Howeswho

Fright Night and Kronos

2012-01-25T08:00:00.024Z

Another two films to discuss this time ... one from ages ago, Hammer's Captain Kronos, and one current, the remake of Fright Night ...

Heading back in time first, and 1974's Captain Kronos is one of the better Hammer films, made even more special by the overall concept which was fully intended as a trial for a possible series of films (I hope I'm right saying that and it's not just an urban myth). Unfortunately the copy we got was very murky and degraded - no clean up whatsoever had been done on it and it had white marks down the screen for some of it ... and anything in the dark, well forget seeing anything much there! Nevertheless it still stands today as a great take on the vampire myth - that here the vampire feeds on the youth of the victims and leaves them withered husks, while the vampire stays looking young and vibrant. I suppose it's another twist on the Countess Dracula idea that bathing in the blood of virgins would keep you young.

The film contains some brilliant performances, and particularly of note are the leading triumbrate of Kronos (Horst Janson), Grost (John Cater) and Carla (Caroline Munro). These three manage to make for gripping viewing, and it's really nice to see in a film of this period that the hunchback servant (Grost) is not an unintelligent man, but a doctor and essential to Kronos in his work. Caroline Munro also brings great empathy to the role of Carla, who could have been nothing more than some pretty window dressing. But she manages to hold her own, to help Kronos in his battle, and even to dominate some of the scenes. It's a shame she is left behind at the end really, as I really wanted her to travel on to more adventures.

Other stand-out roles include the ever reliable John Carson, and Shane Briant as Paul Durward brings a baby-faced malevolence to every scene he is in. Lois Daine as Sara Durward has a cool modern short haired look which is very fetching indeed, and Wanda Ventham as Lady Durward does well with the limited material she is given.

Watching the film today, you can see that Hammer really pulled out all the stops for it, and the characters cry out for more adventures. If there was one film which could do with a remake and a reimagining then it is this ... and I wonder what a modern take and approach to the adventures of Captain Kronos would be like.

Which is totally the opposite to the way I feel about Fright Night. The original 1985 film has gone down in time as a quiet classic. Chris Sarandon's turn as a sexy vampire is memorable, and the characters of Charley Brewster, his girlfriend Amy, and best friend Evil Ed, all helped by TV Horror presenter Peter Vincent all gelled perfectly to create a film with many subtexts about sex and power, and how belief can win over against the odds. It was a strange choice of film to decide to remake as there really isn't anything wrong at all with the original film.

But remake it they have, and in doing so they have managed to completely miss what it was that made the original so appealing. Which is strange as Tom Holland, who scripted the original, is also credited as providing the story for this ... maybe he didn't understand himself why the original became a cult classic. The actual script is by Marti Noxon, a name which seemed familiar, and IMDB confirms that she wrote several episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and was also script editor/producer/exec producer on many more ... which might explain why the new film feels more like an episode of that series than anything else.

In the new version Charley (Anton Yelchin) again finds himself living next door to a vampire (Colin Farrell) but here Jerry Dandridge doesn't seem to be hiding - he kills kids right outside his door, and makes no attempt to disguise what he is. His 'Renfield' is missing from the plot this time, and that's a shame as this element added much to the original plot. Rather than being a 'plain Jane', Amy here (played by Imogen Poots) is a stunner and acts in a very Buffy-like way throughout. The seduction of her by Dandridge is missing, and this led to some of the most powerful scenes in the original film (in the club for those who know it). Although they do recreate the club scene, it has little power as Amy is basically drugged by Jerry with his own blood and forced to become a vampire against her will - in the original film there was the subtext that Amy actually wanted this to happen, and that Jerry was more of a man than Charley could ever hope to be (even down to the sounds of Amy climaxing on the soundtrack as she is bitten in the 1985 version - something she never did with Charley).

But the biggest mis-step is in the reinvention of Peter Vincent from a small-time, washed out TV host who has something to prove (superbly played by Roddy McDowell) into a top-of-his-game arrogant stage magician played by David Tennant. In the new film, there is no reason at all for Vincent to help Charley, and indeed the idea that Charley would ever get to even meet him is laughable - there would be several layers of 'people' to get through before even the sniff of an interview was available.

I am a massive fan of David Tennant. Everything I have seen him in, he has been brilliant. Except here. This is played a little like a drunk tenth Doctor, all fast speaking, garbled dialogue, asides and mannerisms which are straight out of the TARDIS. Tennant even uses his 'Doctor' English voice for the part which adds to the feeling that he is just strolling through it. I'm so sorry if you are a big fan of Tennant in this role, but for me it just didn't work at all. I preferred him when he wore the wig and beard at the start, but when he strips it off, like the character, all the magic goes.

Overall I found the film boring and pointless. There was nothing to really interest or excite me. I did like the moment when the girl being rescued by Charley explodes as soon as she gets into sunlight, and I liked that Amy's vampire face echoed the same scene in the 1985 version. There's also a neat cameo from Chris Sarandon as a hapless driver who gets savaged by Dandridge ... but as I mentioned before, what was the point of remaking it? The original version was and is much better, has more interesting characters who have proper motivations for what they are doing, and was made at a time when the prosthetic effects were of a standard to impress. My advice then, ignore this and get the DVD of the original film ... you won't regret it.

Cereal Killers

2012-01-22T15:30:00.000Z

When I was a kid I used to love those cards you got with bubble gum in packs. There were a couple of series I collected and still have - all the Kung Fu cards from the TV series with David Carradine, a set of Universal Horrors cards and a set of Hammer Horror ones. The set I always wanted was the Outer Limits one and I did have a few cards from it (now lost), but sadly never managed to get a set of the cards - now they cost far too much to buy!

I mention these things as I recently came across a new company called Wax Eye who are doing a set of cards with the title Cereal Killers, and they are simple awesome. I just had to order a set from the US to see them for myself.

The art is by Joe Simko and the cards are all pastiches of popular breakfast cereals. Obviously the place of origin being the USA, there are several which I am not familiar with, but the conceit is good enough for the series to really work. So there are 'Frosted Freeks', 'Loco Puffs' and (probably my favourite of the punning titles) 'Chucky Harms' among many others. Each card has some crazy and impossible puzzles on the back - like match each card to it's silhouette (ie all the black rectangles are the same) - and other items of humour. I liked one which has a 'scratch and sniff' back which reveals that the cereal in question smells of standard grade card used to make trading cards ...

But the company isn't content to just leave it there with an amazing set of 56 cards ... oh no ... they come in little cereal boxes made to look like the ones on the cards - I got a set of three which are all shrink-wrapped together just like the little individual portion ones you get from Kellogs. Each box has 20 cards, and also an eyeball gum candy, and a premium which might be a magnet, skin transfer or black light stickers. There are also foil cards and original sketch cards included though I wasn't lucky enough to get any of those.

For anyone with a sense of humour, these are just amazing. The art is clever and all the details are right, so for 'Halloweeties' the box says 'The Breakfast of Maniacs' and proudly claims 'Made With 100% Real Pain'. The 'Exorcrisp' cereal claims it 'turns milk into pea green vomit colour' ... lovely.

If you are in the USA then the cards are apparently being stocked by Toys R Us, but in the UK, you might find them in specialist comic or genre stores, or they can be ordered direct from the manufacturers from their website. The total cost for a pack of three boxes, plus shipping, came in at around £25 - perhaps a little steep for trading cards, but given the love and care that has gone into these, they really deserve to do well.

Wax Eye can be found online here: http://www.wax-eye.com/

Gorgon Boxing

2012-01-15T15:32:00.000Z

Two films last night were anything but like each other. Different decades, totally different subjects, and yet both good and satisfying.

First up was Boxing Helena, a film from 1993 that I had never got to see before. The version we have on DVD has a strange Korean or Japanese cover which spells Julian Sands' name wrong (as Julian Sand) and has a typo in the tagline ('A deep dark obsession that bares a woman's body and a mas's soul') so this didn't bode well for the DVD, but it was fine. In English and not some incomprehensible tongue, and not something filmed on 8mm from the back of an auditorium in Shanghai.

As we're just watching through David Lynch's Twin Peaks at the moment, it was fascinating to see Sherilyn Fenn (who plays Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks) as Helena, a somewhat bitchy and self-obsessed young woman, who has the misfortune to have doctor Nick Cavenaugh, played by Julian Sands, as a stalker. He went out with her once, and cannot let her go. He climbs a tree outside her flat so he can watch her wander about in her undies, calls her on the phone but then cannot say anything, and invites her to his parties. He's a strange effete chap, but Sands plays Nick's obsession with Helena very well indeed. Then, after conspiring to keep her bag and address book, he lures Helena to his house, where she is hit by a car on leaving, which smashes her legs. So we cut forward to Helena, now with both legs amputated, an unwilling houseguest in Nick's residence ... now he has her just how he wanted, in a position that he can help her and tend to her ... but this is not enough, and so he amputates her arms as well ... leaving her only a head and torso, now totally dependent on him.

The film is written and directed by Jennifer Lynch - daughter of David - and you can see some of her father's influence in the style and approach the film takes. Helena is shown to be a complete bitch, and so you're not really feeling sorry for her, however Nick is just strange - as a stalker and obsessive, he professes his love for the girl, and yet she screams at him to look at what he has done to her! It's a disturbing film, and I recall it causing some ripples at the time of first release, though this might be the news of Kim Basinger pulling out at the last moment, and then being successfully sued for breach of verbal contract (though it seems that a court of appeal then overurned that ruling, and the case was settled out of court). It's strange to see singer Art Garfunkle in an acting role as well, though he is very good as Nick's friend Doctor Augustine.

Overall it's a memorable film, mainly for Sands and Fenn's performances, and also for the twisted nature of obsession and what it can lead people to do. One wonders what a remake might do with CGI-powered amputations ... a roomful of ex-girlfriends reduced to essential components perhaps?

The other film is one of the great Hammer titles, The Gorgon. I'd not seen this for an age, and so it was good to revisit it. The story follows the story of Doctor Namaroff (played with effortless style by Peter Cushing) who is puzzled by a number of local deaths where the bodies of the deceased have turned to stone. The latest victim is Paul Heitz's father, and Heitz (Richard Pasco) and Professor Meister (Christopher Lee) believe the deaths to be the work of the Gorgon, who walks among them every full moon ...

There's much to like about this Hammer horror. It's orginal for one thing, eschewing the traditional fare of vampires, patchwork monsters and mummies, for a mythical Gorgon, a creature with snakes for hair which can turn you to stone if it looks at you directly. There's a subtext that it's actually the bite from the snakes which does the work - the victims all have bite marks on their foreheads - but this seems to be glossed over. Barbara Shelley does a good job as Carla, Namaroff's assistant, and the Gorgon itself is a lovely piece of work from actress Prudence Hyman, combined with Roy Ashton's makeup and Syd Pearson's prosthetic snakes. She remains a spooky figure, shrouded in the distance until a couple of effective close shots in the climax ... lovely stuff.

The stone bodies are very well done, looking remarkably like the actors, and the interim grey make-up as the hapless victims turn to stone is also effective. One concern would be the length of time it takes to turn though - Heitz' father is able to get back from the castle to his home, and to write three pages of a letter before he succombs, wheras others collapse almost immediately. Maybe the venom (if that's what it is) takes longer to act on some people, or perhaps the dose is different.

Our copy of the film came with a superb little booklet by Hammer historian Marcus Hearn, and this is a great addition to the disk, revealing much about the making of the film, and containing some excellent photographs.

The Wonderful Book 1965

2012-01-10T16:18:00.000Z

Now here's a thing ... inspired by the tremendous work done by everyone on The Brilliant Book 2010 and 2011, two fans have gone and created an equivalent work, but for 1965 ...

Paul Smith and Joe Cannon have done the most incredible job and have created The Wonderful Book 1965, and it deserves to go down in history as one of the best produced and funniest spoofs on the series yet. The book was originally produced as a PDF, free to download, but due to the interest, decided to make a very limited number available to buy using POD processes to create a lovely softcover book version. All copies are now sold out ...

The book covers the first season of Doctor Who, from '10,000 BC' through to 'The French Revolution', and follows the same layout and concept as The Brilliant Book with a mixture of interviews, comments, classic moments, all beautifully illustrated with photographs and artwork. But ... all the interviews here are made up, and all the facts have been delightfully mangled to produce a pastiche which treads the fine line between reality and fiction.

I love how in the 'interview' with Carole Ann Ford she is looking forward to Season 2 immensely ... that Barbara is a man-magnet, and how William Hartnell is grumpy. There's a lovely look at all the wigs which Hartnell tried for the part - of course representing all the hairstyles of the future Doctors ... and then there's the facts ...

That Reg Cranfield, who played the policeman at the start of the opening episode, was a real policeman (so cast because Fred Rawlings, who played the part in the Pilot was not convincing enough); how all the skulls in the Cave of Skulls were made by pupils at the Gum Lane primary school; how the Dalek actors were given LSD to make them act 'trippy'; how William Hartnell fell asleep on the floor at the start of 'Inside the Spaceship' ... and so on. I loved these and there are many laugh out loud moments as the writers crash fiction with fact and come up with something better than both!

There's even a short story included which describes the events leading to the start of 'The Sensorites' ... nothing is left out, and the book contains so much detail - factual and fictional - that Smith deserves something of an Oscar for writing it all! And the layout is professional and expertly done.

I have never seen a fan-produced spoof as lovingly and as carefully put together as this, and many, many people are now asking for a 'proper' Brilliant Book for all of the earlier seasons of the show as a result.

To enjoy The Wonderful Book yourself, then head for http://www.wonderfulbook.co.uk/ where the PDF is still available for free download.

Turks and Crusades

2012-01-03T19:22:00.000Z

A couple of audios to talk about this blog. We don't often get the pleasure of being able to listen to CDs, but several long journeys over Christmas meant that we had the opportunity.

First off is the new Doctor Who CD from Big Finish. This one is called The Silver Turk and is by Marc Platt. Now, I have to give due acknowledgement here and say that Marc is one of my oldest friends, and one of the best writers around ... which meant that I was expecting a lot from this CD, especially as it doubly features the Cybermen, my favourite monster ...

The initial problem I had was that the Doctor (in his 8th Paul McGann guise) had as his companion Mary Shelley ... yes, that Mary Shelley, she of the Rights of Women and Frankenstein. Personally I think this is a step too far. I can see that Big Finish have to keep pushing the boat out and bringing in new companions and ideas, but to have such a famous historical figure grated with me.

The plot involves the Doctor and Mary arriving in Vienna in 1873, and straight into a strange situation with a 'silver Turk' - a game playing machine which actually turns out to be a Cyberman. Now here the next problem surfaced, as Sam asked me why the 'owner' was feeding the Cyberman with soup ... as far as she knew, the thing didn't eat food. But this wasn't explained, as the audio expects the listeners to be au fait with all the various Cyberman designs and versions and to have worked out from the cover that this was an early Cyberman, which was perhaps more man than cyber ... but this then led on to more continuity which listeners were expected to 'get' - advance scout parties from Mondas ... It was all a little confusing.

And then Marc starts to bring in all manner of allusions to Frankenstein, with the Cybermen rebuilding themselves from body parts, to being powered up by an electric storm, and Mary keeps banging on about how they should be pitied and so on ... it was all way too obvious a lead in to where she got her ideas for Frankenstein from.

There's another plot too, where a puppet maker called Drossel (inspired no doubt by The Nutcracker's Drosselmeyer) who makes realistic human automatons and then gives them human eyes - not quite sure why ... nor why there then needs to be a Cyberman as a chess-playing robot, when Drossel could build something to do that anyway ... the puppets all sound clattery too, explained by them wearing wooden clogs ... not sure why that should be though, except that it sounds good on audio.

Overall then, I found it disappointing. The Cyberman were somewhat wasted in the overall scheme of things, and they were also very hard to hear - the electronic distortion on their voices making the words impossible to make out. As with all the Big Finish audios, the production was very good, and the quality of the packaging and art superb. I think what let this down was the basic idea. Sorry Marc.

The Silver Turk can be obtained from Big Finish here: http://www.bigfinish.com/153-Doctor-Who-The-Silver-Turk

The other audio we listened to was one of Fantom Films' audio readings of the Time Hunter series. Again, my interest here is that Telos published the original novellas, and so I edited and worked with the writers on them. But Fantom are doing a cracking job at recreating them as audio books.

This one was Deus Le Volt by Jon de Burgh Miller, and was read by Terry Molloy. The plot sees our time travelling heroes Honore and Emily, thrown back to 1098, to the siege of Antioch in the Crusades, where they find the Fendahl from Doctor Who is at large, killing the knights and growing in strength.

Molloy does a brilliant job with the reading. Every character (and there are a lot of them) has a separate and distinct 'voice' and the plot rattles along at a great pace. This was perhaps the closest that the Time Hunter series got to a pure historical - it's not until the last act when all sorts of wierdness starts happening - and it really works as an audio. I'm looking forward to hearing more of these when we get the chance.

Deus Le Volt can be obtained from Fantom Films here: http://www.fantomfilms.co.uk/audiobooks/timehunter/timehunter9.htm

2011 Thoughts

2011-12-28T15:53:00.001Z

It's that time of year when thoughts turn to what the New Year might bring. And so I thought I'd post a few thoughts here about 2011 ... not one of the best years for me personally, but one in which lots of lovely things happened too.

It was the year I turned 50! 50! That's almost ancient. And yet I feel the same as I did when I was 20! We had a lovely party down in Surbiton and lots of my friends and family came along to celebrate. It's events like that which show you who your real friends are.

My vast family extended again as my sister gave birth to a lovely daughter, bringing her family up to five children. I can see that I'm going to be a great-uncle before very long and probably multiple times. Also, my son James got married to Rachel, and they had a lovely wedding in Cambridge. It always feels strange when your own kids leave home, get married and lead lives of their own. Andrew is 18 next year too, and planning to head off to University - both James and Andrew are hardworking and intelligent and I am so, so proud of them both. I guess the next thing will be when I become a granddad ...

Other things happening over the mid-year period included Sam having to undergo a major operation. She had been suffering with chronic back pain for months and nothing seemed to be affecting or improving it, and eventually we realised that it was a side effect of other issues she was having, all of which resulted in her having to go to hospital in July for a hysterectomy to try and sort it all out. After several weeks of bedrest, followed by months of recovery time, she is now doing very well indeed, and is back to her old 'up and at em' ways.

All of this happened over the course of the summer, and the less than good news continued when I was released from my work contract with LTSB at the end of July, as I had worked the maximum duration with them in one stint. The work there was hectic and busy, involving lots of overnight support, and with what was happening to Sam, all this left me exhausted and drained to say the least.

Thus, heading into August (my 50th birthday party) and September, I was not in a good state. I was tired and worried about all sorts of things from finances to Sam's health, to my ongoing divorce ... too many things to try and juggle all at the same time.

Thus, what then happened at and after the annual British Fantasy Society, FantasyCon, hit me totally for six. I don't wish to dwell on it here, but I made some fundamental errors of judgement (described by one of my friends as me being a 'muppet' which is about right) which, in hindsight are very easy to see. But with my own mind being split many ways by everything else that was happening, I was relying on my friends in the BFS to ensure that everything was OK, and perhaps to have mentioned to me their concerns, or tried in advance to help out. But not a single person said a word beforehand, but a great many chipped in afterwards.

The convention was a success, but the fact that people connected with me and with Telos Publishing won some of the BFS Awards in the usual fair and democratic vote which has been used since the awards started in the seventies, caused some people to get so upset (starting with a grumpy rant by Stephen Jones in which he accused me of all manner of things, most of which he has done himself in the past), that without even talking to me to find out my side of the story, they petitioned the BFS' President to remove me as Chair and to replace me with an acting-Chair of their own choosing to try and sort 'it' all out. I had little choice in the matter, and found out I was standing down when the BFS announced that they had cleared me of any wrongdoing in the administration of the Awards.

Then, people who I had considered friends, and some of whom I had known for some twenty years or so, set out to try and destroy me and Sam online, making claims of corruption where there was none, insinuating wrong-doing when there was none, and perhaps worst of all, claiming that Sam's novel, Demon Dance, was not a worthy winner of the award for Best Novel. It had been voted on by the members of the Society in a fair vote, but the fact that it won seemed to be a travesty in their eyes, a major blip that needed significant action to try and resolve. So they took control of the BFS themselves, put in place completely new rules for voting so that 'this can never happen again' ... what can never happen again? Sam win an Award? The whole thing was just awful. The worst part of all is that all these people that I looked up to and respected as friends stabbed me repeatedly in the back, never once trying to see it from my point of view, never once actually coming to me to ask what happened, never once stopping to think that there were real people at the other end of their barbed comments, put downs, and veiled accusations. I felt and still feel so betrayed and upset.

I shudder to think what might become of an organisation which purports to celebrate the whole of the fantasy and horror genre, but will only do so if it is the 'right' fantasy and horror, if a book has been written and published by those who are in with the 'right' people and cliques. The arrogance of these people astounds me, and their self-rightiousness over whatever they perceived to have been 'wrong' here - all without ever actually stating in public what was 'wrong' - beggars belief. They could have just talked to me. We could have sorted out the Award voting and rules in a civilised and friendly way, but they wanted blood. It was and is all just so nasty and unnecessary.

Sam and I won't be attending FantasyCon again, and at the moment I really don't want to see any of these people again. I still don't know what Sam and I actually did so wrong to be treated the way we have been treated. She wrote a book. It was published. People bought it and liked it. Members voted for it in the awards and it won ... isn't that something to celebrate rather than to pour scorn and hatred on? I admit in hindsight that the person administering the Awards should have no vested interest in who wins them (or even who is shortlisted), and apologise for not seeing this in advance - but the rules at the time did not bar this, and in any case, the BFS was several people down on helping out and so I did what I hoped was the right thing, and did what I could to ensure that everything that needed to be done was done, I also tried my best to ensure that the voting was above reproach and had someone independent check everything and do the final counts and tallies. I realise now that I should have just told the rest of the BFS committee that there would be no awards unless someone else came forward to do everything - as I say, hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I would like to thank the very few people who publically supported me and Sam, and to note that there were many, many more who offered support in private emails, phone calls and notes, but who didn't want to go public because they were worried about what those 'in charge' would then do to them ... a climate of fear is not a good one in which to run a society.

As Stan Lee would say ... 'nuff said'.

Writing and selling books is a hard, hard thing to do though, influenced by many factors, and the most important thing is to stay positive, stay focussed, and to keep on moving forward. So despite the rocking that our confidence took, we are doing just that, and looking forward to a positive and productive 2012.

My own collection of fiction, talespinning, came out in September, and I'm very proud of it. It collects just about every piece of fiction that I have written over the last thirty years or so - including some unfinished novels and a couple of screenplays. It has had some brilliant reviews, and is selling very well indeed. Hopefully we'll get a digital edition up at some point in 2012.

Sam and I have been invited to several conventions and events next year as guests, which is fabulous. We both love travelling and meeting people, and so are looking forward to doing that next year. One problem that this gave us though was that we realised that we simply couldn't fit in or afford our annual trip to LA for the big Gallifrey convention in 2012 ... and so we reluctantly made the hard decision to miss it next year, and to try and save our pennies for the 2013 event - which, as this is the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, should be the biggest and best yet. We can't wait to see all our
friends there then.

I have enjoyed writing more to this blog over the year - sharing my thoughts on Doctor Who toys, films, television, and the occasional diversion from all of these things and I hope I can keep it going. Part of the reason why I have been able to do this is the lack of paid work, and obviously I am hoping that 2012 will bring another job with someone to whom I can bring my experience and expertise to bear.

So to everyone who has enjoyed reading this blog in 2011, to all my friends, I'd like to wish you all a happy and prosperous new year!

The Time Tunnel

2011-12-26T08:00:00.007Z

[opening narration for most episodes]

'Two American scientists are lost in the swirling maze of past and future ages, during the first experiments on America's greatest and most secret project, the Time Tunnel. Tony Newman and Doug Phillips now tumble helplessly toward a new fantastic adventure, somewhere along the infinite corridors of time.'

Having just finished a mammoth run of watching all of the sixties Irwin Allen show The Time Tunnel from beginning to end, I had to write something about it ...

When I was a kid, I loved watching Doctor Who (natch) but also my other favourite show was Lost In Space. This was on ITV and we saw it in black and white (not having a colour telly until 1972). I remember being out one Christmas and catching sight of an episode of Lost In Space in full colour on a television in a TV shop - what a revelation that was. I suspect my parents had to drag me kicking and screaming away from it!

Anyway, as well as Lost in Space, Irwin Allen also made some other shows. There was Land of the Giants which I could never quite get into, and also Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea which was better, but the one which I really liked was The Time Tunnel.

The premise is pretty simple, two scientists, Doug Phillips (Robert Colbert) and Tony Newman (James Darren), get themselves thrown about in time via the Time Tunnel, which is operated from 1968 by General Kirk (Whit Bissell), Dr Raymond Swain (John Zaremba) and Dr Ann MacGregor (Lee Meriwether), sometimes assisted in the early episodes by Jerry (Sam Groom). They seem unable to bring the scientists back home, but at the end of each episode throw them off and onwards somewhere else.

I have always considered that The Time Tunnel is what Doctor Who could have been if the latter show hadn't discovered the Daleks early on, and realised that the science fiction element was the way to go forward. For the best part of its 30 episodes, The Time Tunnel stays resolutely rooted in the past, with every significant moment in the history books being the location in which poor Doug and Tony get dumped. Each episode follows a similar pattern, they arrive (tumbling head over heels into whatever place it is), are immediately set upon by whoever the natives are, whether pirates or cavalry or indians or townsfolk or whoever, as a result of which Doug and Tony are split up, and the remainder of the episode is them trying to figure out where they are and what's happening, while the folk in the Time Tunnel back in 1968 have to locate them in order to get them out of there before whatever historical event it is happens.

One of the big problems with the series is that it is inconsistent. The production team obviously made a decision that each episode would be stand alone - there is never anything carried from one to the next, and even Tony and Doug's clothes inexplicably 'reset' each time. But this is carried over into the scripting, with random mcguffins being introduced one week and then forgotten about the next. For example in the Billy the Kid episode, we're told that if the Time Tunnel in 1968 tries to talk to Doug and Tony in the past, then this drains the energy to the extent that a switch cannot then be attempted for another 3 hours, but in the very next episode, Kirk is merrily chatting away to them without a care in the world.

They also seem able to send whatever they want through to whatever time the travellers are in - a ring, detonators, a sort of flashing rod thing - and even people can be sent there, like a doctor. Others can be transported back to 1968 with ease - a pirate, a kid with a bomb - and yet despite all this they are totally unable to bring Doug and Tony back no matter how hard they try.

It all gets a little laughable when you watch the episodes in succession, as these elements are highlighted and made very obvious.

It's also brilliant how Dr Swain is so negative all the time. Whenever he's asked to do anything, it can't be done, there's not enough power, we need to check ... and then when Kirk insists, it's all carried out with no problem at all. Then there's Ann, who fawns over Doug and Tony, and yet who sometimes can't get a fix on them at all - 'Let me try,' says Swain, and of course the man can achieve what the woman found impossible.

There is a story editor credited on the show, but I've no idea what he was doing as the scripts vary wildly in all regards. Bob and Wanda Duncan have the idea that for the Time Tunnel to get a fix on Doug and Tony, they need to know the precise date and location to do that. Other writers don't worry about such things. Sometimes there needs to be a 10 second countdown to switching them out, other times it's done instantly ... all these things are little niggles in the wider enjoyment of the show. There's one episode where someone steals a component from their equipment to stop them interfering ... and they have no replacements! So the whole of this complex under the Nevada desert has no replacement parts at all? That if something goes wrong, then, they are totally stuffed! It beggars belief really.

As the series progresses, so the historical situations start to become more and more random ... and Doug and Tony seem to know everything about every time period. It's common for them to observe a rampaging battle (presumably nicked from another film or TV production) and to be able to tell where and when they are from the outfits and guns in use. Other settings are more esoteric, as when they join Robin Hood and his merrie men, or Joshua as he prepares to attack the city of Jericho... even Merlin and King Arthur get a look in - myth or real seems to make no difference to the Time Tunnel.

However it is some of these episodes which work the best - possibly because they are not strictly tied to historical fact. The Merlin episode is nice as the magician is powerful and can pop back and forth between the Time Tunnel and the events in the past.

It does become apparent, though, that the series is working with a small number of sets and locations, and that they crop up time and time again. There's the Western Town, the jungle, the beach, the tent, the rocky desert area, and various house and hotel interiors. After a time, it seems that the travellers repeatedly arrive in the same place! The stock footage is always well integrated though, and whichever films they took it from, they always try to ensure that it matches what the show is doing, even down to the right costumes and settings for the stock to be included into.

Then there's the final two episodes, where the series finally properly discovered science fiction. There is an earlier episode featuring aliens, and one where they head off on a chase through time which breaks the mold a little. However the last two are perhaps the best of this format. The penultimate one features some fly-headed aliens in the desert preparing to destroy the Earth as part of a 'rite of passage' for the alien leader (who strangely has a human face rather than a fly-like one). At least the alien make-up is better than a couple of the earlier episodes where aliens all had silver faces and wore silver suits. I liked that the explanations here were a little out of the norm - not conquoring or anything, just as a 'point' in becoming an alien commander. The episode also has 'drone' aliens, and I like that the ideas have been thought through at least in principle that this alien society has several levels.

The final episode is perhaps the best of all of them, featuring some crystalline aliens in black cloaks who are intent on stealing all the oxygen from the Earth. This was one I remembered as a child, their shakey hand outstretched to touch you, and if they did, then you could be turned into an alien yourself. it's well done and very creepy. It's a great shame that this is the final episode, and moreso that there is no ending - Doug and Tony just get thrown on somewhere else. I do wonder why they didn't take the opportunity to film a sequence where they do get back, where the people in 1968 greet them, and it's the end of their journey. This could then have been tagged onto whichever was the final episode made, whenever that was ... but this sort of forethought tended not to happen unfortunately.

A lot of the alien 'tech' seen as the episodes progress is stolen from Lost in Space, as are some of the sound effects and musical cues, but this doesn't seem to matter. Overall, for me, the episodes which feature some fantastical element work better than the purely historical. And this brings me back to the comparison with Doctor Who. Subjects covered by both shows include the French Revolution, the Aztecs, the Trojan War and Marco Polo, and yet despite the high production values of The Time Tunnel, Doctor Who seemed to have the edge on the scripts and apporoach taken to the historical events. And, as mentioned, the fact that Doctor Who delved far more into the science fiction element meant that that series thrived and diversified, wheras The Time Tunnel became somewhat stale and samey, even though the historical events were different each time.

Despite all these observations and comments, I have really enjoyed revisiting the show. It has a charm, and is always well made and watchable. The explosions and fights are all really nicely done, and some of the ideas and concepts are just brilliant.

A list of all The Time Tunnel episodes is on IMDB here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060036/episodes

Rare Exports

2011-12-22T08:00:00.000Z

It's Christmas, so what better film to watch than a Christmas film! However, being as this is me, I'm not looking at more traditional Christmas fare, but something a little bit out of the usual.

We stumbled across Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale in our weekly trawl of Blockbusters looking for interesting things to watch. First of all, it's subtitled - the original film is Finnish - and then the lady in the shop was saying she wasn't sure we'd like it ... we weren't sure ourselves as it looked like it could be some slasher/torture fare perhaps, but decided to give it a try. And I'm glad we did!

The film is about Santa Claws, but not the sanitised, Coca Cola happy bearded man variant. This is the original, dark, demonic Santa who came and took away and ate children who were naughty. It's set in an isolated Finnish village, all ice and snow, and a group of Western scientists/explorers have found something buried under one of the local mountains. In a nice touch, one of their drill bores has discovered a vast layer of sawdust and woodchippings deep underground - the waste from Santa's workshop perhaps?

Alongside this story, we follow the lives of two kids, Piatari and Tommi who are worried that the explorers have found Santa and will set him free. Piatari finds footprints outside his window, and the reindeer are all found slaughtered meaning that the village will have no income for the next year. The boy's father, Rauno, sets a bated trap, and they capture what seems to be Santa himself - a filthy old man, naked, and with a long white beard. He is mute and plays dead and deaf, but becomes alert when Piatari is close ... and they realise that what they have is not Santa, but one of his helpers. And that Santa is actually still captured at the Scientists' base.

The film is charming and very imaginative. I loved the idea that Santa's 'elves' all look as we might expect Santa to look - old men with beards - but they are basically going around kidnapping all the children, and also making plans to defrost Santa himself from the huge block of ice that, The Thing-like, he is trapped in.

The direction is assured and the cinematography lovely, with all the ice and snow lending a superb backdrop to the events. The actors are great, with little Piatari stealing the show. From the cast list, it seems that Onni Tommila who plays him may be the real life son of the man playing his father, Jorma Tommila, and it's great casting!

Peeta Jakobi plays the Elf who is captured, and he does a brilliant job of making this Santa look-a-like creepy and disturbing.

The film has a strand of humour running through it which lightens it all, and the ending is imaginative and memorable, giving the whole thing a sort of fairy tale (more Grimm than Andersen) feeling.

If you get on with subtitled films, then this should be added to your 'should watch' pile along with other fare like the NightWatch films, The Adventures of Adele Sec-Blanc, and of course A Chinese Ghost Story. It's perhaps better than the recent Dead Snow as well ... definitely a Christmas Treat to be enjoyed.

8mm Rise of Captain America

2011-12-21T08:00:00.002Z

Some more films watched, so some more reviews and comments ...

First off, Super 8, a new film from Steven Spielberg. We had little idea what this might be all about, having picked it off the shelf of Blockbusters in desperation. As it turned out, it's not a bad little film at all. I was initially concerned that it might be like Blair Witch or Cloverfield, presented as though it had all been filmed on 8mm stock by a bunch of kids, but thankfully it's not like that at all.

The plot follows a group of children in an American Town. They are making their own 8mm zombie film, and have roped in various friends to help. The main focus is a boy called Joe who recently lost his mother in an accident at work. Joe is doing the make-up on the film (as he is a dab hand at making horror model kits) and takes a shine to Alice, the daughter of a man who his father (the local deputy sheriff) blames for the death of his wife - I hope you're following all this! - as he went off sick on the day she died and she did his job instead.

Anyway ... it's 1979 and these kids are filming some stuff at the local train station, when a train comes through and is hit by a man in a van causing destruction of the train in flaming fireballs. The kids try and film some of the aftermath, but something alien, alive, and angry was on the train and it escapes.

Thereafter the kids use the army men as a background to their own film, as the army cordens off the place and tries to find the alien while it rampages about killing people and generally causing havoc. Joe also has a strange white cube that he found at the crash site ... a cube which seems to have mysterious properties.

I liked the way the film built, the characters were all good, and you could relate to them. If I have a criticism, it's that the alien isn't seen soon enough - you get lots of fast CGI flashes, but the slow burn to its eventual reveal is too long! But the effects are good, and the ideas original. 1979 is very well recreated, with no mobile phones or video - instead they have to wait 3 days for their film to be developed ... I remember those days well!

The ending is a little ET (well, this is Spielberg) and of course Joe and Alice are united as best friends. Overall, it's maybe an 8/10 from me.

Next up we decided to sample Rise of the Planet of the Apes. An interesting idea, to create a prequel to the original Planet of the Apes films, but the downside of doing that is that you know what the plot is and what the outcome will be. Despite this, we really enjoyed the film. The main reason for the enjoyment is the simply amazing, standout performance of Andy Serkis as Caesar the ape.

I feel that Sirkis is simply the best at this sort of thing. His performances made the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the recent King Kong remake, and the argument that he is not worthy of any award for his work as these characters are CGI is a nonsense. Without Serkis' heart and soul, the characters would be dead. As it is, they live and breath and you totally understand them.

Thus it is with Caesar. The film follows his life from a baby rescued from an experimental facility where they are trying to find a cure for conditions like Alzheimers by experimenting on apes, to his life as the 'pet' or more truthfully companion to the scientist who rescued him, and then to his teenage and adult years.

Sirkis brings real pathos to the character, and his facial expressions and body language is awesome. Caesar is eventually confined to an ape sanctury sort of place where the beasts are abused, and slowly Caesar uses his enhanced intelligence to work out how to escape. The film ends with the apes rampaging through the city, destroying all before them ... and you are on the side of the apes the whole time!

I loved the film. I thought it was well made and had heart and feeling. I cried with Caesar at points, and the action scenes made me cheer with enthusiasm. So for a film which set out to join some pre-existing dots, it does so much more. Certainly a 9/10 from me, and the hope that Sirkis finally gets some industry recognition for his amazing work.

The final film watched this last week is Captain America: The First Avenger. Now I've probably mentioned before on this blog that I'm not a comics fan, so as usual I have no idea how accurately the film follows the comics. It's basically about a man who wants to be a soldier like his Dad, but who is too small and sickly to get in. This is until he stumbles across a government programme to actually find a soldier who has heart and who cares for others rather than someone strong and fit.

So the weedy Steve Rogers is pumped full of some experimental stuff, and is transformed into the tall and strong Captain America. The realisation of this is all quite clever, as Rogers is physically shorter and very weedy beforehand, and is tall and muscly afterwards - yet both parts are played by the same actor, Chris Evans (the flamey one off of The Fantastic Four).

His nemesis is the wonderful Johann Schmidt, played by the even more amazing Hugo Weaving (The Matrix and Lord of the Rings amongst others). Johann is really a character called Red Skull, so called because he has a ... red skull ... and I'm not sure why he pulls his human face off mid-way through and then never replaces it - why bother with the human face at all in that case! Never mind.

The film follows Captain America as he is initially used for propoganda by the Army, but then single-handedly rescues 150 men from behind enemy lines. He then lines up for the final face-off battle against Red Skull who plans to deliver nuclear bombs to all the major cities of the earth.

It's fast and furious, well made and pretty exciting in a 'leave your brain at the door' way. The characters are all larger than life, and Captain America makes a pretty neat hero all told. Probably give this one something like 8.5/10. It's worth watching!

Siren Song

2011-12-20T13:03:00.001Z

Trying new films can become a little addictive, and I quite like discovering something in the local Blockbuster which turns out to be OK ... but sometimes low budget films can be a little bit hit or miss.

Take a film called Siren for example. It's got a great cover showing a bikini clad girl holding a big knife ... It's not bad at all overall. The basic plot follows a man Ken (Eoin Macken) and his girlfriend Rachel (Anna Skellern) who head off on a boat trip with another male friend Marco (Antony Jabre) who is an ex-of the girl. The very start of the film shows a gorgeous woman in red waiting to be picked up at a lonely crossroads, a car drives up and she gets in, then the couple try and have a liaison in a deserted toilet block but she thinks she sees someone and it all stops ... but then we realise that the couple are play-acting and are in fact Ken and Rachel.

This opening is great but doesn't have any relationship to the rest of the film. The trio arrive at an island where a man swims out to them. He doesn't speak English but has blood coming from his ears. He dies on board so they decide to take him to the island to bury him. There they find another girl, called Silka (Tereze Srbova), who seems to know what is happening but won't say. Silka seduces Rachel, and the two men both find her very attractive as well ... but then the film goes off into a little world of its own with hallucinations and doubles, wandering about, finding bodies, people vanishing ... and all completely unexplained.

It seems that Silka is a Siren and kills men (but why, we don't know). We also don't know why she is seducing Rachel - I thought maybe Rachel was the Siren but didn't realise it, or that she and Silka were sisters ... but no. Eventually Silka is killed, and Rachel is left on the island alone as both the men have been killed as well ... and the film ends.

It's beautifully shot and really well acted from all the cast, but the script really needed some work to focus things and to add some sort of context. If Rachel was the Siren, and was just 'play acting' as human, then that would have linked nicely into the opening sequence. But as it is, the film starts well, but loses it's way about half way through, and then limps to an ending which, if not making much sense, just leaves the viewer hanging with no real closure.

Overall it's enjoyable to watch and has a nice claustrophobic feel to it. The locations are well chosen and used, and the cast excellent ... just don't expect it to make sense.

It's a Wind Up

2011-12-19T11:02:00.001Z

Among the myriad of Doctor Who toys which cross my path are some which are really simple and cute and do what they say on the tin. When some of the stuff being released costs literally hundreds of pounds to buy, it's great that there are some true pocket money toys out there.

I recently got the three new releases from Blew, a company which seems to have offices all over the world! They have released some lovely little wind-up Daleks and a TARDIS, all for a rrp of around £6, but which can be found in some of the cheaper shops (like B&M) for half that.

The TARDIS is a nice little model - it even has a wood grain effect on the outside rather than being smooth which I liked. The action on this one is that you initially pull it back, and then release it. The TARDIS then spins round 360 degrees while moving forward. A very simple and effective desktop toy. Why it's therefore called a 'wind up' TARDIS I don't know, as you don't wind it up.

Here's a video of it working:

Along with the TARDIS, there's also two variants of Dalek available: a red one and a yellow one. Personally I like the yellow (Eternal) one - every Dalek seems to be in red or blue, so to have something different is nice. The Daleks are slightly different from the TARDIS in that when you wind it up and release them, they then patrol forward, the head swinging from side to side. It's a simple toy and yet something which I find quite brilliant.

Here's a video of the Dalek in operation:

The toys would make ideal small presents for the Christmas tree, and I hope we get to see more brilliantly simple examples being released.

Where's David

2011-12-16T18:40:00.001Z

This weekend I'll be at the lovely Waterstones store in the Arndale Centre in Manchester selling copies of my collection TALESPINNING and chatting with anyone who wants to chat!

Sam's there too with her Vampire Gene series ... so please pop along if you're there doing your Christmas shopping ... we'll have a tin of Roses chocs on the table too :)

WATERSTONES, Arndale Centre, Manchester, 17th December 2011.Sam Stone will be signing copies of her new book, Hateful Heart, Book 4 The Vampire Gene Series, at this very popular store. David J Howe will also be there with his new collection talespinning.

Time: 12-4pm Date: Saturday 17th December.
Address: Waterstones, Arndale Centre, Manchester, M4 3AQ

Vworp Vworp!

2011-12-09T18:03:00.000Z

Anyone versed in Who mythology will know that the title phrase on this blog is the words used in the Doctor Who comic strip to describe the noise that the TARDIS makes when it arrives and departs. What you might not realise is that it's also the title of simply the best fan magazine to have been published in recent years, and possibly the best fan magazine ever!

Vworp Vworp! is a magazine dedicated to Doctor Who Magazine ... and in particular to the comic strip it publishes. Issue two has just been published after a year's wait following issue one, and it's something that is well worth waiting for.

My copies (yes, there are two variant covers available for the magazine) arrived bagged, and opening the plastic bag, what should fall out but free gifts! Not just any old tat, but some new games called 'Vworpabix' - based on the 1970s Weetabix Doctor Who giveaways, the team have lovingly created some new ones using new series characters. More than that, there are even some stand up figures to play the games with. Now. Listen up. This is seriously impressive. It would have been fairly straightforward to have created the art and printed the figures up so that you could cut them out with scissors. But that's too simple for the Vworp Vworp! team ... the figures are scored and perforated just as the original Weetabix ones were! You have no idea how much that simple factor impressed me!

But this attention to detail is what marks this fan magazine out. It is simply gorgeous. 102 pages. ALL in full colour. Containing pictures and interviews, facts and figures, and stuff which simply has never been seen before. There are interviews with the first few editors of Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly - from the inspirational Des Skinn, through to Sheila Cranna. There is an extensive section looking at Absalom Daak - Dalek Killer ... covering all the ideas and aspirations that his creators had for him which never came to fruition. There are interviews with artists like Dave Gibbons, Steve Parkhouse, David Lloyd and many others. There's a new comic strip by Paul Magrs. A strip featuring the Adipose and even another 'Star Tigers' strip - continuing the adventure already seen.

But raving about this magazine cannot do it justice. It is every bit as professional and as absorbing as Doctor Who Magazine itself. The writing is interesting, the layout amazing, and the whole thing just reeks of quality, professionalism, enthusiasm and WOW all rolled into one.

Seriously. If you are remotely interested in the Doctor Who comic universe and the history of Doctor Who Magazine, then this is an essential buy.

More information and ordering of copies can be done online at www.vworpvworp.co.uk. Note that as of the date of writing, ordering is temporarily suspended due to the demand! But they say that ordering will be reopening soon.

Where's David

2011-12-09T17:37:00.000Z

This weekend I'll be at the lovely Waterstones store in the Trafford Centre selling copies of my collection TALESPINNING and chatting with anyone who wants to chat!

Sam's there too with her Vampire Gene series ... so please pop along if you're there doing your Christmas shopping ...

WATERSTONES, Trafford Centre, Manchester, 11th December 2011.
Sam Stone will be signing copies of her new book, Hateful Heart, Book 4 The Vampire Gene Series, at this very popular store. David J Howe will also be there with his new collection talespinning

Time: 12-4pm Date: Sunday 11th December.
Address: Waterstones, 42 Regent Crescent, Trafford Centre, Barton Dock Road, Manchester M17 8AP

Return of Denys Fisher

2011-12-07T08:00:00.001Z

Once upon a time there was a toy manufacturer who loved toys. He loved them so much that he decided that one of the top TV shows should have some toys made by his company. And so, in 1977, he released a set of action figures for kids to play with. The range was small, but included the very wonderful Tom Baker as the Doctor, Louise Jameson as Leela, plus of course their space-time ship the TARDIS - a police box which could 'dematerialise' a character placed in it by using a spinner in the light on the top. Of course, to be truly playable, the Doctor and Leela needed some monsters to fight, and so a Dalek and a Cyberman were included, as well as an amazing robot which the fourth Doctor had battled in his very first adventure.

The toys were brilliant. Totally amazing to children, who really didn't mind that the Doctor looked a bit like Gareth Hunt off of the New Avengers, or that Leela had totally uncontrollable hair. They even didn't mind that the Cyberman had a nose ... or that the Giant Robot was held together with rubber bands ... it was the concept and the playability which was key, and these toys had them in spades.

But the range died almost as it begun. Even a late addition of a little K9 model couldn't save it.

That was the end of the Doctor Who Action figures for a good long while. It wasn't until the new series came back in 2005 and Character Options started to release some 12 inch figures that the idea was floated again ... but again it seemed to die. Character released the Doctor (David Tennant) and Martha as well as Daleks and Cybermen, a Cat Nun, Judoon, Dalek Sec Hybrid, Ood and a Clockwork Man, but the range was not to continue. Kids seemed to be more into the little five inch figures, and the 12 inch variety was stopped - I remember seeing a 12 inch Sontaran at a Toy Fair which never made it to production.

Now, in 2011, a new company is trying the larger action figures. This time they are eight inch figures, and are very much an homage to the old Denys Fisher figures of the seventies.

There is a fourth Doctor, resplendent with hat and scarf, and even looking like Tom Baker this time. There is no companion in the initial batch, but there are three monsters. There's a CyberLeader, complete with shiny suit. He has no nose, but his chest unit is a little too small, but otherwise he's wonderful. He even has a Cybermat! Then there's a Sontaran, not one of the small, blue new series ones, but a good old fashioned one, complete with removable helmet and spud-like features. Finally, there is the Master ... but not the Roger Delgado or Anthony Ainley human version ... here we have the amazingly grotesque Peter Pratt decayed version, lovingly resplendent in rotting black robes and with the Sash of Rassilon around his neck. It's a great toy and even comes with the Rod of Rassilon as well!

All four figures are fully articulated, and have been developed with much love and care by Bif Bang Pow! the company behind them. They are very playable, and with the addition of one of the miriad of TARDISes which are already on the market, kids have a full set to stage their own adventures with.

There are four more figures promised for 2012 (Morbius, Scaroth, Leela and Sutekh) and it's another great selection. Personally I would perhaps have chosen others - maybe a Sea Devil, or an Ice Warrior? - but if the range does well, then I'm sure that more and more will be added to the range.

The figures retail for $39.99 for two (which equates to around £25.50 in UK currency) which is brilliant value! If we take the 1970s figures, these figures cost £2.95 when released. Using the Retail Price Index, the 2010 equvalent price is £14.30, so £13 is spot on price-wise.

Strangely, Character have just released a ten inch figure of the eleventh Doctor, though this seems to be an exclusive for the Toys R Us chain ... so we've had 8, 10 and 12 inch figures available now ... it's never ending.

The Bif Bang Pow! range can be bought in the USA from Entertainment Earth : http://www.entertainmentearth.com/hitlist.asp?spotlight=711&eeshop=&collect=&theme=Doctor+Who&company=BIF+BANG+POW%21&rppdup=20&rpp=20&filterdup=0&filter=0&premium=0&nm=0&coming=&clearance=0&justone=0&SearchOrder=com&searchfield=&pref=0&pg=0&orsearch=0&wrid=0&tree=0&sort=0&new=0

And in the UK, they seem to be available from Forbidden Planet. The .com variant has the four for next year at £14.99 each which is very reasonable, but the .co.uk variant doesn't seem to carry the range.

There's a part of me which gets a childish frisson of joy at seeing these figures ... it takes me right back to being a kid ... and that's what collecting is in some ways about.

Twins of Evil

2011-12-05T16:12:00.001Z

Having temporarily run out of DVDs to watch last night, we turned to some of the staple classics and chose to rewatch Hammer's wonderful Twins of Evil film.

I have loved this for a long time. When it was repeated on television sometime in the seventies, I even recorded the soundtrack onto tape so I could listen to it - in the same way as I re-enjoyed all the old Doctor Who stories before I had video to record them with. I love Harry Robinson's score - it's so evocative and just sends shivers up my spine every time I hear it.

The cast is near perfect - from Peter Cushing's wonderful ascetic Gustav Weil, through the evil Count Karnstein played by Damien Thomas (I wondered what had happened to him, and a quick check of IMDB shows that he's done a ton of stuff, lots of series, and is still working today! http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0858669/), and even the minor roles like Luan Peters (remember her from that Fawlty Towers episode 'The Psychiatrist'?) and Alex Scott as Hermann manage to shine.

Of course everyone goes on about the twins themselves, Madeleine and Mary Collinson, feted for appearing in Playboy before they made in the film (see here for more on that story: http://www.playboy.co.uk/girl/418/madeleine-and-mary-collinson), and they're not bad at all. I like the way that the 'good' one is obviously good, and the 'bad' one has that look about her ...

The film is very well made, set in Hammer's indeterminate time period and it's European setting (this time the town is called Karnstein, presumably after the castle and the Count who lives there), and the most is made of the locations. The film is actually quite vicious, with several burnings of young women, not to mention a chap at the end who gets a flaming torch in the eye, and of course the beheading of Frieda, which is very well done indeed.

Even the traditional vampiric disintegration of the Count at the climax is well done, and I remember thinking how good it was the very first time I ever saw the film.

For me Twins of Evil is one of the best of the Hammer films. Others I am very fond of are Vampire Circus, most of the Dracula films, but probably Taste the Blood of Dracula, and Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires on top, plus many others like Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile.

Hammer are at the moment releasing new novelisations of some of their catalogue, and this initially sounded promising, but recently I heard that the novelisation of Vampire Circus relocates and retells all the action in a modern setting ... no! Most of the charm and appeal of these films is that they are set in the 'Hammer-verse' and to mess about with that would seem to be a recipe for disaster ...

Leela and City of Death

2011-11-27T08:00:00.002Z

Thanks to those lovely folks at Underground Toys, I have a duo of little figures to talk about ... to be more accurate, it's a single figure release, and a boxed set of two figures.

First off, Leela. This was released for the San Diego Comic Con this year, and is a lovely addition to the range of classic characters. The likeness is very good indeed, and the figure is packed on its own, making it slightly more affordable than the boxed sets. I do wish that the classic figures could come down in price though, as they are very expensive for what they are, and I don't really buy the argument that it's because they don't sell as well as the new series stuff.

This is a 'Face of Evil' variant, and so Leela is dressed in the skins she wore in those episodes. There is also a nice crossbow accessory along with a boly, plus her ubiquitous knife, and even the gun that is used later in the episodes.

Articulation is the same as on all the figures, with joints at the knees, thighs, waist, wrists, elbows, upper arms, shoulders and head.

Overall it's a fine addition to the range, and hopefully we'll start to see more of the classic companions and monsters appearing.

The box set is from the story 'City of Death' - one of the better Tom Baker adventures - and consists of the fourth Doctor in a variant outfit from the story (they have even added the little paint badge he wore for the duration to his coat), and also a figure of Count Scarlioni. The likeness here is just OK I feel, but I really like that he comes with a changeable head, so you can replace his human visage with that of Scaroth of the Jagaroth. In more nice touches, there is a Mona Lisa painting accessory (which in a very nice touch has THIS IS A FAKE written across it in ink which illuminates with UV light), the Doctor has a sonic screwdriver of course, and there's also a pistol for the Count to threaten the Doctor with.

Overall it's a well produced and thoughtful set, with some nice accessories. I like that the Doctor's shoes are scuffed and different colours, as though he has been walking in mud ... maybe a nod to the 'beginning of life' conclusion to the story.

Ward Story

2011-11-25T10:19:00.001Z

Two films probably from totally different spectrums today ... one is the latest directed by John Carpenter, while the other is a Korean horror film, a sequel to one of the best examples of the art.

First up then is The Ward, a new film from John Carpenter. Now this is Carpenter's first film as director since 2001's Ghosts of Mars, and so it's been ten years since he was at the helm ... and he's not lost his touch. The film follows the story of Kristen (played by Amber Heard who you will recall I raved about in Drive Angry) who finds herself banged up in a creepy psychiatric hospital for burning down a house. There she learns that she is with four other girls of similar age all looked after by a spooky matron, and subject to the whims of a ghost which seems intent on killing them all off. The ghost appears to be that of Alice, a former inmate, and Kirsten needs to find a way to escape before she is next on the menu.

The film is very well directed, with lots of great tracking shots and atmosphere. Where it all falls down is in the plot, which is, to be honest, somewhat cliched and evokes a groan of 'oh, so that was it?' rather than stunned amazement. For a good example of 'stunned amazement' then checkout a film called Triangle ... but here we have something which seems very old hat and not really cutting it for a 2011 film.

If you've not seen it, then I won't give it all away. However it is a good and entertaining film which should keep you guessing ...

A Chinese Ghost Story 2 is the sequel to Tsui Hark's legendary 1987 film A Chinese Ghost Story (or Sien nui yau wan to give it the original title). I first discovered this gem back when Jonathan Ross presented a series on televison about Korean Horror, and was blown away by it. The sequel is not quite as imaginative and as charming as the original, but it does a good job of trying to match it. Our tax collecting scribe from the first film, Ling Choi Sin (Leslie Cheung), still ruing that he didn't get to be with Lit Sin Seen (Joey Wang), meets up with another mage Chi Chau (Jacky Cheung) and together they find themselves caught between the machinations of a general and of another master magician. Add to this a pair of twins, one of whom looks like Sin Seen (and is played again by Joey Wang) and the scene is set for another batch of magic and monsters set amongst the crumbling temples of the area.

It's a great little film, and the performances are superb. However take my advice and watch the subtitled version - we started to watch the English dubbed version and the English voice actors are awful - totally robbing the film of any sense of professionalism. Another criticism is that there is too much time spent on a large demon monster which stalks them through the film. It's a nice mechanical effect, but it all goes on too long, and the somewhat whimsical 'Freeze' spell routine starts to grate. The cinematography is good as you would expect, and there's a lot of fighting through trees and travelling underground ... but you just have to suspend disbelief and go with it.

Overall the two films are good additions to the old DVD collection ... and worth checking out. I also discovered that A Chinese Ghost Story has just been remade and has an awesome set of posters available ... it seems to be called A Chinese Fairy Tale this time, and I look forward to seeing if it fulfils the promise of a remake ...

Where's David?

2011-11-23T11:35:00.001Z

This Saturday I'm going to be at the lovely Waterstone's store at Liverpool One, signing copies of talespinning and chatting to folk. So please pop along and say Hi if you're in the area.

WATERSTONES, Liverpool One, Liverpool. 26th Nov 2011
Sam Stone will be signing her new book, Hateful Heart, Book 4 in The Vampire Gene Series, at this very popular store. David J Howe will also be there with his new collection talespinning.

Time: 12-4pm Date: Saturday 26th November.
Address:Waterstones, 12 College Lane, Liverpool, L1 3DL.

Talking Plush Keyrings

2011-11-18T07:00:00.001Z

I've just been sent the cutest little foursome of Doctor Who goodies! They are from Underground Toys, and are plush characters from the show, which also have keyrings attached, and which talk as well!

They retail for around the £6.99 mark, and if you fancy something different to hold your keys then these could be just what you have been looking for. The only slight issue is that although they are small, you would still need a sizable bag or pocket to keep them in - they stand around 5 inches tall and 3 inches wide.

First up is the TARDIS. Now how can a TARDIS talk I hear you ask ... well it can't. So this makes the materialisation noise when the front is pressed, and in a neat touch a bright blue light illuminates on the top. It's very cute and puffy and for collectors of TARDISes, then this will be a must have.

Then there are two Daleks. A blue one and a red one, and apart from the colour they are the same, with a voice chip that alternates between 'Exterminate! Exterminate!' and 'You would make a good Dalek!'.

Finally there is a cute little Cyberman. Wheras the Daleks and TARDIS are in proportion, this fellah looks more like the super-brain creature from Colony in Space, with a massive head atop an almost foetal body. This one says 'Upgrading is compulsory!' and 'You will become like us or you will be deleted!'

Released just in time for Christmas, these will make perfect stocking fillers.

The Prison In Space

2011-11-15T07:00:00.000Z

Missing stories have long been something of a cause celebre in Doctor Who circles. And by 'missing' I don't mean those which were made and shown on telly but which have now been wiped by the Beeb and are unavailable. I'm talking about the stories which were commissioned, but for a wide variety of reasons were then canned, cancelled and not progressed into production. There are probably more of these than there are actual made and transmitted stories, and in the past, and especially prior to the end of the 1980s when there was a Doctor Who Production Office in London, and John Nathan-Turner was in the hotseat, the official view was that these should not be novelised or put in the public domain as they were probably not progressed for good reasons - their not being good enough being a main one - and so they are not 'lost' or 'missing' or anything like that, but just ideas which didn't make the grade.

However in recent years, the approach has softened, and Big Finish have been allowed (as they seem to be allowed to do just about anything) to make audio stories of these lost adventures.

Last year they released the audio of The Prison In Space, a story by Dick Sharples which would have formed part of season six in 1969, the final season of Patrick Troughton's time playing the Doctor. And now we have a sparkling script book as well. This has been produced by Richard Bignell, and is available from Lulu and comes very highly recommended indeed.

It's an A4 sized book, and contains the full script for The Prison in Space, as well as the initial breakdowns and outlines. Moreover it also includes the original scene breakdowns for Brian Hayles' Lords of the Red Planet - an Ice Warrior story which was superceded by The Seeds of Death. Unlike many of these so called 'lost' adventures, The Prison In Space actually almost went into production - costume and set designers were allocated and work had started on it before it was canned. So it's a fascinating look at a 'what could have been' story.

As most previous commentators have said, the main problem with the story is it's 'planet ruled by women' concept and the inherent sexism that this sparks in certains lines of the Doctor and in the approach ... for example all the guards wear tight and revealing black rubber outfits, and Jamie ends up spanking poor Zoe at the end to break the conditioning that she has undergone to convert her into one of these 'dolly guards'.

The book also contains reviews and commentaries from several worthy folk, and articles by Bignell and historian Andrew Pixley placing it all into the context of the time and what else was going on with the show.

The cover is a startlingly wonderful piece of art by Jason Fletcher showcasing one of said dolly guards along with the Doctor and a representation of the Prison itself.

If you are at all interested in the history of Who, then this book is invaluable.

The Prison in Space: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/doctor-who---the-prison-in-space/18634892?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/1

X-Men Drive the Block Angry

2011-11-14T16:18:00.000Z

Or ... David has watched some more films. This time I chose three which looked interesting. Two I had heard of, and one I'd never heard of ... so what did I make of them?

First off we watched the new X-Men film, called X-Men First Class, presumably because it's an origins piece as to how the X-Men came to first get together. I'm not familiar with the X-Men comics at all so have no idea whether what was presented was 'correct' or not, so all I have to go off is the film. In it we meet a young Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) who has a talent to read minds. He helps the government when a young Magneto (Michael Fassbender) tries to get vengeance on some thugs and they join forces against Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) in true villain form. The problem I had with the film was that it seemed very disjointed. It was more a sequence of 'what powers does this one have' than a coherent film, and although the mutants were very interesting, it quickly became a little boring. I liked the central idea with Mystique that no-one loved her in her blue form, and that she had to love who she was herself before anyone else would love her. The chap who became Beast was interesting as well as his 'talent' - to have hands instead of feet - seemed pretty useless to me, and it took him tampering with his own DNA to turn him into Sulley, the big blue monster off of Monsters Inc. I liked the dragonfly lady, but couldn't see why she would be able to hawk explosive spitballs around, and the lady who could turn into diamonds was also interesting. But overall ... despite the great effects, the film left me a little cold. Just an okay from me on that one. I think the earlier X-Men films were much better.

Next up was Attack the Block. And oh dear. From the off, the main protagonists are shown to be a bunch of little shits. The sort of kids that society seems to be plagued with these days - irresponsible, lacking respect for anything and anyone, speaking in a sort of dumbed down patois regardless of their ethnic origin, and basically troublemakers looking for trouble. They mug a girl (Jodie Whittaker) on her way home from work, stealing her ring and wallet, and then see a meteor land. But on the meteor (or is it some sort of spacecraft?) is an animal which the gang leader Moses (John Boyega) proceeds to chase and kill. But this seems to anger a pile of other space creatures who arrive, and they then chase and attack the yobs who end up joining forces with the girl they mugged to try and survive. To be honest, I disliked these kids so much that I was rooting for the aliens all the way through. Unfortunately the aliens are beaten and the surviving kids hailed as some sort of heroes ... it all left a bad taste in my mouth. I suppose on an intellectual level I can praise the writer and director for so accurately depicting these little shits, and the actors too for making them so unlikable. But a film needs heroes you can relate to and root for and this failed in that respect. The monsters are bargain basement, looking more like shaggy apes with joke-store glowing teeth than aliens - they reminded us of the Cybershades from Doctor Who a couple of years back, and they were rubbish too. Not a great film by any means, and certainly not one I have any desire to see again.

The third film I got because it looked like a thriller in The Fast and the Furious vein, however Drive Angry is actually nothing of the sort. The first surprise is that it's a supernatural yarn, and the second that it's really good! Nicholas Cage plays a mysterious drifter called Milton who seems to have supernatural powers. He joins up with a gorgeous waitress, Piper (Amber Heard), and the two of them head off after the Satan-worshipping cult, headed by Jonah King (Billy Burke) who have kidnapped Cage's granddaughter and who plan to sacrifice her. On Cage's trail is the Accountant (William Fichtner), a brilliantly portrayed being who is powerful and vicious and who just wants to get Cage back in check again. It transpires that Cage has escaped from Hell to perform his rescue, and will stop at nothing to achieve it. So Drive Angry plays out as a sort of road movie, but with supernatural shenanigans (in fact, the TV series Supernatural is probably part of the inspiration for the film), some great characters and performances, and some neat effects and ideas. It was a surprise to me that it was as good and as enjoyable as it turned out to be. The title, by the way, comes from the license plate of Piper's car: DRV AGRY.

Vampire Horror!

2011-11-11T10:15:00.000Z

As well as their Doctor Who releases, AudioGo also do a range of horror CDs, and recently I was sent copies of the two new ones: Vampire Horror! and Ghostly Terror!

Now I love horror, but here we have some of the usual suspects of the genre - basically out of copyright tales from decades ago - revitalised with some modern readers and some limited musical cues. Unfortunately this reliance on the old stories of M R James and others results in some CDs which are antiquated to listen to, and which ultimately disappoint as those tales might have been fine 50 years ago, but to a modern audience, they feel very dated.

First up on Vampire Horror! is The Vampyre by Doctor Polidori. History tells us that this was the tale written by John Polidori during (or after) that same Geneva holiday with Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wolstonecroft Shelley which resulted in Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus being written. Unfortunately Polidori's tale has not stood the test of time. It is long winded and hard to follow, and the reader in this case (Bill Wallis) has a voice which is either too indistinct to hear or too loud resulting in much twiddling of the volume control. It's also unfortunately the only one on this set which actually features a vampire ...

Next up is the best one, M R James' Wailing Well, read by Anthony Head. Head is a brilliant reader and the story is also rather good, setting the scene well in a boys' school, and following the exploits of a group as they decide to visit an old well despite being warned away. For there is something else there, which is capturing the souls of those who get to close.

The third story is For the Blood is the Life by F Marion Crawford, and this is a strangely constructed story within a story within a story, and thus tends not to work too well as an audio piece. Basically a grave barrow has a ghost/phantom laying on top of it which can drain the energy from those who stand on the grave in moonlight (hence the vampire theme). The reader here is John Telfer, and he does a good job with it.

Finally we have An Episode of Cathedral History, another from M R James, read by Cornelius Garrett. This is another story within a story piece, this time about a cathedral and what is found when the altar is dismantled. The tale features some sort of creature, which is very similar in description to the one in Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book (which features on the Ghostly Terror! CDs) and so it's a little hard to see how this fits as a vampire tale.

As a CD set, Vampire Horror! is very nicely produced, and the stories are well read (with the exception of the first). It's just a shame that they are so dated and in the case of James at least, well known and easily available, and that they don't actually feature vampires ...

Where's David?

2011-11-09T17:37:00.000Z

This coming Saturday, Sam and I will be at the Waterstones in the Arndale Centre, Manchester signing copies of books.

Apparently Noel Fielding from the Mighty Boosh is there at the same time, so this could get interesting ...

WATERSTONES, Arndale Centre, Manchester, 12th November 2011
Sam Stone will be signing her new book, Hateful Heart, Book 4 The Vampire Gene Series, at this very popular store. David J Howe will also be there with his new collection talespinning.

Time: 12-4pm Date: Saturday 12th November.
Address:Waterstones, Arndale Centre, Manchester, M4 3AQ

Looking forward to seeing anyone who can make it along.

The Fish! The Fish!

2011-11-07T17:12:00.000Z

Now my normal reaction to hearing about fish, is to quote that bit from Red Dwarf where Cat repeatedly orders fish from the spaceship vending machine ... but this blog isn't about that sort of fish ... it's about the sort which have sprung up in just about every town centre at the moment - the little tankfuls of the critters which nibble your feet ...

I mean, what a strange thing to do. Get some fish to nibble all the dry skin off your feet ... but they are all pervasive and everywhere, and the other weekend in Whitby I succumbed to the ministrations of the fish myself.

It was something of an interesting experience. You sit with your feet dangling in a tank of luke warm water and let these fish swarm and nibble at you. The initial tickling when you first pop your feet in the tank is excuciating, resulting in much squirming and shuddering, but it soon settles down and you have all these fish swimming about around your feet and sort of sucking on the patches of dead and hard skin. They don't have any teeth, so it's all about the sucking and cleaning. And it tickles. A lot.

The fish are called garra rufa and come from Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, and they don't actually eat the dead skin. They are looking for algae which normally grows on rocks and other hard surfaces, but their sucking action cleans and softens the skin on the feet. There was even a typical UK tabloid scare-story about them in the papers in October, something that the NHS was quick to decry:
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2011/10October/Pages/hpa-risk-fish-pedicures.aspx. If only the papers would print the factual denial as large and as prominent as they printed the original scare stories.

What interested me, however, was how anyone discovered about these fish in the first place! Can you imagine going for a dip in a natural pool or river somewhere and being literally surrounded by hundreds of these fish, all attaching themselves to your body and nibbling away! I would have thought you'd be out of the water like a flash! And how many people mistakenly go for a dip in a river of piranah fish, thinking they might be garra rufa? It doesn't bear thinking about. At least they wouldn't make the same mistake twice ...

Another thing crossed my mind too while all these little fish were nibbling away ... they seemed to have a taste for it ... so what would happen if people stopped coming? Would the fish somehow escape from the tanks and come after humanity in some sort of feeding frenzy? Or would the action of the fish on the feet transfer some fishy DNA into the human subjects, leading to some incredible half-breeds like something out of Lovecraft's witch-cursed Innsmouth?

Even now I might have some fishy DNA swimming around in my body, converting me into a water-breathing creature of horror ... So far there has been no sign of any gills opening up ... but I'll keep you in the loop if it happens.

Diary Notes

2011-11-03T14:25:00.000Z

For several years now Danilo have been publishing the annual Doctor Who Calendar, and in recent years have added a diary and other items to their release list. This year's offerings are the Calendar and Pocket Diary, and also a Desk Calendar.

The main release is the large square Calendar, covering all of 2012. The cover features the main players and promotional image from the 2011 season: the 11th Doctor, Amy and Rory reflected in an Astronaut's helmet. The internal pages cover the main characters to have appeared in the season, but the selection is poor and is centred on the first half of the season only. One assumes that Danilo didn't have available to them pictures from the latter part. So we have Pirates and Gangers and Ood and Sontaran and Cybermen, but no Dolls, Minotaur, Silurian or Cybermats. The design is also very basic - cut out photos of the characters against a starfield background - given some of the amazing design work out there, it's a shame that the product doesn't take advantage of it.

While researching the Calendar, I discovered that a personalised calendar can be obtained from http://www.personalise.com/products/2012-doctor-who-personalised-calendar. This is a nice idea, and allows for something slightly different to be produced and tailored for the fan who likes to see their name in everything.

The Pocket Diary is a slim affair with a cover of the 11th Doctor and Sonic Screwdriver. Inside it has colour pictures on each page, but disappointingly, there are only 6 pictures repeated over and over: 11th Doctor; Ganger; Amy; Silent; Rory; and Ood. There are also no Doctor Who dates noted (for example the 23rd November being the show's 49th birthday) which is again a shame.

The final item is the desk diary. This features the Doctor, Rory and Amy on the cover, and contains a page per month. The imagery is similar to the main wall Calendar, and features cut out images against a star background. At least here we find Madame Vastra, Headless Monks and Madame Kovarian alongside the more standard fare which makes it more interesting, but strangely Rory the Roman makes an appearance (was he in the 2011 season?). Again, there's nothing featured from the latter part of the season.

Overall the Danilo items are well produced and printed. It's a shame that they don't cover the 2011 season more broadly, but for this I blame the BBC for not supplying them with imagery early enough. It's also a shame that the imagery is somewhat unimaginative, giving the items a very bland feeling compared with the magnificent collage art on display in The Brilliant Book or on the Ravensburger jigsaws to name but two licensed products which really went the extra mile. But then again, maybe this generic look is what Danilo and/or the BBC want from the licensed calendars and diaries ... hopefully they will be able to provide something more visually interesting for 2013, which is, after all, the 50th anniversary of the show.

Puzzling

2011-10-31T09:24:00.002Z

Jigsaw puzzles need to cover a few bases in order for them to really work well. First of all, the image chosen needs to have areas of similarity - making it challenging to work out which pieces go where - and also areas of distinction so that you have a chance of sorting out the obvious pieces and placing them first. Ravensburger, who currently produce the Doctor Who jigsaws, seem to have these elements down to a tee in the designs they choose for their releases.

The latest two jigsaws in their range feature imagery from Season 6, and as usual their designers have done a sterling job in coming up with some superb pictures.

The 60 piece jigsaw features a great image of the 11th Doctor with his Sonic Screwdriver, flanked on one side by two Silent, and on the other by River, Rory and Amy. The bottom of the image is mostly dark and the top is a similar sky all the way across, making for some challenge in those areas. There are two Silent ... so if you have a Silent piece, then where does it go? Brilliant stuff.

The other jigsaw is slightly larger at 100 pieces, and the image here really deserves to be released as a poster it's so good. It's a collage (again) of monsters, and there are tons crammed in here ... from left to right we have a Silent, two Weeping Angels, the Siren, Gangers, an Ood, a Sontaran, Madame Vastra, three Daleks, two Cybermen and a CyberController ... trying to sort out which pieces are which from that lot would be quite challenging! However as every part of the image is different, it shouldn't be too impossible ... in fact I can see that the 60 piece one might even be harder to do than the 100 piece.

There have been calls for Ravensburger to produce a larger-still jigsaw. Maybe a 1000 piece one which fans could really get their teeth into. From the design prowess available in the company, I'm sure that whatever imagery they chose to use, it would be spectacular and impressive.

Filmwatch

2011-10-29T10:33:00.005+01:00

We watch a lot of films ... most evenings are spent enjoying something on the DVD or Blu-Ray, and sometimes we'll go back and revisit old favourites, or films we've not seen in an age, as well as picking up some new fare from Blockbusters, or buying them when we know they are things we'll want to add to the collection to watch again.

So recently we rewatched the 2002 version of The Time Machine - the one with Guy Pearce and Samantha Mumba as the female Eloi. To my surprise this was much better than I had remembered it. The acting was pretty good, and the effects nicely done. Mumba was OK, and Jeremy Irons as the lead, intelligent, Morlock was chilling and convincing. I remember that the film was panned when it came out, and it's hard to see why as there's not much wrong with it. I wondered what had happened to former popstrell Samantha Mumba ... a quick check on Wikipedia reveals that she seems to have been doing mostly TV reality shows, guesting on daytime TV and concentrating on 'acting'.

This week we pulled three films from Blockbusters to check out. First of all we watched The Green Lantern. Oh dear. What a two hour something something borefest. It's hard to believe that a film with such amazing visual effects could be so slow and boring. But it is. The plot really stretches the imagination too ... there's an intergalactic consortium of superheroes called 'the Green Lantern' apparently because their power derives from will, which is green. So they can do anything they can imagine they can do - so pretty much limitless power. Except that the human representative who ends up with the power (Ryan Reynolds) has the imagination of a damp sponge. When a helecopter is crashing, all he can think to do is to turn it into a giant Hotwheels car and track and let it go all over the place like that. When bad guys attack, what does he do? Open a black hole and suck them in? No. Create an impenetrable barrier and enclose them in it? No. He gets pushed and battered and bruised and eventually uses the gravity of the Sun to drag the baddie to its doom ... so not much imagination at all. It was a chore to finish the film to be honest.

Next up was I Am Number Four ... which I was hesitant about, but apparently the book is good ... but unfortunately the film isn't. It's unfortunately from the Twilight stable of teen romantic stylings and concentrates on how the alien 'Number Four' (Alex Pettyfer) falls in love with a girl at high school (Dianna Agron, who is quite cute) and who then jepordises his future, race and whatever else these mysterious nine kids need to do, by mooching and fawing over her rather than battling the evil bad guys who are out to kill him. In this film the power of good is blue, and the power of bad is red, by the way ... and his hands glow like torches for some reason.

The film sort of struggles along until the last half hour when a kick-ass girl in the form of Number Six (Teresa Palmer) appears. She has the usual teenage girl croaky-voice, but Australian this time rather than the usual American croaky-voice which every female in every film has to have. So annoying. But she is cool, wears leather, rides a motorbike and can sort of dematerialise, move at lightning speed and kill the bad guys with a short sword/dagger thing ... so she's OK. It reminded me a lot of the character Nightcrawler from the X-Men films ... but that's good as he was an excellent character too. The last half hour is actionpacked fighting with guns and explosions and everything ... and then it slows to a dead stop for the last five minutes as our hero has to say farewell to his love, and the evil bully from school turns good guy ... sheesh.

So onto the last film of the week, and after those two I was feeling a bit down. Thank God for Luc Besson! The final film was the French offering The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, and this has gone straight on my to-buy list as it was awesome. I am a big fan of The Fifth Element, a brilliant, rollicking science fiction film from Besson, and this one matches it for sheer audacity and imagination. The effects and acting are superb, and the plot ... oh the plot ...

What I really liked about it is that it's unpredictable and above all original. I've never seen anything quite like this before. A scientist, Espérandieu (Jacky Nercessian) puts his mind into that of an ancient pterodactyl and hatches it from an egg at the museum. While the creature causes havok in Paris, an incompetant policeman, Albert Caponi (Gilles Lellouche) is assigned to sort it all out ... thus Espérandieu is discovered and arrested. Meanwhile our hero Adele Blanc-Sec (Louise Bourgoin), is in Egypt, raiding a pyramid to try and obtain the body of the Pharoah's doctor as her sister has been badly injured and brain-damaged, and she wants Espérandieu to revive the mummified doctor to see if he can help her sister ... so the film moves from Egypt back to Paris, and Adele has to try and spring Espérandieu from jail to help her. We end up with all the mummies in the Louvre coming to life, and going on a sightseeing tour of Paris, and Adele riding the pterodactyl bareback across the city! Honestly, you couldn't make this up ... and it's brilliant brilliant brilliant.

All the actors bring a superb French/Parisien sensibility to it all, and some are quite comic-strip in their characterisation, all wearing bowler hats, and Caponi constantly trying to have something to eat - and being interrupted every time. Everyone is polite and nice, and Adele is the icing on the cake. Louise Bourgeon is simply superb - she is feisty, kick-ass, go getting and sassy, but at the same time polite, gentile and mannered. A brilliant creation indeed.

Personally I have no problems with subtitled films, though I appreciate that they are not everyone's cup of tea, and here the film is in French with English subtitles. So be aware of that if you decide to give it a go. And I strongly recommend that you do.

Where's David?

2011-10-27T09:45:00.001+01:00

Not one but two places to come and chat to Sam and myself this weekend ...

WATERSTONES, Bolton, Lancashire. 29th Oct 2011Sam Stone will be signing her new book, Hateful Heart, Book 4 The Vampire Gene Series, at this store. David J Howe will also be there with his new collection talespinning.

Time: 12-4pm Date: Saturday 29th October.
Address:Waterstones, 32-36 Deansgate, Bolton, BL1 1BL

WATERSTONES, Wrexham, 30th Oct 2011
Sam Stone will be signing her new book, Hateful Heart, Book 4 The Vampire Gene Series, at this store. David J Howe will also be there with his new collection talespinning.

Time: 10am-1pm Date: Sunday 30th October.
Address: Waterstones, 9/11 Regent Street, Wrexham, LL11 1SG.

100 Scariest Monsters

2011-10-24T09:23:00.000+01:00

Another book from the Penguin arm of BBC Children's Books, and this time a small hardbacked tome which purports to be the '100 Scariest Monsters' from Doctor Who ... but it's a strange beast indeed.

It contains double page spreads on 100 monsters, but they are not in alphabetical order (possibly because then that would be too much like the Encyclopedia) nor are they in order of appearance, nor are they even in order of scariness ... perhaps the order is that which author Justin Richards thought of them? There's a mix of Classic and New series creatures here too, so Zygons and Zarbi and Krynoids rub shoulders with Cassandra, the Flood and Vashta Nerada, and each entry has a couple of photographs, some slim text, and a 'Fear Factor' chart showing how scary they were.

This 'Fear Factor' seems to have been pulled from the air, bearing no basis in really how scary the things are. For example the Vashta Nerada get 9/10, while the Daleks are 10/10 ... the Werewolf (from 'Tooth and Claw' gets 8/10 as does Prisoner Zero, the Mummies (from 'Pyramids of Mars') and the Ogri (from 'The Stones of Blood') while the Haemovores get 7/10 along with Aggedor, Axons, Quarks and the Time Beetle! Maybe this is why the book is not in order of scariness - it would all fall apart!

It's a nicely produced little hardback, though the designer needs shooting for the text on pages 6/7 which is dark blue against black and barely readable! However I can see this ending up in the bargain bins after Christmas as it is too similar to Justin's The Ultimate Monster Guide from last year, and it's also like the little Top Trumps books from previous years. It's a book without any point or reason to exist, doing nothing, and produced purely because someone thought it would be a good book for Christmas. A shame.

Where's David?

2011-10-21T22:05:00.001+01:00

The signing tour for talespinning rolls on, and tomorrow I'll be at Waterstones in Wigan, along with Sam Stone, signing copies of the book and chatting to anyone who wants to chat ... so please pop in if you're in the area.

WATERSTONES, Wigan. 22nd October, 2011
Sam Stone will be signing her new book, Hateful Heart, Book 4 The Vampire Gene Series, at this very popular store. David J Howe will also be there with his new collection talespinning.

Time: 12pm-4pm Date: 22nd Oct
Address: 61 The Grand Arcade, Wigan, WN1 1BH

Head Case

2011-10-20T10:02:00.006+01:00

Amidst all the furore about the Character Options figures and what people want to see next, some gems get released from other companies and these can go unreported. Which is a great shame as sometimes these are far more interesting than a simple set of figures. Take Trends UK's current range of science kits. When I was a kid, I loved this sort of thing, and to have a range which also tied into my love of Doctor Who would have been simply awesome.

The company has three products out at the moment. All are science-based toys and some might say are more traditional than perhaps some of the guns and gadgets which are released - how many Sonic Screwdrivers can one actually play with anyway? - but they are all well produced and well thought through, providing a springboard for further thought and investigation into the subject.

First up is a 'Dalek Enemy Identifier' ... or in common parlance, a 20x microscope with some specimen slides and stickers. The toy is nicely designed and can be enhanced with some 'Dalek bump' stickers. The booklet encourages the user to investigate all around them, everyday items from the house, kitchen, garden and so on look different when magnified, so the idea is to find things, look at them, prepare specimen slides, and then to see if you can identify the close-up photographs in the manual. I can see this as being fascinating for anyone interested in the world around them and with an inquisitive mind.

Next is something called 'Silurian Crystal Lab', and this is a beautifully designed item: for once not an 11th Doctor, Dalek or Cyberman item. Here, the kit contains some play dough and some chemicals. The manual talks about crystalline structures (and I wondered if in an alternate dimension we had such a kit but with Krotons on the front - a 'grow your own Kroton' kit!) and then goes on to describe the process of dissolving the chemical salt in water, and then suspending a small pebble in the water so that crystals can form on its surface. Fascinating stuff. The kit then has some 'Silurian Sludge', or play dough, to pop the formed crystals on in order to display them in a glow in the dark dome. I always found this sort of basic crystallography a little boring as it's lots of waiting for things to happen ... you need patience to grow decent crystals! But if you have the patience, then the results can be rather good.

Finally, and probably my personal favourite of the three toys, is something called 'Cybernetics'. This contains all the parts needed to build a half-size Cyberman head from the Pandorica Underhenge which will then react in different ways depending on the circuit board chosen. The kit is nicely designed such that each part will only fit in one place, and the manual is clear enough about how to connect up all the wires - basically same colours go together, connected via little springs which is a simple and effective solution, rather than messing about with little screws.

The three circuit boards provided are: Infra Red - where by using a television or DVD remote, you can make the head move across the floor for three seconds or so before it stops; Light Activated - where any light will make the head move - so best used in the dark with a torch, and then when the torch hits the head it moves; and Object Detection - where the head will move until it detects an obstruction, when it will go into reverse.

Of the three circuits, I didn't try the Light Activated one as it was daylight and I couldn't see the point. The Object Detection one didn't seem to work - the head moved and then just stopped. I think with this, the field of operation is too limited perhaps, and of course the detector is only in one place on the head. So the one which I managed to get working was the Infra Red one, and indeed my TV remote would activate the head - but only if used about a foot away ... again the range didn't seem very strong. However each circuit also has a little dial to change the range, fiddling with that increased it to about two feet ... still not quite strong enough ... and of course the television was also switching off and on and the volume going up and down all the time.

The head itself is lovely, and makes a really nice display piece once the fun of making it move and changing it around is done. In a perfect world, the head would have been full size, and the circuits a little more sophisticated ... maybe one to make it talk, another to light it up (it's a shame that the eyes and head don't light up when it's activated), but all this would add cost, and as it is, the product is very nicely priced indeed. I guess that the next step might be for Junior to pay a visit to Maplins or Radio Shack to see what circuits and lights they have which could be used to enhance the toy ... and from there we have the development of future visual effects designers.

In larger Boots stores in the UK, the Cybernetics toy is in their 3 for 2 offer, which makes this one at least very affordable for the family of kids who love Who and who have all the figures. Hearty congratulations to Trends UK for producing the range, and I hope it does well enough that they decide to do more. The 'Dalek Enemy Identifier' sells for £20, the 'Silurian Crystal Lab' for £23 and the 'Cybernetics' kit for £25.

Shops stocking them are:
Toys R Us
Entertainer
Amazon
Argos – on line only
Forbidden Planet
Forbidden Planet International
Boots – Cybernetics
Play.Com

The Brilliant Book

2011-10-19T09:01:00.001+01:00

Received a copy of the Brilliant Book 2012 the other week, and to be honest, this is probably the best thing to have come along in recent years. Editor Clayton Hickman knows his Who (well he should do, he edited the official Doctor Who Magazine for many years) and the book collects together facts and figures, pictures and interviews from the most recent series. In a way, it strangely reminds me of my own book Timeframe - which people keep asking if there will be another volume of: at the moment unfortunately not as the BBC don't wish to commission 'outsiders' to do the books for them, preferring to rely on staff and 'known' writers to do the work.

The Brilliant Book sort of falls outside this remit as Clayton does not work for the BBC or Ebury as far as I know ... but anyway ... the content follows the most recent season and there are four or so spreads from each of the tales, peppered with additional interviews with Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill and Alex Kingston, plus interview comments from the writers and from Steven Moffat, and even pieces from the effects team on how they created some of the monsters along the way. For me this is wonderful - I've always loved these behind the scenes pieces - and the book blends all this material together along with nice tongue-in-cheek elements like a 'Welcome to Sardicktown' brochure, a flier from the theatre where Henry Gordon Jago presents a 'monstre gathering' culminating in Madame Vastra, a Handroid advertising pack, and 'facebook' updates from Cleopatra and Charles Dickens. It's superb stuff, written with wit and presented superbly thanks, I guess, to the talents of designer Paul Lang who gets a co-credit with Clayton for the book.

For each story there are also some simply superb pieces of photo art from Lee Johnson. These are some of the very best I have seen in terms of composition and picture selection, and are presented as full page pieces - another perhaps-nod to Timeframe where we presented all the Target cover art throughout the book. These would make a wonderful series of posters, and Johnson should perhaps be snapped up to work on some of the other licensed merchandise out there to create Jigsaws and covers and designs.

The book is something of a bargain at £12.99 for 164 pages all in full colour, and it complements the other Doctor Who releases admirably - there are some for the younger kids (like Where's The Doctor and the Annual), some for the readers (Dan Abnett's Ice Warrior novel The Silent Stars Go By), and some for the fact-heads (Gary Russell's The Encyclopedia, and of course Andrew Pixley's special magazines from Panini). And of course taking up any slack are companies like my own Telos Publishing with our books on the missing episodes (Wiped) and the more specialist season and story guides.

All you need are bottomless pockets to be able to afford all this stuff!

Where's The Doctor?

2011-10-18T08:20:00.002+01:00

It's funny how sometimes things that you think of then become a reality. I was thinking maybe 5 years ago about how it would be really cool to have a Where's Wally type book for Doctor Who, with spreads featuring different monsters and settings ... and then they publish one!

Where's The Doctor? (BBC Children's Books, £8.99) is a large format hardbacked compilation of some of the 'find the Doctor' images from the pages of Doctor Who Monster Invasion Magazine by artist Jamie Smart. I was actually a little disappointed when I realised that they were all from the magazine, but pleased too, as I'm not collecting the magazine - too expensive and something had to give!

We have a selection of scenes: Judoon on the Moon; Dalek ship; Adipose nursery ship, Cyberfactory, Ood-Sphere and so on, and in each image you have to locate four elements: the Doctor, Amy, Rory and the TARDIS; while there are three random items which can be found in some of the images: Fido the dog; Fido's dinner and Fido's ball.

I love the humour inherent in the images. In the Judoon one there are some of the creatures using each other as target practice, there are Judoon in police helmets in a car, one riding a rocket, and lots and lots just standing around. The image of the Underhenge is especially wonderful, with all the different monsters featured. We have Judoon trampolining, Roman soldiers aplenty, Sontarans marching, and Silurians and Cybermen enjoying a slide.

The Silence image is also great, with thousands of the creepy creatures packed into an old house on the landings and stairs. Finding the Doctor here is very challenging, but I managed it :)

Overall the book is a great Christmas gift, diverting and entertaining for kids of all ages, and if you shop around, then you can get it for less than the cover price (Waterstones have it for 25% off for example).

The Fall

2011-10-17T08:47:00.003+01:00

I am loving this new song and video by Gary Numan right now. The video is something of a mini-masterpiece - I love them when they have a story and visuals which make you think 'what is happening here' ...

The Power of If

2011-10-16T10:01:00.001+01:00

There's an old Doctor Who story where Tegan, the Doctor's companion, talks about the power of 'if' ... indeed she is looking for the TARDIS' Index File, but the deeper connotation of what she is saying is for me one of the things at the very heart of good storytelling.

Sam and I were at Preston Waterstones yesterday, and one of the lovely things about doing store events is that you get to meet all manner of people ... some of them want to chat about the books and might even buy a copy, while others are not interested in horror (they turn away with a shudder) but if you smile and ask them what they do like to read, then you can get a better insight into what people like and why ... and that can be important.

At the store yesterday, a lady came up to us with a young boy of maybe 8 years old ... she wanted to know if we had any tips on writing for her son, as he had been asked by school to write a 'blurb' on something he liked, and also to write some sort of story (I think). It's hard to get ideas and concepts over to an 8 year old, and so I decided to focus on the power of 'what if'. The way it goes is that anything in life - absolutely anything - can be transformed into the fantastique through the power of 'what if'. So. We're standing in the bookshop talking ... what if a hole opened up in the floor and swallowed your mum? What would you think, what would you do next? Where does the hole go? And why is it there? Instantly you have a story. Another example was 'What if you woke up and your bed, instead of being in your bedroom, was on a cloud ...' And so on.

The lad got it immediately and seemed quite thoughtful that this making up of stories - something he said he did anyway (probably in a form like 'my homework was eaten by dinosaurs in the back garden' or 'I didn't eat that cake, it was a hungry fridge-mouse') - was a basis for writing fiction, and he wandered off to pillage in the childrens' section of the store.

I love that 'what if' approach ... it's even something that seasoned writer and friend Terrance Dicks has mentioned on more than one occasion ... if you're writing something, anything, and you get stuck, then just have two men enter the room with a gun ... that then gets the story moving again. It's the same basic premise ...

So next time you're out and about, try employing the 'what if' ... what if that man at the bus stop is waiting for a spacecraft to arrive rather than a bus ... what if the greengrocers suddenly vanished ... what if that group of children in the park weren't actually from this dimension at all ...

The Reviews are In

2011-10-14T09:22:00.001+01:00

Just wanted to take a moment to pass on a few reviews of my new collection, talespinning. As some will know, this collects just about every piece of fiction I have written over the last 30 years - I'm not prolific at fiction - and I really wasn't sure if people would like it.

First off, the first big review I got, from http://www.geekmom.com/2011/09/talespinning-by-david-j-howe-who-horror-and-more/

'These stories made me want to read more horror and I don’t think I can conjure up a greater compliment.'

'As a whole, this is a great collection with something for most horror and fantasy fans. Doctor Who fans, especially those from the classic pre-2005 era, will doubtless find the Who-verse tales of great interest but there is more to this book than just the Doctor’s world, and the other short stories are all worthy of your time and attention. As a horror story novice I found this a great introduction to a variety of styles, allowing me to get a bit more understanding of the genres I am drawn to and as such talespinning will sit well on the shelves of horror, fantasy and science fiction fans alike.'

Then the book was perused by OneMetal.com at http://www.onemetal.com/2011/10/06/talespinning-by-david-j-howe/

'The two excerpts from David’s novels were fantastically written, but frustrating to read because I wanted more! The excerpts conclude at a point where plot-threads naturally remain unresolved. The fact that these can stand alone should be considered as testament to the quality of David’s writing.'

'David J Howe's talespinning is a great collection of short stories, scripts, and excerpts, and will be particularly enjoyed by anyone interested in Dr. Who.'

And finally, an 8/10 piece from SciFiOnline at http://www.sci-fi-online.com/00_revs/r2011/book/11-09-30_talespinning.html

'The pieces which I thought worked the best was Moonlighting and Blackfriars, both of which are deliciously macabre.'

'As a collection of shorter fiction this collection is eminently readable with a nice range of stories in differing forms.'

Needless to say I'm pretty delighted with the initial reaction, and Sam is now nagging me to finish the novels ...

Stake Land

2011-10-13T15:26:00.001+01:00

We found ourselves without new films to watch last night, and so one quick trip to Blockbusters later, and we were furnished with a new vampire film which I'd not heard of.

Stake Land seems to build on the premise of the adorable Zombieland - one of my favourite films of recent years - except that instead of zombies having taken over the world, it's vampires. I always smile at the taglines they put on these films: 'Forget what you know about horror, this one's a game changer' said something/someone called The Skinny; and 'See this film at any cost' urges Gorepress ... hmmm ...

It's not a bad film at all. The production values seem very high, and while it's obviously low budget, they do a good job of not making that element show. Thus the vampires have fairly decent make-up and there's a whole heap of corpses which get strewn about in every location the heroes end up in. It's a sort of road movie of sorts, but one where the lead characters don't really show any development. It's also very bleak.

The world has gone to pot since the vampires came to town, and everywhere is destroyed. Small pockets of humanity exist: from the nice and friendly, 'come to our town and we'll give you all you need' to the distinctly unfriendly: 'vampires have been sent by God to serve us ... so we'll feed you to them ...'

Our heroes are Mister - a sort of loner vampire killer - and a boy called Martin, and along the way they travel with a pregnant girl (Belle), a Nun (Sister) and another man (Willie), coming up against the loopy Jebedia who runs a vampire-worshipping group. The problem with the film is that it just drifts from one location to another, the characters come and go, and as I say, there doesn't seem to be any development. The most random thing in the film is when unknown people in helecopters drop live vampires onto a town which is holding a party celebration ... no explanation, but the party ends thereafter.

The film also doesn't really end. Mister heads off into the proverbial sunset, leaving Martin and new girl Peggy to continue to drive to Canada where, supposedly, safety from the vampire hoard awaits them. The film ends as they reach the Canadian border.

It was an enjoyable watch, but it lacks the humour and self-awareness of Zombieland. Everything is bleak and uncompromising, and at times it's quite challenging as babies get killed, and the vampires destroy everything in sight. The vamps though are far more like zombies than vampires - they don't seem to think and just attack and eat ... and this also generates a credibility problem for the final battle with Jebedia.

Better than some lower budget offerings I've seen, I'd maybe give Stake Land a 6/10.

Lost Girl vs Terra-Nova

2011-10-11T13:31:00.001+01:00

I like to dip into and try episodes of any new FSFH shows which come along on telly. Recent misses for me have been Tru Blood - saw a couple of episodes, had no idea whatsoever what was going on and so passed on it; Warehouse 13 - which I actually enjoyed, but have managed not to see very much of as it didn't grip me; Doctor Who - which Facebook Friends will know I've not thought much of this year (for the first time in 48 years!); and the new Torchwood: Miracle Day - which was about 6 or 7 episodes too long, and ultimately seemed to be about nothing whatsoever.

There's a couple of new shows started recently. First is Lost Girl. We missed the first episode, but came in on part 2, and this had me hooked immediately. The premise of the show is that there's Fey creatures all around. As in Angel they have their own bar, and everyone tries to get along with everyone else. Lead protagonist is Bo, who is a succubus - if she doesn't get a regular dose of love-energy then she will die. Problem is that taking the energy kills a human. So she is hooked up with a werewolf chap called Dyson who doesn't die when she feeds. She has a human sidekick in the intensely quirky and likable Kenzie, and there's a sort of backstory where she's trying to find out who her parents were ...

So we have tales of leprechauns, human corpse-eating creatures, sirens and just about every other sort of fantastical creature you can imagine. But it all works. Anna Silk as Bo is very good in the lead, and Ksenia Solo as Kenzie is simply brilliant - I'm not sure if it's the actress or the scripting, but whatever it is, it really works.

We have Lost Girl on Sky Repeat Record now so as not to miss an episode ...

I wish we could say the same for the new Spielberg TV series Terra-Nova ... We caught the first episode and thought, hmmm ... we've seen all this before. A family in a dystopian future takes some sort of government initiative to travel to a new world where they can establish humanity all over again (or something). But the new world is 50 million something years in the past, and there are dinosaurs there, and a compound like out of Jurrassic Park, and it's just so so slow and boring.
We watched the second episode to see if it improved, but no. All about the kids getting caught outside the compound and trapped by raptor-like dinosaurs while some breakaway group of dissidents called 'Six' are sparring with the leaders of the compound group.

It's like every sort of after-the-disaster film and TV series ever made ... human factions warring between themselves, some Primeval-like dinosaurs thrown in to provide a backdrop, and just angst and angst and angst from all the characters all the time. Tedius.

So that has now been deleted from the Sky box ... we won't be watching any more.

Vindicated

2011-10-09T19:07:00.001+01:00

http://www.britishfantasysociety.co.uk/news/official-bfs-statement-concerning-awards/

Time To Reflect

2011-09-24T20:40:00.005+01:00

Today we had a lovely day out in Warrington, at the Waterstones there where Sam and I were signing copies of our new books.

One of the customers, a lovely lady called Emma, was in a bind as she needed a two-hander script for her College work, and had no idea how to source it. So I offered to write her something.

Here's what I put together ... presented here for your enjoyment. I hope it helps her out :)

TIME TO REFLECT
(c) 2011 David J Howe

KATIE is in her room, reading a book, when there is a knock at the door. KATIE puts her book down and gets up to answer the door. She moves with a depressed gait. Life is pressing down on her.

She returns to the room with SUSAN, who is talking really fast.

SUSAN
… sorry to burst in like that, it’s something of a new thing for me and I’ve not had the time to …

KATIE
Woah. Slow down will you, what are you on about.

SUSAN
Sorry. Yes. Well. You see. It was …

KATIE
Slow. Down.

SUSAN relaxes a little and KATIE gestures to the sofa/chair to sit down. SUSAN smiles and sits. SUSAN gives a couple of deep breaths and then does a long exhale as her hands, outstretched and palms down move towards the floor as she breathes out.

SUSAN
Thanks. That’s better.

KATIE
Yes it is. Now. First things first.

KATIE fixes SUSAN with her eyes.

KATIE (cont)
Who are you?

SUSAN
Oh! Of course. Yes. You’ve not met me yet. That’s funny.

KATIE
What’s funny?

SUSAN
That you’ve not met me yet.

KATIE (giving a withering look)
Well of course I’ve not met you. I have no idea who you are!

SUSAN (giggling)
Oh, you will …

KATIE (Shaking head)
What?

SUSAN
Nothing. Nothing. Sorry. Who am I? Yes. I’m Susan. And you’re Katie.

KATIE
How do you know who I am, I’ve never met you before.

SUSAN
Oh you have, but you don’t know about it yet.

KATIE (confused)
I have … but I don’t know … look … what are you talking about?

SUSAN
I’m sorry.

KATIE
And stop apologising.

SUSAN
Sorry … (smiles) Sorry.

KATIE
So where do I know you from?

SUSAN
Oh, you know me very well indeed.

KATIE (looks at SUSAN critically)
Do I?

SUSAN
Oh, yes.

KATIE (studies SUSAN)
So … from Uni … no. I don’t remember anyone like you from there. Maybe … maybe from the Bar? Are you one of the girls from the bar?

SUSAN shakes her head.

KATIE (thoughtful)
Not the bar then … hmmm … are you … are you a friend of … of Peter’s? Yes! You’re a friend of Peter’s.

SUSAN
Peter! PETER! That loser. Do me a favour.

KATIE
Not Peter then … now you’re just trying to confuse me.

KATIE stands and starts pacing while SUSAN watches her, an amused expression on her face.

KATIE
So not Uni, not the bar, not Peter …

KATIE stops and point at SUSAN in triumph.

KATIE
Got it! You’re someone from the town … one of those girls I met the other month while working at Boots.

SUSAN
I wish it was that simple …

KATIE
OK.

KATIE slumps back in the chair.

KATIE (cont)
I give up. How do you know me?

SUSAN
Well …

KATIE nods and looks attentive

SUSAN (Cont)
This isn’t going to be easy …

KATIE frowns.

SUSAN (cont)
You see. Katie

SUSAN swallows and there’s a long pause

SUSAN (cont)
I’m your mother.

There is silence.

KATIE silently mouths ‘You’re my mother’ and shakes her head.

SUSAN
I knew you wouldn’t believe me.

KATIE
But … but my Mother is dead … she died four years ago.

SUSAN nods

KATIE (cont)
And she was sixty five years old.

SUSAN smiles

KATIE
And you … you are what … the same age as me? Seventeen?

SUSAN
Eighteen.

KATIE
I don’t get this at all.

SUSAN
Nor do I to tell the truth.

KATIE
Why do you say you’re my mother then? Her name was … was …

Realisation dawns over KATIE’S face.

KATIE (cont)
Her name was Susan …

SUSAN
Indeed … and I am she. No. I mean, she is me.

KATIE rubs her hand over her face.

KATIE
But if you are her.

SUSAN
Yes.

KATIE
And you are here.

SUSAN
Yes.

KATIE
And you are eighteen.

SUSAN nods encouragingly.

KATIE
Then … then … HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU BE MY MOTHER?

SUSAN smiles

SUSAN
Oh, that’s easy.

KATIE
Is it?

SUSAN
Yup. I came back in time.

KATIE
… what?

SUSAN
Yes. Back. Or probably forward. Yes. Forward.

KATIE
Forward?

SUSAN
From the past. Yes.

KATIE
Erm …

SUSAN
Oh, I know what you’re thinking. The girl is nuts. She’s bonkers. Crazy in the coconuts … but every word is true.

KATIE moves away from Susan, looking at her warily.

SUSAN
Yes. I have come forward in time, from the past, with a very important message for you.

KATIE shakes her head as if to clear it.

KATIE
A message.

SUSAN
Yup. Not everyone can do the travelling thing.

KATIE
Well, to be honest I’m surprised anyone can …

SUSAN
Tell me about it.

KATIE (muttering)
I wish you would.

SUSAN
Well, it’s like, you know Doctor Who?

KATIE
Erm … Doctor Who? What like off telly?

SUSAN
That’s the one.

KATIE
Yeah … I’ve seen a few episodes. The one with some statues that came alive, and something else with that bloke off Gavin and Stacey …

SUSAN (overjoyed)
You got it! Yes!

KATIE frowns again and looks at SUSAN quizzically

KATIE
You’re … telling me you came here in a police box?

SUSAN (laughs)
Oh no, don’t be daft. That would be stupid.

KATIE
Stupid. Right.

SUSAN
No, I meant it’s like that timey wimey stuff they go on about there … sometimes you find yourself moving about in time … just kinda happens yeah?

KATIE
No. Not really. I can’t say I’ve ever found that myself.

SUSAN
No? Ah, well, maybe that comes later. Anyway … the important thing I need to tell you is …

KATIE
Go on … am I going to be kidnapped by Daleks or something?

SUSAN (amazed)
How did you guess!

KATIE
What?

SUSAN (grins)
Kidding.

KATIE
Yeah, thanks for that. Look. What do you want?

SUSAN
Lottery.

KATIE
What?

SUSAN
Lottery? I wondered if you did the lottery?

KATIE
No. Not at all.

SUSAN
Good. No point. You’d never win.

KATIE
Oh, thanks for that. So you came all the way from the past to tell me not to do the lottery? Brilliant.

SUSAN
Sorry. Got distracted there.

SUSAN checks her watch.

SUSAN (cont)
Whoops. Nearly out of time. Look. Katie.

KATIE
You are a very strange person.

SUSAN
I know. But listen. I came from the past to tell you … tell you …

KATIE
Yes?

SUSAN
Well … I love you.

KATIE
What?

SUSAN
That’s all. I love you. And I’ve always been proud of you.

KATIE looks at SUSAN and starts to sniffle.

SUSAN
I’m sorry, dear. What with everything going on, I never actually got to tell you. And now … well … now I can see how that has held you back. Stopped you trying because you thought there was no point. Well there is a point, and you have to keep trying.

KATIE
What?

SUSAN keeps an eye on her watch.

SUSAN
Sorry … I only have so long, and only one chance. So use it Katie. Get out there and kick ass like there is no tomorrow.

KATIE nods.

SUSAN
Atta girl.

KATIE
But … if you’re my mum, then …

SUSAN
Sorry. No more time … just know that I love you and I’m proud of you … so get on with your life …

KATIE nods tearfully.

SUSAN
Right … that timey wimey stuff is happening again … got to get back to the point of collection …

SUSAN jumps up and hugs KATIE tight.

SUSAN
Be happy love.

Then SUSAN rushes for the door and off set.

KATIE is left standing there with one hand over her mouth, wondering what just happened.

KATIE shakes her head and frowns a little.

Then the frown turns into a smile.

KATIE
She did love me. And I never realised.

KATIE looks up into the air.

KATIE
Thanks mum.

KATIE moves off stage with a spring in her step which was not there before.

ENDS

Busy Bee

2011-09-01T11:16:00.005+01:00

Time has a habit of slipping away from you ... and in the worlds of publishing even moreso. Since the last time I penned words for this blog a lot has happened. My IT Job has reached another breakpoint and I left my contract at the end of July, so after a quick holiday in the sun, for the moment I'm catching up on all sorts of other things. The new series of Doctor Who has started up again, and I'm very aware that I just couldn't make the time to talk about all the episodes in the first half of the season ... and so far I've not had time to comment on the one just past - the one about killing Hitler, though in fact it was about nothing of the sort. However we have plans for a new edition of The Television Companion for the 50th anniversary in 2013, and so I suspect that my comments on the Matt Smith episodes will find their way into that book ... But enough of what has not been happening ... time for some news of what has! Taking advantage in the break in IT work, and I am absolutely delighted that Telos has picked up a collection of my horror fiction. Called talespinning, the book should be published very soon now, and pre-ordering is available on the Telos site. The cover is by the amazing Bryan Talbot, and the book contains all my horror fiction, completed over the last thirty years or so, plus the scripts for the film Daemos Rising and an unfilmed sequel called Face of the Fendahl, extracts from two incomplete longer works ... it's a great selection of the macabre and the humourous and I hope people will enjoy it! Copies can be ordered direct from Telos: http://www.telos.me.uk/category.php?id=3#120; and every copy pre-ordered will be dedicated and signed by myself. Another book out at the end of September of which I am very proud is a fantasy/horror anthology called Full Fathom Forty. This is being published by the British Fantasy Society, and is a stonking 500 page tome of 40 of the very best stories by members and friends of the BFS. I have edited it for the BFS' own fortieth anniversary this year, and it's one of the strongest anthologies of fantastic fiction I have ever been pleased to read.

For forty years the British Fantasy Society has been promoting and appreciating fantastic fiction in all its guises. Now, to celebrate the many worlds of wonder and terror, the BFS presents an anthology of works by members and friends of the Society past and present. Here you will find angels and vampires, werewolves and killers, magicians and gentlemen, alien worlds and urban nightmares. Let the British Fantasy Society be your guide through a selection of the best fiction to be found on this world ... or beyond! Featuring the fantastic fiction and poetry of: Nina Allan, Suzanne Barbieri, Carl Barker, Mike Barrett, Ramsey Campbell, Jonathan Carroll, Adrian Chamberlin, Simon Clark, Raven Dane, Jan Edwards, Murray Ewing, Paul Finch, Christopher Fowler, Matthew Fryer, Stephen Gallagher, Cate Gardner, R B Harkess, Ian Hunter, Wilf Kelleher Jones, Jasper Kent, Joel Lane, Stephen Laws, Mark Lewis, Alison J Littlewood, Steve Lockley, Graham Masterton, Peter Mark May, Geoff Nelder, Kim Newman, Stan Nicholls, Martin Owton, Cas Peace, John Llewellyn Probert, Tina Rath, Steven Savile, Robert Shearman, Jim Steel, Sam Stone, Deborah Walker and Conrad Williams.

If you are not a member of the BFS, then copies are available for sale. Unfortunately the BFS Website is unavailable at the moment which makes providing a link there somewhat challenging, but copies can be ordered using this PayPal link: I'm also out and about quite a bit coming up. Here's a list of the events which I am appearing and guesting at. Hopefully some of you might be able to pop along and say hello!

THE ASYLUM, Lincoln, 9th-11th September 2011 The Asylum Steampunk weekend is an opportunity to do all things Steampunk. Sam Stone, David J Howe, Frazer Hines, Raven Dane, Robert Rankin and Toby Frost are among the guests for this fun weekend event. I will be taking part in panels, signings and readings. Date: 9th-11th Sept Address: Lincoln Castle, The Lawns, The Victoria, Lincoln. For more information visit: http://steampunk.synthasite.com WATERSTONES, Llandudno 17th September 2011 I will be launching talespinning, at this very popular North Wales Store. Time: 12pm-4pm Address: 37 Victoria Centre, Mostyn Centre, Llandudno, Conwy, LL30 2NG WATERSTONES, Warrington, 24th September 2011 Science Fiction and Fantasy Day. Join Sam Stone, David J Howe and Frazer Hines (and many more) for readings, discussions and talks based around Sci-Fi/Fantasy in the Media and in print. More info on this later. I'll also have copies of talespinning for sale. Time: 12-4pm Address: Waterstone's Warrington, 22 The Mall, Golden Square Shopping Centre, Warrington, WA1 1QP. THE CRYPT, Manchester Vampire Society Meet, Manchester, 25th September 2011 Sam Stone and David J Howe will be reading from their latest works. With Q & A session. Books will be on sale. Address: The Seven Oaks, 5 Nicholas Street, Manchester, M1 4HL Time: 4-8pm FANTASYCON, Brighton, 30th Sept - 2nd Oct 2011 I'll be launching talespinning on Saturday 31st September at FantasyCon in Brighton. Telos also has a strong showing in the British Fantasy Awards which are to be announced at the convention on the Sunday. Address: The Royal Albion Hotel, 35 Old Steine, Brighton, BN1 1NT. Further Information: http://www.fantasycon2011.org/hotel.htm WATERSTONES, Trafford Centre, 8th October 2011 I'll be signing copies of talespinning at this popular Manchester store. Time: 12-4pm Address: Waterstones Trafford Centre, 42 Regent Crescent, Barton Dock Road, Manchester, M17 8AP WATERSTONES, Preston, 15 October 2011 I'll be signing copies of talespinning. Time: 12-4pm Address: Waterstone's Preston, 3-5 Fishergate Preston PR1 3LJ WATERSTONES, Bolton, Lancashire, 29th Oct 2011 I'll be signing copies of talespinning. Time: 12-4pm Address:Waterstones, 32-36 Deansgate, Bolton, BL1 1BL WATERSTONES, Wrexham, 30th Oct 2011 I'll be signing copies of talespinning. Time: 12-4pm Address: Waterstones, 9/11 Regent Street, Wrexham, LL11 1SG. WATERSTONES, Liverpool One, Liverpool, 26th Nov 2011 I'll be signing copies of talespinning. Time: 12-4pm Address:Waterstones, 12 College Lane, Liverpool, L1 3DL. GALLIFREY 2012, LAX Marriott, Los Angeles, USA, 17th-19th Feb 2012 Sam Stone, David J Howe and Frazer Hines will be appearing as guests at Gallifrey. Time: ALL Weekend. Panels, Interviews, Creative Writing Workshop. Address: LAX MARRIOT. Los Angeles, California. GALAXYFEST 2012, Colorado Springs, USA, 24th-26th Feb 2012 I'm overjoyed to be International Writing Guest of Honour at this convention. Other guests are Sam Stone and Kevin J Anderson, with Robert Picardo, Angus Oblong, Christie Golden, Frazer Hines, Robert Elrod, Clare Cramer, Claudia Christian, Dean Haglund, Denise Crosby and Tori Higginson. Time: ALL Weekend. Panels, Interviews, Creative Writing Workshop. Address: Antlers Hilton, 4 South Cascade, Colorado Springs, CO 80903-1695, USA.

That's all for the moment. Hopefully it won't be too long before I can share some more news and views with you all.

Oi Spaceman!

2011-04-24T11:01:00.005+01:00

Whenever I come to write my thoughts on Nu Who, I'm always aware that I might be in the minority. Brief statii posted on Facebook bring a cavalcade of comments as to how I am wrong, how I didn't 'get' it and so on, but generally when I post my thoughts here, I get nice comments and people saying that they're glad I said what I did as they thought the same and felt somewhat bludgeoned by the rest of fandom for not thinking as per the collective ... So I'll do as usual here, and pass on my thoughts and feelings about the opener for Season 6 (or Season 32, or Season 11.2 depending on how you're counting). This year I managed to stay pretty much completely spoiler free - so I had (and have) little clue as to what to expect. So 'The Impossible Astronaut' kicked off with no expectations at all. First of all, the title. It's rubbish. From what we saw, 'Silence Falls' would have been better, or maybe 'Space 1969' ... 'The Impossible Astronaut' sounds more like a novel or comic story ... but then that's what we were presented with, a story which seemed to be more at home in any media other than television. We kick off with the Doctor at various points in the past: being painted naked; in some wartime tunnels; and dancing on film with Laurel and Hardy. All very nice, but what was the point? To attract Amy and Rory's attention? Why not just call on them ... it's not very Doctory. And another thing, for all this episode's bleating on about not being able to change the past, that's all the Doctor seems to do - inserting himself in people's past and changing how the future will pan out. Anyway, he sends Amy and Rory and River Song (who seems to be in a jail or something but is allowed to leave by her captors?) invitations to America to meet with him by a lake ... and the first clue is that he says he is 1103 years old, but last time Amy saw him he was 908 ... so some 200 years have passed for the Doctor. But then a car arrives bringing an old man bearing a can of petrol .. and the Doctor talks with an Apollo astronaut down by the lake who then seems to kill him ... and then while he is regenerating kills him completely. But we're used to all this by now ... regenerations that are not, events which are not what they seem ... even in the Pandorica episode the Doctor was apparently killed ... but wasn't. I wonder if the production team know the story of the Boy who Cried Wolf (or should that be Bad Wolf?). So all this outpouring of emotion from Amy left me cold ... seen this before. Got the t-shirt. And as usual the music was awful. Murray Gold seems to have a sledgehammer approach at times, and the choral stuff here really annoyed me. And the plot now starts to twist and turn. The Doctor's body is burned (so he does seem to be really really dead), and the old man - Canton Everett Delaware III - has another of the invitations, numbered 1 to 4 ... so who had number 1? Surprise! It is the Doctor ... this time aged 909 - so just a year after last meeting Amy and Rory ... but he doesn't seem to know who River Song is yet ... Spoilers! So they head to 1969 to where the TARDIS seems to want to go - to the 8th April to be precise, and the Oval Office, where President Nixon is troubled by a strange child who keeps phoning him for help. He has called in ex-FBI man Canton Delaware (which number we're not sure of) to assist him and before long the Doctor, Amy, Rory and River are all embroiled in the mystery. Amy meanwhile is seeing alien creatures which she then forgets about, and, feeling sick, heads for the toilets where she encounters it again. She works out that once you can't see it any more you forget about it and so takes a photo on her phone. The creature tells her that she must tell the Doctor what he must know ... but what that is, is somewhat obtuse ... that he died? The creature is quite spooky but is overused - scary is half seen in the shadows and background, not in plain view in a toilet. And is it only me who thinks it looks a bit like the Headmaster from the Pink Floyd video for 'Another Brick in the Wall'? It kills a woman in the toilet for no apparent reason other than to establish that it is a threat, and then Amy rushes out - immediately forgetting it. So how did the creature expect her to tell the Doctor anything? Come to that, why doesn't it tell him itself? All this creeping around ... what's the point? No-one could ever reveal its presence as everyone forgets it the moment they can't see it ... The Doctor figures out that the calls from the child are coming from a warehouse about 5 miles from Cape Kennedy ... because the kid mentioned three names when asked where they were and who they were ... this borders on the mcguffin for me. A convenient hook to bring the Doctor to a place where there are all manner of alien gadgets and tech just lying around. River investigates some underground tunnels, and, apart from lots of the forgettable monsters, she finds a locked room with some sort of control console in it. This looked to me like the alien craft from last year's 'The Lodger' to me, but it's function is unknown as the alien creatures move in on Rory and River. Meanwhile upstairs, Amy admits to the Doctor that she is pregnant. What a time to pick ... and immediately one is asking, so is the Astronaut her child? Is River Song her child? Is the Doctor her child? But then River is complaining of feeling sick as well, so is she pregnant too? Is her child the Doctor? Or even Amy? It's all timey wimey wibbly wobbly stuff. So the Astronaut appears again and the suit is revealed to have a child in it (and it would be impossible for a kid to fill and operate such a suit, but never mind) and Amy shoots it with Canton's gun ... And we crash into the closing credits. There's some lovely dialogue in the episode. I liked all of River Song's musings on her life with the Doctor, running in different directions (in case you had forgotten this) but it just served to confuse things more really. You have to keep remembering that River cannot remember any of her past (as far as we are concerned) adventures, and the things she goes on about haven't happened yet as far as we are concerned. It's all a little cerebral for a kid's teatime show really. And that's another of the problems I have. Personally I *like* Doctor Who to be thought provoking and exciting and horrifying. 'The children's own show which adults adore'. And yet ... and yet we have a magazine aimed at 5 year olds (Doctor Who Adventures), lego sets, activity books and novels aimed at the 8-10 age group (or younger) ... there's no merchandise except perhaps Doctor Who Magazine which is aimed at the older age group. So the show is actively courting and cultivating fans who are young kids, and then presenting material on the show itself which they could never follow or understand! Heck the merchandise is aimed at people who were not even born when Christopher Eccleston saved Rose from the Autons! It's food for thought. And so while I'm looking forward to see how this story pans out - and kudos to Steven Moffat, I have no idea at all what might be going on - I am strangely ambivalent about it all. I like my Doctor Who to have a plot, to excite and engage on a level more than just wondering how the characters would react and so on. There are too many shows out there which are unwatchable for a single episode because they are all about the backstory and not about the viewers and presenting an entertaining hour of plot and excitement. Many shows start life as a series of great stand alone stories but then, as they beome popular, alienate all but those who have watched every episode, by making the mistake of thinking that the characters and backstory is more interesting than the plots - The X-Files, Buffy, Supernatural all made this mistake, and recently I've tried to watch episodes of Warehouse 13 and Witchblade and come out the other end having no idea whatsoever about what the show was about - it was all about backstory I didn't know and characters I didn't care about. I really, really don't want Doctor Who to go down that route.

Goodbye Sarah Jane

2011-04-20T08:20:00.007+01:00

I can't remember the first time I met Elisabeth Sladen. I mean, over the years I've met many, many people from the worlds of Doctor Who, both the actors and behind the scenes technicians, and it's hard to pin down when you first meet someone. The first Doctor Who convention was in 1977, and at that time the companion was the lovely Louise Jameson, and she and Tom Baker came to that inaugural gathering in a Battersea church hall and enthralled those who were there. But Lis ... I'm wracking my brain but I can't remember her attending a UK con at all in the seventies or eighties - at least I have no photographs of her attending any of them. So I couldn't have met her then. When Keith Barnfather and Reeltime Pictures made the independent drama Downtime, although I was involved (I played one of the Yeti!) the days I was on set were not the ones that Lis was on set so I didn't meet her then ... The reason that this is so puzzling to me is that despite the fact I can't remember when I met her, she knew who I was. I know we met at one of the Gallifrey conventions in LA a few years back, when it was at Van Nuys and rained all the time. She was lovely and charming, perhaps a little put out by all the people there, and the rain ... always the rain ... but surely that can't have been the first time I met her? I know she was gracious enough to speak to me for the book I wrote for Virgin on the Companions - I probably still have the tape of that somewhere in a cupboard - but that was a phone interview as I recall ... And yet ... I was at one of those Memorabilia fairs in Birmingham a few years ago. A friend wanted to get some signatures and so we decided to drive up there and see what it was all about. It was packed and busy with people and costumes ... mental. While wandering around I saw that Lis was signing in one of the booths - I think she was being sponsored to be there by a retailer - and in one lull in her never-ending queue, I approached and said Hi. She looked up at me and the most beautiful smile cracked her face. 'David!' she said. 'How lovely to see you again!' and we chatted about how she was doing and so on for a minute or two before the people behind me started to mutter. So I bade my farewells and wandered away. I think my memory must be breaking away like icebergs these days. Great chunks of my life drifting away ... I must have met her before ... But then I think Elisabeth Sladen was one of those rare people ... someone who makes you *feel* that you know her through her warmth and friendliness. She obviously knew me and remembered me from whatever passing nod we had enjoyed in the past, and yet she greeted me as an old friend, a familiar face. And that meant so much! As I mentioned, I've met so many people. Some have become close friends, some I know well enough to call up and chat, some I see at the occasional convention and we have a nice natter about stuff, catching up. But many have met so many people over the years, and it all starts to blur. When I was a kid, growing up with Doctor Who, my main eras were the Troughton and Pertwee years. I still love Troughton's era with a passion and have listened to the soundtracks and watched the videos so often ... but then, with 1971 I turned 10, and it was the Pertwee era that I remember watching. I remember missing episodes too due to holidays. This was when I started to collect the books ... the magazines ... the ephemera ... this was my formation as a fan and collector. I recall getting the Radio Times 10th Anniversary Special and seeing for the first time, the preview of the next season - the show's 11th. With a new companion who looked modern and funky. New monsters - a spacesuited Sontaran (whatever that was), dinosaurs and spiders (I hate spiders and so this show held a special fascination for me). Within moments of appearing on screen Lis made the part of Sarah Jane Smith her own. She was real and natural, a proper woman - not all girly like Jo could be - but someone capable who could manage quite fine on her own thank you very much. She was great! The greatness continued into Tom Baker's era, with shows like 'The Ark in Space', 'The Sontaran Experiment' and 'Pyramids of Mars' cementing her brilliance in my mind. I never fancied her ... I think I was a little too young ... but she was like an older sister, someone you could depend on, and she loved the Doctor with a passion that was plain to see. When she left at the end of 'The Hand of Fear' it was a sad time ... the Doctor called to Gallifrey and he couldn't/wouldn't take her with him - how times have changed - and so Sarah was consigned to a roadway anywhere but where she should have been ... And an era passed. Then, thanks to the tenacity of Russell T Davies, she was back ... an episode with David Tennant and it was as though she had never been away ... and then her own series, The Sarah Jane Adventures, with more monsters to fight and wrongs to right. Here she had her own companions, a likable bunch of kids who looked up to her in the same way as I had looked up to Sarah when she was kicking the ass of anti-matter monsters and Kraals. But the great wheel turns, and times change. The past we love stays as a memory, and the people we know and love, whether we have met them in person or not, move on and up and away. I was privileged to have met Lis. She was happy and friendly and had time for everyone, and she remembered my name. You can't ask more from your childhood heroes.

The Shark Whisperer

2011-04-12T17:28:00.008+01:00

Christmas day is never the best time to enjoy a Doctor Who story. You're full of turkey and trimmings, replete with wine and port. Concentrating on some timey-wimey action is out of the question really, and in previous years, the Doctor Who story presented on Christmas Day has tended to be packed with action and adventure and never-mind-the-logic to keep the kids happy and looking forward to when they might be able to buy some toys related to what they have just seen (usually months and months later when they have forgotten all about what was on anyway, having been distracted by more presents from the late-arriving Aunt Ada or something). Anyway ... in the lead up to more 11th Doctor adventures, I realised it was high time I cracked open the Sky Planner and re-watched the Christmas Day adventure from just 4 months ago - but it seems like forever! So I settled down with a glass of wine in one hand and a notepad in the other ... as 'A Christmas Carol' unfolded before me again. The first thing to say about Nu Who is that textually and narratively it's very rich. When I was making notes on a Russell T Davies story, I might fill 3 or 4 pages of my notepad. For 'A Christmas Carol' I filled 8 pages. Every line brings some new information, something to be noted, cross referenced, stamped and filed. Steven Moffat loves to fill his scripts with character and interest and this offering did not disappoint on that level at all. From the outset we're plunged into danger as a very Star Trek spacecraft is plunging to its doom on an unknown planet. There is the squeaky voiced captain from Voyager there, complete with tight fitting white uniform; the multi-racial crew to appease the PC brigade; the navigator who seems to be blind ... all the stereotypes are here. But then there's Amy dressed as a policewoman and Rory dressed as a Roman Soldier fresh from the honeymoon suite ... hmmm ... something for the dads to ponder on I suspect, while the kids realise that more action figures are on the horizon. The spaceship us crashing because there's a machine on the planet which is affecting the sky ... and the Doctor needs to turn it off, but he can't because the controls are isomorphic (cue a nice little bit of tete a tete referencing 'Pyramids of Mars' and the whole Doctor Who isomorphic thing), so instead he needs to change the mind of the grumpy curmudgeon who seems to run the planet Kazran Sardick, who sounds like his name is spelt backwards. For some reason Kazran has people kept on ice in his basement while he lends people money. How he sees any return on this is unknown as he never appears to get repaid ... but a family member is kept as security for the loan. A very strange arrangement. The Doctor arrives down the chimney for no good reason other than it looks cool, and talks everyone to death for a couple of minutes before the family trying to get to see their family member is thrown out. The Doctor realises that Kazran cannot hit the child, and this shows him that Kazran is not beyond redemption. There's a nice verbal reference to 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer' here with Kazran's 'Bored now!' utterance, before the Doctor leaves to try and figure out why there are fish flying in the fog. This is a lovely touch, and is quite magical - you really can accept that the little fish fly around in the fog, suspended on the ice particles therein. Beautiful idea and very well realised. But Amy and Rory and their crashing Star Trek ship have less than an hour! Good job the Doctor can travel in time then ... failing to convince Kazran by any normal means, the Doctor leaves the old man watching a video projection of his younger self, and the Doctor arrives in the video to meet the boy Kazran. This is a very well thought through conceit, that Kazran Sr can watch Kazran Jr meet the Doctor and feel his memories changing as the Doctor changes the course of his life for good. So the Doctor charms Kazran Jr and agrees to attract a fish to his bedroom using the Sonic Screwdriver ... except that it's a massive shark which comes hunting and ends up with half the screwdriver in its belly. There's lots to enjoy here as the Doctor plays leapfrog with time, allowing houseworkers to win non-existent lotteries and popping back to see Kazran Sr to get the code number for the ice vault in the basement (it's 7258 if you ever need it). The shark is dying and the Doctor intends to take it back into the sky but needs an icebox, so they choose the one which was seen at the beginning of the show, occupied by a beautiful young woman called Abigail Pettigrew. Luckily Abigail can sing beautifully and sings to the shark to calm it down. This is now starting to get a little daft and convenient. Plot going out the window as opportunity comes in its place. Why is this woman of all those in the vault the one they choose? Why is she the only one who can sing to calm the shark? And why does her casket have 000 008 on the front counter? Somehow Kazran Sr is still watching all this, but there's no evidence of the Doctor using a camera or anything, so it's all a little strange. Then, for no apparent reason (though I suspect it's to try and make Kazran Sr a nicer man) the Doctor and Kazran Jr spend the next 7 Christmas Eves waking Abigail up and heading off on many adventures together. Kazran Sr has many many photographs of everywhere they went (and it seems to be more than just 7 days). But Kazran Jr slowly grows up ... and he falls in love with Abigail. He also seems a lot older than the 18 or 20 he must be by the end (assuming he's 10 or 12 years old at the start). Kazran is told a secret by Abigail and he puts her back in the box for the last time (the number on the front is 000 001) and tells the Doctor he doesn't want to see him for any more Christmas Eves. Meanwhile (remember the Plot) Kazran's father completes his machine to control the fish (I'm not sure why he wanted to, something to do with people paying to see them, so maybe he was paid to bring sharks and the like down onto the planet for some reason ... all a little vague) but Kazran Sr still won't help the Doctor to save the crashing spaceship (and given that they had an hour to go, it feels like days have passed ... but never mind!). The Doctor tries showing him holograms of the passengers of the ship singing (no idea how he did this) and then somehow transports a hologram of Kazran to the ship so he can see it (again, no clue how this worked). It transpires that Abigail was ill when she was frozen and only had 8 days to live ... which is why the counter was counting down. But how did Kazran know that when he froze her in the first place? Why take as security for a loan someone who's going to die anyway ... he was such a hard-nosed character, that doesn't make sense at all! He would require someone that the family would want back, not someone who was about to die. And what number did all the other caskets have on them? And why a count down? If the idea was that Kazran maybe charged interest on the number of times the families had their loved ones back, then it would count up surely, so at the final reckoning, Kazran could see how much they had to repay him? As I say, this aspect really makes no sense at all. The final straw is when the Doctor allows Kazran Jr to see what he becomes, and Kazran Sr goes to hit his younger self but cannot. I wondered here what happened to that good old Doctor Who trope the Blinivitch Limitation Effect, as admirably demonstrated in that paragon of Doctor Who continuity 'Mawdryn Undead'. If the same person from two different points in their timeline meet and touch, then there is a massive explosion of energy. Except that here there isn't, and Kazran can hug his younger self with no problem whatsoever. The ship is still crashing ... remember the ship? ... but the Doctor discovers that Kazran's machine now won't respond to Kazran either as the Doctor has changed him too much! So the Doctor decides to use his broken Sonic Screwdriver to set up a resonance with the part still in the shark (which apparently has lived all this time - maybe 60 years? According to Google this might be possible though) but they need to transmit something that they know will work - Abigail's singing. So they have to break her out of cold storage again - and thus make her live her last day - singing to save the spaceship. Now the practical side of me says that the Doctor actually had a recording of Abigail singing - Kazran was watching it - so why couldn't they have played that on a loop through the Sonic to sort it all out? The Doctor didn't seem to think very laterally here, and just morosely accepted that Abigail would have to die to save everyone on the ship ... would he have done that if Amy and Rory had not been on it I wonder? So the Doctor returns Kazran Jr to his timestream, and then leaves with a rescued Amy and Rory, and Kazran Sr spends his last day with Abigail flying around in a carriage being pulled by the shark. The End. Whoah! What happened there? Why didn't the Doctor at least try and save Abigail? That's not very Doctory ... He doesn't leave people to die and not even try? We don't even know what was wrong with her, or why they knew it was exactly 8 days she had to live ... she certainly didn't seem very ill or sick in any way. I didn't like this aspect of it as it cast the Doctor in a very poor light. Rather than battling valiantly to save her, and perhaps failing, he was never seen to even try. Even Amy and Rory seemed pretty unconcerned by it all ... such a difference from 'The Fires of Pompeii' where the Doctor is forced by Donna to save just one family from the devastation ... you'd have think he'd learned something. So overall it was a rollicking ride, with some great imagery and surreal scenes of sharks and fish and crashing spacecraft. The performances were brilliant - Michael Gambon as Kazran was superb, being pig-headed and evil one moment and oozing with pathos the next; Katherine Jenkins was cast as Abigail because she can sing, and she was pretty good at all aspects of the role; Laurence Belcher was excellent as the young Kazran; and the award for the best ever actress name on television goes to Pooky Quesnel as the spaceship Captain. The regulars of Amy and Rory barely got a look in however, and one suspects that for the most part the actors were not available at the same time as the Doctor and others, necessitating a split in location which meant they never really met. 'A Christmas Carol' is perhaps the best of the Christmas Specials presented by the new series. A great piece of television, with only a few elements which fail to hold together in the cold light of Boxing Day morning. I can't wait for the next series!

My Garden

2011-03-04T17:44:00.002Z

Someone at the Gallifey Con (Hi Alan) recorded me reading my short horror story MY GARDEN ... and here it is ... enjoy: http://www.ilike.com/artist/David+J+Howe/track/My+Garden#ap

New Short Fiction

2011-02-03T12:50:00.001Z

Hi Folks I was absolutely over the moon the other day to learn that my short fiction piece SUSAN had been picked up by Dark Fiction Magazine for their new issue. It's online now at http://www.darkfictionmagazine.co.uk/episode-4/story-susan/ Please head over there and have a listen - it's an audio magazine and I originally wrote the piece to be read. Hope you enjoy it. David

I Bid You Welcome

2010-12-12T12:03:00.005Z

When out looking for Christmas presents recently I stumbled across a Dracula triple bill DVD in Asda of all places. This is one of the previously released Universal Collection, but here is was £5 ... so I snapped it up. The collection contains the original Universal Dracula with Bela Lugosi, the 1931 Spanish version of the same film, then two other films: Dracula's Daughter and House of Dracula. I'd not seen the latter three at all, and so we were set for a few evenings entertainment. In reverse order, House of Dracula is a curious beast. Not quite a horror film but also not quite a comedy - that would come later when Abbot and Costello got in on the scene. But the set-up is distinctly farcical. Count Dracula visits a Professor to try and find a 'cure' for his vampirism, and the Professor and his beautiful hunchbacked nurse set about helping him. Then Larry Talbot arrives seeking a cure for his lycanthropy, and, when it's not forthcoming, jumps off the cliff into the sea ... the Professor goes down the cliff and they find a cave wherein lies the Frankenstein monster ... as well as some sort of fungal spores which will cure Talbot. Dracula is however trying to trick the professor and passes some of his blood into the human, so the Professor turns, Jekyll and Hyde-like into a human/vampire hybrid ... Honestly if you submitted this as a plot for a film or book then you'd be laughed out of the office ... It's all very hokey, but all played straight, and this helps matters. The cast are all pretty good and make the most of the ludicruous script, and the whole thing is entertaining in its own way. Dracula's Daughter is pretty dire though. Lacking the real thing, the plot is about Dracula's daughter and her attempt to ressurect her father ... it's slow and tedious and has comic characters inserted for no good reason. Not the best thing I've ever seen by a long shot. Then we come to the two Draculas. I'd always been told that the Spanish version was superior to the American one, but I beg to differ. The Lugosi version is far far better, with more atmosphere and character. That Lugosi was very comfortable in the role of the count is obvious, and he takes it all very seriously, wheras in the Spanish version, Carlos Villarias is something of a ham, playing it much like generations would spoof the character later on - all expressions and raised cloak. It is interesting to compare the two versions though as they both used the same script and were filmed on the same sets - but with different actors and directors, the end results are quite different. I preferred Dracula's appearance from his coffin in the Spanish version - wreathed in smoke and mist, but the general settings are better in the American one. I think that perhaps the cinematography just has the edge in the Spanish, but Tod Browning is a better director with more interesting ideas as to how it should all come together ... it's a fascinating exercise and I'm aware of only one other film which has two versions, both from the same script - though in this case filmed on entirely different sets. This is Psycho, where the 1960 Hitchcock version is reportedly vastly superior to the colour 1998 Gus van Sant version.

Doctor Who Live!

2010-12-04T09:02:00.008Z

Interesting idea ... hire some stadium-sized venues and then put on a Doctor Who extravaganza with Monsters and everything ... Hmmm. When they announced Doctor Who Live, I, probably like everyone else, was quite excited. Sounded like fun and something different. I'd seen the play The Ultimate Adventure which was OK - a fun little diversion - but this promised to be bigger and better. So we got tickets to the Manchester News Arena, and the day arrived. When we got there, the place was packed with people all buying merchandise from the stalls around the outside corridor. It's always a little sad that these events seem to thrive more on how much money they can extract from your wallets than on word of mouth. So lots of stuff was being bought. Aside from the items produced specifically for the event (a glossy brochure, T Shirts, Mugs and the like) they were also hawking old Top Trumps card sets and other things which presumably had been sitting in boxes somewhere unsold and unloved. We had good seats - in Section C right down the front. So we settled down to see what might happen. The first slight surprise was that the place was not full. There were lots of empty seats around, but there was enough of a crowd for it to feel full of anticipation. There were lots of kids in Fezs and in David Tennant-like suits. I love seeing that :) When Doctor Who transcends fandom and everyone is dressing up. And so the show started. Live music from the band was excellent, and Nigel Planer comes on stage as Vorgenson, a showman who has a captured selection of monsters in his Mini-scope-like device. Yes, it's a riff on the old Pertwee story 'Carnival of Monsters'. Nice idea, but it got tired very quickly. Planer would talk a bit, then announce a monster, they appeared at the back of the auditorium and stomped around a bit, before going on stage and back into the machine. We saw some Silurians, Ood, Judoon, Scarecrows, Clockwork Robots, Vampire girls, Cybermen ... and all did pretty much the same thing. There was a faintly amusing bit of business where a stooge in the crowd is taking pictures and the Cybermen take him on stage and 'convert' him ... but anyone not in the immediate area would have had trouble seeing what was going on. All this monster stomping activity was interspersed with some clips from the show set to music ... hmmm ... if I'd wanted to watch some clips on video, then I could do that at home without spending £45 to sit in an Arena. The first half came to a close, and we stretched our legs and watched people buying ice creams for inflated prices. Then it was part two ... More of the same. A lengthy video thing about Amy Pond, the Doctor on a video screen ... I thought this was Doctor Who Live! But the Doctor wasn't there! What a disappointment. I held out hope to the end that Matt Smith might bound from the TARDIS in the flesh, but no. He remained a distant video image throughout. The only live aspect was the music, and the two actors who spoke - Nigel Planer and Nick Briggs as Churchill. Briggs was wonderful. A brilliant performance. He was obviously having a great time. But Planer seemed out of sorts - going through the motions. In the second half, some of the audience cottoned on that this should be a little like a Panto and so booed and hissed Planer when he appeared. But this was too little too late. The script was pretty dire, and where it should have been obvious that this was a Panto with audience participation required, the script did not allow for that interaction to happen. Even a somewhat forced element of the Doctor wanting the audience to shout something out when he called ... it was all practiced, but then never happened ... disappointing. There was a sequence with the Weeping Angels which was pretty neat - soldiers coming in from the back to investigate and then all being whisked away by the Angels. Nicely done on stage with lighting effects hiding the transformations and vanishings. The climax of course featured the Daleks - the large, chunky wheely-bin-like Tellytubby Daleks, and they looked pretty good on stage, trundling about barking orders. The Doctor saves the day from his video hideout, and a White Dalek floated around on a pretty well hidden crane arm. Then it was all over. Ultimately, Doctor Who Live did not live up to the hype. It had a basic script, pared down to the minimum to make it as cheap as possible to stage. Two speaking cast members, and a crew of maybe 8 or 10 others who played all the monsters. There was too much video footage and music - this was not billed as a Proms event, so why try and highlight that? - and not enough innovation and variance in the script in terms of how the Monsters were used. Nigel Planer seemed to walk through the whole thing and lacked any real conviction as a villain, and overall the fact that the Doctor was not live and in person at an event billed as 'Doctor Who Live' was really inexcusable. We enjoyed it, don't get me wrong, but at £45 a ticket, we expected perhaps a little more than just an extended, animated exhibition of monsters, accompanied by music and big-screen videos.

New Book on Digital

2010-11-21T16:46:00.003Z

Readers with a long memory may recall that in 1997 I did a book with BBC Books called A Book of Monsters ... a rather lavish illustrated tome all about the monsters in the Classic series of Doctor Who. Well, flash forward a few years, and I get a letter from BBC Books telling me that they'd like to reprint it. Fantastic news! But when I call them to discuss what they want to do, it seems that it's all a mistake. They don't want to reprint it at all ... in fact they don't want to do anything with it! So I arranged to reclaim my rights in the written material, and, having got that back, decided that rather than just have it sit on my hard drive, I might as well make it available for people to get hold of. So I have put it up on a variety of digital formats for anyone interested to buy. I've called it Doctor Who Monsters: A Bestiary 1963 - 1996 to try and make it obvious that it doesn't cover the new series at all. I was always very proud of the book, the text is a great look at how the monsters were conceived and developed, and contains interview quotes with just about everyone who played a part in the process, from the writers to the designers to the actors who played them. The digital edition is just the text from the previous book - there is no new content, and none of the illustrations - but I felt that there are probably a few new fans out there who might like to find out about how it was all done 'in the old days' :) Here's some links as to where to find the various editions. There are supposed to be basic PDF type ones as well, but they don't seem to have gone live yet. I'll add them in here when they do: Kindle USA - http://www.amazon.com/Doctor-Who-Monsters-Bestiary-ebook/dp/B004CLYOD2/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&m=A7B2F8DUJ88VZ&s=digital-text&qid=1290357389&sr=1-2 Kindle UK - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Monsters-Classic-Bestiary/dp/B004CLYOD2 iPhone App - http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/doctor-who-monsters/id403204578?mt=8 iPad App - http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/doctor-who-monsters-hd/id401640251?mt=8

30 Days and 13 Hours

2010-10-24T09:05:00.003+01:00

Watched a couple of new films of late, so some thoughts ... I really enjoyed the original 30 Days of Night film ... a great idea, simple, and yet effective. If you've not seen it, it's basically about a town in Alaska which, every year, experiences a month of night as the sun doesn't rise there. When this happens, the town effectively closes - everyone leaves or settles in for a month indoors. But on this year, the town is targetted as the hunting ground for a pack of shark-like vampires who swoop in and kill anyone and anything in their path. Now there's a sequel to the first film, called Dark Days, and it takes a different tack. The surviving woman from the first film (played by Melissa George there, and by Kiele Sanchez here) travels the country warning people about the Vampires. She meets up with a group of hunters and they start seeking the creatures out. They eventually discover that they are planning an attack on another Alaskan town, and so get on board the ship with the vampires in order to try and stop them. It's more character driven than the first film, and is interested in itself, although I found it slow. The vampires are placed in the background here which is a shame, and you don't really get to see them except as killing machines. There's a queen vampire controlling everyone, and she comes over like Alice Krige as the Borg Queen in that Trek movie, and a policeman Renfield who wants to be a vampire ... The film very much ticks all the boxes of everything that we have seen before and does nothing new. It introduces the idea that the crispy vampires that have been burnt in the sun can be revived with blood - which actually makes a nonsense of the first film where the lead Vampire's girl is crisped, and he kills her with the words 'That which can be broken must be broken'. If all it needed was blood to restore her, then why kill her? I'd probably only give this 5 out of 10 ... The other film is called 13 Hrs, apparently from the producers of Dog Soldiers ... well they really shouldn't have bothered. It's another werewolf flick, but so vastly inferior to Neil Marshall's epic, that it doesn't really bear comparison. A girl, Sarah, returns home to find a group of her friends drinking and smoking pot. They are a disparate bunch: Emily, who is sleeping with Sarah's ex-boyfriend apparently to get back at her, a younger brother, and a couple of other lads, one of whom is I think her other brother. They are so generic that I can't actually remember who was who or what their names were. Anyway, they inexplicably find themselves trapped in the family home with a werewolf on the rampage. The creature kills Simon McCorkindale in a very short cameo appearance in what might have been his last film, and then hunts and chases the kids all over the house, through secret passages and up into the attic. Along the way they argue and bicker and disagree ... one by one being polished off. The denoument is very predictable indeed, and the werewolf effects are terrible. The editing is also awful, rendering fight scenes impossible to follow as the cutting is too quick - one second shots of what's happening all cut together does not make for excitement, it makes for bemusement on the part of the viewer who has no idea what's happening. The dialogue is also risible, with some dreadful lines being delivered dreadfully. Overall the script is not good. Even the title, 13 Hrs is not explained - apparently it's how long they have to survive in the house ... but nothing is made of this in the script. A shame that a british horror film should turn out so poorly, but there you go. Basically actors off of Hollyoaks and Lads Mags (Gemma Atkinson, take a bow), My Family (that's you Gabriel Thomson) and Harry Potter (stand up Tom Felton) do not make for an endearing film when the script is as bad as this one. Just gets a 4 out of 10 from me. For a great werewolf experience, I suggest you check out the aforementioned Dog Soldiers, or Ginger Snaps, or even the reliable classics The Howling or An American Werewolf in London. They knew how to do it properly.

Hot Tub Time Machine

2010-09-28T09:46:00.004+01:00

Chose this film from Blockbusters because a) it's a comedy and we were in the mood for something a little lighter, and b) it's got time travel, which suggested something a little different. It's actually a very ordinary film. I don't think I laughed at all throughout, and the situations were very predictable and staid. Just what you might expect a generic 'lads' film to be like after it's been filted through 200 studio executives, all having their own crack at the scripting. Far superior is Doghouse - similar initial idea of a bunch of pussy-whipped losers heading off for a holiday, but far better in execution (and it has zombies in, which is always a winner). About the best bit in it is when one of the young ladies comes racing into a room dressed in a skin tight ski outfit - she certainly has a nice figure! But the promise of anything more is non-existant. The humour is, if anything, down at the Porkies level, with projectile vomiting and removing faeces-covered keys from a dog's bottom being just two examples of the gross-out factor in the film. Completely out of place and unnecessary really. The time travel element is very lightly used. Basically the hot tub gets some 'Hi Energy' drink poured in it and transports our leads back in time. Then there's some slight interest in that one ends up being the father of the youngest in the group, and a running gag about how a bellhop loses an arm ... but it's all very predictable. A shame as the basic idea - a back to the eighties type of vibe - is not bad. They should have ditched the crude gross-out humour and gone for some good belly laughs instead ...

Whirlwind

2010-09-27T21:07:00.007+01:00

Sometimes life throws stuff at you ... again and again and again. I'm aware that I've not blogged as yet on the ending of that Matt Smith season of Who. Not talked about Sherlock. Not mused on the new merchandise which has come out. Not discussed FantasyCon, nor told you about all the films I've been watching on DVD ... or the old Telly shows I picked up from Network DVD ... and probably lots lots more. The reason. Life. And having too much to fit into the days. I seem to have been living in a whirlwind of late - travelling hither and thither, visiting friends, going to conventions and events, working, more working ... So a few highlights! At FantasyCon, the annual convention for the British Fantasy Society, I was humbled to win the British Fantasy Award for Best Small Press! So taken aback was I, that I stumbled through my words on stage, welling up, and barely got away intact! It was amazing for Telos to win in our 10th year of operation, and on the Telos site blog, there's a piece about it all in more detail. Check out www.telos.co.uk for that. I also managed to leave FantasyCon as Chair of the BFS! Not sure how that happened - I volunteered! Must be mad ... but there's some great things that the Society can achieve, and I hope I can help them do that ... we shall see. Visit www.britishfantasysociety.org for more info on the Society. My partner Sam has been doing very well indeed with the launch of her third novel, called Demon Dance, it's a vampire tale with a difference. Time travelling vampires! There's a thing. She's a great writer and I urge you all to check out her books, starting with Killing Kiss (which as well as a paperback from www.murkydepths.com, is also available as a download for Kindle, iPhone, iPad and a variety of digital editions from places like W H Smiths and other online stores). Telos has just released several very cool titles, including a guide to the last days of Tennant (End of Ten) plus horror from Graham Masterton (The Djinn) and an amazing crime noir novel by Graham with William S Burroughs! Not often that Burroughs has a new work in print these days as he died in 1997 ... but Telos has one! Seek out Rules of Duel if you're intrigued, and like a shot of sixties paranoia fiction about authority and private investigators and surrealiarity in Burroughs' expected style. It's a book which challenges the reader, but which really delivers in a poetic and insidious way if you persist. All available from www.telos.co.uk. We also have pretty much wrapped on Wiped! a new guide to all those frustratingly missing Doctor Who episodes. It's a fascinating tome of tables and discovery ... really enjoyable and informative. I'm proud to be publishing it! That should hit the mailboxes and shops in maybe 3 or 4 weeks time, depending on how long it takes to print. I know I keep saying that I'll blog more ... and honestly ... I mean to. I have no idea how Neil Gaiman does it! The man's a genius, and yet has time to write witty and erudite blogs every week! I guess it's organisation and routine ... I tend not to have either of those (well I do, or nothing would get done ... I mean that blogging tends to fall to the bottom of my things to do list all the time). Until I can find an hour or so to share some thoughts of new films, DVDs, and to get those comments about the Pandorica opening down on here ... be seein' you.

The Descent Part 2

2010-07-04T10:28:00.002+01:00

The Descent was one of the best and most original horror films of recent years. Superbly written and directed by Neil Marshall after his success with werewolf-fest Dog Soldiers, it took a group of female spelunkers into some caves and pitted them against each other, as well as an army of underground monsters. The film was notable for its ending which, depending on which version you saw, allowed the main female protagonist to escape, or otherwise. Now we have 'Part Two', which is another way of saying that we're returning to the same well (or cave) for more underground shennanigans with monsters. This time Neil Marshall has had little to do with it - despite the Exec Producer credit - and it is all but a retread of the first film. The lone survivor has been taken to hospital where she is asked about her friends by a couple of police officers. Rescue workers have found an abandoned mineshaft down into the caves, and so they decide to take the silent, traumatised girl with them! This is really a leap to far. There is no way that anyone would allow her to undergo this in her condition, but assuming we accept that, the two police officers and a handful of caving experts descend into the darkness once more in order to find the other girls. Of course they get lost, trapped by a rockfall and are once again prey to the bat-like human nightcrawlers which live down there. The film succeeds despite itself but only because the premise of the original is strong enough to take a remake. One by one the humans are slaughtered again, and have to crawl through horrifically tight spaces and underground rivers to survive. Once again the girls are pitted against each other. Once again the crawlers attack and are beaten off. Once again you have to stay silent to survive. If you are claustrophobic, then you won't like this film any more than the first one - it's nightmarish from that angle. But there are plenty of shock moments, gore as the crawlers are despatched, and surprises along the way. It's not quite as good as the original, but it's not a bad sequel as sequels go. It's main failing is that it really doesn't try and do anything new with the material.

Doctor Who and the Lesbian Vampire Killers

2010-06-13T09:25:00.004+01:00

Lesbian Vampire Killers is a film which I got out on Blu-Ray when it first came out, and recently I picked up a cheap DVD of it to keep. It's also a film which is not as funny as it should be, but on second viewing, a lot better than I thought it originally was. The plot is great: two stoners, Fletch (James Corden) and Jimmy (Matthew Horne) decide to head for a holiday in England as Jimmy has just been dumped by his cheating girlfriend again. They wind up in the village of Cragwich which has been cursed by Carmilla the Vampire (Silvia Colloca) such that all women there will become lesbian vampires on their 18th birthday. The lads join up with a group of girls on an archaeological field trip from Scandinavia, and end up battling them as they all (bar Lotte for some reason) become lesbian vampires. Paul McGann plays a vicar out to destroy the curse before his daughter succumbs, and there's lashings of decapitations and fangs and boobs along the way. It's a fun film for a beery evening in, and had me laughing out loud on a few occasions. The whole thing is pitched at a comic book level, such that head movements are accompanied by 'swoosh' sounds, and the vampires pose seductively all the time while wreathed in mist, their hair blowing in the breeze. The effects are superb for what was presumably a low budget film. There is no blood as the vampires seem to be filled with a gooey milky substance which splatters everywhere, and no-one is safe from the curse - even Jimmy's ex-girlfriend is turned - except for the virginal Lotte (MyAnna Buring - who played Scooti Manista in the Doctor Who episode 'The Impossible Planet') who manages to survive the film to fight another day. Corden plays a sex-and-beer obsessed lout, cowardly and self-obsessed who feels he has landed in heaven initially, and then bumbles through the film quipping and joking like a poor man's Jack Black. Horne ends up the hero with a penis-handled sword, and even gets the girl at the conclusion - all the other girls amusingly remain lesbians leaving Corden with no-one to love. The film bombed at the box office, probably because it cannot really live up to the hype it was given at the time, but as an enjoyable piece of Brit-horror it's not at all bad. James Corden seems to be flavour of the year at the moment - he's got some sort of World Cup football program on, and is even number 1 in the charts with a remake of the old Tears for Fears song 'Shout', alongside rapper Dizzee Rascal, as well, and was even in the recent episode of Doctor Who, 'The Lodger'. I enjoyed the episode a lot, but unfortunately it all went wrong at the end. There's a lovely build up which puts the Doctor trapped on Earth as the TARDIS cannot materialise due to a time distortion, leaving poor Amy trapped on board (and able to take a holiday as she's not really in the episode that much). The Doctor discovers the source of the time disturbance to be the upper floor of a flat owned by Craig (Corden), and so rents a spare room there to investigate, trying to appear human in the process and mostly failing. Meanwhile, strangers off the street are lured into the upper flat by a variety of characters, and then screaming and flashing lights ensue. There's also a mysterious stain on the ceiling of Craig's flat which is getting bigger and bigger. Typically, Craig's 'girlfriend', Sophie (Daisy Haggard) is a girl from work but they've never told each other their feelings, and so there's an awkwardness about their relationship which neither seems able to correct ... The problem with the story comes in the revelations at the end. The early part is great - Matt Smith is brilliant as an alien trying to be human, with a quirky edge to everything he does. There's some great visual gags and dialogue here, and Smith and Corden bounce off each other well. But the ultimate problem is that there's nothing in the upstairs flat except some sort of alien machine which is trying to find a pilot to go home (in fact, there's no upstairs flat at all - it's a perception distortion). So the machine is intending to try out everyone on the planet with a holographic lure. The Doctor seems suitable, but he works out that everyone chosen so far wanted to escape, but that Craig doesn't. Why doesn't he? Because he loves Daisy. Craig and Daisy proclaim their love for each other, and the ship destroys itself. What? The 'love conquers all' theme was very poorly used here, and with no monster/alien to fight, the ending was very anti-climactic after what had gone before. I was wondering during the episode whether whatever it was in the attic was using the humans to build something - an idea slightly reminiscent of the story 'Frontios' where the Tractators used human body parts to power their drilling machine - but this wasn't the case either. Other commentators have said they like that there was no CGI monster ... but I agree and disagree ... I would have loved to have seen an honest to goodness prosthetic creature there ... doing something nasty with the humans that the Doctor has to try and stop. Maybe they were using the episode to save money or something as well before next week's climax with the opening of the Pandorica - whatever that means.

Return to House on Haunted Hill

2010-06-12T17:27:00.007+01:00

It's always a surprise when a sequel turns out to be good fun in its own right, and this one, a sequel to 1999's House on Haunted Hill, which was in turn a remake of the 1959 original, is not at all bad. First off, however, it really has little to do with the original film, aside from featuring the same house, and a similar collection of ghostly inhabitants. This time, there's an idol hidden somewhere in the house which is trapping all the spirits there. The idol is the focus for a disparate group of people to assemble at the clifftop mansion, and go in search of the object. The film is somewhat confused in terms of all the different characters, and I couldn't hope to try and explain it without help ... so here's what Wikipedia says about the basic set up:

Ariel Wolfe is the sister of Sara Wolfe, a survivor of an massacre some years ago in the sanatorium known as the "Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane", which was overseen long ago by the sadistic psychiatrist Dr. Vannacutt. Sara claims that ghosts had killed all those who entered the building, but no one believes her. When Sara commits suicide, Ariel tries to find out why. A diary of Dr. Vannacutt leads Ariel to the cruel past of the Institute. She and her friend Paul are then kidnapped by an unscrupulous dealer, Desmond, who knows a lot about Sara and Vannacutt's Institute. While meeting Desmond and his crew, Ariel realises Sara didn't kill herself, Desmond killed her. Ariel is required to help Desmond to find a precious artifact, a figurine of the demon Baphomet. The artifact in question being said to be hidden somewhere inside of the Institute. While Ariel, Desmond and four of Desmond's accomplices walk into the building, Paul and one accomplice are told to wait outside. Inside, Ariel and her kidnappers meet Dr. Richard Hammer (a university professor) and his assistants, Kyle and Michelle. Desmond used to be a student of Richard's and they begin arguing about the idol. While bickering, it comes out that Michelle is Desmond's new lover, who seduced Richard only to gain information about the sanatorium and the Baphomet idol.

The film is enjoyable as something you can watch and appreciate the GCI effects, inventive deaths, and general ghostly mayhem as it all careers to the ending. The characters are also quite interesting: the two girls are pretty good to look at, Amanda Righetti (Ariel) seems to get wet quite a lot and Cerina Vincent (Michelle) has an amazing chest. There's even Andrew Lee Potts off of Primeval in there - with an American accent - and lots of guns. Another thing I liked was that on the Blu-Ray version, there are nine places in the narrative where you can choose what the characters do, leading to different scenes, characters dying at different points, all leading to - it seems - one of four different endings for the film. The disk also includes the Director's cut - which I assume is the one which Wikipedia's synopsis details (here). I didn't watch that, but chose to experiment with the interactive film, leading to some degree of fun, as the film really does play out differently if you choose different options. I liked the way in particular that, at one point, if Ariel goes for the map, all the cast are killed in gunfire immediately afterwards and the film ends about half an hour early! Some would be cruel and suggest you take that option to shorten the misery, but I did genuinely enjoy the film, and will watch the Director's cut at some point to see what was actually in that version. As I say, as sequels go, it's a good way to spend an evening and quite diverting. There's even some lesbian zombies, and a nurse ghoul who seems to be straight out of Silent Hill (though nowhere near as creepy as those rubber-clad ghoulies). Sometimes a horror film doesn't have to pretend to be high art, and is just there to be drawn along with, laughed at, and in this case, interactively adjusted.

The Doctor and Vincent

2010-06-11T17:54:00.005+01:00

What an interesting little story. I was pleased to see that the second 'guest writer' slot in this season came up with something which felt a little more like Doctor Who than the earlier Dream Lord one. Richard Curtis of course has a great track record, but this could have resulted in something starring Hugh Grant and Rene Zelwegger, involving a romantic intrigue, missed opportunities, and of course a wedding ... but instead we got a Scottish Vincent Van Gogh fighting an invisible chicken. That's a little unfair perhaps, as the monster was apparently more based around the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, but the head was very chicken-like, and the fact that it was invisible and made sort of squarking noises made me imagine something like a giant Big Bird-like creature off of Sesame Street. Van Gogh, however, was something of a revelation. Completely brilliantly played by Tony Curren, he was totally believable. From the moment he first appeared, looking exactly like the Dutch artist, he held the screen. I loved his interactions with Amy and the Doctor, sympathised for his depression, and cheered him on in the gallery at the end. Curren nailed it completely. I even loved his question to Amy, asking if she came from Holland too as she had the same accent as he! Obviously the TARDIS translation circuits are a little fritzed, making Dutch sound like Scottish in translation. The flow of the story was gentle, but nicely paced, and the whole invisible chicken thing was a bit of a red herring really (lots of animals in this blog). The meat of the episode was the final ten minutes which had me crying both times I watched it ... moving and respectful, brilliantly acted, superbly paced and played ... it's testament to what Doctor Who can do given the right material. Bill Nighy's cameo was equally excellent ... perfectly pitched by the actor, and totally believable. In fact there wasn't anything really duff about the episode at all ... except for the chicken perhaps. Even the music was bearable! One thing I did puzzle over: right at the start, we see a cornfield and Van Gogh painting it, with a trail left by an invisible monster wending through. We are then told that this was one of the last pictures that Van Gogh painted before his death? But then the Doctor and Amy go back to a year before his death and kill the monster ... yet the painting still has the monster trail in it at the end ... but the monster was dead by this point, so why did Van Gogh paint it like that? As I say, not really important, but it confused me. Overall though, a lovely episode, touching all the right nerves. Next week we have that James Cordon off of Gavin and Stacy in a house. Personally I don't really get why he is so flavour of the year at the moment ... but we shall see how he fares.

Battle Royale and Phone

2010-06-08T17:58:00.005+01:00

Two more slices of J-Horror today ... and a couple of films which I had heard about but not managed to catch up with. Battle Royale is a sort of Lord of the Flies meets I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here ... with just about every weapon you can imagine. The back story is quite nice: the kids of today are so unruly and disrespectful that the only way to try and deal with them is to pick a class at random, ship them all off to a deserted island, and then let them kill each other. At the end of three days, whoever is the sole survivor returns home. And if there is no sole survivor, then all the survivors are killed by exploding necklets which each kid wears. The latest class arrives, and the events are apparently being orchestrated by an ex-teacher of theirs, Kitano, who they tormented. There are 40 kids in total, and unfortunately having so many makes the film drag somewhat. There is not really enough time to get to know them before they are being slaughtered by their classmates either on purpose, or by accident. The set pieces are quite nice, with kids being killed by crossbow, hanging, scythe, revolver, tazer gun, poison ... the list is endless, but the film soon starts to get a little repetative as kid after kid makes his or her maker. I won't reveal the ending here as there is a twist, and it's quite nice - I didn't see it coming even if those I was watching with did. Apparently there are sequels to this outing which are dire and should be steered clear of ... which sounds like a good warning to me. The other film is Phone (or Pon), which is a very effective piece indeed. A girl, Ji-won, brilliantly played by Ji-won Ha, finds her mobile phone being called by a mysterious number which cannot be traced. Others who listen to the calls seem to be driven mad by them, and the girl has to try and work out what is happening, and what the connection between the victims is. Best of the lot is the young daughter (Yeong-ju) of a married couple, Ho-jeong and her husband Chang-hoon, who gets posessed by whatever is haunting the phone and ends up throwing herself down a flight of stairs. The young actress, Seo-woo Eun, is simply brilliant and playing the possession, and she is genuinely creepy in a way, perhaps, that Linda Blair was in The Exorcist many years earlier. The explanations, when they come, are all good, and make sense, and the ultimate revelation of who is behind it all is very nicely hidden and revealed. Again, I didn't guess ... and the revelations of what had actually happened are good and gruesome. This is one of the better films of its type, up there with Ringu and the original Ju-On (The Grudge). The sequels are never as good, and the inevitable American remakes often lose the plot and the horror in their translation. But Phone is excellent, and well worth seeking out.

Daybreakers

2010-06-01T17:46:00.005+01:00

It's not often that a vampire film comes along which makes me sit up and be impressed ... well Daybreakers is such a film. I'd bought it on a whim, really, despite seeing some so-so reviews around, but it's actually a really neat little thriller which turns the whole vampire/human thing around on its head and has some interesting things to say along the way. It's 2019, and vampirism has taken over the world to the extent that there are now very few humans left alive, and those that remain are living as hunted men. The vampires have taken over all facets of worldly life, building their own cars and houses with daylight warning sensors, blackout windows (they drive by seeing outside the car via TV screens) and the like. There are human 'blood banks' in which living humans are plugged in, Matrix-like, to provide a blood supply for the vampires, which they take with their coffee from Starbucks-like stalls at the railway stations and on the streets. But the blood is running out, and the vampires are getting desperate. They need to develop an artificial version fast or they will rapidly age and turn into crazed monsters without human sustenance. One of the doctors investigating this helps a group of humans, and is sympathetic to them. He discovers that one of their number used to be a vampire but is now human again ... there is a 'cure' for the vampire condition which offers another way out of the dilemma ... but the vampires in charge rather like being vampires. The film plays out a little like The Matrix (but nothing like 28 Days Later which the blurb would have you believe), with plenty of action adventure along the way, and some really neat vampire effects. The aged and blood crazed creatures that the vamps turn into are very well realised, and the accompanying documentary (which is excellent in itself) explains that vampires look like humans because they drink human blood ... so what would they look like if they drank vampire blood? The acting is really top notch with Sam Neill playing the vampire leader with suave coolness, and Willem Dafoe turning in a brilliant performance as the vampire-turned-human, with Ethan Hawke as the doctor looking for a solution. They really hold the film together and force you to take it all seriously, presenting some scary and terrifying moments in amongst the excitement, like when a group of starved, monstrough vampires are dragged into the light in chains, only to immediately burst into flame and distintegrate into ash as they go. I won't give away the ending and eventual solution to the problem here as it's pretty cool in its own right, and is worth watching the film for. I had a great time watching it, and appreciated all the details which made it original and compelling. It's certainly a film I'll want to watch again.

Creepshow

2010-05-31T17:44:00.003+01:00

Managed to pick up a Blu-Ray of the 1982 film Creepshow while in NYC recently, and watched it the other night. I remembered it as being pretty good, and overall I still feel the same about it. The release has a really good picture - sharp and good colours which helped immensely, and the stories were all good and creepy. For those not in the know, it was written by Stephen King and directed by George A Romero, and there is a certain zombie slant to the stories presented. First up is the wrap-around tale wherein a boy (played by Stephen King's real life son, Joe, now a horror novelist in his own right) has his copy of Creepshow magazine confiscated and thrown in the rubbish bin by his dad - who is somewhat against horror stories. I guess this is irony. Then we get our first glimpse of the brilliant EC-Comics inspired decayed corpse at the boy's window ... and we're off into the first story. 'Father's Day' is a lovely short piece about an aged father who was boorish by day, murdered by his daughter, and who now comes back from the grave on the seventh anniversary of his death to get his own cake. The zombie is brilliant, all decaying flesh and earth and worms ... with a cracked, horrific voice to boot. No wonder everyone who sees him screams! Next up is 'The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill' in which King himself plays a country hick who sees a meteorite fall in his field. He touches it, and starts to grow green plantlife on his fingers. The stuff spreads and soon his mouth, face and body is covered. He ends by killing himself with a shotgun as the greenery spreads across his farm, and onwards across America. King is brilliant in this, playing the hick with sympathy, and the spreading growth is pretty horrific. The third story, 'Something to Tide You Over', is a wonderful little tale of revenge and retribution. Leslie Neilson (yes, he from the Naked Gun and Airplane films) plays a man whose wife has been seeing another. So he buries both her and her lover on the beach up to their necks and waits for the tide to come in. This is horrific and creepy as the man can see his lover being drowned on a television set helpfully provided by Neilson. Once dead, the sodden corpses then return to haunt and kill Neilson. 'The Crate' is perhaps the weakest tale, if only because the monster is a little too much like a man-in-a-suit. A college professor sees the chance to do away with his nagging wife by letting a hungry creature in a crate devour her ... the effects are good, and the acting excellent, but it's totally let down by the monster. The final segment is 'They're Creeping Up On You' wherein a Howard Hughes-like recluse finds his sterile apartment overrun with cockroaches ... they take over and end up spilling from his screaming cadaver! Pretty good considering there is no CGI here to generate the bugs, and that they were all wrangled on set! The film ends back with the boy and his dad ... and it's lucky that the boy sent off for a voodoo doll from the magazine as it means he can now take out his anger on his hapless father. Overall it's an enjoyable film, if a little long, and the zombies are brilliant. I mentioned the 'Fathers Day' one above, but the two corpses in 'Something to Tide You Over' are equally excellent, squelching water as they walk, and leaking seawater when they are hit with bullets. Lovely stuff. Somewhere I still have the comic book adaptation of Creepshow ...

Going Underground

2010-05-31T12:02:00.004+01:00

The mid-season Doctor Who two-parter has not fared that well in previous years. The silly Sontaran thing was pretty dire, and the Daleks in New York scenario was disappointing to the extreme. So it's good to see that the tide has been turned, and the recent two-part adventure ('The Hungry Earth'/'Cold Blood') was exciting and well executed. I loved the first episode in particular. The setting up of the problem was nicely handled, and the idea of people being sucked below the ground very well achieved. It was scary and creepy, and I could imagine more than one child nervously asking their Mum or Dad if Amy was OK after she was taken. In a way, the opening was reminiscent of 'The Green Death' with the Welsh accents and setting, and the mining idea, also 'Inferno' with the concept of drilling deep into the earth. But of course it was really 'Doctor Who and the Silurians' which was being riffed on, with the underground reptiles being disturbed by the drilling and deciding to wage war on the humans. The idea of the humans setting up electronic surveillance all over the town in 9 minutes was ludicrous. I didn't see why that shouldn't all have been done in advance - after all, they have set up this massive mining operation there, it could have been a deserted village to start with - or cleared of people - and surveillance set up to keep unwanted intruders away. But then the kid gets taken ... and we meet the alien being. But it's a she (how can a reptile, cold blooded, and egg laying, have mammary glands?) and her alien face is a mask ... and she speaks perfect English! And she doesn't even have a third eye ... how disappointing. The make-up was brilliant though - certainly the best reptile effect I can remember seeing anywhere (puts the new series of V to shame as well). But if these are meant to be Silurians, then you might as well take the defining characteristics - the hooting electronic voice, the third eye - and use them for the re-mix. It's a little like making the Cybermen not be silver or robotic, or having Daleks with legs ... if you're not going to use the essence of the original, then why bother to even say they're the same thing. Seemed rather pointless to me. Anyway, getting over the creature's perfect white teeth, the beings want a war, and so the Doctor has to try and stop them. In a nod to the original, there's of course two factions - one warlike, and one peaceful, and the Doctor has to try and calm things down. Except that idiot woman on the surface kills their hostage and nearly provokes the war until Stephen Moore (he of the Marvin voice) sends all the reptiles back to their cells to be frozen again. It's a shame that they didn't make use of the tonal device from the original story - it could so easily have been the thing that Amy steals to open the bracelets holding her captive ... also on the doors and other elements ... again, if you're going to bring back old monsters, then why not use some of the memorable aspects of them? What was with the venom-tongue? I didn't get that. It seemed to add nothing to the plot - surely Mrs Kumar ('pull my finger!') was always going to want to stay down there and fix everything with a pipe cleaner, a bottle of bleach, and a small aubergine? The father too ... nothing more for him on the surface anyway. He could have had cancer or any human illness for the plot to work ... I suppose the whiplash tongue was a nice CGI effect, and also gave another nod to the original source story - the idea of the reptiles wiping out the humans with an infection. And after the story had played out, some interesting revelations. I was not expecting Rory to die. Not at all. Very nicely done by all concerned. And Karen Gilan deserves a Bafta for her performance as she struggles not to forget him, only to lose at the end. Very well played, and the first time this season that I have been moved to tears. Then the Doctor shoves his hand in the crack and pulls out ... a shattered piece of the TARDIS ... interesting indeed, and very portentious for what is to come. The series is shaping up nicely, though many of the episodes are on the high good side rather than on the spectactular (like 'Blink' or 'Family of Blood'/'Human Nature'). Maybe there are more revelations to come ... and I think with the final episodes concerning the Pandorica, I guess we have more River Song to look forward to as well ...

Vampires and Bumps

2010-05-31T11:31:00.005+01:00

You can never say that Doctor Who doesn't present a diverse selection of treats for a Saturday night. Over the last few weeks we've seen alien vampire creatures in Venice, Amy Pond getting pregnant and old lady killers, and underground monsters intent on destroying mankind! Never a dull moment. THE VAMPIRES OF VENICE I loved the title and concept of this from the start. Being a massive horror fan, I have always advocated that Doctor Who works well when it's being scary, which is why most of Steven Moffat's previous stories were so well received: spooky gasmasked kids, tick tock clockwork robots, blinky angel statues, walking skeletons and something nasty hiding in the darkness ... all tap into buried fears. So to see vampires back on Who was a treat indeed. Such a shame then that they turned out not to be vampires at all, but alien fish creatures ... who would have thought. The lead up to the revelation of them being space-lobsters was great - the creepy white girls were beautiful and stunning in their pale vampire-ness and the teeth were really well done. The setting was magnificent - never has Venice been so well captured for a show. And the fact that it wasn't Venice at all makes it all the more impressive. The characters were great, from the incredible vampire queen played by Helen McCrory - one of the best supporting characters of the season I feel, to Karen Gilan and Arthur Darvill (Amy and Rory) turning in superb characterisations, the whole ensemble did the production proud. Except that they were space-shrimp and not vampires ... I wonder why they felt the need to go that extra step. Why can't proper vampires be part of the Doctor Who universe - we saw them in 'State of Decay' of course, and they were creepy and well done there as well ... but to have some modern variants would have been so cool. Instead we get a lot of guff about their planet and wormholes, and the whole thing ends with a Deux ex Machina that Russell T Davies would have been proud of, as the Doctor resolves the problem by climbing up a tower (shades of 'Daleks in Manhattan') and turning off a switch to stop the storm. It was all very like 'The Shakespeare Code' as well with an alien-induced storm at the end bringing monsters through a portal to attack the earth ... or 'Planet of the Dead' which used a similar idea ... All a shame really, as the ideas underpinning it were brilliant. I loved Amy getting bitten, and would liked to have seen more of that aspect - dealing with turning into a vampire. Indeed, the Doctor having a vampire companion would have been very neat, giving the whole series a bit of a twist and a kick. But we had space-lobsters. Never mind. AMY'S CHOICE An intriguing episode, and in retrospect, probably exactly what we should have expected from a writer new to Who and probably unfamiliar with all the backstory and history, and what could really be done with the concept. It played with the idea that the Doctor has an 'evil' twin - which could well have been the original pitch when Simon Nye was asked for ideas for the show - except that the 'twin' looks nothing like the Doctor, and styles himself as the Dream Lord for the TARDIS travellers, presenting them with two dilemmas to resolve, one of which is apparently real. The dilemmas were hardly breathtaking, though the village full of alien-infected old people was nice and original. Certainly preferable to the 'Inside the Spaceship' plot of the TARDIS falling into a sun (albeit an ice sun here, leading to some very nice frozen effects on the TARDIS interior and on the actors). The village set-up was effective, and the idea of Amy being pregnant plausable, if played for laughs. (I was disconcerted to see Doctor Who Adventures pointing out to young readers all the insults thrown at Amy for being in the family way - nice way to encourage casual cruelty around the weight gain that accompanies pregnancy. 'Chubs' indeed!) So the Dream Lord taunts the TARDIS crew, and tries to force Amy to choose ... and she chooses the reality in which Rory (poor Rory) doesn't die. But then we discover that both realities are a dream, and all caused by some psycic pollen (!) ... a shame as it was a nice idea. Are we supposed to think that this diminuitive Dream Lord, played magnificently by Toby Jones, is some alter-ego incarnation of the Doctor? Is it the Valeyard? I suspect that will keep the theorists busy for years! Overall it was an OK story, a little simplistic and stand-alone, and especially after all the stuff about the Crack in earlier episodes, a little incongruous. I'm really liking Amy though. Karen Gilan is really coming into her own, and acting her little socks off. Wonderful stuff. Rory is OK, but improving episode on episode. And the Doctor ... well Matt Smith has nailed the part completely ... now who was that guy before him?

The Living Dead Returns

2010-05-08T14:11:00.004+01:00

Return of the Living Dead III is perhaps the best 'third film in a series' going. Considering that the second one was so bad that I don't even have it in my DVD collection, that's saying something. What is so great about this film, is that it takes an idea promoted in the first film - that of humans being turned into Zombies - and takes it another step forward: if you knew that a gas existed which could bring the dead back to life, and you have a gorgeous teenage girlfriend who breaks her neck in a bike accident ... then wouldn't you be tempted? But then how would your girlfriend feel about that and how would you cope. The film presents this dilemma admirably, and the stand out star is Mindy Clarke (currently apprearing in The Vampire Diaries) as Julie, who goes from horny-go-getter teenaged totty to undead brain-craving monster over the course of the film. She is brilliant. Depicting all the emotions and needs and lusts of her condition along the way. She discovers that pain can dull the hunger that she feels, and so starts to fetishise her body with pins and nails and shards of broken glass, until she ends up looking like some sort of incredible Hellraiser demon, all ripped fishnet stockings, pierced and scarified body, and hungry eyes. That she is a good looking girl certainly works in the favour of the film, and her journey forms the core of the narrative. Along the way we also meet a bunch of hispanics who take offence to the boyfriend, Curt (J Trevor Edmond), after an accidental jostle, and spend the film hunting him down to punish him - somewhat singleminded behaviour perhaps, but in line with what has been depicted in the past about this sort of retribution (I'm thinking of films like Assault on Precinct 13 for example). That all of them are turned into blood-crazed zombies by the end is perhaps just deserts for their actions. However along the way, the innocent also suffer, and a homeless man calling himself 'Riverman' (Basil Wallace) also becomes a victim, despite being about the only sympathetic character that Julie and Curt meet. The film ends about 10 minutes after perhaps it should have, with the army people experimenting on the captured zombies, resulting in Riverman turning out to be the zombie with a heart after all. The creatures are all pretty neat, and I loved the one seen early on which rips its bones out of its flesh in order to get at its victims ... all nice ideas and well presented. So, this one gets a big thumbs up from me, especially for Mindy Clarke's performance, which is truly excellent.

Forest of the Angels

2010-05-08T12:13:00.006+01:00

Having now watched the second part of the latest Doctor Who adventure, 'Flesh and Stone', I'm really not sure what to make of it. Don't get me wrong, as usual I loved the experience of watching it. The episode was exciting and visual and had some great moments, but the plot seemed to be for a different story from that of the first episode. Wheras the first took us on a fine journey of discovery, opening up vistas for us: there is one Angel on a spaceship, which then crashes; River Song wants the Doctor to help her out to destroy the Angel along with a band of Religous-themed soldiers (Bishop and the Clerics sounds like a pop group to me); Amy gets herself into a bit of bother with the Angel which has obviously seen The Ring too often and ends up with something in her eye ('There's something on your back!'); and the whole thing ends up with everyone trapped in a vast maze of the dead, surrounded on all sides by statues which are all angels, all slowly coming to life and heading after our trapped heroes. But then part two ... it's a sort of chase through the spaceship which has a rather neat forest in it. Angels chasing the Soldiers ... Amy starts to count down for no real reason - 'To scare her' says Angel Bob ... well that's useful. The Angels are regenerating by absorbing the power from the ship ... but then there's the crack from Amy's room there again, apparently unmaking everything which gets close ... Amy has to shut her eyes and spend the episode wandering the forest and trying to avoid the Angels which assume she can still see ... lots of nice padding, but no real progression. Then there's a pile of stuff about the crack, about an explosion in Amy's time which ripped reality open, River Song being under arrest by the Soldiers for killing someone - and the implication is that maybe she killed the Doctor in her past; the Doctor's future. Kind of interesting and thought provoking if true - River knows how the Doctor dies, and the Doctor knows how River dies ... and they're each living their lives in a reverse order of meeting each other. I was however disappointed at the Doctor losing his temper with River Song. Not a very Doctorly way to behave I felt. It was all very enjoyable visually. The sets were magnificent, and the forest beautiful in a Red Riding Hood fairy tale way. There were some great performances from all the cast - especially impressive was Father Octavian as the believer-soldier who gives up his life without angst and moralising about it - and the Angels were as creepy as ever, though not nearly as goosebump-inducing as the terrifying part-formed creatures in the earlier episode. I am wondering what the title has to do with the episode. 'Flesh and Stone' is a great title, and I wondered earlier if Amy was perhaps going to turn into an Angel, which would have been cool ... but no. Also, why didn't the Angels kill people the same way as before, by sending them into the past? The one that grabbed the Doctor didn't do that, nor did the one which caught Father Octavian. And while we're talking about the Angels, as there were so many of them, how could they move except in total darkness, as another Angel would always be looking at them? One solution out of the dilemma in the corridor near the start would have been for the soldiers to move all the angels into a circle so they were looking at each other ... but no-one onscreen thought of that. And as they all went into the crack at the end, does this mean that the Angels now no longer exist at all, in past, present and future? What does that mean for poor Sally Sparrow? I wasn't convinced by Amy wanting to get intimate with the Doctor at the very end. It was out of place for the episode, and indeed the series, and smacked too much of trying to be shocking perhaps for the sake of it. I had hoped we'd seen the end of the kitchen sink drama approach of previous years, and this element wasn't welcome by me. But there's obviously something going on ... the reason why Amy - indeed everyone - cannot remember recent Dalek and Cyberman invasions ... and what the significance of Amy's wedding day is. Overall the season is shaping up nicely, and tonight we have some Vampires to contend with ...

Return of the Land of the Living Dead

2010-05-07T17:05:00.004+01:00

A couple of interesting Zombie films were on the agenda this week ... George Romero's Land of the Dead, and Return of the Living Dead from Dan O'Bannon. Land of the Dead is a peculiar thing, a Zombie movie which doesn't feel like one. It comes over more like some sort of vigilante film than anything else. The world has become infested with Zombies, and they stand around trying to recapture their lost humanity by continuing to do what they did before ... shopping, serving customers and so on ... while in a protected enclave, the last of humanity lives in a high rise development with its own shopping mall and every convenience you could imagine. However the owner of the complex, Kaufman, played by a fairly laid back Dennis Hopper, needs to get food and supplies in from somewhere so he has hired Cholo, played by John Leguizamo, to get the supplies for him. There follows a fairly predictable path, as a special 'supplies truck' is stolen by Cholo when Kaufman cuts him off after he has delivered the goods, and it's up to a small group of humans led by Riley (Simon Baker), and which include reformed prostitute/dancer Slack (Asia Argento), to retrieve the truck ... The film is most interesting for the zombies though, in particular 'Big Daddy' played by Eugene Clark who turns in a movie-stealing performance as a hulking brute who seems to have more intelligence than most - working out how to use a gun and other implements as weapons. The other zombies are mostly defined by their old jobs: a butcher, a cheerleader, a Salvation Army band member; and they follow 'Big Daddy's lead in attacking the complex and killing everyone inside. The film ends with zombies and surviving humans going their own way in a sort of 'live and let live' approach to the menace. I can't say it's a great film, but it has its moments and is never dull. The other film is a favourite of mine and I never get tired of revisiting it. Return of the Living Dead is a straight zombie film which is a sequel of sorts to Night of the Living Dead. Some zombies from that outbreak have been canned up by the Army, and accidentally delivered to a medical supplies centre where they have stayed for years and years before worker Burt (Clu Gallagher) decides to show newby Freddie (Thom Mathews) what is in the basement. Cue the escape of gases which overcome Burt and Freddie, and which bring all the organic objects in the supply warehouse to life. In a great sequence we see a split dog (a dog mounted and cut down the middle, nose to tail, to show all the internal organs) whining, and butterflies flapping in a cabinet. Then a cadaver comes alive and runs amok before it's pinned to the ground with a small pickaxe. This still doesn't kill it and so they then cut it into pieces and take them over to the local morturary run by Ernie (Don Calfa) who destroys them in the incinerator, causing poisoned rain to fall over the nearby cemetary where a group of stoner mates of Freddies are partying. Next thing they know, the dead are coming back to life ... It's a wonderful fun film, and the leads play it straight, the laughs coming out of the situations rather than any overt comedy. I love the Tar Man zombie in the cellar - one of the best zombies ever committed to film - and the idea of the things being able to run and reason is very nicely handled. The 'Send more Paramedics' line deserves especial mention of course, as does the idea of Ernie and Freddie literally turning into zombies as we watch, and without dying in between. The production design by William Stout is exemplary, and the zombies are brilliant as a result. The old woman one which is captured and pinned to the table is a case in point. Her backbone writhing and weeping fluids as she explains that the creatures want brains to eat to ease the pain of being dead is a neat twist, and lends a little sympathy to the creatures. The stoner crew are amazing ... what a bunch. And what on earth Freddy's girlfriend - who is a 'nice girl' - is doing with the likes of Trash (Linnea Quigley) who strips off faster than you can blink and dances on a tomb before being got by the zombies, is anyone's guess. I have to also point out that the two main leads here are called Ernie and Burt ... something of an homage to Sesame Street perhaps? Definitely worth a watch, it's one of the gems of zombie cinema.

Bubba Ho-Tep

2010-05-02T16:55:00.004+01:00

Sometimes films pass you by for no reason at all. Bubba Ho-Tep is one such. I am a massive fan of the Phantasm films and thought that Beastmaster from the same director was pretty cool as well, so I have no idea why I didn't catch up with this gem sooner ... The premise of the film is somewhat strange: Elvis Presley is alive and well and living in a rest home suffering from a fractured pelvis and an infected pecker. Seems that The King swapped places with an Elvis tribute act many years ago, and it was the tribute act (Sebastian Haff) who allegedly died on the loo with cheeseburger in hand, while the real King continued to perform as Haff until he broke his pelvis in a fall from a stage, and went into a coma. Also in the rest home is John F Kennedy - not dead at all from a bullet taken in November 1963, but living as a black man (he was dyed!) with a sack of sand in his skull. There are a series of deaths at the home, and Elvis and JFK realise that there's an ancient Egyptian soul-sucking mummy on the loose, and only they can bring him down before he sucks their souls right out of their own ass-holes! It's a mind bending concept, but the direction and performances are so spot on that it is nothing but enjoyable. Bruce Campbell as Elvis is a revelation. He is spot on as the aged crooner, with his mannerisms and voice down pat. It's a brilliant performance, and a shame that it didn't garner more widespread acclaim at the time. Ossie Davis as JFK is also superb - delivering the revelation that they dyed him black with a straight face. The whole thing is played completely straight and this enhances the film. It's a fun romp through horror, played by folks who know just how to pitch it all. The effects veer from the slightly naff - the scenes with the giant scarab bug reminded me a lot of the similarly naff giant fly sequences from Phantasm - to the superb - Bubba Ho-Tep's appearances in the rest home are creepy and well developed. He's one scary mummy! I really appreciated the conceit of the hierogyphic graffiti on the toilet wall, and also that when Ho-Tep spoke, you saw the pictograms appear from is mouth before they are translated on screen - the images match what is said as well, and these alone are very funny. I'd recommend this film to anyone who hasn't seen it. It contains enough surreal touchpoints for people who are not that into horror, while the frightening elements are enough to keep a horror fan happy as well. Very enjoyable indeed.

Return of the Blinky Angels

2010-05-01T16:19:00.003+01:00

This was what we were waiting for! Steven Moffat in full flow with a great little horror tale which just builds and builds. To be honest, this episode wiped the floor with the others. The standard suddenly jumped up a notch, and everyone seemed to be well into their stride with it all. Of course, the Weeping Angels were one of the success stories of earlier years - a genuinely original monster which was creepy and scary into the bargain. I wasn't sure though about bringing River Song back into it. I liked her in the Library story, and of course she was always a cert to return, but it all seemed a little bit like 'the best of Steven Moffat' - all we were missing was a kid wandering about in a gasmask, and a clockwork robot to make it complete. The episode was so full of good bits that it's hard to single one out. I loved the take on The Ring, with the Angel coming for Amy through the TV screen ... the idea of Amy maybe being 'infected' by the Angel was interesting, but perhaps an idea too far as this never happened in 'Blink' - are we to assume that poor Sally and her boyfriend are now 'infected' as well? The sets were amazing, and the filming in Clearwell caves superlative. I loved the way that the story kept unfolding: so it's one angel that's a threat, no, it's hundreds of them ... I even spotted the anomoly before they did on telly, wondering why all the statues had one head when their creators apparently had two. The reviving angels were brilliantly realised. Zombielike in their visage and slow approach, they certainly gave me the willies! I'm not sure what giving the Angels a voice achieved though - other than referencing the Vashta Nerada in 'Silence in the Library', with poor skeletal Dave forever wondering who put out the lights. Why did the Angel want to talk with the Doctor anyway? To scare him? But why? Then there's the whole River Song question ... who is she? Seems the Bishop knows (and what a wonderfully realised idea of having a Bishop with Clerics as the armed forces. Wonderful! So she might be the Doctor's wife? Sam thought that maybe she was actually the Doctor himself ... interesting idea and I'm not 100% certain that this is entirely disproved by whatever evidence we have been presented with so far. Parts of the episode reminded me of the Resident Evil game and film - having to go through a maze to get to a control centre, while being attacked on all sides by a zombie-like enemy. Not a bad thing to copy if that was the idea. But we shall see tonight how it all pans out, and I really hope and pray that it doesn't drop the ball as so many other two parters have done over the last few years. After a cracking first episode, we need a brilliant conclusion! Can't wait to see if it delivers.

Daleks in the Wartime

2010-04-24T16:58:00.003+01:00

So, that last episode of Who ... in anticipation of something better tonight when the Angels are back (wonder if they'll nick the Doctor's wheels again ...) some thoughts on last week's episode. Well it started well, is about the best I can say. The wartime setting was nicely handled, and even Churchill was a nice cameo - even though I find it hard to believe that Churchill would ring the Doctor and ask him to come and see a new weapon ... why would he do that? Unless of course Bracewell encouraged it as part of the Daleks' shaky plan. I loved the initial reveal of the Dalek in olive green, and the very 'Power of the Daleks' homaging of 'We are your ... Soldier!' I loved the Daleks gliding around the base serving tea and coffee, and the fact that only the Doctor knew they were a menace. But then it all fell apart. The nice sense of paranoia which the aforementioned 'Power' played on so well was missing and the Doctor started hitting a Dalek with a spanner! Then we go off into some technobollox about the Daleks having this cute little device (*1) which lit up and which somehow contained pure Dalek DNA ... we learn that Bracewell (*2) is a Dalek robot and has built the things on Earth - but where did he get the Dalek DNA from I wonder ... and then the Daleks, having had the Doctor identify them, can now get their little Dalek gadget to create some 'pure' Daleks ... ... and here they come now! Tinky Winky Dalek! Dipsy Dalek! La La Dalek! and of course not forgetting Po Dalek! The Dalek Tellytubbies roll out looking for all the world like giant toys (*3) and proceed to exterminate the other ones ... erm ... Then, realising that there's a lack of action, Churchill sends some Spitfires into space (erm ... OK ...) and they attack the Dalek saucer ... How on earth they 'flew' is anyone's guess - Bracewell's anti gravity wassname maguffin might have got them into space, but there's no gravity there so how did the craft actually manouver - propellors won't work (no air) and the wings are useless (no atmosphere) ... never mind. Bracewell turns out to have a Dalek bomb in him as well, and so the Doctor and Amy, accompanied as usual by Murray Gold's inappropriately loud and intrusive music talk him out of it! Didn't we see that before in reverse in 'Remembrance of the Daleks' where the Doctor talks a Dalek into destroying itself. It didn't work there either. At least this time we get some lovely performances from the leads, and Gatiss does his best with the dialogue. Then the Daleks escape. The End. It was all way too rushed for 45 minutes, and what there was made little sense even on first viewing. Interesting how Amy can't remember the (many) Dalek (and Cybermen) invasions of previous years at all ... and of course we get to see Amy's crack again on the wall behind the TARDIS as it leaves. It's a story which could and should have been so much better, even with a lot of the same elements. A wartime adventure where the Doctor finds that Daleks are being used and has to side with the Nazis to destroy them ... or even more of a skit on 'Power' with the Daleks plotting to destroy and no-one listening to the Doctor so he has to use his wits to get him through it all ... And the new Daleks - woeful. They're too big, wobbly and brightly coloured. Daleks should be tight, small, bundles of power and threat and paranoia. If these were 'pure' Daleks, then we should have seen original 1963 versions, or those from 'Genesis of the Daleks' ... but then maybe this is all part of this parallel world/whatever it is thing going on with Amy here ... maybe this is what the Daleks looked like in her world ... maybe they were kid's toys which took over when the time was right ... who knows. All in all a very disappointing third episode which perhaps tried to do too much but ended up collapsing due to the weight of the requirements put on it, and the need to try and bring the Daleks back as 'new and improved'. Why try and improve something which just doesn't need it ... we shall never know. PS: The little asterisks are my somewhat cynical way of highlighting the elements which were included because they'll make great toys rather than having any real relevance to the story.

Beasts and Tricks

2010-04-16T16:57:00.007+01:00

The title of the second Who episode in the series has an intersting ring to it. 'The Beast Below' ... as others have stated, perhaps something of an euphamism there. I liked the episode overall, though it did leave me a little cold on first viewing. There's also a few loose ends which I didn't appreciate, having hoped that we had seen the end of this sort of thing in the scripts. The Smilers are a case in point. What exactly were they? Some sort of robots? But who was controlling them, who made them, and why do they sit in little fairground booths? And how could their faces spin *three* times to show, smiling, sad, and then angry. I know it looked great and spooky, but then it was unexplained, and I didn't like that. And Queen Elizabeth X ... I wondered when she got black and cockney? And was she supposed to be 100s of years old? I heard something about slowing time down but it didn't make much sense really. And when did Amy record that frantic warning to the Doctor on her voting booth screen? There weren't even any controls allowing you to do that were there? And then there's the elevator shaft of doom ... leading to the Beast's mouth. The Doctor makes it sick ... and they're back on the spaceship? Why weren't they vomited out of the creature's mouth into space then? It was suggested to me that maybe they wee ejected out of a blow hole back into the ship ... but that was never mentioned or seen. And come to that, how did that kid who was 'taken' at the start end up back in the ship - the space whale could tell the difference between a kid and an adult when they're in its mouth? I dunno, it all seemed to be hanging together by threads really, but as with the last 5 years of Who, it rattled along at such a pace that you don't have time to notice these things while you're watching it. I quite liked the ending with Churchill and the Dalek ... but I always cringe when I see impressions of real characters in Who, it just seems wrong somehow - the action should be alongside the events of history, not slap bang in the middle of them ... but we shall see ... In other news, watched a couple of films recently: Up was great fun. It's another Pixar piece and that company can really do no wrong. It had us crying in the first ten minutes, and then presented a very funny and fun journey to a wilderness waterfall for the main characters. All animated superbly, and on the blu-ray it looked awesome. Think we'll have to buy that one. Squirrel! The other film was a horror called Trick 'r Treat, a wonderful Halloween piece of the type which we all thought would never be made again. Someone commented to be that it was a film about Halloween, which celebrated it, and this is spot on. It's not a slasher or a gore film, but an intelligent portmanteau movie of four stories which all cross and intersect as the film progresses. There's the tale of four twenty-something girls out on a night out, looking for male friends to spend the evening partying with ... We have the local Principle, and how he spends his Halloween - preparing 'special' candy for the local kids, and then going out in fancy dress ... There's the couple who don't really like the holiday and who decide to dismantle it all before the night is over ... There's the story of a group of kids who decide to visit the site of a coach crash many years previously, and in doing so disturb something which should have been left alone ... And finally the tale of a Scrooge-like old man, and how he is visited by the spirit of Samhain before the evening is over. All the cast and performances are superb, the film is wonderfully directed and rich in imagery and idea, and the little Samhain demon creature is a brilliant creation, appearing in all the stories somewhere ... watching ... waiting ... and perhaps claiming more than just candy ... I loved the film, and can see it becoming an October 31 staple to rewatch.

Days and Weeks

2010-04-09T17:43:00.004+01:00

I've just been watching the DVDs for the two Zombie films 28 Days Later and the sequel 28 Weeks Later. I'd seen the first one years ago, probably when it came out, but the sequel I'd not seen before. 28 Days Later is one of those films which gets a good rep from the mainstream, probably in part because the director, Danny Boyle, is seen as being cool and hip after films like Trainspotting. It's actually not a bad little film, with some awesome cinematography of a deserted London at the start. I do have a problem with the chief scientist guy as he's played by David Schneider, who I know from the comedy The Day Today. So I find those scenes a little hard to take seriously. Our Hero, Jim, awakens in a deserted hospital and then goes walkabout wondering what has happened. You can see parallels here with the old BBC series Survivors, and indeed that the remake stole some of the ideas and imagery from this film in turn. Unfortunately, Jim meets up with some fellow survivors of the virus - called the Rage - and they set off across country, ending up captives of a group of soldiers led by Christopher Eccleston in a great little performance. The problem I tend to have with all these 'post apocalyptic' films - and indeed novels - is that few have anything really interesting to say, and it's all down to the basics: how do the survivors get food, power, water, medical supplies and so on ... fighting against both themselves, and whatever random threat is 'out there'. The film ends on a sort of hopeful note with an airplane being spotted - signalling that perhaps there are others out there who survived the virus. It has been argued that the film doesn't have zombies in ... as these are just humans infected with the Rage virus which makes them get angry, vomit blood, get bad teeth and complexion and run after normal humans to eat them ... sounds like zombies to me. And if it looks like a zombie and acts like a zombie ... The sequel, 28 Weeks Later, follows a similar trajectory, although it focuses initially on the rebuilding of life in the UK once all the infected people have died of hunger. This time the 'hero' is a man called Don, who is reunited with his two kids after a horrific zombie attack at the start of the film. Predictably, the kids disobey the rules and go back to their old house to collect some things, and find that their mother is there in a crazed and animalistic (but not zombified) state. She is taken back to the labs (strangely housed in the same residential block where all the survivors have been placed as part of their return to the UK. A brilliant piece of tactical planning by the US army there). Of course she is still infected with the virus, though immune herself, and when hubby finds her and kisses her .... ten seconds later he has the Rage and escapes to infect the rest of the humans in the complex ... The film then descends into zombies versus soldiers ... and guess who wins? Unfortunately from a very well directed and exciting opening, and a good idea about how the infection takes hold again, the film gets boring quite quickly. It's the same as everything else out there unfortunately, but without a strong underlying plot or characters to drive it forward. One thing about it though - the music. During the opening sequences, as Don is running from the zombies, and again at the end of the film, I found that I recognised the music ... to the extent that I had to check. And yes, indeed it is, the music is all but identical to Murray Gold's music for the Doctor Who episode 'Doomsday' where Rose is on the beach at the end ... that haunting score which everyone loved so much. The scores are so similar, that I even played them together ... the Who one is a tad faster, but otherwise ... 28 Weeks Later was released in 2007, and the 'Doomsday' episode of Doctor Who was broadcast in 2006 ... so maybe the composer for 28 Weeks Later (John Murphy) is a Doctor Who fan? We shall never know.

Nothing Human Lasts Forever

2010-04-07T17:46:00.004+01:00

Watched the film The Hunger (1983) on DVD last night. Another one that I'd never seen. This is the one with David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve as vampires, with Susan Sarandon as the human who stumbles into their world. I'd seen all the TV series of the same name, and the film does share a certain similarity in the editing and surreal nature of some of the filming. The film was directed by Tony Scott who was also behind the TV series, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. But the film ... what an interesting idea and way to discuss vampires. Deneuve was suitably icy and emotionless as Miriam the vampire, which is a little strange as it was all about her not wanting to be alone. Bowie played her latest companion, John, and was just brilliant. I loved him as the young man, and then when he aged to old man in the space of a day, he had the stance and performance down pat all the way through. I appreciated the conceit of him aging 50 years while waiting to be seen in a clinic ... something we have all felt! Kudos to Dick Smith for the brilliant old man make up as well - really superb - and I also loved the really really old make up effects too at the end of the film. The crumbling corpses were really creepy and well done, especially when combined with some great lighting and visuals on screen around them. It's a very simple film on one level, but leaves a lot to think about. Deneuve's companions never die, just suddenly get ancient in the space of a few days - and when they do she shuts their bodies in boxes in her attic. And as they also cannot sleep, this is an eternity of living hell. Which is really not a very nice thing to do to those you profess to love. But then when she herself dies, they too die, and she ages and crumbles to dust herself. So was she living off their everlasting life force in some way? The film suggests so, closing with Sarandon now taking on the mantle of female vampire, ever young, ever perfect and ever in search of companion after companion to share her eternity with. I found it a little languid in places, slow paced, and yet the film has a beguiling elegance which perhaps demands that it is told in a measured way. It doesn't lend itself to fast-paced action sequences at all. Overall a good slice of vampire cinema, taking a different tack - there are no fangs in sight here - and with much to consider past the closing titles.

Star Trekking

2010-04-06T17:48:00.004+01:00

We watched the latest Star Trek film last night, and as I said when we saw it at the pictures - see the earlier post on that - what a cracking film it is! J J Abrams has managed to reinvent it so well. The plotting and characters are both new and yet seem to fit like a comfortable pair of shoes. Lovely performances from the main leads playing Kirk, Spock, Sulu, Chekhov, Uhura, Scottie and Bones, some great and awe-inducing effects pepper the film, and the intelligent plot is lovely to watch unfolding. We saw it on Blu-Ray and certainly the quality is there. It's also around 200 minutes long and yet never dragged or sagged. Testament to a good film methinks. Hopefully there will be more to come, but even if this stands as a one-off, it's a great little film, and sort of reaffirms ones faith in science fiction movies, especially after the exscrable Pandorium ...

Four Films

2010-04-05T09:51:00.007+01:00

Easter is a time for films, and so courtesy of the local Blockbuster, we rented four for the long weekend. THE FOURTH KIND I'd read a bit about this one, and nothing was very complimentary. We got it because Zee wanted to see it, and, well, it has Milla Jovovitch in it. It's a fairly standard alien abduction story, with a conceit (which I don't believe at all) that it's all real. This exends to having supposed genuine footage in the film itself of the actual protagonists, while Milla et al act out what happened. It does have a couple of very nice sequences in it which are unnerving. When the chap has a fit on the bed around 100 minutes in, it's really quite creepy, as is the bit where the policeman sees the UFO over the house - and so do we for about 1 second. The ending however is totally spoiled by being 'seen' in fizzing and fuzzing camcorder tape while we hear the voice of the alien speaking to us in Ancient Sumarian (translation helpfully provided). I was impressed that they got through the whole film without ever actually showing the alien - the scene where it enters Milla's house and abducts her is very scary, and you never see a thing. But this is also the problem - these days we expect to see something ... and to have everything relayed to us during the exciting moments through a third person camcorder picture which is blipping all over the place making the picture unseeable was somewhat disappointing. Overall the film wasn't a total wipeout, and I'd give it maybe 5 or 6 out of 10. THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS I had no pre-expectations of this at all. I knew that Heath Ledger had died mid-way through making it and that as it was a Terry Gilliam film, I should expect something surreal. But it blew me away. The plot is fairly straightforward. Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer in best Dumbledore mode) has made a deal with the devil (Tom Waits) to see who can first get to 5 souls. Parnassus has a rickety sideshow trailer and through a cheap fake-glass portal on there, people can enter into a land from their own imagination. At some point they must make a decision, and if they choose wrong then the devil wins the soul. Travelling with Parnassus is his 15 year old daughter (Lily Cole) who will be forefit to the devil if he wins before she turns 16; a dwarf (Verne Troyer in a brilliant performance); and a young man in love with the daughter (Andrew Garfield). Into their lives comes con-artist Heath Ledger, on the run from the mafia for money owed. He manages to turn the sideshow around and to start to get what Parnassus wants ... but can it all be done in time. As with all Gilliam's films, the visuals are rich and amazing. Whenever anyone enters the mirror, they find themselves in some fantastic CGI land, but it's all so well done, and genuinely leaves you wide eyed in amazement. I loved the way the film all hung together, and appreciated the use of several London locations which are very familiar to me: Blackfriars bridge, Borough Market, Southwark Cathedral ... The acting is all top notch, and Ledger's death caused some rewriting where his character is played by three other actors when they go through the mirror at different times: Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law, all of whom do a fantastic job at inhabiting this character through the adventures. I loved this film, and it's one I will buy for myself when I can find it cheap on Blu-Ray :) Probably 9/10 from me. NEW MOON Oh dear. We got this one because Zee wanted a laugh ... but it wasn't a laugh, it's possibly the worst thing I've seen on DVD for some time (and considering that we watched Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 the other night, that's saying something). The plot ... there isn't one. It seems to consist of sulky-faced teenager Bella being dumped by her sparkly vampire man Edward, and then moping about it for months and months. She is so joyless that I can't see why anyone would spend any time with her at all. And Edward is just as bad! We got about 45 minutes into the film, and the Blu-Ray player decided that it had had enough and started to slip and pause the film. We thought this was a sign and so stopped watching it. A dreadful, dreadful piece of cinema with no redeeming features that I can see. At least Twilight was fun to watch in some areas, but this, this is angst-ridden plotless rubbish. The makers should be ashamed at themselves. 0/10 from me on that one. Waste of film. DOGHOUSE I'd heard about this one, and even saw some of the preproduction images for it (We had dug them out for Telos' book It Lives Again! as Axelle discussed the film in there). It's a comedy Zombie film, probably most aligned to Shaun of the Dead, but in the mould of Zombieland too. A group of blokes, all having been dumped or in trouble with their wives and girlfriends head off to the deserted town of Moodley to get drunk and forget their troubles. One of their number is getting divorced and this is their excuse: to help their mate. When they get to Moodley though, they find it deserted except for hoards of zombie-like women, all insane and out to kill any man they find. Their mission is then to survive to the end of the film. I loved this. It's a great fun film with lots of silly moments - I laughed out loud at the Zombie granny with the Zimmer frame. The acting is strong - it has Noel Clark in it for that almost obligatory Who connection - and the set-up is very neat. It transpires that it's all a government test of some toxic weapon to turn women on men and thus win wars without needing soldiers ... nice. The effects are grisly and gruesome - I had to look away at the finger cutting scene - but the comedy is also played to good effect. The female Zombies, or Zombabes as they are termed, are brilliant. All with the tools of their trade: cleaver for a butcher, scissors for a hairdresser, dressed as a shopgirl, a hooker, a bride, a goth monstrosity, a huge hulking housewife with curlers ... and they move fast too, with intelligence to take an axe to a pole supporting a platform on which one of our heroes is hiding. It rattles along at a nice pace, and is a very good way to spend an evening. I don't think it's quite as good as Zombieland for entertainment value - but then that film is pretty amazing - but it does a very good job. 8/10 from me for that one. David

End of Ten and Starter for Eleven

2010-04-04T12:55:00.012+01:00

Hiya my little chickens (well, it is Easter after all) This is the annual 'David determines to write on his blog each week -athon' ... let's see how far we get. Honestly, I do often think that I should pen something each week, but every week there's way too many other things to do. But today, Easter Sunday, with the sun shining, Sam in bed with the baddest flu/cold I've ever seen, I have an hour or so to spare, so here I am putting some thoughts down. This year has been hectic already, and it looks like continuing in the same vein. We were out in LA for the annual Gallifrey Convention at the end of Feb, and it was a great event as always. Lovely to make some new friends there, and to catch up with all our old mates. Highlight was seeing Ben and Kim get married at the event, but there were so many wonderful moments. The costumes were again awesome, with everything from multiple Zoes to Sally Sparrow to White Robots and even the Ergon strutting the corridors. And best not to mention the soriority girl party one evening - about 1000 cloned 5 foot tall, skinny, blonde all-American teenagers in little black dresses and red shoes invaded the convention halls! Now there's a story to write about! After the convention we stayed on in LA to relax with Frazer, staying with mates Josh and Em. We got to visit Redondo Beach where Sam got a genuine rare black pearl from an oyster bought at a store selling them. We got to see the incredibly brilliant film Batch Slap for the first time - and this film is superb. Trust me. Get some mates together with some beers and wine and slap it in the DVD. A rollicking grindhouse release about three gorgeous girls with big boobs and big guns looking for diamonds in the desert. It's smart and sassy, violent and cheesy ... everything you need from a fun film. Check it out. Another film we saw at Josh's for the first time was Trick r Treat, a smashing little Halloween film about a town and what happens there one year. It's clever and thought provoking as well as creepy and scary ... what if Samhain really does come and visit ... another recommended DVD. Back from LA, and last weekend we were off to World Horror Convention in Brighton (which is probably where Sam picked up the sickness). The event was great, but the hotel was too cramped and way too airless and hot. Apparently loads of people got sick there ... not good. It was lovely to meet up with old friends Jim Herbert, Neil Gaiman and Graham Masterton again, as well as to make lots of new friends. Tanith Lee was beyond awesome and it was an honour to sit and chat with Chelsea Quinn Yarboro. Telos launched some brilliant books by Simon Clark and Vincent Chong, and all in all everyone seemed to have a great time. We managed to find a really nice gluten-free Indian restaurant on Saturday lunchtime and spent a quiet and relaxed time in the company of Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James which was an appreciated respite from the mania of the convention. And so to Who, the usual reason why I put finger to keyboard and muse on what's been going on. I realise that I never blogged on the last David Tennant special, and the reason is that despite watching it a couple of times, I really couldn't find the energy to write about it. It was big and bombastic, full of giant, crazy ideas ... and totally lacking in any depth or plot whatsoever. Every turn of the wheel brought more unexplained nonsense: the Master is dead but can be resurrected with some DNA from his human wife, who has a plan to stop him, but he comes back anyway as some sort of flying superhero who can burn people to death with electric bolts fired through his hands ... then there's a machine which can make everyone the same ... and aliens ... and a spaceship ... and then Time Lords who can somehow send a crystal back in time through a hologram, and who made the Master mad all along so that they could return ... only for them to be banished again ... while the Doctor goofs and gurns and ends up saving Wilf only to die himself - but not after he has time to re-visit everyone he has ever met ... I *still* have no idea what it was all meant to be about. And then the Doctor regenerates and the TARDIS explodes ... well that makes about as much sense as anything else we'd seen in the story, so why not. Which brings us sort of up to date and the debut of young Matt Smith as the Doctor. I had very few ideas as to what to expect - I tend to avoid spoilers and reading news pages - and so it was all pretty fresh and new to me. The one thing I *really* disliked was the incidental music. From the choral harmonies through the 'jokey music' as the Doctor tried to decide what to eat, through the bombastic symphonies and back to choral again ... Murray Gold seems to have no idea that drama should not need the music to tell you what to feel at every moment along the way. It was all too much. I wish that someone else had been brought in to look after this critical aspect of the show as Gold seems to layer everything with sledgehammer precision, and leaves no room for appreciating the acting and performances as his choir sings in the background. Other than the music, the other aspect which I find it hard to like, at least initially, is the title music, and the title sequence. Now Doctor Who has a long history in this area. Successive producers have tweaked both to try and keep it all up to date, and, more importantly, timeless. This worked just fine for the first 17 years or so, but then John Nathan-Turner decided that rather than creepy electronics and timeless graphics, he wanted the theme to be played on a kazoo, and the titles to be composed of starfields and a logo created from an old Letraset pack. This then got worse and worse until we ended up with the McCoy 'tumbling kid's blocks' logo, and music which was dated at the time. I don't know about you lot, but when I look back today at those stories, I *still* feel the same today as I did then, that the titles and music did the stories no favours whatsoever. And I feel the same about this new set. The theme seems to have lost all it's oomph, it's weak and spangly where it should be pumping and driving, and it's not otherworldly at all. And the sequence - well the last little bit is OK, when the 'DW' splits away from the logo, becomes a TARDIS and vanishes down the tunnel of fire ... but the first bit, with the TARDIS spinning along a cloud tunnel, being hit by bolts of lightning, is desperate. I am actually reminded of the C Baker sequence, where they added in lots of little wooshes and stuff to try and hide the fact that the music was so poor. I've seen this a couple of times now on YouTube and it's not improved for me. It seems very 'young' as well - maybe I'm just getting old - but Doctor Who should have a timeless appeal and not be rooted in today's CGI world. It is especially unfortunate that this is the case, as otherwise the episode was really good. Matt Smith seemed to grasp the mettle and made the Doctor his own, but Karen Gillan as Amy was just awesome. I guessed she was a strippergram straight off - no Policewoman would have a skirt that short - but she was sparky and endearing, and had the best backstory yet. The girl playing her as a young girl was also excellent, although she really needs a talking to about letting strange men into her house at night. All the stuff with the food was padding ... unnecessary, and strangely worrying to see the Doctor spitting out good food like that. There wasn't even a clever way that this was worked into the plans of the Atraxi (the 'Eyeballs in the Sky' from the old Perishers cartoon made large) later on. I liked the direction and the idea of the monster ('Prisoner Zero') being one or more objects ... the whole thing rattled along nicely, and I can't think of any annoying lapses in logic which threw you out of the narrative and rendered it all meaningless - something which tended to blight the last five years of the show. So for the moment it's a thumbs up from me for the new series. Steven Moffat knows what he is doing, and I hope and trust that the next few weeks will get better and better. There is a tradition of the opening episode being a little lighter in tone and content (New Earth, Smith and Jones etc) and so this bodes well for the rest of the season. I can only assume that Steven was on holiday when the title sequence and music was approved ...

Wow

2010-01-30T09:48:00.006Z

Hi all Yes yes yes I know I need to blog on the end of Tennant ... meantime ... here's something amazing on the 'tube. Enjoy ... David

Doctor Who - The Waters of Mars

2009-11-26T18:56:00.004Z

So that's what it takes ... a new Doctor Who episode to drag me kicking and screaming back to the keyboard to pen some thoughts ... soooooo much has been happening since I last posted here it's unbelievable. Those who keep up with me on Facebook will know some of it ... but every time I vow to post more here, everything conspires to get in the way. Anyway ... enough of that, and onto the latest Who episode, The Waters of Mars which was on a week or so back. What an intriguing episode. The trailers and pictures really got my imagination going, especially as they revealed the monster and all ... but what of the story itself? Well as usual I'm just gonna waffle on and we'll see where it takes us. The TARDIS arrives on Mars ... possibly the first time the Doctor has visited there since Pyramids of Mars (and I know people will correct me if I'm wrong) and it's a rather lovely red quarry, and the Doctor has a fetching spacesuit which looks very similar to other spacesuits he has worn (maybe to make it easier for the people who make the little figures to release another variant). As the Doctor had a helmet on, I wondered how he heard the cute Gadget robot when it threatened him ... and that robot ... hmmm ... another merchandise opportunity perhaps. To diverge slightly, I had to laugh watching the Confidential episode when they showed a drawing of Gadget and everyone sort of nodded sagely in the face of Russell T Davies' obvious enthusiasm and love for it ... when all I was thinking was that it was the same as Number 5 from the Short Circuit films ... at least it was changed for the televised version as presumably someone else spotted the near identicalness of the drawing. We head to a space-base which looked very CGI to me, more so than other exterior CGI shots in other episodes, and there the Doctor meets the crew. I liked the Doctor's response to 'Name, Rank, Intention' with 'Doctor, Doctor, Fun' ... but I was less impressed by the woman in charge - Adelaide - waving a blaster around. In a pressurised room? What if she missed? Maybe it was just some sort of Stun Gun or something, a taser perhaps. The flashes to the future-Wikipedia were nice at first, but became increasingly laboured as we saw them for every crew member. Alright already, we get the idea. They're all going to die. Today. The whole scene was further let down by the wall-to-wall rubbish music which irritated me throughout the episode. Please would someone tell Murray Gold that less is more ... But the monsters are afoot, and I liked the first transformation taking place in the background to the shot. It's a shame then that every transformation was then seen like this, weakening the initial good idea and making it all feel very samey. The lights go off in the Biodome, but they seem to make a noise when they do. Do lights actually make a noise when you switch them off and on? They do in films and on TV, but in real life? I know that when you switch on hot outdoor floodlights, there can be a sizzle as any moisture on the casing is evaporated ... but on Mars? In a partial vacuum? I don't know. And then they analyse a roar and decide that it's Andy's voice print. Rubbish! How could that possibly work? A speechless howl can be tracked to a person's normal voice print ... disbelief is beginning to be stretched here. Before we can say Lynx Deodorant, the monsters are sweating just like the poor man in those advertisements. Water literally pours off them, and the effect was very well done and very unsettling. When the coloured girl, Maggie, changes into a monster, she's the best of them all as she stands in the isolation ward. Now why does that have door seals of a lesser quality than elsewhere in the base? Don't the designers know what 'isolation' means ... Ah ... but of course ... the base was designed by the same lunatic who designed the spaceship in 42 and the walkway with the giant fans in The End of the World ... that also explains the hideously long, vast, pointless hangar-like connecting walkways to the external domes. So as it's all getting a bit scary for the kids - and Maggie is very scary and unsettling indeed - we need some light relief, so the Doctor manages to make a robot that is designed to go at 2 miles per hour, somehow sprout rockets and go at 10 miles an hour instead. Baffling but fun. I liked the ice field set a lot - very simple - and I hoped that something might come up from the ice later, but no such luck despite all appearances to the contrary. But the chat here between the Doctor and Adelaide is tedious. It drags the whole thing down for a good five minutes. Moments in time being fixed ... I dunno ... sounds a bit like make-it-up-as-you-go-along to me. But then a Dalek interlude. What a rubbish Dalek! Why didn't it kill her? The Daleks were dragging Earth light years off course ... killing countless people into the bargain. If Davros' plan had worked, then everyone would have died anyway ... so are they now trying to say that it would never had worked because Adelaide could not die until her allotted time? Makes it all seem a bit pointless then. Back to the plot, and how can water get in through airtight seals? Air has smaller molecules than water, so there's no way it could happen. And in any case, if water did get through, why didn't the air inside then escape? The pressure seemed quite great later on ... Now we have messianic choral music which is OK, and the bit in the airlock where the Doctor talks with Adelaide was much better than the earlier scenes. And so the Doctor walks away ... listening as the humans all struggle to survive behind him. This is a lovely sequence, very nicely played and quite original I felt. However, where the Doctor said that Adelaide's dying to save the Earth was what inspired her granddaughter ... how does that then reconcile with the ending? But the Doctor has a change of heart and returns to try and help save who he can. I liked the hopelessness of it all when Roman was splashed with a drop, and then the Shuttle-guy, Ed, getting sprayed was nice, leaving them all with no hope. The shuttle explosion was spectacular - lovely effect and very impressively carried out. The hull is breached ... so how does everyone breathe then? And the Doctor can electrify the doors? Why didn't he do that before? And how does that work anyway? On what sort of space-base does a control panel allow you to electrify the doors. It would have to have been designed by a lunatic ... oh. The point of including the Gadget robot becomes apparent as the Doctor sends it to get the TARDIS. How convenient that it can hold a key, is the right width to get through the doors, can operate all the correct controls and get the TARDIS back to the Doctor in the nick of time. Lucky that the TARDIS console didn't need hitting with the rubber mallet then. But I was wondering ... when the Doctor first got to the base, he left the TARDIS and climbed over mountains and ended up looking down on the base from a quarry-like area which was in a crater of sorts with a mountain range around it ... so how did Gadget manage a straight run to the TARDIS then? Slightly puzzling. So the people are saved and the base and the water is blown up. A great climax, which is then spoiled by a rubbish final ending. I appreciate the Doctor's mindset of 'I can do anything I like' and being Timelord Victorious, but it all came over as wrong handed. I could see that they were riffing on Donna telling him he needed someone to rein him in sometimes ... and it put me in mind of how perhaps the Master justified his actions ... because he could. I also wondered if the climax to David Tennant's run will see the Doctor and Master change places, with the Doctor being the menace to the universe and the Master having to stop him ... All of which would have worked, except that the Doctor had no need to dump everyone down on Earth on the day the base exploded, outside Adelaide's own house! Why not anywhere else in the world, and tell them to take on new identities and allow everyone to think they all perished on Mars ... much more sensible and logical. So Adelaide's granddaughter is going to be inspired because her gran blew her brains out? She didn't save Earth doing that now did she? I can see it being all hushed up by the family anyway, and them pretending she died on Mars ... which makes her death ultimately pointless. There's also the question of why Adelaide killed herself at all - she never once gave the impression that she was a quitter, that she would accept her fate. It was only when all other options were exhausted that she set the base to detonate ... so it's so out of character for her to do what she did. So unworked for in the narrative and the acting. Just very disappointing. And finally, to cap it all, a comedy Ood Sigma appears like the Watcher of old, and stands, silently watching the Doctor as he gets all griefy and angsty about it all ... and as the Cloister Bell tolls in the TARDIS, so the credits roll. Overall then ... it was a great episode. Exciting and rollicking, you bet! Some brilliant monsters which were creepy and scary, genuinely unsettling and very well acted and brought to life by the cast. I loved the base under siege setting, so redolent of Doctor Whos past, and another great performance by David Tennant capped it all really. The script was generally strong - and I think the juxtaposition of Phil Ford and Russell T Davies' ideas really worked well, though I would be at a loss to guess who came up with what bits. I would hazard a guess that the basic plot of alien water monsters on Mars came from Phil, while Russell jazzed it all up with the Adelaide/Doctor interplay, and the ending. But I could be completely wrong. It had moments where it dragged - like the Dalek sequence half an hour in - but also moments of magnificence - like the Doctor walking away listening to humans die as he goes. Overall it was perhaps the best of all the Specials to date, managing to maintain the excitement and tension, to tell a nice little story, and to keep interest throughout. Personally I know very little about the final two episodes due for transmission, but as I'm not a fan of the Master, I'm kind of ambivalent about them. We have already seen a climactic two parter with the Master and I have a sense that this will be more of the same - all the characters from the past rolled out in a potpourri of deja vu, feeling like some sort of 'best of' all the previous season enders. Maybe I'm wrong ... but as always we shall see.

A Day at the Races

2009-06-28T17:08:00.007+01:00

'So, David, back to the race ... how do you feel Something Perfect will do?' I'm standing on a small green, speaking with Jonno from Channel 4 Racing about a horse running in the next race to start; the 3:15 at Newmarket on Saturday the 20th June ... and I've never so much as stepped foot at a Race before! So how did this happen? Since when was I a Channel 4 pundit on the races? It all started because I was enjoying a nice weekend away with an actor friend, Frazer Hines, and we decided to spend the Saturday at Newmarket, which is where Frazer has his stud farm. So Sam, Frazer and I all roll off down to Newmarket on the Saturday. I am as green as anything, not having a clue what to expect. Sam had booked tickets for the Premier enclosure, so we finally figured out how to get in there and of course the first thing we did was get a jug of Pimms and settled down to watch the first race, and study the horses running that day. For me, it was all a case of seeing which one had the best name, but horses called things like 'TARDIS Travel' or 'Tennant's Fancy' weren't listed ... so I had no idea. Then Frazer spotted that a horse owned by a friend of his was running, so he decided to make a call ... seconds later, he's back with a big smile ... his friend's wife was there, and she had invited us into the paddock to see the horses with the other members of the Silver Lining Syndicate before the race. Now, to me, a paddock is a big straw-filled area bounded by wooden fences like you see on telly ... and I imagined we'd perhaps be sidestepping the piles of dung and trying to avoid getting trampled by these racehorses, all fired up before the race. Not at all ... the paddock is apparently a lovely big grassy area with a sort of track around it, where the grooms lead the horses next up to race, warming them up and getting them ready. So we wandered in there and stood watching the horses going around us. The horse owned by Frazer's friend was called Polly, and raced under the name 'Something Perfect' and she looked very smart. In fact, she won the 'best turned out' prize and we all applauded politely. Then the jockey arrived and we had a chat before he headed off to get on Polly to ride her down to the starting gates for the race. But Polly was having none of it. She got a little skittish and kicked out ... not at all a happy horse. The jockey hopped off and calmed her, and then led her out onto the racetrack before mounting her again and riding off to the start. We then decided we ought to put a bet on her, after all, the syndicate which owned her had been kind to us and ... well ... you just do that sort of thing don't you. So we popped out to the betting huts and Sam put a small bet on her. I nipped to the loo, and when I emerged, Frazer was standing by a fence. 'Here he is,' says Frazer. A nice gentleman on the other side of the fence says, 'Oh yes, hello, good afternoon, I understand you write for Doctor Who?' I smile, I often get this ... 'No, not for Doctor Who, about Doctor Who. I'm a sort of historian?' 'Oh very good, come round here then ...' So I look at Frazer, slightly perplexed, and he nods and smiles, so off I trot to the other side of the barrier. There to stand next to the nice gentleman, who seems to be called Jonno. Next thing I know there's a microphone thrust under my nose with a big Channel 4 logo on it. I look up, and there's a TV camera pointing at me. Oh crikey! The questions start with some stuff about Doctor Who ... that's fine ... I can deal with those. 'I understand you've travelled all over the world with the show ...' Eh? How could he possibly have known that! So I say something about conferences taking place in LA and that it's great the show has such a global following. And then he asks me about the horse ... I couldn't remember its name ... nor even the name it raced under ... at that point I couldn't even remember if it was a boy or a girl! We had enjoyed a jug of Pimms remember. I mention that the horse seemed a little skittish, but the jockey had sorted it, and we hoped she'd do well in the race ... Then Jonno asks me who else is in the Syndicate ... erm ... um ... but you can't do that on telly can you. So I say that there's quite a few people in it, including TV actor Frazer Hines who is here today ... Jonno seems happy ... he closes the chat and we return to the studio to watch the race. I thank Jonno and return to Frazer, now joined by Sam, who are laughing their faces off. 'You have to be the biggest bulls**tter going, David,' says Frazer when he can speak. 'I'm glad they didn't ask you how the syndicate named the horse!' So was I!! As it happened, 'Something Perfect' came third in the race. Beaten by 'Cosmopolitan' in first place, and 'Penzena' in second. There was a bit of a flurry, as the jockey on 'Penzena' was apparently seen smacking 'Something Perfect' in the face with his riding crop during the race, however on playback, the officials decided it was accidental as the horses were all close together on the track ... but then as there were only 8 horses running in the race, bets only paid on the top two places ... so we were robbed! Like I said to Frazer on our way back, the races have been spoiled for me now as I think you always get to see the horses before and after the races, get to go in the owners' enclosure, drink Pimms and appear on Channel 4 ...

Radio Appearance

2009-06-10T17:40:00.003+01:00

Folks might be interested to know that I'm interviewed talking about the old Doctor Who Target Books on a radio documentary being broadcast on Tuesday 23 June, from 11.30am to 12 noon. 'On the Outside it Looked Like an Old Fashioned Police Box' The PR reads as follows: "Mark Gatiss, Doctor Who writer and fanatic, presents a feature exploring the hugely popular Doctor Who novelisations of the 1970s and 80s published by Target books. In an age before DVD and video, the Target book series of Doctor Who fiction was conceived as the chance for children to 'keep' and revisit classic Doctor Who. They were marketed as such, written in a highly visual house style. Descriptive passages did the work of the TV camera; the scripts were more or less faithfully reproduced as dialogue. They were as close to the experience of watching as possible and were adored by a generation of children who grew up transfixed by the classic BBC series. Target Doctor Who books became a children's publishing phenomenon selling more than 13 million copies worldwide. From 1973 until 1994, the Target Doctor Who paperbacks were a mainstay of the publishing world. From humble beginnings they grew into a list running to 156 titles, shaping the reading habits of a generation." I've also heard that Russell T Davies, Gary Russell, Terrance Dicks, Philip Hinchcliffe, Chris Achillios, Caroline John and Anneke Wills are taking part. So give it a listen if you're around, or it should be on the BBC iPlayer afterwards.

Heatwave

2009-05-31T19:53:00.002+01:00

England is such a crazy country. One day you have to wear a coat to work in the morning as it's so cold ... the next it's chucking it down with rain so hard that you need a big golf umbrella (ella ella eh eh eh) to keep dry, and then that evening it's so scorchingly hot that you can't wear a jacket! But we live here and so are kinda used to the vagiaries of the weather ... Taking advantage of the nice weather, my partner Sam decided that she wanted another car (to be fair, we need two as I will be using the one for work, and so she needs another for her work) and so headed out and ended up getting the most adorable little silver softtop MG ... so we have been posing in it with the roof down, catching the rays, and generally enjoying the sunshine and the weather. The other week we ended up down by the river Thames and spent an amazingly relaxing afternoon eating tapas and drinking Long Island Iced Tea and beer while watching people go by. Both Sam and I love watching people ... I think it goes with the territory of being writers. Sometimes you see someone and a story just pops into your head! Their background or history or something equally bold and diverse and strange about them. Film-wise we finally saw Twilight ... hmm ... not that impressed. Some nice scenes where the evil vampires are hunting, but apart from that. And, I'm sorry, but vampires do not 'glitter' in sunlight. They smoke and scream and writhe and burn ... burn ... BURN! Much, much better was Ultraviolet, a kick ass SF vampire romp with Milla Jovovich. I liked the stylish way it was put together, the effects were great, and Milla struts her stuff wonderfully. The vampiric element was effectively handled as well, but it was also quite subtle too. Until next time ...

Forgotten Warriors

2009-05-24T16:38:00.008+01:00

I managed to pick up a paperback edition of Tony Lee and Pia Guerra's graphic novel The Forgotten a month or so back and had a happy time reading it on the way to and then back from Paris, bracketing a nice weekend away. The strip had been published originally by IDW in their Doctor Who series (which, in a very rubbish way, is only available in the US. Such a shame as it's really very good) and now has been collected in this graphic novel format. I picked up a copy from Forbidden Planet, but it should be available online I guess. FP also stock some of the individual comic magazines, but a good place I have found is Graham Crackers, a retailer based in the US. Their website (www.grahamcrackers.com) lists just about every issue still available. Anyway, the idea behind Tony Lee's tale of ten Time Lords is straightforward, and yet it manages to work so well that I think it's probably the best multi-Doctor story we'll never see on television. The Doctor and Martha (for she was the companion at the time of writing) arrive in a museum which seems to contain a multitude of objects all related to the Doctor in some way. Unfortunately the Doctor has lost his memory and has no idea why this is. The pair stumble across a room which contains all the Doctor's standard outfits, along with a key item for each. 1st: cane; 2nd: recorder; 3rd: keys to the TARDIS; 4th: bag of jelly babies; 5th: cricket ball; 6th: cat badge; 7th: umbrella (ella, ella, eh, eh, eh); 8th: cravate; and 9th: psychic paper. By holding each object in turn, the Doctor is able to 'see' an adventure his earlier self had, and in doing so it returns part of his memory to him. The ideas come thick and fast, with mini-adventures interspersed with the main narrative. As the Doctor remembers, so he comes under attack, first from Autons, and then by giant spiders before finally being hunted by a Sandminder Robot and a clockwork Droid. However a mysterious someone is controlling events from behind the scenes, and I won't say more or it will spoil the lovely surprises that this story has to bring. I loved all the continuity elements - and there are a lot of them - but they are worked into the story brilliantly and don't seem forced at all. Indeed, some points of continuity are worked into the resolutions as well. Overall the story has a very satisfying feel to it, and you can tell that the creators have a great love for the subject matter. One of the small pleasures for me was trying to spot as many of the objects in the museum as I could, I managed quite a few, but I wonder if there is a definitive list anywhere ... Another wonderful item which I have to rave on about is an Ice Warrior Helmet ... a what I hear you cry! Well, the Ice Warriors from Mars are probably the last, great, Who monster from the dim and distant past not to make an appearance in the new series on television. We've had the Daleks, the Cybermen, Sontarans, the Master ... even the Macra ... but no Ice Warriors as yet ... give it time I say. Anyway, this is one in a range of scale helmets produced by the amazingly talented people at Weta in New Zealand. When I first heard about the helmets I was a little unsure ... I had seen similar ranges for Lord of the Rings and Narnia amongst other current film franchises, but wasn't convinced that Doctor Who really lent itself to such a range. Well, if the quality of this Ice Warrior one is anything to go by, this should shape up to be a pretty awesome little addition to the collectors' shelves. It comes in a rather nice little printed box, with a great pic of the creature on the front. Inside, nestled in protective polystyrene is the helmet, and also a smart looking stand on which to display it. The first impression is how heavy the helmet is. After all it is cast in metal, and then painted up. It's a brilliant re-creation of the Martian creature, complete with red eye shields. If I was going to be picky, I'd suggest that a mouth section would have completed it nicely, but I can understand why that wasn't done, as the mouth is not really a part of the helmet, being part of the creature underneath. However in the series, it's suggested that the helmet might also be a part of the creature, with electronic 'ear pieces' and so on ... The helmets are limited to 500 each, and the limitation number is given on the base of the stand. With others in the range including a ceremonial Time Lord headpiece and a Cyberman head, they would look very nice indeed lined up in a display cabinet I think. Even the price isn't too shabby, being around the £35 mark each with shipping of £7.62. They are available from Weta direct from their website at www.wetanz.com. The helmets also ship from the UK directly, and don't come winging their way from New Zealand!

Star Trekking

2009-05-10T18:04:00.007+01:00

That's the way to do it! Went to the pics recently to see the new Star Trek film and had one of the best times I can remember at the cinema in recent years. What a brilliant film! I have to admit that I am not the world's biggest Star Trek fan. I'm not even sure I have seen every episode of the original series and certainly can't name them or know what order they came in. Later Star Trek variants bored the pants off me, with perhaps only the Borg episodes coming close to interesting me (and that's only because the Borg were a cunning reworking of the Cybermen from you know what). But this film had it all. J J Abrams takes us back in time to before the original crew of the Enterprise were in situ, documenting the events which surrounded and led up to them all meeting and ending up at the helm of the USS Enterprise in the first place. The touches were all there - Captain Pike, Romulans, Vulcans, Kirk's legendary way with women ... but recast and mixed up so that it's not quite what you expect. The actors are uniformly brilliant, with each managing to capture traits of the original cast members without it being too forced. I particularly liked Simon Pegg's Scottie (along with the almost obligatory appearance by Deep Roy who must hold some sort of record for genre film appearances by now) and Uhura was also nicely played, though I couldn't get my head around her romance with Spock. Sylar out of Heroes played Spock and was suitably broody and logical (even if I did expect him to wave his finger at Kirk and start to trace a line of blood across his forehead ... a little Heroes reference there for the initiated). The effects were awesome, with so many magnificent crowd-pleasing sequences on show. To pick just two: the sight of Vulcan imploding into a black hole was jaw dropping, and I loved, just loved the shot of the Enterprise rising up above the atmosphere of Titan like some sort of submerged behomoth hoving into view. The film managed to play with the emotions maginificently as well, eliciting tears in the pre-credits sequence - and any film that can bring you to tears in less than ten minutes is doing something right! But it then handled the comedy well, with Kirk's inflated hands and tongue, as well as his chase by the plant-monster-thing on the ice planet. Of note in all this is the sequence with Scottie in the water tube - a nicely handled piece of sctick which ended, predictably with Scottie being saved. The plot was well worked out (Doctor Who take note), playing with time in a way which got the brain cells working overtime. I adored the sequence near the end where Nero's ship is being destroyed on one side of the black hole in the sequence at the start of the film, while simultaneously being sucked into itself at the end of the film. Lovely stuff. Nero himself was suitably loony, but perhaps was also the weakest character as although he talked a lot, we never really saw what was driving him apart from his insane desire for revenge at any cost. Overall it's a rollicking two hours, which pass like lightning and which never drags. A brilliant way to revisit and reinvent the series, setting it up for more films, and along the way, by means of the cunning 'alternate time line' conceit, avoiding problems with the hard core fans of maintaining continuity with the original series. Truly a magnificent achievement.