Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Every Which
Way But Juice

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Directed by Tim Burton
USA 2024
Warner Brothers
UK cinema release print

Warning: Spoilers about the fate of Jeffrey Jones’ character from the first movie here.

Well this was a pleasant surprise.

Back in 1988 I went to my local cinema (which was two minutes around the corner at the time... it’s now a Tesco) and saw Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (kinda fuming then that it wasn’t spelled Betelgeuse as in real life). It was the first movie I saw by Burton and I liked it fine. When Michael Keaton, who starred as Beetlejuice, was announced to be cast as Batman in Burton’s next film and there was a huge backlash against that decision, I was pretty sure both he and Burton could pull it off and, yeah, they really did.

The next time I saw Beetlejuice would have been a couple of years later when it came out as a sell through VHS cassette tape (yeah, sell thru, as it was known back in the day) and, yeah, I think that was about it for me and that film... I saw it only twice and not again, since I kinda stopped being enamoured with the cinematic mystique of Tim Burton. He’s made some fantastic films... Batman Returns, Sleepy Hollow, Planet Of The Apes etc but, as creative as he is, I do find him a bit hit and miss these days. So, it’s perhaps no surprise that I didn’t relish the idea of, 36 years later, seeing his new sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (a title destined to give computer grammar checkers an annoying wake up call the world over). I thought it would be kinda dull and I really wasn’t looking forward to it at all. I thought it would be a good one to review for the blog though so, yeah, I figured I could get it out of the way for good in the first weekend. So I dragged myself along to it, and...

I’m happy to say that, well, Tim Burton really is on form with this movie. As are the returning actors/characters Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice, Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz and Catherine O'Hara as Delia Deetz (all of whom are really impressive here and look almost as young as they were the first time around). Along with some nice visual and musical references to the first movie, we also have a bunch of actors who are new to the franchise, who are all also excellent, including Jenny Ortega as Lydia’s daughter Astrid, Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci, Arthur Conti and even Danny DeVito in a small role.

And it’s wonderful. Once again Danny Elfman gives us a score reminiscent of the old one and utilising some of the same themes (although, alas, my favourite piece of leitmotif from the first film is, for some reason, sadly absent from the score this time around). However, once again the people at Watertower Records have not made the score available on CD at time of release (because why should they give people the actual music in proper physical form rather than just a garbage sounding streaming experience instead, eh?).

And, just like most of Burton’s work, it’s wonderfully inventive both on a visual and conceptual level. Lighting the fuse of a chalk drawing bomb to open a portal to the afterlife was a nicely executed idea. And I think people are going to like the Soul Train sequences too.

There’s also a treat for Italian genre fans because, when we get to see the back story of the person who turned into Beetlejuice, it goes full on Black and White, subtitles and does its best to resemble an early Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda movie. And Bava also gets a nice name check here too, since Lydia mentions she saw a Bava all nighter at the cinema when she was nine months pregnant with Astrid, including her father’s favourite Bava Kill, Baby Kill (review eventually coming when I revisit that one on Blu Ray).

Then there’s the elephant in the room. Lydia’s father is in this but, Burton’s regular actor Jeffrey Jones doesn’t play him, now that he’s a registered sex offender (young boys apparently) and has been somewhat cancelled. Instead, although he’s in this all the way through, his photo appears and he gets half eaten by a shark early on in the film... his plane crash and adventures at sea depicted as an animated story. For the rest of the film, as he wanders through the afterlife, the top half of his body is missing (when he speaks, blood spurts from his windpipe), the rest presumably still in the shark. I’m thinking he maybe got paid something for the use of his likeness here, though.

But, look, I wasn’t expecting much from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and was so surprised by just how good a movie it is. As I said earlier, Burton is back on form for sure and it’s a really impressive return from him and the cast in this one. I absolutely will be buying this when it comes out on Blu Ray (hopefully before Christmas) and I’ll probably reacquaint myself with the original around the same time. This one’s definitely worth seeing at the cinema so, if you liked the first one, make sure you don’t miss out on it.

Stranger Things 4

Ex-stranging
The Experience

Stranger Things 4
USA May - July 2022
Nine episodes

Warning: Some spoilers running right up that hill at you.

Okay, it has to be said that series four of hit show Stranger Things was a little bit hit and miss for me. I didn’t like it as much as the second and third series, for sure but, I still liked it a lot better than the first. That being said, there’s lots of good stuff within it too so... let’s take a little look.

Okay, plot...  it’s Spring Break and various characters are reunited, after the close of the last season meant that some of them had to move away from the sleepy town of Hawkins. Something, though, is killing high school kids in Hawkins, making them see dark visions for a week or so in advance... before levitating them into the air, breaking their bones and then sucking their eyeballs back into their head. However, as with other seasons, the plot strands are split both globally and in terms of character threads, into three or four different groups, which merge and then diverge over the series. You have one lot trying to figure out what’s going on with the bizarre murders that look very much like they come from the Upside Down (the physical manifestation of the alternate, dark version of Hawkins where all the dark things dwell), you have Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) being retrained (through ordeal) to recover her superpowers by both Mathew Modine and Paul Reiser, themselves pursued by an army splinter group, because they believe Eleven is the only way to stop what is coming to Hawkins. You also have three of the kids trying to recover Eleven (along with new stoner character Argyle) and we have Joyce (Winona Ryder) finding out that Hopper (David Harbour) may still be alive after the events of the last series finale but, needs assistance to help break him out of a Russian security prison in Alaska. And, of course, the series concludes with all the characters reuniting but, things go a little differently this time around.

Okay, so lots to like here. The playing of a Dungeons And Dragons game crosscut with a basketball game is pretty well done. There’s a nod to the famous real life Hellfire Club (although mostly just in the name used for a D&D group) and, being as it’s set in 1986, the usual pop culture artefacts such as an Elvira poster, a Halloween mask and, in a series of moments which surprised everyone in terms of the spin off benefits... using the Kate Bush song Running Up That Hill as Max’s (Sadie Sink) favourite song, used to save her life and pull her away from the clutches of the creature at one point midway through the season, resulting in it being number one in the world charts for weeks (and still counting at time of writing). I remember when this song came out in 1985... it turned me on to Kate Bush big time and within the space of about six weeks I’d saved up enough money to purchase all of her albums, of which there were then five in total. Of course, in those days they were vinyl albums but they were certainly among the first non-soundtrack titles I upgraded to CD when the format was introduced.

Another great pop culture moment is when the kids are trying to find a drug supplier by only his first name. The two who work in a video store run it into their computer and narrow it down to about seven people in the area before checking the rental records... when they find the one who keeps renting out all the Cheech And Chong videos, they know they’ve got their man. And Dustin quoting Han Solo in normal conversation (Never tell me the odds!) was a nice touch. Not to mention the casting of Freddy himself, Robert Englund (from the Nightmare On Elm Street films... which don’t really appeal to me, I remember him best in V), as a key character in one episode.

Another thing I liked about the show was that the main villain turns out to be someone from Eleven’s past (she’s repressed the memory for so long) and, not only that, it turns out he’s the prime mover for the villains in all three previous seasons. I also liked that, although it seems for a little while that the day has been saved by the usual suspects... there’s one important character left in a coma and, as the Upside Down has ruptured Hawkins in various multidimensional rifts... well, it starts snowing that kind of ash that is in the air in the Upside Down... it’s clear the kids aren’t out of the woods yet...

Although I really thought they would be because, well, I was under the impression that the fourth series was the final one for the show but, no, it turns out that there’s going to be a fifth and final season at some point and, all I will say about that is, they’d better get their skates on. Those kids are growing up fast and when you compare them to flashback footage from previous iterations, it’s really noticeable. The other thing about that is... usually a year has gone by with each new show but... I just don’t see how they’re going to be able to pick up the storyline again without carrying on from exactly where they left it this time around. Which makes getting it in the can even more urgent, I would have thought.

Talking about the music though... there’s a thing about the needle drop of pre-existing tracks that I really didn’t like. Namely the way they’ve been cut up and looped about. For example, would it have killed them to cut the big Kate Bush scene (out of the many in the show using that song) to the actual track as it exists rather than keep chopping it about like that? And in one long scene where the villain is monologuing for quite a while, the music seems to start off with the last track from Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi score before, bizarrely, jumping into his opera Akhnaten midway through. Not quite sure what’s going on there.

All in all, though, like I said, I still appreciated Stranger Things 4 more than the first season and I have the two volumes of score CD (not the stupid song compilations) on pre-order (which at two discs each makes it the most music we’ve had from a season in one hit). So if you liked the other three seasons you should probably be okay with this one. I’m kind of hoping that Season 5 will be a marked improvement though... and I hope they continue to bring Kate Bush along for the ride.

Stranger Things 3

Flaying Alive

Stranger Things 3
2019 USA TV

Okay so... the kids are back. And so are some Russians.

This 3rd Series of Stranger Things takes place, for the most part, in 1985. Which totally throws things out the window when most of the kids, except Dustin who is on his way home from summer camp, sneak into a screening of Day Of The Dead on its opening night. It begs the question I have been asking myself all the way through these three series. How come none of the kids are accountable for being out and about, sometimes missing for days, with none of their parents wondering where the heck they are? You’d think after all the stuff that the kids went through in Series One (reviewed here) and Two (reviewed here), they would be closely watched and supervised by now.

Anyway, this third season is easily as good as the second and far superior to the first. It does kind of wear its influences loud and clear on its sleeve though... especially in terms of the plotting which sees the return of the mind flayer taking over host bodies and a group of Russians who have built a secret facility, underground near Hawkin’s new shopping mall, The Star Court... and who are foolishly trying to open the ‘big, portal of terror’ once closed by Eleven at the end of the second series. I’ll come back to the story influences, as I see them, in a minute.

This one sees Dustin return with his new, ‘super duper’ ham radio, which has truly unbelievable range and which he calls Cerebro (yeah, okay, we get it already) and a whole lot of loved up stuff. Right away though, things are thrown into turmoil in terms of people pairing off for relationships, dumping each other and, in the case of Will Byers, getting angry that his friends aren’t interested in playing Dungeons & Dragons anymore... just not so angry that he can’t feel the presence of a part of the mindflayer that escaped the last series in the back of his head.

And, it’s actually a proper, full on horror story kind of series this time. The plot, which has Dacre Montgomery’s Billy character from Season 2 taken over by the mind flayer so he can start converting other people in the local community into slave zombies for said creature, is pretty much a cross between Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and The Blob. And it really goes for it too... I rarely make a fuss over special effects (unless they’re really bad) but I was very impressed with the goriness of the exploding rats and people in this one. Especially a wonderful horror moment, unseen by the two people who have just left a scene, of a rat exploding into a splash of red gore and intestines, only for said innards to start oozing and crawling their way out of its cage. Beware of the blob, you guys!

The show is filled with the usual witty one liners... when Max, played again by Sadie Sink, takes over from the adults in sorting out a pretty ugly looking medical emergency, the line that seals the deal is “I skateboard. Trust me.” Someone who’s used to dealing with horrific injuries on a regular basis I guess. Or the wonderful moment where she refrains from answering herself, Millie Bobby Brown’s query as Eleven of... “What are happy screams?”

Alas, a couple of regular characters die in this season, including one of my favourites near the end of the last episode (at least, we think that persons’s dead.... there’s kind of a mention made of an “American” in the mid post-credit scene at the end of the last episode*). So that’s a shame. However, there’s a fantastic new ‘potential love interest’ character in the shape of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman’s daughter Maya Hawke playing Robin Buckley, who works at the Ice Cream parlour in the mall with Joe Keery’s Steve Harrington character, who’s certainly come a long way since his introduction as a possible villain in the first series. Actually, apart from being absolutely brilliant as a foil for Steve in this, Maya Hawke’s character demonstrates one of the things which impressed me the most about this series...

I just can’t tell you specifically why, in regards to her or it could be considered a spoiler.

What I can say, though, is that things play out a lot less predictably than they did in the previous two seasons. Things are set up, sometimes they have been set up from the previous year and... it does get pretty obvious how strings are going to be pulled but, for the majority of them (and excepting the death of two regular characters in the final episode, which you can kind of guess by the direction the script has gone in), the threads don’t pull together in quite the same way you thought they were going to... well, at least not yet, anyway. One or two things might still happen if there’s a fourth series but.. nope, things didn’t quite go as predictably as they did in the previous two shows... which I am very grateful for.

It also seems a lot darker... not just in the amount of blood and viscera in the majority of the episodes but also in terms of what’s at stake and the dramatic intensity of some of the scenes. There’s a beautiful ending to the sixth of the eight episodes where things get really dark for Eleven (and all of humanity) and the show's producers have decided to go 'full on' by using an extract from the Phillip Glass opera Satyagraha (probably my favourite opera, it’s on play at work all the time) and then allowed it to play out through the end credits too and, with the addition of this music, it really gives the visuals and dialogue a lift of ‘doom laden hell on Earth right around the corner’... which is just what this episode needed.

There are also the odd annoying things about the production. For example... and I can only assume this is in homage to the prolific nature of these same kinds of mistakes in many 1980s shows and movies, the kids penetrate a certain area of the Russian base by... crawling through air ducts. Dudes, this is such an awful cliché! My dad worked in the heating and building trade and he complains every time people do this in the media. Those things are filled with whacking great globs of machinery. You can’t be crawling through them. He also gets annoyed with the other thing the kids did in this one... look up to find a trap door in the lift so that they can escape discovery. Guys! When was the last time you ever saw a trap door in an elevator? Answer... never (or rarely). You don’t put them in otherwise you would have your passengers crawling out and making trouble when the lift gets stuck. This doesn’t happen!

Asides from that, though, Stranger Things 3 is probably the best of the three seasons so far but, honestly, after an ending like that where things seem to, despite the stupid mid-end credits sting, have come to a conclusion... well, I almost don’t want to see where they’d go with this one. I really don’t want another series after the way this one has finished so... yeah... loved it but not holding my breath for a fourth because, I suspect, unless the writers compromise themselves in ways I wouldn’t want them to, it wouldn’t be the same show. This season though... was a really nice slice of 1950s B Movie science fiction horror wearing 1985 clothes. So worth a look.

*Since I wrote this, that character is sighted alive and well in the trailer for Season Four, albeit in changed circumstances so, yeah, still in it I guess.

Stranger Things 2

Mazes and Monsters

Stranger Things 2
2018 USA

Okay so... people who read my review of Stranger Things (which can be found here) will know that I... well I didn’t hate it, I was just mostly not impressed with it in any way. Well, all that changed when I finally got access, via a friend, to Series 2 recently. It’s a real change of pace for the show, I felt and it almost feels like the clichés were all gotten out of the way in the first season so we hit the ground running on this one, immediately picking up from the loose end that Will Byer’s was left with ‘something’ from his experiences in the ‘upside down’.

This season won me over very quickly and it was great when you see the montage in the first episode as the four friends (minus Eleven) are seen making preparations for Halloween and go as the lead characters from Ghostbusters. This one felt a little more like the 1980s as I remembered it... in that rose-tinted nostalgia vision we all have for the decades we are growing up in and it was especially nice seeing the kids saving (and stealing) all their money to go down to their local amusement arcade to try and beat the new ‘animated video game’ sensation Dragon’s Lair. For those too young to remember, this was kind of an experimental game using proper cartoon footage which, if I recall correctly, cost about 5 or 10 times more to play than any of the other video games in the arcades, was way too expensive for me to play more than once and... always seemed to have a queue next to it.

Things like this heroic fantasy themed game would be important to those kinds of kids though and I appreciated the nostalgia hit here.

So, onto the plot and... it’s one of those again where you have a few different ends of ‘this season’s problem’ being solved by different sets of regular characters. This one involves a super intelligence, the mind flayer (named after a character from the Dungeons And Dragons manual), who has an army of growing demogorgons (the kids only had one to deal with last season) who are inhabiting an offshoot of the ‘upside down’ which has manifested and grown under the town of Hawkins and who the kids have to find a way of stopping... both helped and hindered by Will Byers, who has the intelligence of the mind flayer sitting inside him, using his mind and body as a host organism. We also have Eleven, who has been secretly living with the Sheriff of Hawkins, who runs off to pursue her own issues and has adventures in the big city, before finally reuniting with everyone at the end of the penultimate episode like the cavalry as she turns up to... if they’re lucky... kick some demogorgon butt by closing down the gateway to the ‘upside down’.

So... lots of things going on and, as you might guess, it’s riddled with loads of 1980s references and even the music, which is usually somewhat inspired by the sound of John Carpenter’s scores anyway, it seems to me, has a couple of moments in Eleven’s big city adventures with her soul sister who also exhibits special powers, where it either goes into a cover version or, more than likely, is straight needle-dropped in from one of my favourite cues from the score to Escape From New York. So, yeah... very much more my kind of thing, this series.

There’s even a new bully character... since the class heavy from last season turned out to be one of the nice guys after all and is now a protector for the main protagonists... and this new guy, who’s sister is the new love interest of one of the kids, is seriously channeling the vibe of Judd Nelson from The Breakfast Club, including looking just like him.

And yeah, good acting from all around including  Caleb McLaughlin, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Millie Bobby Brown, Winona Ryder and Noah Schnapp  but, also, a couple of new characters played by Sean Astin (presumably here because he was in The Goonies, a film I’ve never seen) and Paul Reiser... who seems to be both channeling and also atoning for his role in James Cameron’s ALIENS here. And talking of the A L I E N universe, there are an awful lot of references to various films in the franchise here... or at least the first two... with a particular Harry Dean Stanton skin shedding scene coming to mind at one point in the narrative.

So yeah, I was all over this one and watched it through fairly quickly... although I’m already a season behind again and am not sure when I’ll get access to the third series. This one also has a kick ass final shot which, more or less, has been seen all over the show in the form of a sketch, as the writers revisit some of the tropes from the first series... such as a new bully character and, instead of Christmas tree lights being used as a communication device, we have gazillions of abstract sketches which, when taped up all over the house, give a map of where the creatures of the ‘upside down’ are living. And tonally it plays out exactly like the first series, with the same ‘will they, won’t they’ romance beats and concerns of the main characters. I was surprised at one of the scenes of bloody aftermath when one of the new characters is feasted on by a few demogorgons because, I dunno, we’d already seen it happen once and for some reason the camera decides to back to the carnage, perhaps to explain to the audience that, yes, this character you all worked so hard to accept and started to like has now been shredded but, I dunno, the style of the content choice on that moment seemed a little out of place here.

Still, other than that, Stranger Things 2 is a much better incarnation of the show and, like the series itself, this review is a little short, I’m afraid. Looking to see how the series progresses now and kind of hoping we don’t just get more of the same in the third one because, yeah, this particular set of manifestations of the ‘upside down’ has been a little done to death now, I think. Check this one out if you have the time to binge.

Stranger Things

Needful Kings

Stranger Things
2016 USA

A friend of mine gave me access to Stranger Things saying “This is a show I think you might like.” Since it’s one of those streaming thingies on a web site (or something like a web site but a bit beyond my understanding), he probably knew I would never bother to try and see this show any other way than him letting me to watch it. I really don’t like the digital world and streaming deprives me of the neccessary ownership of holding a shiny disc in my hand, not to mention allowing me to ignore the studio if they decide to play puppet-master and pull it from their virtual releases schedule. Having now seen it, I’m not sure I’m the particular audience that Stranger Things is catering for... although I did warm to it by the final couple of episodes.

Set in the, presumably fictional, town of Hawkin (named after Professor Hawking, I would guess), this is the story of four teenage friends who are into cool stuff (like Dungeons & Dragons, for example) and it mostly takes place in 1983. However, as we see at the start, some kind of ‘monstrous thing’ is unleashed and, when one of the boys, Will Byers, goes missing, his three friends try to find out what’s happened to him in the face of establishment adversity, even when the boy’s body is found (which will make sense once you start to watch it). Along with their new super powered, escaped Government Research Group experiment friend 011, aka eleven or Elle for short, the friends become embroiled in a fantastic adventure involving an alternate layer of reality, a monster and a sinister, threatening Government conspiracy. And, of course, multiple sets of investigations... where different, older sets of characters get involved with alternate elements of the mystery so everyone can accidentally end up meeting near the end and then, by pooling their resources and discoveries, beat the evil government agency responsible and find the missing character.

So, yeah, it’s trying to tap into exactly the same kind of source material that J. J. Abram’s Super 8 (reviewed here) was trying to get into... and so you have loads of 1980s horror and science fiction references on show here, with many nods to Stephen Spielberg thrown into the mix... along with stuff like ‘Salem’s Lot, John Carpenter, The Evil Dead... basically everything you’d want to showcase in a loving homage to the 1980s. Even some of the music is a little like something John Carpenter might have come up with for The Fog (reviewed here) in a kind of light form. Having said that, the producers have included The Bangles cover version of Simon & Garfunkel’s Hazy Shade Of Winter in one episode and, thinking about it, that’s a bit of an anachronism. Admittedly it’s a disturbing cover for me because The Bangles only cover two thirds of the original song and left out my favourite verse (“... at any convenient time. Funny how my mem’ry skips while looking over manuscripts of unpublished rhyme... drinking my vodka and lime...”) but what really infuriated me as I was thinking about it on the bus coming home from work was that Stranger Things Season One is set in November 1983... but The Bangles didn’t bring that version of the song out until 1987, if mem’ry serves and is not skipping here. So, you know, if you’re going to do 1983... get it right!

So, okay... all this referential stuff is something I should be well into and, normally I would be... but I found it really hard to get into here. Ditto for my dad who only managed to make it a half an hour into the first episode before bailing on it in disgust at the amount of formulaic writing showcased here. I at least made it to the end of the last episode and, I’d have to say from about episode 5 onwards, things start to get a little more interesting in terms of just wanting to find out what is going to happen next. The characters do grow on you.

For the most part, though, all this stuff is dull and clichéd... something you don’t want to have with even the most post-modernly eclectic approach to popular entertainment and, with its obvious plot line, it did feel like somebody had just taken an old episode of The X-Files and expanded it into something unnecessarily longer. The opening of each episode proclaims it to be A Netflix Original Series but, honestly, it’s so far from original it’s not funny.

That’s not to say there aren’t any plus points and, like I said, I did stay to the end with it. For example...

Although the story is pedestrian in nature and not exactly full of surprises (trust me... you’ve seen it all before, sometimes dressed a little differently), it does at least stick rigidly to being an all round, coherent narrative and this is very much improved by having some really warm characters and, frankly, some great actors in it. I’d heard that Winona Ryder was in this one and she does an absolutely phenomenal job as Joyce Byers, the mother of the missing boy. Of course, it took me half an hour to realise which one she was in it because, frankly, she still looks like she’s in her mid twenties and certainly not old enough to be anyone's mother, especially not of the teenage brothers depicted here. She plays a character halfway between losing it at the disappearance/possible death of her boy and a perceived crazy but driven warrior as she becomes embroiled in the phenomena... talking to her absent son through Christmas tree lights etc. Don’t worry... it’ll make sense if you sit down and watch it.

She is more than ably supported by David Harbour as Jim Hopper, the post-tragedy washed up excuse for a town sherriff who, perhaps somewhat predictably, straightens himself up and opens his mind, becoming one of the real good guys when he realises there really is a government conspiracy and that Joyce’s youngest boy may still be alive. And we have Mathew Modine as the head of the Government group who knows much more about what’s going on, and what’s gotten loose, than anyone else in town. Actually pretty much everyone is really good in this and I could just list the whole cast here and say, these people are all doing a swell job... but you’ll see that if you watch the show.

Special shout out to the four kids who are going after the mostly absent Will, though, because they’re awesome... Finn Wolfhard, Caleb McLaughlin, the outstanding Gaten Matarazzo and the quite unbelievably phenomenal acting tour de force that is the eleven year old (at time of filming) Millie Bobby Brown... who plays Eleven with an amazing level of intelligence and understanding that a lot of actors don’t sometimes get when they are over twice her age.

Now, the story is clichéd, it’s true, but it is kinda addictive... mostly in terms of staying around to see if you are right about what’s going to happen next. However, I did think that the 1980s theme was kinda downplayed quite a lot in places and... I don’t know why I didn’t respond to it much since, well, I remember the 1980s pretty well in terms of the pop culture. It’s funny, I really like movies and books that are retro set in the 1960s and I have to wonder if the majority of the people on places like Twitter and the like who are raving about Stranger Things are so positive about it because many of them are quite young and it gives them a sense of borrowed nostalgia for a time they never, actually, properly lived through themselves, maybe? I don’t know whether that’s true or not but Stranger Things has proven very popular with young audiences, it seems to me, and a second series has already been commissioned. 

Which is lucky because, as is the nature of such shows written by people who know that a follow up could always be on the cards, there are still quite a few questions raised about, for example, the strange world of ‘the underneath’ which features so prominently in this as a mystery element. Is it really a parallel realm or is it, in fact, a near future reality of this town in this fictional version of 1983? Is one of the most interesting characters in the show really gone at the end of the last episode or will that person return for the second season? Is one of my favourite characters really dead at the end of episode three or can something be done about that? And what is really going on with that other character everyone has been making such a fuss about? There’s definitely something up with him.

So, yeah, the writers have written it as open ended as possible so they can riff on other genre conventions in the next series along... so there’s that. And that’s going to happen sometime over the next year, I would guess. Meanwhile, I keep asking myself if I’d recommend Stranger Things to any of my friends and, I think, judging from my own reaction and that of my dad, that it will probably play better to a much younger audience than people who actually lived through those times. It does have its moments of intrigue and mystery and, in terms of direction, shot framing and some nice camera movement which echoes some of the props from one of the episode's directors. It’s certainly a competently put together piece, if you can ignore the clichéd nature of this particular postmodernistic beast. So if you’re 30 or under, I suggest you may want to give this one a go and... if you’re over that age, maybe you’ll try to be a little more understanding and forgiving if some of the stuff in this seems painfully obvious and protracted. At that age you’re not necessarily the target audience, methinks.