The Reprint Conundrum: Target Doctor Who Novelisations

I was tagged in a Facebook post today (On the Doctor Who Collectors Group) about reprints of the Target Doctor Who novelisations as some collectors were getting very confused about the reprints, how you could identify them and so on. And as it's a far more complex subject than you might imagine, and as Facebook is very transient, I thought it was worth putting some thoughts and explanations on the Blog so that they can be referred to going forward, maintained and updated with new information, and generally remain accessible to anyone who wants to know.

Throughout this piece I will refer to the Toybox site.  This is an online resource for Doctor Who collectors which attempts to catalogue every item of Doctor Who merchandise ever released ... and of course this includes the Target Books. But also, for the Targets, we also tried to document every reprint we knew about or could find. It's not complete, but it's a pretty good starter for ten and also has cover images showing variances and so on ... so it's a good place to go. www.doctorwhotoybox.co.uk

Okay. First things first. These are books, and books have an identifying number called an ISBN. This stands for International Standard Book Number, and is (or should be) a way to uniquely identify a given book. The rules say that every book should have a unique ISBN. If you change the book's format (ie it's physical size) or it's Cover Image, or it's content (significantly rather than minor corrections), or it's language, or it's publisher, or it's title then you should give it a new ISBN. The 'rules' can be found here if you're interested ... https://www.isbn-international.org/content/isbn-assignment.

In practice, however, this doesn't happen, and you get all manner of things going on. But as a general rule of thumb, the ISBN for the Target books follows this pattern.  So the first editions will each have their own ISBN. and that ISBN remains constant until they change the cover art ... most of the time.

If we look at the Book Covers now, and obviously each book has it's own cover. The first 12 books have the 'Block' Doctor Who logo. Which looks like this:

They they changed it to the 'curved' logo like this ('The Giant Robot' was the first title to use this logo but that has Tom Baker's face over the 'O' so is not really representative):

:
Before moving on to the 'neon' logo:

Then the McCoy Logo:

And finally, to a totally different cover design for the last couple of books:

First editions (and we're talking first edition paperbacks here. Most of the Target books had hardback editions as well, some of which were published prior to the paperback editions, some of which were published at the same time as the paperback editions, but NONE of the hardbacks were badged as 'Target') will have specific colours for the logos and text, and these changed for reprint editions. So on the Toybox site, you will see that we try to highlight what is different or specific about which edition of the book.  Some reprints changed the logo style as well, and also the artwork changed for a reprint ... but not always.

But be careful when checking cover colours and spine/back cover colours as they can fade and change to different colours with extended exposure to sunlight.

So usually you can initially spot what might be a first edition from the cover, the logo, and the colourings ... but there can be some other changes too ... You see that first edition cover of 'The Daleks' above? Well the tagline under the Author Name 'Based on the popular BBC television series' ... that line is missing off some of the reprints.

There's also part of the ISBN number printed on the first edition spine of the first three titles only, and this is missing off some of the reprints ... so you have to be observant and diligent to be able to spot a first edition.

The other good identifier on the books is the cover price.  The books started at 25p each, but then rose in price, pretty much each year. So the price will give an indication as to which year the book originated from. And bearing in mind the confusion over the insides (see later) this is very helpful indeed.

Moving to the insides of the book, and the first thing to note is that these books were all produced back in the days when the covers and the insides were printed separately, and then brought together when the books were bound. What this means is that sometimes the publisher found themselves with stacks of covers, and no books to put in them ... or sometimes it was the other way round, they had lots of what are called 'book blocks' and no covers to wrap around them.

So what they would do, was to reprint either the covers or the insides so they could bind the books and get them out to shops.  BUT when they did this, they sometimes made changes to the insides or the covers ... so you can have a first edition cover, with a second edition book block inside it ... or a first edition book block with a reprint edition cover around it.

Another aspect of this is rejacketing, where older copies of the book would have their jackets removed ('stripped off') and a new jacket put in their place. This happened when there were large numbers of stocks of a book in the publishers warehouse, and the publisher wanted to perhaps increase the jacket price on them, or to change the jacket for a new illustration or branding, thus refreshing the stock and allowing it to be sold ...

This makes it VERY hard to try and definitively pin down what edition is what ... there are so many changes!

Another point to note is that when covers were reprinted, they sometimes didn't go back to the original plates and artwork, and instead used a previous cover to reprint from. This means that some subsequent reprint covers are 'zoomed in' and lack detail. Also the colours can be harsher ... all these things are because they just took an earlier cover and used that as the basis for the new reprint.

Look at page 4 of a given book, and you will find the publishing information. This is supposed to tell you which edition it is, and sometimes publishers will print in it 'Second Edition' or 'Reprinted 1996, 1997 (twice), 1999' or whatever to show which this copy is.  Another way this is done is by printing a sequence of numbers like this '2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3'. That sequence would indicate a second edition as the '2' is the lowest number there ... Others might have '3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12' which would indicate a third edition as '3' is the lowest number there.

Here's an example of a First Edition Target:

You can see that it DOESN'T SAY it's a first edition.  Some books will however note this.

Here's the same page from a reprint edition:

You can see the FIRST PUBLISHED information, and that it also says SECOND IMPRESSION and REPRINTED IN ...  So this is possibly a second edition, or possibly a third edition (the information can be interpreted to mean that the Second Impression was then reprinted again ... making this a third impression).

However, sometimes they didn't update the information on this page when they reprinted, meaning that while the cover might have been different, with a different price, the insides remained the same.

Here's another example of a reprint interior:

Here you can see the four reprints are noted.

If you look on the Toybox site, you'll see that some of the books have loads and loads of reprints, while others have very few indeed, and some have none!  This is simply because as the range continued, the publishers learned how many to print, and if they got their sums right, then no reprint was ever needed. Especially too as they got to the end of the range, when they knew that they couldn't afford to end up with loads in stock ...  Again, the print runs, where known, are noted in the Toybox listings.

I think those are the main points ... to summarise:

Check the cover:

• Is the logo correct
• Is the colour correct
• Is the cover image correct
• Is the cover price correct
• Is the ISBN correct

Check inside:

• Does it indicate any reprint editions?
• Is the ISBN the same as the cover?

If all these are confirmed, then congratulations, you probably have a first edition!

Review: The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye) 1958

We watch a lot of films here ... some of them come in for review, others are just for pleasure ... and with this one, I found it lurking on a new-ish TV Channel called Talking Pictures ... and I had to see it.

The last time I saw it was a long time ago - so long in fact that I couldn't really remember any of the details ... but gosh it's a good film. It's actually quite a surprise that this has never been remade ... one wonders what modern effects could manage which might surpass what is presented here.

Made in black and white in 1958, it stars Forrest Tucker as a UN Troubleshooter-type who is heading to Trollenberg to check up on a scientific viewing station there, led by Warren Mitchell with a great Germanic accent!  On the train are a couple of sisters, one of whom is psychic and who collapses, insisting that they get off at the stop.

They're all soon embroiled in a mystery on the mountain, where a strange mist or fog seems to move about of its own volition. It's radioactive too, and people who find themselves caught in the mists are then found with their heads torn off.

The film, from a screenplay by Jimmy Sangster (who has more superb credits to his name than I have had hot dinners: just check out his credits on Wiki here), mixes together a lot of things which seem familiar. It's a little like a classic Doctor Who adventure in a way, and even has a gruesome prologue where a hapless climber is killed. The moving fog, and whole 'something in the fog' trope has been used of course in films like The Fog, The Mist and Silent Hill ... and the idea of radioactive aliens being behind it all is just classic 50's sci fi.

But boy are these aliens good. The film was called The Crawling Eye in America and for good reason, as that's just what these creatures look like. They are amazing. Their bodies are lit from within, and they have waving, seeking tentacles. A single eye is mounted on the front, and it moves about, seeking the victims out. It looks like a real human eye, and I suspect that the creatures were built around a human head, incorporating the eye into their design. They are amazing, original and very creepy.  They also make a sort of screeching and wailing sound as they approach which is also quite terrifying.  I wonder if anyone has any behind the scenes pictures of them?

The first time we see one of them is when a small child is cornered by one in the hotel. This is a very daft scene in many ways as previously no children were seen or even mentioned ... and suddenly there is one in danger! But the whole thing is so well done, that you can forgive a lapse like this and just go with the flow!

Overall it's quite a superb piece of filmmaking, with some brilliant effects to cap it all. Well worth a watch.

There's a trailer for the film here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un84y-zrGNs

And the full film seems to be here:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1980q5_trollenberg-terror-the-crawling-eye-1958_shortfilms

Review: Satan's Blade (1984)

Yet another Arrow release from the 80's slasher camp, and another that I'd never heard of before. I wonder where they keep finding them! Unfortunately it might have been better if this one had stayed lost!

It's a puzzling story which suggests that a knife is cursed, and that anyone who comes into contact with it turns into a bloodthirsty maniac. We open with two girls robbing a bank, killing people there, heading for their hideaway, stashing the loot, before one kills the other, and then she herself is slaughtered by an unseen assailant. We then leap five years later to when two couples, and a group of five girls, are checking into a holiday lodge which is where the earlier murders were committed. Of course the murders start up again, with people being stalked and killed ... but is it the old fisherman by the lake? Or someone else committing the murders? And what about that stash of money which stays hidden throughout the film ... ultimately it's pointless as it has no bearing on anything ...

Of course who the killer is, is the big payoff, but it's not that much of a surprise.  Elsewhere the film has a lot of nudity, so much so, that it veers into soft porn territory at times ...

Unfortunately the cast are uniformly terrible, with bad delivery and poor acting at every turn. The blood looks like tomato sauce (it probably was) and overall it's a mess of a film. In fact it's the sort of film you get if you have the same person writing, directing and producing it, and the culprit here is one L Scott Castillo Jr. But not him alone as Thomas Cue wrote the screenplay and also acts in the film.

There's an extra in which Castillo Jr, interviewed by a mystery woman called Pam, shows us some of the 'artifacts' from the film, which include reels of the actual film, and old video covers, and a knife which looks nothing like the one in the film ... It's all rather painful.

As you can tell, I really wasn't enamoured with this one, and it's a struggle to come up with anything to praise it for. Even the music score is a synthesised mess ...

It's independent filmmaking at its most raw and unfocussed.




SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS

•Brand new 2K restoration of the film presented in both 4:3 (1.37:1) and 1.85:1 versions
•High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations
•Original Mono audio (uncompressed PCM on the Blu-ray)
•Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
•Brand new audio commentary by podcast The Hysteria Continues
•Interview with writer-director L. Scott Castillo, Jr.
•Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matt Ryan Tobin
•Fully-illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Brian Albright, author of Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990

Review: Return of the Killer Tomatoes (1988)

This is a great little film! And one which I'd not seen before. I've not even seen the original Killer Tomatoes film, so had no preconceptions as to what this might all be about. But as sequels go, this is pretty enjoyable and well done fare. It's streets above other 'so bad they're good' type films, and I'd almost go so far to say that this is 'so good it's good'!

The basic plot is that there's a mad scientist, Professor Gangreen superbly played by John Astin (the original Gomez Addams), who has discovered a way to turn tomatoes into people. So he has created Rambo-esque guards for his house, and also a hot female assistant (Karen Mistal). In fact she is so hot she's steaming! Except that said assistant falls for one of the lads from the local high school, and he and his mate (played by a young George Clooney) decide to try and liberate her ...

It's generally a nonsensical romp of a film, with some brilliant '80s moments. I love how it starts as a beach movie, with a whole bevvy of unfeasibly hot babes in bikinis, and then moves into sideswipes at consumerism as they try product placement of all types to try and get enough money to finish the film ...  Tomatoes are bad as well and are smuggled in, while people run around screaming if there is even a hint of tomato! Chad (Anthony Starke) and Matt (George Clooney) work in a pizza place and pizzas are made with every ingredient but tomato as well - strawberry jam being one such replacement, and the whole film is silly and yet compelling.

As mentioned, I was somewhat entranced by Karen Mistal who plays Tara Boumdeay (Professor Gangreen's assistant). She is stunning and with a body ... what a body ... The '80s fashions really work to her advantage in this regard. We even get a return of the bikini girls at the end as Matt uses the Professor's machine to create some hot girlfriends for himself.

I loved the film. I liked the sense of self-awareness that it has, the breaking of the fourth wall, the insanity of the plot, and the gorgeous girls of course. For the ladies, there is of course George Clooney, and another assistant of the Professor called Igor, who is a handsome blond chap with a very educated speaking voice (Steve Lundquist).

It reminded me a lot of the more recent Sharkanado movies, with the same sense of the absurd and rollicking fun which they embody.

My one disappointment here is in the extras on this new Blu-Ray release from Arrow. Usually Arrow stuff their disks with tons of material, but here there's only a recent interview with Anthony Starke to round it off (there's a trailer and a couple of other minor elements, but no documentary or behind the scenes information. Ah well.

Worth getting to watch with your mates on a beer and pizza night. Just watch out for the tomatoes!

SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations
• Original Stereo audio (uncompressed PCM on the Blu-ray)
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Brand new audio commentary with writer-director John De Bello
• Brand new interview with star Anthony Starke
• Original Theatrical Trailer
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matthew Griffin
• Fully-illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by critic James Oliver

H G Wells and Neil Gaiman Stories on TV

I love short stories ... they're great in collections, and anthologies, and the very best make you think and feel emotions ... they can also be experimental in a way that might be tricky at a longer length, but they can also be varied and range from funny to horrific to gut-wrenching, to sad ... there really is no limit!

No surprise then that some of my favourite television is in the 'Short Story' field. Anthology series which take a the form of stand-alone tales of terror (or science fiction). Among such series in the past have been Out of the Unknown, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Hunger, Tales of the Unexpected and Urban Gothic. All of them presented some great material during their runs, and all managed to make the most of what modest budgets they had available.

Unfortunately, in more recent years, this sort of Anthology series has all but vanished. All people seem to want are character-driven series with season arcs and cliffhanger endings to each season ... the idea of telling discrete stories each week doesn't exist. There was Black Mirror of course which took a more political slant on the genre, but it's hard to think of any others.

Which is why I was excited to see, first, a little series of films based on the work of H G Wells - The Nightmare Worlds of H G Wells, and, more recently, four of Neil Gaiman's short stories presented in similar fashion. I suppose one could also include here Mark Gatiss' brilliant M R James adaptation of The Tractate Middoth from a couple of Christmasses ago ...

The H G Wells stories were an interesting bunch, and I have to admit to not being very familiar with his short works. From what was presented, I got the feeling that they struggled to find ones which were actually adaptable to television. The themes seemed a little muddled in each, and the outcomes very obvious. I liked a lot the one about the old man who 'jumps' into the body of a younger man as he seeks immortality, and I also liked the one about the poisonous mushrooms, in which Shaun Parkes shines.

The direction of these was also well thought through, with largely black drapes taking the place of backgrounds, and the action taking place in a sort of theatre set, slightly removed from reality.  This was, presumably, a cost-saving measure, but it worked in the telling of the stories, making them slightly spiky and unreal. I'm not sure though that I could believe Ray Winstone as H G Wells. His accent being somewhat offputting, and not how I had ever imagined Mr Wells to sound (I have to admit, I have no idea what Wells' accent would have been, however!)

The four stories chosen were: The Late Mr Elvesham, The Devotee of Art, The Moth and The Purple Pileus.

Overall, however, I enjoyed Sky's presentation of these tales, and it was very refreshing to see proper short stories dramatised on television.

The Neil Gaiman stories were given the overall title of Likely Stories, and there were again four chosen: Foreign Parts, Feeders and Eaters, Closing Time and Looking for the Girl.

Unfortunately I was less taken with these adaptations, though for the most part they were well made and cast. I liked seeing Montserrat Lombard in every one - she's a superb actress and brings a full range of emotion (and accents) to each role. I was less enamoured with comedian Johnny Vegas telling stories in a gentleman's club though.

Probably the best of them was Feeders and Eaters where Lombard plays a girl waitressing in a cafe who hears stories from her clientele. One such comes from a young man who has met and is looking after an old, old woman (excellently played by Rita Tushingham) ... but she needs fresh meat to survive, and the implication, very subtly done, is that she is literally eating him alive. It's so subtle though that you could miss it - I only knew because I published Gaiman's story in one of Telos' anthologies a few years back!

This is basically the problem with them though, there's not much story there. Gaiman is a brilliant writer and novelist, but the short stories they chose are perhaps not his best. But then I'm not the director/producer and don't know what criteria they were looking for. It's certainly true that all four are seedy and dark and dwell on the human condition ... so perhaps this was what they were aiming for. And if so, they succeeded!

Foreign Parts in particular made me feel quite grubby - it's about a venereal disease which takes over its host and makes them a better person somehow ... very strange.

I really hope that these two series have been successful for Sky and that they are moved to widen their net and seek out more authors and more works to bring to the small screen. There is such a wealth of potential out there that it seems a shame to limit it to just two authors ...

Review: Blood Bath (1966)

The new Arrow release of Blood Bath is not so much a release of a film, as an entire set devoted to how Roger Corman, Frances Ford Coppola, Jack Hill, Stephanie Rothman et al managed to take an obscure, unreleased Yugoslavian film and create another three films from it.  It's quite an undertaking, and included on this blu-ray set is a truly excellent feature wherein Tim Lucas takes us through all the different versions, explaining what happened, when and how and why.

I have to admit that Blood Bath is not a film I had previously seen, nor was particularly aware of, and as a black and white 1966 horror, which is fairly incomprehensible in places (and which has nothing whatsoever to do with some of the illustrative poster and ad art), it's a hard watch. William Campbell plays an artist, who is also a vampire, who is famed for his images of dead girls. In fact he paints them and then kills them, or vice versa, dipping them in wax in his studio. He is tormented by the ghost of a dead woman, and his undoing comes when this spirit summons his dead and waxed women to come alive at the end and kill him!

What is fascinating about all this, is how footage from a film called Operation: Titian, made around 1963, was cannibalised into three other films called: Blood Bath, Portrait in Terror and Track of the Vampire. I won't go into the detail here, but there's a general overview of what happened on the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Bath.

It's interesting to see Sid Haig, years away from starring as Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses, and Patrick Magee, better known from films like Tales from the Crypt and Asylum, not to mention The Monster Club, making appearances here, and both do well with the material. William Campbell also does a good job, as do the various directors, matching shots and details from the earlier versions into something which sort-of hangs together.

As always, the presentation by Arrow is excellent. All four films are included in the package, so I suppose you could try and make your own versions if you so wished, as well as various documentaries and commentaries.

It's certainly a release for film historians and those interested in the career of Roger Corman, and also as an object lesson perhaps in how film-making used to be done.

LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS

• Limited Edition collection of the complete Blood Bath

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation of four versions of the film: Operation Titian, Portrait in Terror, Blood Bath and Track of the Vampire

• Brand new 2K restorations of Portrait in Terror, Blood Bath and Track of the Vampire from original film materials

• Brand new reconstruction of Operation Titian using original film materials and standard definition inserts • Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing on all four versions

• The Trouble with Titian Revisited – a brand new visual essay in which Tim Lucas returns to (and updates) his three-part Video Watchdog feature to examine the convoluted production history of Blood Bath and its multiple versions

• Bathing in Blood with Sid Haig – a new interview with the actor, recorded exclusively for this release

• Archive interview with producer-director Jack Hill

• Stills gallery

• Double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artworks

• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Dan Mumford

• Limited edition booklet containing new writing on the film and its cast by Anthony Nield, Vic Pratt, Cullen Gallagher and Peter Beckman

Poster for Blood Bath. The film does not include blondes being
chained up, nor dipping girls in boiling blood. There are no skeletons, and no torture
chamber, and no rack on which a girl is strapped. There is no shrieking of mutilated victims,
and no-one is caged in a black pit of horror. There is however
a net which is used to dip a dead brunette in wax ...

Time and Spaces

Received through the post a lovely little book from the nice people at Miwk Publishing ... this is Time and Spaces: A Photo Journal of Doctor Who Filming by Yee Jee Tso.

The informed among you will realise that Yee Jee played the 'Asian Child' Chang Lee in the 1996 Doctor Who TV Movie which starred Paul McGann as the Doctor ... and thus this book is a record of the recording and locations of that TV Movie.

What Yee Jee has done is to revisit the locations 'today' and photograph them, putting them into the context of the TV Movie. There are a few excerpts from recording schedules, quotes and reminiscences from Sylvester McCoy and Daphne Ashbrook, and some lovely photos from the studio recording.

It's a shame that there aren't more photos from the actual recording on location, but instead we get a selection of lovely images of these places as they are 'today', with descriptions of how they were used for the making of the TV Movie.

It's a fascinating little memoir, and a trip down memory lane to the locations and places where history was made back in 1996, when the Doctor was back ... and it was about time!

Time and Spaces by Yee Jee Tso
Available from Miwk Publishing: www.miwkpublishing.com

12th Doctor's 2nd Sonic Screwdriver

It's been a long time since I was sent one of Character Options' Doctor Who products to review ... but at last they come through with the 12th Doctor's second Sonic Screwdriver ...

This first appeared in the last episode of season 9, 'Hell Bent', and was something of a surprise when the Doctor produced it from his pocket.

The main immediate difference from its predecessors is that there is no 'focussing' element at the end, instead there is a crystal-like structure which on screen reminded me a little of a Metebelis crystal. Otherwise it's the usual tube-like device with various bits and bobs on it - though different bits and bobs here to previous screwdrivers.

The operation here is a single push/pull switch on the side. Pushing it once and holding it activates a green light and a buzz, while pushing it twice and holding it makes it flash green with a whine sound. Pulling it once and holding it activates a blue light and a different buzz, while pulling it twice and holding it makes it flash blue 'chasing' around in a circle with yet another whining sound.

It's pretty cool, though it is quite hard to activate the 'two push/pull' functions. My thumb was hurting from the effort of holding the switch in place to make them work. It's also not obvious that there even is a 'two pull/push' element - I had to actually read the packaging to find out what it did! Perhaps the activation contacts could have been bigger and easier to connect to, or maybe just having four little buttons to press would have been a lot easier to navigate.

It might also have been nice if there were a couple of other manual functions to the toy - like the way that the old ones had an extending shaft and so on. However I guess that this would have pushed the manufacturing costs up.

It's a smashing looking toy though, and as the Sonic Screwdrivers have, over the years, become synonymous with the Doctor, it's nice that the newest one is available to buy in toy form.

The toy should be in the shops 'within weeks' Character say, but I'm sure there are some retailers around who will be taking pre-orders very soon.

Review: Bride of the Reanimator (1990)

H P Lovecraft has a fascinating legacy in films. I'm not sure there has ever been a wholly successful adaptation of his work (Wiki lists 33 films based on his work!), but the Re-Animator films give it a good shot.

Produced by Brian Yuzna. directed by Stuart Gordon, and starring Jeffrey Combs as Doctor Herbert West, Re-Animator (1985) was a great little film, chronicling Dr West's experiments with a luminous liquid which could re-animate the dead. Very watchable and entertaining, the film has since gained a cult following as these things do, and spawned two sequels.

After its success, Yuzna and Gordon turned to another Lovecraft tale for their next offering, From Beyond, and after that, Yuzna alone decided to go back and see what Herbert West was up to, the result being Bride of the Re-Animator. That these films were in part based on the old Frankenstein films can be no secret, with even the titles following the order of the old Universal classics.

Bride of the Re-Animator, while not quite as good as the original film, nevertheless has a good stab at being entertaining, crazy and quirky all at the same time. Once again Herbert West wields his glowing serum, but this time it allows him to create all sorts of monstrous creations through the connection together of various body parts. Thus a dog ends up with a human arm and hand, there's a cute little creature made from five fingers and an eyeball, and, as we reach the end of the film, a whole room full of monstrous creations straight from the crazed mind of FX artist Screaming Mad George.

The film is certainly paying respects to The Bride of Frankenstein with the creation of a statuesque female by Dr West from various body parts, including the heart of his assistant's girlfriend! When she rises, it's straight out of the black and white Universal film, with mad hair and jerky movements. And of course she never asked to be created in the first place ...

I really enjoyed the film, and it has a lot going for it. The monstrous creatures at the end are marvellous and I found it all channelling a sort of Freaks or The Sentinel vibe for me, as well as the more obvious Frankenstein influences. What is interesting is how close some of the plot elements are to the original H P Lovecraft story. According to details here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_West%E2%80%93Reanimator, the original work was serialised over six parts, with the first two being used for the original Re-Animator film, and the last two for Bride of the Re-Animator.

Overall the film is part of a very nice offering from Arrow, with the usual selection of documentaries and commentaries.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 3-DISC LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS

Brand new 2K restorations of the Unrated and R-rated versions of the film, approved by director Brian Yuzna

High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations

Original Stereo 2.0 audio (uncompressed PCM on the Blu-ray)

Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

Newly commissioned artwork by Gary Pullin

Limited Edition Collector’s Booklet

Limited Edition Packaging to be revealed

DISCS 1 & 2 – BLU-RAY/DVD – UNRATED VERSION

Brand new 2K restoration of the Unrated version

Brand new audio commentary with Brian Yuzna

Audio Commentary with Brian Yuzna, star Jeffrey Combs, visual effects supervisor Tom

Rainone and the effects team including John Buechler, Mike Deak, Bob Kurtzman, Howard Berger and Screaming Mad George

Audio Commentary with stars Jeffrey Combs and Bruce Abbott

Brian Yuzna Remembers Bride of Re-animator – brand new featurette in which the director looks back at the making of the first Re-animator sequel

Splatter Masters: The Special Effects Artists of Bride of Re-animator – Brand new FX featurette with a wealth of behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with Robert Kurtzman of KNB, Screaming Mad George, Tony Doublin and John Buechler

Getting Ahead in Horror – archive making-of featurette

Deleted Scenes

DISC 3 – BLU-RAY – R-RATED VERSION

Brand new 2K restoration of the R-rated version

The Target Book - Redux

It's always lovely when a book about a subject you're passionate about gets published, and even moreso when it's written by you!  Thus it was when The Target Book was launched on an unsuspecting public back in 2007. The reception it got was brilliant, people seemed to love it! We ended up doing (I think) two print runs with our Indian printers (at the time, printing in India was cheaper than in the UK, even factoring in the shipping costs) of the paperback edition, and two different limited edition hardbacks with leatherette covers ... even so, eventually the paperbacks ran out, and the book slipped out of print.

We then had a problem. I would have loved to have got the book onto a Print On Demand system so that copies could still be bought, but the physical page size we had chosen (as being the largest we could do for the rrp we wanted it to be) was not compatible with any system, so we couldn't use the PDFs we had, and I didn't want to have to completely re-lay out the book. Printing in the UK was too expensive for full colour at a short print run, and so we just had to accept that the book was out of print and move on.

But people kept coming and asking about it, perhaps driven by the silly prices that copies of the book were displaying online (many of these driven by crazy automated pricing algorithms ... I suspect no book was ever sold at the prices being charged!) and we had to keep turning people away.

The BBC Books reissue.

Then, in 2016, several things happened all at once. Firstly I was approached by the BBC about whether I would lend some of my original Target cover art for an exhibition which was planned in London. I was uncertain, as there seemed to be absolutely no benefit to me in lending the pieces. It was to promote some reprints of the novelisations being released by the BBC, and the gallery was apparently charging an entrance fee for customers to see the exhibition, yet there was no loan fee, and no benefit to me in taking part. So I initially declined. The BBC in the form of Edward Russell was disappointed, but understood my rationale, and I think it was he who suggested, why don't you see if the gallery would sell copies of your book on the range? Not realising that it was long out of print.

In the same week, I had a call from a regular printers that we use at Telos Publishing, and in the course of the call, I mentioned that we had this full colour book, and we'd love to bring it back into print. My contact then told me that they had just got in some new colour machines, and that she thought we could do it for a cost which worked (obviously the unit cost - what the publisher pays the printer - for a book has to be low enough that when trade discounts and so on are applied, plus all the publishers' costs, that the book can make a profit for the publisher, otherwise there's no point in doing it).  So we knocked some numbers around, and yes indeed, we could produce a new edition of the book for a cost which worked ...

So I then looked at the book more seriously to see what might need to be done. I checked with Arnold T Blumberg, who had laid the book out originally, to ensure that he still had the files, and that he could make changes to it if needed, and yes indeed he did.

BBC Books' 50th Anniversary edition

The immediate thing which needed attention was at the back of the book. We had seven pages of advertisements at the back of the first version, and pretty much all of them were now out of date. So why not use those seven pages more productively for a new Appendix, which could bring the story up to date. When we published the first edition, BBC Audio had only just started releasing the Target novelisations on audio, and indeed there was a short sidebar which discussed that elsewhere in the book. And BBC Books hadn't started their programme of reprints at all. So I could cover both of those developments properly in a new section. So I got started writing and researching. Luckily everyone involved was happy to help, so I got information from Michael Stevens who has produced the audio ranges, Ben Willsher who did some of the new artwork covers for the audios, Justin Richards, BBC Books Consultant and Albert dePetrillo, managing editor at BBC Books. With interviews completed, facts assembled, and artwork pulled together (Chris Achilleos kindly snapped some pics of his original sketches for the new covers he had done for the BBC for me to use in the book!) it was all taking shape nicely.

With the new section completed, I also had to address elements in the rest of the book. Paul Scoones kindly supplied a list of minor errors which he had spotted in the book, so these were corrected. I reworked the sidebar about audio releases to remove all the BBC Audio ones (as those were now covered in the Appendix) and to expand it slightly to include all the audio versions of TV stories which had been released beforehand. I missed off the Century 21 EP of episode 6 of 'The Chase' as that's not strictly a novelisation, more of a condensed and narrated version of the episode itself, likewise with the Genesis of the Daleks LP. But all the actual novelisations are now listed, from 1978's talking books onwards.

BBC Books' new edition
with new cover art

Other illustrative detail came from artist Jason Fletcher (Fletch!), who had kindly supplied an image of the fourth Doctor to use as a foil stamp on the back of the second deluxe, limited edition hardback. I felt that it would be nice to include that somewhere, and so it became part of the endpaper design for this new edition. Finally, Alister Pearson suggested using a piece which David Lavelle had created for the Target Exhibition which showed both the first and seventh Doctors against a Target background. We managed to fit this on the Dedication page (which I had always thought was a little empty before). Unfortunately the credit for Alister and David for this image somehow vanished from the files along the way ... so huge apologies to both for that.

Arnold sorted out the layouts, going through several iterations as usual to get everything to work and to fit. We shifted the seven blank pages to before the Index and the Target Cover Gallery as that made more sense, and expanded the Gallery to include all the new editions of the books which BBC Books have released to date. In a way this was a departure from the original intent of the Gallery which was to show all the original covers, and of course most of the new BBC editions use the original Chris Achilleos art, but they are so lovely that we thought it was worth showing them. Of course those titles with new covers (Remembrance of the Daleks, Vengeance on Varos, The Visitation and Battlefield) are also included.

David signing copies of the finished book.

I had decided to release the new edition in hardback - we'd not done a straightforward hardback before - and to that end, I needed to design some endpapers, and also, for the front and back covers, I wanted to take advantage of a new process that the printers had in, a UV gloss ink, which would give a glossy look to the parts of the cover it's applied to.  This is not the same as a UV gloss laminate, which we had experimented with in the past on some of Telos' books printed in India, with variable results, but a fifth run of ink.  To achieve this, I had to supply a mask for the whole cover showing which parts should have the ink applied. Strangely this is more complicated than it sounds, but I managed it.

Thus the whole thing went off to print, with delivery set for the week before the exhibition opened. Now the waiting started!  Along the way, Chris Achilleos reached out to me about my decision not to take part in the exhibition, and after discussing it with Chris, I agreed to loan some of my original pieces for display, in part as a favour to Chris, and in part as I now would have my book available again, and the Gallery had agreed to sell some!

The Sticker!

A friend called Matt Doe also got in touch. Matt is a dealer and collector of Who toys and so our interests intersect! Matt offered to produce a little sticker of the cover art from The Target Book to give to people who ordered it direct from Telos. It was a brilliant idea, and so we sorted that out ... thus we had a lovely little extra to say thanks to everyone who supported the book by pre-ordering it.

The books arrived yesterday (22nd April) and look totally brilliant. The printing quality is lovely - the original edition was a little dark in places on the printing, a feature I think of the heavier quality paper which was being used, and also of the Indian printing presses - and the cover with the matt and glossy areas is beautiful. I'm very happy.

I hope everyone who visits the Cartoon Gallery in London to see the original Target art will fall in love with it in the same way as it has captured me and so many others over the years. I hope people will be interested enough to want to get a copy of the book too!

As I have been writing this piece, the first review has come in ... hopefully this bodes well for the future :) https://scifibulletin.com/doctor-who/reviews/review-doctor-who-books-the-target-book/


The Target Book
Written by David J Howe with Tim Neal
Foreword by Terrance Dicks
176pp. Large format 22cm x 28cm hardback. Fully illustrated in full colour throughout.
ISBN 978-1-84583-114-1
Available from: http://www.telos.co.uk/product/the-target-book-hb-pre-order/

Doctor Who: The Target Books Artwork runs from 28 April – 11 May 2016 at The Cartoon Museum, 35 Little Russell Street, London WC1A 2HH
Website: http://www.cartoonmuseum.org/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/50174-doctor-who-the-target-book-artwork

Jessica Jones

Television today is a bewildering array of choices. And to add to all the TV Channels on Sky/Virgin/Supplier of Choice, there's also Netflix to contend with. There also seems to be more genre fare than ever, with a new horror/fantasy/SciFi series debuting every week!  So it's hard to know what to watch and follow.

Thus it was that we stumbled across Jessica Jones. I'm not a comic reader so had never heard of her or the series, but we did a little digging, saw that it starred David Tennant, and so decided to give it a go. And I'm glad that we did.

Jessica Jones is a strange beast. A show which has superheroes in but which doesn't major on that fact. There's no (well, limited) explanations. And the characters are not all likeable. But it works so well, and when it kicks into gear, it really grips with a thrilling narrative quite unlike anything I've seen before.

The basic idea is that Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) is a private eye, and she's quite good at her job. But she's tortured and beaten inside because of a relationship with a man called Kilgrave (David Tennant) who has the power to make anyone do what he says. Jessica has a power too, she's immensely strong, and can jump or fall long distances without hurting herself, She has a relationship with Luke (Mike Colter) who owns a bar, and he has a power too: he is indestructible and his skin cannot be broken by anything.

As the story progresses, so Jessica tracks Kilgrave down, but the man is so twisted and evil, leaving programmed commands in people to kill themselves and others. To cut out their own hearts, or to murder loved ones. The instructions have to be carried out, the victims cannot help themselves, and so Kilgrave is able to take over houses and apartments, to turn an entire police station or hospital against themselves and others ... he's a demon!

The series progresses over 13 episodes, with Jessica getting closer and closer, trying to shield those she loves against Kilgrave's wiles, but all the time failing and falling.

I won't say how it all ends, as it needs to be watched to appreciate. Krysten Ritter is brilliant as Jessica, managing to keep going, and to keep the 'hidden' levels of angst and pain visible on her face, even as she struggles to catch up with Kilgrave. David Tennant is, as usual, brilliant. He's using his English Doctor Who voice here rather than his natural Scottish, and he comes over as immoral, crazy, yet haunted by Jessica who is his only weakness. It's a great performance.

If you get a chance to catch it, do so. If you love crime drama tinged with the supernatural then you should love it.

Review: Thieves' Highway (1949)

Arrow Academy dual-format Blu-Ray/DVD release, 19 October 2015

The movie

The late-era film noir Thieves’ Highway is held in high regard by many fans of the genre, but its great reputation is – in this reviewer’s opinion – not entirely deserved.

The main problem with the movie lies in its scripting, and more particularly its characterisation. The story centres around war veteran Nick Garcos (Richard Conte), who returns home to the States to find that his truck-driver father has lost both of his legs in an accident arranged by unscrupulous San Francisco market trader Mike Figlia (Lee J Cobb) as part of a scheme to avoid paying him for a consignment of tomatoes. Joining forces with a deceitful former associate of his father’s, Nick drives to the city with a truckload of prized Golden Delicious apples, seemingly intent on using this as a pretext to make contact with Figlia and exact revenge on him. So far, so good. However, it appears that, on arriving in San Francisco, Nick promptly forgets all about his revenge motive after he manages to get Figlia to pay him a good price for the apples – despite having foolishly abandoned his truck right outside the man’s market stall, predictably prompting him to help himself to the produce. Then, in a moment of jaw-dropping idiocy, Nick uses a public phone in a crowded café to call his girlfriend Polly (Barbara Lawrence) and brag about how much money he has made, while everyone present listens in. It is no great surprise that, when he later goes for a stroll along a deserted waterfront, he is attacked and robbed – although it eventually transpires that the culprits are two men sent by Figlia to get his money back. In the meantime, while waiting for Polly to arrive in San Francisco so that they can get married, Nick has started an affair with an Italian prostitute, Rica (Valentina Cortesa), despite knowing that Figlia has paid her to keep him occupied. (Honest, I’m not making this up.) Small wonder that when Polly does arrive, she is none too impressed to find Nick lying on Rica’s bed – although it is only on learning that he has lost all of his money that she immediately gives up on him and leaves! And so the plot staggers on, from one improbable development to another …

In many classic film noirs, the protagonist is dogged by fate at every turn, but in Thieves’ Highway, the misfortunes that Nick suffers are really all the result of his own stupidity – or, at best, unbelievable naivety – which is nowhere near as satisfying. It is only after Nick himself has been repeatedly scammed by Figlia that he apparently remembers why he came to San Francisco in the first place, and physically attacks the man – until, that is, some police officers turn up to deliver the patronising moral that people can’t take the law into their own hands, so Nick should really have left it all to them. Nick then hooks up with Rica, and they drive off into the sunset together in his truck …

To be fair to the movie’s esteemed director Jules Dassin (also responsible for such classics as The Naked City and Rififi), the moralising police officers and the implausible ‘happy ending’ for Nick and Rica were late additions made by the studio, 20^th Century Fox, without his agreement. Where Thieves’ Highway does succeed admirably is in the visual flair that Dassin brings to it, and in its authentic depiction of the lives of the truckers and market traders involved in the Californian fruit and veg trade – an unusual but interesting background for a movie. The outdoor fruit market scenes shot on location in San Francisco’s Oakland Produce Market area are especially effective, with a number of real-life market traders being used as extras; and there are some memorably dramatic incidents on the road as the truckers make the long, tiring journey to San Francisco. In the end, though, the shortcomings with the script really let the whole thing down.

The Arrow Academy Blu-ray

Arrow’s recent Blu-ray release of the movie – which is handily presented in a dual-format package with a DVD (not seen for this review) and a well-designed booklet with an essay by critic Alastair Phillips and some nice stills – has immaculate picture and sound quality, courtesy of an excellent new 4K digital restoration by 20^th Century Fox. A good collection of extras include The Long Haul of A I Bezzerides, a 55-minute documentary portrait of the man who wrote both the movie and its source novel, Thieves’ Market; another new documentary, The Fruits of Labour, in which film noir expert Frank Krutnik, author of the excellent book In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity, discusses the movie’s genesis, production, reception and politics; selected scene and character commentaries by Krutnik; and the theatrical trailer.

Review by Stephen James Walker

Review: The Spider (Edderkoppen)

The six hour-long episodes of the Danish TV serial The Spider (original title Edderkoppen) were released as an English-subtitled two-disc DVD set in the UK last summer, fifteen years after their original broadcast, as part of Arrow Films’ “Nordic Noir” strand of crime dramas. Unlike more famous Danish shows such as Borgen and The Killing (with which it shares a number of principal cast members), The Spider is not a contemporary thriller but a period piece, set in 1949, a time when Denmark was still suffering the after-effects of the Second World War, with many everyday items still subject to rationing. The central character, Bjarne Madsen (Jakob Cedergren), is an idealistic rookie journalist on a left-wing newspaper, who becomes preoccupied with investigating a local ring of black marketeers presided over by the ruthless Svend Aage Hjalmar (Bjarne Henriksen) – “the Spider” at the centre of this web of crime. Bjarne is aided by veteran crime reporter H C Vissing (Bent Vejding), who takes him under his wing, but they find their enquiries obstructed at every turn by corrupt police officers, who are in the pay of Hjalmar.

Partly based on true events, the story is set against the background of a nation struggling to come to terms with its wartime past, when some people joined the resistance to oppose the Nazi occupying force, while others became despised collaborators, creating tension within local communities and even individual families, as shown when Bjarne’s cocky collaborator brother Ole (Lars Mikkelsen) – curiously named after the series’ creator, director and main writer Ole Christian Madsen – returns from a period of effective exile in New York with a wad of cash, intending to set up a jazz club.

This is a very well-made serial, with strong central performances, high production values and good direction, creating a very authentic-seeming period atmosphere. Unfortunately, it is really let down by its scripting. The characters are clichéd and one-dimensional, the situations hackneyed and predictable, and the plotting disjointed and implausible. The end result is that, although The Spider has an interesting setting and an intriguing premise and is very pleasing to look at, sitting through all six episodes becomes really rather a trial.

Arrow Films’ DVD presentation of the serial is a bare-bones one, too, with no extras whatsoever. So, overall, this is sadly not a release I can recommend.

Stephen James Walker

Review: Five Dolls For an August Moon (1970)

So this is a Mario Bava film, and one that I'd never heard of. The director is famed of course, and rightly so, for such masterworks as Black Sunday, but it seems that somewhere after that he lost his mojo.

I have no idea why this film is called Five Dolls for an August Moon. There are no dolls in the film, and no moon either, and it may or may not be set in August. What it seems to be is a sort of rip-off of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, or And Then There Were None, in that there are ten people, five men and five women, on an island, and that they get killed off one by one ... no-one seems to know who the killer is, not least of all the viewer, and to be honest the film is so talky and slow that the viewer actually ceases to care much ... And when we get to the end, it doesn't make sense anyway, with people seemingly vanishing when the police arrive and then reappearing again ... and the police search the house - by which they go to the top of the stairs and without moving a foot further, or calling out, or checking any of the rooms, declare that the place is deserted. It's all very strange.

One of the woman is a sort of 'observer' type character and runs around outside in a short dress or fetching pair of jeans, acting strange, hiding clothes in rocks, eating seafood straight from the water ... that sort of thing. The others are a strange mix of poorly acted Italian stock, looking as though they have just wandered in from whichever Italian Soap Opera was popular at the time ... It's all spinning beds and girls in knickers ... very soft porn stuff.  There is one nice death reveal - where a load of glass balls tumble down a staircase and roll along a passage to a bathroom, falling in the bath where one of the girls seems to have slit her wrists because she can't take it any longer ... I know how she felt!

And the music! Oh my. It sounds as though it's all been played on a Bontempi organ and is dreadful. There's a meat locker in the house (inexplicable) and for some reason all the dead bodies get wrapped in plastic and hung in there.

While I can applaud Arrow for seeking out, cleaning up and issuing all these strange films in high quality Blu-Ray format, it's a shame when the subject matter is as poor as this.

There is an interesting and informative documentary on the disc (apparently from around 2000) where Mark Kermode explores the life and work of Bava. Of particular interest were the parallels between Bava's Planet of the Vampires and Scott's Alien ... where it seems that if Ridley Scott hadn't seen Bava's work, then the writers certainly had ... there are a lot of parallels.

So overall, it's a lovely transfer, clean pictures, incomprehensible film and dreadful music ... Probably unmissable for the Bava completist!

SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS

High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations

Optional English and Italian soundtracks presented in original uncompressed mono PCM audio

Optional isolated Music and Effects track

Optional English subtitles for the Italian audio and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing for the English audio

Audio commentary by Mario Bava’s biographer Tim Lucas

Mario Bava: Maestro of the Macabre – a documentary profile of the director, hosted by Mark Kermode and featuring interviews with Joe Dante, John Carpenter and Tim Burton

Theatrical trailer

Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys

Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Glenn Kenny and a new essay by Adrian Smith on the Fancey family and their efforts to bring international exploitation titles, including Five Dolls for an August Moon, to a UK audience during the 60s, 70s and 80s