these kinds of scenes by trying to brighten them up on the transfer and thus killing any sense of time established visually. Those kind of companies also forget that these things aren’t just entertaining films, they’re historical artefacts to preserve the original works of art so, you know, you have to get these things right.

Another inexcusable thing is the amount of rear projection shots used when none of the fantastic creatures are being filmed. There’s a certain set of locations where, whenever the main actors are seen from the front, they are standing in front of a screen of the location with terrible, shadowy lines created around their figures... something you may expect from scenes blending modes with the actors but not in scenes just using the main cast. And then, whenever the cast are seen in the actual location, you only see them from behind and Jane Seymour, or the actress standing in for her, has a different coloured dress from the close up shots. This really isn’t good people.

There’s a sequence in this film, though, which really sums up what the film-makers thought of the intelligence of the potential audience. That’s of a seagull wearing a stolen locket on set and then, when she (it’s the wizard in seagull form) flies off with the locket, the ‘seagull flying stock footage’ has absolutely no locket in sight. This is terrible stuff but then again, I guess the ‘home video’ revolution was still a few years away when this was released.

The box office on this wasn’t great although it made a good deal of profit on it’s original investment and a fourth Sinbad film set on Mars was planned but, alas, never made. In America, the film was released less than two months in the wake of another fantasy film called, you know it, Star Wars and so, by this point, the wonderful (for the most part) fantasy films of Ray Harryhausen were seeming a bit old fashioned already. This is the excuse given for its damp squib box office at the time compared to films like Lucas’ first opening shot of his ground breaking sci-fi opus and I think, certainly in America, where even the previous year’s Logan’s Run was seen to be somehow old fashioned once Star Wars had hit, this was probably true. In the UK, Star Wars didn’t open until quite a while after Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger but, even then, I remember being not much fussed as to whether I saw this one or not and I think I eventually saw it as part of a double bill with one of those 1970s Spider-Man movies they created out of sandwiching multiple episodes of the TV show together. I think I was more interested in Spider-Man at the time.

At the end of the day, if you are into Harryhausen’s fantasy films then this is still one you should see and the newish but very sold out ‘extras loaded’ set, The Sinbad Trilogy, from Indicator is the best way to do that (since writing the first draft of this review, the same company has released separate, stand alone versions of the Sinbad films on Blu Ray). Indicator have shown time and again that they care very much about the restorations they do and even if you don’t like this entry in the series, the other two films in the set are more than worth the price of admission, so to speak. Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger is one of my least favourite of Harryhausen’s films but it still is worth a watch and it has the distinction of being both the second Sinbad film to have a Bond girl in it, with Jane Seymour (the great Caroline Munro from The Spy Who Loved Me starred in The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, although she was a Bond girl after she filmed that one) and, with Patrick Troughton, also the second to feature one of the Doctor Who actors (again, Tom Baker starred in The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad). So don’t turn your back on this one... just don’t expect great things from it, would be my advice.

Doctor Who - The Enemy Of The World

Two By Two

Doctor Who - The Enemy Of The World
BBC DVD Region 2
Airdate: 23 December 1967 - 27 January 1968

2013 was a relatively good year for Doctor Who fans. After the initial disappointment that an alleged cache of “missing presumed wiped” episodes of the show had possibly been mostly ransacked and sold off to private collectors, the good news was that, as part of that cache, all but one episode of the missing 1967 story The Web of Fear and all of the serial that preceded it, The Enemy Of The World, were now once more amongst us. The BBC more or less rush released the two stories onto DVD with pretty much no extras at all at the end of the year and, from what I can remember, both stories languished at the very top of the DVD charts for a week or two. Not a bad chart performance for a couple of black and white Patrick Troughton stories almost 50 years old.

This marks my first screening of this story, although I had the novelisation of this one, adapted by Fourth Doctor companion Ian Marter. I remember when reading that novel as a kid, wondering how they'd managed to be able to use a word like “bastard” on a family viewing, British TV show in the 1960s and, as the existence of this recording confirms... they didn’t. Marter was adding his own dialogue to the mix and gave it a far more adult tone than it had originally, methinks.

This is a good story to have back with us, though. There are, sadly, very few Second Doctor stories surviving and this one is a particularly interesting one to have because it features my favourite Doctor, Patrick Troughton, in a dual role. Yes, I know it’s the old ‘jump the shark’ doubles plot but, already in the, then, short history of the show, this wasn’t the first time that a doppelganger of The Doctor had cropped up and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Here it’s done pretty tastefully and, believe it or not, there’s only one scene right near the end of the last episode where the two characters actually come face to face. So you don’t have to sit through too much of that split screen stuff here.

Why this is a good story to have had recovered though, is because of the versatility of Troughton’s standout performance. Yes, we’re all aware he was good as The Doctor and even non-Doctor Who fans will remember him, I’m sure, as being an outstanding character actor in films such as, for example, the original version of The Omen (reviewed by me here), where the priest he is playing gets impaled by a church spire. However, although he is a double for the title character, Salamander (the titular 'Enemy of the world'), he is only his double in appearance. The evil Salamander speaks with a kind of Mexican accent and this gives Troughton a chance to show off how he handles dialects. He also does some much more subtle stuff than this with the dual role, though. For instance, as The Doctor is working on perfecting his impersonation of Salamander so that he can find out if the tyrant of a future time in the Earth’s history, the far off year of 2018, is actually what his enemies are saying he is... he comes over as something like a cross between the two roles. Pulling it off enough to fool Salamander’s chief of security but still being different enough from his performance as Salamander throughout the serial that you can almost see The Doctor going through a learning curve.

The companions in this one are two of my favourite ones, Jamie and Victoria and, of course, age old unrealised sexism raises its head again when, to help The Doctor, Jamie makes it appear that he is saving Salamander’s life so he can get a job as one of his personal bodyguards. He asks Salamander to sort out a job for Victoria and she gets... cook’s assistant. Well, it is ‘of it’s time’ I guess and I’m not too worried about those kinds of gender stereotypes, especially when some of the episodes have smart performances by Mary Peach as a resistance fighter and Carmen Munroe as a food taster, the latter being an extremely strong role with no clear black and white division on the character who finds herself working for Salamander, even though she hates him, before eventually switching sides and... well, I’ll leave you to discover the final fate of her character here.

The music in this one is quite prominent in the mix in some places for a show of this nature in the era it was broadcast and the plot itself, while a little reminiscent of an old Flash Gordon serial in its twisty/turny revisiting of terrain and locations backwards and forwards as the narrative continues, is still quite entertainingly told... even if it doesn’t have an inhuman monster bent on the destruction of The Doctor and his companions, as many of the shows had.

As usual with the Troughton stories, there’s a lot of humour involved and one of the things that got me chuckling was when someone mentioned they should rendezvous at the old, disused jetty. “Disused yeti?” proclaims The Doctor, slyly referencing the robotic creatures from the, now sadly lost, story The Abominable Snowman. The creatures were quite popular and had made their debut only two stories prior to this one. They would make their second appearance, in updated and perhaps a bit less appealing costumes, in the very next Doctor Who adventure, The Web Of Fear (reviewed by me here).

As a lot of the earlier Doctor Who serials did in those days, the end of each story would directly cliffhanger into the next story and this one is no exception. At least, however, we are able to watch the other side of the cliffhanger in this case. At the end of the sixth episode of The Enemy Of The World, the TARDIS is in flight in space and time but the doors are open and The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria are trying to hold on for dear life in case they get sucked out and scattered in time and space (I won’t tell you why... "spoilers sweetie"). Luckily, we now have the majority of the episodes recovered for The Web Of Fear and after the prologue of that adventure, we once more rejoin The Doctor and his companions in this predicament until Jamie can get the TARDIS stabilised once more. So, in that regard at least, it’s nice that running stories were rediscovered and restored.

The Enemy Of The World is quite a nice, pacey Doctor Who adventure and it’s also better for the fact that not everybody is what they seem. The bad guys and good guys aren’t as clear cut until the final episode and doubts about the intentions of certain characters do rear themselves right from the onset. If you’re a fan of Doctor Who and the Second Doctor in particular then The Enemy Of The World should definitely be on your ‘watch list’. If, however, you are new to the programme then I suspect a more ‘monstercentric’ episode might be a better jumping on point than this. Still, hard to go wrong with Troughton in such fine form and, once again, this charming actor doesn’t disappoint. And with Donald Trump voted in as the president of the USA at the moment, the idea of a dodgy dictator such as Salamander ruling the world of 2018 with an iron fist doesn’t seem like a million miles away from the real world, to tell the truth.

Doctor Who - The Ice Warriors

Ice To See You

Doctor Who - The Ice Warriors
UK Airdate 11th November - 16th December 1967
BBC Region 2

Okay, so this is a first time watch for me of the first Doctor Who serial to feature the title creatures of this story... The Ice Warriors. I was looking forward to seeing this one because Patrick Troughton is my favourite of the many incarnations of The Doctor throughout the show’s lengthy history and I don’t remember having ever seen this one before. The titular menace, however, are not exactly one of my favourite species of Doctor Who monsters, although they’ve always, since I was a kid, seemed to have been the third most popular monsters of the entire programme, coming in just behind the Cybermen and then the Daleks (although I suspect the Weeping Angels and the Silurians may be a little more popular than the Ice Warriors these days, since they’ve only appeared in the new incarnation of the show once, to date, in 2013).

For me, they’ve always been a bit of a clunky villain and, before they were brought out of cold storage for Matt Smith’s final season as The Doctor, they were really only used in stories opposite Troughton and Jon Pertwee, so they’re not the monsters they used to be in the 1960s and 70s... so to speak. Unfortunately, in this story, they’re exactly the monsters they used to be and... yeah, I’m still not that impressed by them as such... even if their leader is played by Bernard Bresslaw (well I only arrrrrsked).

Another thing which I wasn’t all that impressed with was the story on this one. There’s a nice idea that, in the far future, after the ice caps have risen and are about to claim the entire planet due to various problems, the Earth is split into two factions...Scientists, running the show and standing in for the last remnants of civilisation... and Scavengers, who have abandoned the treacherous ways of science, to an extent, because it was the scientists who got the Earth into this situation in the first place. However, in terms of the problems to be solved and how those final solutions are realised, it seemed to be a much more standard plot than a serial six episodes in length would have called for. It’s not that far off from an old 1950s Republic serial in terms of going back and forth between the same three or so sets trying to find new things to do, to tell you the truth. Add in a subplot taken directly from The Thing From Another World to introduce The Ice Warriors into the plot line and there you have it. So I was a bit disappointed in that aspect of the show, I have to admit.

However, that being said, the acting in this one is very strong. You have the usual regulars being Troughton’s Doctor, Frazer Hines’ reliable Jamie McCrimmon and Victoria Waterfield played by Deborah Watling. They are all very good, of course, but its some of the other actors in this, and what they bring to their characterisations, which makes this particular story worth watching. First of all you have a character called Penley, an ex-Scientist turned Scavenger, played by Peter Sallis as a relatively young man (that‘s Clegg from Last Of The Summer Wine and the voice of Wallace from Wallace And Gromit, to name a few things he’s known for), playing against type as the cleverest and most grounded of all the characters in the serial other than The Doctor himself. He takes control of a situation just when he needs to and is quite helpful at propelling the story, what little there is of it, along.

We also have Peter Barkworth as Clent, the leader of a group of Scientists trying to push back with technology against the ice. Now he’s very interesting because he kind of starts off as the human villain person of the piece, the guy every other rational human has to overcome to be able to do the right thing when it comes to saving the planet, but he is fleshed out so well that you actually begin to empathise with him. Because of the way Barkworth plays him, you totally understand where he’s coming from and it’s a fact that he’s written in such a way that he isn’t totally unreasonable and comes off more like a bad manager who learns a lesson and helps out when thrown a bone... as opposed to an out and out villain. This works really well and you feel, by the end of the sixth episode, that he has kind of redeemed himself a little. This is a well written character, well realised by the actor who portrays him and you’d be hard pushed to find better, these days, than the level of depth he brings to what is, lets face it, a token “sci-fi character of the month” role for the show. Really fantastic stuff.

It’s trying to be a bit of a romp of a serial, this one, but it’s dreadfully slowed down and made more sluggish in some respect by the Ice Warriors themselves... I was getting kind of tired of their ‘hissing’ speech patterns not long after they started. Since Vicky and Jamie are rarely in the same sequence in this one - Victoria spends most of the serial as a hostage and Jamie spends most of the time paralysed, unable to walk, after falling foul of an Ice Warrior weapon - there’s not much in the way of seeing how the two assistants get on with each other in terms of on screen chemistry. I still kind of prefer Zoe over Victoria, to be honest, but that might change when I see more of Vicky as a companion (I’ve not seen Enemy Of The World or reviewed The Web of Fear yet). I find it kinda strange that Vicky just gets sent to the TARDIS for most of the last episode (apparently she was unable to film that week) and also find it strange that their are some unusual continuity errors in this... given that they had a whole six episodes worth to address the issues. For instance, the TARDIS lands on its side but, when it takes off at the end, it has suddenly righted itself again. Similarly, Jamie has a lucky escape from death, as I mentioned before, courtesy of an Ice Warrior’s sonic gun but, after all the fuss, he’s walking around with no problems at all during the final episode with no apparent explanation as to his miracle recovery. So I wondered what had happened to the scripting there.

All in all, although The Ice Warriors is maybe not as fun as most of the Troughton stories I’ve seen, it’s certainly one of the best acted and it’s never quite too sluggish that you lose interest in it. Episodes Two and Three of the Six episode run are, unfortunately, missing presumed wiped, but the sound recordings do still exist... so the episodes have been animated to the original soundtrack. The animation is a bit over stylised/simplified and lacking in much movement (apart from the constant blinking of the characters, for some reason) but it’s watchable enough and certainly one of the better solutions they could have gone with to bring us the entire story... so it’s not too terrible. I’m sure most fans of Troughton will love this story but, it’s not a jumping on point for the Second Doctor if you’ve not seen any of his other, better serials, I would have to say.

Doctor Who: Kill The Moon

Moon Zero Who

Doctor Who: Kill The Moon
UK Airdate: 4th October 2014
BBC 1

Warning: Very slight spoilers here but... honestly... it’s not worth worrying about, I reckon.

Oh dear.

You know, when I saw the trailer for this one last week I was somewhat underwhelmed by it. Not so much by the cheap lack of location shooting... Doctor Who has always been about doing things cheaply... but by the possible lack of story we might get in a setting like the moon once again. But, I’m always game to see what they come up with next...

Now I’ll say up front that there were some very good things about this episode and I’ll get to those a little later but I must say that my fears were somewhat justified because, after a damned good lead in for the first twenty minutes or so, with the TARDIS materialising on a space shuttle that’s crash landing on the moon, the atmosphere was quite chilling and that’s, in my opinion anyway, pretty much how a lot of Doctor Who should be... allowing for a little diversity here and there. However, what we were presented with this week was not so much of a story as a moral dilemma. Which in itself isn’t a bad thing but the way it was explored seemed less interesting to me and, for the majority of the second half of the show, I didn’t care about it one way or another and I would have been just as happy if every one of the characters had met an untimely end.

One of the reasons is that I can’t believe The Doctor hasn’t been on the moon later than the year 2049 before. In fact, as I just wrote that sentence I decided to check by randomly doing a search on the first moon based Doctor Who story that came to mind, The Moonbase. Yep, sure enough, Patrick Troughton took on the cybermen on the moon in the year 2070... so I think if what had happened at the end of this story, prior to that one, had indeed happened in the continuity of the series, then I think The Doctor might have noticed something not quite right about the moon’s chemical make up about then... I’m sure no two moons are identical, after all.

Another big problem for me was the science of the thing. Now I’m not a scientist by any means but I threw the question out on twitter last night and, asides from being completely off about the age of our beloved and cherished celestial body, the shockwave and other things like, for instance, the fact that there are clearly still tides visible on Earth when the moon has parted company, makes the story seem more like a fairytale for kids and not something you’d schedule in your programming at 8.30pm on a Saturday night. This kind of stuff kept bothering me all through the episode and since none of it was explored in any great detail, I stopped caring about what was going to happen half way through this one. It lost all credibility for me.

There were some positive things about the episode, however.

Capaldi was great as The Doctor and so was Jenna Coleman as a much toughened up version of Clara. There was a hard moral dilemma in the story and although the dialogue pertaining to it left me a bit cold, the dialogue dealing with the relationship between The Doctor and the people who he is surrounded by was very “on the nose”. We had Clara getting very angry at him too and giving the impression that she’s left The Doctor behind for good... although she obviously hasn’t. And it’s not surprising actually because, and I think some people might have missed this because she didn’t address it in her tirade against The Doctor, the TARDIS only rematerialised to pick up Clara and the others after she had stopped the countdown with only one second to spare. Which means, if she hadn’t have stopped the countdown, there would have been no way for The Doctor to jump in and rescue them, he wouldn’t have had the time... they’d be dead.

Which sounds like a grim option for a time traveller but there are precedents for why he couldn’t have looked ahead and gone back earlier scattered throughout the series over many decades. Now that is a good reason for Clara to have a very adverse reaction to what’s happened to her and I think her outburst and decision was a good one. Capaldi’s Doctor was being as coldly ruthless as he could get back in the William Hartnell days on this one and that’s no bad thing. That being said, however, I do think the Danny Pink character now bears watching a little closer. There’s a chance he might have been “got to” and could be the enemy of both The Doctor and Clara for all I know, judging from his advice to her at the end of last night’s episode... sound advice or not. Keeping my eye on him for a little while because he might not actually be who he at first seems, I suspect.

The other positives were that the sets didn’t look that cheap, they were well shot and used, the costumes didn’t look tacky as you would expect and the first twenty minutes or so had, as I said, a great atmosphere. The downside of that, of course, was that the “giant spiders” were a bit, well, a bit unthreatening and just didn’t seem like anything I should need to be frightened of... and I say this as a confirmed arachnaphobe, I assure you. So there’s that.

All in all, although I appreciate the huge amount of work that’s obviously gone into this episode and quite like the darkened tone, somewhat, I have to put this one down as truly an episode I would like to forget about as quickly as possible. When science fiction ignores science then it becomes something far less interesting, as far as I’m concerned.

Doctor Who - The Krotons

Kroton Torpedoes

Doctor Who - The Krotons
UK Airdate: 28th December 1968 to 18th January 1969
BBC Region 2

I remember exactly when I first saw The Krotons on television... and it was a really big deal.

My earliest, haziest recollections of Doctor Who as a two year old were of the Autons smashing their way out of shop windows in the Jon Pertwee classic Spearhead From Space (reviewed here) and Jon Pertwee was the Doctor I grew up with... along with, um, Tom Baker and Peter Davison. However, I was aware of all of the Doctors at the time from various publications... the 1973 10 year Radio Times anniversary magazine, The Doctor Who Book Of Monsters and, of course, the numerous Target novelisations of the stories which I started reading when I was fairly young. And my favourite of these last were always the ones with Patrick Troughton’s incarnation of The Doctor in them.

Flash forward a little to November 1981. We were already past the great purge of the BBC's stupid destruction of what was then the majority of their Doctor Who back catalogue and, as a result, they only had the one Patrick Troughton story left in their vaults at the time (a few more have thankfully resurfaced over the years but the majority of them are still lost). The story was The Krotons but, since they rarely showed repeats of Doctor Who related stories on television at the time, barring the odd rerun of The Brain Of Morbius or The Deadly Assassin, it seemed unlikely that I would ever see a Hartnell or Troughton story in my lifetime (or so I thought then and, in the days before commercial video recorders, this was actually a very reasonable conclusion to reach).

Then something wonderful happened. To bridge a gap between series 18 and 19 of the show, the BBC ran a series of repeats, screening old stories in the winter of 1981, before Davison’s first full series as The Doctor. The stories they ran, shown as part of a season called The Five Faces Of Doctor Who, were Hartnell’s first story An Unearthly Child, Troughton’s The Krotons, Pertwee’s The Carnival Of Monsters, Hartnell,Troughton and Pertwee’s The Three Doctors and Baker’s recent swan song, Logopolis.

And so I had occasion to finally see  Troughton in action in, not only a Troughton era story, which had started its original first episode broadcast right towards the end of the first year of my own birth, but also a Pertwee era story which I didn’t really remember from the first time it played back in 1972. And they were great. I really loved Troughton in the role of The Doctor and from pretty much that point in my life he became my favourite actor in the role. Still is to this day.

The Krotons may not have been the one the BBC would have shown if they’d have had any kind of choice in terms of repeating from Troughton’s back catalogue, but it was certainly a good one, depicting the somewhat clichéd Doctor Who story chestnut, the ignorant enslaved by the technologically advanced.

In the case of The Krotons, The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe accidentally stumble on a race of primitive humanoids called The Gonds who are educated by The Kroton’s machines throughout their lives. The brightest and best are picked each year to be “companions” of the unseen Krotons and disappear into the Kroton’s machine, never to be seen again. The Doctor and his companions already know why they’ve not been seen again.. because they are disintegrated by the Krotons as, it turns out, The Krotons convert smart brain energy into something they can use to finally ‘take off’ after centuries in their broken spaceship... the repairs to which are conveniently just reaching completion. It’s up to The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe to rally the Gonds against the Krotons and also defeat the superior new faction of Gonds who want to attack the Krotons straight away with no chance of winning. It’s all pretty standard stuff for a Doctor Who story but, since it is a 1960s Doctor Who story, that means it’s still pretty good at what it does where many other shows or movies might fail.

The camerawork is kinda cool and there are some interesting POV shots from the ‘camera-as-Kroton’ vision with some establishing shots, too, which border on the surreal and maintain interest without worrying about not filling the soundtrack with the constant drone of dialogue, like most shows these days try to do.

The score, such as it is, is interesting too. It’s just been released on CD earlier this year by Silva Screen but it’s not a traditional score rooted, or indeed anywhere near, melody. Instead it’s a load of electronic sounds and atmospheres which allowed the BBC Radiophonic Workshop a chance to show off its technical brilliance and imbibe the story with sound tonalities to create the tension and atmosphere required when the villains are, indeed, a robot/crystalline species themselves.

The acting and scripting are all pretty much pitch perfect and you do care about the various characters and the antics they get up to on screen, although some of the cliffhangers are not exactly as worrying as you might want, to be sure. The personalities of both The Doctor and his companions come to the fore, re-enforcing the character types and flitting between the comedy that the Troughton era was best known for and the sense of imminent danger that has always been a big part of the show.

The DVD print fares pretty well for a Troughton era story, not that surprising since they’ve had the original of this one for a while, and the transfer seems as good as you could expect from the BBC at this stage of their admirable contribution to the home video format. Certainly an entertaining time for Troughton fans and, if you’ve never seen a 'Second Doctor' story before, this one would make a great jumping on point, seeing as how the character dynamics are all well on show and it’s all wrapped up in a charmingly entertaining story. Definitely one to watch.

Doctor Who - The Snowmen

There’s No Business Like Snowbusiness

Doctor Who - The Snowmen
Airdate: 25th December 2012. 
UK. BBC1

Warning: Oh yes. A positive web of fearsome spoilers here in this one.

Oh my God! They killed Kenny! Err... oh no... best not say that, it’s one speculative spoiler too far, perhaps... but whatever... um...

Okay then. That was bloody good.

I’m so glad and, frankly, relieved that, after complaining about four of the last five episodes in the current series, this mid-season Christmas special turned out to be... well... a little bit special after all.

This is probably going to be a fairly short review because I’ve really not very much to complain about and everything to praise... except for one thing (oh c’mon... you knew I was going to complain about one thing, didn’t you?) and that is... why the heck is The Doctor being such a sulky, stick in the mud after losing “The Ponds”. I’m not sure you can really go and sulk in Victorian London for so long and change your basic character to one of so much “bah humbug” as that. And then to change it back in a flash... that’s pretty silly. I mean, okay, you can use the riddle of the double death in this season of a character (and possibly more... will Moffat stop at just two almost impossible deaths?) as impetus to bringing The Doctor out of his sulky rut... but if you ask me the gentleman was perhaps protesting too strongly anyway, in certain sequences.

So anyway, other than that, there’s so much for people to take away and ponder from this episode...

There was the return of the lesbian silurian Madame Vastra and her wife Jenny Flint, running around London with Strax the Sontaran (all three of whom first appeared in A Good Man Goes To War - reviewed here) and who I would still like to see more of. Then there was the brilliant new assistant who first appeared in Asylum Of The Daleks (reviewed here), the first episode of this season, and there to give rise, apparently, to the kind of nerdy timey wimey and, indeed, timey-whiney attitude that stray reviewers such as myself (especially myself) are apt to engage in when it comes to complaining speculation about the tying up of loose threads (often in a less than satisfactory manner, I might add) in the Moffat shows. But thats okay. It gives us something to keep us busy complaining... so that’s all good.

Then there was the great idea of intelligent snow that mirrors thought and is looking to create a more stable being to wreak havoc on our tiny planet... and it’s at that point very early on in the proceedings that I should have figured out who the real villain was, but it took a little while longer and I can kick myself a little really because, when I first saw the new shots of the doctor wearing the top hat I thought to myself it was very reminiscent of another long gone Doctor who I remember being drawn in a very similar fashion in reprints from various Doctor Who annuals when I was a kid.

Okay, so the theme for this episode, and perhaps this series is, if I’m not very much mistaken... and I might well be, let’s face it, I’m probably wrong almost as often as I’m right on this stuff... is my favourite Doctor, Patrick Troughton... the second Doctor. Honestly, the title The Snowmen was already reminiscent of the title of the story The Abominable Snowmen, after all, so it really shouldn’t have been that much of a leap for me.

Pennies began to drop only when The Doctor mentioned a good strategic attack plan would be the London tubes in 1967... which gives them time to set up shop just before Troughton’s second pop at this villain in the tubes of London in 1968. Then, when the GI initials on the card, that Richard E. Grant’s villainous character was giving out, were properly revealed as being The Great Intelligence... that was all the confirmation needed. The Great Intelligence was the villainous “thing” controlling the Yetis in the two Troughton adventures The Abominable Snowmen and The Web Of Fear. Woohoo... are we heading for our very own Yeti story at the culmination of this season? Are we heading towards a special edition of the programme where The Doctor and Clara will be CGI spliced directly into the action of whatever surviving footage there is of the Troughton episodes of The Web Of Fear in much the same way as the Deepspace Nine episode Trials And Tribbleations CGI spliced the DS9 crew back into the classic Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles, all in time for The Doctor’s 50th anniversary celebrations in November of next year?

Well, probably not that last, I suspect. Wishful thinking, the CGI splicing bit because, frankly, this is the BBC not Paramount Pictures... it probably costs a bomb to do that kind of thing well. But, you know, if they do go down that path... you heard it guessed here first!

Okay... so there was all that in this episode... what else?

Well, everything else, actually.

A bit of magical wonder as Clara Oswald Oswyn trails The Doctor to his secret, cloud hopping TARDIS lair (oh, okay, two things I didn’t like then... the new TARDIS interior sucks, it has to be said, in comparison with the last two). A bit of the old run, jump, monologue about gobbledy-gook physics and then run around a bit more... which is always good for screen time in Doctor Who (and talking about going on about Doctor Who... can they please stop pushing those two words throughout the latest series please... okay, so that’s three things I didn’t like then). The dialogue was fantastic, with some brilliant high comedy in a three hander between The Doctor, Clara and Strax as the audience are introduced to the inherent properties of a “memory worm” in, probably, the most humorous way they could. The framing was clean and the editing pacey and coherent (coherent is good and not always something which can be counted on these days, to be honest) and the music, elegant and melodically Victorian, was very impressive... with Murray Gold’s Eleventh Doctor sub-theme only being pushed about three times in the episode, saved for the occasions when The Doctor was doing something extremely... well... Doctor-like. Which is what good leitmotif should do, I guess. There was also a nice but of musical parody when The Doctor was pretending to be Sherlock Holmes where Gold wrote and orchestrated a cue in a nod to the music being used currently on Moffat’s other succesful TV show, Sherlock... so that was a nice bit of business.

Okay, so I’m not going ot labour the point here... this episode was a marked change in tone and pace (by which I mean it wasn’t deadly dull like a lot of the episodes this series) and overall, this and the usual promise of puzzling things to come, which I’ve fallen for yet again (even though Moffat usually lets me down big time with his end games) is enough to keep this viewer on board for the rest of the series, for sure.

Really strong episode. Well worth your time and especially if you’re a fan of the Troughton era... now if they can just bring Jamie and Victoria or Zoe back for the finale, then I will be fairly happy. Great episode... well worth a watch. Can’t wait to watch again on DVD.

Doctor Who - The Dominators

The Domination Game

Doctor Who - The Dominators

UK 1968

BBC Region 2

Every time I watch a Doctor Who story starring my favourite incarnation of The Doctor, The Second TV Doctor as portrayed by Patrick Troughton, I marvel at just how perfect a piece of science fiction TV the show was “back in the day”. The five part story The Dominators is just such an experience and, although it’s true that, like a lot of the Troughton stories, it’s pretty simplistic in its overall make up... I ended up enjoying this one much more than I’d been expecting as I tucked myself away with it on Christmas Eve 2011.

There’s a lot of shoddy technical work on this one, as would be expected from a story of this era... the most obvious one being that a lot of the long shots are shot on a rocky landscape on location but the majority of the close up work is done on a set against a backdrop of that same location... these two things do not match or blend well... or in any way, in fact, and I’ve just found out since rewatching it for the first time in a over a decade, that Patrick Troughton was not around for any of the actual location shoots and the footage of him in longshot is all done with a double (although apparently not a very convincing one although... I’m pleased to say I didn’t actually notice that myself).

The story does have a sense of action taking place on a larger scale, even though it’s actually only set in two places on an alien world where the Dominators of the title are drilling into the core of the planet to generate enough radiation when the planet explodes to power their waiting fleet. There are only two menacing (and vaguely stupid looking, due to their enourmous shoulder pads) Dominators in fact, and they tend to argue with each other quite a lot and get all shouty... but they do have an iconic alien robot race with them called The Quarks who were supposed to be a new merchandising opportunity from the BBC along the lines of the popularity of The Daleks. Alas... it’s easy to see why The Quarks failed to have the desired effect because, no matter how iconic they are, they really do only need to be knocked over by someone to get themselves into difficulty and they look quite frail due to the way they’ve been designed. The Quarks didn’t appear in their own right on TV again apart from a brief cameo in the last Troughton story The War Game (reviewed here), although they were briefly considered for a return engagement in the classic story The Five Doctors... before being replaced with a new and deadly creation. I do remember that they did appear fairly regularly in the Doctor Who comic strip during the Troughton era... so they did get around at least that much.

The story is a true delight to watch with the chemistry between The Doctor and his two companions Jamie and Zoe being the absolute best it ever got on the show... also, the team split up often so that two strands of story can be told simultaneously. The clifhanger endings to the first four episodes aren’t great but they are serviceable and the acting is convincing enough to keep you watching.

One thing that made me laugh was the introduction of children’s favourite Brian Cant as the practical miilitary advisor to a pacifistic race who are facing the destruction of their planet. His plan of “waiting to see what happens” doesn’t amount to much and he might have had a better go at it by singing some of his Playaway songs at the enemy rather than attempt to support his lack of strategy by speaking loudly and getting himself killed on his first meeting with one of the Dominators. He does look confident though... you have to give him credit for that. Unfortunately, just when you think that Brian can... you realise that he just plain can’t.

The story feels a bit padded with various characters rushing to and from the main city centre and this kind of business did remind me of some of the Flash Gordon serials I used to love as a kid. Keep everyone moving between the two settings and nobody will notice that you’re unneccesarily dragging things out to fill up air time. It’s all pretty bearable though and there’s enough nice stuff in the script which make all the to-ing and fro-ing much easier to swallow. The final sequences do though, it has to be said, feel like they’ve been lifted from the Hartnell story The Dalek Invasion of Earth (later remade as the movie Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.) in that The Doctor and his companions and new friends dig a tunnel into the side of the tunnel being drilled so they can grab the bomb before it detonates and send it back to The Dominators to destroy them in a move that more modern incarnations of The Doctor may very well not have approved of.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about The Dominators. If you like classic Doctor Who then this is definitely one of the better ones and, as far as I’m concerned, anything with Troughton in it is worth a watch. Check it out if you’re in the mood for a switch-your-brain-off serial.

Omen Holiday

The Omen Pentology Box

666 Warning of the Beast: This article contains devilish spoilers.

Ok... It’s been literally decades since I saw the original Omen trilogy and I’d never seen Omen 4 or the remake released on the 6th day of the 6th month of 2006... and what with every horror movie blogger on twitter going nuts about Halloween I thought I might as well jump on the rickety band-hearse and have a go at a horror movie blog too. Although I do feel it a bit strange doing something for such a dubious occasion because the truth is, when I was a child growing up in the late 60s/early 70s, Halloween was never really an event over here in the UK... in fact it barely got a mention and certainly we weren’t plagued by trick or treaters or encouraged to watch various horror movies to celebrate said non-event. I wasn’t even allowed to frolic naked in the woods and plunge my dagger bloodthirstily into an undefiled virgin as a sign of my willingness to sacrifice the pure in heart for a prosperous and everlasting life... let alone dress up in a dodgy costume and threaten people for sweets in a kind of ritualistic, monster endorsed protection scam. In fact, the only real reference I saw to Halloween each year was when the Sunday edition of The Observer would drop through our door and I would turn to that “special” page near the back and read about Linus and Sally waiting in the pumpkin patch all night, looking out for The Great Pumpkin.

But as usual, I digress.

So anyway... I racked my brains with what to watch and I remembered I’d not seen all The Omen movies and figured out, as an extra special treat, I’d watch them all back to back on the weekend before Halloween so I can write some kind of long and winding and hopefully, at least, marginally entertaining review of them which I can try to complete so people can read it in time for Halloween if they so desire. But the real clincher for this deal, the real deciding factor on this was... oh, bugger it. Alright, here’s what happened. I went to the Camden Film Fair and saw a copy of the 6 disc set of the five Omen films (The Omen Pentology) going for a measly five quid... so I bought the darn things and figured they’d be good blog material for this bizarre Halloween thingy everybody seems to be making a fuss about again this year... okay? You dragged it out of me.

But just so you don’t feel irritated about my incredible cheapness at having purchased all these films for just a miserable £5, please realise that I stuck through watching all five of these movies as the quality of them deteriorated exponentially as the series progressed. Back-to-back with an overnight sleep after three of them for the pretension of preserving my own sanity. So it’s not like I didn’t do some work here! Anyone who’s seen Omen 4 will probably know what I’m talking about here and hopefully sympathise. Anyway, on with the show...

The Omen 1976 US

Directed by Richard Donner

20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

I remember seeing this on TV when I was 10 or 11 and absolutely loving it. 30 or more years later... I still think this is a great movie and I can see why it had such an impact and garnered such box office success on its release. Mind you, if it hadn’t been a hit, we’d have never have had to sit through Omen 4... um... no, still glad they made the first one, regardless of the consequences of their success.

If you don’t know the story of The Omen then you probably aren’t into horror films and you should probably be reading one of my other blogposts instead of this lengthy piece. Let me just do a quick run down of major iconic elements for those of you who haven’t indulged... just the basics...

Okay...baby killed and swapped for Jackal’s spawn born at time of baby’s death. Son of the devil goes home with new British ambassador and called Damian. He has a 666 birthmark on his head. People know son of satan is around and want him dead. People die in devilish and cunning ways. British ambassador realises truth and goes to kill son but is shot dead by police instead. Damian is adopted and rises to power to be Devil born from politics to destroy the world... yada, yada, yada.

Okay, I’ve been trying to pick apart some of the reasons why the very first Omen movie worked so well whereas the sequels... really didn’t, and I’ve come up with the fact that The Omen has a kind of mystery element to it. The great actor David Warner plays a photo-journalist and his snaps of people show distortions on the prints which predict their violent deaths. Gregory Peck plays Ambassador Thorn and when he teams up with David Warner to find out just what the heck the violently deceased priest played by Doctor Who legend Patrick Troughton has been going on about, you are really rooting for the characters and willing them to put all the supernatural jigsaw puzzle pieces together in their heads. I remember as a child being absolutely on the edge of my seat when each new photograph and clue was followed up. This is a dimension the sequels are sadly lacking but, to be fair to them, you already know all the answers by the end of the first movie so you really can’t introduce much of a mystery element into the material after that point.

It’s a really well written (by David Seltzer) little horror movie and the performances are, quite frankly, all superb and you’ve got a brilliant cast so it’s really not surprising. In addition to the three acting legends I mentioned in my last paragraph, you also have Lee Remick, Billie Whitelaw and Leo McKern added to the mix. Seriously folks, on an acting level this film cannot fail.

So good script, good acting. What else?

Well, something I never noticed the last time I watched it (probably because in the late 70s they would have been showing it in ‘orrible pan and scan on TV) is the composition of the shots in this first one. Donner’s a great director but I don’t know much about his key visual signatures... but what I did notice in this one is that nearly all the shot compositions in this film (apart from one where Damian runs into Lee Remick on his bike and terminates her pregnancy by knocking her to a long fall from a flight or two up) are pitched to the right of the screen. Almost everything runs in perspective to the right of the shot... an effect which works consistently and well throughout the running time. I’d be really interested, time permitting, in going back to some other Donner films to see if they’re put together in the same way. Because this one just works so well.

And then of course there’s the music! The late, great Jerry Goldsmith composed a lot of movie scores in his long career and received his fair share of Oscar nominations over the years... and rightly so. His score for The Omen is phenomenal and influential (in the worst way) and it’s the one time in his entire career that he actually won that Oscar. There’s a great and sweeping Hollywood love theme but the most remembered sequences are those where he’s got a choir chanting latin lyrics, often set to a jaunty rhythm which maybe shouldn’t quite work... but actually does work really well. It’s unsettling and breeds anxiety in the viewer and really serves the film well. It’s not non-stop like scores these days... in fact it’s quite a short score. Jerry Goldsmith was a master of spotting soundtracks (spotting is the art of choosing which sequences of a film to write a musical cue for and which to leave unscored) and it really shows in this film with great, long sequences left unscored, allowing for the dread filled sequences to carry a greater impact on the viewer.

I said Jerry’s score was influential in the worst way and that’s because, every time now somebody want’s to do a parody of The Omen they use Orff’s O Fortuna from Carmina Burana... and the reason they do this is, for some reason, people think this is the music used in The Omen. No... it’s not even close in structure, melody or tempo and I’m always left wondering who it is that thinks Jerry’s score is even remotely similar to Orff’s signature piece. I’ve even seen Classics meet the Movies style albums include the Orff piece and claim it’s from The Omen on the track listings... madness!

Goldsmith’s score would exert a very long reaching influence on all of the subsequent movies in the series, even the ones he didn’t score, as you will see later.

Okay... so if you’re a fan of horror movies, The Omen is a great movie to sink your Halloween fangs into. Which brings us to...

Damien: Omen 2 1978 US

Directed by Don Taylor and Mike Hodges

20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

The one really good thing about Damien: Omen 2 hits you like a ton of bricks as soon as the movie starts... and that is Mr. Goldsmiths follow up score. If The Omen score got him the Oscar, this movie should have got him a knighthood. It’s even better than the score to the first movie... it’s like The Omen on viagra. Fast syncopated rhythms mixed with haunting and often aggressive vocal chanting... it pounds your musical soul like a strong tide pounds away at a cliffs edge. Truly beautiful and sometimes disturbing music. The vocal motif for the “crow” which is one of Damian’s familiars, is true genius.

That being said... there’s a lot not to like about this movie. As that pounding masterpiece seduces it’s way into your eardrums, we join Leo McKern as he races to join Ian Hendry to get the seven daggers which will kill Damien. These are the daggers that he gave good ol’ Gregory Peck to do the deed with and it was established in the first film that you need all seven to kill off Damian... the first to extinguish the life and then the other six radiating out from the first piercing to destroy the soul... take note of that because they really screw that up in the next movie. My whole problem with this opening sequence where McKern and Hendry get buried alive in sand is that this little prologue to the main narrative is supposed to take place only about 8 weeks after the end of the first movie... but Leo McKerns hair and make up look very little like they did in the first one. Seriously, the continuity between how he looked in the first one and how he looks in the second one is seriously screwed.

After this sequence the film jumps several years in time... Damian is in Military Academy and is now living with Gregory Peck's brother as his new father figure, played by William Hurt. This film is all about Damian discovering his demonic inheritance and killing all those who get in the way of his family fortune of wealth and political power. Where he had Billie Whitelaw playing his “devil’s protector” figure Mrs. Blaylock in the first one... and a really big dog, here we have a young Lance Henricksen (Yay! Frank Black’s in an Omen movie) playing a similar role along with a crow and... you know... a really big dog. Unfortunately, having Lance Henrickson in this movie really does nothing to save it.

The first film is notable for it’s violent deaths presented as gory set pieces... but they were well paced and made sense and held interest in the context of the growing mystery of the photographs. Unfortunately, this film seems to be trying to give you even gorier or nasty deaths (woman with eyes pecked out and run over by truck, guy cut in half by lift cable etc.) without really having any need or emotional context to them. It really does seem to be a few set pieces hung together for the sake of having them in there and this really doesn’t serve the film very well... which is appropriate because there is no real story, the shot set-ups are fairly run of the mill (to these tired old eyes anyway) and it’s just, plainly speaking, an uninteresting watch.

Which is a shame but, seriously, other than the music it’s a dull watch... just not as dull as...

The Final Conflict: Omen 3 1981 US

Directed by Graham Baker

20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

Yeah this one’s terrible. Damian is all grown up now and, like his pseudo-father, becomes the British Ambassador based in London. He manages this by using his demonic ways to influence the death of the current Brit Ambassador who sets a press conference so that when the door to his office is opened, a shotgun blows his head off. I was quite surprised to see that his secretary was played by a young, uncredited Ruby Wax and it is she, herself, who inadvertently pulls the trigger on her boss.

Actually this movie could have done with a few more sequences like this in it. You remember I said the last film seemed like gory set pieces written in and glued together for the sake of having them? Well this film has hardly any of those kinds of scenes and you really do miss them. The Final Conflict: Omen 3 is a dull plod of a movie which deals with Damien’s King Herrod-like reaction to stop the son of God being born into the world... but the pay off to that... the scene where you want to see the Devil and God battling in evil confrontation... a final conflict, if you will, just doesn’t happen. At the end of the movie Damien just gets stabbed with one of those knives and dies. Good triumphs over evil and the credits roll.

And about those daggers people. A sect of good guys (one played by Tony Vogel of Dick Barton fame) who are there to make sure the son of God is born and Damian fails are each given one of the daggers so each can make their own assassination attempt on Damien... but we know from the previous two films that this just isn’t going to work, right? You need all seven to get the job done, remember? This just best serves to demonstrate just how poor the writing has gotten by the time of the third movie... which is a shame because that very first movie was really something special.

By this time, the familiar trap of recurring horror films with lengthy character arcs has happened and a lesson could be learned from watching Universal’s old Mummy series in regards to this. If these first three films are supposed to take place over the space of, say, 20 years... how come they are always set in the time contemporary to their release? What’s up with that?

And I’ll bet you can guess what the one good thing about this movie was now. Yep! Goldsmith’s score is a far cry from his scores to the previous two pictures in tone and style but it’s still a corker of a score. I think it’s on a level with some of his work on Poltergeist and maybe the Vger music from his Star Trek: The Motion Picture score. Whatever the style is though... it’s another winner and I think the differences occur because there is a sense of hope and lightness all the way through this one which wasn’t really prevalent in the first two movies. This was the last Omen film Goldsmith specifically scored but... well hold on, let’s not get ahead of myself...

The Omen 4: Awakenings 1991 US

Directed by Jorge Montesi, Dominique Othenin-Girard

20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

Omen 4: Awakenings is a made-for-TV movie which had limited success and was, I believe, released theatrically in some countries... although I don’t remember it ever getting any kind of broadcast or screening over here in this country.

Or, to put it another way...

Omen 4 is a preposterous movie which really tries hard in places and attempts to establish a bond with the audience through some of the characters but ultimately fails on many levels.

The Devil’s son is replaced in this one with the Devil’s daughter and the main female protagonist who plays the mother who adopts this child at birth, is played by none other than Faye Grant, who older readers may remember played the charismatic resistance leader in the original miniseries and follow up series of V on TV. But even she cannot save this awful excuse for an entry into the Omen series.

And the one thing which totally does more to kill it than anything else is Jonathan Sheffer’s unbelievably inappropriate score. Seriously... it needs to be heard in the context of the movie to be believed but I bet it makes a great stand alone listen for fans of Carl Stalling’s work. Almost the entire show is Mickey Mousing it (Mickey Mousing is the term for music which is designed to catch and highlight on-screen action) and the net effect is that you have this seriously comic score playing all over the damned thing and making it sound like a Tom and Jerry cartoon (and I have nothing against Tom and Jerry music, have a CD soundtrack of that stuff myself). It’s like the studio executives just said to the composer, “This stuff is too dark for us. Can you lighten the mood somewhat so we can sell more Hallmark moments during the commercial breaks please?”

And when they’re not playing Mr. Sheffer’s score, they track in a bunch of cues “needledrop” style from Jerry Goldsmith’s first and third Omen scores... sometimes with a little overdub of electronics by Sheffer on top. This method of scoring reaches it’s laugh out loud funniest moment when a private detective is about to be demonically killed and he’s having hallucinations in the street. He looks up to see a group of hooded pseudo monks lip synching the latin chants from Goldsmith’s Omen score and, quite frankly, I was bouncing with laughter at this point. What the f---? Is this supposed to be a comedy?

At the end of this shambling, comic zombie of a movie, Faye Grant is demonically influenced to shoot herself through the head and the devil’s spawn is waiting in the wings to return in a further sequel which, thankfully, the studios never bothered to inflict on us. Good for them... but that wasn’t the end of the Omen’s diabolical grasp for the cinema box office...

The Omen 2006 US

Directed by John Moore

20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

On the sixth day of the sixth month of 2006, Fox released their re-make of the original film. Now I almost went to the cinema to see this because, although I mostly tend to steer away from modern remakes, the initial teaser trailer for this one showing a young Damian playing on the swings who then turns slightly to look dead into camera was quite eerily done and shows a certain cinematic competence (it’s a shame in a way that this little sequence isn’t in the final movie). I can’t quite remember why I never got to get to the last showing before it left my local cinema but I suspect sex was involved somewhere along the line. I could either go to the last screening of The Omen or travel many miles to my (then) girlfriends house and have a weekend full of bizarre, demonic sex... as usual in these things, sex won out on that particular occasion.

Thing is though... it’s not a bad remake now I come to look at it... it’s just completely unnecessary. Here’s the stats on it...

1. David Seltzer, who wrote the original movie back in 1976, is once again credited as being the writer on this one. That’s because the script on this one is almost, word for word with the odd exception here and there (possibly improvised or changed around by an actor) identical to the original one from the first movie. It’s framed from different angles and some of the locales are changed but, ultimately, it’s like watching a new movie run off from the exact same template. One or two differences like a zoo replacing Windsor Safari Park (from the first one) and a slightly different, but no less grim decapitation scene are changes but other than that it’s pretty much a total rerun.

2. The actors in this are major talents and all do a great job except... they are not as great or legendary as the original cast who you are always going to compare them to. You have Liev Schreiber playing Gregory Peck, Julia Stiles playing Lee Remick, Peter Postlethwaite playing Patrick Troughton, David Thewliss (one of my favourite actors) playing David Warner, Mia Farrow playing Billie Whitelaw and Michael Gambon playing Leo McKern. They’re all seriously good too... just not as serious as the originals.

3. Marco Beltrami’s score is excellent but is typical of modern horror scoring. He’s favoured leaving any choral chanting behind and going for sinister and atonal with the odd bit of rhythm and melody... and it works really well. However... why go to that effort when you are going to have six piano notes in one scene, where Liev Shreiber sees the news story of the skewered priest, lifted directly from the sinister lead into Goldsmith’s original main theme, which was a piano rendition of the love theme The Piper Dreams? No other musical reference in there except during the end credits where the original, latin chanting Ave Santani theme is briefly rearranged about halfway through. Why? Do you really want people to compare one of the greatest scores ever written for an American horror movie with a piece of 21st century horror scoring. Jerry always wins... he has the devil on his side.

OK, so it was worth it for me to see this remake to just see what kind of spin David Thewlis was going to give to the David Warner character but ultimately... it really didn’t need to be redone. But I can see why they did it. Releasing it on 6/6/06 was a bit of a marketing opportunity that you can only waste once!

All in all, I quite enjoyed rewatching, in my own perverse way, these movies for my Halloween “celebration”. The first film will get a spin again in a year or two. And the second and third are tolerable for their tap-your-feet-along-video-jukebox-style appeal with Jerry’s golden scores. But ultimately I can’t recommend any of these movies bar that first one... but it’s a strong recommend for that first one if you’ve never scene it before. The way Richard Donner builds up tension and suspense is riveting.

Take a look... but keep one eye out for sharp, spiky, falling objects!