Man Made Monster

The Elec-Strickfaden Man

Man Made Monster
aka The Electric Man
aka The Atomic Monster
USA 1941
Directed by George Waggner
Universal/Eureka Masters Of Cinema
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Man Made Monster, directed by George Waggner, was adapted from a short story, The Electric Man, by Harry Essex, Sid Schwartz and Len Golos and was originally intended to be a vehicle for Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi before being put on hold for a little while. It stars Lon Chaney Jr as Dan, the titular horror and, well, it was a very important movie, despite it not being one of the best remembered horrors from Univeral at the time. Not only was it important to the careers of Chaney and director Waggner... it also was important, ultimately, to a famous comedy team of the 1940s and 1950s... I’ll get to all that in a minute.

So the film starts out with a bus crashing into an electrical pylon, killing the driver and five of the six passengers. That surviving passenger is Dan, played as I said by Lon Chaney Jr in what was pretty much his first starring role in a Universal picture, although he gets second billing behind the mad scientist character Dr. Rigas, played by Lionel Atwill. Anyway, Dan survives the crash and is invited by kindly Dr. Lawrence, played by Samuel S. Hinds (who played George Bailey’s dad in It’s A Wonderful Life, reviewed here), to stay with him at his laboratory/home for pay and food so he can study the condition that Dan seems to have. Dan had a sideshow carny act involving electricity... or rather electrickery, much like the shows I suspect Ken Strickfaden was involved with in real life, many years before. And, certainly, Stirckfaden’s marvellous machines feature prominently in this movie (you can read my review of a biography of Strickfaden and find out his importance to mad science movies everywhere here).

However, while Dr. Lawrence is away for a science conference, Rigas starts experimenting with Dan and gives him daily charges of superhuman amounts of energy. Eventually Dan becomes a shadow of his former self because he comes to depend on the electric treatment for his strength. Of course, a side effect is he can shoot electricity from his fingers and so on... so another movie which I’m sure comic book gurus Stan Lee and Steve Ditko would have seen and been influenced by back in the day. Of course, when Lawrence twigs what’s been going on, with a little insight from his daughter played by Anne Nagel and her newspaper man boyfriend Mark, played by Frank Albertson (who would go on to play... Hee Haaaw... Sam Wainwright in It’s A Wonderful Life), things turn sour and Rigas gets Dan to kill Frank and uses hypnotic powers over him, to make him confess to the killing (and forget everything else about it). But, when he is given the electric chair for his perceived crimes, of course, thing take the expected turn, leading to one of those ‘Just’ but, tragic endings that Universal did so well with some of their horror pictures.

And it’s great. A really nicely put together slice of ridiculous pseudo-scientific gobbledy gook played for drama and a cautionary tale (the Second World War had just started and Rigas wants to build an army of such electric supermen). It’s well acted by all the principal cast but the outstanding actor in the crowd is Corky... as Corky The Dog. He’s Lawrence’s canine who takes a shine to Dan and does funny, doggy things throughout the movie, including some clever tricks. He’s the one character I was most afraid might come to harm but, spoiler, he survives the movie to give a touching performance as he rests his arms and head on the lifeless body of Dan at the finale. The only problem with his performance was that you can occasionally catch him looking off screen to see what his owner wants him to do next but, this is something many porn actresses have also been caught doing on camera over the years in many productions so, I think I can cut the four legged thespian some slack here.

It’s an entertaining film and clocks in at just under an hour. It also has some nice shot compositions in it too, which is something I always find astonishing considering the 4:3 aspect ratio of these pictures. For instance, there’s a scene where Lionel Atwill is standing over Lon Chaney Jr’s body on a medical table, using his stethoscope to figure out if he’s accidentally killed him or just made him faint. A loop of wire from one of Strickfaden’s marvellous machines loops down from above into the foreground of the shot just above Chaney’s horizontal slab and, of course, Atwill is perfectly framed within the loop. Some nice noirish moments too, where the shadow of the police guard is seen only as a bold silhouette against the wall, as it approaches the lever for the electric chair. Yeah, there’s some nice stuff in the movie, for sure.

And, like I said, it’s also important. In that it was well liked enough that it gave director George Waggner and star Lon Chaney Jr their next picture together, released later that same year. That picture was, of course, The Wolf Man (reviewed by me here) and without it, the Universal werewolf movies that followed (if there had been any at all), would certainly have turned out a little differently. Would they have contributed to the later ‘monster rally’ movies and therefore, at the end of the 40s, have contributed significantly to saving the career of two comedy stars on the wane, Bud Abbot and Lou Costello, when their combined project Abbot And Costello Meet Frankenstein (which included Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster and The Wolf Man, reviewed by me here) took in big bucks at the box office? Who knows what would have happened if this director and actor hadn’t done this picture together.

Man Made Monster is part of Eureka Masters Of Cinema’s recent(ish) Blu Ray set Three Monster Tales Of Sci Fi Terror, alongside The Monolith Monsters and Monster On The Campus. It’s treated as well as all the other sets they’ve recently been releasing in a similar vein, which means it has some nice commentaries and, frankly, is about as good a transfer and print as you’re ever going to see it in. So, yeah, lovers of Universal Horror might want to check this set out and I’m very pleased to now have these wonderful films on the shelf, so to speak.

Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway

Holy Three Stigmata!

Jesus Shows You
The Way To The Highway
Spain/Estonia/Ethiopia/
Latvia/Romania 2019
Directed by Miguel Llansó
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Yeah... I suppose this has spoilers all through it. In a way.

Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway is the second feature film by Miguel Llansó, the director of the equally surreal Crumbs (reviewed by me here). Like that earlier feature, the bombardment of various seemingly conflicting or contradicting elements on the audience seems to be the order of the day but, also like that earlier film, once you start to glean and uncover parts of the underlying roadmap, a fairly linear or, at least, penetrable through line on the narrative starts to slowly emerge.

The film had me from the start when the opening title appears over time as an old 1982 ZX Spectrum loading screen, as it would have loaded up from a cassette. We are then flung into the world of the far future where Daniel Tadesse, the male lead of Crumbs, returns in this one as CIA agent D. T. Gagano, partnered with Agent Palmer (played here by Agustín Mateo). After an agent who has been connected to Psychobook, which is something which somehow controls the majority of the future world, has her eyes demolished by a Russian virus, it’s up to Agents Gagano and Palmer to enter Psychoville with their low tech VR headsets, in a series of missions where they can find and trace the source of the virus... which is being distributed as a slimy substance at one point.

Now Gagano just wants to resign from the CIA and stay with his oversexed girlfriend Malin (played by the sensational Gerda-Annette Allikas... this is, bafflingly, her only movie credit). However, when the two agents go in, entering an environment where their masked avatars (of Robert Redford and Richard Pryor) are filmed in a way that is reminiscent of stop motion animation, they come face to face and get into a fight with an Irish accented version of Stalin. On their second encounter, Gagano goes into a coma and is trapped in this alternate reality. A reality where Batman is a fascist president named Bat-Fro, who sends in his subordinate Mr. Sophisticated’s king fu warriors to bring him the Ark of the Covenant... which is actually the very first laptop to enter psychoville. Bat-fro is costumed exactly as Adam West in the old TV shows and, indeed, an old Batman Equal Pay PSA advert starring West, Burt Ward and Yvonne Craig from 1973 is shown playing on a TV set at one point.

And if this all seems fairly mad to you... there’s lots more pop culture references and all of the actors have been deliberately, badly dubbed in English language to mirror the kind of bootleg and international prints of various exploitation films from the 60s and 70s. With some insect men who shoot laser beams from their eyes thrown in for good measure, of course.

Let me just take an aside here to say that the Arrow video contains a relatively short visual essay on the influences of the film and I actually watched that extra (I rarely have time for the extras these days) because it sounded interesting. Alas, the person putting it together correctly identifies that the basic plot structure (or at least as it’s presented to the audience in the most obvious layer) hails from spy movies but he seems stuck on Eurospy films being the influence when, frankly, lots of spy movies have the kind of stylistic qualities inherent in the movie, expecially from the 1960s. And, frankly, citing Our Man Flint as a Eurospy film (it’s an American movie, people!) and, even more alarmingly, incorrectly identifying Bernard Lee as playing ‘Q’ in the Bond movies (he plays ‘M’ guys!), kind of kills the credibility of the piece. Yeah, we can all see he’s referencing Kung Fu movies but, probably not the ones you specifically cite and while I can see it would be worthwhile mentioning the luchador movies such as those made popular by Santo and Blue Demon, it seems to me they’ve kind of missed the point with the obvious homage to knock off superhero movies when you’re not talking about the Filipino and Turkish (among others) superhero movies of the 60s and 70s. So, yeah, was looking forward to the visual essay but I wasn’t impressed, especially when the narrator completely fails to mention the obvious, all pervading influence on the movie... Philip K. Dick.

Okay, so the terrific and chaotic visuals and story strands knitted together before your eyes should all start to come together when, at one point fairly early on in the movie, you find out the full name of Agent Palmer is Palmer Eldritch. As in the Philip K. Dick novel The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch. Indeed, at one point in the film the viral substance which seems to be opening paths to new realities has been synthesised by the Jesus character into candy, directly referencing one of the two drugs used to gateway into different realities in the novel, Can-D and Chew-Z (with the Z being pronounced in the American way to make sense of the second term). Furthermore, when Jesus first properly appears in the narrative, the story almost nods to the idea of Mercerism, central to Dick’s famous novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? And when you realise that the director is referencing Dick and his way of putting characters into alternate realities they had no knowledge of, such as in A Maze Of Death, Ubik and others of that ilk, then the on screen shenanigans of Agents Gagano and Palmer seem relatively easy to decode. Like you’ve just been handed a primer. At some point from then on you realise that all three layers of reality represented in the movie (as barriers between the two layers break down and create a third netherworld between the two) are all just one single alternative reality to an experiment going on at MIT. Except, there’s a little Easter egg towards the end of the picture, referencing the main viral villain, which suggests that even this final reality may well be a false reading.

Whatever the underlying reality, though, Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway is a chaotic, maelstrom of surrealistic, alternative worlds with lots of fun and bizarre imagery, quite unlike any other film I’ve seen to date, including the director’s previous movie Crumbs, which is an entirely different brand of ‘What the heck?’ than is on show here. It’s one of those films I could easily revisit over and over again and certainly one I’ll be introducing to various film buddies at some point. Why this didn’t get a huge cinema campaign and a shot at the box office over here other than a single, one off screening at Glasgow Film Festival, is a complete mystery to me. People need to be exposed to more films like this, especially in a country where we have quite a diverse range of people living here who would be in more of a position to recognise and understand the visual influences and tropes on display here than some other international audiences, I suspect (and probably more so, for sure, than the expert commentator on the visual essay was able). Anyway, if you love film and want to see something you may well not have seen before then, Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway is the one to watch. But watch out for those 8-bit music saturated end credits... if you have any leanings toward epilepsy then you might want to give those end titles a miss.

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.

Katla

Ash On Demand

Katla
Stream date: June 2021
Season 1 - Eight Episodes.
Iceland

Warning: Plenty of spoilers rising up from out of the volcanic ash on this one.

Okay so... onto Katla then. After the absolute brilliance of Station Eleven (reviewed here) I wanted to watch another gripping TV show and, also, I wanted to see something else from Iceland, after seeing the brilliant Lamb movie (reviewed here)... so I settled for this one. Here’s a fairly spoilerish taste of the plot.

In the half deserted vicinity in the small town of Vik, near the Katla volcano, only a few people have stayed on... mostly scientists, since it started erupting ash. It’s been erupting ash for about a year at the start of the first episode. One of the inhabitants is Grima, played by Guðrún Ýr Eyfjörð. She is mourning and trying to recover from the ‘missing presumed dead’ disappearance of her sister Asa, from the year before. Then we have her father, Þór, played by Ingvar Sigurdsson. 20 years before, shortly before his wife took her life, he had an affair with a young woman called Gunhilde. The first episode starts off with a naked woman rising from the ash in the vicinity of Katla and possibly affected by hypothermia. When the hospital cleans her up she tells them she is Gunhilde, played by Aliette Opheim. She has all the memories of Gunhilde from 20 years prior and doesn’t realise things have changed and time has passed. She is also pregnant with Þór’s child. The problem is... Gunhilde is also alive and well, living with her 20 year old son in the next town over.

Meanwhile, another ash girl turns up. It’s the missing Asa from a year ago. When she and Grima try to find out what happened to her in the intervening year, they find Asa’s dead body. Oops. Also meanwhile, a volcano scientist who has come into town suddenly finds his young son has followed him here (his young ‘psychotic’ 8 year old son, I should point out). Problem is, the son has been dead for three years. While all this is going on, the local police chief, who has been caring for his very sick wife who is near to death (but still very much alive) is confronted with a younger version of herself in their home. He’s heavily religious so... it all gets a bit much for him. And then Grima turns up... another Grima. They don’t exactly hit it off.

And on it goes. It’s all very slow burn and intriguing. So intriguing and well made, in fact, that it took me until I was four episodes in before I realised it was riffing/ripping off Stanislaw Lem’s much lauded science fiction novel Solaris (and subsequent TV and cinema versions) to use as a starting point. It’s just that the planet Solaris has been substituted with the volcano Katla and the space station has been substituted with the community in the town. And that’s really okay because... well the classic Tarkovsky adaptation of that was quite lengthy (and all the better for it) but this series has eight hours (so far) to play around with the initial concept and build on it, exploring ideas within that set up and, like all good science fiction, using the central concept to talk about the drama of the people themselves.

By about three quarters of the way in, you kinda get the feeling that the reasons these ‘changelings’ as they are being called (when certain realisations set in... tying them into another legend) are turning up is to help people come to terms with parts of their life they haven’t been navigating very well... they just don’t do it in the most passive manner. Also, it seems like these carbon copies of people at various stages of their lives are, just like the ones in Solaris, not aware that they are copies. They think they’re the real deal and, when find they’re not... things don’t always go well for them. There is a lot of death in the last episode, for instance. A lot of it self inflicted and it’s possible character’s issues they have with themselves are solved by this.

The thing is, though, not quite all of the threads are tied up in the last episode and there is a certain amount of ambiguity regarding just what’s gone on and how the show will continue. We know, for instance, that some more copies are in the process of hatching from the volcano, stacked up underground like the clay people from Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars (reviewed here), waiting to pop out of the cave walls. Also, if I’m not very much mistaken, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those characters who have gone to their final rest... original or copies... suddenly popped up from the ground again in the second season. So, yeah, an intriguing concept explored in a  much more leisurely and detailed fashion than in Solaris, perhaps... but it’s not over yet.

What else... well the town is all covered in ash and so it looks very grey and colourless for a lot of the time, which allows the directors to pitch that mood against bright colours at any given moment and give the cinematography a jolt when required.

But it’s the writing and acting which are the real things to look out for on this one. The dialogue between the characters and the way they say as much without words as they do when they use them is wonderful and, of course, wouldn’t work unless they had absolutely brilliant actors filling all the roles here. Everyone is great here... even the psychotic child who is, frankly, an unpleasant and dangerous character people have to deal with... but I was especially impressed at the two actresses who were playing both the younger and much older versions of their characters. It actually took me a long time to realise they didn’t just get different actors to play them and that the make-up department were really earning their keep... as much as these fantastic performers.

And it’s a great show. Everything is slow, moody and mysterious... even down to the musical score which is, as far as I can tell, sadly not available on CD. Although the show is a one trick piny in terms of its initial concept, it’s been a well travelled pony and this show certainly never runs out of steam and does leave you wanting more (which is as good a goal as any). And that’s me done with Katla, which I would recommend to pretty much anyone. I just hope the promised second season* is forthcoming sometime soon, for sure.  

*Apparently this second season should be streaming on a ‘usual suspect’ streaming service sometime in June 2023.

M3GAN

AIiiiiiii!

M3GAN
aka MTHREEGAN
USA 2023
Directed by Gerard Johnstone
Universal/Blumhouse
UK Cinema release print

 Warning: Very slight spoilers for certain kinds of people.

A quick shout out for M3GAN, which I had a lot of expectations for, especially since it was written by Akela Cooper, who wrote the totally brilliant Malignant (reviewed here). Okay, so I’ll have to be brutally honest and say that this film isn’t nearly as good as Malignant, which came off as the best Brian De Palma parody ever... but I have to say I found this one pretty entertaining at the very least. It’s being sold as a horror movie but, yeah, while it uses the same kind of visual syntax as a horror movie in places, there are no supernatural or alien threats in this one so, yup,  M3GAN is securely in the realm of science fiction, I think. Although, that being said, I think it could very easily be cross pollinated with a horror film franchise in due course. Now, I’ve not seen any of the Chucky movies (thankfully) but I can’t help but think that sometime within the next 8-12 years we’re all going to be lining up to buy tickets for M3GAN VS Chucky at some point.

Okay, so M3GAN is an android prototype invented for children to be their play companion. Gemma, played by Allison Williams, is a toy designer who is working on a very overt parody of Furbies mixed with those horrible Funko Pop toys people seem to like these days. But after her sister and her husband die in a car collision with a snow plough at the opening of the movie, their daughter Cady (played by Violet McGraw) is the lone survivor of the incident and busy Gemma has to be the sole guardian of the child. So, despite her boss’ wishes, she starts constructing the proper prototype of M3GAN, which stands for Model 3 Generative ANdroid, to help keep Cady entertained. The android pairs with the first person who touches it, Cady... and learns as it goes, being the guardian responsible for entertaining, educating and, above all, keeping her charge safe. What could possibly go worng... as the 1973 posters for Westworld used to say.

Well, plenty because, as you can see, it’s a variation, once again, of the primary law of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws Of Robotics, that of not allowing a human to come to harm. And, of course, almost all literature which uses these basic tent poles as their primary set up treats this as a cautionary tale, to explore what can go wrong. And it’s not long before M3GAN finds herself causing harm to others and, pretty soon, developing a taste for it, using her new found killer instincts to keep Cady safe but also to prevent her own discovery as a killer and, failing that, her own survival.

And, yeah, it hits a lot of clichés. There are some nice shout outs and, I’m pretty sure it’s riddled with visual references to the Chucky movies (although, not having seen them, I only noticed one myself) and, well, if anyone remembers the original Robocop movie, there’s a pretty obvious homage which is used three times in this movie (no less).

However, I’d also have to say that M3GAN is a mixed bag because, although I think it will be successful at the box office (as will the inevitable sequels), it is full of clichés from within both the horror and sci fi genres and this kinda works both for and against it. I mean, it’s great in some ways because the audience wants to see all those buttons pushed. But, at the same time, it telegraphs the main human character’s obvious salvation within about ten minutes of the opening of the movie. As soon as Gemma shows Cady something she invented years before and begins to demonstrate it to the girl, you know exactly what form the deux ex machina denouement is going to take, very early on in the movie. Which is a shame... I wish they’d found some other way of doing this which would be more of a surprise but, trust me, as soon as you see something, you’ll know exactly where things will be heading and, also, exactly the location where the final scenes of the movie will be taking place.

Another annoying thing about M3GAN is that, even before it was released, it became a victim of its own success. I remember seeing the trailer quite a while back last year and, apparently, it played very well with a teenage demographic. So, in their distorted, money grabbing wisdom, Universal or whoever was in charge of production at the time ordered cuts and reshoots so it could get a PG13 certificate in the US. So, the goriness was excised and some of the kills were removed while others were re-shot (or at least re-edited) is my understanding. So what we have is a film which is trying to have its cake and eat it... going for the teenage market to rake the profits in rather than go with the original idea of the movie. At least one of the team behind it said they liked this version better as it leaves more to the imagination and, yeah, I can kinda have seen how that might work (although, the film really isn’t scary or even horrific, it has to be said). However, it’s also been said that they’re thinking of re-releasing it in an unrated directors cut so, yeah, they’re going to go for the delayed ‘double dip’ sales when it reaches Blu Ray, I suspect. I’ll just wait until the proper cut comes out before buying this one, I think... no matter how many years down the line it is.

All in all though, M3GAN is a fairly entertaining movie which will even please the younger fans of horror genre movies too, I suspect. There’s no post credits sequence on this one (feel free to leave during the credits so the cinema staff can get their screen clean up started quicker) but there is an obvious sequel option blatantly shown on the very last shot of the movie so, we know those sequels could keep on rolling for a while if they choose to pull on that particular thread. Worth a look but perhaps not all the film it could have been.

Christmas Bloody Christmas

Ho Ho Horror

Christmas
Bloody Christmas
Directed by Joe Begos
2022 Shudder

Wow, wow, wow!

Regular readers may remember that I discovered a couple of movies by a low budget horror director earlier this year and was pretty much blown away by them (with reservations... always with reservations)... the pretty great ‘Scanners sequel that isn’t a Scanners sequel’ movie The Mind’s Eye (reviewed by me here) and also, the incredibly cool vampire movie Bliss (reviewed by me here). And now this director, Joe Begos (who I should maybe start referring to as The Mighty Begos), has made a Christmas horror movie... well... yeah, it is just about technically a horror movie in the weird science mode, I think... Christmas Bloody Christmas and, wow again, it’s a dandy.

Incidentally, Dandy is also the name of the incredible lead actress of the piece, one Riley Dandy, who plays lead female protagonist Tori Tooms. Joining her as the lead male protagonist is the equally cool Sam Deitch as Robbie Reynolds. These two are absolutely perfect as Begos knocks it out the park again with an ear for good dialogue in his script, enabling the two lead actors (and others, naturally, including a small role for Dora Madison, the incredible star of Bliss) to give a truly enthusiastic and natural performance. It’s Christmas Eve and Tori, who runs a small town record shop and has a very good working relationship with her employee Robbie, is about to shut up shop for the holidays. And the dialogue between these two is just electric, totally selling the relationship of two people just about ready to fall into bed with each other. The two performers have this amazing chemistry that ensures you absolutely are sucked into their fast paced world and totally care about them. That’s good because, in the infinite wisdom of a faceless corporation, some military defence technology has been used to create a new range of realistic looking and acting Santa Claus robots, which they have deployed into shops and malls to entertain the kiddies. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, something has gone wrong because a random news item in the background of a scene says that they are being recalled by the manufacturer. This doesn’t stop the one in the local toy shop from reverting to its military training, grabbing a handy axe and chopping up all and sundry (including, refreshingly, a little kiddie even). And because Tori was a direct witness to one of the murders on its killing spree... it’s coming for her next!

So, yeah, terminator Santa Claus goes bad and goes on a slaughter rampage. It’s a nicely cheesy set up that could go a number of ways but... Joe Begos, remember! This is a director I’ve learned to trust and he just nails the humour and the ramped up violence perfectly. He introduces the concept of the ex-military, mechanised Santa as the last of a series of adverts (which kind of places the time setting in a satirical, alternate version of our present, more or less) in a way which reminded me of those adverts used for similar purposes in the original Robocop (I think writers like Frank Miller were doing this kind of thing first in American comic books... and, even before him in some of the wonderful British comics like 2000AD in the 1970s). And from there it becomes a very character driven story as we cross cut between Tori and Robbie’s drunken, sex fuelled Christmas Eve to the Robo Santa turning bad and getting into some serious axe wielding with Dora Madison’s character, who is having sex in her toy store with her husband after hours.

And, it looks amazing. If you think of the kind of bright, saturated lighting styles of Mario Bava and certain Dario Argento movies and then multiply it up several notches so it looks like everyone is kinda neon lit, you’ll get some idea. Also, well done to the director for having some serious falling snow in this movie. Usually you get wisps of it flying around in the movies but it really is coming down heavy in some of the earlier sequences in this one and I really appreciated that.

So, yeah, it’s filled with genre clichés for sure... such as snow covering the visibility on the windscreen of Robbie’s ‘not quick to start’ vehicle, in order to obscure vision and tease the audience etc and there’s even an example of that zoom in while pulling back (or vice versa) shot that Hitchcock used in Vertigo, purloined most famously by Steven Spielberg in Jaws. But, again, The Mighty Begos (it’s rare I get to trust a director this quickly and totally) plays the clichés and makes them all fun once more. Some of the practical gore effects... which included head stomps. head splits, eye gouging and more... maybe don’t always seem 100% realistic but it’s a heck of a lot better than using CGI and I really appreciated the look of this one in regards to the technical effects. Also, it’s a horror movie (kinda) so nobody, not even the leads, are safe from the possibility of some kind of harm or even death. You really won’t know until the last few shots if there are going to be any survivors on this one... it could go either way.

Now, there are a couple of little nitpicky things I have to mention... because I almost always do find something not to my taste in a movie, right? Number one, if you’re going to have the lead protagonists indulging in some fairly hot cunnilingus... well it’s usually customary for people to be naked in such situations? Secondly... how many people are living in this town? I mean, if you are going to be continually blowing stuff up and leaving a trail of impressively maimed corpses behind you... then someone’s going to stray out of their house in order to see what all the fuss is about, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t have a record shop and a toy store that could stay ‘in the red’ in town. So, yeah, a complete lack of interest by the town’s inhabitants to the screams and the vehicles/buildings blowing up amongst them would be my number one problem with the movie, for sure.

But, you know what? I don’t care. It’s just a fantastically fun movie and I wish this one had gotten a cinema release because that’s where I would have liked to have seen it. I was somewhat surprised, however, that there was a little, derogatory dig at Blumhouse in the movie... I don’t know how they got away with that. I hope it’s in the spirit of friendly rivalry between Shudder and Blumhouse and not something more malevolent going on, for sure. That aside, though, if you want a seriously cool and engrossing, switch your brain off and gawk at the pretty, fast moving, fluid camera movement with protagonists and antagonist bashing the hell out of each other... tinged with a big slice of Christmas cheer... then Christmas Bloody Christmas is pretty much the new go to movie for the season. It’s an instant classic and I can only hope that we can get a Blu Ray release of the film in time for next Christmas and, also, a nice CD release of Steve Moore’s wonderful electronica score would also be very welcome in this household. Definitely check this one out if you like exceptionally well crafted, Christmas blood and gore. Outstanding.

Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity

The Cleavage Of Zaroff

Slave Girls From
Beyond Infinity
USA 1987
Directed by Ken Dixon
88 Films DVD Region 2

It seems strange to me that a prestige label like 88 Films, no less, would release this movie in an open matte 4:3 aspect ratio but, at least I know I’m gaining picture in that method of transfer, rather than losing the sides. As a result of this decision, I made a mental note to be kind if I saw any camera booms entering the shots from the top, because that can often occur in open matte transfers, when extra picture information the film maker didn’t expect you to be able to see makes its way into the frame.

I don’t know what it was that drew me to watch Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity... maybe a sense of curiosity about Buzz Lightyear’s famous catch phrase. Possibly the prospect of seeing a finely crafted science fiction epic to stimulate my brain with its twisty, philosophical bent. Or maybe it was the vaguely ridiculous title coupled with cover art of scantily clad ladies with huge, photogenic features wielding unfeasibly large guns and being menaced by strange aliens and robots... all hovering above the strap line, “Big Movie. Big Production. Big Girls.” But mostly it was probably the ridiculously cheap asking price when I ordered it from Amazon four years ago (something which has since inflated to a figure close to the Infinity mentioned in the title, due to its out of print status).

We start off with a title sequence with some actually quite wonderful music composed by someone called Carl Dante. Nice music which is totally and deliberately reminiscent of Basil Poledouris’ amazing score for Conan The Barbarian, for sure, due to it’s orchestration. It even contains a little hint of Jerry Goldsmith’s klingon battle music from Star Trek The Motion Picture in it too and I have to wonder if those composers’ music was used as a temp track to rough cut the picture with.

The film continues quite strongly, it has to be said, with a prologue where a top heavy, scantily clad young vixen is being chased through a jungle by a not unimpressive, given the budget, alien monster with a gun wired to its arm. It closes in on the girl but, just before it kills her due to its ‘non-cleavage appreciating alien ways’, a man shoots it with his miniature laser crossbow and the woman is saved... or is she? Probably not as we can probably conclude from what this guy gets up to later in the film.

Meanwhile, on a starship, two chained slave girls called Daria (played by Elizabeth Kaitan) and Tisa (played by Cindy Beal)... who have absolutely no back story at all, I should point out... break loose from their chains through brute force and then, in the words of one, “reverse the polarity of their cuffs.” Hmm... where have I heard something like that before? They overpower their dumb guards and somehow manage to steal a smaller spaceship from inside the larger spaceship, winning their freedom. Their celebrations are short lived though, due to there being no inhabited planets nearby. Well, none, that is, apart from the ‘planetoid’ that pops up on some kind of beacon. They go to investigate and crash their ship on said planetoid. Then they find a castle with their new host Zed (played by Don Scribner), his two lethal robot servants and his other two guests... brother and sister Rik and Shala, played by Carl Horner and Brinke Stevens. However, after sneaking about in the castle after dark (plus some hot softcore sex action between Daria and Rick), Zed’s sinister secret is out and after Rik is killed on a hunt, the three women are released into the surrounding jungle and its ‘phantom zone’ filled with various zombies, giant spider webs (no spiders though) and the big alien wielding the gun from the start of the picture.

It turns out, you see, that Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity is actually a cleavaged up, busty remake of The Most Dangerous Game (aka The Hounds Of Zaroff)... a film which has been remade many times over the years, most recently as The Hunt (reviewed here). And, actually it’s not a terribly made film but the writing is very bizarre. In that it’s kind of rubbish and elabourate and unnatural sounding while, at the same time, you get a sense that it’s supposed to be this bad and that’s all just part of the writer’s plan. Which actually makes the film a lot of fun in the ‘so bad it’s good’ stakes, it has to be said. So yeah, a typical dialogue exchange might be, when Daria burns her hand getting them out of their cell on the slave ship at the start of the movie and, when Tisa asks if she’s alright, she quips back... “A little well done, perhaps.” And the villain is a little too much like he’s a schoolboy philosopher in some respects, coming out with lines like... “I’ve always found the female of the species to be the greatest challenge... far more crafty and cunning than their male counterparts.”

Also, although the special effects look quite low tech in some ways, they’re actually not too terrible either although, there are a few technical flaws in the movie. Such as when one of the gals hits an alien over the head with a big stick. For some reason not made very clear in any way, shape of form, this causes the alien to just explode out of existence... however, when he does this, an entire wall wobbles like you’re watching a movie equivalent of an old BBC episode of Blake’s 7. So, yeah, that’s not so good. And there are other things in the movie that don’t really make sense... like when Tisa goes back to look for a map dropped on the jungle floor because her cleavage wasn’t quite adequate to hold it in her bikini top by itself (should have given it to Daria). When she backtracks to look for the map, she is looking all around her cautiously without even once looking at the ground where, you know, you might think a dropped map may be located (she finds it eventually).

And, yeah, that’s mostly everything I want to say about this movie. Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity isn’t exactly high art but it’s an entertaining enough diversion for what it is and maybe that’s enough for a Saturday night. Probably better as a collective ‘movie night in with friends and booze’ experience, I suspect. The UK version of the film from 88 Films is probably the best version to get in terms of the DVD as the American disc is apparently similarly presented in an open matte transfer.

However, the UK disc wins out, kinda, by having an accompanying feature included called... hmm, okay... Famous T&A. This is literally a collection of badly cropped 4:3 clips of various actresses such as Ornella Muti, Ursula Andress, Brigitte Bardot and various others, in examples of their nude scenes. Starting off with Sybil Danning doing a reverse strip into a costume, she hosts the entire thing dressed as a Roman Gladiatrix and reading ridiculously written lines about the various actresses bodies over the course of the hour and a quarter. And I do mean reading. You can see she’s reading from cards in certain scenes for sure. Now, I would normally be up for something this rubbish and pseudo-sexy but, honestly, the 4:3 aspect ratio on this was a real turn off for me. If I want to watch various stars taking their clothes off, then I want to be seeing them properly framed in the correct aspect ratio, thank you very much. I mention this bonus film in passing here purely because I know some people will have some nostalgia for this kind of bosomy showcase, which may remind them of the old celebrity episode of Electric Blue from the 1980s. Ultimately though, it’s not worth purchasing the disc for this special feature alone... although I could understand why you may be tempted.

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

Happily
Evelyn
After

Everything,
Everywhere,
All At Once
USA  2022
Directed by Dan Kwan
& Daniel Scheinert
(aka Daniels)
UK cinema Unlimited
cardholder preview.

Warning: Some inevitable spoilers.

Wow. It’s ‘the morning after’ and I’m hoping that my brain has managed to process enough information for me to try and write something half intelligent about this confusing but, ultimately very fun experience at the movies.

Well... okay, in a nutshell, the plot of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once involves an infinite number of alternate multiverses and a team of ‘good guys’ who have come to our universe because they believe a character called Evelyn can help fight against a villain known as Jobu Tupaki, who is threatening to destroy all the different multiverses by sucking them all in as part of the ‘everything’ of a giant black bagel with ‘everything’ on it. So Evelyn is taught how to jump into different versions of herself in different worlds to acquire the memory of the skills she needs in order to slingshot back into her current universe and try and fight a battle, of sorts, in her own reality. That’s my best take away from this as a plot so, if I got it slightly wrong, forgive me but, it’s a very dense film of different layers and, well, everything kind of happens all at once in it, as the title suggests.

But, as I implied, asides from not being 100% on how the physics and rules of the ‘jumping’ from incarnation to incarnation works... it kinda doesn’t matter. Once you can relax into this film and just take it for what it is, which is a bombardment of rich and, frankly, crazy ideas, then you should have a lot of fun with it. There are endless pop culture references in here from 2001 A Space Odyssey through Ratatouille (which I’ve not seen myself but, even so, I totally got the long running Racacoonie joke in this) and even Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love.

But this is only one level of the fun as we are transported along with Evelyn, rapid fire, into alternate realities where, for instance, Evelyn is a rock with googly eyes (like a pet rock... and the googly eyes are kind of an inverse black bagel in terms of their significance in the movie) or caught in a lesbian love affair in a universe where everyone has hot dogs for hands (and ooze mustard and ketchup from their mouths when having sex). So there’s stuff going on all the time at, trust me on this one, a fair lick of a pace... love it or hate it, you at least won’t get bored during this film, which is split up into three parts... 1. Everything, 2. Everywhere and 3. All At Once.

So you need a cast who are experienced to be able to handle all this stuff credibly (and also handle some of the quite intense action choreography which is sometimes needed for many of the scenes). And that’s exactly what we have here...

Evelyn is played by Michelle Yeoh who, frankly, I’ve always had a soft spot for and she really demonstrates that at 60 years of age (looking pretty much like she's 30) she’s still not too old to really carry a movie on her back. She’s always had brilliant fighting skills from her pre-Bond (and after) days of making kung fu action movies and, while that certainly stands her in good stead for this role (which was apparently at first conceived for her old Supercop co-star Jackie Chan), her brilliant way of putting over the emotions and complexities of her character are absolutely wonderful. What a fantastic actress.

I’ll get to Evelyn’s husband in a little while. Her daughter is played by Stephanie Hsu, who I don’t think I’ve seen before but, once her different multiversal personalities start snapping to and fro, it’s a quite dazzling performance as she captures multiple different states of mind at the flip of a switch. Again, a very strong actress who really shines in the second half of the film.

As Evelyn’s father we have the living legend that is James Wong. He just turned 93 a couple of days ago and has finally been given a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame (with over 600 roles to his credit... it’s about time) but he was certainly spry and nimble enough to do some sequences you would expect from a much younger actor in this.

Joining these three as a villanous henchman... or rather henchwoman (and sometime hot dog fingered lover) is the equally legendary Jamie Lee Curtis. She’s certainly come a long way in her career and does a great job with one of many complex roles in the film, which must have been far from her comfort zone. Trust me when I say that all the actors in this movie look and act totally ridiculous for a lot of the time... which has always been the case with actors but, in this movie, more so.

And then there’s the big surprise (for me at least, I went into this one relatively blind), of just who is playing the key role of Evelyn’s husband Waymond. He gives a very good, supporting, warm hearted performance but also, in an incredible fight sequence where he uses his belt bag as a pair of nunchucks in a tax office, acquits himself way more than adequately in the fighting skills department. All the way through the movie he looked somewhat familiar but I just couldn’t place him. All the candidates I thought he might be would have been a lot older than he is here. So, when I saw in the credits that he’s played by Ke Huy Quan, I blinked somewhat, said to myself, “Wait... really? Is that...?” and then confirmed what I suddenly realised with the IMDB app on my phone. Yep, it’s the guy who, as a boy, played Short Round in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom (and who was also in The Goonies, which is a movie I haven’t seen, actually). All I can say is wow. He’s just fantastic in this and, I can tell you, has great chemistry with Michelle Yeoh. They should put these two in more movies together, I think.

And that’s all I’m going to say about this one. Especially since it’s almost impossible to describe most of the scenes in any credible way... you kind of have to experience it to know it, I think. Suffice to say, I found Everything, Everywhere, All At Once to be a highly entertaining and extremely impressive cinematic experience and I’ll definitely be importing the Blu Ray release of this very soon (I have a feeling it won’t get one in the UK... I believe it’s reserved for TV channel exclusivity aka ‘the death of the art of film’ over here). It’s not showing in a lot of UK cinemas... or certainly a lot less than, say, other multiverse movies currently at the cinema (which I will catch up on soon for the blog, I promise)... so I would definitely try and catch this one on the big screen if you have the opportunity.

Sting Of Death

Belly Of A
Swampitect

Sting Of Death
USA 1966
Directed by William Grefé
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers lurking like tendrils
of death wrapping around your heart.

Sting Of Death is the first film in Arrow’s lovely He Came From The Swamp - The William Grefé Collection Blu Ray boxed set and it was my primary reason for picking this collection up because, after all, who doesn’t want to see a movie where various people are threatened by a jellyfish monster? Well, after watching the movie, I suspect the answer is probably me but, hey, the concept sounded like it was a lot of fun.

The film is watchable and it has bright colours. It’s about a bunch of women going to stay with the father of one of their number, Karen (played by Valerie Hawkins) for their vacation. Her father, Dr. Richardson (played by Jack Nagle) happens to live on an isolated island in the Florida swamps and is a marine biologist, helped by his two assistants in the form of Karen’s love interest Dr. Hoyt (played by Joe Morrison) and the forever lurking, facially disfigured, hulking Egon (played by John Vella). And, yeah... I think the character’s name is supposed to invoke associations with Ygor and his ilk in the 1930s and 40s Frankenstein movies from Universal. Well, I say he’s disfigured but his bashed in right eye, which is supposed to be sealed shut, does kind of pop open and come a little unstuck in some scenes.

Okay, so the film starts off with the jellyfish monster destroying radio communication on the island and then grabbing a bathing beauty off the decking outside the front of Richardson’s place and pulling her to her death while the credits play out. There is a line around halfway through the movie where the Doctor asks where Ruth disappeared to and I think this is in reference to this character... who is otherwise not mentioned again throughout the running time of the film.

Then the girls arrive, as do some students who promptly chase the freakish Egon off with their hateful prejudices, before enjoying the second of two long dance scenes where Grefé seems to spend an incredibly long time focusing on the backsides of various bikini clad girls as they dance about to Neil Sedaka’s new song written for the movie, “Do The Jellyfish”. It’s not a good song but the various party shenanigans seem to distract the teenagers from noticing right away that the jellyfish man attacks a girl in the swimming pool right in front of them. Another teen is also badly injured and, due to no radio, the doctor sends him and all the students back to get medical attention but... yeah... they are attacked by a swarm of jellyfish controlled by the jellyfish-man and all die. And when I say jellyfish, what I mean is inanimate polythene bags tied up with dangling bits of string floating calmly on the surface of the water while various teenagers act like they’re being stung and in their death agonies. Yeah, the special effects are not high tech  on this one.

It all ends in tears after a few more deaths and people going ‘missing’ as, in a twist reveal (which really was a twist for me because, it was kinda lame and I must not have been paying proper attention), the Jellyfish man turns out to be Egon, who has perfected, among other things, the power to transform himself into a man wearing a muddied up diving suit with dangling tendrils and an almost completely see-through polythene bag on his head. I promise you, the jellyfish man looks a lot worse than I’m making him sound here.

There’s the usual resolution to this kind of picture and it’s not unwatchable... just not quite making it into the ‘so bad it’s good category’, as far as I’m concerned... although it certainly flirts with it at times. I do have a love for the atmosphere of these kinds of throwback pictures though... it’s colourful and it feels like it’s been shot in the 1950s, rather than being filmed the same year that The Beatles had their Revolver album in the charts. I’ve mentioned this in reviews of films before but it’s like certain filmmakers were kind of stuck in time and churning out exactly the same product in the 1960s which was more ‘of its time’ a decade earlier. I do like these kinds of films but, the movie doesn’t quite do enough to turn this into an absolutely essential piece of viewing, as far as I’m concerned... although I think it would be a good one for a monster themed allnighter with your friends, in between two more scarier pictures, to be sure.  

Of note is the big, black bruise on Jack Nagle’s head. He hit his head on the first day of shooting and the wound had to be explained away in the script. Also, when the bruise was wearing off in the shoot, this had to be augmented by having the make-up artist drawing in the bruise for various scenes. This is mentoned on the wonderful William Grefé documentary feature, which also comes in this set (reviewed by me here) and a few other anecdotes, two of which I’ll briefly mention here...

One involves the loss of the cable for the ariflex camera, overboard in the swamps before a day’s shooting was even started and this caused some headaches on the location during the day, a lot of hours were lost... remember, this was when Grefé could churn out one of these pictures in two weeks or less so time was a valuable commodity while shooting.

The other thing involves John Vella. I wasn’t kidding about that being a big polythene bag on his head so, on at least one occasion, when a shot was taking a long time to get done, he nearly suffocated through lack of air. Obviously he didn’t (or the film would be much more well known now, I guess) but you can pretty much see his head lurking within the bag, in many of the shots.

And that’s pretty much it for me on Sting Of Death. It didn’t quite hit the mark with me but, well, it was watchable and I did kinda enjoy looking at it to an extent... but it didn’t blow me away like I’d hoped. I’m really keeping my fingers crossed that it’s not, as some reviewers have said, the best of the movies on Arrow’s Grefé collection. Time will tell I guess.

Wild Cards - Three Kings

Joker Lives Matter

Wild Cards - Three Kings
Edited by George R. R. Martin & Melinda M. Snodgrass
Harper Voyager ISBN: 9780008283599

Three Kings is the 28th in the Wild Cards series of mosaic novels which have been going since the 1980s. This one is the second of the British interlocking viewpoints into the Wild Cards saga, following on directly from the various stories in the previous volume, Knaves Over Queens (which I reviewed here). Pop into my book index and you’ll see all the more recent novels, from the last ten years, have been reviewed here so if you want to get a flavour of what the Wild Card universe consists of, then you should maybe have a look at one of those earlier reviews before diving in here.

So, I said in my last review that I thought the new UK series, while excellent, had rather shot its bolt by having so many decades rushed through in one volume. So yeah, this one is set square bang in a few weeks ranging from February to March 2020... finishing literally before a real life virus shut down the nation. Coronavirus is, unsurprisingly, not mentioned here in any form and, since this is an alternate reality anyway, it doesn’t need to be. Something tells me though that, had the writers known just what would be going on in the world right now, they would have slipped some sly references in.

That being said, there are parallels to things happening right now as this particular story deals with rioting on the streets as the Twisted Fists (still headed by The Green Man from the previous story), Britain First and other factions fight in the streets as rioting breaks out at some point over the monarchy and who will be on the throne at the end of the story.

This one starts off with the dying Queen Margaret (Elisabeth drew the Black Queen and died from the Wild Cards virus before ever taking the throne, back in the 1940s) who entrusts Alan Turing, the Ace known as Enigma, to search back through the records to find her Joker offspring, abandoned at birth, as she fears both her sons, Richard and Henry The Ninth (as he becomes for a while) are incapable of taking over from her competently. And so is set in motion a chain of events involving Turing, Richard, The Green Man, Noel/Lilith, Constance the Ace fashion designer (still making protective clothing for the new monarchy, much to her anger) and one or two other players including, of course, the evil Irish crow Goddess Badb who is pretty successfully manipulating everything, unknown to all the others, in the hopes that she can turn Great Britain into a bloodbath of heroic proportions.

And like pretty much any of the Wild Card books you’d care to grab over the years, this one is a great, fast paced yarn full of pathos, drama, action and, as it happens, the death of at least one regular character (or more, I’m not going to tell you). This one is also one of the less fragmented of the mosaic novels. Unlike the last volume, which fit together various stand alone stories, this one is taken bit by bit from multiple viewpoints of specific characters and locks together as a quite seamless story. What this means is that you have specific goals and character motivations which you can focus on and watch (or read, I guess) play out as an arc over the whole story, rather than having lots of mini climaxes throughout.

It goes without saying, at least in the Wild Cards novels, that you care for each and all of the characters... except for the villains of the piece, obviously. Even though the pacing on this is terrific and the stakes are high (at least on a national level, it’s nothing compared to some of the threats faced in the Wild Cards universe which, quite recently, nearly saw the destruction of the world), it still manages to explore the subtleties and worries of the main characters in a way that will have you investing in their well-being from the start and, of course, that means the narrative can really punch you in the gut when each and every twist or death is just around the next corner.

In terms of its space within the engulfing Wild Cards shared universe, there really aren't that many links to the more US or global based novels in the series and there’s not even a Croyd Crenson sighting or much of anything about what’s been going on in the world since it almost ended in High Stakes (which I reviewed here). You won’t miss that though because there’s so much going on while the Knights Of The Silver Helix (as the Ace division of the British Secret Service are known) are trying to find any information at all which has been buried in the past about a possible heir to the throne before the Joker-hating Henry the Ninth gets properly bedded into the throne and his supporters take to the streets to attack the least fortunate heirs of the Wild Card virus.

There are shifts in allegiance for some of the characters here, as Aces switch sides or are asked to do things which go against their role in the grand scheme of things. And, of course, there are many sacrifices along the way, not just the loss of life but various acts of betrayal and redemption as the clash of the cold war meeting terrorist organisations like the Twisted Fists (technically) forces people into situations and actions which might seem unthinkable to them in lighter times.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Three Kings... I’m not going to go into too many details here but I will say that, while there is a sense of resolution to things as they are, there are also some characters that I really hope they don’t leave behind. What I’m saying is... I hope this is another of the mini trilogys that pop up from time to time in the Wild Cards universe. I need to know what becomes of the relationship between Constance and Bobbin, for starters. And Alan Turing’s arc seems a little unresolved too, I would say. So I hope the next volume in the series is published sooner rather than later. These characters come alive so well on the page it would be a shame to lose them just yet, even though most of the main players in this one are in their seventies or over. As usual I will end this by saying that, if you’re a loyal reader of the Wild Cards books, Three Kings is an absolute winner. If you’re not that familiar with them though, this is really not a good jumping on point and you should maybe consider reading them in publication order. 

Unknown Worlds Of Science Fiction

Glass Act

Unknown Worlds
Of Science Fiction
Curtis (Marvel)
6 issues plus one annual
January 1975 - November 1976 1969

Unknown Worlds Of Science Fiction was, I’m pretty sure, a failed second attempt to capture a similar market as the earlier Marvel Comic Worlds Unknown (reviewed by me here). This time, however, the stories were allowed to be more maturely themed (for the most part) as they were appearing in Marvel’s magazine arm Curtis. People may remember these various magazines Marvel used to produce, with titles like Savage Sword Of Conan and Doc Savage, as being absolutely superior to their four colour comic counterparts because they were allowed to be more subtle in the writing and they were filled with beautiful black and white artwork on a larger page. They also had a much longer page count... Unknown Worlds Of Science Fiction has over 60 pages per issue, for example. It wasn’t until Marvel showed that they could do some great, mature readers colour work in things like their Epic Illustrated comic (obviously inspired by Heavy Metal magazine and definitely worth another look if you dismissed it for that reason) and their Epic label later on, publishing such beautiful works as Blood - A Tale, Stray Toasters and Elektra Assassin, that the black and white magazines started to lose a little traction, methinks.

Roy Thomas introduces the first issue with another enthusiastic but gloomy take on where the world was at in terms of appreciating and marketing science fiction. It’s a similar take on what was said in the opening issue of Worlds Unknown but I think they were hoping the change to a more mature audience would lengthen the life of the comic. Alas, there were actually less issues of this title, albeit with a lot more content. He also talks about famous science fiction writers from past and present and one of the things the comic does is to occasionally have a text interview with either a bastion of science fiction like Ray Bradbury, Alfred Bester, Frank Herbert and others... as well as often having a comic strip adaptation of one of their shorter works housed within the same issue. There’s also the odd article about a specific event or award related to science fiction too. Most of the issues were comic strips, though... either based on works by very famous authors or written by the various Marvel employees like Bruce Jones, who seems to be quite prolific for the magazine.

This is where the comic strip adaptation of The Day Of The Triffids eventually wound up, after it was initially advertised a couple of years before as being an up and coming story for Worlds Unknown (presumably pulled to make way for the slight change in direction of the last two issues, which instead went out with an adaptation of The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad). It was obviously intended to run for two issues as it’s presented as a two parter in the first two issues here, taking up the same page count it would have had in the former title. It’s also not a bad adaptation, actually, although I prefer the look and feel of the Triffid guns in the first BBC TV adaptation of the book rather than the way in which they are presented here.

The first issue also adapts, toward the end, the Bob Shaw story about Slow Glass, an other worldly glass that absorbs the light shone into at and plays a person's life back with a huge delay, so past times and places (depending on which point in history you are in) can be viewed through it. The editor here really ran with this concept because, not only is the original story adapted... it’s also used to bookend every one of the regular six issues in the series. Each issue starts off with a new customer coming into the antiquated store which is the only known supplier of Slow Glass and then observing the stories as they appear in the comic you are reading.

During the first issue’s introduction, Roy Thomas gets himself in a little trouble with future letter writers in that he promises the stories in the magazine would never resort to ‘space opera’ tales... which he, quite rightfully in some respects, sees as just space westerns. He even runs a satirical parody of Flash Gordon in this first issue called Smash Gordon. Most of the tales in Unknown Worlds Of Science Fiction don’t fall into the much loved (especially by me) space opera category but it’s kinda interesting that in one of the other stories in here, The Savage World, the likenes of Larry ‘Buster’ Crabbe is definitely on the head and shoulders of one of the characters in a tale which, really isn’t that far off from the space opera Mr. Thomas seems to have gotten so tired of. I’d just assumed that this was the artist using film and TV stills as models for the characters because I’d seen a lot of that kind of ‘borrowing’ growing up with the great British sci-fi comic 2000AD and, when I showed the pages to my dad, I remarked that I hadn’t realised the American comic books had done this also. As it turns out, though, while researching this review, I found out that this story was, actually, an unused piece of artwork drawn in 1954 for an issue of the Buster Crabbe comic series, with new dialogue lettered in. It just seems a bit of a curious addition in light of the editors comments but I guess if you have space to fill and the deadline is knocking on your door, you use what’s to hand, maybe.

And it’s not a bad comic actually. It kinda falls into the obvious thing about every single story having a ‘Twilight Zone’ style twist ending and, while that does get tiresome after a while, I can’t think of any better format to replace it if you’re doing an anthology comic. Funnily enough, while there are some nice adaptations... such as Michael Moorcock’s Hugo award winning Behold The Man, the content of which, detailing the story of a time traveller who goes back in time to meet Christ and ends up becoming Christ and getting crucified at the end (something which, you can tell from the letters page, the editorial team were expecting to get a huge backlash from)... it’s usually the original stories by staff writers that are the most interesting.

I think my favourite one has to be Bruce Jones’ Preservation Of The Species from the giant sized issue, released a while after the magazine had folded but with a kind of last hurrah attempt to get better sales while finding a single issue venue for a lot of unused stories which had obviously already been written and artworked for the original magazine in, well, slightly more optimistic times.That being said, this last hurrah of an issue also contained a reprint of the Marvel adaptation of Frederic Brown’s Arena from Worlds Unknown so, maybe not a huge amount of material left unpublished. Preservation Of The Species is pretty much the only one of the many stories over the seven issues where I didn’t see the twist coming until after it happened. The writer successfully managed to distract my attention away from the real story by focusing on the peculiar ‘powers’ manifested in the main female protagonist and directing me away from the real trick of the story. So, yeah, I really enjoyed that one and, to be fair, I liked quite a few of the stories in the series but, as I said, those twist ending style reveals do get a little wearing after a while... especially when they are so obviously telegraphed a lot of the time.

And that’s that... like its predecessor, Unknown Worlds Of Science Fiction didn’t have bad sales exactly... but they weren’t that good either. If only they could have held on for another year or two, they might have found their fortunes reversed by riding the magical Star Wars bandwagon but, alas, it was not to be. Still, a nice set to have a read through and, I have to say, I do kinda miss the days when you could pick up the latest black and white Marvel magazine from the shelves of your local newsagent. A good series for fans of science fiction, despite its reliance on story twists. Some lovely artwork in a variety of styles too. Worth a read if you have the time.

Xtro

Xtro Curricular

Xtro
UK 1982
Directed by Harry Bromley Davenport
Second Sight Blu Ray Zone 2

Warning: Some spoilers on this one, if you’re that bothered about such things.

Well, you’ve got to give a big round of applause to Second Sight for resurrecting such a memorable and somewhat trashy but not uncharming ‘classic’... in a brand new Blu Ray transfer with a fair few versions of the movie you can watch (in different cuts), a whole slew of good extras (which I haven’t had the time to look at fully yet, although the long featurette that starts it off is certainly worth the watch and that particular documentary is directed by Jake West who helmed one of my favourite vampire films, Razor Blade Smile), an accompanying booklet, slipcase and, the one thing which completely sold it for me, a CD of the soundtrack that the director composed for the movie.

Now, Xtro is a movie I saw only once before in the mid-1980s, in that I rented it out from my local off licence over the road. The off licence is still there but, alas, they no longer rent out large box VHS tapes these days. Thinking about it now and how it was caught up in the whole, shameful, Video Nasty affair (I reviewed two DVDs dealing with this awful part of recent British history here and here), albeit as a discretional Category 3 video, I’m amazed I was even allowed to rent this one when I was about 15... I think it was an X rated movie and some of the shops carrying it might have known it was a risk having it around, even though this title never actually got prosecuted (it was liable for seizure, though).

Anyway, this was around 36 years ago and, to be honest, as excited as I was by the exploitative tag line “Not all Extra Terrestrials are friendly!” (I’d not liked E.T. - The Extra Terrestrial all that much), I forgot the film soon after I saw it. There were, however, always two bits that stuck out in my mind and my 50 year old brain was hoping I was even remembering the right film when I pre-ordered this thing. So one of these was because of a specific actress. The film has a pretty good cast for the low budget style horror movie it is but all the actors take this thing seriously and there’s no sense of them ever dumbing down on some of the more ridiculous dialogue or unusual concepts which somehow worked their way into the film. These actors include Philip Sayer and Bernice Stegers playing Sam and Rachel, father to the little boy who is a central protagonist/antagonist (depending on your point of view) and Tony, played by Simon Nash. Rachel also has a new lover in the absence of the father, played by Danny Brainin but the person who really stuck in my mind is Maryam d'Abo.

This was Maryam d'Abo’s first movie but, just five years later, she found herself catapulted to fame as the main Bond girl in the excellent Timothy Dalton Bond film The Living Daylights. However, the memory of her wandering around naked and having sex in this film is one of those two main memories I have of Xtro and it’s always something I wanted to come back to one day.

The other thing was one of the two roles played by Tik and Tok in the film... who oldies might remember as the fresh, leading British proponents of ‘robotic dancing’ in the early 1980s. The role in question being a scene where Tony’s Palitoy Action Man (the British equivalent toy to the US template GI Joe) grows to full scale, comes alive and proceeds to terrorise a downstairs neighbour in the Victorian building that the main family call their home here... eventually bayoneting her to death. It’s quite a surreal sequence and one wonders why the heck Palitoy even allowed it (or have continued to allow it on various releases over the years). I did note at the time that this was not the ‘eagle eye’ variant of the Action Man that was the dominant version from 1976 onwards but, thinking about it now and noting on the documentary when the guy inside the suit said there were holes in the eyes for him to see out of, that does kind of make sense.

So what else has this on offer? Well the soundtrack is a little bit anemic in places... it’s all done by the director on some synthesizer kit he had at the time and, while quite effective in some places (in a late 70s to mid 80s Doctor Who kind of way), at other times it leaves a lot to be desired and could do with a little more impact, I felt. That being said, it’s not the composer/director’s fault... although the budget was quite large compared to what he was used to playing with, I suspect any musical augmentation was not going to be the order of the day when the money ran out.

After a terribly long set of opening credits, we have a scene with Tony and his dad Sam playing with their dog at a country cottage. Sam throws a stick up in the air and it turns into a shaft of light as the whole area is engulfed by blackness and Sam is abducted by something which may or not be a spacecraft. We then join Tony who wakes up from dreaming about this three years later but he is the only one who correctly remembers what happened... everyone else thinks his dad just went missing. Then, as if by magic, the Xtro lands on Earth and starts killing a few people.

Then, in what is a very memorable scene (so how come I didn’t remember it after all these years?), it impregnates a young woman in a farmhouse played by Susie Silvey, who also appeared in such movies as Come Play With Me (reviewed here) and The Playbirds (reviewed here). When she wakes up after the shock, the quite effective looking alien creature is now just a shedded mess of skin and internal organs but suddenly the poor woman finds her belly is growing at a massive rate. She rolls around on her back on the floor as it grows to maybe ten times larger than any other pregnancy would be and then she, somehow, gives birth to Tony’s long missing father.

And if you think that sounds strange you’d be spot on but it’s just one thing in a movie which gets stranger and stranger, featuring toy tanks shooting at Rachel’s lover, a clown toy come to life and doing nasty things to people (including collecting eggs from an ‘alien cocooned’ Maryam d'Abo) and an out of the blue appearance by a Black Panther in the flats. Not to mention a scene that I will simply describe as... burning, liquorice telephone.

The film is awkward, off kilter and looks quite cheap and tacky in some places but, like
I said, it’s not without its charm and it does have some good things in it too, not to mention some striking moments which I’ve already described for you above. The acting is, as I said, pretty good (by many of the cast, but not all) and covers up for some of the dialogue. The director also tries to do some interesting things with the camera on occasion such as shooting parallel set ups through some iron railings or shooting people through sections of foreground shapes made by architecture or foliage, at certain points.

Ultimately, though, if you are looking for a horror film which has a lot of polish and flair, you may be less enamoured with Xtro than you might suspect, given its ‘much loved’ status grown over the years. I was personally very glad I saw it again and I think it has a certain something special about it which makes it worth looking at. I would also suggest, if you’ve never seen it before, to go with he menu option of ‘alternative ending’ to see the ending which most people will remember this film having (it’s also the better, if somewhat less low concept and bleaker ending of the options available on this disc). If you are a die hard horror fan, though, then this is a movie you should probably have an opinion on and if you’re ever going to pick it up, this new Blu Ray edition is definitely the version to have. Give it a look sometime, maybe.