Cryptic Movie Quiz Answers

 

Annual Cryptic
Movie Quiz 2021
Answers

Hello and thanks to all who had a go at my quiz this time around. Not much of a response this year, it has to be said. Not sure if I’ll bother to do another one at the end of this year to be honest (let me know if you want me to).

This year’s winner is Steve Braham in Australia, who got 11 out of the 16 answers correct.

The answers are pictured above in the grid and this is how you break them down to solve them.

1. Take a detailed look at the bed linen that backwards lad brought in!
A detailed look could be when you ‘scan’ something with your eyes. LAD backwards is DAL. Bed linen could be a sheet. So we get Sam Fuller’s Scandal Sheet.

2. Travelling atop the back of the European Community.
The European Community is often abbreviated to the EC. If you travel atop something you are riding it so... EC Rider... Easy Rider.

3. A gap situated between two of their typical structures for this large body of beavers united by common descent, history or culture.
A structure built by a beaver is a Dam. A body of peoples united by a common descent, history or culture is a Nation. A gap between two structures is an alley. So we have Damnation Alley.

4. Ions pass through... it’s one of many similarly unlawful acts.
Crimes are unlawful acts. An ion through a pass is Pass-Ion so...
Crimes Of Passion.

5. The perfect fusion of VHS and homo sapien.
Well, yeah, man and video spliced together gives you Videoman.

6. Shoo! It was a bit of a scramble yesterday evening.
Yesterday evening was Last Night. Shoo scrambled up is Soho, so... Last Night In Soho.

7. It’s solely an alliance of frozen water.
Solely something means it’s Just something... frozen water is Ice. An alliance is a league so... Justice League.

8. The first games player is a militarised ant of a behemoth.
A games player is often referred to as a Gamer these days. The first one might be titled Gamer A. A soldier in the US military is referred to as a GI. Put it together with Ant and you get Giant. A behemoth is a monster so... Gamera The Giant Monster.

9. Not a light person to pull your stranded vehicle away.
Opposite of light can be dark. Someone who tows your vehicle away could be a tower so... The Dark Tower.

10. The backwards glance.
A glance could be a peek. Backwards it’s The Keep.

11. The act of devouring the coverings on top of her fingers.
Eat her nails... The Eternals.

12. I’m dreaming of a Shark Father Christmas!
Well this one couldn’t be anything other than Santa Jaws.

13. ... as sunlight power does!
Solar is as solar does. So... Solaris.

14. It’s crimson... negative on the frozen water.
Crimson is red. Negative is Not. Frozen water is Ice so... Red Notice.

15. Had all the violence and bloodshed taken out of it.
It had gore... now it’s gone... gore gone... The Gorgon.

16. Carnal relations at the Overlook Hotel.
Sex at the hotel from The Shining is... Jess Franco’s Shining Sex.

Hope all those who had a go enjoyed playing! Thanks very much and congratulations to Steve in Oz... who finally won one after years of trying and failing.

My Favourite Films of 2021

 

21 From 21

My Favourite Films of 2021

“Caveat emptor”, I say!

Okay, there’s a huge problem with my putting together another best films of the year column (after an absence last year due to the way the pandemic affected my viewing habits)... and it’s still mainly due to the Corona that I have to put this warning up front. You see, there are a load of films I wanted to see this year which, for some reason or another, just didn’t make it in front of my eyes and, rather than wait another three months or so until I’ve seen them all, I am going ahead without them. So, yes, it might be foolish of me to do this without having seen Spider-Man No Way Home but, well, there’s a possibility it might be one of my favourites of the year but, I’ll have to wait until I’ve seen it. Similarly, while I’ve seen a lot of non-UK and non-USA films this year, this is not the case with ‘first run UK release films’, which is what this list really has to be. So, yeah, this list is fairly dominated by American product but, so what? They certainly make great movies too.

One last thing... if you’re wondering where the new James Bond film is in this list... well, I’ve decided not to do my usual ‘Worst Films Of The Year’ accompanying list this year so, yeah, that’s why it’s not in my list. And it is quite possibly was the worst film I’ve seen all year, in all honesty. Anyway, nobody will ever agree with a list of movies put up by another person (or there’s something wrong with you) but this one is mine and I hope you enjoy it. In all but one case (where I’ve not got around to publishing the review yet), you can click on the titles to take you to my original review of the film. So, in reverse order then, my 21 first run UK release favourites of 2021 were...

21. Freaky
USA Directed by Christopher Landon
Wonderful comedic take on a classic body swap style movie but in this case, it’s a teenage girl accidentally trading places with a male serial killer. Absolutely hilarious movie from the guy who gave us the two fantastic Happy Death Day movies and it doesn’t skimp on the gore on this one either.

20. Army Of The Dead
USA Directed by Zack Snyder
Snyder's post apocalyptic zombie heist movie has already had a prequel from another director released (it’s on my to watch list, haven’t had time to catch up to it yet) but this was an enjoyable slice of body count carnage. Just wish they’d put it out on a proper Blu Ray.

19. Willy’s Wonderland
USA Directed by Kevin Lewis
Ha. A typical slice of maniacal Nic Cage mayhem as the silent hero finds himself trapped in a locked down, abandoned restaurant... battling evil animatronic animals who want his soul.

18. Jolt
USA Directed by Tanya Wexler
Kate Beckinsale plays a lady who needs to wear an electric shock wire vest to give her a jolt to take away her extreme anger management issues. However, this energetic action thriller works best when she doesn’t pull the trigger to dampen her lethal skills.

17. The Advent Calendar
France/Belgium Directed by Patrick Ridremont
Quite a nice horror franchise opener (one hopes, this one could run and run if it’s picked up) deals with a series of life changing incidents which escalate on a daily basis as each candy in an advent calendar is consumed with dire consequences for the owner.

16. A Quiet Place Part 2
USA Directed by John Krasinski
Not as good as the first movie but a really not bad sequel to the classic first film, which builds on the foundations laid in that one, rather than just repeat them.

15. Deerskin
France/Belgium/Switzerland
Directed by Quentin Dupieux
Wonderfully surreal film about a man obsessed with his newly purchased deerskin jacket. From the genius who gave the world Rubber (reviewed here).

14. In The Earth
UK Directed by Ben Wheatley
Wonderful film made by Wheatley during the pandemic and set in the pandemic. A modern tale of folk horror which gets extremely intense and suspenseful in certain scenes.

13. Censor
UK Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond
A really interesting tale set during the height of the Video Nasty moral panic in Britain in the 1980s, as seen from the point of view of a character who is one of the offensive censors of the time.

12. Jungle Cruise
USA Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
A wonderfully pun-tastic movie based on the old, 1950s Disneyland ride that’s a total joy from start to finish. It’s like watching Indiana Jones crossed with the first Pirates Of The Caribbean movie by way of the Stephen Sommers Mummy movies. Just a completely entertaining family film adventure with a genuinely surprising twist about three quarters of the way through.

11. Malignant
USA/China Directed by James Wan
If you like Brian DePalma’s Sisters (reviewed by me here) then you’ll probably be one of those audience members who really appreciated Malignant for the wonderful movie it is, rather than one of its ‘surprisingly many’ detractors. I was puzzled by what was going on in this movie for a while until the idea behind the central antagonist was revealed (not completely a surprise reveal but I’m glad they did it this way).

10. The Suicide Squad
USA/Canada Directed by James Gunn
This follow up to Suicide Squad is absolutely brilliant. It’s easily one of the best four of the recent DC Cinematic Universe films put out and, with its surprisingly gory content coupled with a very strong dose of black humour, it seems to be much more reflective of the content of modern comic books, as opposed to what people who don’t read them think comic books are like nowadays.

9. Gaia
South Africa Directed by Jaco Bouwer
Another wonderful eco-friendly horror film about the Earth fighting back at the human species who overrun it. A perfect film to double bill with In The Earth (from earlier in this list).

8. Adrienne
USA Directed by Andy Ostroy
Powerful documentary film about the wonderful actress/director Adrienne Shelley, who was murdered just before she saw how successful her movie Waitress was about to become... directed by her husband and featuring their daughter, this is both a hard movie to watch but also a wonderful celebration of her life.

7. One Cut Of The Dead In Hollywood
Japan Directed by Yûya Nakaizumi
While not quite as brilliant as the original movie, One Cut Of The Dead (reviewed by me here), this is still a very charming and funny companion piece to it.  While the final scenes where the truth behind the Hollywood sign is revealed is not as brilliant as the reveal behind the ‘crane shot’ in the first movie, it still brings a big smile to the face and is worth a look if you loved the original.

6. Reminiscence
USA Directed by Lisa Joy
This is a beautiful film noir filtered through a kind of Philip K. Dick tinted lens which doesn’t end the way you might hope. It would not be out of place in a triple bill with the original cut of Blade Runner (reviewed here) and Hotel Artemis (reviewed here).

5. The French Dispatch
(review coming soon)
USA Directed by Wes Anderson
I’m kinda shocked that, in a year when Wes Anderson has a new film out, it only scrapes into my top five rather than take the number one spot. It’s certainly not in my top five Anderson films either but, it’s still a pretty remarkable film. One of my favourite, living directors, for sure.

4. French Exit
Canada/Ireland/UK
Directed by Azazel Jacobs
Wonderful film dealing with some dark ideas in a funny and quirky way. This one had me immediately thinking that I’m going to have to track down the source novel at some point soon.

3. Last Night In Soho
UK Directed by Edgar Wright
Cinematic chameleon Edgar Wright takes us on a nostalgia infused look at London in the 1960s via a modern day prism. No real surprises in this one but it’s so skillfully put together and so beautiful to look at that you can’t help but admire it.

2. Gunpowder Milkshake
France/Germany Directed by Navot Papushado
A truly spectacular slice of colourful, female led action thriller which should be on more people’s ‘film of the year’ lists. This is everything a modern action movie should aspire towards being. Simply astonishing.

1. Pig
UK/USA Directed by Michael Sarnoski
Nicolas Cage again, this time playing a man who is trying to retrieve his stolen truffle pig. This gives us a classic Cage set up and then proceeds to completely ignore it as the incredibly beautiful film about friendship, bonding and loss does nothing you would expect it to. My second watch through cemented it for me as the film of the year, as far as I’m concerned.

And there you have it... I’m sure most readers worth their salt will disagree with my choices but, you know, I can’t help it if you’re all wrong... ;-) I hope you enjoyed reading this list and, if possible, hope some of you discover what you consider to be some real corkers from checking this out. Thanks for reading.

Terror Of Mecha-Godzilla

Mech N’ Roll

Terror Of Mecha-Godzilla
aka Mekagojira no gyakushu
Japan 1975
Directed by Ishirô Honda
Criterion Blu Ray Zone B

It’s funny how one’s perceptions of a movie can change when you revisit it years later. I remember watching  Terror Of Mecha-Godzilla once, almost thirty years ago and thinking that it wasn’t that great (that being said, it was an English VHS version, which was probably the dubbed American cut, I would expect). Looking at it now I realise it’s one of the high points in the series.

This is the ‘last film’ of things in a few ways. Firstly, it was the final Godzilla film in the Showa Era wave (and hence the last in Criterion’s wonderful Showa Era boxed edition). The character would not return to cinemas for another nine years later, rebooted back to being the antagonist rather than hero of the films, with the Heisei Era movies which revisited the monsters and encounters of the original series in ‘modern’, re-imagined ways.

Secondly, it’s the last Godzilla film of the director of the original (and many of the early sequels), Ishirô Honda. He decided to do this film on a freelance basis, years after he had been ‘let go’ by the struggling Toho, because he liked that the woman who wrote the original script was from his area and I think he realised there was an interesting plot at the heart of this one, which is still effectively a direct sequel to the previous movie in the series.

Thirdly, not only was it’s Honda’s last Godzilla movie, it was his last feature length film period. Although, as I’ve mentioned before, he afterwards went to work as assistant director on some of the films of his good friend Akira Kurosawa. I personally belive it’s Honda’s assured direction of this one which makes the film superior to many of the other, later entries in the Showa Era movies.

Look at the lengthy opening credits sequence, for example. Honda chooses to play selected highlights of Jun Fukuda’s footage from the final fight of Godzilla VS Mecha-Godzilla (reviewed here), by way of a recap, of sorts. Also, true to Honda’s ‘very slow burn’ approach, since Godzilla only turns up in the film about two thirds of the way through, it’s a way of giving the viewers a taste of what’s to come and keep them in their seats. However, the way this is edited together is far more exciting and attention grabbing than it was in the original film the footage was culled from. This is not a failing of Fukuda, perhaps, since it obviously is paced faster but, I did find it interesting how there was even a sense of gravitas to the clash of these two titans in this revisited opening as opposed to just the humour of watching it the first time around.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that while the opening credits are playing out, we have the return of another old, absentee from the series for a while in the form of composer extraordinaire Akira Ifukube... and it’s great to hear his original Godzilla march playing over this titanic battle. In fact, in terms of the first two thirds of this movie, I’d say this is right up there as one of Ifukube’s finest Godzilla scores, although, towards the end, is does tend to sound like he’s constantly playing the same cue over and over, it has to be said.

The plot of this film involves the wreckage of the Mecha-Godzilla under the surface of the sea going missing. A submarine searching for it is destroyed by a dinosaur called Titanosaurus. For some reason, the good guy scientist at the Japanese equivalent of an Oceanic research lab are puzzled as to how a dinosaur could suddenly be alive. I’m more puzzled, bearing in mind they all clearly demonstrate they have a working knowledge of not only Godzilla’s various appearances... but also many of his kaiju antagonists and allies... that they are suddenly surprised there’s another one. But, hey... whatever!

Anyway, Dr. Mashumi, played by Akihiko Hirata, is helping the aliens from Black Hole Planet 3 (the antagonists of the previous movie) by controlling Titanosaurus and also helping them with their super duper, ‘rebuilt and improved from the previous wreckage’ version of Mecha-Godzilla. He does this because a) he is an embittered man who was sacked 15 years before for believing in dinosaurs and controlling them (which makes no sense, see previous paragraph) and b) because they saved his daughter when she got accidentally electrocuted helping him. His daughter, Katsura, played by the beautiful Tomoko Ai, was given robotic insides and helps control Titanosaurus. When she takes a knock later in the film, they also bury the controller of Mecha-Godzilla in her, to make things easier. Probably shouldn’t have fallen in love with one of the good guys then, I guess. Which is what is really at the heart of this story and probably what drew Honda to it... can a cybernetic girl still love and have human thoughts and feelings. Gee, I guess so, is what the writer and director conclude here. By the way, if you’re wondering why the name Akihiko Hirata, who plays Dr. Mashumi, looks familiar, he’s no stranger to having parts in various Godzilla films over the years and it was he, of course, who played the doomed hero Dr. Serizawa who created the Oxygen Destroyer in the original Gojira (aka Godzilla, reviewed by me here).

There are a couple of things of note in this one, such as a prisoner of the aliens being gunned down with multiple bullets and the director actually using blood squibs... which you wouldn’t really expect to see in a movie made specifically for the Children's Champion Film Festival in Japan. Similarly, there is some nudity, of a sort, when Katsura is undergoing surgery and her mechanical innards are being repaired... her breasts are clearly visible here. Admittedly, they’re bizarre, prosthetic breasts such as you might find on a department store mannequin but this didn’t stop the footage from being censored in the US release of the film.

Other than that it’s kaiju shenanigans as usual but Honda genuinely brings a certain levity to the proceedings and, like many of his previous movies, takes things quite slow. It’s the first time in a while Godzilla hasn’t had an ally other than the humans to help him defeat his foes and, arguably this is noticeable. He gets beaten up quite badly by Titanosaurus and Mecha-Godzilla in this one and, it has to be said, without the humans blocking Titanosaurus’ controls with sonic waves and Katsura killing herself to relinquish control of Mecha-Godzilla for the good of humanity, then Godzilla wouldn’t have had a chance here. As it is, he gets to swim off into the sunset and this is his goodbye for the original cycle of films.

Criterions presentation of the film is wonderful, as are all of their entries (barring the ‘hidden on a different disc’ and slightly less quality transfer of the Japanese version of King Kong VS Godzilla, reviewed here). This really is the only set of these you need to be going for if you don’t speak Japanese and want a quality presentation of the material. Terror Of Mecha-Godzilla is a fine film from the franchise although, you kinda need to see the previous film to get all the references. Definitely it would be high on my list of Showa Era films, for sure and, as such, is one of my recommendations in the series. As is the wonderful Criterion boxed edition, Spine Number 1000 for all you Criterionphiles out there. Definitely worth the investment... these films have never looked better in English speaking territories.

No Time To Die

 



A Die For A Die

No Time To Die
UK/USA 2021
Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga
EON Productions
Blu Ray Zone B

Let me once more state for the record that I don’t have anything against Daniel Craig. In fact, I think he’s a great actor. He’s just got the wrong colour hair for James Bond and, also, I just don’t like any of the Craig Bond films. I’d frankly rather watch him in other roles. That being said, my expectations were hopeful for No Time To Die because I was receiving some very mixed, word of mouth reviews from the various friends I have. For instance, my die hard, Bond fanatical friend Chris, who usually has very few bad words to say about the Daniel Craig Bond films, was very disappointed with this one... thinking it one of the all time lows of the series, from what I can make out. Conversely, my cousin Steve said this was one of the very best Bond films and went back to his local cinema in Australia to see it a number of times. So, yeah, I thought this one would at least be interesting if it was dividing people’s opinion so much.

Alas, I have to report back that this latest outing for England’s popular secret agent has a lot in common with the previous Craig films, as far as I’m concerned... in that it’s very boring, drab, dull and any other descriptions which could be best summed up with the modern term... meh! My initial response once the film had concluded was... how can they make a movie which was both worse than Quantum Of Solace (reviewed here) and simultaneously, unbelievably more boring than Octopussy (reviewed here)?

Once again, the film picks up the plot threads from the previous Craig films, allowing them to all be seen as one single arc. We catch up with a now retired Bond living with his girlfriend Madeleine (Léa Seydoux reprising her role from S.P.E.C.T.R.E, reviewed here) but then, of course, Bond manages to find himself back in the thick of the action and attempting to save the world from yet another super villain, this time in the form of Safin (played by Rami Malek).

And... it’s a bit of a yawn, to be honest. The fact that the opening gun barrel sequence has Bond missing his target for the first time ever in the history of the EON Bond films (there’s no red blood washing it out in this version... just a really awkward transition), should have given me a heads up. The pre-credits sequence is certainly plot and character motivated but it forgets to be a big blast of action like the many James Bond films before it. I mean, there’s definitely a little action there but just as it starts to get going it’s already over and we are into a quite dreary opening title animation accompanied by a similarly dreary opening song. Sadly, this is a good guide to how the rest of the film is going to go... it’s a long, slow burn (running two and three quarter hours) with very few action sequences and, for the most part, not enough ooomph in them to really deliver the kind of pace and energy a loyal legion of Bond fans might expect from the franchise. This would perhaps explain why the response to the movie in my timeline on Twitter has been lukewarm at best.

Now, I was pretty careful to pick up absolutely no spoilers for this one before I fired up the Blu Ray but, alas, as I’d revealed to my friend @cultofthecinema on the phone a few days before, I was pretty sure how the movie was going to end (using the same kind of casting information with which I’d predicted, a couple of years before release, a certain event which takes place towards the end of the Star Wars movie The Force Awakens). And, yes, I was dead right on that one. I really don’t want to give away the ending of the film here but, even if I’d had no suspicion before the movie started as to the final trajectory of the story, the writers and director manage to telegraph it so much that it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion by the midway mark. Scenes which would have been better occurring at the end of the movie play out earlier than you might expect and, by some point, I suspect most people in the audience would realise there’s a reason why certain plot points are explored more fully before the final innings, so to speak.

Okay, enough on that. Let me say something positive here. There are two things I did like about the movie. One was the brief but effective scenes where a new character played Ana de Armas shares the one good action scene with her Knives Out co-star Daniel Craig. I could have done with a lot more of her character in the movie, to be honest.

And the other thing was Hans Zimmer’s score. He’s done a wonderful job on this one and managed to deliver a nice score which really gets to the heart of what the John Barry and early David Arnold scores were about. I love Zimmer but I was really surprised he was able to pull something like this off. He also interpolates various themes from the classic Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (reviewed here) for the score and, although the film doesn’t reference the plot of that movie at all (how could it when the Craig films were supposed to be a total reboot), there are a lot of musical echoes of it... enough to inject a kind of ‘surrogate nostalgia’ into the movie, it has to be said. Probably didn't need that ‘emotional association by proxy’ though. Not that there aren’t a lot of visual references to previous Bond films from the history of the franchise in the movie anyway... bit of a strange kind of homage. Nevertheless, I thought Zimmer did a remarkable job with the music... although now I know why there wasn’t too much action music on the CD soundtrack... you can only score what’s on the screen, I guess.

Okay, my biggest problem with the movie is it’s far too long. And that makes no sense since, not long after a scene where M and Bond are at each others throats and Bond is not welcome to return to active duty, it’s almost immediately followed up by them being all pally again and Bond being recruited for the mission. I can only assume that some kind of sequence of events which would have led to this change of heart was cut from the movie to get the time down. Even so, the film drags so much that, you have to wonder why the producers and director didn’t get the editor to trim another hour out of it.

All in all, then, I didn’t have a good time with No Time To Die. I wish Craig all the best in the world and hope to see him in some more movies soon but, as far as Bond films are concerned, I think I’m more than happy to see the back of him. If the series is to continue, as it implies right at the end with the familiar caption ‘James Bond Will Return’, it will have to be a hard reboot with, I suspect, a much younger actor. But let’s see what happens with the ageing producers before we count any more chickens, would be my final word on that.

Doctor Who - Eve Of The Daleks

Exterminating Eve

Doctor Who
Eve Of The Daleks
Airdate: 1st January 2022
BBC 1

Warning: Spoilers looping back into spoilers.

Now this is more like it. Doctor Who - Eve Of The Daleks is the best Doctor Who New Years Special ever... with one or two caveats. And also, I mean, yeah there have only been three New Years specials to date, this one being the third but, even so, this was a hugely entertaining one and I loved it. It’s also the first time in a while that Doctor Who has properly aired on a Saturday evening again (which is exactly where it belongs).

Okay, so we have, once again and for the record... Jodie Whitaker, Mandip Gill and John Bishop returning as The Doctor, Yas and Dan. The plot is simple... The Doctor performs a reset on the TARDIS and, while they wander around in a storage facility in Manchester, our heroes get sucked into a time loop, which is presumably caused by the TARDIS, as they try to stop customer Nick (played by Adjani Salmon) and Sarah (played by some woman I’d never heard of called Aisling Bea who, honestly, knocked this out the park and should be in everything from now on) from being killed by rogue Daleks. Trouble is, when they and also The Doctor and her companions get killed each time, it resets the time loop but leaves their memories of their last encounter intact... and they have a slowly diminishing amount of time to try and formulate a plan before the time loop closes at midnight on New Years Eve 2021, defeat the Daleks and remain outside the area of said time loop.

Now, I will be the first to admit many faults with this episode...

Yes, it’s such an old plot it’s unreal that anyone would try and package this idea up yet again. I mean, I don’t remember if they’ve ever bothered doing this one in Doctor Who before but the old ‘attempt to survive each successive time loop’ idea has been done in many sci-fi shows over the years.

Additionally, a lot of it didn’t make sense... such as why the characters assumed the time-loop would be closing at midnight or why their interaction with Sarah’s mum via phone wasn’t affecting the rest of the world and dragging it into a time loop also. And I could probably go on with a whole laundry list of things which shoot holes through this particular plot device.

However, the execution of this... well, asides from the science and technical stuff... was absolutely brilliant. Sarah and Nick were drawn as great characters who managed to shift tone and get together romantically by the end of their time loop experience and the actors had some great lines to deliver. Ditto for The Doctor and her companions. Dan has finally made clear to the characters (if not the audience... I was slowly beginning to suspect, I think) that there’s a probable lesbian romantic entanglement to come between The Doctor and Yas. Which could be interesting but, you know, probably not in any way that the show could get away with and stay a family show (back to the old Dalek porn if you want to go that route, I’m afraid).

And yeah, I was suitably impressed with the whole shenanigans. Also the music was great again too. Segun Akinola provides a score which, amazingly, doesn’t suffer from not including the leitmotif set up for the Daleks by Murray Gold and the driven, bass rhythms used here work really well to help establish them as something of a threat again. That being said, they seem fine at point blank range with their new ‘gatling gun’ style, revolving extermination attachments but... well... just a few metres off with a moving target and, once more, their skills at shooting resemble the stormtroopers in the Star Wars franchise. As in... they can’t hit a thing.

There were some nice references to old Doctor Who history too. For instance, Nick does the old ‘duck down between two shooting Daleks’ trick to take two of them out, which harks back to the William Hartnell and Peter Cushing days if memory serves. And also, at one point in the episode, Sarah exclaims “Oh my giddy Aunt!”... which was, of course, one of Patrick Troughton’s catchphrases as The Doctor at the tail end of the 1960s. That being said, no matter how many times the Daleks have come to Earth now and tried to invade it... how in heck do people still not remember them? It’s a little less than credible that, after everything they’ve put the human race through time and time again, that nobody seems to remember them (unless they work in UNIT, maybe).

And, yeah, that’s that... things are set up for what I think, if I got this right, are Jodie Whittaker’s last three special episodes over the year in the title role. I’m assuming that Yas will also either die or carry on assuming The Doctor has died by the end of Jodie’s last show. I guess we’ll find out by the end of the year. One thing we do have to look forward to though, via the post credits trailer for the next special, is the return of the old Jon Pertwee monster from the 70s (reviewed here and with a brief but memorably bad return in Peter Davison’s reign in the 1980s, reviewed here), the Sea Devils. They always frightened me as a kid and, hopefully, they can be frightening enough again for me to take away the memory of their second appearance in the show. So hopefully... third time’s a charm.

Either way, Doctor Who - Eve Of The Daleks... old plot, technically questionable but, hey, great acting, great music, entertaining presentation... a generally brilliant episode, for sure. This one has, temporarily, restored my faith in the good Doctor, I have to say.

New Year's Day 2022

 

Happy New Year 2022!

Well that’s another year over and another year of Covid behind us (that should leave us with only another four or five years of Covid misery to go before the required global collaboration to defeat it kicks in, is my guess). I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all my readers a Happy New Year and say thank you to first time and regular readers alike.

By way of a quick preview of the next one or two years, depending on how quickly I can get posts up, I will say that, midst many reviews of things which are unknown to me (but will hopefully prove interesting), there are some certainties for sure, in the works. As long as I stay in good health and financially solvent, that is.

For instance, the last of my Showa era Godzilla reviews should be up sometime within the next week and also the last few reviews of both the Classic Universal Monster movies (although certainly not all their monster movies for sure... more will eventually follow) and the rest of the Gamera series should be following soon after. Plus, there will definitely be reviews covering various boxed editions... so look out for running series of reviews on William Grefé, Bill Rebane and Yokai Monsters. Those ones are at least certain to come up this year. I’ve also got reviews of the complete run of The Falcon movies and the short run of cinematically released Perry Mason movies completed and waiting in the wings. As are a bunch of Jean Rollin movie reviews. Plus, oh yes, lots of classic Doctor Who stories.

I’m also hoping to finish revisiting the Hammer Dracula films on Blu Ray and, in time, their Frankenstein series... along with a whole raft of other movies from the famous British studio. I also intend to finally dig into those two Sam Fuller boxes from a few years ago... not to mention some more Harryhausen, Corman’s Poe pictures and a revisit to Universal’s Inner Sanctum series of movies. Throw in a whole raft of giallo and horror titles plus some Kolchack and, yeah, I’m hoping it will be a good year for the blog. Plus, loads of surprises which I don’t even know about yet. Most importantly, perhaps, I need to work my way through Severin’s The Eurocrypt Of Christopher Lee set and, fingers crossed, their All The Haunts Be Ours box of folk horror should also be pitching up on these shores over the next week or two.

Now I come to think of it, I need to get back to Zatoichi and The Sleepy Eyes Of Death movie cycles sometime soon. So, yeah, a full slate of things to come which, yeah, they could take a while to get through. But there wil be lots of non-series films and TV shows in various genres and from various times to throw into the mix too.

I hope at least some of those propositions sound appealing and, once again, Happy New Year to you and thanks for spending some time here. Stay safe!

Autopsy

Weightless
Autopsy
Turvy

Autopsy
by Patricia Cornwell
Harper Collins
ISBN: 9780008467258

Warning: Some ‘how the characters have moved on’ spoilers included.

I’m so happy to finally, after a good few years, be able to return to what has been my annual Christmas ritual for some years now... starting the first chapter or so of the latest of Patricia Cornwell’s Dr. Kay Scarpetta hardbacks. Autopsy sees Scarpetta, one of my favourite contemporary characters, returning to her old stomping ground of Virginia, taking over as the chief. However, it’s not an appointment which everybody is happy with and, as she tries to get a handle on what can only be described as ‘adverse interpersonal working conditions’ (yeah, had enough of those in my time), she becomes embroiled in a number incidents which are all connected although, at least from how I understood it, not all connected in the same way.

So Cornwell weaves a tale of a woman found with her head bashed in and her hands removed... a neighbour of her regular character Marino. Marino has both followed Scarpetta and her husband Benton to Virginia and also, it would seem, married Scarpetta’s sister (aka Lucy’s mother). Also added to the mix are a poisoning which Scarpetta has to deal with up close and personal, not to mention what looks like a double murder in space, where Scarpetta has to remotely instruct from a video link as two astronauts try to work a crime scene with her help. And it’s all gripping stuff.

Also like a fair few of her Scarpetta mysteries of recent decades, the time frame in which all the events take place is a small one. Not as small as some of them but certainly this one takes place over no more than a few days, in the December run up to Christmas. Also fitting her usual pattern, the solution to the whole mystery... or in this case, set of mysteries, is left until the last minute. It rarely seems rushed but it’s quite an effective sprint to the finishing line, as it always is. Happily enough, I didn’t arrive at a solution before the main protagonist did (and I don’t think I was armed enough to be able to, in all honesty) but I did get myself believing I would this time due to my concentrating on two specific clues which, while not red herrings, were not going to be all that workable to the reader, I would say (and that’s not always a bad thing if you don’t want to tip off your audience too quickly).

And it’s the usual, intriguing tale told from Scarpetta’s regular first person world view of things but, it has to be said, it’s also quite scary. Not scary because of the various murders and so on which come to light but, scary because I completely trust this author, due to her various life experiences and thorough research, to know what she’s talking about in some of the more, up to the minute stuff. Unlike some creators have been doing, this story is firmly set up in the real world and in real time... so the characters tend to move on with their lives between books. In this one, my favourite supporting character Lucy Farinelli (who Cornwell’s legion of fans have all read about as she grew up in the books) is staying on the same property as the good doctor herself. The reason being that this book is set firmly in a post-outbreak world. The pandemic is still, as it is, thriving and Lucy’s young girlfriend and their small child have both been to London, caught Covid and died between books. I read with worry as Cornwell describes just how truly bad the Coronavirus is in London, with mass burials etc and, as I noticed the information spinning much more ‘on the nose’ than we are getting on our own news over here in the UK... I was reminded once again how badly off we are now in this pandemic. Because if there’s one thing I trust more than the news being reported at the moment, it’s Cornwell’s research into what’s really going on.

So that element is quire scary and, indeed, so is the way Lucy has chosen to deal with the death of her lover. She basically talks to her all the time as an AI version on her computer... one who is almost impossible to tell from the real life model in terms of behaviour, responses, look and resourcefulness. Almost like having the real person, now deceased, standing in the same room as you. I’ve no doubt, as Scarpetta worries about how commonplace it will soon be for this technology to be commercially available that Cornwell probably knows it’s already here and it won’t take all that long to trickle down into the public domain. I’m used to her dealing with cutting edge technology a year or two before we realise it’s already here. Stuff which seems like pure science fiction when she first published it has turned out to be hard science ‘already with us’ on more than one occasion. So, yeah, this is an interesting and perhaps worrying thing to be reading about but... I do appreciate the heads up, for sure.

Interestingly, at a high level, presidential meeting where Scarpetta works a crime scene in space, remotely, I found it similarly interesting that the people in power are not ruling out the idea that the problem they are facing in space might be extra-terrestrial. Also a scary but not unexpected attitude given various little nuggets of information being let slip to a ‘Covid distracted’ public of late.

Of course, with Scarpetta now moving in these circles, one has to wonder how long it will be before she comes face to face with Captain Calli Chase, the lead in protagonist from Cornwell’s other main series of books at the moment (reviewed by me here and here). I thought it might even happen in this very novel but, for the time being, the two are not quite inhabiting each other’s personal universe as yet (although I suspect this is only a matter of time now).

I look forward to the day when that crossover comes but, for the time being, Cornwell does just like her main protagonist does in Autopsy, peeling back layers of story with her writer’s scalpel (okay, you know, pen or keyboard) until she cuts back to reveal the truth of the fiction. It’s amazing stuff and, as a bonus to me, when I googled a word to find what I thought was a bad typo, I was happy to also learn a new word... so I won’t be looking for a splash in every plash now, that’s for sure. If you like Cornwell’s Scarpetta books, which surely must have a built in audience by now, then you’re sure to love her latest taut, tension filled procedural thriller. I hope she manages to get the next one out for November so my once and future Christmas ritual can kick in again next year.

tom thumb

Yawn Of
The Bed

tom thumb
UK/USA 1958
Directed by George Pal
Warner Archive DVD Region 1

I must have been not much more than a nipper when I last saw tom thumb. It was one of those films that was perpetually showing on television every Bank Holiday and Christmas in the UK throughout most of the 1970s and probably the 1980s too. A well loved favourite that people didn’t fail to tune into. I wasn’t particularly wanting to see it again however but, my dad was keen to remake the acquaintance of the movie and I can remember him singing songs from this throughout the 70s (and sometimes still). So I took a gamble for his birthday because the only way this is still available to see, from what I can gather, is from a Region 1 Warner Archive DVD (it’s kind of a shame this isn’t available in Blu Ray) and reports were mixed as to whether the film was in the correct aspect ratio or not. Or maybe I’m just too old and ‘full frame’ doesn’t mean what it used to (which certainly used to mean a 4:3 aspect ratio whether the film was shot like that or not). Well, for anyone else wanting to pull the trigger on this one, let me assure you that the film is, at least, presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio on the Warner release.

And it’s such a charming film. It kind of does seem made for kids in some ways because the acting is much broader than what you might normally see in an MGM Musical of the time... but that makes it no less entertaining and, although the special effects which won an award in its day are somewhat creaky now, the film hasn’t really lost any of its magic and, another plus if you’ve never seen it before, is that the story really doesn’t always go in the direction you think it will.

The film starts with a wonderful title sequence where a big old leather or Rexine-style bound book is shown bearing the title of the film in really small print. Then a hand with a magnifying glass passes over it so we can read said title before the pages start turning and we are introduced to the various cast members as page after page of illustrations etc. After this the film carries on with the magical Queen of the Forest (played by June Thorburn) asking the Woodcutter (Bernard Miles) not to cut down the big oak which has enough timber to keep the village warm all winter. For his kindness at eventually agreeing she grants him three wishes but, when he goes home to tell his wife (Jessie Matthews), the two of them accidentally waste their three wishes in sausage related mishaps. However, as a last streak of kindness, the Queen gives this childless couple a child of their own... except, instead of a baby, they get a full grown Tom Thumb, played by Russ Tamblyn, shrunken down to around 10 inches instead.

All goes well and we have singing and dancing and George Pal, who had what was more or less his first go at directing his first feature length film here instead of just producing (and it was a roaring success for him), also uses his ‘puppetoons’, which are basically stop motion characters such as Ray Harryhausen would later animate in movies, as various toys and objects that dance around and speak with Tom when the parents aren’t around (hmm... where have I heard that premise before?).

Then we’re introduced to the romantic interest, Woody, played by Alan Young, who wants to pair up with the Queen of the Forest but can’t until he’s kissed her and made her mortal. And also, the two villains of the piece, played by Terry Thomas and Peter Sellars. The film has some wonderful scoring by Douglas Gamley and Ken Jones (which I can’t believe has not made it onto CD as yet) and some of the work on the songs was by Peggy Lee (I’m not sure how much of a contribution she made, though). Actually, the songs are great and the sequence with the animated ‘yawning man’, voiced by the always brilliant Stan Freberg, is particularly infectious and is almost guaranteed to make any audience watching the scene feel sleepy.

There’s a nice symmetry to some of the shots as Pal uses uprights such as a bed post at centre of the screen while the woodcutter and his wife sleep, somewhat innocently, head to head, horizontally in bed, facing away from each other with the tops of their heads united (no wonder they never produced any kids... this position is not something you’ll find in the Karma Sutra). Something tells me this style of framing is so the audience gets used to it when sly techniques are used to try and cover up certain special effects trick shots throughout the movie. Some of these effects are successful... and there a few oversize novelty sets for when just Russ Tamblyn is on screen... but there are also quite a few bad matte lines in the picture, it has to be said.

There’s also a certain sense of traditional fairy tale cruelty laying at the hear of the film, such as when the woodcutter and his wife are charged with robbing the villages gold and instead of sentencing them to prison they are sentenced to a public whipping. Apparently, the ‘whipping guy’ had forgotten to be cast on the day of the shoot and so the masked character is Peter Sellars, doubling up on roles. Of course, this film is based on a fairy tale from The Brothers Grimm, who were not known for holding back on the gore and nastiness content of their tales in their original translations (they have become somewhat cleaned up throughout the years in different international versions) but the movie, at least, doesn’t make good on this particular set up, as Tom and Woody race against time to bring the real culprits to justice before the whipping begins. There’s even a nod to the source material as Russ Tamblyn is seen dancing on the cover of a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales early in the movie. Of course, he would reprise his role as Tom Thumb as well as playing another character just four years later in the big Cinemascope production of The Wonderful World Of The Brothers Grimm.

The acting in tom thumb is, as I said, not exactly subtle but I do like the fact that the film really doesn’t take itself too seriously and loved the fact that, when Tom is lowered by rope into the treasury, the bags of gold are labelled up as either ‘Gold’ or ‘More Gold’. And its little details like this within the frame that keep the film from getting dull at any point and make it a bit of a carnival ride entertainment. So there you have it... if you’ve not seen tom thumb then maybe you were missing out in your childhood. It’s full of wonderful, larger than life situations which, may seem humdrum now but which must have been a thrill to see at the cinema on its first release and, I for one, am certainly glad to be falling back under its spell again. Definitely worth a watch if you enjoy fantasy cinema and this film opened the doors to Pal directing an unproduced film he’d always wanted to have a go at, his amazing version of The Time Machine (which is another of the many classics which he either directed and/or produced). It would be nice if we could get a Blu Ray of this but, until then, the Warner Archive DVD is probably the best way you’re going to see this, almost but not quite, forgotten classic these days.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

Wilbur Seeing You
For The Last Time

Abbott and Costello
Meet Frankenstein
USA 1948 Directed by Charles Barton
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Lon Chaney Jr: I know you'll think I'm crazy, but...
in a half an hour the moon will rise and I'll turn into a wolf.

Lou Costello: You and 20 million other guys!

Abbot and Costello’s movie career was flagging somewhat, from what I can remember. I can’t find my reference for that now but I’m pretty sure the highly successful comedy duo were nearing what would have been a natural break in their careers, possibly for good. And then somebody came up with the idea for Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein which, despite Lou not initially liking the script, they at least agreed to try.

So three years after the cessation of Lon Chaney Jr’s contract with Universal, following what everybody thought would be the final film to star three of the classic franchise monsters, House Of Dracula (reviewed here), he was re-employed to make this film, which has Abbott and Costello playing two postal workers, Chic and Wilbur. Chaney would obviously replay his role as Lawrence Talbot, aka The Wolf Man and the film would also see the return of both Count Dracula and the Frankenstein monster. It’s kinda ironic given the title, I suppose, that Abbot and Costello don’t actually get to meet Frankenstein himself, of course, just the monster which became synonymous with this fictional name but, yeah, I guess we can forgive the marketing people on the movie for this grave error, to some extent at least.

Bela Lugosi returned to the role he made famous on stage and also on screen in the 1931 version of Dracula (reviewed here) and, it was a somewhat belated but welcome return for sure. Although he’d played other vampire roles for other studios over the years, such as the truly great movie The Return of The Vampire (reviewed here), this was only his second and final time playing the famous Count, brought to the world from the writings of Bram Stoker.

Also returning for another shot at his role was Glenn Strange, who was playing the Frankenstein monster for the third time, after his turns as the famous character (after Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi had all had a go at the role) in House Of Frankenstein and House Of Dracula. That being said, when he damaged his ankle on set, Chaney Jr once more doubles up for him in a few shots in the movie, most noticeably the scene where he throws one of the two leading ladies out of a window to her death. It’s interesting to note that, for the first time, Glenn Strange actually gets a few lines in the role, reminding the audience that the monster can, in fact, talk when he puts his mind to it. He could also laugh, I guess because he ruined a lot of takes of certain scenes reacting to the improvisational shenanigans Lou Costello brought to his role when playing scenes opposite him.

The two leading ladies are Lenore Aubert and Jane Randolph, who both feign romantic interest in Wilbur here for different reasons... as a way of getting them to their own personal goals. Randolph is an insurance agent, Joan, trying to track down (as is Chaney’s Lawrence Talbot) the big packages containing Dracula in his coffin and the Frankenstein monster. She thinks Wilbur knows where they are because they are accused of stealing them somehow due to some earlier, well performed tomfoolery in the first third of the picture.

Dracula’s interest, along with that of Lenore Aubert’s character Sandra, is to revive and make a slave of the Frankenstein monster. His actual motivation as to why is left unclear but,as he says, he needs a different brain inside the fleshy casing. The brain of someone who has... “No will of his own. No fiendish intellect to oppose his master.” Which is why Sandra is trying to entice Wilbur to her castle laboratory... it would be fair to say she doesn’t want him for his body, just his brain.

And, it’s a hoot. There are some nice set pieces and, although this wasn’t quite the first film to fuse comedy with horror, it’s certainly the one that shows you how it can be done right and, the simple answer is... to play the comedy straight. That is to say, the three classic monsters are taking the proceedings of the film absolutely seriously. The characters are respected and their playing out a typical Universal horror movie plot. And then you add the comedy around and with them via the two lead actors, Bud and Lou. And it works really well and certainly the audiences thought so. This film completely revived the two comics’ ailing career and saw them continuing on in movies for quite a while. The box office receipts were very healthy on this, especially seeing that the film was the second cheapest picture Universal produced that year but then was their second biggest money maker of the year. That’s a good return and it’s a shame this didn’t also help the ailing careers of the classic monsters, who would not return on screen for Universal for many decades.

It’s been said that the film should not be treated as canon with the other Universal monster movies that came before it and not be seen as, for instance, a direct sequel to House Of Dracula, because of the ridiculous jumps in continuity. After all, the Frankenstein monster and Dracula (played by John Carradine in the previous two installments) had met their end and, also, Lawrence Talbot had been cured of his lycanthropy in the previous film... only to be living with the wolf man’s curse again in this one. My personal take is, especially considering the actors in the roles, that there certainly is continuity for precisely the same reason. I mean, have you looked at the continuity between films for those last few? It’s atrocious and so the lack of logic in the continuation of those characters here is actually very typical of the franchise... so it obviously is part of the whole bunch of them, as far as I’m concerned.

There are lot of good things about the movie. Abbot and Costello work nicely here and are fairly amusing. Costello breaks the fourth wall a few times by mugging at the camera and it kind of makes the audience complicit and engaged with the storyline, to some extent. When he glances directly into the camera to push a point or impress himself by accidentally pulling a table cloth off a chest without disturbing any of the objects on it, it almost feels like you are interacting with the film and it’s a real plus in terms of the.... well, I was going to say credibility of the characters but, maybe I should just say, it’s a real plus in arousing your sympathies and making sure you are rooting for the right characters to come out on top.

There are also several bad things in the film, mostly in terms continuity, it has to be said. One big problem for me is that, in a scene where Lugosi is biting Lenore Aubert’s neck to bring her completely under his spell, we can clearly see him reflected in a mirror. Even in the last movie (and certainly in the first when Lugosi initially played the role) it was always established that a vampire casts no reflection so, yeah, the internal logic of the creatures goes out the window with this final film in the series. Which is a shame but, as I said, the Universal monster movies were not exactly known for their tight consistencies.

So, yes, a big box office hit which, I might go so far as to say, saved the careers of Abbott and Costello but which saw the demise of the monsters although, it would not quite be the last of Universal’s monster movies. There are still a few more reviews for me left to write in terms of the classic Universal monsters. For instance, an uncredited voice appearance of Vincent Price turns up in the punch line to this movie as The Invisible Man and, although Price would not go on to play him for a third time, The Invisible Man would meet Abbot and Costello in an upcoming film. As would, of course, another iteration of The Mummy and, yeah, I will be covering those films too plus, of course, the fifth and last of the classic, big Universal franchise monsters, who would only ever appear opposite Bud and Lou on their TV show. I’m talking of course about the trilogy of movies top lining the Creature From The Black Lagoon, the first of which you will find reviewed here. So, yes, join me soon for some more Universal monster shenanigans.

Hawkeye

Bird With
Christmas
Trimmings

Hawkeye
USA 2021 6 episodes
November - December 2021

Warning: Some spoilers.

Hawkeye, the latest of the Marvel TV series which link into the Marvel Cinematic Universe films (MCU) tells a story of main protagonist Clint Barton, played once again by Jeremy Renner and, in this one, he’s just trying to get back from New York to his family for Christmas Day. However, he runs into trouble when a girl called Kate Bishop, played by Hailee Steinfeld, who has been training most of her life to be just like Hawkeye after seeing him in action in the Battle Of New York from the end of the first The Avengers film (aka Marvel’s Avengers Assemble to us here in the UK), stumbles on a secret underground auction of equipment left over from the decimated Avengers mansion, as it was after the events of Endgame. Namely, his old Ronin suit and retractable sword, which gets her into trouble when gangs related to many that Ronin wiped out mistake her for Ronin and come after her. So Hawkeye (aka Barton) has to stay in New York and keep the police and gangs at bay while the two try to uncover exactly what’s going on with the people behind the auction and how Kate’s mother, played by the always wonderful Vera Farmiga, is mixed up in things.

It’s an okay and mostly entertaining show I thought. It doesn’t feel in any way important to the way the Marvel universe is being reshaped at the moment but it does cram in some other elements which will lead on to other things... and ties up one small loose end.

For example, we have Alaqua Cox playing deaf/amputee character Echo, who is soon to spin off into her own series, apparently. And we have Florence Pugh reprising her role as the new, prime Black Widow, sister of Natasha, trying to make good on her mission to kill Clint Barton leading directly from  the post credit scene in Black Widow (reviewed here). There are also a bunch of extra characters in the form of LARPers... which if memory serves stands for Live Action Role Players (yeah, I think some of my friends used to go in for this) and a one eyed dog who seems to have a terrific build up and seems like its own loose end, due to the way he meets up with Kate and Hawkeye in the TV show. I felt like the dog character had more of a purpose, perhaps, in an earlier script but maybe that part was jettisoned at some point... who knows?

And the chemistry is good between all the actors. It simmers along quite nicely with the odd, fairly well staged action scenes thrown in when they’re needed to pick up the pace... there’s a great scene where Kate and Hawkeye are getting to know each other in a car chase where she is firing off different borrowed trick arrows as they try and escape from a load of thugs. So, yeah, I loved the Christmas feel of the show and it was entertaining enough but not quite hitting on the right amount of mystery to maybe feel like it was somehow more important in the grand scheme of things.

One of the things it does do, however, is act as yet another tie in to the old, non-MCU versions of some of the characters and bring them into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I believe what’s happened with Marvel, after both their acquisition by Disney and then with the latter company also swallowing up Fox, is that they now have control over all... well, almost all... of their former characters. So at the end of both Spiderman Far From Home (reviewed here), Venom - Let There Be Carnage (reviewed here) and, I’m assuming (as I haven’t seen them yet), The Eternals and Spider-Man No Way Home, they’ve started integrating and folding characters and actors from previous non-MCU Marvel films into their own films. This is also the case with Hawkeye in that, when the main villain is revealed to be Kingpin (who it’s pretty obvious was going to put in an appearance in this), then he’s played by Vincent D'Onofrio, another great actor who played him in the old Daredevil TV show (which I’ve also not seen... yet). So, with the recent, possibly quite tenuous, news that Hugh Jackman may also be returning as a Marvel character he made famous in the X-Men films, it looks like we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this bizarre, cross franchise interpolation for a few years to come, I would think.

And, I’ve not much more to say about this other than, it kept me entertained and I had a blast with some of the Christmas references in the show. For instance, when Hawkeye is trying to teach Kate how to throw by aiming at the TV set controls, she hits it and it switches on revealing James Stewart running through Bedford Falls in It’s A Wonderful Life (reviewed here). But my best Christmas moments in the show were musical, when two of my favourite Christmas albums, Christmas In The Stars (The Star Wars Christmas album) and the great Vince Guaraldi’s incredible score to A Charlie Brown Christmas, were both featured as backgrounds to a couple of scenes.

And, yeah, a short review but not much to say about Hawkeye, I think. This one feels like a much smaller piece than some of the recent MCU TV shows but it’s not the least entertaining of them, for sure. I’m now wondering, since the plot thread was resolved in such a way that people who only watch the films will not know that it’s even happened, if we’ll ever be seeing Florence Pugh back as Natasha’s sister in the franchise. Because, presumably, people who haven’t seen this will wonder why she is not trying to kill Hawkeye the next time they meet. I guess we’ll see how popular that kind of move is away from the comic books (where it’s done all the time) when the time comes, no doubt. I think people will be confused.

The Toys That Made Us

Toy Society

The Toys That Made Us
December 2017 to November 2019
Three Seasons of Four Episodes per Season

Just a quick diversion of a review to give a heads up to a TV series I found by accident, when I needed to kill an hour one day. The Toys That Made Us is, in the words of its brilliantly 1980s cartoonesque theme song over a clever animated title sequence, “An eight part documentary series of the toys that we all know.” And, yeah, if you’re wondering, even if you’re not that good at maths, how an 8 part documentary series could run for three seasons of four episodes... they were obviously not expecting to be so successful with viewers (I’m assuming) and renewed for another season past their initial expectations. For the third series, the lyric changes to an incredibly stretched out “The continuing series... etc”.

That song and title sequence is great, though. With a cartoon boy and girl rushing into a toy shop and grabbing a toy each off the shelves before we see two adults in their own scenarios, still having their toys with them. So a doll in a female manager’s power office and an astronaut retrieving his Luke Skywalker action figure in zero gravity round out the credits... and it’s a perfect visual metaphor for the psychology of modern toy purchasers and collectors.

And the series is just as well put together as those titles. It’s a very humorous but extremely informative look at the background stories behind various successful toy lines and where they had all ended up by the time the series was made a few years ago. Wonderfully witty voice over commentary is pitted against various talking heads of company executives, toy designers and even some celebrity fans (as you’ll see as you read down the page), making for a show which is really entertaining. They also feature, in many cases, little re-enactments of real life events... many shown in a hilarious light.

The first episode covers the Star Wars figures made by Kenner (and Palitoy but they don’t really get a mention here) including the unbelievably lucrative deal they made with Lucasfilm (who weren’t smart on their end of the contract) and it also includes some wonderful knock off toys such as one country’s Dalmation with a Stormtrooper’s head and another showing a character in front of a control panel on the box... except the Death Star technology seems to have metamorphosised into a pocket calculator photograph in a very strange montage.

The second episode is one of my favourites, which surprised me as it’s dedicated to Barbie. Starting off with a re-enactment of the unboxing by the creators of the first Barbie prototypes, the designer hastily files off the painted nipples to make it look more market appropriate for the time. What I didn’t know was that the Barbie doll was a swiped knock off itself, of a German doll based on a newspaper strip about Lilli, a high end call girl and that the doll was given by men to state their intentions to sex workers there. And don’t get me started on the original prototypes for Ken’s sex organs.

The third episode delves into the world of He-Man and the Masters Of The Universe (something after my time in terms of toys, like a fair few of the items explored in the show). But I even found this one incredibly entertaining and it highlighted an issue that seems common among the people who first put a toy design out... a lot of the people who came up with these things at different stages of the process all say they were the inventor of the toy.

The last episode of Series One is dedicated to GI Joe... although mainly from an American perspective. This goes through the years from the first prototypes made behind the bosses back when he was away on a two week vacation, where incredibly authentic weapons were made and built next to artist’s poseable mannequins refitted with clay... which are the versions which are best known to me over here in the UK as the beloved Action Man from my childhood... to the modern, rebooted, smaller GI Joe figures. It demonstrates the huge risks some of the companies involved took and also shows the incredible popularity of the newer figures too.

Season 2 opens with an episode devoted to the toys of Star Trek. This includes those wonderful Mego figures I used to love as a kid (wish I still had mine, they go for a bomb nowadays) and also includes lots of mis-steps along the way such as the infamous Star Trek helmet with flashing light (honestly, Rodenberry would sign off on anything) and shows how, even though it’s a very successful franchise, the various companies trying to launch their action figure lines often failed because of incredibly bad timing.

Next up are the Transformers... another toy I know nothing about other than the live action movies. What I did find fascinating about this one is their origins being from several different Japanese toy lines mixed together and their roots in two of my favourite sets of action figures I used to adore as a kid, the Henshin Cyborg (Cyborg, Muton and Android over here in the UK) and my beloved Micronauts (I think I still have my Pharoid Micronaut in an inaccessible drawer somewhere).

Following this is the amazing tale of Lego, how a successful Danish house builder was hit by the great depression, became a carpenter and started making wooden toys which sold well... and the various stages to get to the full on Lego bricks inspired by the colours of Mondrian’s paintings we know now, including the ‘clutch power’ introduced in 1958, which was a real game changer. It also looks at their decline and almost liquidation before, of all things, their Bionicles sets saved them when, again due to bad timing, their Star Wars and Harry Potter licences wouldn’t sell toys.

The last episode of Season Two is devoted to something called Hello Kitty which seems to be a phenomenon in itself and includes collections and talking heads of such celebrities as Paris Hilton, as well as introducing us to the Hello Kitty vibrator. The writers use a nice Godzilla analogy in here too.

Series Three kicks off with the creation and development of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles property, taking it right back to the comics and, in a nice on screen moment, reuniting the estranged comic book creators, Eastman and Laird, for the first time in a long time. Writer/director/actor Kevin Smith also turns up in this one.

Next up is the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and the tenacious, eight year attempt to bring the show to the US, which utilises action footage from Japanese TV shows blended with new American footage... and the rise of their toys, which are retooled versions of the Japanese toys. It even owes some of its origins and shows a clip from that wonderfully bizarre Japanese live action Spider-Man TV show that I’ve been wishing some smart Blu Ray label will make available over here some day. Some nice footage of a younger Stan Lee in here too.

A bizarrely entertaining episode on the origins of My Little Pony comes next with a wonderfully poetic continuation of their success story in terms of their current designer (and let’s hear it for those ‘rump designs’... or butt paintings as the current design gal puts it). And then the series rounds off with a look at the various US themed Wrestling action figures over the years. I can’t believe so many of these non-articulated figures sold to kids at all, to be honest but the rivalry between the various Wrestling companies is certainly as fascinating, if not more so, than the successes and misfires of the toys.

And thats that. The Toys That Made Us is a truly great show and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that, at some point, it will be picked up for a fourth season. It’s shot full of humour and the only thing I will say to people who haven’t seen this is... watch them in order because some of the jokes depend on referencing back to earlier episodes. This one’s thoroughly recommended for both the young at heart and, of course, any grown men (who are, by definition, still just kids anyway). As one such specimen, I got a lot out of this show, for sure.

Rack Toys - Cheap, Crazed Playthings

Rack To The Future

Rack Toys -
Cheap, Crazed Playthings
Second edition by Brian Heiler
Nacelle ISBN: 9781737380108

Rack Toys, subtitled Cheap, Crazed Playthings is a wonderful little memory tome by Brian Heiler, the man behind Toy Ventures magazine (first issue reviewed here) and the Plaid Stallions website, which is here. I’ve been wanting to grab a copy of this for years but have always been put off by the fact that Amazon always used to list it as being only one page long. So I was really pleased to see that the author has just brought out a second, revised edition of the book.

This tome is aimed squarely at people like me, who spent most of their childhood in the 1970s and can remember either a lot of the toys pictured between the pages or, if not, remember another toy just like it, often using the same mould and repackaged. For these toys are the things of childhood legend... the kind of obviously cheap, lower grade toys hanging up on racks in chemists and cut price goods shops of the time. Many of these were licensed properties which were often reworks of a previous toy and you always knew, even as a kid, that there was a lot less thought involved in the production of these things than the regular children’s toys, where the policy was not just to give the product a different colour and put a sticker belonging to the latest license on it... which is exactly what the rack toy manufacturers often did.

Asides from a foreword and afterword, the book is comprised of six chapters and, if it’s word count you’re looking for, well... the book is a bit sparse in that area but what’s there does enlighten and it’s more about the brilliant full colour images of hundreds of these toys which are the main allure of the book. I’ll quickly take you through the six chapters now, although there are some overlaps and ‘creative categorising’ in this tome too, it has to be said...

Chapter One is entitled Comic Action Heroes (which is also the name of a line of a much loved set of Marvel and DC figures from my childhood but, alas, these are not featured in this book because they weren’t mere rack toys... although, you know, they still hung on racks in the shops). This section focuses on super-hero licenses and is perhaps the best to re-introduce you to one of the wonderful conundrums of the contradictory world of rack toys... that some of these things just don’t make any sense when you relate them to the licence in question. So, okay, I can just about accept a Spider-Man parachute because I saw him spin a web and use one as such in an early Spider-Man comic but, a Superman parachute? That’s a different proposition... the guy can fly and has no use for such contraptions. And as for the Spider-Man The Exterminator set... seriously? This is a gun, handcuffs and police ID badge branded with Spider-Man on the packaging. What were they thinking? It makes even less sense than the Spider-Man miniature ten pin bowling set depicted on the same page. So, yeah, there’s stuff here which will certainly bring a smile to your face... whether you remember the toy in question or not. At least the Superman water gun has a little comic strip on the packaging explaining why the last son of Krypton might have a use for such a thing. And, if you were always agonising over the origins of some products, Heiler will put you out of your misery and reveal that the Batman branded water pistol really was repackaged later as Doctor Who’s Anti-Dalek Fluid Neutraliser. And who knows what evil was lurking in the hearts of men when they repainted the 1966 Batmobile and put a figurine of The Shadow in it to rechristen it the Shadowmobile?

Chapter Two - Spooky Fun shows us a lot of figures and other products based on the various horror franchises such as Universal’s classic monsters... so Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolfman, The Mummy and Creature From The Black Lagoon are all present and correct. As are some of the larger monsters such as King Kong and Godzilla. Heck, there’s even some Jaws tie-ins. I never saw Jaws when it first came into cinemas because I was only seven years old but even I had a tie-in rubber shark when I was a kid (or more likely a knock off... I’ll get to those a little later).

Chapter Three - The Future Is Fantastic covers many of the science fiction based toys such as Planet Of The Apes (again, an abundance of parachutists and some completely out of continuity items like an Apes helicopter), Star Trek, Space 1999 and even... and I would have loved one of these as a kid but I had no idea these were even being manufactured... a tie-in action figure from the TV miniseries of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. There are also tie-ins for such sci-fi shows as Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers In The 25th Century and Flash Gordon. Another surprise was the ‘bend-em’ flexi-figure based on the extra terrestial from the final scenes of Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

Chapter Four is branded TV And Movie Superstars and contains a large number of licences including a Police Woman crime lab play set, a M*A*S*H helicopter and a Trapper John MD medical kit to tie in with the largely unsuccessful M*A*S*H spin off show. Plus loads of other stuff you may or may not have forgotten such as toys inextricably... and often inexplicably... linked to franchises such as Manimal, Street Hawk and Laverne And Shirley (although, as the writer points out, how could you have a Laverne And Shirley Pocket Calculator when this Happy Days spin off show was set in the late 1950s and early 1960s?).

Chapter Five - Saturday Morning Fun focuses on toys based on the three or four hours of shows and cartoons which would be laid on for kids on TV on a Saturday morning. Again, you have to wonder why a submarine and a deep sea diver (you know, the ones you put in the bathtub and then suck water through the attached tube to make it sink) would be branded up as a Woody Woodpecker submarine and diver. I was surprised to find some Disney stuff in this section too.

Chapter Six - Generic Joy deals with the products which weren’t tied to any famous licence and there’s some very interesting stuff here... such as the old staple of plastic infantry men in various packaging. And a whole fleet of really interesting looking toys based on the moon landing and the space race from the late 1960s. And, wow, Squirt Rings! I’d forgotten about those but used to love them as a kid. A moulded plastic ring which you wore on your finger, careful to hide the squeezy, water filled bulb attached to it in your hand so a quick clench of your fist turned the ring into a water pistol. Those were great fun.

Chapter Seven, the final chapter is called Hey, Knock It Off! This one is an extremely interesting and outrageously entertaining section which deals with unlicensed copies (or knock offs) of licensed properties in all their strange forms. So four plastic ‘soldier-like’ musicians are branded with an illustration of The Beatles, but the band is renamed The Swingers for copyright purposes. Or there’s the Sonic Man and Sonic Woman... nope, nothing bionic about these. And the Space Visitor, which seems to be some kind of science fiction vehicle with Superman’s head and arms growing out of it is... well... it’s an abomination of science and must have come out of the mind of some crazy, plastic figure of a mad scientist somewhere. I’d love one of these bizarre and somewhat unhinged toys. And of course, there’s the famous Mr. Rock... who is now worth much more money than the original Mego Mr. Spock action figures that it was riffing on.

Okay, I have some light criticisms based around the wording in this book. The typography is appalling with many typos throughout. Normally it’s not enough to hinder communication and, for example, I know an action figure was more likely to have come onto the market in 1974 as opposed to the listed year being 1074. I’m pretty sure that, in the wake of the Battle Of Hastings, for example, the kids weren’t playing with plastic action figures. There’s also the odd sentence with words left off the end completely and also a repeated caption on a page. And there’s one glaring layout where it looks like the designer came off the rails and forgot the runaround value on a section, where all of the last words on the right of a paragraph are half cropped out completely... which can impair comprehension a little.

However, I can live with all these errors and I’m sure they’ll correct them for the next edition. I was just grateful to be able to pore over the pictures in this epic book and be transported back to my youth (I’m currently in the process of living through my fourth childhood, of course). So, yeah, if you’re into the toys of the late 1960s to early 1980s then Rack Toys - Cheap, Crazed Playthings is absolutely for you. A wonderful archive of a simpler but, perhaps more fun time to grow up in. And now I just need to figure out where to grab a Wonder Woman pencil sharpener from.