Wallace And Gromit - Vengeance Most Fowl

Gnome With The Wind

Wallace And Gromit -
Vengeance Most Fowl
Directed by Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham
UK/France 2024
BBC/Aardman Animation
Airdate: 25th December 2024

Warning: Very minor spoiler.

Wallace And Gromit - Vengeance Most Fowl is, by my reckoning, the sixth proper entry into the series of the two titular characters and, although not especially themed for Christmas (it turns out) it is brand new for Christmas and that’s why I’ve included it in my series of Christmas reviews this year. And, I have to say, I thought this one was mostly okay, easily taking my ‘fourth favourite’ spot of the sixth films in the franchise.

This one follows Wallace and Gromit’s further misadventures after Wallace, known for his Heath-Robinson style inventions, invents a robotic garden Gnome called Norbot (voiced by Reece Shearsmith), originally to help out with Gromit in his garden duties but, once he and the general public sees how successful it is... as an invention he can hire to people for Gnome Improvements, so to speak (yep, the film is once again filled with elabourate verbal and visual puns... no wonder this franchise is such a big hit with the British viewers). And what could be more British than Peter Kay reprising his role as Chief Inspector Macintosh from the Wallace and Gromit feature film, The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit?

Meanwhile, however, we have the return of the awesome super-villain from The Wrong Trousers, Feathers McGraw who, using his ingenuity from within his zoo-prison (following on from events in that second Wallace And Gromit short), manages to hack the Norbot robot and change its setting to evil, to help both discredit Wallace and also so he can make good on his escape and return to where he has hidden the blue diamond he stole in the first film. Evil Norbot builds a whole army of evil gnomes and it’s not long before Wallace and Gromit, under suspicion, are chasing after the crafty penguin and coming a cropper of the evil Norbots.

Now let me address the elephant in the room right away... Peter Sallis. Who died in 2017. Now I’ve been watching Peter Sallis in things since I was a kid, my first remembrance of him being from when I was a nipper and seeing him killed in a gory manner in Taste The Blood Of Dracula (reviewed here). And, of course, he was probably the longest serving actor in the long running BBC situation comedy Last Of The Summer Wine for a fair few decades. He was always the beloved voice of Wallace since the very first short film, so I was somewhat trepidatious of some guy called Ben Whitehead stepping into his vocal shoes. But you know what? He does it really well. I wouldn’t have known, if he hadn’t died, that this wasn’t Peter Sallis. My guess here is... and I’m not in any way detracting from the mimicry skills of Mr. Whitehead... that Sallis had such a distinctive voice that it’s slightly easier to get away with parodying his speech, perhaps. That’s my best guess anyway and well done to the new guy for getting it so right.

And it’s all pretty nicely done. From the Cape Fear style scenes of Feathers McGraw preparing himself for his escape from prison (using a close parody of the mighty Bernard Herrmann’s original score for that film) to the smashing denouement featuring a chase on two narrowboats and a villain who escapes to return another day, it’s all pretty good. And talking of the score, regular composer Julian Knott’s themes have been used to full effect by another composer this time around... which seems a shame but the score on this one is by the always excellent Lorne Balfe, so I shall forgive them. And it works a treat, with Knott’s themes referenced in various guises throughout the musical highlights.

A downside perhaps... and it maybe stems from my not realising this wasn’t a 25 minute short when I started watching it... is that for all the wonderful punning, beautful animation and comic timing... it seems a little long for the subject matter, coming in at a walloping, feature length 1 hour and 19 minutes. It doesn’t exactly drag but I did find myself looking at my watch on occasion.

And I think that’s me done with Wallace And Gromit - Vengeance Most Fowl... the ending seems to leave the gate open for another Feathers McGraw led sequel and, since the problem around the voice of Sallis seems to have been surprisingly solved... well... why not? Bring it on, I say.

Taste The Blood Of Dracula

Offspring Breakers

Taste The Blood Of Dracula
UK 1970
Directed by Peter Sasdy
Hammer/Warner Archive Blu Ray Zone A

Okay, so the time has come for me to revisit the very first of the Hammer Dracula films I saw as a kid. I think I was about six years old when Taste The Blood Of Dracula got it’s first TV screening in the UK but it was a big deal as I think I’d only seen the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula before this. I remember it was one of two films (the other being Dr. No) where we actually walked up one night to the next street from where we lived back in those days, to my uncle’s house... as he was one of the few family members who actually possessed a colour television set as opposed to our black and white model. I really liked this film then and, as a consequence, despite being somewhat less thrilled by it this time around, it’s always going to be the Hammer Dracula movie that holds a special place in my heart for this reason. Not my favourite (that would get a release in 1972, I review it here) but certainly the one that most brings with it a strong sense of nostalgia.

And though it is actually quite a ploddy film in a way, I have to say that the way the story evolves over the course of the picture is yet a slightly different angle into the various ‘Dracula killing sprees’ which are the prime ingredient of the movie.

The film actually opens just before the end of the last movie, Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (reviewed here), with a travelling salesman, played by British comedian Roy Kinnear, being knocked unconscious and abandoned on the road following a somewhat traditional Hammer opening of a stage coach filmed in the local forest. When he awakens, he stumbles into Christopher Lee’s Dracula’s death scene from the last movie and, it transpires later, collects the amulet, the cloak and some of the powdered remains of his blood for their ‘resale value’.

We then switch to the plot proper, as three disloyal fathers, played by Geoffrey Keen, Peter (It’s cheese, Gromit!) Sallis and John Carson meet on the last Sunday of every month in their little three man secret circle, to while away the rest of the evening in the company of the charming ladies of a bordello (including the young Madeline Smith in her first role for Hammer), run by Russell Hunter (who played ‘Lonely’ in TV’s hit show Callan, opposite Edward Woodward). As importantly, we meet their respective children played by Linda Hayden (from Blood On Satan’s Claw, reviewed here), Isla Blair and Lucy Paxton. And also Anthony Higgins as Ms Hayden’s worried and disapproved of boyfriend.

We then get into some business where the three brothel boys fall in with the son of a lord played by Ralph Bates, in the first of his films for Hammer. He dabbles in black magic and gains the aid of the three, in the guise of providing them with thrills beyond what their now jaded minds can think of. In this case, he urges them to purchase Dracula’s cloak, amulet and powdered blood at great expense so they can sell their soul to the devil but, when things take a dark turn and only he drinks Draculas blood mingled with his own, before being beaten to death by the others, he is abandoned at the site of the ritual.

However, because of his loyalty to Dracula, his body is suddenly covered with some special spooky dust, which forms a kind of shroud around him, before he rips free of the shroud and is revealed to be a reborn Christopher Lee as Dracula. Now, I suspect Bates must have felt a little hard done by at this point because he was originally supposed to be playing the lead role after Lee’s reluctance to return to the character but, the distribution deal with Warners Seven Arts would go up in smoke without Lee in the part so he was, eventually, lured back to the role and the story rewritten for the return of the original Dracula.

After that, the film becomes a simple cat and mouse game as Dracula takes revenge on the three who beat his ‘servant’ to death by mind controlling their offspring to kill their relevant fathers, before Ms. Hayden’s boyfriend finally rescues her from his clutches and somehow kills Dracula in a bizarre moment which I had to look to Wikipedia to explain to me and, well I’m still not really sure why he dies here but it is spectacular, despite not really being reliant on the forces of logic. It’s a bit of an unsatisfying ending, to be honest but, I liked it well enough when I was six years old so I’m not going to start knocking it now.

The film is, as I said, a little bit ploddy... for instance, it’s over a third of the way in before the characters and supernatural elements are set up enough to be able to credibly bring Dracula back from the dead for the audience. However, there’s some nice photography in this to keep the visual interest up throughout. Sasdy manages to deal with crowded frames quite well... for instance, when the three fathers are all crammed into a shot with Bates and Kinnear, Sasdy positions them so the three fathers are vertically aligned in terms of height in the frame on the left of shot with the other two more to the right of the shot... which gives it a nice sense of balance.

This is also the first Hammer Dracula film in my memory (I might be wrong in this so please hit me up in the comments if I am) to feature a solitary, bare female breast for a few seconds in the bordello scene... so that’s kind of interesting. I was a little disappointed that the fathers are more or less marked as ‘bad people’ for two timing their wives to visit their monthly fix of scrumptious harlots... thus making their later murders morally acceptable to an audience... but I guess they weren’t quite there yet when it came to completely innocent bystanders being killed (although, certainly, one of the daughters meets an untimely demise at the hands... well, at the teeth... of Dracula himself).

The film is significantly bolstered by a score from James Bernard, who wrote the original Dracula (aka Horror Of Dracula) score for Hammer, so he uses his three note motif for Lee’s vampire all over the show, to great effect.

And there’s not much more for me to say about this Proustian rush of a movie that is Taste The Blood Of Dracula. A bit dull in places but ultimately an entertaining entry in the series and, while not one of the best it’s certainly not the least of them either. The film has a great title too, ushering in a tag line parodying the British milk adverts of the time... Drink A Pint Of Blood A Day... so, yeah, it’s a nice little slice of Hammer Dracula, make no mistake. I’m not looking forward to the next one in the series so much though, from what I remember of it.

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.