Review: The Lair (2024)

Neil Marshall's latest is a great monster action movie, with lots of thrills, spills, and of course monsters!

The basic idea is simple: a female air force pilot, Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk), finds herself downed in Afghanistan and takes refuge in a huge underground bunker. Exploring she finds vats containing some sort of humanoids, and when one gets broken, the thing in it revives and chases her out of the bunker again, where she is rescued by friendly troops.

However they won't let things lie, and are soon back with Kate to explore further, only to find that more of these genetically engineered nasties are loose, and set on hunting down and killing anything that they can find, either in the bunker or outside of it.

The film is great fun and the opening is fast and furious as we go from a crash in the desert to the bunker, escape and back to base ... then there's a slow section where we find out more about the soldiers and so on, before it's back to the bunker and more deep underground shenanigans with the monsters.

The pace and action overcomes any concerns over casting or how many of these soldiers are just dreadful shots and you just get swept along with it. As a Saturday night with beer and mates movie, it's perfect.

Review: Longlegs (2024)

Longlegs is something of a strange film. It follows a path and turns out to be not quite what you expected come the end.

Nominally it's about a female police detective, Lee Harper, who is hunting a serial killer who kills following a somewhat eccentric pattern of dates related to the birthday of his victims.  But the killings all seem to be carried out by the father of the victim, who kills his daughter, but anyone else around also.

So there's a pattern but no obvious motives until an occult element is thrown into the mix involving a life-sized doll which each victim is sent, in the head of which is a strange silver orb which seems to contain something and yet nothing.

As the plot unfolds, Harper finds that she is at the centre of events, and that the mysterious Longlegs, so called as by the name he signs coded messages left at each killing, has plans for her personally.

I enjoyed the film, though it is somewhat hard to work out what is happening. Not as hard as some critics made out though, and ultimately all becomes clear. The ideas are rooted in Satanic beliefs and in evil, as well as a touch of voodoo. There's a healthy dose of Silence of the Lambs in here also, and while Nicholas Cage, who plays the deranged (or is he) Longlegs is not a patch on Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lekter, there is much to appreciate and enjoy in his performance.

The explanations when they come are impactful for Harper and her family, and leave a lot of thoughts in the mind as to what happened next. I don't think it needs a sequel though as this is complete in and of itself.

It's telling that the BluRay I have has a very non-descript cover on it (same as the poster shown here). Obviously the marketing team had no idea what to make of this either.

I have often said that I have not seen a film with Nick Cage in that I haven't enjoyed, and this does not break that run. Enjoyable and thought provoking, which is what every film should be.

Review: Abigail (2024)

Abigail is a film which, when people came to review it, they were skirting around and tiptoeing as they didn't want to spoil the surprise of the film.  To be honest it is pretty good, and so as to try and review without mentioning it would be really hard ... if you have not yet seen this film and want to see it ... then stop reading now.

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Have you stopped?

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If you carry on then you will learn what the film is all about ... Your choice.

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Right then.

Okay, so we start like an everyday thriller. There's a rich gang boss type chap, and a group of thug-types (although they are a pretty hopeless bunch) are sent by a third party mystery person to kidnap his 12 year old  ballerina daughter to hold her for ransom. So far so good.

They end up in some old mansion somewhere, with the girl hooded and in chains in a bedroom, while the rest of the gang lounge about and wait for the ransom to be paid. The house is one they were told to go to ... and only one of them is to ever interact with the girl, no names to be used ... normal ransom stuff.

But then we discover that this little girl isn't such a little girl after all. She's instead an old vampire with incredible strength and ingenuity. Her father is also a vampire, and this is a little game they play to stop them getting too bored.

The house locks down on them (shades of The House on Haunted Hill, or 13 Ghosts) and they're left to try and survive with a hungry vampire kid on their trail.

The film is great fun. It takes 30 minutes or so before the realisations start to kick in, but once it gets rolling it's very enjoyable. The deaths are great and there is A LOT of blood ... vampires explode with a very wet and messy geyser of blood (reminiscent of the vampires in Planet Terror) and some of the gang get vampirised and are then controlled by the girl ... imaginative and fun stuff!

With so many vampire films out there, it's great to come across one which is different and which just rolls with the premise and takes it to its natural (or unnatural) conclusion.  This is a film that I will certainly watch again.

Review: IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM

We are truly in a magnificent age of Doctor Who books.  With the official fare often sadly lacking from the BBC, it's left to the fans to fill the gaps, and they are doing so magnificently!

It Belongs In A Museum is the first book-length work from Neil Cole, who runs the Museum of Classic Sci-Fi based in Allendale in Northumberland. Neil created and set up his museum some years ago and while it is small, it hosts an amazing array of props and costumes and artefacts from Doctor Who and other sci-fi films and TV series ... but it's Doctor Who which is Neil's passion. 

He started publishing pamphlets/magazines on the various items he has in the museum, but then decided to expand his reach into this rather lovely large format paperback book all about some of the surviving items from the Patrick Troughton era of the show.  Some of these are on display in the museum, while others are in private collections around the world.

The book is primarily focussed on the museum and on Neil's own interest and artwork, and as such is very much a labour of love. 

The book is in three parts:  The first chronicles the path to the museum itself: Neil's aspirations from a young age; the start of his collection; finding the location; and then the long hard road to realising his dream. It's an amazing story! I could have done with larger images to see the development of the space and the displays, but there's enough here to get an idea of the slog he had to go through.

The second part then takes us on a tour of the Patrick Troughton stories, detailing them, and talking about and describing the 'artefacts' that remain from them. I did wonder why the actual pictures and more detail of said artefacts were not just included here in order, but these can be found in part three of the book - again stepping through each and showing good images of them. I suspect this might be because only part of the book has colour pages, and so the material has been grouped to allow both black and white printing, and colour printing on some pages. It's a fascinating collection of 'things'. From Ice Warrior claws to a spike from a portcullis gate, to scripts and other production documentation. What I love is that Neil treats them all with reverence and fascination. There's even talk of items which he hopes might exist, like part of a Quark or the wing-folding airplane from 'The Faceless Ones', but which are not currently known to exist.

These are not *all* the items which have survived, as I do know of some others which are not mentioned here, and Neil himself talks of, for example, the miniature Yeti tracking devices from 'The Web of Fear' which he was unable to source pictures of in time, but I guess you have to draw the line somewhere, and certainly even picking just one item from each story is challenging, particularly for this era of the show. Some stories he even has several items mentioned which is lovely to see.

Neil's black and white artwork which features for each Troughton story is also great - he has a real talent for capturing the essence of the things he's drawing. Thus the book is also an art book, collecting these together.

It's a hefty tome at 130 pages and printed on a very thick paper so the overall effect is of something chunky and substantial. 

I've mentioned before about how fan endeavours these days have transcended the days of fanzines and photocopied pages, and technology makes it easier to self-produce books and other items which were out of the reach of most people even 20 years ago. Neil Cole has produced an amazing piece of work, and as a first book it's impressive. As a follow up he is promising a similar volume on the Pertwee Years and it will be fascinating to see what exists from that period of the show.

The Museum of Classic SciFi can be found here: https://www.museumofclassicsci-fi.com/

And the book is available direct from the Museum: https://www.museumofclassicsci-fi.com/copy-of-the-collection

It Belongs In A Museum is also available from the stockists Galaxy Four at: https://www.galaxy4.co.uk/blank-cboj/it-belongs-in-a-museum

Review: THE DNA OF DOCTOR WHO

Before I launch into this review of the new DNA of Doctor Who book from Roundel Publishing, a quick note to say that I am one of the contributors to it. Editor Gary Russell kindly asked me to contribute a piece which was loosely based around 'The Seeds of Doom' but which actually covered Philip Hinchcliffe's Doctor Who novelisations for the Target range.

When one thinks of Doctor Who as a whole, certain periods in its long history stand out. There's the Troughton era of course, time of monsters galore and 'base under seige' adventures ... Pertwee has the action packed approach, and of course there's the vast and complex adventuring of 'The Daleks' Master Plan', 'The Key to Time', 'The Trial of a Time Lord' and 'Flux' ... but if pressed to focus in on the one era which stands out above all others, many would perhaps pick on the stories made under the producership of Philip Hinchcliffe, who, with his script editor Robert Holmes, defined more than any other, the essence of what made Doctor Who compulsive watching.  I have long said that Doctor Who is far more a horror show than science fiction, and it's that horror element which scares and enthrals in equal measure ... and Hinchcliffe's era encapsulated everything which is great about that approach.

Little wonder then that Gareth Kavanagh and the fine people at Roundel Publishing chose this era to launch their series of kickstarted-funded books looking at what makes Doctor Who tick.

The book is available in large format hardback and paperback, and, as it was a kickstarter, depending on which 'tier' you chose, comes with a variety of DVD/art cards and other ephemera.

Looking at the book, and I am immediately reminded more of a fanzine than of a commercially produced product ... but this is no bad thing. In the bad old days, fanzines were how a wide variety of writers and commentators got their ideas and words out to the world ... and in today's world, while paper fanzines may be a thing of the past, the expression and talent which went into them is now channelled into YouTube videos and professionally produced books like this. 

The book is not full of glossy photographs, many of which we may have seen many times before, but it is full of ideas and writing, ably supported by William Brooks who provides consistent design and imagery throughout. 

The idea is fairly simple: essays exploring various aspects of Doctor Who through the lens of Philip Hinchcliffe's stories ... so we have pieces which look at Morality and Politics, the representation of disabled characters, borrowing from the classics, the Big Finish stories, Female Companions, orthodoxy, World building, ESEA characters ... and many more. The writers had a pretty free reign to approach the subjects as they wished ... and each is by different contributors, some with special knowledge of the subject in question (so the piece on disabled characters is by Alex Kingdom who suffers from cerebral palsy; and the piece on Big Finish is by Kenny Smith who produces that company's monthly free magazine). This leads to a variety of styles, ideas and points of view which makes the book refreshing ... and again reinforces the fanzine idea: this is exactly the sort of thing that fanzines did in the eighties and nineties before the internet took over.

It's a fascinating deep dive into the worlds of Doctor Who, and specifically the Doctor Who from this period.

Interspersed with the chapters are commentaries pulled from new interviews with Hinchcliffe in which he explains his thoughts and rationales around some of the subjects being discussed, and others besides. These sections are fascinating indeed.

Add to the package a special DVD containing an interview with Philip, a piece from a 2023 convention where fans recall their favourite Hinchcliffe moments, and audio commentaries for 'Genesis of the Daleks', 'Pyramids of Mars', 'The Hand of Fear' and 'The Deadly Assassin', and this is a fantastic package which should delight any fan of the series, and those who love those sixteen adventures from 'The Ark in Space' to 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' especially.

Copies are available from https://cutawaycomics.co.uk/publications/the-dna-of-doctor-who