Quizwoz 2023 - The Annual Cryptic Movie Quiz

 

The Annual Cryptic
Movie Quiz 2023

Welcome back, once again, for this year’s Cryptic Movie Quiz for the festive period.

How you play...

Check out the grid above and you’ll see spaces for 14 movie titles running horizontally and, below this intro, are the cryptic clues to assist you in working out what these 'non-Christmas' movie titles are. To help out, I’ve filled in a line of letters vertically downwards spelling out MERRY CHRISTMAS... so you have a letter in its correct position for each of the titles. Please don’t forget to click on the grid to see a larger version of it and maybe print it off to help yourself.

Email your answers to me at nuts4r2@hotmail.com before January 9th 2024 to get your entries in. A few days after that, I’ll stick up the name of the winner (or winners, if it’s a tie or a group effort), along with all the answers, here on my blog. No prizes, it’s just for fun but, if you like solving piuzzles and have some down time during the Christmas break, maybe give it a go.

By way of an example, here’s a question from last year’s quiz, followed by the answer...

Example question:
Game of an Egyptian God as a North American warrior.

Example answer:
So Game, an Egyptian God could be Ra and a North American warrior could be called a Brave.
So put those three together and you get... Gamera The Brave.

Or just check out the January solution pages from the last few years to get a feel for how to put these things together (you often have to make adjustments for the puntastic nature of the solutions). If you keep checking back in the comments section below, I will probably put the odd extra clue down there every now and again to help you out throughout the Christmas period.

Full marks are rarely scored by everyone so... if you’re feeling a bit stuck, there’s still everything to play for. Some people have won it with less than half the grid correct. So send me what you’ve got anyway.

I hope you enjoy playing. Make sure you have lots of fun this Christmas period, drink responsibly and play irresponsibly. Here are the questions...

1. Somebody visually recorded Italy’s capital city.

2. 16th Century firearm demonstrating one more organ of auditory processing than the average human.

3. The monster maker swore at his creation.

4. Using oars to steer thre author of Delta Of Venus towards the shore.

5. Scrambled by the hello.

6. If the four lettered town in Switzerland started and ended with the same two letters.

7. Enthusiastically expelled breath on a device manufactured to give out light.

8. Auditory organ sandwiched in a backwards, long playing record album.

9. The cannibal ate his girlfriend. He was...

10. What you get if a Pokémon goes down with a nasty skin condition... from a certain point of view.

11. Family tribe of the light coloured James Bond car in The Spy Who Loved Me

12. “Oh, Mr. Neeson!” called John Thaw’s Detective Inspector.

13. Daniel goes for a walk next to The Bridge On The River...

14. This verion of the International Space Station is powered entirely by the sun.

Godzilla Minus One

Gojira Warfare

Godzilla Minus One
Directed by Takashi Yamazaki
Japan 2023
Toho
UK Cinema Print

You know, I’m at that age where I don’t go out to the cinema on week nights anymore. I get up at 5am for work the next day so I tend to restrict my cinema time to the weekends if possible. But then Cineworld had an Unlimited cardholders preview of the new Japanese Godzilla film, just in time for next year’s 70th Anniversary of the character and, well, regular readers will know this would not be something I could resist. So I braved it out last night to the preview and... wow.

I’m not a fan of the usual hyperbole that enthusiastic audience members use to describe new films in a franchise just because it’s new and shiny. So please don’t take it lightly when I say that Godzilla Minus One is, probably the greatest Godzilla movie ever made (to date). Taking its cues from the original 1954 Ishiro Honda classic movie, this one... in my humble estimation... actually manages to pay homage to that version while somehow surpassing it.

Now, it is a reboot, so to speak and in some ways I’m sure some people will see this as just a remake from the original material but, no, it’s not. It shares some similar traits (quite deliberately and rightly so) but it is its own beast of a movie and it’s actually set just after the Second World War, as seen from the Japanese perspective. Starting towards the end of the war, the main protagonist Koichi (played by Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a kamikazi pilot who can’t see the sense in carrying out his mission now the outcome of the war is obvious. So he lands it on the fictional Odo Island (which is an island featured in the original Godzilla movie) and the mechanic team there try to figure out what’s wrong with his plane when, actually in many ways, it’s the pilot who needs fixing.

Then the creature talked about by the locals, Godzilla, shows up and leaves all but Koichi and one mechanic dead, in a truly frightening sequence. The remaining mechanic blames Koichi for not using his aircraft guns against the beast in the hopes of saving the lives of those colleagues who were either stomped, thrown or eaten and this continues the strand of emotion running through the whole film... guilt. Especially survivor’s guilt... of the chaos of war and the new terror of Godzilla. 

When Koichi returns to a war flattened Tokyo, finding both his parents dead, he befriends a woman (played by Minami Hamabe) who has ‘stolen’ a baby and is being pursued as a thief when she tries to steal it food to keep it alive. The baby is not stolen... it’s left in her care by a dying parent and Koichi’s life becomes inextricably entwined with her and the child... not to mention the presence of Godzilla who, after the Bikini Atoll test bombs, is irradiated and changed, growing larger and gaining the ability to emit a nuclear death ray from it’s mouth. And that’s mostly what I’ll say about the plot but it’s a film which is all about personal redemption and ultimately doing the right thing in the face of lethal and overwhelming odds.

Like the original film, so many decades ago, the director wisely sticks to keeping Godzilla’s screen presence to a minimum. The creature only gets about 11 minutes of screen time in a 125 minute film. Instead, the focus is on the human drama at the heart of the story and also creating many characters that the audience can really get close to. So we have a director who understands that by keeping The Big G’s appearances to a minimum, the scenes of spectacular devastation when he does put in an appearance every so often, become intensely magnified in contrast to the heartwarming, grittiness of the drama of an American occupied, post-war Japan.

And there are some wonderful nods to the franchise too, especially the original film. For instance, there’s a device which appears to me to be a version of the famous Oxygen Destroyer from the first movie and in one sequence of gripping rampage, the iconic shot where Godzilla starts chewing on the train carriages is replicated but given a new spin too, as one of the main protagonists is aboard the train and finds a way to narrowly survive that experience.

And it’s just brilliant. The film has a lot of heart and the human drama and the story of the various characters is, as I said, the main focus here, punctuated with appearances of the title monster when appropriate. Godzilla is not a character you’ll be rooting for here either. Like in the very first couple of movies, he’s very much the villain of the piece and you will want to see him stopped by whatever means possible.

And the musical score by Naoli Satô is brilliant too. I am hoping this gets a CD release because it’s phenomenal, not just in the nods back to the original franchise... although speaking of that...

By about three quarters of an hour into the movie, I was assuming we wouldn’t be hearing any of original Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube’s music interwoven into the film which, I was almost disappointed by but, honestly, the film was working so well without it, I really didn’t mind. Except, no it’s here, they just make you wait for it with some cunningly spotted sequences, bringing in the first of Ifukube’s themes for a big Godzilla moment and then, later, bringing in the full Godzilla march during a climactic action sequence. Talking of which... the leitmotif for the march seems almost twisted around this time. It’s not so much scoring the majesty of the creature... more it’s scoring the rag tag band of humans who have come out to fight Godzilla and it becomes their heroic fanfare, of a sorts. But it works very well in this capacity, I must say.

One last thing... given the trials and struggles of the lead characters leading up to the end of the film, I was surprised that the finish of the story was quite so optimistic. Two things happened which, well I won’t say I didn’t see them coming, they were always a possibility and certainly didn’t surprise me... but they did almost disappoint me in their fall back on Hollywood style optimism and hope for the future. That being said, I don’t begrudge the audience the almost impossibly happy ending the film has and, yeah, it’s not really a complaint either.

Bottom line is, I absolutely loved Godzilla Minus One and, as I said, I think it’s the best one yet. I hope this gets a sequel set in the same period following some of the same characters, for sure. Go and see this one at a cinema, is my advice. Kaiju Eiga fans will not want to miss this one on a big screen.

The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard

Necro Crom Icon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctor Who - The Giggle

52 Card Split

Doctor Who - The Giggle
Airdate: 9th December 2023
BBC

Warning: Spoilers right from the outset.

Ha! I totally called it... and have been amongst a few people for several months now at least. Wish I’d have written it in last week’s blog and backed myself more (goes back to check last week’s blog to make sure I didn't)...

Oh... okay... it turns out I did, actually.

Okay... well in that case... it needs repeating. So here’s a sentence from the last paragraph to my review of the Doctor Who episode Wild Blue Yonder (reviewed here) from last Sunday...

“Kinda half looking forward to next week’s show but not happy that Tennant will be leaving it then... if indeed he does and they don’t pull a ‘split regeneration’ on the audience, so they can ‘have their cake and eat a spin off series’ too.”

So, yeah, they totally went there. And, truth be told, I was both happy and disappointed with this direction at the same time. Happy because I’m sure the adventures of David Tennant's incarnation of The Doctor can carry on having adventures in a spin off series... probably one of the spin offs the BBC have been touting for the last year... but disappointed that this in some way dilutes the show for the next... sorry... split generation Doctor played by Ncuti Gatwa. Not that I thought he was a great debut in the role but... okay, getting ahead of myself again.

So, The Giggle... good and bad stuff in this week’s episode but mostly bad. Now, when Russell T. Davies had the reigns of the show before there was always the odd bad episode but, mostly I loved around 99% of his tenure on the show. So... I’m finding his decisions less likeable this time around and this episode was, for me, the worst of the new batch of three. So...

Okay, good things...

The opening in Soho in 1925 was good and I especially liked some of the eerie, surreal terrors found in the episode... such as the puppet babies trying to eat Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) which seemed, to me, to be lifted straight out of the original Barbarella movie... but with less blood. Still sinister though and I enjoyed the whole sequence in that room a lot. I bet that gives some of the kiddies nightmares, for sure.

And it was great to see Bonnie Langford as Mel again... although her inclusion seemed a little pointless, it had to be said. As far as anything in a work of fiction could be said to be pointless. But she was really great in this and I loved hearing about what became of Sabalom Glitz (died tripping over a whisky bottle... I’m sure the late Tony Selby would have loved that) and, also, I was pleased when Ncuti Gatwa mentioned Logopolis... one of my favourite Tom Baker stories.

Okay... the bad.

I don’t know who the heck Neil Patrick Harris is but he did a good job as a Doctor Who villain. Just not a good job as The Celestial Toymaker who, if memory serves, didn’t leap around that energetically and try to channel Joel Gray’s Master Of Ceremonies from Cabaret (which seemed so blatant to me that I can only assume it was a deliberate riff on that character) back when Michael Gough played him in the 1960s. That being said, I’ve only been following the show properly for 53 of its 60 years so, I’m not exactly an expert on it like some people are. But good on Harris from making a good job of what was written... just didn’t buy that writing, to be honest.

Generally, it felt like less was at stake because everything was just ‘made up’ all the time too, without limits. Although, the story about The Toymaker shrinking down The Master and putting him inside his gold tooth was a neat trick for bringing The Master back... I assume everyone spotted that his tooth remained and an unknown hand picked it up after The Toymaker had winked out of existence? A bit like Ming's ring at the end of the Flash Gordon movie.

Okay... not many surprises. My one surprise was when Tennant started dying and I really thought they might let that cash cow go a second time... except, nope, first ever (according to the writing) split regeneration brought about, to my mind, for all the wrong reasons, I reckon. It felt like a gimmick to hang onto future David Tenant ratings in a spin off series ‘cash grab’ rather than a genuine plot point to be honest. So was a little bit disappointed to tell you the truth (and I say that with the background that Tennant is my third, all time favourite Doctor... following closely behind Troughton and Pertwee).

Oh and.... ‘first split regeneration’ kinda but... it’s not without precedent in the show. Russell T. Davies already regenerated The Tenth Doctor’s severed arm and made a new Doctor from that (albeit a mortal one... which makes much more sense as a story thread to pursue since, you know, Tennant ages in real life) during his reign in the show. Yeah, I know it’s kinda different but... it’s also kinda the same.

Now then, the elephant in the room. I was somewhat underwhelmed by the way Ncuti Gatwa played The Doctor to be honest, “love”. Lots of confidence but coming off as a bit too full of himself somehow... which I didn’t expect actually. I was expecting to like the new guy right from the start because RTD has been saying some good things about him and, also, I know he’s already starting shooting his second season so... I’m guessing the producers are confident enough in him to pull in the ratings. But, you know, it’s very early days for this incarnation of the character so, if you felt the same way as me about him... I would caution you and say, let him settle into the role and we’ll see what he’s really like. I’m kinda hoping to be blown away by both him and also RTD again at some point soon. So, let’s not jinx it, right?

One last thing... no explanation has been given as to why Jodie Whitaker’s regeneration into David Tennant had the costume regenerate with her/him this time around... for the first time ever in the show. A friend showed me a quote from RTD saying he didn’t want to have Tennant in female clothes because it mocked ‘drag culture’ or some such rubbish. My friend also went on to point out that Jodie was wearing a pretty gender neutral costume anyway and she agreed with my less than elegant response to such a terrible decision. Either way though, it still doesn't explain why, in the world of Timelord physics, The Doctor’s clothes suddenly changed with him instead of just The Doctor... thus destroying all verisimilitude within the show. Not to mention, why did Gatwa’s new Doctor emerge from Tennant’s body with half a costume on? It makes absolutely no sense and, I’m sorry, if you’re going to pull such ridiculous nonsense on an audience, at least come up with a reasonable explanation of it within the world of the show. It just makes the writing feel a bit amateurish, to be honest. Like nobody actually really cares about the world of Doctor Who.

And I think that’s me about done on this one but, while I’m at it... The Giggle was my least favourite, by a long chalk, of the three new 60th Anniversary specials but, honestly, although I kinda liked the first one and quite enjoyed the second one... I thought that, all in all, this was not the way you celebrate a Doctor Who anniversary. Sorry to be a bit of a stick in the mud and probably a little bit old school (no, just old... yeah, I know) but I want a lot more old companions and a lot more Doctors teaming up together to save the universe from an extinction level event in this kind of celebration. I thought the two 50th anniversary shows... The Day Of The Doctor (reviewed here) and the original cut (don’t get me started) of An Adventure In Space And Time (reviewed here) were hands down ten times better than these ones... so, yeah, bit frustrated by the lack of celebratory goodness here. Not to mention the absence of a stand alone Radio Times special celebrating sixty years of the show (I still have my 10th Anniversary Special with Jon Pertwee on the cover).

So, yeah, more than a little underwhelmed and I am not really looking forward to the new Christmas special, to be honest. But, yeah, of course I’m going to watch it and I hope it proves way better than I am expecting. As always, I’ll let you know my thoughts about it here... probably on December 26th, I would think.

Opening The Cage: A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin

A Lizard But
Taller, In London*

Opening The Cage:
A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin
Written by Keri O’Shea
Warped Perspective No ISBN

Just a very quick shout out to Keri O’Shea’s new monograph, Opening The Cage: A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin. I have to admit, I bought this one thinking it would be another modern take on one of my favourite gialli which I would probably disagree with and ultimately become enraged by but, how often do you see a dedicated study on Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin? So I plonked down my money and received my copy a very quick two days later, accompanied by a brief note by the author thanking me for my support (I always love it when that happens.... it’s just a shame she didn’t sign the copy too).

And I have to say, I was quite joyfully surprised by this one when I started to read. I mean, okay yeah, if I ever sat with this lady in a pub there might be possibly be some slight disagreement in the difference in genre between giallo and horror in cinema but, honestly, this was a refreshing, intelligent look at the movie through none of the obfuscating prisms... nor, indeed, the usual paths I was expecting from modern film criticism.

I mean, if you’re looking for an in depth look at how the film was made or marketed etc then you are possibly at the wrong venue. What we have here instead, is an analysis of the film which goes into other areas less well travelled. And where the thing does stray to make its point, it does so in a very thorough manner and, perhaps my appreciation of this particular work on the subject comes from the fact that the writer is, indeed, taking me into areas where I don’t have nearly as much knowledge as she... so I was always going to find this one interesting, at the very least. But this isn’t “the very least”... it’s so much more.

For instance, the chapter entitled A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin And The Curious Death Of The Age Of Aquarius is one of many chapters highlighting the two ‘LSD blinded hippie witnesses’ in the movie but explains how the films main protagonist...and, okay yeah, spoiler warning, don’t read on if you’ve not seen the movie... antagonist, played by Florinda Bolkan, rejects the hippies as a negative factor (whilst obviously embracing some of their lifestyle for at least a little of the movie, in her recent back story) and how this is filtered from Lucio Fulci’s own attitudes towards them and their falling out of favour with the world after incidents like the Manson Murders. Indeed, the next chapter entitled We’re Not In Wonderland Anymore, Alice gives a good background on Manson and his followers, as other chapters veer off into such fascinating subjects as LSD and various locations in London where the movie was shot (I learned that some of it was also shot in Italy, doubling for London, which I didn’t realise before).

Above and beyond the high quality of the writing and the thought behind it, the whole book is presented well too. Starting off with the famous poster image on the front cover of Leslie McRay... who wasn’t even in the film but modelled for the advertising (see my review of The Female Bunch here for more details)... the book is really well designed and put together as an attractive package featuring lots of colour photos. Admittedly, the section on Fulci’s burgeoning interest in art and his use of it in the movie could have used a few illustrations of the paintings in question and, yeah, there are just a couple of pages where legibility and readability are slightly threatened by the colours on the underlays but, I can’t complain because the whole thing hangs together really well and just looks fantastic!

And I even learned a new word and now know what Cruention is so, yeah, the book is certainly informative in ways I wasn’t expecting it to be, too. All in all then, Opening The Cage: A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin is a very positive read on aspects of one of my favourite Fulci films that are often not considered and this one clearly demonstrates how various writers can bring their own, very valid spin to things. If you’re into the movie then I’d say snap this one up while you can. Copies can be ordered direct from the publishers at https://warped-perspective.com/index.php/shop/

 *Yeah, if you can work out that pun title... you're really good. ;-)

Chinatown Kid

Frisco Fu Fighters

Chinatown Kid
aka Tang ren jie xiao zi
Hong Kong 1977
Directed by Cheh Chang
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers in this one.

Chinatown Kid is the eighth of the films presented in Volume One of Arrow Films ShawScope Blu Ray boxed edition and, like all but a couple of the films included in this box, it’s a first time watch from me. There are two very tonally different versions of the film presented here, the slightly happier ending 90 minute version and the darker, more shades of gray original cut, lasting almost two hours and with a much less optimistic ending (if either ending could said to be optimistic).

The film follows two characters, the primary being main lead Sheng Fu as Tan Tung. Now, I’ve seen Sheng Fu in a number of films in this set and I’ve quite warmed to his mischievous on screen personality and Beatles style mop top... so I was sad to learn, in one of the extras presented here that, at the height of his career and happily married to singing sensation Jenny (who also co-stars in Chinatown Kid), he died in a car crash at the age of 28, in the same period as he was filming The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter... a film I’ve not seen as yet but, when I watch it, if I notice his character suddenly dropping out of the narrative, well, at least I now know the reason why.

This film follows him getting in trouble in Hong Kong by basically helping somebody out and then having to exit the country hastily, after he is framed for drug possession and the police are after him. He flees Hong Kong, heading for a destination that we also see his co-star Chien Sun as Yang Chien-wen also go to.  Yang comes from a completely different class background, having won a scholarship to study abroad. So they both pitch up in San Francisco, where cinema marquees for such famous pornographic films as Deep Throat and The Devil In Miss Jones act as a perfect time capsule of the era.

The two co-stars meet and get illegal immigrant jobs in a restaurant but when Tan, who is very much the focus of the film, keeps getting into trouble defending people using his Kung Fu skills... he eventually finds himself out of work and out on the streets. However, the combination of his blind naivete and wanting to help people out means he’s suddenly working for one of the king pin bosses of Chinatown, going from rags to extreme riches in a matter of weeks. However, when he finds out his boss is actively involved in drug dealing, he then sets out to destroy that trade. It’s lots of ‘to’ing and ‘fro’ing through a moral minefield as Tan constantly strives to do the right thing and is constantly getting himself into more trouble every time he falls into the trap of helping people. Indeed, as the movie goes on, various people who he’s helped, then reject his friendship and he even finds himself at odds with Yang after a while.

The film has it’s fair share of fight scenes where Sheng Fu gets to show off his formidable martial arts skills, facing off against some opponents who seem to be almost as good as him. Occasionally, like in the big fight at the end of the picture, he fights side by side with Chien Sun, when Chien’s character finally understands just how Tan has been secretly helping him... by funding his studies with his fat cat gangster money.

And it’s an interesting film regarding the morality of the characters portrayed. In terms of the various gangland factions throughout the movie, there are no good guys. Everyone is either the ‘bad guy’ or the ‘not quite as bad guy’ but, of course, by the end of the film, even the slightly less sinister gang turns out to be just another bunch of ruthless criminals. The only real innocents in the movie are the two male leads... Tan due to his ignorance, naivete and loyalty to people and Yang, out of a sense of wanting to keep up with his studies (which leads him to drugs to stay awake to study after a long shift at work). And, as I said, it’s a nice time capsule movie too... I mean, how many films are there where the corrupted, innocent hero gets involved with the wrong people due to his desire to own a digital watch? Indeed, it’s a sign of the times and also a nice comment on the character that, when he is dying from his wound in the final scene (he’s just arrested in the shorter version), he tries to give Yang his digital watch as an ultimate symbol of their friendship.

And that’s me done on Chinatown Kid. It’s refreshing to see a Kung Fu filled Shaw Brothers movie actually set in times contemporary to when it was made. I mean, okay, The Mighty Peking Man (reviewed here) was, for sure but... yeah... that wasn’t a martial arts movie. I can see how pictures like this might have influenced the next generation of film directors and certainly, for instance, John Woo... who was an assistant director at Shaw Brothers in the late 1960s. So yeah, a funky score (excluding the terrible title song at the start, which Tan is forever quoting the lyrics from throughout the movie) of needle dropped cues from the De Wolf library, a chunk of which are included on one of the two accompanying soundtrack albums in Arrows mighty ShawScope Volume One box set and, even a dagger disguised as a belt buckle... make this a lively and fun watch. Worth a look.

Doctor Who - Wild Blue Yonder

Mavity The
Mystery Grav

Doctor Who -
Wild Blue Yonder
Airdate: 2nd December 2023
BBC plus nameless evil entities

Warning: Trying hard not to put spoilers in but I know the stuff about the cast may give away the nature of the threat that The Doctor and Donna face this week.

Right then. First of all folks... this is going to be a very short review because there’s no way I’m going to put major spoilers in this one and, as you’ll see from my points about the... erm... ‘redacted’ cast list, certain things about those credits may give a lot of things away. So I’ll keep it brief.

But what I will say is...Wild Blue Yonder is the scariest episode of Doctor Who I’ve seen since the days of Jon Pertwee, for sure. Okay... maybe that one where The Doctor gets stuck on the tour shuttle with the alien who starts absorbing him and mimicking him in the Tennant era was pretty scary too but, been a long time since an episode was this warped and I am delighted to say that. I’m sure lots of young ‘uns will be scared witless, have terrible nightmares and usher in a lot of complaints from parents to the BBC so... yeah, classic Doctor Who is back, in a way.

Okay... there are some bad things here, offset by the brilliance of the majority of the episode. But, the main problem I had with it is the opening prologue with Isaac Newton discovering... umm... mavity. I’ll come back to the mavity thing in a minute. But, you know I’m going to say it in my best ‘I’m no racist but’ accent here anyway... Isaac Newton was never black or Mediterranean or whatever colour this guy’s skin was. This is either, as I suspect, terrible and completely baffling casting on the behalf of the BBC (or more likely that other production company) or... okay... When The Doctor and Donna both make the joke to Newton about the ‘gravity of the situation’, Donna definitely said gravity, I think. Newton said mavity. And later, The Doctor had to change his usage of the word gravity to mavity to make Donna understand. What? Maybe, since it’s proved once again in this episode that Donna certainly isn’t as stupid as she’s made out to be, the possibility exists that we’re in an alternate universe where Isaac Newton had darker skin and there were later to be formed, the Laws Of Mavity. Perhaps.

I kind of hope so, in a way, because that would explain the Newton thing, for sure. Except, Donna did say gravity to begin with so... maybe not. Either way it’s really bad writing, for sure. And hopefully not really bad casting after all but... somehow I doubt it. And I say this very much because of the consequences of what people pick up from television... remember that a lot of people in their teens, twenties and thirties now believe (and I know this because I work in an educational institution), that Hitler was machine gunned to death in an exploding cinema (thanks to Quentin Tarantino) and that Sharon Tate and her unborn child was not murdered by the followers of Charles Manson and instead made lots more films into her old age (again, thanks to Tarantino) so, yeah, this kind of casting, if not done deliberately to foreshadow a parallel universe, is very dangerous in terms of damaging historical education, it has to be said.

But, forget that.

Wonderful episode... truly disturbing and I got a real touch of nostalgia for 1970s Doctor Who from this one, in terms of the creeping scariness of the episode. Okay, you could see where the ship's corridors were designed to be able to put up cost cutting backdrops (digital or painted, whatever) in much the same way that the old extended corridor in the opening titles of The Prisoner (the greatest TV show ever made) was just a blown up photo to give it depth. But that’s okay... Doctor Who is supposed to have dodgy effects, isn’t it? And, anyway, it’s the story which is where this one shone... and the dialogue for sure. Nice cameo from a certain person we expected to turn up last week too, it has to be said.

However, here comes my last grumble on this one. 

That veil of secrecy and the cast list with three actors redacted. What a load of rubbish and, once again, I feel deceived by the programme makers. And if you’ve seen the episode you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. I will say, though, that it was also a very smart move on Russell T. Davies’ part because, think about it... with the small cast and the very contained environment the story takes place in, practically any small piece of knowledge about the episode would have told you everything you needed to know. There was so little in terms of story elements in it that anything at all given away would have killed it. And, I’d have to also say it’s one of the least rewatchable of the episodes, in my opinion, because there’s not so much to it. 

But, like I said, and I’ll conclude this review here, Doctor Who - Wild Blue Yonder was one of the most disturbing episodes in a very long time so, yeah, despite the vary valid grumbles I have of it, I really enjoyed this one. Kinda half looking forward to next week’s show but not happy that Tennant will be leaving it then... if indeed he does and they don’t pull a ‘split regeneration’ on the audience, so they can ‘have their cake and eat a spin off series’ too. We shall see, I guess.

The Spider Woman

Spiders In Pyjamas

The Spider Woman
USA 1943 Directed by Roy William Neill
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Well this one’s a lot of fun, to be sure. Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce and Mary Gordon reprise their roles as Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson and Mrs. Hudson for The Spider Woman, the next in the series of Sherlock Holmes films which started at 20th Century Fox and then quickly got relaunched and contemporised by Universal from the third film onwards. This one is not based on any singular tale from author Arthur Conan Doyles long list of Sherlock Holmes stories. Instead, the screenwriters have mashed up no less than five of them to concoct a mighty fun entry into the ever popular series (with this being number seven, we’re at the halfway mark). The stories pillaged for this particular celluloid confection are The Adventure Of The Final Problem, The Adventure Of The Empty House, The Adventure Of The Speckled Band, The Sign Of Four and The Adventure Of The Devil’s Foot.

And it’s quite a wonderful romp, like much of these Holmes films... perhaps one of the best of the series. It features Gail Sondergaard as Adrea Spedding, the titular Spider Woman... a female Moriarty who is set up and written as a clever villain who can match wits properly with Holmes. A kind of Irene Adler alternative in a way, it might be said.

Also along for the ride again is Dennis Hoey doing his wonderfully dim but righteous version of Inspector Lestrade. It’s only his third film in the role but already he’s gone from second fiddle to Holmes to second fiddle to Watson. At one point, where he’s whistling to try and blend in with a crowd, Watson comments “He said inconspicuous Lestrade, not half witted!” which is just one in a number of great comical lines scattered throughout the story. The chemistry between Hoey and both Rathbone and Bruce is absolute magic and it even gets quite moving when, in the wake of Sherlock Holmes’ death near the start of the film, when Watson and Lestrade are both clearly grieving, Watson gives the policeman his favourite of Holmes’ pipes as a souvenir to remember him.

What’s that? Sherlock Holmes dies early on in the picture?

Well, it’s not in a battle with Moriarty on the Reichenbach Falls but it does take place near a waterfall as, under the pretext of a fishing holiday with Watson, he fakes a cerebral haemorrhage and seemingly falls into some rocky waterfalls, apparently to his death. This is in order to try and investigate, behind the scenes, a string of murders known as The Pyjama Suicides, masterminded by Spedding and using, it turns out, deadly spiders which I suspect are somewhat fictional but which have such painful bites that the victim leaps to his death from the pain.

So not long into the film we have Holmes returning to 221B Baker Street under the disguise of a postman and revealing himself to Watson and Lestrade. Now, bearing in mind the Holmes films of this series have almost always featured Rathbone in at least one disguise, the previous film Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (reviewed here) had eschewed that trend. However, although the disguise is easier to spot because the audience is expecting (surely?) Holmes to return after dying so early in the film, Rathbone makes up for it by donning two disguises here, one of the aforementioned, highly opinionated (enough to receive a sock on the jaw from Watson) member of the English postal service and another, in brown face, of a Maharajah, in order to find out the truth behind the suicide murder scam.

This one has it’s fair share of action too, including a number of deathtraps including a toxic gas via a chemical process when a child accompanying the Spider Woman throws a harmless looking sweet wrapper into the fireplace of 221B Baker Street... and a wonderful end game sequence where Holmes is tied behind a moving target of Adolf Hitler at a fair ground with his chest exposed behind the conveyor belt standee, while an unknowing Watson nearly shoots him through the heart a number of times. The scene with the sweet wrapper is a wonderful sequence as the two adversaries, Holmes and Spedding, acknowledge their recognition of the other’s status in a cat and mouse back and forth as each destroys and offers up evidence of their role in the game, which is clearly afoot, so to speak.

One other nice thing is that, clearly seen on the wall in Holmes room at Baker Street, is the pencil figure with the bullet holes from Holmes bound target practice experiment from the previous film, Sherlock Holmes Faces Death. A nice piece of continuity there (and I guess it certainly saved time redressing the bullet hole ridden wall on the part of the set builders).

And that’s me done on this seventh and very lively example of Rathbone and Bruce’s Sherlock Holmes adventures. The Spider Woman shows everyone at the top of their game and it must have hit big with audiences because it wasn’t too long before Gale Sondergaard returned to the screens in a picture called The Spider Woman Strikes Back. Admittedly, it wasn’t a sequel or spin off and she wasn’t playing the same character but, the marketing people must have thought that cashing in on the title familiarity was a good bet. One day I’ll have to seek that one out and have a look at it.

Dream Scenario

Dreamageddon!

Dream Scenario
Directed by Kristoffer Borgli
USA A24 2023
UK cinema release print.

Warning: This one has some spoilerage in
terms of discussing the concept and where it goes.

A brief shout out now to new movie Dream Scenario, written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli. This one stars Nicolas Cage as Paul Matthews, a professor at a university who has never really done much with his life and never gotten around to writing his book... instead he resents that others are profiting from the same field of research as he and he comes across as a bit of a non-person, in many ways. That is until he starts invading other people’s dreams, through no fault of his own. After an opening sequence where we witness a dream experienced by one of his daughters (and I don’t think that’s particularly a spoiler... it was obvious to me from the first shot that we were in a dream) he hears how he was just a passive person in the dream... not responding to what was going on around him as anything special and not really helping out. He is a little concerned, after hearing this, that he’s seen like this in real life by both his two daughters and his wife (played by Julianne Nicholson).

However, after a few more scenes it turns out that a lot of people have suddenly started dreaming about him, from all over the world and that his persona in these dreams, one of someone who is just a casual, uninterested observer, is the common denominator (for a while). Paul becomes an overnight media sensation and is highly sought after as advertising fodder for high profile creative companies such as one run by Trent, played by Michael Cera (in the kind of role I’ve not seen him do before but he’s very good in this) and for various interviews. However, there’s a point in the movie where one person he meets has a dream where he’s not as passive but, when the young woman in question tries to co-opt him into reliving her personal dream fantasy of him, it goes kinda wrong and, suddenly, from that point on... things change.

Suddenly, Paul is seen killing and terrorising various people in their dreams and, all of a sudden, nobody wants to be around him... this affects his job, his wife’s job and various other things in his life. Even Paul himself is, as I kinda knew he would be once the movie started going down this path, haunted by himself in an aggressive dream fantasy and suddenly, the film shifts gears and becomes all about the bizarrely modern trend of ‘cancel culture’ and how it affects the innocent victims as much as people who have truly done anything wrong.

And it’s a nice little movie. It almost outstays its welcome in the last quarter of an hour or so when it takes another turn into what happens when the whole phenomenon stops but, it doesn’t quite wrongfoot itself and the way it ends is as nice a way as any (and I was waiting for that oversized novelty Talking Heads jacket to make an appearance in the film since an early reference to it). There are also some nice things going on technically, such as an early scene where Paul is recording a dinner conversation on his phone and the dinner is cross cut with him listening to the recording in his car. At some point in the sequence, the audio properties of the recording of the conversation juxtapose the images of the actual conversation and we then subtly shift, perhaps, into Paul’s visual memories of the conversation as exhibited by that shift in audio quality, which is visually no different whatsoever to the actual scene as it plays out. Which is a really nice thing to do with it, I thought.

In terms of tone, the film is hard to pin down but it reminded me a little bit of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries but leaning heavily into Woody Allen’s homage to that film in Deconstructing Harry. And then, towards the end, there’s a Philip K. Dick kind of epilogue to the whole story which brings it almost into the realm of soft science fiction. And yeah, a short review of the film, for sure but, that’s me done with Dream Scenario, I think. It’s an interesting look at the way an innocent victim’s life can be turned upside down by events which are completely nothing to do with that person but still invite the wrath of the world to your doorstep. An interesting film for lovers of cinema, I would say. Very much worth a look.

Doctor Who - The Star Beast

A Wolf In
Meep’s Clothing

Doctor Who - The Star Beast
Airdate: 25th November 2023
BBC 1 (co-produced with some other
evil studios who are ransoming it to
the rest of the world on a streaming
channel, thus becoming typical
Doctor Who villains).

So, Doctor Who - The Star Beast is the first of three Anniversary episodes to commemorate Great Britain’s favourite Timelord’s 60th year... puzzlingly airing two days after the actual 60th anniversary date but, it makes more sense to air it on the traditional Saturday evening anyway... back where it belongs. And it’s adapted from the always brilliant Pat Mills’ and Dave Gibbon’s Fourth Doctor comic strip from Doctor Who Weekly from way back when (to read more about that, see my very recent review of Doctor Who - The Fourth Doctor Anthology, right here). It also marks the return of David Tennant to the role of The Doctor, making TV history by playing a second incarnation of the Timelord (who mysteriously regenerated into new clothes too... I hope they address this issue soon) and the brilliant show runner who brought the show back in the early 2000s, Russell T. Davies.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about this, to be honest. I loved the majority of the Davies era and think the show started going progressively downhill since he left. Tennant is maybe my second or third favourite Doctor of all time and I know he can act the heck out of this role so, I wasn’t worried on his behalf but, I dunno, I had mixed feelings about all this.

And, yeah... maybe I was right to.

This new show was both brilliant but tempered with some really bad stuff also. Still, my favourite Camden Town shop, Cyberdog, was featured in a few shots at the start and end of the show so... that was cool. But yeah, seriously, I also had reservations about how long an adaptation of The Star Beast could take in terms of screen time... I guessed about 15 - 20 minutes but, of course, it’s a) not about jumping through sets of panels and b) there’s all the other stuff about why The Doctor has the same face, not to mention the fallout from what would happen to Donna Noble if she ever remembers The Doctor due to her life saving memory wipe (aka she will die).

Okay, so the story worked fairly well and, it was well performed by just about everyone... and some of the comical dialogue and physical comedy was fantastic. I’m not sure that The Meep came off as evil as it should have done from the comics but... the insectoid Wrarth Warriors were well handled and the bigger budget, presumably half funded by Disney, meant it feels a little more epic than we might have hoped for but, luckily, it was directed with a deft hand and it really somehow felt more like Doctor Who than it had in a while. So that’s all good.

There were problems with it too though, at least from my perspective.

Number one was the truly cheesy, break the fourth wall opening where The Doctor and Donna are kinda filling in the back story for people. Honestly, I suspect this was added after the ‘Disney masters’ or somebody overly cautious at the BBC panicked about it because there were two reasons why this sequence didn’t work. Firstly, standing in front of a screen and filling it in with special effects later, as we’ve seen on lesser shows like The Mandalorian, doesn’t have to look that cheap. Were those matte lines I could see around The Doctor? That doesn’t really matter though... it’s Doctor Who. It’s supposed to look cheap and wobbly. However, all the bits they filled the audience in on... which was admittedly needed at some point... are already firmly flagged up and highlighted to death within the story itself. It just felt like they were repeating themselves later and it rendered the opening sequence completely superfluous anyway. So why include the bloody thing in the first place?

Number two... when the show was relaunched with Eccleston and later Tennant, all of my friends who, I assure you, are all more ‘woke’ than me (which isn’t hard... so apologies for that, I guess... not really though, I am who I am) were complaining about how politically correct and tick boxy the show had become and, in the intervening years, that aspect just kept getting worse (alienating a lot of viewers, from what I could see). And, alas, this one is absolutely devoting loads of time to being horrendously twee and ‘down with the kids’ and, it felt like it was just ramming the whole mental illness rebranded issue and so on down the throats of the viewers. It’s fine though. Unlike some of the more tolerant and modern thinking people I sometimes deal with... I can totally live with it and just ignore it when it comes up... but just wish I didn’t have to. I’ve already had one derogatory text from a much more enlightened friend than I expressing a little disappointment with this angle on last night's episode. Still... it is what it is, I suppose.

Thirdly, the IMDB and various other outlets have been lying to us again. Listed in this episode’s credits are Jemma Redgrave, Bernard Cribbins and Bonnie Langford, returning to their respective roles but... nope... none of these people are present and correct here, I’m afraid. The show and disclosure of some of its contents was always deceitful in its marketing since its return in the early 2000s and, nothing has changed it seems. I get annoyed about this stuff but move on and just carry on trusting my own instinct about what’s going to happen next... rather than attempt to get my information from the ‘official source’, so to speak.

But, those three problems aside, the episode was a hoot and I mostly had a blast with The Star Beast. I especially loved Murray Gold's score and the way he kept teasing the old Tenth Doctor action music, All The Strange Creatures, in different tempos and orchestrations throughout the episode... the Tenth Doctor's theme in Fourteenth's clothing, so to speak. And I am looking forward to seeing where the TARDIS has fled to for the next chapter (and oh, by the way guys, lovely redesign on the regenerated interiors... shame you had to blow it all up only a couple of minutes after we get to see it). The next episode has been shrouded in secrecy so it’s the one people are most wanting to see, of course. I’ll probably be late to seeing that second one, unfortunately, due to an early Christmas function but, I am still hoping to get my review up next Sunday. It just might come in the evening rather than in the morning this time. Keeping my fingers crossed I won’t have to run something else and hold it over until Monday though. Allons-y!

Doctor Who - The Fourth Doctor Anthology

Meep Throat

Doctor Who -
The Fourth Doctor Anthology
Panini Comics
ISBN: 9781804911587

This is a somewhat timely reprint of all the Tom Baker likeness comic strips that appeared in the original Doctor Who Weekly and subsequent Doctor Who Monthly comics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before he changed to Peter Davidson in the strip. And when I say timely I mean, strategically marketed to come out and grab the cash at the best possible time, when readers like me will be wanting to reacquaint themselves with one Pat Mills story in particular, The Star Beast. Because, at time of writing, a modern TV adaptation of that particular strip, which ran over a few weeks, will be screening in just a few days as episode one of the new 14th Doctor 60 year anniversary specials.

I used to love the comic and I still, if moths haven’t got to them, have the first 70 or so issues up in the loft somewhere. I remember reading these issues the first time around and being completely hooked on them from the opening story (in particular). Revisiting them now, it’s certainly easy to see why. They had the absolute cream of the crop of British creative talent working on these and most, if not all, of the writers were doing the same job on Britain’s greatest comic (and in their words, the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic) 2000AD... which I also have the first thousand or so issues of, stashed away in boxes. So these stories are brought to you by giants like writers Pat Mills (the creator of 2000AD), John Wagner (co-creator of Judge Dredd) and Steve Parkhouse... not to mention artists such as Dave Gibbons and, for one brief but memorably stylised story featuring an old style Cyberman straight out of the William Hartnell story The Tenth Planet, Mike McMahon (who drew the greatest Judge Dredd strips ever... although, arguably, the same could be said of Brian Bolland).

And yeah, you can tell it’s all these 2000AD people writing this for what was, then, the British arm of Marvel, because the stories are absolutely packed chock full of action but also two very tell tale things... they are full of ideas worked into the world building and, they are equally full of dark humour coupled with brilliantly terrible puns (both visual and verbal). Not to mention, they wear their influences very much on their sleeves sometimes in terms of riffing (or let’s face it, stealing) from famous pop culture franchises.

For instance, the story Dragon’s Claw deals with the warriors of the Shaolin Temple and the myth of the 18 Bronze Men (who featured in a fair few kung fu movies) is woven into the plot. Although, in this version, the 18 Bronze Men turn out to be Sontaran warriors. Similarly, an excellent story called City Of The Damned, where a planet is ruled by leaders who have wiped out all emotional reaction from the population, must surely have taken it’s inspiration from George Lucas’ early film THX1138.

There are even a few things which directly tie it up to 2000AD stories a few times, such as the mention of a ‘Shuggy Hall’ in the story Dogs Of Doom... Shuggy was a kind of ‘crazy snooker/pool’ game played in Mega City One from the world of Judge Dredd. And in my favourite of these stories, which opens this collection, The Iron Legion (which deals with a mechanical robot army based on the Roman Empire invading parts of the galaxy, controlled by an evil race of alien entities), there’s an old broken down Robot called Vesuvias and, honestly, he’s not a far cry from Walter The Wobot, Judge Dredd’s robot butler in the early days of 2000AD.

The stories presented here range from longer, multi part stories to one off, self contained tales but, the majority of them are hits rather than misses even now, I would say. As for The Star Beast, with Beep The Meep and the alien Wraiths hunting him... well, I remembered it well so I must have liked it back in the day but, it just seems to me now like the twist in the character (which I saw coming even in my early teens) is very obvious and, that story doesn’t have too much else going for it, to be honest. Also, I’m really not sure how the story can be fleshed out to take up more than around 15 minutes of screen time so I’m guessing the TV version of The Star Beast will be padded with a lot of the falling out from the surprise regeneration at the end of the last show, The Power Of The Doctor (reviewed here) and a shaky, possibly temporary resolution (of sorts) to the Doctor/Donna problem.

That being said, anything written by Pat Mills is always going to be worth a look so I remain hopeful and, regarding Doctor Who - The Fourth Doctor Anthology, I remain grateful that these wonderful strips have gotten a beautiful reprint at the best possible time. I loved revisiting these stories and they’re definitely worth tracking down if you’ve never read them before.

Abducted By The Daleks

Exterminating Angels

Abducted By The Daleks
aka Abducted BY The Daloids
Directed by Don Skaro
UK 2005 DVD 0
A Stella International Production

I’m pretty sure Don Skaro isn’t the real name of the director of Abducted By The Daleks... and I also suspect he wrote the film and did various other things on it because, on the credits, all kinds of pseudonyms are used, some of them Doctor Who oriented. Story by Billy Hartnell anyone? I’m pretty sure he’s the same director who made the notorious Fantom Killer movies which, I suspect, he also directed under an assumed name. Now, I think I know his real name because I’m pretty sure the director is the man who sold this to me at the Camden Film Fair back in 2005. I’m not going to say what his real name is here because of a) the very slim chance I may be wrong about my assumption and b) because he seemed like a really nice guy (who sold me some rare soundtrack CDs sometimes)... although he did seem to vanish from the scene a few years after this movie came out. He was a regular stall holder at Camden and I saw, on more than one occasion, one of the ‘stars’ of Abducted By The Daleks and other films come and talk to him briefly, making a rendezvous or business engagement for later in the day/week/whatever.

Given the somewhat illegal nature (in the UK at the time) of a lot of the films he had tucked away and behind his stall for ‘ special customers’, I’m guessing he’s one of the reasons the old Camden Film Fair used to occasionally get raided by the police. We customers didn’t mind... stalls being raided for forbidden items just increased ones desirability to keep going to that particular film fair, it has to be said. It was like free publicity. And talking of free publicity... this little film with covers printed on an inkjet printer and burned onto suspicious looking CDRs... had its fifteen minutes of infamy when the British press got a hold on one somehow and were all over it. Dalek porn corrupting the youth of today... or some such rubbish... perhaps forgetting about Jon Pertwee’s wonderful character companion, actress Katy Manning’s naked photo shoot with a Dalek as an embedded part of Doctor Who culture.

The BBC were said to be furious and, the next month, the name of the film had been changed to Abducted By The Daloids. However, since the film has a good many scenes with actual Daleks in it... I can’t imagine the BBC went anywhere near it and probably figured it wasn’t worth suing as the total budget of the film, which runs for only 55 minutes, is probably less than the price of a couple of ham sandwiches in the BBC canteen. I can’t help but think the title change was merely a less than subtle move to stop policemen coming in and realising what was being sold, after it had hit the tabloids. Can’t sell confiscated stock, after all.

And so we come to the film itself, which stars Katarzyna Zelnik, Eliza Borecka, Sonja Karina, Lina Black, Maria Vasolva and... three Daleks. On the way to somewhere, four girls get lost in the woods after running over a grey alien (aka a Zeta Reticulan... which is not mentioned again later in the story at all). Luckily, the driver of the car happens to carry four torches in her glove compartment for just such emergencies. As the night goes on, the girls... first one... then two more.... get teleported up to a Dalek spaceship for interrogation (sans clothing, of course). When their insanely unpersuasive, shouty efforts fail to make them talk about what earthlings are like, they teleport the fourth one up (who is being stalked by a serial killer who skins his victims alive). She turns out to be the Dalek’s dominatrix for hire, who also tries completely non-harmful ways of getting the girls to talk. It’s almost like the Daleks could just have asked her what Earthlings are like instead, rather than go to all this trouble. All the girls are exterminated apart from the makeshift domme who is teleported down to Earth for a scene with the serial killer. Said teleporter accidentally changing her appearance so she can be played by another ‘actress’ when the other one was, presumably, not available for the last part of the shoot.

It’s pretty terrible but the director does have a few ideas which are worth mentioning.. such as using the naked bodies of the girls reflected in the tip of the Dalek eyestalk. But mostly it’s just rubbish and pretty much all the girls seem really bad actresses. Every now and again, music lifted from one of the Godzilla films, One Step Beyond, The Mole People or Pink Floyd will be used to ‘enhance’ the drama. But, everything looks fake... even the terrible pretence at a lesbian scene by ladies who clearly aren’t into it that much. And I suspect that at least one of the girls has more silicon on her than the three daleks put together.

The Daleks themselves are interesting. One looks like a purchased prop from one of the Peter Cushing films, one looks like a Jon Pertwee era Dalek and the third... looks like an old ride or bad waxworks version, with the top section completely out of proportion with its body but still, somehow, looking kinda elegant.* The Daleks just aren’t able to save this terrible film though.

It’s bad but, that certainly doesn’t stop it from being entertaining... in that, “how does anyone make a movie this bad”, kind of way Well, to answer that, the ‘alternate cut’ on the disc is just a series of multiple outtakes and flubs strung together in he same sequence as the movie. And, honestly, if the girls were as hard to work with from take to take during this shoot as is evidenced here... it’ possibly no wonder that the serial killer story had to be, one assumes, tacked onto the end with a different actress to pad the already small running time.

So yeah, the film gets an A for effort but it never really lives up to the unwritten promise of the title and it is very cheesy... the Daleks never even get to use thier sink plungers in a way you might imagine they might in a film with this kind of content. With a title like Abducted By The Daleks though... not to mention some help from the ‘outraged’ tabloids... I suspect this one was a very good seller for the director in question. 

*I actaully saw an archival interview with Terry Nation on television a few days before this post was published and I'm pretty sure that third, overly streamlined Dalek is one which he actually had in his home for a while.

Doctor Who - Scream Of The Shalka

Low In Shalka Hole

Doctor Who -
Scream Of The Shalka
Internet Airdate:
13th November - 18th December 2003
BBC 1 - Region B Blu Ray
Six Flash Animated Episodes

I’ve been meaning to watch Doctor Who - Scream Of The Shalka for quite some time now but, despite picking up a cheap second hand DVD of the story sometime during the pandemic, I could never quite bring myself to do so. In the 9 year gap between the ‘almost but not quite any good’ Doctor Who - The Movie (reviewed by me here) and the start of the ‘official ninth Doctor’ (or tenth if, like me and any sane and reasonable person who isn’t mathematically challenged, you realise John Hurt’s The War Doctor is also able to be numbered in terms of his chronological appearance in the show), we were left with nothing much happening for the show’s 40th anniversary. And so, this series of six, short webisodes, running between ten and fifteen minutes each, gave us the first ‘ninth Doctor’ as voiced by Richard E. Grant (who shared a breakout movie with the previous actor to play The Doctor, Paul McGann, in Withnail & I).

Now, as the show went on to bigger and, arguably ‘better’ (but maybe not so better for a long time now) things, Scream Of The Shalka was dumped as being non-canon to the series. Which is a shame because, a) it’s actually Richard E. Grants second spin as The Doctor, following a live action appearance in a nonsensically bad (if memory serves) Comic Relief special and b) The Master is voiced by none other than classic Shakespearian actor Derek Jacobi... who would, of course, turn out to be the ‘surprise’, hidden in plain sight even from himself, incarnation of The Master making his debut in a memorable David Tennant episode of the series, before regenerating into John Simm.

We even have The Doctor picking up a nicely played new companion, Alison, voiced by Sophie Okonedo, who would of course go on to play Liz Ten aka Queen Elizabeth 10th in two episodes of Matt Smith’s tenure in the show. Not to mention a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ voice appearance by a pre-Doctor David Tennant in one episode of this story.

And, it’s a shame this isn’t considered canon and Richard E. Grant wasn’t picked up to continue the role (mainly due to future show runner Russell T. Davies absolutely hating his performance here, from what I understand) because, all in all, I quite enjoyed this one when I sat down to watch it quite recently.* Okay, the animation was not liked by anyone in my house other than me, to be fair. The style is fairly primitive but, with the budgetary constraints, I think the pretence of stylistic simplicity to mask the fact that this isn’t a Disney or Fleisher production is quite charming, in a way (yeah, some things never change when it comes to money... as the BBC’s reconstructed, animated episodes on various Doctor Who releases demonstrate).

But, I think this has two big things going for it. Unlike Davies, I don’t think Richard E. Grant’s performance was ‘phoned in’ and I think what he manages to convey with his voice here, playing an absolutely enigmatic and intriguing incarnation of everyone’s favourite timelord, is actually quite brilliant (yeah, I know, I’m sure I’m in the minority when it comes to this issue but that’s my reaction and I’m sticking to it). Secondly, I think it’s extremely well written and I would have loved to see a two parter live action version of this story at some point... it kinda walks over a lot of what was being done in the Moffat and Chibnall eras of the show, as far as I’m concerned.

I mean, yes it’s a lot of nonsense about an alien hive mind creature coming to live for a time underneath the Earth after a ‘meteor’ crashes and then enslaving and controlling certain places on the planet as the precursor of a full-on invasion with, I have to say, lots of pseudo-science plot points which kinda went over my head... but it was entertaining and thoughtful hokum at the very least and I was kinda into it. The surprise reveal about a certain aspect of this version of The Master also means the show had more than its share of unexpected moments and, yeah, like I said, intriguing and somewhat complex stuff.

It does get dull in a few places and, to be fair, I spotted one of two continuity errors but, it’s pretty fun stuff and so I’m surprised that Scream Of The Shalka isn’t more mentioned in Doctor Who lore. Although, I didn’t watch it at the time because, I didn’t see something streaming on the net as a proper venue for moving image content (and I still don’t... streaming sucks... time to get physical again, people!). Also, I’m not entirely sure I knew about it at the time... publicity for this thing can’t have been that good and I don’t remember anyone talking about it in those days. My loss, as it turns out.

So there you have it. Doctor Who - Scream Of The Shalka was, I think, much better than it deserved to be and, for my money, much more entertaining than I was expecting it to be. The only poor thing about the experience is that animation does not sit well with the DVD format, where you are always going to see some kind of bitmapping at play. A shame, then, that the story has not been reissued on Blu Ray since that’s a much smoother medium for presenting animated content, for sure.

*Okay, this morning but, by the time this one gets up on the blog, probably a number of weeks ago.

Doctor Who - The Movie

Harmony Padme Hum

Doctor Who - The Movie
UK/USA Directed by Geoffrey Sax
UK Airdate: 27th May 1996
BBC 1 - Region B Blu Ray

Doctor Who was dead... and had been for several years. 

The Seventh Doctor as personified by Sylvester McCoy was the current Doctor when the show was cancelled (for pretty much no good reason by people in power at the BBC who never liked it to begin with... from what I remember). However, this attempt was made, in 1996, to start up the series again as an American/British co-production, shot in Canada. So, yeah, entitled Doctor Who - The Movie, this was a pilot film which, although it did well in the UK, bombed in the US and so was never commissioned as a series. And looking at it now, it’s still easy to see why.

Now, the last time I watched this, before revisiting it on this current Blu Ray incarnation, was on the broadcast date mentioned above. However, this was not the first time I had seen this and this is how I know that both the TV broadcast and this Blu Ray are heavily cut... or rather, missing some footage. I think I first saw this on a bootleg VHS tape somewhere around 3 or more months before the episode... sorry, movie... was broadcast and, to be honest, most people I personally know had already seen this in the same way before it hit our airwaves. Doctor Who, despite the stupid fate of the classic run of the TV show, was always a much loved British phenomenon and so the Brits were desperate to see this one as soon as they could. So, yeah, it was almost impossible not to run into someone at a jumble sale or in your office who had access to a copy.

And that’s how I know this was cut. Admittedly, it had even more excised from it on British TV but in this current version, after the Seventh Doctor, played once again by McCoy for the first ten minutes or so, lands on Earth... he stumbles into a gangland conflict and is shot. Now, on the broadcast version and in this one, he only takes one bullet, despite a later piece of dialogue revealing that he was hit three times. In the print which was doing the rounds on VHS bootlegs, that scene went on a little longer and he takes many more bullet hits. And that’s just one of the cuts I remember and it’s very frustrating now because, the bootlegs were obviously struck from an earlier, pre-cut print of the episode and so, some of the scenes just never existed in any broadcast or home video version to this day. Which is such a shame because I would love to see it again.

Looking at the show now... it really hasn’t held up well over the years but there’s still lots to like about it, as much as there is to hate. For instance, McCoy is excellent in his scenes, as is the new incarnation of The Doctor played by Paul McGann, who quickly manages to make the part his own, playing the role with exactly the kind of flourish and personality quirks that many previous actors had built into the role. He really shines in this and it’s a shame the pilot episode never took off. And another good thing about the pilot is the companions... both Yee Jee Tso to an extent, as a gang member with his heart in the right place but, especially Daphne Ashbrook as Dr. Grace Holloway, who is so good in this she almost steals the show from McGann... but not quite. The chemistry is good, though and they do make a lovely pair... quite literally as they share a kiss on more than one occasion, hinting at romantic entanglements if the show was to continue to run.

And the whole of the first half an hour or so... set in our near future on December 31st 1999 and dealing with the death of the seventh incarnation on the operating table as Puccini plays on the stereo (as Grace manages to kill him with a defibrillation machine because she doesn’t realise he has two hearts), his resurrection in the morgue intercut with and echoing footage from Universal’s 1931 movie Frankenstein, the escape of The Master as a kind of slime mould who invades an ambulance driver and takes him as a host body and The Doctor’s attempts to convince Grace of who he is and just what is going on... is really great. And then it all goes completely pear shaped when The Master somehow gets on board the TARDIS without a key, gets the gang member to open the Eye Of Harmony which powers the TARDIS and then uses it to threaten the existence of the Earth so he can steal The Doctor’s remaining lives for himself. It’s truly dreadful and makes not a lick of sense, with physics bending scenes such as The Doctor walking through a solid glass window because physics is compromised... but only when it’s convenient to service the next dramatic point of the story.

In fact the writing in this is pretty bad, for the most part... again, once the Eye of Harmony is open. It tries hard to appeal to an American audience and has scenes like a motorbike ambulance chase and even a fist fight in the TARDIS between The Doctor and The Master. It’s just not very well done. Eric Roberts plays The Master and he does his best but he just comes off as a cheap villain for the most part, rather than having the gravitas of the versions which came before him (something McGann seems to get right with his version of The Doctor). I don’t believe it’s Roberts’ fault, to be honest... it just wasn’t written any differently in the script. And the dead giveaway here that this was half financed with American money is that there are a fair few references to Tom Baker’s incarnation of The Doctor (the one best known Who actor to American fans of the show at the time, on the cable networks which showed it in the US) via little ‘object cameos’ such as a long, colourful scarf, his yoyo and a bag of Jelly Babies.

And alas, all that hard work to get it to appeal to a multi-national audience... those Fourth Doctor moments, the pop culture references and the nice, steam-punk look of the new Doctor’s costume... really didn’t matter because the second half of the movie is just, yeah, it’s mostly terrible with the producers seeming to want to turn it into an action packed US cop show or some such. It just doesn’t work and it becomes ‘bad Doctor Who’ pretty quickly. Which is a shame because, McGann and Ashbrook would have made a good crew for the TARDIS in any future adventures.

As it is, the ratings dive bombed in the US and this was never followed up. Paul McGann would eventually play The Doctor again in a series of Big Finish produced audio adventures and, most notably, in the short internet streamed prelude to the 50th Anniversary show The Day Of The Doctor, fittingly called The Night Of The Doctor (and included as an extra on both the 50th Anniversary special Blu Ray and on this Blu Ray too). That prelude showed how McGann’s Doctor regenerated into the retrofitted incarnation The War Doctor, created for The Day Of The Doctor, after Christopher Eccleston refused to return to the show and John Hurt was called in to fill the role instead.

And that’s me done on Doctor Who - The Movie... it’s kinda nice seeing it again (albeit in the official cut as opposed to the pre-release version) but it wears it’s mis-steps very firmly on its sleeve and, despite its warm reception in the UK at the time, it really isn’t a good version of the show, to be fair. I would certainly not recommend this one as a jumping on point for anyone interested in the modern show’s past but, you know, it’s currently available if you want it.