Mysterious Island

Minding Nemo

Mysterious Island
UK 1961
Directed by Cy Endfield
Columbia/Impact Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: All the mysterious spoilers on this one.

So Mysterious Island is based on the novel of a similar name... my favourite of Jules Verne’s novels, The Mysterious Island. I first heard of it by reading a Marvel Classics comic when I was a youngster and was fascinated by it, especially the twist towards the end. It was long before I caught up with this version on television (I guess I would have watched it in on a black and white set in the 1970s) and I like to revisit this movie in particular every now and again for a few reasons. One is that it’s easily the most entertaining production of this ‘adaptation’. Two is that it’s got an absolutely fantastic, somewhat blistering, driven score by Bernard Herrmann and thirdly, because the last adaptation of this I saw, as a Columbia serial, also heavily featured the queen of an alien race and her cohorts wearing left over costumes from serials like Flash Gordon (reviewed here) and Buck Rogers (reviewed here), chasing the various protagonists around said island for a lot of the running time and, frankly, that’s about as far from the book as you could get.

That being said, this is in many ways just as bad in terms of taking huge liberties with the original text and, truth be told, I’ve never myself seen a straight version of this done properly. The obvious differences here being: Well, there are no women in the book that I can recall but, in this one, two female characters are inexplicably washed up on the beach to join the main characters in a random shipwreck. This seems to happen a lot with adaptations of Jules Verne’s works, I’ve noticed, since they rarely have any major female characters and, for some reason, movie studios insist on putting them in anyway. So they completely screw themselves in the ‘accurate adaptation’ department before they’ve even started. Secondly... there’s no pet dog in this and the four legged character is sorely missed, in my opinion. 

Thirdly, well... it’s a Schneer and Harryhausen production and Ray needs something to animate so, the ‘mysterious’ benefactor of the island (I’ll get to him in a minute) is working on solving mankind’s hunger problems by having figured out how to make crops and animals grow to huge size (the science here is not elabourated on). So we have a giant crab, giant turkey-like bird, giant bee and giant octopus for some of the characters to fight here. Interestingly for a film utilising the genius of Ray Harryhausen, the crab used is a real crab, gutted and with armatures fitted inside it, rather than a rubber model. 

Okay, so the film starts off strongly with Herrmann’s powerful score crashing in over the Columbia logo before his music gets full on broody as the various credits rise against a moving backdrop of the sea (and you can hear it behind the music too), the various shots of the sea tinted yellow, then purple, then blue and then back to yellow again... constantly cycling between various colours as the credits are raised. And it’s during these credits that we have the films first big clunker of a mistake. A total spoiler... I’ll get back to it in a second.

The plot is about five prisoners (actually, four union army prisoners and one confederate captor) escaping gaol during the siege of Richmond, Virginia in 1865. They take a hot air balloon but circumstances are such that they wash up on a deserted island and have to survive. Strange things... no, mysterious things... happen to them. The captain is washed up separately and unconscious but a fire has been lit where he can be found by the others. Some vine creepers are left by the entrance to two caves in a cliff wall, allowing access. The giant turkey thing is shot from afar, saving the lives of some of the crew. A chest of useful implements such as rifles, ammunition, a compass, charts, a sextant, tools, pots n’ pans, a telescope and a copy of Robinson Crusoe conveniently washes up on shore at a convenient point. And a pirate ship which places the lives of the escaped survivors in peril is mysteriously blown up from beneath with an explosive charge. The whole mystery of the original book comes from trying to figure out who the survivors’ mysterious benefactor is. And it’s wonderful... at least in the book.

But let’s go back to those opening credits because, this is where things get silly. There’s a huge spoiler in them because, instead of just listing Herbert Lom as being among the cast, the studio decide to list the credit thusly: “Herbert Lom as Captain Nemo”. Yeah, so that blows, right out of the water, the mystery of the helping hand being Captain Nemo and the surviving remnant of the Nautilus submarine from the earlier Jules Verne adventure yarn 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (Columbia wanted James Mason from the 1950s version to play Nemo again here but, alas, that didn’t happen). 

Luckily, Lom, along with all the other principal actors consisting of Michael Craig, Joan Greenwood, Michael Callan, Gary Merrill, Beth Logan, Percy Herbert and Dan Jackson... are all brilliant in this and, even though the twist is revealed on that opening credit, the film is hugely watchable and entertaining without being forewarned. Although, just to compound their error, in this version, it’s revealed the rifles in the chest are engraved with the word Nautilus... just in case we forgot the whole “it’s Captain Nemo folks’ vibe of the, well, not so Mysterious now Island. 

There’s still a little suspense left though, as Nemo warns his new companions that the volcano on the island is due to destroy it in two days or less. Can they all work together to find a way off the island before they are burned to a cinder? You can probably guess which characters survive and which one doesn’t, I suspect. 

And that’s me done with Mysterious Island for a while. Always a pleasure to watch this one and, although there’s not a huge amount of Harryhausen’s trademark animation in it, it’s still a greatly entertaining movie, even if they do go out of their way to advertise the twist in both their credits and, preposterously, on the original cinema trailers for the film too. I’m glad that, when I was a lot younger than I am now, Marvel Comics at least didn’t advertise the twist ahead of schedule. Still, if you’re going to see a cinematic version of Mysterious Island, this is certainly among the more fun ones, even if it continues the tradition of being completely inaccurate to the original novel.

The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver

Lemuel Pegging

The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver
USA 1960
Directed by Jack Sher
Morningside Productions/
Impact Blu Ray Zone 2

Warning: Both small... then large spoilers.

I have to say that, every time I revisit The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver, I find myself wondering how much time Ray Harryhausen actually spent with this film. From what I can make out, it’s surely only the squirrel and crocodile sequences in the second half of the movie which he was needed for? I guess the process of using a travelling matte to make people appear on the same frame at different sizes would have kept him busy but, as far as the stop motion animation side of things go... I think those two scenes were basically it. 

The film is based, of course, on Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels aka Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships which was written in 1726... but the film is set in 1699, starting off in Wapping in England. One can only assume, since most of the worlds and peoples that Gulliver (played here by Kerwin Mathews) meets in his travels in the book are completely absent from this movie (and from many other adaptations, it has to be said), that Wapping, England itself is counted as one of the three worlds because, like many, this motion picture only deals with Gulliver’s time in Lilliput where he is a giant and is even pegged down on the beach (as in the classic imagery usually used to illustrate the tale in various manifestations) and his time in Brobdingnag, where the tables are turned and both he and his fiance Elisabeth (played by June Thorburn) are tiny compared to this land of the giants. Luckily, they have the help of a young girl in the second segment called Glumdalclitch (played by Sherry Alberoni... for some reason, the name Glumdalclitch always makes me think of the treasure buried in a woman’s ‘lady garden’ so it always makes me smile, at least).     

I won’t go too much into the plot because there isn’t much of one other than, in Lilliput, Gulliver attempts to stop a war and in Brobdingnag he tries to not die from being put under suspicion of being a witch by a magician who hates him. Some of the biting satire has managed to survive though, such as the war between the Lilliputians and their enemies being about which end of an egg you should smash to eat it from, the small end or the big end. Yeah, that sounds about as silly a reason for war as pretty much all wars started in the world, it seems to me. So... no reason at all. Also, a remark by the king of Lilliput that he hates justice but loves the law, certainly rings true of a lot of people in positions of authority these days, for sure. 

The film is... a pleasant enough watch. Kerwin Mathews is much less a block of wood than in his previous movie for Schneer and Harryhausen, The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (reviewed here) and, while not ground shaking, the effects hold up far better on this nice new (at time of writing) Blu Ray edition from Impact than I’d expected and it passes the time nicely. 

That being said, there are a few issues with some of the execution and logic of things which seem a bit less thought out than they could be. For instance, to help the Lilliputions when a rainstorm comes, Gulliver blows the clouds out of the way. Um... yeah, the clouds would still be normal size and a person really can’t be doing that, even if he is a giant, I suspect. Another example would be when Gulliver goes fishing with his hat. We see a shot of the hat full of fish but, alas, when he empties it onto the beach for his tiny acquaintances, the scale of the fishes has changed to what would almost be normal size to them. Don’t get me wrong... modern CGI effects are no better (Spider-Man often seems to change size swinging from shot to shot in various films, for instance) but it seems to me a little more thought might have gone into issues like this.

That being said, it’s a nice and colourful film and the one thing which always brings me back to it is the absolutely astonishing score by Bernard Herrmann. It’s one of his more unusual ones where he’s trying to sound more English (it seems to me) and although there are some key Herrmann moments where he uses his characteristic repeat cells, it’s a much fuller and melodic sounding score and not one the unwary listener might, at first, peg as being from the same compositional mind that gave us, in the very same year, the ‘strings only’ score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

And that’s me about done on The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver I think... I really don’t have too much to say about the movie and the ending, where Gulliver and Elizabeth are washed up on a beach and waxing poetic, isn’t exactly stunning either. It’s mostly about the music and the various character actors involved for me (keep and eagle eye out for the woman who gives Dr. Gulliver a chicken as payment at the start of the film, it’s a youngish Joan Hickson, who would go on to play Miss Marple on TV, some 24 years later). If you like films of this period with a nice cast, an okay script and some wonderful scoring, then certainly give it a go. As far as Harryhausen goes though... it’s not exactly his strongest.

The Mandalorian And Grogu

Crest Of The Razor

The Mandalorian And Grogu
aka Star Wars: The Mandalorian 
And Grogu
Directed by Jon Favreau
USA 2026
Lucasfilm
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: This will probably have some very minor spoilers in it.

So the new attempt by Disney to pull some box office back from a franchise they’ve already run into the ground, namely the Star Wars franchise, is actually not a terrible movie... but it does have its problems. Titled The Mandalorian And Grogu, the film follows on from the TV show The Mandalorian and continues the exploits of Din Djarin (The Mandalorian, played by Pedro Pascale and a few others when he wears the mask) and Grogu (played mostly by CGI).

And, though the story is a completely stand alone adventure from the regular series... well therein lies the problem. 

Now, regular readers will know I’m not exactly the biggest fan of The Mandalorian but, in terms of that property, this is a pretty well put together movie, at least for the first half of the film (yeah, don’t worry, I’ll get there) and is much more enjoyable than the episodes of the TV show. That being said, although it’s a half good movie... is it a half good Star Wars movie? Well no, it still doesn’t quite feel like it belongs in the Star Wars universe, I would have to say. Although, to be fair, it does try its best... but it also tries to be a lot of things... some of which are really cool but, are equally not necessarily giving off Star Wars vibes. I mean, I don’t think George Lucas would ever had conceived of this as a story in quite this way and... depending on what generation of Star Wars viewer you are... that may well impede your reception to the movie, for sure.

Now the other thing about the film is that, although it ultimately tells one story, it does seem more episodic than I was expecting. Not episodic in the way the original movies were as they tried to emulate the old Flash Gordon serials (reviewed by me here, here and here) but more like the whole thing is a game of two halves... the first half being a James Bond style opening sequence followed by a rescue mission that goes wrong, nicely setting up some new characters and ending after a gladiatorial combat scene. And up to that point... apart from some issues like the old serial title crawl which featured in the original movies being absent, not to mention some large passages of synthesiser music replacing the traditional orchestral leitmotif one expects form a Star Wars film... it’s actually a pretty enjoyable movie. 

However, the second half, starting from where the main lead is taken prisoner as payback for his actions in the first half of the film, well it’s no less action packed but I found it mostly very dull (until Sigourney Weaver brings in the X-Wings at the end). I was looking at my watch in this part of the film because, yeah, it got gruellingly boring for me, I have to admit. 

Overall, though, the first half won me over somewhat and you do need to see this one on a big screen to fully capture the spectacle. Director Martin Scorcese turns up at one point (though you might not recognise him at first) and there’s a nice, if somewhat blatant, lifesize reconstruction of the Star Wars chess game from the original movie. Look at the floor of the arena and a better look at the aliens fighting there and you’ll see what I mean. But, there are also some blatant references (I think one building even says Nexus 7) to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (reviewed here) on one planet, which look good and are also vaguely reminiscent of stuff they’ve borrowed in other films in the franchise, such as Attack Of The Clones (reviewed here) but, nice as these sequences were (and they are pretty good at this stage of the movie), they didn’t quite add up to Star Wars for me. 

However, Ludwig Göransson’s score, which I’m complaining about a little above, is also pretty good and uses the themes he’s developed in the show pretty well (I might try and get a CD from somewhere if they bother to release it in this essential format). And I also thought the effects work, which some people seem to be complaining about, actually worked pretty well in this movie. Especially the one for the character of the son of Jabba The Hutt, which looks a bit clunky but certainly convinces you that a creature like this could do the things it does without crumpling to the floor every five seconds.

And that’s me done with The Mandalorian And Grogu... I hated the second half of the movie but I mostly had a good time with the rest of it and I’m glad I caught it at my local cinema, who seemed to have absolutely no clue as how to frame it on their screens but, yeah, lack of competency of the staff at Cineworld seems to be a thing which really hasn’t gotten better over the decades. Oh well.  

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.

Night Life Of The Gods

Apollo’s Creed

Night Life Of The Gods 
Directed by Lowell Sherman
USA 1935
DVD Region 0

Warning: Full on spoilers.

“Once upon a time, a famous author named Thorne Smith wrote a book, conceived in a moment of delirium, and written in a cuckoo clock, the first chapters convinced us He was crazy. The ensuing left no doubt that possibly WE were. So we leave you to enjoy this new and completely mad type of whimsical humor on the screen.

Stop rattling cellophane! Take Sonny's shoes off! Park your gum under the seat where it belongs, and let's all go crazy together.”
Foreword from the movie version of Night Life Of The Gods

Just a quick dash of a smidgeon of a short review for what was, up until relatively recently (I believe) thought of as a lost film. That is to say, the movie adaptation of Thorne Smith’s Night Life Of The Gods. Dead at the age of 42, one year before this movie was made, Smith was a famous and much loved contemporary humourist who wrote a number of books and collections which tackled booze, sex and society in a comedic and witty manner. Night Life Of The Gods is certainly one of his best remembered but two of his other novels, Topper and Topper Takes A Trip, are perhaps even more known works, both of which were the basis for the first two of three Topper films in the 1930s and 40s, followed by a popular spin off TV show and, in later decades, various other TV films and shows which were less successful.

Now I said above that this movie version of Night Life Of The Gods was thought to be lost, certainly according to a book I’ve recently been reading which was revised around about ten years ago. Well, it must have turned up somewhere but I am surprised that such a title has not, since its rediscovery, had a proper DVD or Blu Ray restoration since its ‘found’ status. As such, I have been forced to take the ‘underground’ route and have acquired a ‘copy’ from that sometimes great resource for ‘unreleased and consigned to the scrapheap for good’ movies... eBay. 

So here I am and... I can understand in some way why this one has not been polished up for a modern audience. The foreword, which I have duplicated in its entirety at the start of this page, is somewhat off putting but it shows how ‘less than confident’ the producers were about putting this somewhat unusual concoction before the general public in the first place. Yeah, let’s tell them it’s crazy in case they don’t enter into the spirit of the thing, right? Not to mention using the horrible US spelling of the word humour, of course.

Okay, so I’ve no idea if this measures up to the original novel (nope, I haven’t read it but I should probably read this author’s works at some stage, he’s one of my dad’s favourite writers) but the plot is about an inventor called Hunter Hawk, played by Alan Mowbray and his crazy explosions which leave his family, who all live in the same house as him, somewhat nervous... and perhaps hopeful that he might die in one of his own explosions and leave them all his money. 

After he is knocked unconscious in his laboratory, pretty much the rest of the movie takes place in his dream. He invents a machine, which he can wear as a ring, which turns people into stone statues and, I have to say, it’s a power used a lot and looks particularly good when shown on screen... especially for a 1935 movie but, perhaps even for modern times. However, the ring can also bring the stone back to flesh but, more so, it can bring statues to life and so, in the usual drunken adventures which are possibly a signature of a Thorne Smith protagonist, Hawk and his friend bring to life the statues of the Gods, such as Apollo (played here by the great serial and b-movie player Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan, billed under his real name of Raymond Benard), Neptune and Diana... and they all go on drunken revelries around the city, pursued by the police and leaving a trail of chaos behind them. 

Now, it’s not a bad film by any means... one particular moment, where Bacchus (as played here by George Hassell) is getting a massage and then decides to neck down the massage oil as there is no suitable alcohol around, certainly tickled me. But, the film does feel somewhat like it’s in the mode of that special kind of chaotic humour you would find in an early Marx Brothers movie... without having the benefit of Groucho, Harpo, Chico... or even Zeppo... present to give the shenanigans that special ingredient. That being said, bearing in mind audiences were already used to and loving Minie’s boys* by this point in their career, I am somewhat puzzled as to why Universal thought they needed that wordy and somewhat cringeworthy opening foreword to introduce the proceedings.

I mean, it’s not terrible but, it’s not terribly good either. The saving grace is, perhaps, that everyone seems really invested in their role and Alan Mowbray certainly seems to be taking things very seriously indeed. And at the start, Hawk seems downright sinister but it’s tempered by Mowbray’s performance once the wine induced hijinks are underway, for sure. 

And there I am with a longer review than I’d expected to be able to write and nothing much more to say about this one other than... while the costumes and scantily clad nature of them seem more appropriate to the pre-code days of Hollywood, which ended only the year before, the modesty of all the actors and actresses here is kept firmly intact. 

Would I recommend Night Life Of The Gods, in terms of the movie version. Well it’s certainly not for everybody but I think such a film, which is somewhat different from most of the other stuff being pumped out by the major studios at the time, certainly deserves a modern audience. I don’t think it will necessarily win any big fans but it’s certainly something which I feel should be seen by people, nevertheless. So, yeah, I would kind of recommend it to various shades of cinephile, actually.

*The Marx Brothers

Death Of A Unicorn

Unique Horn

Death Of A Unicorn
Directed by Alex Scharfman
USA/Hungary 2025
A24
UK Cinema release print

Warning: Definitely some minor spoilers here.

Death Of A Unicorn is a bit of an unusual film, it seems to me. At first I thought it was a little like one of those movies that Hollywood sometimes churns out as being an ‘independent movie’ when it’s about as far from one as you could get on a truly independent budget… but the studio is still trying to sell it as a quirky, fun and unusual movie to appeal to a specific kind of audience. And I’d normally avoid such things if it weren’t for the fact that, despite seeming to try to be all those things so fiercely… it is, actually, also a genuinely quirky, fun and unusual movie.

The story involves the oft times brilliant Paul Rudd as Elliot, a lawyer who has been invited around to a hugely wealthy family’s retreat in the mountains to seal a deal to serve said family, with the pharmaceutical CO father of the family (played by Richard E. Grant) near death from cancer. He is also accompanied by his daughter Ridley, played by the equally brilliant Jenna Ortega (who was so good in Beeteljuice Beeteljuice, reviewed here). They are here for the weekend but, on the way, they accidentally hit a unicorn with their car and, after trying to kill it to put it out of its misery, Elliot and Ridley get sprayed in its blood. This has the effect of clearing Ridley’s skin condition and fixing Elliot’s vision so he doesn’t need his glasses (among other things). They stuff the fabled creature into the back of the car and Elliot tries to get in good with the family, consisting of Grant, Tea Leoni, Will Poulter and various servants and doctors including Jessica Hynes as a personal bodyguard/chief of security. Then the unicorn wakes up and is put out of its misery again with a gun shot to the head… before the family discover the medicinal properties of its ground up horn, which cures the father of his cancer. The unicorn then becomes their main concern as a money spinner but, the unicorn’s mum and dad are on their way to take revenge on the humans… among other things.

And it is a nice little film. I was torn at first because the villainous, shallow, filthy rich family are given such over the top performances by their respective actors that it just felt like they were all having too much of a good time hamming it up at the expense of the audience, for a while. However, I can only think this must have been a deliberate instruction from the director because the characters who are not ‘all about the money’ and who are more decent types, all seem to come across as naturalistic and genuine in comparison. Rudd is delicately balancing a half in/ half out relationship with the human antagonists and Ortega, as the voice of reason, anchors the film when things threaten to get overly pretentious with the majority of the rest of the cast. Ortega also has a special relationship with the unicorns, it turns out… I’ll leave you to discover that element of the film for yourself.

It’s also a film where the depiction of right and wrong in terms of where the characters’ respective moral compasses are set is not necessarily something that will save them from the wrath of the unicorns. A doctor played by Sunita Mani, for instance, definitely has the audience sympathies I would say, despite being torn between her own humanity and the best financial interests of the family. This doesn’t stop her from being despatched in a way which would mean the police, who discover the bloodbath at the end of the movie, wouldn’t have to look in a few different places to recover her remains.

The film is nicely shot and edited with some amazing visual effects. The unicorns are, I can only assume, fully CGI but they come across as great personalities… and mostly terrifying. This is a 15 rated film in the UK and for good reason. Don’t bring your kids along to this one because the unicorns are quite ferocious and you will see some nicely gnarly scenes of such things as unicorn horn impaling and people being ripped apart (sometimes a thrilling combination of both) or, for example, having their heads burst under hoof. These unicorns have more in common with the ones depicted in the second Shazam! movie (reviewed here) than anything you might get in kiddie literature.

Also, it has a quite nice ending with a little ambiguity, perhaps, as to the fates of a couple of the characters but with a sense of positivity and, in one character, a certain sense of redemption for what’s gone before. So I have to admit I quite liked Death Of A Unicorn, which I was lucky enough to see four days before it opened officially, at a special preview screening. Very much worth a watch, I would say.

Broken Homes

Masking Betrayal

Broken Homes
by Ben Aaronovitch
Gollancz
ISBN: 9780575132481

Warning: A very big spoiler in this one so, if you are going to read this book at some point, I would suggest you read it before digging into this review.

Broken Homes is the fourth novel in the ever popular Rivers Of London series by Ben Aaronovitch and it’s yet another follow on from the original novel in that the lead villain from that story, who main protagonists Inspector Peter Grant, his friend Lesley (also an inspector) and their boss Nightingale, in the very small division of the metropolitan police dealing with magic… is once again the main antagonist here, known only as the mysterious ‘faceless man’.  People who have read the first will remember that, in that novel, the final battle with said bad guy caused Lesley’s face to fall off and, despite many attempts to undo this surgically in subsequent tomes, she still remains no further to getting her ‘beyond scarred’ mess of a visage fixed in any way, forcing her to also wear a mask when out and about.

This novel deals mainly with the area around Elephant and Castle and a specific tower block called the Skygarden, where Peter and Lesley eventually end up taking a flat, undercover, to try and figure out what’s going on. As it turns out, the building itself is the key to the nefarious plot of the faceless man and the various murders all lead back to having something to do with the periphery of this building.

And once again, it’s a wonderful blend of procedural detective work offset by the world of magic with absolutely loads of pop culture references and other clever things afoot. So a nice parody of Orwell’s Animal Farm can be found early on when Peter mentions (the novels are written from his point of view), “It’s a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something but some members are more guilty than others.” Another clever thing is, when recounting a battle with one of the Dr. Moreau-like beast/human hybrids from the end of the second novel, he mentions having gone ‘mano-a-mano-tiger’ with him.

And, as usual, the various references to other franchises and works of fiction come thick and fast… with nods to such things as Harry Potter, Game Of Thrones, classic era Battlestar Galactica, Ghostbusters, Doctor Who (Peter refrains from correcting a reference about the Autons for fear of looking too nerdy), Something Wicked This Way Comes, Lord Of The Rings (the Skygarden block is compared to Isengard), Monty Python and even a mention of actress Zhang Ziyi. Along with, I’m sure, many others I’m not nearly nerdy enough to have picked up on. Perhaps my favourite shout out is to Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? or, knowing Peter, the movie version called Blade Runner (reviewed here), with a lovely passage about various questions he is using to interrogate a suspect which reads “I called it the Voigt-Kampff test, even though only Dr. Walid got the joke - and he had to look it up on Wikipedia.”

Now though, I have to address the big, shocking moment from the end of the novel. Which, to be fair, I had seen coming since book one and have been waiting for it to happen but, it still took me by surprise to some degree and, funnily enough, because I’d given up on my idea of the true allegiances of one of the characters about halfway through this book because she really does help with the investigation… or so I thought. Here’s the thing… ever since the first novel (and I believe I mentioned it in my review of that one and possibly in the second book review also), I’ve assumed that Peter’s best friend Lesley will, due to her traumatic experiences in the first novel, switch sides and join with the enemy. It’s too much of a perfect character arc of betrayal to ignore in her, I thought. 

However, I’d just about given up on the idea by about three quarters of the way through this novel but then, right near the end of the book, boom, it played out just as I’d thought it would (although the nature of the betrayal was so casual and off handed that it took me by surprise). Peter has the faceless man handcuffed and in his custody when Lesley tasers him and runs off with the villain… who has presumably got it in his power to grow her face back somehow (or at least I suspect that’s what has been the promise). So at the end of the story we have a very bitter Peter Grant and the crew of The Folly, where the entirety of the magic division lives, is just Nightingale, Peter, Molly the bizarre house servant (who has a loose end set up in this story which is buried and, I suspect, which the author will come back to in another novel), a new acquisition of a Russian magic terrorist being temporarily held prisoner there and, of course, Toby the dog.

And that’s me done with Broken Homes, I think. I’ve taken advantage of Forbidden Planet’s recent restock of the series in signed editions so the next five novels in the series should be on the blog this year some time. As per usual, I can’t say enough good things about these books and they are something I’ve been heavily recommending to people.

Whispers Underground

Sub Stack

Whispers Underground
by Ben Aaronovitch
Gollancz
ISBN: 9780575097667

Whispers Underground, by Ben Aaronivitch, is the third of this writer’s Rivers Of London series and, I have to say, I really do like this set of novels (and thankfully, there are a fair few of them still to explore, since I caught up with these late in the game and, as far as I can tell, he’s still writing them). A quick summation for those who are not familiar with the series... these novels deal with the exploits of a British copper called Peter Grant with various other supporting characters and are kinda like Harry Potter for adults... if Harry Potter worked in a small, barely tolerated magical division of the British police.

The first novel (reviewed here) found Peter and his unfortunate partner Lesley, stumbling into this section of the force due to various things which happen to him and he is taken under the wing of a centuries old (the age is doubtful and not revealed as yet in the books I’ve read) teacher called Nightingale. I say that Lesley is unfortunate because, during that first adventure, her face fell off and no amount of plastic surgery, to date, has been able to fix this (at least by the third book). However, in the second novel, Moon Over Soho (reviewed here), she demonstrates a similar gift for magic as Peter by the end of that one and so is back in this one as a full fledged apprentice, staying at The Folly with Peter, Nightingale and sinister housekeeper Molly.

This one is more of the same but it also, again, has a slightly different flavour to it, starting off with the murder, on a tube train track, of the son of an American ambassador and leading to somewhere I really wasn’t expecting... but which is a great ‘take’ on the title of the novel by the time you get there. While the previous one had more of an emphasis on action than the first, this one dials some off that back again but it’s never less than entertaining. The ambassador’s son was stabbed to death with the shard of a broken pot and, because Peter is becoming sensitive to the remnants of magic, he realises that magic had been used to fashion the particular pot that is identified as the murder weapon. So things go from there as he joins the homicide squad but also separately investigates the magical stuff while the investigation is ongoing.

He’s hampered and helped in this by a wealth of new characters, some of whom I’m guessing may return in later books, like a female FBI agent who inevitably learns of the existence of magic, in no uncertain terms, while she’s tagging along and following Peter and Lesley in their investigations. And there are some really nice sequences to this, set underground in both the tube system in London and the sewer system... and even deeper than that when Peter is left for dead in a collapsed tunnel made by an ‘earthbender’ who can burrow through solid ground at speed.

The time is a lot more compressed than I thought it would be in relation to the previous stories. It’s clear that while this is the third novel, the events of the first book only took place about a year before. The book is structured over the space of one week on the approach to Christmas day, with section headings taking on the name of the day and chapter headings created from the areas of London in which Peter finds himself at any given time (the book is told completely from first person narrative stance by the main protagonist). Also, although the main plot is nothing to do with the previous novel, which left things dangling in the air in terms of the villain of the piece for that one, there are certainly lingering encounters at two points with that particular menace... the writer dangling these scenes because he obviously doesn’t want the reader to forget that villain, who is obviously going to be a kind of ‘arch nemesis’ for Peter, Lesley and Nightingale at some future date.

And, as the others in the series, there’s a fair few bits of pop culture reference thrown into the mix. For example, the elvish language as created by J. R. R. Tolkien turns up on one of the pots... and being as it’s not the ‘real elvish’ language of the world of these books, it’s only Peter who recognises it enough to get it translated. There’s also a nice reference to the British horror movie Death Line, which is also set in the London Underground system and which I still, amazingly, haven’t got around to watching. And I was also pleased, bearing in mind when this book was written (before the Chibnal era) that Peter and his family all gather and watch the Doctor Who Christmas Special each year.

And I think I’ve revealed as much of Whispers Underground as I want to other than to say that, in the last chapter, there's a nice hook when one of Peter’s new ‘colleagues’ tells him about a ‘talking fox’ she has been communicating with. So I’m guessing that’s a nice little set up for something coming in a later novel, for sure. I absolutely loved Whispers Underground and will definitely continue on to the next one at some point soon... hopefully this year if time permits.

The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard

Necro Crom Icon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Series 2

 

From Hell

From - Series 2
Airdate 23 April - 25 June
10 Episodes

Warning: Yeah, I think this one will have to have spoilers.

So Season 2 of From gives us very little answers to the many questions posed on an almost weekly basis in the first season (reviewed here). The cast, including Harold Perrineau, Elizabeth Saunders, Eion Bailey, Ricky He and Avery Konrad... also return with many of the surviving regular characters and, in the case of a few people... dead ones too. Some in flashback but also some as ‘personal ghosts’ who appear in certain characters’ heads to help them try to think out their problems... or perhaps hinder them, who knows. We also have a bunch of new characters to contend with too.

This one carries on from exactly where the last season left us, with at least four cliffhangers to be taken care of... so thread one: Sheriff  Boyd is teleported by the tree to a structure where he manages to escape from a well with the help of an old man chained to a wall (yeah, hold that thought). The old man dies but not before he transfers his blood to Boyd, which now has worms crawling around in it and which also gives him hallucinations about a music box. The music box will also overlap into other characters’ sleeping and waking dreams as the show progresses, playing an important part in the season finale.

Thread two: The voice on the radio who knows exactly what’s going on... is unresolved and perpetuates a mini mutiny involving a new way of thinking between two of the trapped characters, with some dramatic consequences.

Thread three: The character digging to find where the electricity comes from (only to find their wires lead to nowhere and there’s no way any of them should be able to have electricity at all) falls through the house, which actually collapses... but is rescued by Victor, who helps her navigate the tunnels where the creatures sleep (it would seem).

Thread four: The bus full of new arrivals... this takes a while to resolve and introduces us to, among others... the doctor’s girlfriend, who just happens to be on the bus and who is going through drug withdrawal; a sensitive and almost prophetic guy who seems to have some kind of way of navigating all this locked away inside him (if he could only access it); a bad guy who is as unstable and tough as they come, just to throw a spanner into the works and, also, a fairly calm and rational little old lady, who I think will come to play a much more important role in the following seasons (which I hope all get green lit as soon as the next one).

And, yeah, I binged the whole thing in a few sessions because, although there aren’t that many new crazy things happening in this one (although, honestly, there are a fair amount of new ideas... one of them meaning that nobody in town dare go to sleep or be left alone), it’s still pretty compelling and the actors really nail their characters and work well together.

So it’s all pretty gripping. Once again, Victor, the longest inhabitant of the community who has been there since he was a boy (when the rest of the town died overnight on him), seems to be the key to everything... or at least the key to having a better chance of survival. If he was just able to remember stuff but, of course, his slightly stunted ‘child’s brain in an adult body’ is a very convenient way for the writers to drip feed the necessary story beats and revelations over time so, he’s also a very useful character to the overall drama of the show, for sure.

My one big criticism of the show would be how Sheriff Boyd doesn’t notice and ask the obvious question in the first episode. You’re stuck in a well like structure and the voice of an old man helps you and a rope is thrown down. When Boyd gets out, the old man is a prisoner, chained to a wall. Yeah, right? Then who was it who threw the damned rope? And why does nobody stop to ask this question? Has this been left here as a sleeper element for another season or were the writers seriously just running through the wet paint around the corner they painted themselves into here? Don’t know... I may find out, I guess.

The last episode has a conclusion of one of the mini arcs in that Boyd manages to save the lives of three people who are dream sleep victims. It also has a big cliff hanger in which, through being injured in a big fall from a very specific place in this weird world, one character appears at the end to actually escape but, I’m not sure we’ve been given the full picture concerning that little revelation, obviously... so we’ll have to wait and see. Wait until 2024 I guess, which is when Season Three of From, which has been commissioned (thankfully), is due to air. Meanwhile, if you’ve not latched onto From yet, it’s pretty compelling... and sometimes brutal... stuff so, yeah, maybe give this one a go.

Troll

For Whom
The Bell Trolls

Troll
Directed by Roar Uthaug
Norway 2022
Motion Blur Films

Just a very quick shout out to the new movie Troll, directed by Roar Uthaug, who did the last Tomb Raider movie (reviewed here). Troll is, as the title suggests, a movie about the discovery of the existence of.... and in this case, the ensuing rampage of... a Troll in Norway. After a bit of emotional set up from the film’s lead protagonist and her father (played by Gard B. Eidsvold), talking about trolls and the place of fairy tale creatures in the modern world, we jump 20 years to find that the kid, Nora (now played by Ine Marie Wilmann) has grown up to be a paleontologist. However, just as she’s finally discovered a dinosaur on a dig, a government helicopter is sent ot pick her up to advise the prime minister (played by Anneke von der Lippe) about what it is they could be facing after ‘something’, has broken out of a mountain and left giant footprints around, after said mountain has been dynamited by people trying to build a road through it. Of course, the something is, indeed, a troll like the ones her estranged father tried to get her to believe in when she was a kid and it’s up to her, her father, the prime minister’s aide (played by Kim Falck) and a young military officer (played by Mads Sjøgård Pettersen) to track the troll down (not a problem) and stop it from being a threat (a bit of a taller order, it has to be said).

And it’s great. Damn near perfect, in fact. Especially since the casting is spot on and you have the movie populated by credible actors who are able to pull the audience in and make the fantastic subject matter more palatable... so good job there. Unlike, say, the excellent Troll Hunter (reviewed here)... which was a ‘found footage’ movie anyway, if memory serves... Troll is a very slick affair filled with fluid camera shots and both fast and slow editing, where necessary, to create the required sense of urgency in any given scene. And it’s got the special effects to back it up, too.

So yeah, it’s basically a giant monster on the loose movie, Norwegian style and, indeed, midst all the many Star Trek, Star Wars and various other pop culture references throughout the movie (not to mention another appearance of the Wilhelm scream), somebody does indeed mention it’s a ‘Norwegian Godzilla’ at one point. So, yeah, if anything, this film is certainly a lot of fun and is one of the better made monster movies of the last ten years or so. Which begs the question, why the hell do I have to be watching this thing streaming on a small screen when the quality and spectacle of this one is of such a standard that I should have been given the option of watching it in a proper cinema screen with a decent sound system? This is where the streaming channels who bankroll these things show themselves to be as much against the art of cinema and the film they are funding as they are in getting the thing made. I would have loved to have seen this on an IMAX screen, for sure.

All this is backed up by an incredible score by Johannes Ringen which, unbelievably, is not available as a stand alone CD (just some stupid electronic download... absolute rubbish option). The whole thing is fast paced, never in danger of being dull and has some extremely likeable characters who are relatable enough to care about when things start getting dangerous for them. And, also, there’s a mid-post-credits scene which helps to throw up the possibility of a second movie if this one makes enough money. So, yeah, once again I find myself apologising that this is, indeed, a very short review of the film but, with a product like Troll, it’s hard to find much of anything bad to say about it. Like I said before, pretty much a perfect movie and one which I will recommend to a lot of people. Don’t miss out on this one.

Rivers Of London

Swazzle Stick

Rivers Of London
by Ben Aaronovitch
Gollancz
ISBN: 9780575097582

One of the few joys of getting old is finding another writer whose work you really enjoy. The extra icing on that particular cake is when it’s the first book in what turns out to be a substantial series of novels already published. I think I’ve had a few recommendations from people to start up with the Rivers Of London series over the years, the last time from someone three years ago with whom I was doing jury service but, since the people who make these recommendations don’t know me that well, I’ve always put buying one of these books on the back burner, so to speak.

So I’m very pleased that I finally lifted the lid and read the first novel in the series and, a fine tome it turned out to be. Not quite what I was expecting either, to tell you the truth. Set in modern London (mostly... I’ll talk about that in a little while) the books follows the first big adventure of graduate policeman Peter Grant and his colleague/friend/crush Lesley May. Told in first person viewpoint by Grant, who really is the main protagonist here, the book starts off in Covent Garden with these two young coppers guarding a crime scene late at night. The crime scene in question dealing with a man near the actor’s church in Covent Garden, who has had his head knocked off. When Lesley goes to get coffee for them both in the small hours of the morning, Peter finds himself face to face with a witness to the crime. The only problem with that is... the witness is a very old ghost.

The book goes on from there as Peter and Lesley discover a previously unknown (to them) one man branch of the police dealing with ‘magic and occult’ phenomena. A man known as Nightingale. Peter becomes his apprentice, learning how to cast spells and detect supernatural phenomena... since Nightingale is also a very old wizard. Along the way, Peter and Lesley find themselves entrenched in a very dangerous investigation, negotiating the practicalities and bureaucracy of dealing with the existence of Gods, monsters and other creatures that go more than just bump in the night. Generally putting themselves in very dangerous situations where, if you’re not careful in the case of the main antagonist of this particular case... your face might fall off.

And it’s great, shot through with a very strong dose of humour right from the outset. The main characters are all very likeable and the situations they find themselves in inhabit a world which could easily be cliché ridden but, in actuality, are told with a certain freshness and sparkle that you don’t always find in more poe faced works dealing with this kind genre, or indeed ‘genre mix’, as it marries strong fantasy elements (including the rivers and their rulers fighting over territories... such as rivals Father Thames and Mama Thames) with modern police procedural methods and references. It’s by no means downgrading the police but I do like the fact that it’s par for the course in this novel for certain officers to falsify evidence and witness reports, lying at the request of their senior officers which, when Peter has to do that, gets him the compliment of “You do have the makings of a proper copper.”

Also, when the writer/narrative voice starts to make jokes about the Midichlorians from the Star Wars prequels and paraphrases a line from Blade Runner (things which the reader would either know or not and, Peter usually doesn’t get a laugh from these since the characters he cracks them with don’t seem to recognise what he’s talking about) then... well, Aaranovitch already had me hooked but even more so once he’s started down this road. There even another discrete reference, again not spelled out, to the 1972 British movie Death Line, at one point.

More humour is found when Peter’s attempts at learning magic have some decidedly dodgy and damaging results at times. Plus casual one liners such as when he’s told a suspect is hiding in Walthamstow and his first thought is “Many would say that was punishment enough.”, had me in stitches... or as close as I get to stitches on my generally unsmiling features.

The approach to magic is something I quite enjoyed too. Peter is picked on because Nightingale sees something special in him, particularly considering he managed to see... and interview for a witness statement... a ghost, when he didn’t even believe in them until then. And the way Peter approaches the many magical realms opened up to him is to relate it all to science and he experiments with it the same way a scientist might test various hypothesis... very much in laboratory conditions.

The other big thing I enjoyed was the many shout outs to parts of London that I know well. Most of the locales Aaranovitch writes about are known to me and I find it ironic, since I don’t go into London as much as I used to. That’s also going to age the books for future readers too, I’m afraid. This book was first published in 2011 and, already in 11 years, many of the shops and haunts he writes about have changed or disappeared. I remember them but, I suspect that as Peter carries on in future books, he will note the changes to certain places in the text... at which point it will probably be a London I recognise less with each passing book unless I start going down there more regularly and actively revisiting these areas for myself.

And the story develops in a way which I didn’t see coming until it was revealed either (which is a hard thing to do to me, to be honest, I usually see stuff coming a mile off). There was one point in the story where a particularly horrible and terminal crime is committed against a babe in arms which, honestly, should have given me a big clue as to where this was all going... I just wasn’t expecting it and I missed it completely. And I’m really not complaining... that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned. Surprise me with the writing and I’m going to stay interested, for sure.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Rivers Of London other than, as a sign of respect to the hundreds of books on my to read pile, the second volume in the series, Moon Over Soho, will definitely be going on my Christmas list and I’m planning on reading all the other books in the series during 2023 too, if I can afford books on top of all these new energy bills... I might be piling them all up and burning them to get some heat going instead, if I’m not careful. But, if you like stuff like the Night Watch books and are happy if I describe these novels a being a kind of Harry Potter for grown ups... then you should probably like this one, for sure.

Monster Hunter

 

Gates Of Meow

Monster Hunter
2020 Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson
Germany/China/Canada/Japan/South Africa/USA
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some spoilerage but, it’s not really that kind of movie.

So, once again, director Paul W. S. Anderson teams up with his wife, Milla Jovovich to make another movie adapted from a video game series. Now, I have slight issues with their Resident Evil series of films because... well, they were nearly all absolutely brilliant with the exception of two of them. The second one was kinda let down by some of the prosthetic ‘man in suit’ effects but the real disappointment was the sixth film in the series, Resident Evil - The Final Chapter... which totally failed to make any kind of sense and contradicted the running story of the films up until that point with absolutely no attempt to explain the complete lack of continuity, effectively negating everything we’d learned in the second movie.

So, yeah, I was always going to go see Monster Hunter, although, I hereby make the usual caveat that I haven’t played the game so really don’t know if it’s any good as an adaptation or not. Although the film has been freely available for a while in HD from ‘the usual web sites’ (and I believe that’s where at least one of my friends saw it), I decided to wait for half a year and see if it got any kind of cinema release in the UK. Since I’d seen the Resident Evil films at the cinema, I wanted to do it right with this one because, whether you like them or not, Anderson always tends to make huge spectacles of his movies and so I booked a local screening, even paying a little extra on top of my Cineworld card to see the film on a big IMAX screen.

The film itself... well, I firmly believe that with a few tweaks this could have been a really great movie but, I did have an issue with it and I think, all in all, it’s an okay and relatively entertaining movie and, at the very least, has the potential to be a long running franchise, if it gets the box office take to make that happen.

Okay, so the film is almost but not quite plotless. There are two worlds, one of fantasy style sand ships and big monsters and... also our world. After a brief prologue on the other world where the leader of a band of ‘yo hos’, played by Ron Perlman, gets in a skuffle with a big monster on his sand galleon and has to leave behind one of the monster hunters of the title to fend for himself, played by the ‘legend in his own lifetime’ Tony Jaa (who I though t had retired to become a buddhist monk or some such but, apparently not)... we join the main US protagonist of the movie, a ranger played by Milla Jovovich. She and her band of hard core military types are taking their heavily armoured transport to look for a scout team that have gone missing (in our world). Then, some archaic markers in the sand they pass by suddenly go all pyrotechnic and they are transported into the world of the prologue... and come face to face with various giant beasties.

It would be true to say there’s not much plot development after that. The film becomes one big action set piece after another and, within half an hour, Jovovich is the only one of both her team and the original team she was looking for, left alive... and only because Tony Jaa has tried to help out on occasion. When the two leads finally meet, after she manages to escape from a load of quite vicious giant spiders, everything gets a bit Hell In The Pacific meets Shelob for a while as the two, who don’t speak each other’s language, work through their issues with the tried and true movie clichés of violence and mistrust followed by, eventual, mutual respect.

And there’s also a double climax to the movie... one set in the other world and then one set in ours... both of which involve some large, ‘almost but not quite unkillable’ giant dragons and Ron Perlman, whose character can speak English due to a twist in what little of the plot there is, as he brings his team in to help out in our world after another dragon crosses over.

Okay...so the film is nice to look at, has some great actors, some not bad special effects and is quite pacey but, alas, that last thing is also the big problem with the film, for me at least. There’s no let up. The first half an hour is quite relentless, driven and harrowing, as Jovovich’s team all die big, monstery deaths but, it just carries on and on. There’s no real calm before the next storm... even the scenes where Jaa and Jovovich meet up for the first time are full of sequences where they are continuously brawling for way too long. This film, in my opinion, makes the one big mistake that a lot of modern action picture directors tend to make and that is... falling into the trap of giving the characters no real downtime before they face the next peril... thus giving no contrast within the tone of the scenes and, by the end of the film, it all seems just a little bit dull. Indeed, even the double climax seems like something of a let down because there’s no real build up to it... just conflict after conflict with the only really nice moments involving a cat... which I won’t spoil for you here but, make sure you stick around for an extra scene mid way through the end credits. I actually think that, in the case of this movie, it might have been more effective if the director had made it a little longer and put more pauses in the film to help liven up the action scenes. As it is... yeah, it feels like a ‘pretty good’ kind of movie rather than a truly great one, to be honest.

Even so, I think people who are into big monster movies will still find a lot to like in Monster Hunter and, like I said... the cat, man. We need to see more of the cat! I’d be quite happy if some more of these were made because, like I said, the director is a bit hit and miss and I’m sure he could make some decent follow ups which surpassed the original, if given half the chance. I might grab this one on blu ray once it goes into the sales and, I guess I’m still relatively happy that I waited to see it on the big screen. Hopefully there will be more to follow.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen

Zeman By Proxy

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen
aka Baron Prásil  
Czechoslovakia 1962
Directed by Karel Zeman
Second Run Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Many story spoilers.

Baron Prásil is the Czechoslovakian name for Baron Munchausen. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is the third of the six feature films by this wonderful director to utilise live actors pitched against various animation styles. It’s a film which was on TV a lot when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s but which seems to have dropped off the radar a bit over the last few decades. Like a lot of great films we were used to being exposed to back in the day, kids now, among them up and coming filmmakers of the future, just aren’t getting the opportunities to easily see the classics of cinema like they used to. For sure, there are still some modern classics shown but, honestly, TV stations are just not educating people with quality product like they should do in these dark times.

So, anyway, of the three Karel Zeman films I’ve watched since Christmas, this is probably my least favourite. That being said, it has all the usual Zeman charm in abundance and is certainly as inventive and entertaining a spectacle as his previous two features, for sure. This one is very similar, stylistically, to his previous cinema release, Invention For Destruction (aka The Fabulous World Of Jules Verne, reviewed here) and uses a lot of matte paintings and sets built which are based, somewhat, on Gustave Doré’s illustrations for one of the more popular 19th Century versions of the legends based on the real life Baron. The difference being that this one is shot in colour... although it’s not a colour film as is typically understood by that term these days. Rather, the live action scenes, starring actors such as Milos Kopecký (Munchausen), Rudolf Jelínek (Tony the moon man, who is actually not in any way such a thing) and Jana Brejchová (as Princess Bianca... although she was a bought woman sold to ‘The Sultan’ by pirates) and, indeed, the majority of the animations and drawings in the film, are obviously shot on monochrome stock and then tinted. The difference between the same process here than in most silent films where colour tinting was more common, being that sometimes a few colours are assigned to different sections of the screen simultaneously.

The film starts dramatically on Earth with shots of nature turning to aviation via butterflies, birds, various aeroplanes (including something like a jumbo jet) and then to rockets headed to the moon (the reality of which would not come to fruition for another seven years). Then, Tony the astronaut sees footprints on the moon. He follows them and finds the original rocket from Jules Verne’s From The Earth To The Moon and is then, astonishingly, greeted by the three central protagonists of that book who, like their companions, don’t need space helmets like Tony to be able to breath the atmosphere. Cyrano De Bergerac also greets them (he had some adventures on the moon in one of his literary incarnations, if memory serves... although my old English translation paperback of his lunar adventures is either up in the loft or donated to charity a couple of decades ago) and, lastly, Baron Munchausen adds his welcome.

The five of them obviously mistake Tony for a moon man and the good Baron decides to fly him back to Earth in his ‘star galleon’ (my term) flown by geese for Tony to see how Earth dwellers live. Of course, by the time they get to Earth the clock has flown back and the two have various of the Baron’s famous misadventures, picking up the ‘princess’ in the palace of The Sultan where, in a wonderful moment of satire, the Baron starts talking in comically abrupt woodwind sounds very similar to the sounds used by the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Tony remarks (in this translation, other versions referenced on the documentaries included are obviously taken from a much different subtitle translation) that the Baron’s conversational tones in this manner are... “Musical but hard to follow.” “The language of high diplomacy!” retorts the Baron and, yes, I couldn’t agree more.

And the adventure continues as the Baron and his two companions escape the sultan but, after using a smoke screen made up of Turkish tobacco, which everyone on the ship they are in puffs to summon up said smoke screen (even the ship’s figurehead has a puff), they end up in the belly of a giant fish and, later, during a battle scene, we also have a version of the famous cannon ball ride (there and back) so the Baron can gain the advantage of seeing what the enemy are up to. When Tony is slung into prison for stealing all the gunpowder for one of his scientific ‘fantasist’ inventions, the Baron lights the gunpowder which was hidden in a well in the castle for just such a purpose and the three of them are blown back to the moon.

It’s a nice flight of fancy from beginning to end and, along the way, you’ll see the usual Zeman inventiveness such as the Baron riding a sea horse which actually does have four legs with flippers for feet to swim with, accompanied by a swordfish on which the Baron hangs his clothes and dresses while riding said sea horse, a captivating but perhaps over used red smoke (the old coloured droplets in water trick) and even a battle being conducted like a piece of concert music.

Like I said, it’s not my favourite of his works but it’s still an excellent film and, like the other two Blu Rays in this series from Second Sight, there’s a hefty bunch of extras on the disc including a feature length documentary on the life and work of Zeman, which includes complimentary comments and interviews from some modern directors who have been influenced by Zeman’s works such as Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam (whose own, even more wonderful film of the Baron’s tales certainly stole a few things from this version, as well as others). These are found alongside a wonderful featurette by Michael Brooke of facts and figures about both the many and varied film and TV incarnations of the Baron’s adventures, plus his interesting insight into the musical score for this version. This featurette in particular was a real eye opener for me... I mean, we’ve all heard of the medical terms Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen By Proxy but stuff like Munchausen By Internet was new to me and, well, I loved the mathematical uniqueness of Munchausen Numbers for sure. Although, how you discover something like that last, where a specific four figure number is broken down into separate digits, each number multiplied by a factor of itself and then added to the previous to end up with the sum being the original number you started out with, is beyond me.

And there you have it. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is certainly a fabulous film with a fabulous director and with another fabulous batch of extras from Second Sight. And now I’ll have to track down some more of this director’s work at some point soon. And also some more Czech cinema. I’ve seen a couple of other interesting films from Czechoslovakia in the last couple of weeks (which will show up in review on this site at some point fairly soon) and I’m really enjoying what I’m seeing from the cinema of this country. I’ll get back to you on those.