Invasion Season 2

 

This Portal Coil

Invasion
Season 2
10 episodes October 2023
USA Apple

Warning: Some spoilerage.

I really wasn’t sure if I could get back to Invasion for a second series. I’d loved the first season, which was partly responsible for winning me back to modern TV during the pandemic but, by the end of the last episode (you can find my review of that first year here) I felt the ending was kind of a cop out. The aliens had been seemingly defeated only to leave one of the stars, Casper (played by Billy Barrat) in a coma and a sudden surprise mothership floating in the Earth’s atmosphere. That all seemed like an afterthought to me... a kind of tack on ending to keep the story going for a second season.

But, here we are and I returned and I found that, wow, there was actually enough material left in the original story set up to keep me watching for the next ten episodes.

This one has exactly the same MO as the first one with four different groups of characters. We have... 1. The kids who go after the sleeping Casper when he is taken to France... including India Brown as Jamila and the villain turned ‘good all along’ Paddy Holland as Monty (in a performance that really shows that this lad should go far if he sticks with the acting bug). 2. Golshifteh Farahani as Aneesha Malik, still on the run with the magical alien shard, protecting her children and running into a bunch of characters in a group called ‘The Movement’, headed up by Enver Gjokaj as Clark (who you may remember from Agent Carter, reviewed here and his further exploration of his character there in the last series of Agents Of SHIELD... reviewed here). 3. Mitsuki, played by Shioli Kutsuna, who lost her girlfriend to the aliens in the first episode and who is now called in to help the government further penetrate their mysteries, including an amazing new character called Maya, played by the equally watchable Naian González Norvind. 4. And finally, we have ex-Navy Seal Trevante, played by Shamier Anderson, who links up with new character Rose, played by Nedra Marie Taylor... tying the story right back in to the first episode of series one and Sam Neill’s character. He gets a mention and a head shot here and there is potential for him to actually return to the show in the future, if whatever reason that kept him from only being in the opening episode is somehow resolved.

And, yeah, it’s good stuff. The story is spun along, the acting is wonderful, the music is great, the action sequences are riveting and there’s even a new version of the aliens - nicknamed hunter/killers - who are impervious to fire, unlike the aliens in the first series. It’s compelling stuff and had me hooked again right from the start.

However, I can’t help but think that the show is being kept spinning instead of coming to a natural conclusion. In the last episode, Trevante manages to cross over through a portal opened by Mitsuki and joins the mind image of Caspar to bring the battle to the aliens and then, well, I guess we wait until season three, however far away that is. I’m going to forget all the story again while I wait for the company behind all this to get its act together, I suspect.

So a great series with pretty good special effects too but, it seems to me like it’s being strung out for the sake of being longer... which seems to be the way of all modern American TV these days (I hope the new ‘Disneyfied’ series of Doctor Who doesn’t go down a similar route... is it too much to ask?). So, honestly, getting a bit tired of the cliffhanger nature of series finales and the ‘will they/won’t they’ carry on with another season... which seems to be less than fifty/fifty these days. I’m thinking that not starting to watch anything until the show is finished for good might be the best way to deal with modern TV at the present. There’s no certainty you’re ever going to get a finished story. But, yeah, I like the show a lot and I’ll be there for their next one, assuming they get that far ahead with it before the plug is pulled (and before some of the child actors grow up to be too old to play their characters within the context of the story). Invasion is good show and I hope it manages to keep itself going.

THEM!

Upping The Ante!

THEM!
USA 1954
Directed by Gordon Douglas
Warner Brothers
HMV Exclusive Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some ant sized spoilers.

THEM! is easily one of the very best of the 1950s Atomic Monster paranoia films ever to be made. It takes its ridiculous premise and, like the majority of the ‘monsters mutated by atomic age radiation’ films of the time, treats its subject absolutely seriously. But, this one just seems to go the extra mile with everything and, if anything, this film is more like watching a police procedural movie than anything else, just with the ‘embiggened’ monsters thrown in as the ‘whatdunnit’ element.

The film starts off very strongly with a lone girl of 5 or 6 (played by nine year old Sandy Descher) walking traumatised through the mojave desert with her broken, plastic doll. Two cops find her, among them one of the film’s main protagonists, Sergeant Ben Peterson, played by James Whitmore, who I always tend to think of as ‘the poor man’s Spencer Tracy’, somewhat, in looks at least. He and his partner pick up the ‘mute from shock’ girl and drive her in their car as they investigate a holiday trailer a stretch down the road, which eventually turns out to be the trailer the girl was using with her now deceased parents. They find nothing but carnage (no bodies) on the site and... drumroll... no money is gone but someone has raided the sugar cubes! Now what could possibly be interested in stealing the sugar, I hear you gasp.

When a mysterious, Doc Savage-like trilling is heard in the air, the traumatised girl sits bolt upright in the ambulance they have just loaded here onto, then settles down again when the sound goes, without anyone other than the audience realising she even moved. Then, the two cops leave the girl with the medics and more police who come to check out the scene, while they go to investigate a store in another part of the desert, in case the owner knows something about this mysterious case. Alas, the store is in the same bashed about state with the wall torn off. They find the owner, his rifle snapped in two, his body crushed and lifeless, thrown into the cellar of the shop. And, yeah you guessed it, a whole load of ransacked sugar. Ben leaves his partner behind to guard the crime scene but, after he does so, his partner hears the sound and goes out to check on it... we hear his gun shots and screams as he dies at the hands of... something big. And yes, fans of the Wilhelm Scream sound sample will identify it in a number of places in this movie.

Okay, when the body of the cop is found he, just like the owner, has died from, among other things, being injected with a large dose of formic acid. Hmm... sugar, formic acid... what can it be? It’s got Ben foxed, along with his new friend, FBI agent Robert Graham (played by The Thing itself, James Arness). They call in a scientist who thinks he may have a lead... so we have Dr. Howard Medford, played by Edmund Gwenn (who many remember as Kris Kringle from Miracle On 334th Street but who I found utterly captivating in a film he made for Hitchcock just a year after this one, The Trouble With Harry) and his equally scientific daughter Patricia, played by Joan Weldon, who is the female/barely hinted at love interest in the movie.

And it takes these two to reveal that the culprit in this ‘whatdunnit’ is, of course, giant sized ants that have been mutated by atomic bomb testing over the last nine years. This is further underpinned when, they are forced to reveal this far fetched theory after Patricia is menaced by a marauding ant and they have to shoot out its antenna to help kill it. But the ant problem is not a small one, if you’ll pardon the observation. If something isn’t done to stop the growth of the colony, it will be less than a year before man is no longer the dominant species on the Earth. Our intrepid heroes manage to find the nest, destroy it and poison the ants inside but many of them, the queen and some flying newborns, have already flown the coop for fresh pastures. And where this movie could easily have gone into the standard sci fi/monster melodrama by this point, it actually stays a police procedural, as the police and FBI, working far more co-operatively than I’ve seen them working together in most movies, start following leads and witnesses for sightings such as ant shaped flying saucers and big ‘sugar heists’. Eventually the film takes us to the nest of ants hiding in the storm drains under Los Angeles...so for a second time, the various factions including the military, arm themselves with flame throwers and seek the ants in their nest.

And it’s just a great movie. Originally it was to be shot in colour and 3D but a nervous studio changed that to 2D and black and white just days before filming commenced. That being said, the opening title letters of THEM! are coloured up red against the black and white background. But I suspect the black and white photography also helps disguise the worst aspects of the giant, animatronic ants and, as you’ll see in some of the deleted effects shots included on this Blu Ray, things were cut out when the ants were just standing there looking too clunky. And, yes, there are some silly bits, like when the police and FBI are using bazookas to heat up the top of the nest and these little cartooned on beams of light suddenly appear coming from the ends of the weapon. But it’s mostly pretty cool and, the flame throwers are certainly real. If you’re wondering how the actors such as Whitmore and Arness are so trained up on using these safely, well, apparently they were combat veterans who were used to using them during the second world war.

The film has a gutsy moment near the end also, when Sergeant Ben sacrifices his own life to giant ant mandibles rescuing two kids... so that’s not a nice thing to do to the audience but it’s very effective, because Arness is trapped on his own with the ants in the next scene and you’re wondering if the director will kill him off at this moment too.

Eagle eyed viewers may spot a young, pre-Spock Leonard Nimoy as one of the army men in one scene, if that’s of any interest to you. Also, when Walt Disney was looking at this film with a mind to cast James Arness as Davey Crocket, he saw Fess Parker in a scene and chose him instead. The film was directed, of course, by none other than Gordon Douglas who did some great films in his career, such as Rio Conchos (reviewed here), In Like Flint (review coming next year) and Frank Sinatra’s Tony Rome films. Also, he helmed the first of the two sequels to In The Heat Of The Night, namely They Call Me Mister Tibbs! So, I have to wonder, between that film and THEM!, is he the director who has made the most movies with an exclamation mark in the title. Surely not but, if you know, then please hit me up in the comments section below.

One last thing which I never hear mentioned but, well, I think it’s kind of an important observation. A traumatised little girl with a broken doll who has had a traumatic incident with some kind of exo-skeleton creature where the film’s main protagonist eventually has to track the threat back to their nest, armed with a flame thrower. Sound familiar? I’m pretty sure, given his interests, that James Cameron must have loved this film and absorbed it, either subconsciously or otherwise, when he was writing his big hit sequel movie ALIENS... yeah, think about traumatised Newt in that film with her broken, plastic doll and Sigourney Weaver with her flame thrower. I’m pretty sure THEM! must have been in the back of his mind at the very least.

So there you have it... THEM! is a great movie with a cast of really good actors making the ridiculous premise seem just about feasible (or at least giving it the required gravitas to keep the audience interested throughout the running time) and all aided by Bronislau Kaper’s fugue-tastic score (which is available on a very faithful re-recording on the first of the Monstrous Movie Music compilation CDs, which you can buy here). This film is still a load of fun and, to quote my dad who was watching this with me... “I don’t remember this film being so complex!” So there you have it folks... not just another atomic age monster movie (not that there’s anything wrong with that, they’re great) but easily one of the best and most iconic. Iconic enough that both the ants themselves and their eerie warbling sound effect would feature in at least one referential movie cameo, over the years (I’m thinking of the brilliant Looney Tunes Back In Action but there have probably been some others, for sure). 

Devil Girl From Mars

Martian Manhunter

Devil Girl From Mars
UK 1954 Directed by David MacDonald
British Lion/Studio Canal Blu Ray Zone B

Devil Girl From Mars is a movie I’ve been meaning to get around to seeing for some time. It’s all set in more or less one location, that being an inn on the Scottish Moors. Just to underscore the location, we have John Laurie cast as one of the owners, many years before he went on to household fame as Frazer in Dad’s Army. Now, the single location makes more sense when you see, on the opening credits (underscored with music by British composer Edwin Astley) that the film is based on a stage play by John C. Mather and James Eastwood, the latter of the two writing the screenplay.

The film takes time to build up its characters after a huge spaceship, thought at first to be a meteorite, comes crashing to Earth. So we have a young model fleeing from a doomed relationship, played by Hazel Court, the land lady played by Sophie Stewart, the barmaid played by Adrienne Corri, the land lady’s sister’s son and a throwaway geezah who gets disintegrated fairly early on into the proceedings. Through the miracle of a radio tuned to a station giving exposition, we know that a Professor has travelled to the area to study the fallen meteorite, played by Joseph Tomelty with an accompanying reporter played by Hugh McDermott. And furthermore, we know from the radio in their car, that an escaped murderer... though he didn’t really do it on purpose and he’s also the lover of the barmaid, played by Peter Reynolds... has escaped from the local prison.

And, of course, all converge at the inn for the night, only to find themselves locked in a small area of land by invisible walls, as a flying saucer lands and out pops... Nyah played by Patricia Laffan, a Martian woman wearing a slightly ahead of its time PVC fetish suit (the actress wasn’t allowed to eat or drink on set in order to get the thing on and off). She is accompanied by her killer robot, who looks mighty impressive on the posters. Said robot bears no resemblance to the actual costume at all and it’s a bit clunky and quaint but, certainly tall and imposing.

Nyah is a cold blooded woman, being from Mars and one of the women who have, after years of bloodshed, won the Martian War Of The Sexes. So, with her mighty powers, she is here to collect male breeding stock to help her top up her race again. In fact, she’s a little off course due to the thickness of the Earth’s atmosphere, so she plans on getting to London soon, in order to freeze everyone with her ‘everybody stands still with glazed expressions on their eyes’ powers so she can take her pick. So it’s up to these, pretty powerless humans to try and come up with some kind of plan to thwart her efforts.

And it’s all very quaint and British and, I feel, has been held up to ridicule for a long time but... yeah, I dunno, I actually found the film not only charming but quite watchable. There’s a good bunch of actors who really know how to bring the characters to life (if you’re going to be stuck in a pub with a bunch of nice people, these would be the ones) and the sets and miniatures are well lit and shot. I mean, right from the outset you can tell the pub and its immediate surroundings are a huge interior studio set but, even so, it’s a pretty good one, it has to be said. And there are some quite clever lines in the film too such as, when being scolded by his wife for drinking, John Laurie remarks with words to the effect that he’s being patriotic by drinking the scotch. His wife’s withering retort is, “You should see him when he has a patriotic head in the morning.”, which I thought was pretty good.

Now, to be fair, there are a lot of things people could latch on to in order to criticise this as a bad movie... the smoking glasses after a guy has been disintegrated, the cumbersome robot and the uptight demeanour of the Martian lady... but I found it to be mostly good and, not exactly gripping but it’s a pleasure to see actors of this quality taking the subject as seriously as they can and, it turns out, I have a lot of love for this film. Even if the ending seems somewhat... well... a bit rubbish and unsatisfying. But, yeah, I’ve said it and you can judge me for it (I know my dad will, who found the whole thing absolutely ludicrous) but I really liked Devil Girl From Mars and think it would make a good part of an all nighter marathon of British sci-fi/horror films from the period. Good stuff, as far as I’m concerned.

Universal Terrors 1951-1955

Terror Forming

Universal Terrors 1951-1955
By Tom Weaver with David Schecter,
Robert J. Kiss and Steve Kronenberg
McFarland Books
ISBN 9780786436149

A quick shout out to a great book which is actually so dense in content and information that, with my lack of amount of free time these days, it took me a fair amount of time to read and absorb. Subtitled Eight Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Films, Tom Weaver’s Universal Terrors 1951 - 1955 is an exhaustive tome written by the same team (with one addition) behind The Creature Chronicles (reviewed by me here).

This one is pretty much a ‘making of’ style book about the production (plus pre and post) and making of eight specific movies, most of which I knew fairly well. These include three which I wouldn’t necessarily myself had counted as being typical of the films Universal were churning out to their horror fan base in the 50s... those being The Strange Door, The Black Castle and Cult Of The Cobra. The other five are all ones which I would instantly associate with that decade’s predilection for atomic aged monsters... either rediscovered, mutated or out of this world... namely It Came From Outer Space, Creature From The Black Lagoon, This Island Earth, Revenge Of The Creature and Tarantula.

The lion’s share of the volume is written by Weaver with his usual doses of humourous writing and the occasional judgemental eye at the behaviour and credibility of cast and crew, many of whom he has interviewed in his many years over his career as a film historian specialising in such B-movie gems... for instance, you can tell how he feels about director Jack Arnold and the stories he’d spun throughout his life (and perhaps he’s right to make that judgement call). Other writers also have their own specialist sections within the chapters, with the layout of the book being an introduction (including a great, hand drawn map of the Universal International front lot at the time) followed by eight big chapters with sub sections by Weaver, followed by the great David Schecter (who I have a lot of respect for in his coverage of the music, considering how many of those film scores he’s rerecorded and raised from the dead on his CD label Monstorus Movie Music), Robert J. Kiss and Steve Kronenberg.

Each chapter is split into sections being Full Credit Information, then Weaver’s big chunks following Production History, which includes sub sections on Synopsis, Cast Biographies, Production and Marginalia (with some wonderful doses of interesting trivia)... before going onto the other writers’ sections exploring The Release (including Critics Corner which quotes various quotes from reviews from the films’ initial releases), The Music Score (very detailed breakdowns including many notes on who wrote what and which bits were tracked in from other identified movies) and a final Analysis section.

And, yeah, it’s pretty thorough. If you want a blow by blow account of which actor or stuntman ‘so and so’ were doing on 3pm on a given day on the shoot, if that was of any interest... you are going to find it all in here. It gets very interesting when the notes from the day’s shooting doesn’t correspond to how people later remembered things from that day.

Among many nuggets which I learned for the first time (except from the two chapters on Creature From The Black Lagoon and Revenge Of The Creature, which are cut down versions of the chapters in the book on the trilogy of movies covered in the aforementioned The Creature Chronicles) are such gems as the fact that long standing Robin Hood actor Richard Greene was actually the grandson of motion picture pioneer William Friese-Greene. Or that Charles Drake (no, not Charlie) was sometimes a drunken mess and once assaulted an actress outside her home for publicity. And I also didn’t know that Jeff Morrow went on to become the face of Suntory Whisky in Japan for a while (just like director Akira Kurosawa was and, fictionally, Bill Murray’s character was in Lost In Translation... from what I remember). There’s also some criticism thrown into the mix on the extent of Ray Bradbury’s involvement on the screenplay for It Came From Out Of Space.

And, like I said, a short review and that’s all I’m going to say about Universal Terrors 1951 - 1955 other than to say that, if you were a ‘monster kid’ as many Americans are fond of labelling a certain kind of horror movie enthusiast (as I guess I was, to the extent that you could be in the UK) then you are probably going to love this book and should maybe try and grab a copy. It’s a long read with many facts and figures (and previously rarely seen photos from the productions) plus it’s entertainingly written and certainly an enlightening experience, for sure. Definitely worth the price of admission.

Shaolin Mantis

The Man
From A Mantis

Shaolin Mantis
aka Tang lang
Hong Kong 1978
Directed by Chia-Liang Liu
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some mantis-like spoilers in this one.

Wow. This is an extremely entertaining Shaw Brothers martial arts movie, for sure (and for Shaw, I guess). The film stars screen legend David Chiang as Wei Fung, who becomes the Shaolin Mantis of the title. More on that later but, a quick summation of the style of the film is as follows...

A lame fight with freeze frame credits is followed by a scene where Wei Fung has to demonstrate and prove his kung fu skills to his emperor by defeating two of the emperor’s champions, the second being a cameo guest appearance by Chia-Hui Liu, who is perhaps best known to many westerners as Gordon Liu, from his appearance as two different characters in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies. After he proves his mettle, Fung is sent out to spy on the clan of a region where the emperor suspects there is rebellion brewing and gain proof of such, with time deadlines devoted to punishments meted out on his family if he fails to return from his mission (ultimately ending as death for all as the final incentive).

So off Weng goes and he meets a good looking, young, insolent brat of a woman named Tien Chi-Chi, played by Cecilia Wong. She is in the process of throwing out her 18th personal tutor in, probably, as many months and, somehow, she takes a shine to Wei Fung and gives him a job as her new teacher. Luckily for him, this takes him into the household where the rebellion just happens to be brewing. When the elder uncle finds out he is a spy, he is going to kill the new teacher but, unbeknownst to Wei, the daughter tells him they are to be married and promises that he’ll stay in the compound. And so they do marry, with Wei none the wiser about what has happened. But soon he needs to go back to ensure his parents are safe and his situation is clarified for him in no uncertain terms. So he and his wife decide to break out but, first they must fight five fights with skilled kung fu experts, including the girl’s mother and auntie, to be able to leave. With tragic circumstances but, Wei escapes with his life (he’s the only one at this point... as his wife, the mother and aunt, all die either in these sequences or as a result of what happens).

Now then, while stumbling in the wilderness at his lowest point, a praying mantis attaches itself to Wei’s hand and won’t let go. He eventually gets it off him but then observes the mantis, along with assorted mantis friends... and realises the skill of the mantis staying attached to his hand comes from the insect’s martial arts mindset. An extended training montage plays out where he observes and emulates the moves and stance of the mantis, as he perfects a new mantis style of kung fu, giving himself maniacal mantised-up martial arts powers in order to beat the styles of the various guardians of his dead wife’s clan with something more formidable. And so he returns to fight his away back into the compound, bringing his mantis mayhem with him.

Eventually he returns to free his family from prison but, there’s a nasty twist at the end as to where his true allegiances lay... which I have to say I saw coming from the first five minutes of the film, to be honest (he’s way too reluctant a hero and obviously doesn’t want to go on the mission in the first place). It’s one of those endings where pretty much anyone you were rooting for dies and the only winner in this is the established emperor.

But the film packs a punch. I’m pretty sure the fighting on the credits and the opening two fight scenes where the hero has to prove his worth are only there because the next half an hour are pretty much just long, drawn out character development stuff... until the last hour of the film is pretty much one fight scene after another. So, if I were to sum the movie up it’s as follows...

Credits fights... two ‘prove your skills’ fights... long, slow but still entertaining scenes where characters and their relationships are built, followed by... fight, bigger fight, slightly bigger fight, even bigger fight and then biggest fight ending in tragedy and escape... followed by a silly but enthralling mantis kung fu training session... followed by a fight, a bigger fight, an even bigger fight and then, just for good measure, a really big fight. Followed by the ending which, almost but not quite... involves a fight.

But, honestly, I found the whole thing thoroughly riveting. I mean, this spectacular fight choreography looks more like a ballet so, I don’t know, maybe it’s the testosterone infused equivalent of dance but, whatever, it’s great to watch and, all in all, I had a great time with Shaolin Mantis. The swords and other weapons looked, maybe a little too shiny (like lacquered plastic accessories you’d get on early 1970s Playmobil figures) but David Chiang is as brilliant as always, as are the majority of the cast and I’m really pleased I blind bought this one last year (after the company posted a video of one of the fights on twitter). It’s good stuff and, well, I  have another fifty or so Shaw Brothers martial arts films still to watch and waiting in the wings so, I’ll get to those sometime soon, I guess.

The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires

Ege Of Darkness

The Legend Of The
Seven Golden Vampires
UK/Hong Kong 1974
Directed by Roy Ward Baker and
Chang Cheh (uncredited action sequences)
Hammer/Shaw Brothers/Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone A

The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires was the very last of Hammer’s Dracula cycle, made in collaboration with the famous Shaw Brothers and, despite attempts made to regain Christopher Lee as Dracula one last time, he declined after reading the script. I’ve always had a bit of a problem with this one for reasons I’ll get into in a minute but, I have to say on this rewatch, polished up for a lovely stateside Blu Ray release from Shout Factory, the film looks better than any previous versions I’ve owned and, I also had a lot more fun with it. I’m wondering now if the last version I saw was maybe the cut down US release version, The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula, because some of the sequences are in a much different order than I remember them from my last viewing and it all makes a bit more sense this time around.

One person who does return, in a lovely portrayal of the original Van Helsing, is Peter Cushing in one of the roles that made him a household name, looking very dapper throughout most of the shoot in a reddish brown jacket which looks very much like the ones he wore the decade before in the two Dr. Who movies (reviewed here and here). Alas, he’s my main problem with the movie also... or rather, the inclusion of his character is... I’ll get to the elephant in the room in a little while, I promise.

He’s joined in this by Robin Stewart as his son (who seems to spend the entire movie looking like a clone of Ralph Bates for this one) and the lovely Julie Ege as his female benefactor (for the cost of coming along on a specific mission with Van Helsing). Plus a whole bunch of Shaw Brothers actors including the legends (in my opinion) that are David Chiang and Szu Shih and, I have to say, they’re all pretty good. The film starts off with Dracula (played by John Forbes-Robertson, in absolutely no way similarly to Lee) who quickly steals the body of a Chinese guy, goes to China and lives there for 100 years with his fierce Seven Golden Vampires plus their undead, zombie slaves. Then Van Helsing and crew go to protect the village which Dracula holds in a grip of terror in a romp of a tale which is a heady mix of kung fu action with typically entertaining Hammer vampire nonsense kind of grafted onto it (or vice versa, if you like).

That being said, I think the chorography on the fight scenes on this one are nowhere near as interesting as the regular Shaw Brothers movies I’ve seen from these actors and, I think that out of all of them, it’s Szu Shih who seems the best of the bunch, showing off her dynamic fighting skills much more in keeping with what you would expect if it was purely a Shaw Brothers production.

It mostly looks nice with some beautiful frame compositions and an almost Bava sense of lighting in some places, where actors and sets are lit two tone from a range of colour palettes such as blues, greens, reds and mauve washes of colour, which really pop and bring interest to the shots. That being said, for some reason the external location shots seem to be quite muddy and dull to look at on this one, in contrast to the sequences which are studio bound. You can certainly see the difference between the clarity of the visuals on this beautiful Shout Factory transfer, for sure. There are also some brief sequences of topless women and bodice ripping galore (although, sadly, not in the case of the constantly bosomy and brilliant Julie Ege) and some nice special effects when each of the seven golden vampires reverts back to the dust from which they came. Although, a badly fake rubber bat flying behind a vertical rock while a vampire jumps out from the other side of the same rock is not the most convincing transformation sequence, it has to be said.

And, yeah, it’s a nice enough final film in the series but, it has the awful problems of continuity in terms of both the Van Helsing and Dracula characters in the film, which not only contradict the film fitting into the previous Hammer Dracula movies... it also contradicts itself in this story too. To explain...

We know from Dracula AD 1972 (reviewed here) that the original Van Helsing, who this character does seem to be, according to some dialogue referring back to his past encounters with Dracula, perished in the year 1872. The prologue to that film sees Dracula and Van Helsing killing each other but with Dracula being revived from powdered blood spilled then, 100 years later (where Peter Cushing plays the great grandson of the character he played in this prologue). However, in The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires, Dracula has already taken the form of the Chinese guy 1804 and has gone to China for 100 years, until he meets up with the original Van Helsing in this film in the year 1904. So not only does this transformation take place long before he could have remet Van Helsing, it also predates the previous Dracula films... a complete impossibility if this film is to be believed. And, hello, if Van Helsing dies in 1872, then how come he’s running around and still getting into trouble in 1904? Especially when he clearly states that he’s met Dracula and fought him before... erm... except hasn’t Dracula been hiding as a Chinese guy for 100 years? How did they meet again?

So yeah, no matter which way you look at it, the film is a total nonsense. The script could have easily been fixed to change dates and historical durations of events in this film but, well, it looks like nobody could be bothered with keeping any sense of continuity within these films. And it just doesn’t work. So, if continuity is your thing (and why wouldn’t it be?) then maybe this final entry in the Hammer Dracula saga isn’t for you.

That being said, though, I did enjoy this presentation of The Legend Of The 7 Golden Vampires far more than I expected to and, yeah, it’s a hard film not to have a good time with. Like I said, it’s a boy’s own kind of romp, a bit like the Hammer version of She but with added kung fu goodness. A nice thing is the addition of a score by James Bernard but, somehow, his famous Hammer Dracula theme seems somewhat flat when you don’t have Christopher Lee accompanying it on screen. Still, it is what it is and I got a lot more out of it this time. Definitely worth a watch if you are a lover of what Hammer were doing during this period and, certainly a very odd blend of two studios presenting a kind of subdued mixture of what they both did best.

Outland

Io Pic

Outland
USA 1981 Directed by Peter Hyams
HMV/Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Full plot spoilers.

It’s been a while since I last saw Outland but I do try and watch it at least once on every home video format I eventually own it on... now it’s the turn of Blu Ray and, it has to be said, the film really hasn’t lost much of its power.

I first saw it at the cinema on the year of its release. I was 13 years old but the film was an AA rating, which was nobody under the age of 14... so I either lied about my age by a year or just wasn’t challenged on the door (I forget which).

The film is set on Io, the third largest moon of the five surrounding Jupiter, on a titanium mining colony run by Con-Am. Sean Connery plays the new marshal of the colony, Marshal O’Niel. He’s only been there a couple of weeks but his wife has had enough of being sent from one grubby outpost to the next and so she takes their son and goes to the nearest space station, waiting for a flight back to Earth (their son has never seen the planet he reads about in books). However, O’Neil can’t join them for now because there’s something bad happening at the mining colony and he’s onto something which is killing people. People are doing things like uncoupling their space suits while out on the surface (we watch in graphic detail as their blood boils and their heads explode as the air and organs inside fight to get out... at least, I’m guessing that’s the scientific idea behind those kinds of deaths... maybe they just look cool), travelling down to the outside in the lifts without any suit at all and just generally going mad.

Teaming up with Dr. Lazarus, played by the incomparable Frances Sternhagen, he discovers that these psychotic episodes went up hugely after the arrival of the branch director. So he starts digging and soon uncovers a bunch of people supplying drugs to increase manpower within the mining community, which also eventually makes their customers psychotic... and it all points back to the company, or at least the branch manager, played by Peter Boyle. However, after O’Neil finds and destroys a shipment of drugs, hit men are sent to kill him, arriving on the next shuttle. And, of course, nobody really wants to help him defend himself from these killers.

Okay, so when I was a kid there were two pieces of conventional wisdom about this film which I took with a grain of salt but do still acknowledge that there is something to them. Firstly that this is a remake of High Noon (reviewed here). Well, of course the last 25 minutes, where O’Neil’s potential allies abandon him to his fate and he has to take on the killers alone (more or less), is absolutely an homage to High Noon but, the film is not a complete remake because High Noon was all about that right from the start of the movie. The first two thirds of Outland, however, are a strong police procedural thriller, which happens to take place on a moon of Jupiter. It’s definitely got its own vibe going and it does what it does very successfully.

The other bit of conventional wisdom at the time of its release... and I remember reading this phrase at the time in Film Review, the ABC cinema chain’s monthly magazine that they sold in the kiosk... was that it’s a ‘poor man’s Alien’. Nope. Neither film has much in common other than the one huge influence of Alien (on pretty much everything at the time) of the lived-in, aged up sets with a kind of built in obsolescence. So yeah, it’s certainly gone down that route but, no, it’s a ‘poor man’s’ nothing.

What it is, is a top notch thriller with brilliant performances by both Connery and Sternhagen (who have remarkable chemistry together... how come these two weren’t teamed up in another film?) backed up by a, perhaps slightly simple but certainly solid story and what were, for the time, state-of-the-art special effects... which generally have, for the most part, aged well and don’t look too clunky on the Blu Ray format. What ages the film most is the nature of the computer graphics on the screens but, like a lot of speculative movie fiction, if the film makers had guessed how advanced things have gotten by today, then the films would have lacked credibility for the audiences of the time, for sure. I especially like the interactive, screen golf game that Peter Boyle’s character plays in his apartment.

And, added to this, it’s all supported by a really great score by the fabulous Jerry Goldsmith. He was in his phase where he was experimenting with very subtle electronic augmentation to the orchestra and it’s a truly wonderful score, mixing the dense atmospheric cues of the depressing environment the miners work in with some wonderful action cues which never let the toes stop tapping (I still listen to it on my bus journey home some evenings).

So that’s me on Outland. One of the great science fiction movies of the early 1980s and some of the best of cinema of that era, for sure. Definitely worth checking out if you’ve never seen it and especially if you like police procedural thrillers. 

Yes, Madam!

Mad Men VS Madams

Yes, Madam!
aka Police Assassins
aka In The Line Of Duty 2
Directed by Corey Yuen
Hong Kong 1985
D & B Films  Co. Ltd/Eureka
Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, this gets really confusing... this is the first in a series of films that came to be known as the ‘In The Line Of Duty’ series but didn’t get that moniker until the filming of another movie, which also became known as In The Line Of Duty 2, in addition to its real name. But then this ‘first’ film known as Yes, Madam! was marketed internationally as, um, In The Line Of Duty 2 and... yeah, it gets even more complicated than that with the various titles and switched sequences... I have no idea which one I’m supposed to watch next. What do they think this is... a Caroll Baker giallo?

Anyway, Michelle Yeoh had only done two movies prior to this one and this was her first starring role. Meanwhile, the producers wanted to create a new male action hero to co-star in the movie to be ‘the new Bruce Lee’. Various people from a kung fu school in the USA were sent over to audition and some of the ladies went along too. When Corey Yuen and the producers saw what Cynthia Rothrock was able to do, they changed their ideas and rewrote the role for her... this was her first film and she is the first caucasian actress to headline Hong Kong movies.

The plot deals with Yeoh’s Inspector Ng trying to stop bad guys from finding some small time crooks who accidentally become embroiled with some microfilm (remember the days of microfilms in movies being a big deal?). To help her, because it all started when a high ranking police inspector from Scotland Yard is murdered for the microfilm... another ‘English’ police inspector is sent to give Ng a hand... which is Rothrock as Inspector Carrie Morris. After that it’s all comedy and bits and pieces of action (much less action than was shot due to running time constraints) as Yeoh and Rothrock’s characters try and keep tabs on three small time criminals - named Aspirin, Panadol and Strepsil - before they get themselves killed and the microfilm is destroyed.

The humour, like a lot of these Hong Kong films, is more than a little broad but the stunts and action sequences, most of which were performed by the actors themselves such as Yeoh and Rothrock (who got a lot of bruises for their seven month shoot... Rothrock got a torn inner ear for good measure, too), is pretty good and inventive. This was the first time Rothrock used her signature move ‘the scorpion kick’ in a movie... the choreographer asked her if she wanted to throw anything of herself into the mix and she showed him that move and he definitely wanted it in the film. I’m actually surprised by these two actresses having this as their first big roles because, I have to say, they both seem pretty confident in this and make it all look easy.

Despite not quite having as much action as I was expecting, the film still seems to hurtle along at a blistering pace... the comedy might be a bit too unsubtle at times but you certainly won’t get bored with this one. There are a couple of nice highlights too, such as, at the end of her first big action sequence in the film, Michelle Yeoh gets a Dirty Harry moment where she tells the villain she is pointing her shotgun at that she doesn’t know if there are any shells left in the gun and that he would maybe like to try his luck. Another nice moment in terms of editing is when Cynthia Rock saves the life of Panadol (played by famous director Hark Tsui) by shooting a rope from around his neck when he’s hanging off of a wall... the rope breaks and he lands in a chair at the police station, courtesy of a nicely placed edit and shot match. Good stuff.

One thing which felt a little off to me was the moment when a hitman digs his silencer into an apple and puts the apple in the mouth of his victim to stop him from calling out. When he shoots the guy point blank through the mouth, there seems to be absolutely no exit wound on the guys head, even when the camera shows the dead guy later. Just felt a bit odd... hardly any blood for such a close up piece of violence.

The other thing that felt way off was that, at the end of the day, the bad guy gets killed but only while he’s going quietly with the police, by one of the comic relief thieves. In fact, the two heroines and their accomplices are all under arrest for trespassing on the villain’s property and, if not for the murder, he would have gone scott free. The film then just stops and you assume all the good guys and gals go to prison for their actions... a really unusual ending for sure.

But, nevertheless, I found Yes, Madam! to be a pretty entertaining movie and Yeoh and Rothrock make a really good team here (I believe they also became fast friends in real life... Rothrock didn’t know the language when she came over to Hong Kong but Yeoh knew some English and they used to go out to dinner every night, is my understanding). It’s a shame the two didn’t do more of these films together, for sure.

The Satanic Rites Of Dracula

Rites Said Dead

The Satanic Rites Of Dracula
UK 1973
Directed by Alan Gibson
Hammer/Warner Archive Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Spoilers for the inevitable outcome here.

The Satanic Rites Of Dracula is one of the more closely related of the Dracula follow ups. Although it’s set a few years after the events of the previous film, Dracula AD 1972 (which I reviewed here), it was actually released only one year after. It does have four running characters from that previous excursion in the contemporary adventures of Hammer’s flagship vampire, although only three actors returned to those roles.

The two obvious returners are Christopher Lee playing Dracula and Peter Cushing once again playing the modern descendent of the Van Helsing clan, Lorrimer. We also have Michael Coles returning as police Inspector Murray from the previous Dracula adventure, this time working in conjunction with a special government agency represented mostly by characters played by William Franklin and Richard Vernon. It should be noted that Coles is, apparently, the only person in Hammer film history other than Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing to play the same character in more than one Dracula movie.

Rounding out the more important cast members are Freddie Jones as a Nobel prize winning chemist and, to fill the boots of Stephanie Beacham, who was not available to reprise the role of Van Helsing’s granddaughter Jessica, we have Joanna Lumley who, it has to be said, doesn’t have an awful lot to do in this and plays the role, it seems to me, completely differently from her predecessor... but then again, that’s because the character seems differently written as, although it takes place in more or less the same times, there’s no sense of a swinging London vibe to this movie at all (even though it’s set there). I should probably also mention Pauline Peart’s brief role as a wordless vampire girl, one of a few chained in a basement, since she does cut a striking figure and she still goes to Film Fairs to sign photos from this film.

The film opens strongly with lots of location footage of London with a really annoying and distracting silhouette of Dracula superimposed over the whole credits sequence, slightly off centre at the bottom of the screen. However, John Cavacas’ excellent, funky 1970s score more than makes up for this annoying blemish on an otherwise interesting credits sequence.

This movie always seems to be better in my memories but, every time I sit down to watch it over the years, it always seems a little bland too. Dracula doesn’t even enter the picture until about half an hour into the thing. And when he does, there’s no real discussion as to how he was revived after his death at the end of the previous movie, this time around. However, there’s some distracting nudity, some occult practices and also cults like the Hellfire Club referenced to ensure the audience know that they’re in black mass kind of territory... and also mention that vampires also have a weakness in the grip of a Hawthorn bush, which they use here to help usher in Dracula’s latest death at the end of the tale.

The plot of this one involves Dracula’s attempt to kill off humanity with a new instant and more deadly version of a black plague. When it’s pointed out to him that the destruction of mankind would mean he’d leave himself without an adequate food supply he changes the subject but, the film very gently touches on the idea that Dracula may also be wanting to bring about his own downfall by this point.

So, yeah, it’s another contemporary adventure romp with a biker gang of hoodlums controlled by Dracula’s new corporation, to lend action scenes to the picture, all of them wearing sheepskin waistcoats just like the one I used to wear myself when I was two or three years old. There’s lots of shooting, chasing and punching... not to mention some quite nice frame designs where various uprights and horizontals are used to highlight different parts of the action. But for all this, somehow, the film seems curiously bland in places and, I think I’ve finally put my finger on why some of the film feels like this, finally...

I noticed, this time around, that in all the various shots of characters going about their business in London, there are never any people on the streets. Like everything had been locked off for filming but the production was too cheap to have extras. It’s a little off putting, to tell the truth. Like London has suddenly been emptied out in the aftermath of some great catastrophe. Oh... although there’s a shot inside Freddie Jones’ house where, you might notice a person extra, as one of the crew seems to be ducking behind a half open doorway at the rear of one shot, although there’s clearly meant to be nobody there apart from Freddie at this point.

In addition to the Hawthorn bush oddity and a number of in-the-moment, do it yourself crosses and stakes used throughout the movie, we have a nice scene where Peter Cushing’s character melts down a silver cross and casts it as a silver bullet (which he manages to miss Dracula with later) and a nice moment of running water demise, when Inspector Murray turns some sprinklers on the chained vampire gals in the basement, having learnt that this can be deadly to a vampire from the previous movie, invoking death by running water. That being said, it’s one of a few scenes where the action seems ever so slightly slowed down and a bit strange... this particular scene even more so because the director has chosen to switch to a posterised colour version of the shot to show the undead ladies writhing around on the floor. I’m not sure why this colour technique was used in just this one scene in the movie but, the cynic inside me suspects that something went wrong with the action of the shot which was only discovered later and they posterised the footage to disguise it. That’s my best guess on that one, anyway.

So that’s me finished with The Satanic Rites Of Dracula for a bit. The film is a little insipid in places and it’s certainly not as strong as the previous outing, Dracula AD 1972 but, it’s still quite entertaining and I appreciate the attempt to give the film a stronger link to the previous story through the characters and their learned knowledge from that film. And the John Cavacas score rocks and is worth picking up on CD if you don’t have it as it’s one of the few Hammer scores which has been released on CD still at this point. This was the last time that Christopher Lee played Dracula for Hammer but, not the last time Peter Cushing would play one of the Van Helsing clan... which would create continuity problems galore, as I’ll point out when I go on to watch that Hammer/Shaw Brothers collaboration as my next, final Hammer Dracula film review.

DarkFest 7

Dark Climes and
Tripped Up Climbs

DarkFest 7
Organised by Allan and Yanni Bryce

It was February 2021. I was just under a year into what would be two and a half years of working from home due to the Covid 19 pandemic. It was a surreal (but strangely much missed) time and I had two things which reignited my appreciation of the art of film and reminded me that, sometimes, life could be worth living, for a bit, during those unusual times. One of those things was Severin’s Al Adamson box set (written up with links to all the reviews here) and the other started with a friend telling me that the great Caroline Munro was on a nice cover painting in a magazine in my local W H Smith. Now, after washing my hands for the recommended 20 seconds, I rushed to my local news vendor - masked up and keeping my distance from everybody - and purchased said magazine, The Dark Side.

And I rekindled my declining relationship with magazines again. Not because I’d ever not liked them but, I just didn’t realise people were still doing these things in print (thankfully... I hate digital editions of anything and just don't bother reading them). And the magazine was great and I haven’t stopped buying both that and its sister magazine Infinity since. The editorials by Allan Bryce are so fun to read and I really appreciate these gems of printed materials as I grab them each month. But then I discovered that, as an annual event, the Bryce’s organised a thing called DarkFest at the Genesis cinema (around the Whitechapel area of London). I’d not been tempted before now but the quality of the guests this year such as Caroline Munro, Linzi Drew, Valerie Leon and Eileen Daly plus loads of good stalls and six mostly cool horror movies taking place over 12 hours (from 11am to 11pm), all for the ‘great value for money’ sum of £40, seemed too good to resist this year. So me and a friend braved the rain and went to check it out.

Now, I’ve often said in my years of going to FrightFest that the horror film fan community are among the friendliest in the world and this was exactly the case here. Which is very fortunate actually as the crowding of all those stalls and wonderful people somewhat resembled the ‘stateroom scene’ from the Marx Brothers movie A Night At The Opera (if you know, you know) and moving around the event was sluggish at best. I got the wonderful Ms. Munro to sign my Japanese At The Earth’s Core souvenir programme, had a word with Linzi Drew and also got a beautiful lingerie calendar signed by the charming Mrs. Moon, the organiser of the Misty Moon events. Alas, Eileen Daly left before I could get near to her which was a shame... this is the third time I’ve tried to see her and fate always conspires to keep me away.

Now I was worried about how my friend would take the first movie shown, Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas (reviewed by me here) since it’s... well it’s badly acted, badly written and badly directed. It’s also very fun but, luckily, my friend said it was her favourite film of the day. I then left her to the next movie so I could get a chance to visit some of the stalls and empty out my wallet (and also grab a hot dog) but when I rejoined her 20 minutes before the end of Scars Of Dracula (reviewed by me here only last week) I managed to trip over the stairs in the cinema in the dark and hugely exacerbated the pain in my knees after a perilous falling accident in 2019. As I type these words I am in total agony and can barely walk... which is not the best state to be in.

We then watched what is probably my favourite vampire movie of all time... the low budget, highly creative Razor Blade Smile starring Eileen Daly as Lilith Silver and directed by Jake West. It’s been restored and will be getting a proper Blu Ray release soon so I won’t do a full review yet but, if you’ve never seen this film, with Daly playing a Jerry Cornelius-like vampire turned assassin caught up in a deadly conspiracy... you’re missing out. It’s a wonderful film and deserves to be properly re-evaluated by modern audiences. I could never figure out why there wasn’t a string of Lilith Silver movies made after this one.

At this point I had a brief but nice chat with Rick Melton, the erotic artist whose magazine cover had caught my interest in the first place. He was a really nice chap and I am looking forward to a new book coming out, according to him, in about ten months time. Then, after this year’s ‘Slaughter Awards’, we saw one of Lucio Fulci’s best horror films, The Beyond (reviewed by me here). This was good fun but, surprisingly, had loads of walkouts. I’m guessing the audience was already very familiar with this movie and were somewhat jaded and needed refreshments by this point.

After that we were faced with two more films... Friday The 13th, which held no interest and, the mystery film which I’d correctly guessed was a screening of a new transfer of Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter. Alas, the screenings were already running around 20 minutes late and we knew that if we stayed past the advertised time we would both have trouble catching our last trains home from Liverpool Street station so, at this point, we decided to call it a day. Alas, this was when I’d found that Eileen Daly had just flown the coop and all the stalls were beginning to get packed away already.

So, apart from the overcrowding at DarkFest 7 (but hey, at least everybody was friendly) and the late running schedule, I had a blast at this year’s event and something tells me that my friend (who preferred it even to FrightFest) and I will be back again around this time next year for DarkFest 8, which I assume will happen. I’ll report back on that one as the opportunity arises.

The Bourne Identity

Bourne Again

The Bourne Identity
USA/Germany/Czech Republic 2002
Directed by Doug Liman
Universal Films Blu Ray Zone B

What a great film. 

It’s been around 15 years since I last revisited this version of The Bourne Identity but I remember still the very first time I saw it at my local multiplex back in September 2002. I wasn’t expecting much from the film and I hadn’t at that time read Robert Ludlum’s original novel (which probably helps... it’s a loose adaptation at best) and I also hadn’t seen the original version starring Richard Chamberlain in the title role. This one, co-produced by Ludlum himself, who died before post-production was finished, was something Liman had wanted to make and I think Ludlum was not happy with the Chamberlain version. Whether he would have been happy with this version is anybody’s guess but... I’m pretty sure he would have hated the sequels, which have almost nothing in common with the novels on which they purport to be based.

All I can say is, I remember being overwhelmed when, quite against my expectations, this first movie in the series turned out to be incredibly good cinema. The hand held responsive camera work, the standout performances by Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper, Brian Cox, Clive Owen and Julia Stiles, plus the somewhat aggressive editing style which, no matter how choppy it gets in certain sequences, doesn’t confuse the viewer as much as the sequels would later (I’ll get into that when I review those films for this blog... coming soon)... they all add up to a pacey film which doesn’t let huge action sequences get in the way of both the story and some incredibly good character work from the performers.

One reservation I had is Matt Damon. He’s always been a great actor but he seems somewhat too young for the role. Or rather, he actually isn’t too young for the part... he just looks it. However, he does such a credible job and handles himself so well during the fight scenes (some of which were apparently done without a stuntman), that he totally manages to sell the movie. And, of course, the always marvellous Franka Potente, star of the phenomenal Run Lola Run, is so much more an interesting version of the character she plays and seems to bring more depth to the role than what a cookie cutter American actress might have done with it, it seems to me.

About that camerawork, some of it was handled by Liman himself (and I really wish this director had stayed around for the sequels) and some of it was by Oliver Wood, who was deliberately left out of some of the rehearsals so he could actually respond with the camera to where the action goes, rather than know where he was going. It’s an interesting idea and, since the camera is sometimes late to make a movement because of this, it does give the film a certain feeling which puts the audience right there in the events, as if they were responding to what was going on around them, in a different way to how some other films manage it.

The way the story is handled is great too... although it could have done with more of Marie (Franka Potente) in it, in terms of the importance of her character in the books. We start off totally in the dark as to who or what Bourne is, just like the character... although Liman does put in the odd scene or two early on of the CIA who are trying to track and kill their own operative, not knowing why Bourne has ‘gone rogue’. In the early appearances of the CIA manhunt scenes, they’re literally there to keep the audience warm as to the fact that something ‘fighty-punchy’ will eventually happen. Another scene early on where Bourne casually takes down two policeman, not knowing how he’s doing it, serves as a similar reminder to the audience that the slower pacing (for an American film) is going to get more action oriented as the movie progresses.

Lastly, I should probably mention John Powell’s absolutely brilliant score. The main title music and it’s use in the film plus other wonderful themes including the Treadstone theme (sadly and mysteriously absent from Powell’s own revisiting of the score in a composer’s cut, decades later) are absolutely top notch and the modern, almost techno style orchestrations really help carry the load, especially the strings section going into overdrive with repeat motifs to build suspense in certain scenes. Actually, that’s the one constant in four of the five films starring Matt Damon’s interpretation of Jason Bourne (both the character and actor are absent for the fourth off the five movies which, ironically, seems to me to be the best of the sequels)... no matter what you may think of those sequels, Powell’s scores for these are a powerhouse and also a great listen away from the images they were written to accompany. I’ve had the CDs for these movies on many spins over the years.

And that’s my take on this version of The Bourne Identity (and I will get around to the Chamberlain version, which I bought over twelve years ago but still haven’t reached that point where I need to watch it as yet). Despite the seeming age of the lead actor, this is truly one of the great modern spy films... normally I’d stick to the sixties classics in terms of that genre but, yeah, this one is a great movie and it certainly deserved the success it got. If you’ve never seen this one, seek it out and give it a go.

Scars Of Dracula

 

Bloody Mess

Scars Of Dracula
UK 1970
Directed by Roy Ward Baker  
Hammer/Studio Canal
Blu Ray Zone B

Wow. I wish I could say this Dracula film was as bad as I remember but, truth be told, while I remember thinking how bad it was last time I watched it, I didn’t remember any of the plot details at all. I think it’s so bad I just blanked them out of my mind somehow. Many people believe this is where the decline of the Hammer Dracula films started, with each one being steadily worse as they were released onto an unsuspecting public. Frankly, I think those people are crazy, considering the next film in the series was easily the jewel in Hammer’s Dracula crown and was, itself, followed by two very interesting Dracula movies too.

Now, you could be forgiven for looking at various elements of Scars Of Dracula on paper and thinking, wow, this one looks really interesting and, yeah, it does look interesting and I will go on to call out those points of interest in a minute. Also, it has a very strong cast with Christopher Lee reprising his signature role and with Jenny Hanley as the ‘final girl’ he has to bite. Playing her boyfriend and main minder is a young Dennis Waterman, a role many have said was miscast but, honestly, I think he does just as good a job with his lines and actions as any of the other actors in the cast and he’s certainly not why the film fails to engage. We also have the great Patrick Troughton playing Dracula’s human slave in this one... a part which I still think is beneath him but he does a good turn here. And, of course, Hammer regular Michael Ripper turns up in his third consecutive Dracula movie, with a much more expanded role than he usually gets, I would say.

So it’s still a great surprise, considering all the things it’s got going for it, that it’s a dull as ditchwater, almost plotless affair which even the impeccable acting and James Bernard’s score cannot rescue. The storyline just involves Hanley and Waterman ending up in Castle Dracula looking for his lost brother and bringing on various vampire troubles for themselves. Everything leading up to their confrontations with Dracula and his helper seem to be just so much terrible story padding and, none of it really works. There are though, as I said, a few points of interest but lets get the elephant in the room out of the way first...

The film starts off with Dracula reviving, from powdered blood on his cloak, by a very fake looking (and much used throughout the course of the movie) vampire bat flying over it and dropping fresh blood onto the ‘Dracula residue’. Yes, Dracula is brought back to life by a complete lack of imagination leading into his demise in the previous film, Taste The Blood Of Dracula (reviewed by me here) being played in reverse and, well, the location of his death, which took place in a cathedral of sorts if memory serves, has somehow been relocated to Castle Dracula... don’t ask me how. Since this film was released the same year as the previous entry, they must have thought audiences have a really short memory.

There’s an interesting scene, probably not the first movie to deal with this and the goriness is mostly kept below shot, where Patrick Troughton is seen clearing up after his master’s latest blood feast by sawing up a young lady’s body for easy burial. This was a nice touch and certainly showed something the producers may not have gotten away with in an earlier entry in the franchise (although I'm sure their Frankenstein films must contain something similar).

Another point of interest is the scene where Dracula, who is mostly played more like an English gentleman in this by Lee (probably his most interesting stab at the role, in which he brings a certain parallel humanity to the character), scales the sheer wall of his castle in much the same way that Spider-Man might do it. Although the scene shows his progress up the wall at high speed, it’s a moment which is taken directly from Bram Stoker’s original Dracula novel, albeit with Lee’s incarnation of the un-dead Count looking a lot different from the one that Stoker wrote about.

Finally, Dracula’s death in this is also quite novel... although somehow still quite dull looking in execution. Dennis Waterman pulls a bar of iron off of the top of the castle and throws it into Dracula’s torso like a spear, staking him. However, maybe in this version the stake has to be wooden to be effective because, Dracula just pulls it out again. He then raises the makeshift spear in order to do unto Waterman what has been done to him, when a stray lightning bolt from the raging storm is attracted to the stake in Dracula’s hand as it would be to a lightning rod and, before you know it, Dracula is up in flames and his burning corpse falls from the walls of the castle. So, yeah, an interesting death at least, if poorly realised when away from the page.

And that’s me really done with Scars Of Dracula now. It’s a real mess but, of course, the series would soon redeem itself, at least in my eyes, with the truly wonderful Dracula AD 1972, which I’ve already reviewed on this blog and which you can read just here.

The Devil’s Hour Series 2

Loop Dreams

The Devil’s Hour Series 2
Directed by various
UK October 2024
Five Episodes

Warning: Very light spoilers for series one.

Okay, so when I reviewed the excellent first series of The Devil’s Hour (right here) I rightly praised it but was forced to conclude that it’s a bit of a one trick pony in terms of any future iterations. But, just to prove me wrong (and they really did), here comes Series Two. I wasn’t expecting much from it after the conclusion of the first series but, I certainly got more than enough here to keep me happy. This second season is easily the equal of the first... although it’s one episode shorter than the 2022 season.

One thing which I’m very happy about is that, after hearing a short interview with the main co-star Peter Capaldi (who plays the serial killer but on the side of righteousness, as far as we know) is that the story arc obviously has a very clear beginning, middle and end because the second and third seasons have been shot back to back and the third series will definitely be the final one (although I suspect it won’t actually get a release until October 2025 or 2026).

All the cast return here, including Capaldi as Gideon, the always brilliant Jessica Raine as Lucy (in at least two different iterations of her character and their respective occupations), Nikesh Patel as Ravi (who is a detective in both of his ‘versions’, so to speak), Benjamin Chivers as Isaac and Meera Syal as Isaac’s psychiatrist. They’re all absolutely fantastic in this, as are all their co-stars.

This one starts off with the Detective version of Lucy we were introduced to right at the end of the last series... we see her life post-Gideon and, I think (it gets confusing at first), we find that the future version of her character is the one who is talking to the ‘far future’ version of Gideon in this particular multiversal loop, which we saw towards the end of the last season. It all points to this second version of Lucy we know as living a life taking place before the main Lucy of last season... because when she dies, Gideon has her blessing to ‘wake her up’ in the next life (if I’ve got this correctly), which is what the first series was all about, it turns out.

The show continues after this following both Detective Lucy and the later (or previous, depending on your point of view) iteration of Lucy after the events of the first six episodes, crosscutting between the two and also the various versions of the other actors’ characters in their respective versions of their reality. Where this one gets interesting is that Gideon seems to be building, possibly by accident, a network of people who seem to be ‘awoken’ (sometimes tragically so) to their plight in the universe. This could possibly be a small group utilised in future loops of themselves, I suspect.

So the focus on this one is the explosion in the toy shop which kills so many children... primarily to find the identity of the bomber in the yellow hoodie. Now, we’ve not been shown his/her face as yet but it kind of seems obvious to me just who this person must be and, maybe it’s a bit obvious from the start (although I’m still hoping series three will be able to surprise me on that score... fingers crossed).
 
A couple of things of note though... they’re still hiding people in the background of shots on occasion. There’s a brilliant moment in the early stages of the second episode here where Lucy and Isaac are with their psychiatrist and, in one long shot only, another version of Isaac peeking out at them from behind the curtains is clearly visible in a ‘blink and you’ll miss him’ appearance. And it’s not just things like this which keep me watching because the show is just so gripping on its own but, heck, this is pretty good icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned.

Two minor gripes though... and they really are minor.

We still don’t know why the show is called The Devil’s Hour. The waking up at 3.33am is still a feature for at least one of the characters but there’s no significance attached to this at any point, it seems to me.

Secondly, when one of the Lucy characters is going through a lot of pregnancy test kits over a ‘time passing’ montage, we see her throwing each dud into her bathroom bin as each negative result comes to light. Alas, the dud kits are piling up on top of each other in the bin to suggest the passage of time but... yeah, honestly that’s ridiculous. I mean, I know, visual shorthand and all that but are they really expecting us to believe that this woman doesn’t ever empty her bin over a number of months? Or even let other rubbish pile up on top of it?

Other than that though... I was gripped and thrilled and, asides from feeling smug at least about the identity of the yellow jacketed bomber (to an extent), The Devil’s Hour continues to surprise me, certainly with the twists the story takes but, not least of all in that it actually manages to hold its own with the previous series. I’m absolutely, once again, flagging this show up as one to watch and... I just hope there’s a Blu Ray version coming up at some point down the line.*

*Got sick of waiting to show this one to my folks so I just ordered a ‘Korean Blu Ray’ of the first two.

Gladiator II

Maximus Carnage

Gladiator II
aka GladIIator
Directed by Ridley Scott
UK/USA 2024
Paramount Pictures
UK Cinema Release Print.

Warning: Very small spoilers.

I really wasn’t expecting much from Gladiator II (or GLADIIATOR, as the actual film print reads) as I didn’t think too much of the first movie when it hit cinemas. For me, the first Gladiator had some nicely staged battles and a fantastic score by Hans Zimmer. Those were the two standouts for me... other than that, it was an okay movie, not a great one. So I really wasn’t expecting much from this sequel which, honestly... did anyone want a sequel to a movie where the title character, Maximus, died at the end... thus going a good way to negating any attempt at a possible follow on.

Well, I have to say that, although Gladiator II is a completely unnecessary follow up, I actually preferred it a lot more to the first film. I mean, it’s still not a great film but, yeah, it kept me entertained for much longer and, despite running for two and a half hours, it didn’t really drag either (I thought the first one did drag, somewhat, it has to be said).

This one is, in terms of story content, a kind of toned down remake of the first movie where, this time, it’s Lucius, the grown up son of Maximus, played here by Paul Mescal, who is captured after his wife is killed by his mother’s new husband. Said husband, Marcus Acacius, is played by Pedro Pascal but he’s not really a villain and he plays the character sympathetically. Lucius goes about conquering the new games devised by two Caligula-like ruling emperors (who are essentially the main villains, for a bit), with the intention of taking his revenge on Acacius but there’s more to it than that. Denzel Washington plays the guy in charge of the Gladiatorial school, so to speak and he wants to use Lucius to rise up for his own political ends. Washington is amazing in this, as is the returning Connie Nielson as Lucilla.

There are political conspiracies paced with, frankly, somewhat over the top Colosseum games which include... I dunno... some kind of genetically altered killer ape/dog creatures and a flooded arena filled with sharks. Um, I assume there are going to be one or two accusations levelled at director Ridley Scott that he’s jumped the shark with this movie, for sure. That being said, although the action sequences are maybe not quite as consistently engaging as the first film, they still work very well and the quieter scenes where violence suddenly intrudes into the narrative have positively Japanese levels of arterial spray (well, more like arterial floods) and certainly liven up those moments considerably.

But, I don’t really care, as escapist fantasy it’s fast moving and, well it’s Ridley Scott so, whatever you may think of his movies post-1982 (after his three masterworks The Duellists, A L I E N and Blade Runner, reviewed here), you know that the cinematography is going to be nothing less than stunning so, yeah, no surprises there (and he seems to be using the different qualities of image tone between the two films for the flashbacks as the very thing which makes them feel like a window to the past). What did surprise me was the last combat scene in the film as I didn’t expect to see a certain character turning out to be the real villian until about half an hour before the end (I thought he would become an ally)

And as an added bonus, we get a score by one of Zimmer’s stable, the great Harry Gregson-Williams, who of course gave us the incredible score to Wonder Woman. And yes, Gladiator II is on CD and this was the real motivating factor that dragged me into cinemas to see (well, hear) this thing and, on the music front, I was not disappointed. I can’t wait to hear this thing as a stand alone listen, for sure. It does have a fair few nods to Zimmer’s leitmotif on occasion (although not the Holst derivative, from what I could hear) but it does its own thing and has some nice orchestration.

So yeah, I think that’s me done with Gladiator II other than to acknowledge that Derek Jacobi’s returning character feels somewhat wasted, Connie Nielson is the absolute glue which holds the film (and the story, to an extent) together and I didn’t even mind the tongue-in-cheek ‘I Am Spartacus’ moment after the Coliseum sea battle scene. Definitely worth seeing this one at a cinema if you can spare the time.

The Black Widow

Along Came
A Spider Woman

The Black Widow
USA 1947
Directed by
Spencer Gordon Bennet & Fred C. Brannon
Republic Pictures

I really love the old cinema serials... starting right back from my passion for Feuillade’s silent French serials and with more than much love for the American talkie serials, which met their ultimate demise at some point in the 1950s. I mean Universal, Republic, Columbia... they all had their own, distinct style of serial making and I could watch these things forever. So it brings me no joy to say that The Black Widow, a theatrical serial I wanted to see so much I had to look for it as a non-commercial release (if you catch my drift), is probably my least favourite of them all... although it’s still quite watchable and has at least a little entertainment value for sure.

I don’t know what went wrong with this one though. It’s got all the ingredients of being another fast and furious serial from Republic which, if you know their serials, means the odd car chase and lots of fist fights where everything at a location or interior set which isn’t nailed down will, within the course of a few minutes, get thrown or used as a breakable weapon by protagonists and antagonists alike. And The Black Widow looked like a real good one... not only that but it’s directed by the team of Spencer Gordon Bennet & Fred C. Brannon, who both had a very good track record with directing exciting serials. And it’s even got special effects by Howard and Theodore Lydecker, who did absolutely fantastic work in many a Republic serial. Think of the cave melting effects of the decimator in King Of The Rocket Men (a serial I hope to revisit in a high definition restoration very soon) or their work on getting the title characters in that and The Adventures Of Captain Marvel (reviewed here) to fly to their destinations in various shots.

Okay, so this one is about Sombra, aka The Black Widow... a fortune teller who is a female spy working in the USA, under the instructions of her father who will sometimes teleport to her headquarters in a puff of smoke, instructing her in which secret gadgets and inventions to try and steal from the American authorities to hinder their war effort and help their own. Now it’s not really said which foreign power she’s working for but the implication is that she’s supposed to be Japanese, I think... although the ‘yellow face’ make up job is pretty unfathomable most of the time and she just seems like the US girl she is... played here by all American gal Carol Forman (who made a name for herself playing leading villainesses in similar productions and who would, of course, go on to play the lead villain, The Spider Lady, in the first Superman serial a year later).

Anyway, the big flies in her ointment here are the two main protagonists, detective fiction writer Steve Colt, played by Bruce Edwards and his ‘side kick cum damsel in distress’, lady reporter Joyce Winters, played by Virginia Lee. These two, week after week, put themselves in danger trying to thwart The Black Widow’s plans for world domination. Except, there’s no chemistry between the two at all, it seems to me and not much interaction besides the odd argument as Steve tries to stop Joyce from going along with him on dangerous missions. It just all feels kinda limp and there’s not even a hint of romantic interest suggested between the two leads either so... yeah, these two are not helping the serial much, it has to be said.

And that’s even with the inclusion of a number of neat gadgets and ideas littered throughout the ‘13 exciting chapters’ of this one. Such as the fact that Sombra can disguise herself as anyone via a mask and impersonating their speech, making for many shenanigans and plot twists reminiscent of the modern Mission Impossible films. This obviously wasn’t a new idea then, of course... Fantômas was doing the same thing back in the 1913 serial and the books which pre-date that but, this may well have been one of the earlier American examples of the ‘mask madness’ which we’re all so familiar with today... the impossibility of which is always overlooked by whichever film maker is going with it.

Other interesting novelty features for the serial are a fake looking black widow spider that pops out from a compartment in a chair and bites Sombra’s victims to death and also a drug which feigns death by slowing the victims heart so it looks like they’ve passed on. Sombra uses this heart stopping pill to escape from jail at one point. There’s even that neat trick which I’ve seen used in a couple of other serials (such as Batman in 1943) where, at the flick of a button, the fleeing enemy car changes its colour so the good guys miss it... but even that is badly done here on two occasions, where it looks nowhere near as good in this serial as I’ve seen done elsewhere... I was surprised at how this turned out for the Lydeckers, to be honest.

And, yeah... not much more for me to say in this one. It’s got the usual quota of fights and chases (none of which were that exciting here, it seemed to me) and it’s got plenty of cliffhangers where the director has to reveal a slightly different sequence of events the next chapter, to allow our hero or heroine to survive the certain death we’d witnessed the week before). So, yeah, The Black Widow is certainly still fun but, I dunno, I prefer the other 20 to 30 serials I’ve previously seen to this one so... it was okay. I’m not done with the serials though... I’ve just bought a nice Australian Blu Ray set of seven restored Republic serials, five of which I’ll be revisiting and, with the other two, I’ll be making my acquaintance with them for the first time. So there will definitely be more serial reviews coming to the blog at some point... but I will be watching them an episode a week so, there will be gaps between the reviews, for sure.