Justice Inc

Avenger's Ensemble

Justice Inc
Dynamite comics Trade Paperback reprint
ISBN: 1606906623

So here we have another modern comic strip "mash up" of 1930s pulp characters, this time teaming up Doc Savage, The Shadow and The Avenger. Now I read a DC series called First Wave a few years ago which teamed up these characters but, as I recall, I found it so awful a rendition of the original source material, being nothing near these fictional people in either spirit or tone, that I just flat out refused to bother to review it. This one is a little better but... it's still not great and, especially in terms of Clark Savage Jr, still not what I would call a credible portrayal of the character.

The Avenger was a relatively short lived character created by the Smith and Street magazine as another one to try and rival their two aforementioned heroes in popularity but, despite having a radio series too, the magazine folded after a few years. The published pseudonym for the writer of the series was Kenneth Robeson and the publishers promoted it as being written by the creator of the Doc Savage tales but, honestly, I don’t think Lester Dent, the main Doc storywriter and creative force behind the property, ever wrote any of The Avenger stories. The initial novel, Justice Inc, told of how the hero Richard Benson loses his wife and daughter in a villainous plot involving a plane crash. He survives death but the shock of his ordeal causes his skin to go grey and harden like clay. This means he can resculpt his features to resemble anyone and this master of disguise, along with his aides, sets up Justice Inc to avenge the victims of crime. That's pretty much all I can remember of that initial pulp story, to be honest, as it's been over twenty years since I read it.

This first story hit the newsstands in 1939 and it's in this year that the bulk of this new comic book is set. Starting off with their new, present day incarnation of The Man Of Bronze, a time travel element is introduced into the story to allow Doc to travel back to 1939 to meet himself before returning to the present, leaving us readers back in 1939 to continue the story. A story which, as it happens, is almost a retelling of the original Justice Inc version of The Avenger, but interpenetrated with Doc Savage and The Shadow, intersecting the timeline and with Doc's miraculous science being responsible for the clay faced resurrection of Richard Benson as The Avenger. After both Doc and The Shadow train Benson in how to take care of himself, the three go on to work together to try to foil the dastardly plans of The Shadow's villain The Voodoo Master, Doc Savage's two-time nemesis Johnny Sunlight and a mysterious third villain who is another variant on the Lamont Cranston personae... who is neither The Shadow nor, in this version and more in keeping with the later novels, a dupe identity for The Shadow.

And there you have it.

Except the writing isn't brilliant to be honest. I can't speak for The Avenger because I've only ever read the first novel but Doc is engaging in far too much chit chat here and even displaying a
sense of humour and self awareness that just wasn't part and parcel of Doc's almost emotionless, inpenetrable character. Similarly, The Shadow seems way too verbally aggressive and disrespectful of people for me to take him seriously as a credible version of the character. So this didn't sit well with me.

A good point about the comic is the artwork, which gives it a nice, painted, 1930s style pulp sensibility throughout... but the plot is fairly choppy (if this was a movie I'd say it was badly edited) and is a distraction to comprehension at certain points, I found. Furthermore, the geeky fanboy nods to the actual identities of the writers of the original books, like having characters with names like Ernst, Grant and Robeson, felt clumsily done and less enjoyable than a more sly, subtle set of references.

Another element which didn't sit well with me was the lack of the original companions of the characters. Sure, Monk Mayfair and Margo Lane are in there briefly but they don't seem too much like their original, pulp counterparts and, especially in the case of the Doc Savage novels, they were very much ensemble pieces with all of the subsidiary characters carrying a lot of weight and bearing on the feel of the stories. Here, they're pretty much ignored, it has to be said.

Adding insult to injury, they've included Doc's cousin Pat Savage, The Woman Of Bronze, in the story but she's hardly in it. The pretext that Margo Lane uses to recruit her into the escapades sets up a plot development which seems to me, unless I somehow missed it, to be completely superfluous to the main storyline and a complete loose end, not picked up later on in the narrative. Which is a) not so great writing and b) completely pointless and a waste of a great character who has always had a lot of potential. Even Lester Dent himself uses the character a little too sparingly and she only appeared in a small fraction of the more than 180 original Doc Savage novels, as if Dent himself failed to exploit the richness of the character. Modern Doc scribe Will Murray, who writes the latest incarnations of the novels, has probably done more to make use of Pat's personality for dramatic purposes... perhaps even more so than Dent did. Here, though, writer Michael Uslan kinda drops the ball with the character as far as I can see. Of course, on the plus side, with Pat hardly being in this volume, at least she isn't as badly presented as Doc is here. So that's something.

So could I recommend this volume to fans of the characters and of comics in general? Well certainly I would tell Doc fans to steer clear. It's not great, to be sure, although it's a hell of a lot more entertaining than DC’s First Wave interpretation of the character, it has to be said. If you’re a fan of comics in general... well the story is fairly simplistic, as you would expect it to be when dealing with 1930s pulp characters, but if you’re into rip roaring adventures with plenty of action then you might find this one an okay addition to your library. For anyone else, however, I'd say go back to 1970s Marvel for a better comics fix of Doc Savage and 1970s DC for a better comic book version of The Shadow. Much better versions, to be sure, and ultimately more satisfying... especially the black and white Marvel magazine style comic of Doc Savage... that run was an absolute masterpiece of a series.

Nerve

Snitch Of The Def Nerve

Nerve
2016 USA
Directed by  Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman
UK cinema release print.

Okay... so I have many grumbles about this new film Nerve but most of them are unimportant for what, ultimately, turns out to be a fairly entertaining movie.There are a few things which kinda grate though so... if you're interested, read on.

First up... this is something like the fifth movie made in just the last few years with this title. Sure, it’s based on an original novel but perhaps a title change might have helped ensure there’s no confusion in the marketplace as to which movie is which? I’m sick of producers and directors calling their movies, ones which aren’t even a remake, the same title as various others. They really need to sort themselves out.

Secondly... what the heck are the BBFC up to now?

Nerve has, quite bizarrely, been given a 15 certificate by those fiendish moral guardians, so what can this be about? Is it for extended scenes of nudity or sex? Nope, nothing like that here. Is it for excessive violence, perhaps? Nah, not much of anything to be seen here. Excessive swearing perhaps? Nope, not that I can recall, Anything which is said is certainly well within the remit of the ‘young teenage’ audience this has obviously been made for and I certainly hear far stronger stuff from 7 - 8 year olds on the bus on their way back from school. Oh, wait... here’s the clue in the description underneath the certification before the film starts...

This film has been given a 15 rating for... 'Risky Imitable Behaviour.' What the f***? Seriously BBFC? Seriously? Gee... I was watching a Western a while back and in that movie, which could be shown on television during the day, men in funny hats were firing six shooters at each other and killing their enemies. Some of them might even have been smoking. Surely that’s all pretty much even worse imitable behaviour than what you see in this movie? This is just another example of how completely screwed in the head our ratings system is over here. Don’t buy into it folks! Also, if I were to make a guess as to which scenes the BBFC were talking about... well they’re in every trailer for the movie that I’ve seen. Don’t remember getting any warnings about watching the trailer to this thing though.

Okay, so Nerve is not a bad movie but it’s definitely a film aimed specifically at the teenage audience. A teenage audience of whom only half will be allowed to legally watch it in this country because of the insistence of the BBFC. So what we have is a bunch of teenagers talking on their various social media devices and some dizzying fast camerawork and some badly inappropriate songs. All in all, this makes the first 15 - 20 minutes of this movie almost unwatchable. It’s been a long time since I was tempted to walk out of a cinema because of how bad a movie was up to a certain point and, I won’t beat around the bush here... this one did tempt me.

However, once the plot of a secret society and virtually untraceable reality game show called Nerve, which asks their players to risk certain things on dares to win cash, kicks in properly, we have something which does settle down to become a little more watchable and, dare I say it, fairly  suspenseful. It does help that we have an extremely charismatic pair of actors in the lead roles... Emma Roberts from 4.3.2.1. (reviewed very briefly here) as Vee and Dave Franco from the Now You See Me films (reviewed here and here) as Ian. Despite some full on camera movement acrobatics and lots of short shots which make things sometimes hard to follow, these two and their relationship as they team up to play the game, risking it all as they ultimately try to beat the ‘Snitches get stitches’ rule as the game empties your bank account and steals your identity to take you to a death match, is the glue which solidly holds the film in place. You find yourself really caring about these characters because their on screen chemistry is so good. So that’s a surprisingly big positive in the way you may perceive this film, I think. If you can actually get through the breathtakingly shallow, teenage angst of the introductory character set ups, that is.

Another thing that doesn’t harm the movie is the way the technology is used and shown as infographic overlays on the screen. I recently reviewed The Shallows (here) where it really hurt the movie to the point where it was something I found myself focusing on again and again in a negative manner. Here, though, it works really well and part of that is because the context of the story actually means that it makes sense for the directors to be doing this sort of thing. It’s almost essential, actually, and saves a lot of otherwise inane dialogue from being inserted into the movie about ‘how many followers do you have’ and ‘how many watchers are in the area’. To be sure, the dialogue does hit that level too at a couple of points but only when they need to be specifically highlighted in context of advancing the story... otherwise the visual shorthand is handled just right here and it works like a dream, despite the excessive energy of the constantly moving camera operator and the people in the editing suite.

Something that really doesn’t work is the inane musical choices. Don’t get me wrong... Rob Simonsen’s electronica score is actually pretty good and I look forward to picking up a CD when it’s hopefully released in September. However, it does seem to be overshadowed by the sound mix in a lot of places and, worse, the inevitable batch of totally inappropriate, just awful, kiddy pop songs which also seem to pop up to populate the movie and render the sometimes seductive visuals at their most banal. I hate songtracks and this is one of the worst I’ve had to sit through at the cinema, for sure. Yeah, I know I’m far from the target audience to this stuff but... I know bad kid-pop music when I hear it.

Having said all that, though, Nerve does manage to be somewhat intense at certain points... there are a few beyond the edge of your seat moments in this. It’s also, as I said earlier, somewhat entertaining and, although I don’t think I could ever sit through it again, it’s certainly not a bad choice for a movie to see on a Saturday night at your local cinema. I suspect, if you are younger than the actual certification age of this movie, you will probably enjoy it a lot more than anyone else but, you know, if you do watch it... make sure you don’t end up killing yourself due to all that excessively ‘risky imitable behaviour’... or the BBFC might come and arrest you, or something.

The Shallows

Fin And Bare It

The Shallows
2016 USA Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very mild, shallow, mini moment spoilers lurking within.

The Shallows is a new movie about a great white shark and the carnage it wreaks in the shallow waters by a secret beach. As such, it’s bound to invite comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s great white shark opus, Jaws, and frankly, it’s a bit of a big movie to find yourself compared to. Not many movies are going to come out anywhere near as good as Jaws when you play the shark comparison game, including the Jaws’ sequels, and so The Shallows, as predicted, comes nowhere close to the level of that movie.

That being said, it has its own unique spin in that, apart from a few deaths, it is pretty much just a single woman, and a companionable seagull, fighting for life against the shark which has them trapped on a small island, just beyond a beach that hardly anybody knows about. There’s a lot which is good about the film and, it has to be said, a lot of that is to do with the central protagonist Nancy, and the strength of Blake Lively’s performance in this key role. However, I have to point out that it’s not a movie without a fair few problems, at least as I see them, and so I 'll quickly address those here.

The director uses a lot of 'in your face' close ups in this movie and it certainly does help to ratchet up the tension when Nancy finds herself in trouble. However, I don’t think the editing or coverage is all it should be here. Let me try and explain what I mean. There’s a shot early on when the camera is following Nancy fairly tightly... it’s not an extreme close up by any means but it’s certainly setting up the next to be an establishing shot of the beach that she has been driven to for the first five or ten minutes of the movie. Alas, although the next shot is, indeed, an establishing shot of the beach, it’s quite contrary to anything the audience is set up to be expecting... namely a POV shot from roughly where Nancy is standing. Instead, we get a sudden cut from a fairly slow, maybe even static shot of Nancy to a long, hurtling helicopter shot taking in the whole bay from a different direction. It kinda takes you by surprise and maybe that’s the point but, to be honest, I really don’t think it did the tone of the piece any favours in these early stages where you’re trying to con the audience into feeling comfortable within the space and try to get them to relate to the characters. So yeah, little artistic quirks like that can work quite well but here, I feel, it really didn’t.

Another thing in which I think Collet-Sera is maybe trying to push the boundaries of the regular syntax of the visual aspect of cinema too far is with constant shots inserted over the main canvass in order to convey personal information about the characters. For instance, as the movie starts, Nancy is being driven to the beach where she will eventually fight for survival and she’s flicking through her library of photos on her phone, pointing out certain things to the driver which, of course, are laying the foundations of certain sequences later in the film. Every time she flicks through a photo on screen, a third or so of the shot has an inset of what she is seeing on her phone, rotating through as she does this. Similarly, when she’s later skyping on the beach, the inserts of the ‘skype experience’ are inset, at some odd angles, into the picture. It’s very distracting. Especially when the shot cuts to a reverse and the inset is then just continued on a different part of the screen. I found it jarring and contrary to a naturally flowing movie experience, to be honest. As the film progresses, similar shots of Nancy’s watch are shown as inserts in to various parts of the screen. Now the director here is no Godard. He might well have been making a comment designed to pop you out of the movie so you can think about what you are seeing but, to be honest, it didn’t feel like that. It felt more like the director was trying to deliver information and, perhaps, the visual execution of this maybe didn’t work out so well. That’s how I felt about it anyway and, like I said, it's pretty distracting.

Another big problem is the amount of unbelievable, coincidental clichés found in this movie. Okay so... I guess if you’re going to be trapped on a very small piece of rock which is going to disappear under the tide at some point, you’d best make sure that your main protagonist is a trainee doctor so she can look after herself when she gets in trouble. And what are those unbelievably long earings she’s wearing? Who wears those? Could they, in fact, serve a dual survival purpose later on in the film by being that size and shape? Oh yeah... turns out it does come in mighty handily at some point in there so... yeah, all a bit too much of this kind of stuff, I thought.

There is, however, a great central performance in this film, as I said before, by Blake Lively. It’s a pretty intense performance and the actress manages to deliver something quite special here for what is, for most of the film, a one woman performance. Without giving too many spoilers away.... there’s a great scene where a guy on the beach can see that Nancy is trapped but he’s taking advantage of the situation rather than helping. However, when he goes to retrieve Nancy’s surf board from the ocean, he comes a cropper when the shark goes for him. Nancy does shout a warning to the guy as he swims out to her board but... and this is quite an obvious thing to happen at this fairly early stage of the movie... the guy is pretty much pulverised getting back to the beach. However, the camera does not actually show, at this point, what the shark is doing to the gentleman in question. Instead, it resorts to an old cinematic trick which is in no way necessary these days but which is, usually, much more effective. The camera instead decides to concentrate on all of Nancy’s reaction shots as she witnesses whatever our imaginations are believing to be happening and, I’m delighted to say, Lively plays this set of events with absolute believability, shock and nausea... for quite a while, it seems, until the camera deigns to show the gory punchline to the scene with the aftermath of the man in question. So, really, well done for her for being able to carry the weight of this film on her shoulders, despite the possibly deliberate but in no way less unsettling visual flourishes in which the director indulges.

The other star of this movie is the score by composer Marco Beltrami. Now I quite like a lot of Beltrami’s work anyway and although this eschews the classic, John Williams channels Korngold approach that the inevitable Jaws comparison may bring to mind, it’s not quite the modern, sound design meets atonality style of scoring you might expect the producers to plump for here. That being said, there is an ostinato used as a bass line in certain sequences near the end where Nancy and the shark are going head to head, so to speak, which is perhaps reminiscent of William’s famous two note motif for his great white shark score but, I honestly don’t know if that was a deliberate homage to the maestro or just my expectations of such making a connection with anything resembling a two note rhythm that was going to crop up here. Either way, it’s buried within the composition rather than being given its own voice as a dominating tone so, yeah, the music does its own thing and it’s pretty good and very supportive here. So top marks to Beltrami for doing something interesting, once again. Such a shame, then, that there seems to be no CD release for the score to this movie (nor any kind of release, it seems) as I would have liked to have heard this one away from the film it supports.

All in all, The Shallows is not a great film but it is fairly suspenseful and entertaining. Although a lot of the edge your seat thrills do involve the central protagonist pushing herself and doing things which the average human being night not be so stupid to even attempt (aka getting back in the water, while bleeding out and with a shark nearby), the ultimate result is that you may well be leaning forward in your seat at certain points (if you see it on a big enough screen) and holding your breath. Sure, it has its problems and I really wish the director had been less into the visual shenanigans with the various pieces of technology throughout the movie but it’s not a bad little piece if you want a ‘safe thrill’ from your cinema going experience. I wouldn’t go out of my way to either recommend it or warn against it... but if you find yourself circling the idea of the movie for long enough, maybe you might want to go in for a swim and take a bite.  

Respectable

Maxted Headroom

Respectable - The Mary Millington Story
UK 2016 Directed by Simon Sheridan
Odeon Films DVD Region 2

When I read on Twitter that Simon Sheridan, the writer responsible for the excellent book about Mary Maxted (aka Mary Millington), Come Play With Me - The Life And Films Of Mary Millington (reviewed by me here) had written, produced and directed a new documentary film about her, I was expecting something like a more seductive, pop culture approach to the lady’s life which would be a kind of abridged version of the book... but in no way a substitute for it. As it turns out, Respectable - The Mary Millington Story is both less and more informative than the tome in question. Which is a bit of a bonus, as far as I’m concerned.

The film starts off with the sound of film... proper film, none of that digital rubbish... running through a projector and, as you can hear the stock threading through on the soundtrack, the screen is dark and we hear the first of many recorded sound bites from Mary herself. We then get a quick rundown of the trajectory of her tragic life as a kind of précis of the film to come, in quick inserts from the various ‘talking head’ interviews which, as always in a film of this nature, fill up the majority of the running time. Which is what you would expect when the writer has obviously gone to the trouble of getting so many interviews with people who either knew her, encountered her or could bear expert witness due to their being in a similar profession (and it was really great seeing Linzi Drew again, to be honest). Anything else and the audience would feel somewhat short changed, to be sure.

Now, if you have read the aforementioned book on Mary’s shenanigans then you might feel that her early life story is somewhat glossed over here, perhaps. What you have to remember though is that you can’t throw all that detail in about a person from a book and expect the documentary, which is not that much shy of two hours anyway, to be either interesting or pacey. I think certain things are said which hit the key points and, if not all the facts and issues which may have gone into the lady’s psychological make up are highlighted here, they are emphasised enough that one can glean the main issues which led to certain behaviour later on in her life, perhaps. Either way, it doesn’t matter because anyone interested in reading more about the subject matter can purchase the aforementioned book and find out for themselves.

That being said, there is also a lot of stuff in this movie which I hadn’t actually heard before, to be honest and, unless I was sleep reading before, wasn’t included in the volume in question. It’s also quite possible that some of the stories and anecdotes which come to light here were either not available or actually not allowed to be printed at the time that the book was first published for various reasons. The first printing was released, after all, about 17 years ago. So, for example, I never realised... or at least it never hit home in my brain before... that Mary’s notorious short porn film Miss Borloch was actually one of the prize winners of what was the first ever porn film awards, The Wet Dreams Festival, at Amsterdam in 1970. Everybody who went to the event had to go naked and the judges included famous feminist writer Germain Greer in their number. Mary Millington was an even bigger star in Europe, it seems, than she was initially as an illegal, ‘under the counter’ star in the United Kingdom, at the time.

Another story new to me involved her, sometimes official, prostitution antics (for want of a better word), where it is alleged that Coleman’s Mustard once hired Mary to sleep with the head of Tesco so they could get their brand of product into the supermarket chain. Which is a bit of an eye opener, if this is true.

Other stories, like a more softened down version of her encounter with prime minister Harold Wilson are also present (if you want more details, buy the book) and her meteoric downfall involving the tax men, a corrupt police force (it would seem... who Mary paid protection money to but still managed to have them constantly raiding her sex shops), her increasing but completely unnecessary kleptomania and various other factors which culminated in her early suicide are all thrown into the mix. There’s also some things that don’t, necessarily, add up when it comes to taking a closer look at that suicide. It’s often noted that, in light of another brush with the law where they threatened her with a prison sentence, she retired to her room without her husband (who slept elsewhere in the house that night and who she was in the process of divorcing), wrote some goodbye notes and then ended her life by taking a large amount of pills washed down with vodka. And that’s indeed the story that the autopsy confirms. However, there is a big question mark in the involvement of certain other people, or a specific person, which is quite pointed in terms of the remembrances of some of the guests on this documentary and it’s interesting that several of them mention that Mary would never drink alcohol. Just being around the smell of beer made her feel sick. So... yeah... interesting stuff, I would say.

The way the film itself is shot and presented is very pacey and the whole thing never flags as the director balances the various interview footage of people such as members of Mary’s friend and family (which are heartbreaking in some cases), various lovers and major celebrities such as François Pascal and actor Dudley Sutton (who worked with her in the film The Playbirds - reviewed here) with excerpts from Mary’s films, recordings of Mary herself and the occasional bit of documentary footage of London in the 1970s... which I personally found most nostalgic since I was a child model at the time, working in my school holidays in various locations around London. Sheridan also adds the nice touch of coming back to new footage of the source of some of the on screen audio and visual excerpts... so he might precede an excerpt of a film with a shot of a projector showing it or go into a sound bite of Mary while showing a tape recorder playing the sample. He doesn’t do this a lot but he does it enough to make an impression and I kinda liked this way of handling it, all of which adds to an interesting watch.

Above all, from the various testimonials caught here, I got the impression that Mary Millington was much more about living a life of moral justice, far above the issues of the legality or illegality of what she was doing at any given time. So, for instance, she would stock illegal, ‘under the counter’ items in her sex shops because she believed it was the right thing to do and shouldn’t be against the law at all. There’s a lovely line from one of the interviewees in the film which, for me, summed up Mary’s brand of enlightened naivety very smartly. It's mentioned that she was a lady who carried "the spirit of the 1960s Summer of Love well into the seventies with her." I kinda like that idea and it’s maybe something we should all think about doing more of, methinks.

So there you have it. Respectable - The Mary Millington Story is a truly great little documentary that’s written, produced and directed by someone who has had an interest in Mary’s life for a very long time and can be considered something of an expert in this field, I suspect. In other words, a truly informative, sometimes thought provoking but always entertaining look at a tragic but very influential, in some ways, lady who also happened to be Great Britain’s first, bona fide porn star. The disc comes with the usual amount of interesting extras that are the normal expectation of an Odeon DVD release of one of Mary Millington’s films and this one gets a big recommendation from me. And if you do take a look at this movie and like it... then you can always go buy the book, too.

Doc Savage - The Man Of Bronze

Righting Ron

Doc Savage - The Man Of Bronze
USA 1975 Directed by Michael Anderson
Produced by George Pal
Warner Brothers iTunes on iPhone6

The Arctic Circle, 1936. An American flag glides along the horizon and, eventually, a snow vehicle ridden by Ron Ely as Doc Savage - The Man Of Bronze, comes into view. We know he’s Doc Savage because the name is emblazoned on this and, indeed, on every vehicle that Clark Savage Jr owns in this movie.

Lower Edmonton, UK, 1975. A young boy of only seven years old is watching Chris Kelly’s movie programme Clapperboard on TV and the film, which he’s never heard of until now, is reviewed. He and his mother are watching as a clip is shown where Savage attempts to ward off certain death in the form of flying snakes, composed of green light, who reform themselves back into shape after being blasted with a shotgun shell. It’s pretty exciting stuff and both the boy and his mother urge the father that night to take them into Enfield at the weekend, to see the film at the Savoy cinema. By a strange twist of fate featuring two colliding cars which mount the pavement to wreak havoc on soft bodies just a year later, the family will soon move house to a location less than five minutes walk from that very same cinema.

Of course, the little boy was me and all the family were absolutely enthralled the night of that cinema trip. Doc Savage was, and to this day still remains, one of the greatest movies we’d ever seen. Now, a lot of Doc Savage fans didn’t like the camp humour of the film, which was lost on me at that time in much the same way that the Adam West Batman TV show is also serious business when you are a youngster... but we all thought it was brilliant. We loved the cheering on the soundtrack whenever a blow for justice was dealt. We loved the applause when Doc reminded his aides, The Amazing Five, of their honourable and heroic code. And most of all, we loved the 1930s knockabout theatrical serial atmosphere to the movie, which was perfect for Doc and which fit right in with another amazing thing I’d discovered on BBC TV about a year before this, the original Flash Gordon serials starring Buster Crabbe.

I recently found myself with a ‘good friend’ in London and she hadn’t seen the movie before. Due to a lack of options and the fact that I had no DVD player on me, nor my US Region locked disc of the movie, I downloaded it from UK iTunes and we watched it on my phone. It’s a movie I’ve seen dozens of times over the years and all I will say is... it still holds up.

The film was directed by Michael Anderson, who’d directed one of my favourite spy films, The Quiller Memorandum (reviewed here), and who would go on to direct another pre-Star Wars sci-fi classic the year after the release of this film, Logan’s Run. This movie plays up the ridiculousness of the situations found in many of the Doc Savage books without, I feel, poking too much fun at the characters. This was ‘wonder producer’ George Pal’s last movie and, despite reports of a sequel being half filmed while this movie was in production, the box office was so poor on this the second movie never came to be. Which is a shame because, in the days before the internet, news like aborted movie projects never came to light much and me and my father were waiting for the sequel to this to be released for years after.

The film follows, pretty faithfully (despite reports to the contrary), the first of Kenneth Robeson’s Doc Savage tales, at least for the first half of the book. The stuff about the green, floating snakes is added for the movie and perhaps, for the medium of film at least, gives a more exciting ingredient than seeing Doc running around trying to cure an Ancient Mayan tribe of a man made plague. The characterisations of Doc and his crew, played by Ron Ely (Doc), Michael Miller (Monk), Darrell Zwerling (Ham), William Lucking (Renny), Eldon Quick (Johnny) and Paul Gleason (Long Tom) are pretty much spot on. Even Monk’s porcine companion Habeus Corpus is along for the adventure, just as he was in a lot of the books.

The pacing is terrific and I remember we were all fooled for a few seconds, the first time we saw it, when Doc’s plane is shot down and destroyed with, seemingly, him and his crew in it... before a clever and less than subtle reveal gives the audience the truth behind that incident. We also marvelled at the refractive glass moving everything in Doc’s Empire State Building headquarters exactly 6 inches to the left, thus defeating a sniper’s bullet before it is even fired. And the wonderful fight scene between Doc and the prime antagonist of the movie, Captain Seas (played by Paul Wexler), where different fighting styles such as Sumo and Gung Fu come up on subtitles as the styles are played up, before plain old fisticuffs settles things, is a nice humourous touch used to lift the sometimes dull nature of such action sequences (in other movies) onto another level.

Frank DeVol’s original score for the film is pretty serviceable but everyone will remember it for his adaptations of John Philip SoUSA marches, which give Doc and his crew a strong musical identity during the action sequences. And anyone who says lyricist Don Black’s greatest song is Diamonds Are Forever (reviewed here) doesn’t know what they’re talking about, as far as I’m concerned. His lyrics for the Doc Savage song, which comes into the movie a few times, is easily his greatest work.

The epilogue to the film sets up the cliff hanger, sadly unrealised, for the next Doc Savage adventure, The Arch Enemy Of The World... and I so wish that the box office could have been better for this movie. I had a new idol and the film started me on the path of reading as many of the Bantam reprints of the 180 plus Kenneth Robeson (aka Lester Dent) novels as I could find... not to mention the eight issues of the Marvel comics which adapted four of those novels (such as Brand Of The Werewolf, featuring Doc’s cousin, Pat Savage) and the eight issues of the black and white Marvel magazine of original stories, which had excellent artwork in the style of their similarly produced Savage Sword Of Conan magazine. Some truly phenomenal stuff.

As the years pass, kickstarted by this film, I continue to read Doc Savage publications and buy what merchandise I can... which is not much, alas. I still have my bronze figurine of Ron Ely in the role on my bookshelf and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Shane Black can do with a Doc Savage project, which is currently being developed with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in the role... who looks very much like those old James Bama painted covers (which were modelled, incidentallly, by TVs Flash Gordon, Steve Holland) for the Bantam reprints. I regularly review Will Murray’s new Doc Savage publications, still written under the old Street and Smith house name of Kenneth Robeson, and if you go to the book section of the index here, you will find a fair few of those covered.

Doc Savage - The Man Of Bronze is, today, what it’s always been. A really fun slice of Boy’s Own adventure with never a dull moment. Heck, it even has Pamela Hensley, who went on to play Princess Ardala in the TV version of Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, only four years later. Not to mention that it’s the debut movie of iconic character actor Michael Berryman, who is still working at the time of writing this review. If you haven’t already guessed it, the original Doc Savage movie gets a big recommendation from me to anyone who has a pulse and is breathing. One of the great adventure movies and with lines like... “Have no fear, Doc Savage is here!”... it’s always guaranteed to bring a smile to the face.

Suicide Squad

Deuce Ex Position

Suicide Squad
2016 USA Directed by David Ayer
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah, there’ll be some minor, suicidal spoilers in this one. Read at your own peril.

Okay, so this film is getting a lot of hype right now and, in terms of box office success, it’s making a big killing. I have to say that, while I wasn’t really looking forward to seeing this movie, I didn’t have a bad time with it. It’s not a terrible movie but it is a movie which does have a lot of problems. I can totally understand the critical dubbing it’s getting but that doesn’t mean to say you’re not going to like it. Let me explain what I’m talking about here but first, a little background as to where this review is coming from.

This is not the version of DC’s Suicide Squad which started appearing in 1959, in issues of The Brave And The Bold and Action Comics, although some of the members were in place even back then. This version, adapted for the movie, seems to be based on the fifth incarnation of the comic book which started maybe five years ago (which I think may be when Harley Quinn was first in it... I think). Now I don’t know much about any of the characters in this movie, apart from The Joker, it has to be said. Some of them I know purely from playing the Batman Lego games on my old Playstation 2 and iPhone. The others I know nothing about and certainly Harley Quinn was a character invented much later than the comics I was reading, for the Batman animated adventures... so I’m not even sure if she’s properly become canon in the non-kiddie versions of the comic books or not. I’m guessing she must have transitioned into the more adult DC titles after a while or we wouldn’t be seeing her here. So, yeah, the only character I know something about, in terms of the protagonist/antagonist supervillain elements of this piece, at any rate, is The Joker so... that’s my only credentials for the credibility, or not, of this review. Sorry about that. But I can still review it in terms of being a movie... I just can’t comment too much on the adaptation elements. So, yeah, take it or leave it, I guess.

Suicide Squad is definitely a movie which can’t help but show you its very obvious influences. Now, I’ve never even got around to seeing The Dirty Dozen but I know for sure that what we have here is a DC version of that movie but, that’s okay because I believe one of the incarnations of the comic book was too, so... yeah, that shouldn’t be a problem. Its other main influence seems to be John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York in terms of the way the action is contained within a few, abandoned city blocks with various antagonist forces trying to stop Suicide Squad from reaching their destination. Now this really is quite blatant and its interesting that the writers have chosen to push the analogy further by actually using Carpenter’s carrot/stick approach to getting an anti-hero to do your dirty work. That is to say that each member of the Squad who starts the film off in captivity is injected with an exploding neck bomb which can be triggered to take their head off at the whim of their boss. I’m surprised the writers went this far, to be honest, and I can only hope it was done in the spirit of homage, rather than anything else.

Okay, so positive points about the movie are that it looks quite good, in the odd moments the camerawork settles down and you can gather your eyes together for longer than a second. It’s also got a terrific cast including the main lead, as far as I’m concerned in terms of amount of screen time and presence, Will Smith as Deadshot. The lead female is definitely Harley Quinn, portrayed really interestingly by Margot Robbie. And we have Jai Courtney, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Cara Delevingne, Joel Kinnaman, Jay Hernandez and Karen Fukuhara. And they’re all pretty  good. Fukuhara plays a character called Katana and she has an groovy sword which is like a distant cousin to the sword Michael Moorcock created for his Elric Of Melnibone character, which was called Stormbringer. Stormbringer was made out of black, other-worldy material and had runic symbols carved into it, if memory serves. It often had a mind of its own and when it bit into its enemies, sometimes without the intention of the person wielding it, it sucked the living soul from its victim and the albino Elric was fed the energy from that soul through the hilt of the weapon, allowing him to stay strong when his normally pallid state would not allow him to conquer his enemies so easily. Katana’s sword also steals the souls of her victims but then it traps them within the weapon itself... which allows her to talk to her dead husband whose life was taken with her sword. So there’s some interesting stuff going on in the background of this movie. 

There’s also a fair bit of action throughout the film and, for the most part, it doesn’t really drag too much and it at least keeps moving forward to a specific goal. There’s not much plot but that’s okay too... not all movies need that much of one to do what they do. This is sadly deficient compared to, say, any of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe movies at the moment but... yeah, that’s okay too. Not every movie has to have the kind of gravitas and interesting plot twists of that kind of writing and, while this certainly doesn’t, it doesn’t really harm the movie, I think.

There are, however, a few things that do harm the movie, or at least give it some problems to try and overcome or, in this case, run through while the writers think nobody is looking,

Okay, so we have Jared Leto as The Joker, Now I don’t know anything about this guy except that he was exceptional in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream. Here he’s dong his own thing with The Joker, just as he should do and, though it’s fine that he’s doing it his own way here... I just didn’t warm to this interpretation as I did to the great performance turned in by Heath Ledger in the role or, even, the pretty good versions portrayed by Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero. This version seems to have less weight about him but, I don’t know, maybe that’s the point. I can’t fault him for his performance on any level and, if reports from the set are to be believed, he certainly gave it his all. I just didn’t like it too much although, saying that, I think the character as performed by Leto could have some potential if the writing was a little warmer and he was given a little more three dimensionality. I don’t think his performance particularly hurts the movie though. Especially since he’s hardly in it. Just a few short scenes scattered throughout the picture where he never really interacts with any of the main protagonists, except for Harley Quinn, at all... other than to shoot at them form afar in one scene.

What does hurt the movie is the amount of exposition needed to flesh out each and every character in the story. It’s surely pretty obvious to most people that DC are trying to cash in on the box office success of multiple hero fests that Marvel have so well established over the last decade in films like Avengers - Age of Ultron (reviewed here) and Captain America - Civil War (reviewed here). The problem is that Marvel took a long time to establish those characters in their own films first, for the most part, and it was a well thought through concept. In ‘DCland’ it’s a ‘quick, cut to the chase’ approach and it really shows. It was quite evident in their previous movie, Batman Vs Superman - Dawn Of Justice (reviewed here), with its bizarre ‘meta-humans on a computer screen’ sequence and it’s even more of a disaster here where, because they have a whole bunch of new characters put together, there’s probably more exposition and back story in the movie than actual plot and, although they’ve tried hard to shoe horn in the vast amount of explanations they need to get through here, it’s a bit of a mess of ‘flashback hell’ to be honest.

Another thing is that there’s a very strong, almost surrealistic, supernatural element to the whole antagonist angle in this film and... I’m just not so sure it sat well with the majority of the other elements here. When Marvel adapted Thor and his world of Gods as characters, they were careful to present it as an ‘alternative science’ approach to make it fit in better with the rest of the dramatis personae and they’ve taken this long to go ‘full supernatural’ with the introduction of a Doctor Strange movie later this year. Here it’s all very much something that all the other characters take in their stride and... I guess you have to ask yourself why? Sure, they’ve all seen Superman in action and this film is very much a third part of the Man Of Steel series, linking into the ending of the last movie in particular... but it’s still very much a stretch to credibility when you see some of the things happening here.

About that... this film also features cameos by two of the super heroes seen in Batman Vs Superman. I won’t spoil one cameo because it takes you completely by surprise, comes fairly early and it’s over almost before it’s started... but anybody who’s seen the trailers for this film will also know that Ben Affleck reprises his Batman/Bruce Wayne role from the last movie (forewarned is forearmed though... there’s a lot of material in the trailers which didn’t make it into the final cut of the cinema release). He does this four times, in fact... three times in his Batman costume, scattered through the movie, and a fourth as... well, just make sure you stay around for the mid end-credits sequence to see another reference to the forthcoming Justice League movie.

Another big problem is the use of music in some scenes. Steven Price’s score is not at fault. It’s a good selection of appropriate music which serves to boost the tone of the movie... although he does use a melody very reminiscent of something John Barry used in scenes of the Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (reviewed here) quite often and it kept popping me out of the movie with visions of the Swiss Alps, to be honest. However, its the song placement which becomes a problem in this one. It starts off pretty well with some well mixed in tracks that serve as a kind of audio shorthand for some of those horrendously prolific exposition scenes I was talking about. I was kinda applauding the choices and the way they were being used until... at one point during the briefing scene, it’s mixed in way too loud over important dialogue and you can barely hear what the actors are saying to each other. This is pretty terrible and I had to rely on my knowledge of the trailer, where the same dialogue is unencumbered by too prominently mixed music, to remember just what was being said in this scene. So... yeah, that’s just awful and unforgivable. Maybe they can remix it for the home video version. The song placement just doesn't work from this point on and, when even more songs come in later, you just know this was a movie that was all about the ‘songtrack’ deal at the cost of serving the art effectively. So really not very happy about that.

Also, the writing is very sloppy. At one point the Squad’s incentive for doing what they are doing is destroyed, a dramatic moment so obviously played as a card in the hand of their employers and, furthermore, Harley Quinn’s own neck device is also disarmed by The Joker. What then would propel them, her especially, to return to prison at the end because a duplicate controller is pulled from a convenient pocket. Did everybody just forget what’s happened? This is just plain crazy.

The films biggest sin, though, is the entire predictability of everything you are about to see. The destruction of the neck bomb controller, characters X and Y not being dead after all, character Z having no back story so you know he’s gong to die real quick as an example to the Suicide Squad of what will happen if they disobey orders etc. It’s all written extremely badly and you will always see it coming. There are absolutely no surprises in this movie at all, except... the brief appearance by one of the superhero characters I mentioned earlier. So that’s a real problem.

You know what though? For all its challenges, Suicide Squad is quite a fun film. I’m almost regretting seeing it on a big screen because, for me, it felt like one of those early to mid 1980s straight to VHS releases which you would hire from the local ‘off licence’ and watch with your mates. It works in its own way and maybe doesn’t feel like its something they could have got away with as a cinema release but certainly could glean a small following of people who could watch it in the same way they might enjoy a Chuck Norris movie or a Cannon Films production. Not the best movie in existence but something which might appeal to an element of your own personality and fit right into your way of seeing the world. It’s not something I would go out of my way to recommend, for sure, but it’s certainly not something I would tell people to avoid, either. It’s probably good for a Saturday night out... or in... and if you go in not expecting too much, as I did, then you shouldn’t be too disappointed with it.  After all... why be so serious?

Bazooka Joe and his Gang

Gum Play With Me

Bazooka Joe and his Gang -
60th Anniversary Collection
Abrams Books 2013  ISBN: 9781419706325

This was one of those rare purchases where I was recommended something from Amazon and they actually got it right... piquing my interest enough that I ordered this from their online store. Bazooka Joe and his Gang - 60th Anniversary Collection, published in 2013, is not just a set of reprints of the original first run of the teeny tiny Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum comics, at a larger size. It’s an interesting look, from several people in some way related to the phenomena, at the history of Topps Bazooka bubble gum and the various, associated paraphernalia of the same historical period.

The book starts off, after a few reprints of the character introduction comics of the original Bazooka Joe 'gang', with an essay by Tally Morse about his father, Wesley Morse. Wesley was the original artist for the Bazooka Joe comics of the fifties and, although he died in the early sixties, he worked on enough material that fresh Wesley Morse Bazooka comics were still being published into the 1980s. It's absolutely fascinating to read about this artist, who based his initial, try out sketch for the character on his son before his boss got him to change the beany cap to a baseball cap and add an eye patch. We get a fascinating peek at his early life and how he lost his wife prematurely, a showgirl from the famous Ziegfeld Follies where he worked producing their iconic poster art, and how he used to ask his then eight year old son for advice on occasion. A son who fondly remembers his father's cigarette stained drawing board.

Unbeknown to his young son at the time and something he found out later, Wesley was also one of many artists (only two have been properly identified), who used to work on the Tijuana Bibles of the time. Tijuana Bibles were popular, small, 8ish pages, underground pornographic comics produced between the 1920s to 1960s, which were very popular in the US during the depression. They would often depict famous celebrities or comic book characters of the time and, if you think of it, the style and format of these things were not a million miles away from the Bazooka Joe comics which the elder Morse was, sorta anonymously, most famous for (that and his iconic work for Ziegfeld).

This is all great stuff but, as I said earlier, the book has a number of varied sized essays dealing with, not just Wesley, but a whole host of fascinating aspects of the company and also looks at some of the other writers and artists who have worked for the company in a similar capacity. You will discover how the characters were updated successfully and not so successfully over the years. You will also learn about the throw away nature of the cornball writing and the lack of long term continuity between the strips due to the policy that each comic would be written as though it could be the very first one that a person had opened... which is a very interesting writing limitation when you think about it and, obviously, helped shape the stylistic content of the writing throughout the history of the company. It also made me wonder how, without any character progression, Joe could suddenly find himself transformed one decade into a contemporary teenager, flipping burgers and playing video games. A comparable shock to the system came to me one year when I found that the clean cut Captain Birdseye had suddenly transformed himself into a stubble chinned man thirty years younger than how he had previously looked... his white hair replaced by black.

The book also includes the way the gum was manufactured, how it caught on and, of course, the origins of its name. Many people might think of a military connection when they first hear or read the name Bazooka. However, the name derives from an invention of the then popular US musical comedian Bob Burns. When a stringed instrument broke, he had to improvise and got a bit of drainpipe, shoved it full of sheets of music and blew down it to make a bass note. It sounded so good he made a proper version with a funnel. A slang term for someone who was just 'blowing a lot of hot air' at the time was bazoo. Burns then made it sound more like a musical instrument by giving it a similar sounding suffix to certain instruments such as the balalaika or harmonica. Thus, the Bazooka was born and, when the military finally got around to testing their new weapon, which looked a little like Burns' instrument, one of the people at the test referred to it as a 'bazooka' and the name, apparently, kind of stuck. And, of course, Topps used it as the brand name for their 'atomic bubble gum'.

The book is handsomely illustrated with colour reprints, illustrations and photos throughout... including photographs of what some of those items you saved the comics and sent in cash for really looked like when the customer received them in the mail. It also gives you the chance to see some of the comics in original sketch form, then as a colour mark up and then as the final, printed version. It’s interesting to compare these to see how the artist gave these original panel sketches definition... and to see any changes made between the sketch stage and the end product. It's also fun to sometimes see the same jokes updated or recycled over the years, sometimes using different characters and sometimes using the same basic gag idea but coming at it from a slightly different angle.

Other things on show here are various foreign language versions of the comics. Ofttimes these will just mean translating and then distilling the essence of the American English dialogue, which often would take up less room than a foreign translation. Other times this would mean changing the artwork entirely, by the looks of it, depending on which country was being targeted. There's also an insight into writing the 'fortunes' on those things, by the same guy who wrote the infamous "I am held prisoner in a bubblegum factory" fortune.

This beautifully designed book even highlights various satirical 'pokes' at Bazooka Joe over the years and finishes up with a visual timeline of the majority of the Bazooka products through the decades which shows the various wrappers in context with each other so you can see how the product changed and progressed. All in all, Bazooka Joe and his Gang - 60th Anniversary Collection is an amazing find, as far as I'm concerned and something I even found informative about areas of American pop culture I am a little shady on. A wholehearted recommendation from me, for anyone old enough to remember the kid with the eye patch and the guy with his sweater pulled up over his mouth. An absolutely amazing little archive of US pop culture history, as far as I'm concerned.

London Film & Comic Con 2016

Once, A Con, A Time

London Film & Comic Con 2016
Showmasters at London Olympia

It was 4.05am on the morning of Friday 29th July 2016 when my Starship Enterprise alarm clock started proclaiming it was time to “Beam us up, Scotty” and making energiser sounds at a volume designed to rob a person of precious sleep. Time for me to get up, get dressed, have breakfast (while checking Twitter, naturally) and pack my bag for the opening day of this year’s big event, the 2016 edition of the London Film & Comic Con. I’ve written about three of these cons previously on my blog and, if you’d have read the previous editions here, here and here, then you would know that my affection for what was once my favourite annual treat has somewhat soured over the years, as it’s become more popular and ‘corporate’, for a number of reasons. You might wonder, after my conclusion to last year’s review, why I actually bothered to go back there again and... the answer to that is Friday.

For a few years now, LFCC have been opening their doors for just a couple of hours on a Friday evening as a preview to the show but, for the first time this year, they have added the Friday as a full day and decided to put the two hour preview on the Thursday instead. Now, as it happens, they cancelled the Thursday evening at short notice but the fact that the event was a day longer and, also, a few weeks later in the year than when it is normally held, made me decide to pre-book tickets for myself and a few friends, based on the idea that it wouldn’t be so crowded and that the numbers would be further cut down by people going on holiday more around this time of year. So I took the Friday off of work, booked my ticket and, as you can see from my previous paragraph, got up extra early to try and get the jump on the various queues for different kinds of ticket holders.

Let me say that, overall, the event this year was a much better show, at least in terms of lack of stress and ease of use. The people at Showmasters have exceeded my expectations by actually listening to what went wrong with the past few years and finally come up with a workable solution which made for a pleasant day. I can’t speak up for how the Saturday and Sunday went but the Friday was a pretty big success. It was a bit of a double edged sword in that they couldn’t account from the fall out of stallholders expectations this year, and I’ll get to that in a little while, but overall the organisation of the show was a whole lot better.

I arrived at Olympia just before 7am and managed to find my way to the right queue... delighted to find that there were maybe only less than 60 people ahead of me. Gone are the days when I would turn up for the show a half an hour early and start the queue off myself but... yeah... no use wallowing in nostalgia, I guess. This year the queue was moved into the building after only ten minutes after my arrival where, I’m delighted to say, there was a proper bag search and a big screen showing new movie trailers for people who got there early. The down side to this was that my two friends, who arrived at different times, were forced to queue separately as there was no way anybody could effectively save a place for people in the queue. I spent the next couple hours in the company of two charming ladies in the queue, Barbara and her daughter Jenny (pictured above), both of whom were in some way working in the entertainment industry and who regaled me with stories about meeting up with the likes of Sean Connery and Richard Harris. It was a pleasant couple of hours and I managed to slip two of my favourite jokes into the conversation. Barbara was a fan of Judy Garland and so I managed to get my “weigh a pie” joke in... and Jenny was a fan of Disney’s Stitch, so I managed to get my ‘difference between Robbie Burns and Walt Dis’nae’ joke in. So my work there was done.

When the show was officially open, the queue moved like wildfire as we were all just quickly scanned in and allowed to enter. I’ve not seen the hall that devoid of people in a good few years and it was nice to be able to wander around without accidentally recreating the Marx Brothers stateroom scene from A Night At the Opera. The organisers had really got the stalls and other entertainments on offer organised right by opening out into two halls (and upstairs for celebrity signings) and there was a hell of a lot more space to be able to get to look at everything properly this year. So well done, again, to Showmasters. Not something I was expecting to say about them but they really did an exemplary job this year... on the Friday, at least.

The stalls were great and this is the one show I see various different bits and pieces on offer that I wouldn’t normally see at the likes of the regular Westminster and Camden Film Fairs and it was good to see entire stalls devoted to pin badges, colourful shoes, weapons and props etc. That being said, there were hardly any DVD stalls this year and the majority of the few I found were overpriced... apart from one of the stallholders I know who always gets a good deal for people on the stuff he brings in and who brought me along some nice filmic treats in the form of the US Blu Rays of Belladonna Of Sadness and a Chesty Morgan triple feature. So thanks to Jason for that and thanks to the gentleman giving away free, signed copies of the first issue of comic book Trippers, which you can find more information about on the facebook page for Dark Dell Comics (I don’t do facebook myself but the first issue is well written so it’s probably worth a look).

My main reason for being here this year was to buy the three sets of vintage Topps Star Wars cards that weren’t available in this country in the 1970s... the yellow, green and orange sets. Alas, for the first time in a while, there wasn’t an abundance of dedicated trading card stalls (I think there were only two or three) and these particular cards were not something anyone had. One guy didn’t have any vintage cards at all although, I did manage to pick up the first three sets of Topps The Empire Strikes Back cards and the set they brought out for Raiders Of The Lost Ark, from the early 1980s, from another trader there. I also bought a preview mini set of the upcoming British Horror Film cards and was jammy enough to find a rare, hand signed, autograph card by Paul Stockman... he who played Konga in... erm... Konga.

However, while there were a lot of stalls at the show this year,  my one big criticism would be that there wasn’t nearly enough ‘old stuff’ for people like me on the stalls... mostly newly produced merchandise and, for the most part, a lot of the different stalls were interchangeable with a fair few specific types selling the same things as each other. Now, one of my stallholder friends had warned me that almost all the regular stall holders, bar two, from the Westminster and Camden Fairs, had flatly refused to attend this year because of the absolute disaster of the previous two years and... yeah... this really did show. I wanted to get some pre-Ecceleston Doctor Who DVDs and... really? Nobody was selling them here this year? That was somewhat unexpected.

The other thing I noticed, but I think this is purely because it was a Friday, rather than the Saturday and Sunday shows, was the small amount of cosplayers at this year’s event. Now there were some but I didn’t see battalions of Star Wars stormtroopers or Mega City lawmen that I usually see at these things. Nor did I see an abundance of Doctor Who cosplayers which was a big surprise. There wasn’t a fez in sight. I expect they were all there for the Saturday and Sunday shows, though, and if that’s the trade off for coming on a Friday... I think I’ll stick with the Friday show, thanks.

That being said, there were some wonderful cosplayers there and I am kicking myself for not asking the lady dressed up as Rey from The Force Awakens for a photo. The most unusual cosplay I’d seen in a while was the two ladies dressed as the twin girls from Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining... which was cool. Also saw a couple of people dressed as the Victorian Cybershades from the 2008 Doctor Who Christmas Special, The Other Doctor. So stuff like this was nice to see. However, I did see an abundance of ‘professional’ cosplayers wandering the halls with assistants holding a hat out. They were charging people money to take shots with them and, I dunno, this seems to be a little counter to what the spirit of cosplay is about but, hey, it’s up to them what they do. Free enterprise and all that.

My one negative experience this year was booking the tickets and that’s the one thing I can positively say was the fault of the organisers. I had to book for myself and two friends and the online ticket booking is on a timer. Unfortunately, it also wanted to know all the details (address, email, date of birth and such like) of everyone attending and, let me tell you, when you’re on a 15 minute timer... that’s not long enough. I had to try this twice and I only just beat it by about three seconds. So booking tickets wasn’t the most positive or practical experience in the world, it has to be said.

Even so, despite the lack of DVD and card stalls and the ticket buying woes, I have to say that this year’s London Film and Comic Con, for me and my two friends @cultofthecinema and Doctor Rob, was a resounding success and, though maybe a shadow of its former self in terms of ease of use and range of goods on display, a much better experience than it has been over the past few years. Lets hope Showmasters continue to learn and do good things in this arena and maybe they’ll win back some of their old stallholders, with any luck.

Jason Bourne

Billion Dollar Bourne

Jason Bourne
2016 USA Directed by Paul Greengrass
UK cinema release print. 

Warning: Very mild spoilers.

Hmmm.... okay, I’ll jump right in here with a quick history of my reaction to the Jason Bourne films. Still haven’t seen the Richard Chamberlain version of The Bourne Identity but it’s in the ‘to watch’ pile and I will get to that soon. Absolutely loved the Matt Damon remake of The Bourne Identity... one of the great spy films to join the classics such as The IPCRESS File (reviewed here), The Quiller Memorandum (reviewed here) and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, as far as I’m concerned. Then Paul Greengrass took over as director for The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum and, although the story content and acting etc was fine, the camera movement and editing made the action sequences barely watchable at best and, certainly, incomprehensible at their worst. There were some redeeming features in Supremacy such as Bourne’s visit to the daughter of two of his past victims but, ultimately, I didn’t think much of these movies other than continuing to love what John Powell was doing with the music in them.

Surprisingly, the Jeremy Renner starring The Bourne Legacy (reviewed here), while having an atrociously simplistic story which the writers seemed to be trying to disguise by giving it as many links to the Matt Damon films as possible, was actually quite entertaining. James Newton Howard’s score was cool too and I expect he might have gotten the gig with that after turning out an incredible pseudo-Bourne score for the Angelina Jolie vehicle Salt (reviewed here), a few years earlier.

And so now we come to Matt Damon’s semi-triumphant return to the Bourne films, along with Greengrass returning as director and.... it’s a mixed bag to be honest. I say semi-triumphant because, although I’m sure it will do the right numbers at the box office, Jason Bourne really doesn’t have too much going for it but, at least in terms of Matt Damon, his performance is worth watching, as always. So at least we have a credible main lead and the film feels like it’s got some kind of authentic link to the Bourne series.  However, even a great actor like Damon needs to have a half decent script to work from and... I really don’t think he got that here. In fact, this feels just as simplistic as The Bourne Legacy in terms of story content and no amount of heavy weight actors brought into this melange of  various, patched together conspiratorial shenanigans going on at the CIA is going to help make this anything which could reach the dizzying heights of the first movie.

We also have the return of Julia Stiles as Nicky Parsons in this, who really helps Damon keep this movie afloat, and as far as I could tell she’s the only other series regular in this one other than the title character. However, the way she's written in this story and her stupidity at attracting attention to herself, while brilliantly played by Stiles, really doesn’t do the character any favours. Well done to Stiles for making it work but, like most of this film, it’s the writing that’s the problem... not the acting.

The heavyweights I was referring to earlier are the three main supporting cast with Tommy Lee Jones as CIA Director Robert Dewey, Vincent Cassel as ‘The Asset’ (aka kick ass Bourne style assassin bad guy) and the relatively young Alicia Vikander as CIA tech guru Heather Lee. All of these people are good but they all serve a bad storyline. Jones is very much in the mould of CIA Directors from the previous films so, we pretty much know what’s coming from him and do we really need to see the CIA playing political games against each other involving fellow agents who are aggressively ‘taken out’ when they start to get in the way... yet again in the Bourne series? Can’t some of them just play as a team, once in a while. Vikander is pretty strong and just about manages to pull off the gravitas needed that not having so much ‘old timer character baggage’ from other films almost hinders. Her character works quite well and it’s someone the audience can root for as a possible ‘non evil’ character most of the time.

Vincent Cassel is always a nasty bad guy but, here, he really could have done with being given more lines, I think. Also, it has to be said, certain revelations about his character further serve to highlight just how amateurish the story is here. We have a back story to everything we already know about the Jason Bourne saga and his links to Treadstone, which is grafted on wholesale for this movie and which brings in Jason Bourne’s father... and what happened to him just before Bourne joined the CIA. When we get a true reveal on just who Cassel is playing in this, very near the end of the movie, it’s actually one of those things which you think of very early and then dismiss because, hey, that would be really lazy story telling, right? Everything seems to connect in this movie just a little too conveniently and way more than you would expect it to in real life... it seems to me. Cassel’s character is pretty much a victim to the cause and effect method of storytelling that a lot of US cinema tends to fall back on, crutch -like, these days and it’s a shame that the writers felt the need to do this, I think.

In terms of the way the camera moves and the editing... well it’s certainly fast paced but it suffers from the “Paul Greengrass special” school of filmmaking in that, a) the camera never stops moving around and b) it’s lots of short shots cut together continuously which, to be honest, can be more than a little disorientating and distracting  from the main action on-screen. I have to put my hand up and say, for once in a Paul Greengrass movie, I wasn’t totally lost in the action sequences and, for 90% of it, I was managing to figure out just what was going on. However, the editing and vertiginous camerawork never lets up and, after a while, you are just left wondering as to which part of the screen the director wants to show you, to be honest.

Composer John Powell returns to the fold with this one and he’s joined by composer David Buckley. Now I don’t know who scored which bits or what the nature of the collaboration was but I did notice how good the score throughout the movie was, when I could hear it above the ‘extra loud and in your face’ sound effects tracks. I’m looking forward to acquiring this asset on CD in a week or so and it will be interesting to hear it properly, away from the pop pop bang bang noises. The Jason Bourne theme is all over the movie but I wasn’t able to detect the Treadstone Assassin motif in this first sitting. I’m sure it must be on there though and this score certainly feels like it belongs in a traditional Jason Bourne film... so I would be interested in knowing who composed which bits.

Other than the score and the acting performances, however, it’s really not a good entry into The Jason Bourne series and, while it is pacey and quite entertaining, it has nothing of the power of the endings in previous Matt Damon entires in the franchise. The end here seems very contrived and, ultimately,  a bit anticlimactic... especially in terms of how Bourne is able to see and hear things for his not so mind blowing twist at the end. Even so, every plot point seems designed to propel the action forward without actually telling you what it really is everybody is playing this game for and I thought it really out of character when Bourne doesn’t run from it all at the start. All in all, if you like the previous Bourne films then I don’t think you’ll have a particularly bad time at the cinema with this one... it’s just not quite reaching that high bar which was set previously. It’s worth a watch if you like action spy movies with not much plot, though... so yeah, if that’s what you’re in to, maybe give Jason Bourne a go. There are a lot of worse things out there in the local cinemas at the moment.

Giallo Meltdown - A Moviethon Diary

Mellow Giallo

Giallo Meltdown - A Moviethon Diary
by Richard Glenn Schmidt
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform  2015
ISBN: 9781507839126

This was another of those pesky “other people who bought this who are much cooler than you, also bought this stuff...” recommendations from Amazon and, frankly, I’m not sure if this book is a work of crazed genius or the exact opposite. I’m going to plead the fifth and conclude to myself that it averages out as something in between the two but, most books devoted to Italian giallo films are doing a service to a hugely neglected, although certainly rediscovered in the last decade or so, genre of cinema that mixes mostly terrible acting and bad mystery plots with violence and sex soaked shenanigans. The fact that these films are quite often so beautifully filmed, designed, edited and musically scored that the craftsmanship behind the camera more than makes up for the lack of coherence and elevates the genre to an art form which is possibly the most vibrant in the history of cinema, makes them much worthier of your attention than a lot of the stuff playing in your local multiplex these days.

Now, my main problem with this book is the use of English throughout.... American, Canadian or any other. There are a heck of a lot of typos and grammar clangers in this book and, while I understand that a smattering of these are clearly deliberate, to match the humour of the writer, I still see red when words or letters are mis-used or, in the case of some sentences, missed out altogether. That being said, there’s a fair amount on offer in this tome too and it’s certainly not like any other book on giallo you may have read in the past, I suspect.

The book itself is divided into 13 sections where the writer sits down for three or four days at a time and just binge watches a load of giallo movies... well into double figures, in any one period. I guess we’ve all done stuff like this but Schmidt is a repeat offender and, frankly, when it comes to watching gialli, who can blame him. He’s often joined by his wife LeEtta... who also did the cover art to this misguided gem of a book... and various other friends, mother-in-law and pets, as the moviethons run their inevitable course. It’s not the best structure in the world but it’s not like he’s trying to say huge amounts about the films in question and these are more like reading reactionary notes to the images and situations as they unwind before his J&B stained eyes in real time... even though he’s obviously gone back and edited them to make them more coherent after the fact.

Okay, so I don’t know much about Schmidt himself, other than he seems to be a fairly entertaining guy. It looks like he’s also a blogger for doomedmoviethon.com and cinemasomnambulist.com and this may go some way to explaining his writing style which, to me, seems to be as manic, unfocused and driven as a drugged up version of James Ellroy in one of his more frenetic streaks of twisted prose. Think White Jazz on acid! That being said, his humour runs consistently throughout the text and, although he’s not trying to deliver solid, critical reviews of the films here... he does quite often touch the little kernels of truth about a flick which demonstrates that his somewhat self-deprecating words actually mask a rare insight into the art of film in general.

The films range from the obvious to the obscure and that’s one of the things that kept my interest going throughout the length of the book, to be honest. I’ve got maybe between 150 to 200 gialli in my personal library (and growing steadily) but this guy seems to have seen even more than I have... which means about a third of the movies covered in this book are new to me and, for the most part, went straight on my ‘to acquire’ list... although I suspect I have a fair few of them already, foldered away in my ‘to watch’ movie backlog, which is probably well over a thousand movies deep by now.

The book gets off to a good start when the writer mentions that his wife refers to Luigi Pistilli as the Italian Jeremy Irons. Which is pretty funny, I think. Say that to anyone at my work place and I can guarantee that not a one of them will even know who Pistilli is but, little moments like this are what makes the book readable and, although I found his style infuriating at various times, I somehow could not put the thing down. It even distracted me from my Candy Crush time so... you know... I must have really liked it.

And on it goes. There’s a weird mix of fairly obscure films and giallo classics on show here. I like that the author is totally okay with sourcing copies of the films he wants to watch from... um... illegitimate sources and that he’s up front about it. Over half the films in here are not, and probably never will be, commercially available and I think the writer takes the same attitude as me when it comes to seeking out prints of movies you want to see before you die. If it’s not available commercially, life is too short to wait around on the off chance that it might, one day, become so. So there are a lot of caveats in here about bootleg VHS transfers with Greek subtitles and bad tracking problems. In the case of a couple of the films he’s watching, he even complains that the movie has some of the reels in the wrong order. I have to respect someone who goes to extreme lengths to watch films which he can’t source from anywhere else and, by the looks of it (and also like me) he's happy to upgrade to a proper, commercial transfer, when one becomes available for sale. Or ‘if... it becomes available’, more to the point.

The writer has some nice patter when he’s at his most coherent. Here are a couple of my favourite gems from a book that has a fair few jewels tucked away when you least expect them...

“The beautiful scenery is totally beautiful. Darn it, where's my thesaurus.”

“The killer liberates them both of the burden of keeping all that blood inside their bodies.”

I’m also really pleased he has some of the same problems that I have when I’m trying to review a movie and can’t remember details like character or actor names. At one stage he says:

“Good old Howard Ross is here as the police inspector. IMDB says his character's name is police inspector.”

I’m glad that the guy is this sarcastic when it comes to the IMDB because, honestly, the amount of times it’s let me down in a similar manner is beyond belief. Sometimes it can’t even find the title of the movie you’ve just watched because it’s just not been entered into the database. So, yeah... I can kinda relate to this guy because he obviously has the same kinds of research problems as me to get through.

For all this, though, there was one bit which put me into a red rage, at first, when the writer is talking about giallo master Dario Argento’s Do You Like Hitchcock? He refers to one of the characters in it spying on his neighbours like Cary Grant does in North By Northwest. I was on my feet and angrily ranting up and down the room at this point because, as you know, everybody knows this was James Stewart in Rear Window. After I’d calmed down and read another paragraph, I came to the realisation that maybe the writer was having me on because he then goes on to reference the Hitchcock movie where the two characters swap murders as being The Birds (as opposed to Strangers On A Train). Okay, so this is even more blatantly ludicrous than the first ‘slip up’ and so, I can only conclude that the dude is messing with the reader’s minds for fun. At least... I hope he is.

At the end of the day, Giallo Meltdown is a slightly patchily written but hugely entertaining love letter to a genre of films which has become very popular again over the last decade or more. One thing I will say is that, if you are less than familiar with some of the films he’s giving notes on here, you might find yourself a bit lost. So we come to that old conundrum of the reader having enough knowledge so that they’ll be entertained by R. G. Schmidt’s jokes and observations about a particular film while, at the same time somehow being unfamiliar with classic and basic essentials of the genre such as Argento’s Deep Red (reviewed here) and Tenebrae (reviewed here) or Mario Bava’s Five Dolls For An August Moon (reviewed here)... that you will actually find the writer’s plot descriptions of some use. It’s kind of a Catch 22 situation but I think I’d rather be in the former camp than the latter. Either way, the book is as much about the writer and his companions (and some of the revelations about these companions, although expected, are kinda heartbreaking) and I ultimately had a good time with it. If you’re a fan of the genre and the various actors, actresses, directors and composers (I’m pleased to say he also talks about the music in these things a fair bit), then you should probably give Giallo Meltdown a try. I’m glad I did. I just have to find out what Mountain Dew is now because the author here drinks gallons of the stuff and I don’t think they make it in this country.