The Anthology Pentalogy: A Quintet of Shorter Form Portmanteau Pieces

A quintet of shorter form portmanteau pieces from the dim and flickering twilight world of the monochrome anthology series.  

I love anthology series, me.  From Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery to the sci-fi thrills of The Outer Limits and the dying sputters of Bray under Roy Skeggs with Hammer's House of Horrors and Mystery and Suspense, I am so there for it.  

13 Demon Street: The Vine of Death (Curt Siodmak, 1959)

13 Demon Street is an odd little homunculus - fronted, like Thriller (a.k.a. Boris Karloff Presents) by a veteran of Golden Age horror: in this case Lon Chaney Junior -  and created and written by genre stalwart Curt Siodmak (father of the modern motion picture lycanthropic legend with 1941's The Wolf Man, but also the man behind the 1942 sci-fi/horror novel Donovan's Brain, which has been adapted into film no less than three times [as 1944's The Lady and the Monster starring none other than silent cinema tyro Erich von Stroheim himself as the mad scientist, 1953's Donovan's Brain and 1962's The Brain].  Produced in Sweden for Scandinavian television, the extant episodes of this rarity - though recorded with the European cast speaking English - feature hardcoded Swedish subtitles.

Beginning like every episode with a glimpse of the exterior of the windswept and Mockingbird Lane-esque house at 13 Demon Street, we enter through the creaking door via a moving camera shot that is reminiscent of though obviously nowhere near as ambitious as the title sequence of the beloved 1989 to 1996 HBO Tales From the Crypt series of all our childhoods to be confronted in the shadows of a darkened room by Lon Chaney himself as our daemonic narrator, who introduces the episodes with sometimes witty, epigrammatic comments.  Three episodes of the series ('Condemned in the Crystal', 'The Girl in the Glacier' and 'The Photograph') would later be bundled into the 1961 portmanteau feature film The Devil's Messenger, again featuring Chaney being regaled with the trilogy of tales by a lost soul (Karen Kadler) at His Satanic Majesty's request.

The episode under consideration here is 'The Vine of Death', which was one of the few instalments of the series to receive an official home video release - as a bonus feature on the DVD set of Boris Karloff's The Veil (more on which later).  After being informed by lumbering Lon that we are about to witness the story of "a man who, innocent and trusting, wanted to plant a flower - instead of which he dug his own grave" we segue to Copenhagen where we are introduced to archaeologist Frank Dylan (Swedish actor Ingemar Pallin, doing a creditable American accent) who is hard at work planting in his indoor garden / greenhouse when he is interrupted by acquaintance Wallace Forten (Loritz Falk, credited as Larry Falk).  Frank has had to dig a pit five feet deep, giving the reason that he has to install soil that he's had specially shipped all the way from the Malayan jungle.  He has possession of some calcified tropical vine bulbs dated to between three and four thousand years old that were discovered in an ancient grave and wishes to try and incubate them.  At this point Frank's beautiful young wife Terry (Pat Clavin, who'd had some genre experience in a small role in 1958's The Electronic Monster) enters to complain about the house's garbage disposal not working again, to which the neighbourly Wallace eagerly volunteers his services to cover for Frank's lack of plumbing nous.

Once alone together, it soon becomes obvious that Wallace is very eager (can't blame him really) to reignite his and Pat's past torrid affair, though she seems less keen.  When Frank finishes work early, keen to plant the Mirada bulbs, he finds his wife and friend in a compromising -m though resistant on Terry's part - clinch and a domestic row ensues that ends with Wally stabbing the aggrieved academic to death.  Terry's panicked instinct to call the police is swiftly quashed by Wally, who decides that the best solution is for them to bury Frank in his ready-made grave in the greenhouse.  After planting the Prof the guilty pair must fend off the investigations of Detective Johnson (Don Molin), who takes an interest in the hothouse when he finds the Mirada death vine -which is fabled to strangle its prey - has begun to sprout fro Frank's secret sepulchre,  Of course everything wraps up somewhat predictably in the usual comeuppance . just desserts style of E.C. comics such as Tales from the Crypt as murderous sex pest Wally is throttled in the green embrace of the creeping vine - prefiguring the Alan 'Fluff' Freeman segment of Amicus' Dr Terror's House of Horrors of half a decade hence.     

Suspense: Dead Ernest (Robert Stevens, 1949)

Broadcast - "live, as it's performed", in the immortal words of RokTV's Harfynn Teuport - on May 3rd 1949, I do believe that this kinescope telerecording is the earliest piece of television I've ever seen (obviously, the medium of film is something else entirely).  Taken, like many instalments of Suspense, from a radio script (this one originally penned by the extraordinarily monickered duo of Seeleg Lester and Merwin Gerard) as early US television does seem to have been as much radio with pictures as its UK equivalent was televised stage performances, this adaptation by Reginald Denham and Mary Orr actually marks something of a change from many episodes of Suspense I've seen thus far in that it escapes the television studio interior-bound settings of most of them with quite a few sections of exterior location filming.  This sort of outside filming would usually shot silently, with dialogue confined to medium or close-up inserts filmed in studio, so it's always a fascinating Frankenstein to watch be knitted together in the gallery.

Opening - after the customary ridiculously quaint sponsorship ad spot for Auto-Lite car batteries ("you're always alright with Auto-Lite!") - with the aforementioned outdoors on-location footage on the (mean) streets of New York, we meet couple Ernest (Will Hare) and Margaret (Patricia Jenkins) outside a cinema, where Ernest Bowers is dropping off his wife to enjoy an afternoon feast of "Newsreel, sports short, travelogue, Bugs Bunny and a double feature" - the double feature in question being 1948's One Sunday Afternoon ("have a good romantic fling with Dennis Morgan" Ernest tells Margaret - not Denis Norden, as I misheard!) and Whiplash - while he heads off for Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers.  As he leaves for the ball game, his dutiful wife makes sure that he is wearing his medical bracelet and has the letter explaining his medical condition in his jacket pocket in case of emergencies; for Ernest, like Madeleine Usher, suffers from catalepsy and can at the drop of a hat slip into a deathlike coma.

As Ernest leaves the studio-bound box office and returns to film to cross the actual road, he fails to heed the very real traffic and is involved in a close-call car collision that leaves him insentient and insensate in the street.  The crowd of rubbernecking onlookers that gather round him as well as a policeman take him for dead, his bracelet disc having cone loose and slid into the gutter and the note in his jacket going unnoticed as the aforesaid coat, which the cop had used as a makeshift pillow whilst trying to revive him, is surreptitiously taken by unscrupulous tailor Murdoch (Barry Macollum,  giving an 'Oirish' performance so stereotypical it could almost be offensive if he wasn't actually Irish in real life).  Taking the garment and scuttling back to his shop, Murdoch sells it on to young newlyweds Henry (Tod Andrews) and Fran (Margaret Phillips, a rather lovely Welsh actress who made quite a career on US TV from the late '40s through the early '60s, appearing in shows such as Lights Out [more on which anon] and One Step Beyond as well as further instalments of Suspense).  Arriving home, they discover the document in the pocket detailing Ernest's catalepsy and pleading that his body not be subjected to embalming or autopsy for a period of 72 hours lest he not be dead.

Failing to get through to the Bowers' doctor on the number supplied in the missive (the errant medic thoughtlessly being away on holiday as his patient patiently awaits the dissecting knife on the mortuary slab) the dynamic duo race against the clock to reach the morgue before the dormant Ernest is eviscerated in his torpor and pumped full of formaldehyde by the pathologists (Fred Stewart and Joshua Shelley), who have taken the telephone off the hook to listen to the ball game that the soporous supposed stiff should have been watching himself.

A nicely tense little episode reminiscent of Poe's 'The Premature Burial', as well as later fare such as the 'Breakdown' episode of more prestigious anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 'Dead Ernest' is an intriguing and brief enough time filler with a gripping premise as well as a fascinating artefact of early television drama.   

Lights Out: The Lost Will of Dr Rant (Laurence Schwab Jr.)

Like Suspense before it, Lights Out started out on radio before making the jump to the screen starting with four specials in 1946 acting as prelude to a full series of half hour episodes beginning in 1949.  Hosted initially by Italian-American actor and veteran gangster film heavy Jack LaRue, the reins were taken over after the first year by radio announcer and personality Frank Gallop (charmingly and evocatively referred to as "the hollow-voiced man with the ectoplasmic eyebrows" by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram) who appeared onscreen as a disembodied head against a black background eerily lit by a solitary flickering candle to preside over the evening's proceedings.

The episode 'The Lost Will of Dr Rant' holds the unique position in the (un)hallowed halls of eerie tales fame as being the first ever television adaptation of an M.R. James story, preceding the BBC's arts flagship Omnibus presenting Jonathan Miller's 'Whistle and I'll Come to You' by some seventeen years.  By a weird twist of fate, 'twas only the night before I viewed this very episode that I happened to rewatch - for the first time since its initial broadcast - the 2013 BBC A Ghost Story for Christmas adaptation of the very same story, which went out under the tale's original title: 'The Tractate Middoth'.  This wasn't an intentional 'compare and contrast' exercise or anything, but complete coincidence.  The dark and eldritch things do move in mysterious ways.

Broadcast on May the 7th 1951, we begin proceedings with the customary intro from the spectral and candlelit Gallop inquiring as to whether the audience is looking for "a good book to relax with tonight" before assuring that there exists a "strangely curious one..." - with which we transition to a library where Bill (Leslie Nielsen - yes that Leslie Nielsen, way before the Zuckers' Airplane! stuck him in the parody comic circuit and still five years away from Altair V - the eponymous Forbidden Planet) is dealing with the strangely irascible John Eldred (Russell Collins).  Mr Eldred is after a very particular tome, but is reluctant to go upstairs alone and search for it himself.  Ever helpful, Bill volunteers to fetch the text - a Talmudic treatise known as the Tractate Middoth (more properly Middot, or 'Measurements', the tenth section of the Kodashim and dealing with the dimensions and chambers of the Second Temple in Jerusalem) - only to find himself confronted by a gruesome spectre of the macabre in the decrepit form of the late Dr Rant (Fred Ardath), the man who in life donated the text to the library.  

Collapsing after his encounter with the supernatural, Bill decides to take a vacation to let his shattered nerves recuperate.  Encountering Mrs Simpson (Eva Condon, in a role essayed by Doctor Who's own Leela Louise Jameson in the 2013 version) and her lovely daughter Mary (Pat Englund, no relation to Robert of Elm Street fame as far as I can ascertain) who run an underpopulated guest house on the train - I mean that he encounters them on the train, not that they run a guest house there - he decides to board with them and discovers that Mrs Simpson's uncle was the self-same Dr Rant.  The departed doctor had concealed his last will and testament in one of his ancient books in some sort of sadistic treasure hunt, pitting his niece and her cousin John Eldred against one another to discover the book guarded by his malevolent spirit.  Pledging to aid the ladies in their quest for their inheritance, Bill races against time to reach Eldred before he reads the text only to find the old man collapsed with the volume clutched in his hands and therefore gains a girl with a vast inheritance and an extensive private library - what more could a man ask for?

Tales of Tomorrow: Frankenstein (Don Medford, 1952)

One of many TV anthology series of the '50s to capitalise on the then-current craze for science fiction and atomic horror (this was, after all, the era of such pulp titles as Other Worlds, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Fantastic Adventures; the cinema crowds cheering to the adventures of Anne Francis and Leslie Nielsen in Forbidden Planet and Anne Robinson [no, not that one - she'd have been about ten years old at the time] and Gene Barry tangling with Martian invaders and Americanisation of British literature in The War of the Worlds), Tales of Tomorrow was a sort of pulpier prototype Twilight Zone that lasted for eighty-five episodes over two television seasons from 1951 to 1953.  Broadcast live as televised theatre on the ABC network, with a corresponding radio show of the same title on the wireless, the show sadly has many lacunae as episodes were not archived for posterity but thankfully some Kinescope  recordings survive.

The sixteenth episode of the first season, broadcast on January 18th 1952, 'Frankenstein' quite obviously is a rendition of the much-loved and much-adapted Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley tale and - like pretty much every large or small screen rendition of the story - takes a great many liberties with the original text.  

Performed live on January the 18th 1952, the episode opens with the extremely story-appropriate Tales of Tomorrow opening title sequence, all crackling electrical arcs emanating from Kenneth Strickfaden-style mechanical equipment after a gloved hand throws a switch, before we are informed by the stentorian tones of announcer Allyn Edwards that we about to "thrill tonight to the most famous tale of a science-created monster" - framing Shelley's tale in its rightful context as begetter of science fiction literature as well as one of the world's finest Gothic horror tales.  We have our modern Prometheus, Dr Victor Frankenstein (John Newland, who as well as starring in fare such as Tales of Tomorrow, Lights Out and Thriller would go on to direct episodes of the latter - including one that we shall shortly come to - as well as helming and hosting many episodes of One Step Beyond) sitting at table with his fiancee Elizabeth (Ooo-wee-oo and it's Mary Alice Moore!  No, that doesn't really work anywhere near as well as Mary Tyler Moore, does it?  Apologies to Weezer) and her father (Raymond Bramley); note the change in family dynamics from the saucy source material - Elizabeth and her father are most clearly just a fiancee and a  prospective father-in-law here, rather than her being an adoptive sister raised alongside Victor by his/their parents, presumably to negate any potential queasiness or fainting vicar's wives over the whiff of adoptive incest if that's even a thing.  Mind you, Mary Shelley herself seemed to think so when she got cold feet and rewrote a significant portion of the original novel in 1823 toning down much of the raw energy of the original.  Needless to say, I prefer the 1818 text myself.  Here, even Victor's young brother William (aggravating child actor Michael Mann - no, not that one, though if this precocious sprog grew up to to direct The Keep and Manhunter it would at least make it worth acknowledging his existence) is changed for some reason to his cousin, distancing the family bond.

After chatting about Victor's theories on how to create the perfect man and giving us some exposition about the castle where Frankenstein has retreated to carry out his research is in the middle of a lake and accessible only by boat. Elizabeth and her daddy (her actual dad, keep your minds out of the gutter!) depart and the good doctor repairs to his laboratory to reanimate his creation with the de rigeur arcing and sparking machinery.  When the creature (horror legend Lon Chaney Jr., a bit worse for wear - as we will discuss - under very effective makeup by Vincent Kehoe that prefigures Robert De Niro's bald and stitched-together monster  in Kenneth Branagh's film by some 41 years) revives for a bit of a confused stumble about the lab and tires itself out, Frankenstein straps it down to a gurney and thinks it secure enough to leave unsupervised, at which of course the monster escapes to stumble around the really quite effective painted cycloramas of the castle and putting the frights up comedy cockernee servants Matthew (the amazingly-named Farrell Pelly) and Elise (Peggy Allenby) before killing the latter.

We're going to have to address the reeling, drunken elephant in the room here, I suppose.  The one thing that everyone - including those who've never seen the episode - knows about this production is that Lon Chaney's alcoholism which had dogged him almost his entire life ("He had that drinking problem" said Charles T. Barton, Chaney's director on Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, "all through his life, even when he was very young.  I don't know why.  I guess he knew.") was well out of controol at this point.  The actor who had warned directors in the 1940s to "get as much out of me as you can before 1.00 P.M., because after that I can't guarantee anything" before getting blasted with drinking pals Broderick Crawford and Andy Devine had now reached the nadir of doing live to tape television absolutely blasted - the actual nadir being the bit where he lifts a prop chair menacingly and then gingerly puts it down muttering about saving it for the actual show, clearly thinking that he's taking part in a run-through.  Mind you, no-one comes out this particularly well: Newland garbles quite a few lines towards the end, and that child is absolutely abominable.  Noel Coward would have recanted his famous bon mot about the young Bonnie Langford if he'd ever seen this kid.  At least Bonnie's always been a pro.

Pretty awful altogether, not helped by the poor quality of the surviving recording but trying to get a novel down to half an hour of TV is a pretty hopeless errand of an exercise unless all you want is a dramatised precis or live-action blurb.  For a slightly more effective and sober attempt, there's always my review of the 1973 Canadian television Dracula which at least has a bit of dignity about it.

Thriller: The Return of Andrew Bentley (John Newland, 1961)

Not to be confused with the British anthology series created by Avengers and Professionals supremo Brian Clemens which ran from 1973 to 1976, this homonymous precursor was a US show that ran on NBC between 1960 and 1962 and was also shown under the titles Boris Karloff's Thriller and Boris Karloff Presents - which tells one up front who the star hosting the weekly segments is going to be.  The erstwhile William Henry Pratt whilst a silver screen star was no stranger to the tellybox, having presented a thirteen week run of Starring Boris Karloff  in 1949, been the star of Colonel March of Scotland Yard from 1954 to 1955 and taken the hosting reins again for The Veil in 1958 (more on which here) amidst a myriad of guest turns in a panoply of other series.

Screened on the evening of the 11th of December 1961 this instalment has the excellent pedigree of a script by genre legend Richard Matheson, adapted from a short story penned by H.P. Lovecraft protege and expounder upon the Cthulhu mythos August Derleth that was originally published in that bastion of early 20th century pulp literature Weird Tales and anthologised in the Arkham House (a small press set up by Derleth and fellow Lovecraftan acolyte Donald Wandrei to publish the works of Lovecraft and his circle) collection Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People - the titular lead tale of wwich was also adapted into an episode of Thriller later in the same season. 

We begin, as all gothic tales should, with the trip trop of horses' hooves as a carriage sweeps into the grounds of an ancient house.  The manse is the property - for the time being, as his time on this mortal plane is fleeting - of one Amos Wilder (Terence de Marney, who had a long acting career but whom I mainly know from telesnaps and off-air audio recordings as church warden Longfellow from lost Doctor Who story 'The Smugglers'), who has invited his only surviving relatives to inherit his property before his impending ending.  These comprise his nephew Ellis Corbett (John Newland again, directing the episode as well as starring) and his bride Sheila (take a bow Antoinette Bower), who are greeted by the strange old duffer who announces his intention to leave his home and considerable fortune to them with the stipulation that Ellis remain in the house for twenty four hours of every day, and check his burial place in the family vault beneath the house daily for any signs of disturbance - in case of which he has left sealed instructions to be followed.

So far, so eccentric rich relative one might think (the wealthy of course are never mad, only eccentric) but after telling Ellis and Sheila that they will never converse again uncle Amos takes poison and chooses to go out playing his organ.  And why not?  That's how I want to go too.  Let someone else deal with the mopping up.  The funeral takes place shortly thereafter and uncle Amos is interred beneath the house, Ellis following his post-mortem instructions precisely down to chalking magickal sigils upon the door of the vault to keep something out: said something swiftly rears its ugly head in the spectral form of the late Andrew Bentley (Reggie Nalder, a.k.a. Alfred Reginald Natzler, familiar to fans of horror and exploitation cinema from many things but perhaps most famous as the vampiric Kurt Barlow from Tobe Hooper's 1979 adaptation of Stephen King's Salem's Lot) who appears at night mooching around the bowels of the house and setting his daemonic familiar (Tom Hennesy) upon the unsuspecting investigating Ellis.  The demon is actually quite disturbing; eyeless and all teeth like some Gigeresque xenomorph all clad in black, and shot through a vaseline-smeared lens for maximum eldritch and otherworldly effect.

With the help of local physician Dr Weatherbee (Philip Bourneuf) and vicar Reverend Burkhardt (Oscar Beregi Jr.) the Corbetts - sadly sans Sooty and Sweep, wrong Corbett family - must marshal their wills against Bentley's dark magic as the late mage, who was dispatched by uncle Amos upon discovering the extent of his diabolical plans,  attempts to enter his demon into the dead sorcerer's body and wreak his ghastly revenge.  And try to keep the house, it's clearly a good investment spectral wizards or not.

In summary then, we have run through a sampling of the delights available within the veritable cornucopia of the myriad anthology series of the 1940s, '50s and '60s outwith the obvious and commonly-viewed choices such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and have only really skimmed the surface.  In retrospect I wish I'd included something from John Newland's regular directing and presenting gig One Step Beyond in this selection.

Next time, Gadget.  Next time...

All of the episodes discussed are -or were at the time of scrawling - available for free at archive.org - happy exploring.

Doctor Who: Season 40 / Series 14 / Series One.... Aaargh! 2024 Series Round-Up

Well, it's the morning of Thursday the 27th of June as I type these words and BBC Breakfast are live in my home town this morning speaking to the locals about the election and stuff. I generally loathe vox poppy stuff ("Here is some ignorant and ill-informed rubbish from a bloke waiting for the bookies to open!") and was going to switch over to avoid cringing myself inside out at it, but I was this many picoseconds old when I found out that a shop/food bank that I've walked past tons of times is run by a guy called Mark Auton.

WTF? All the times I've been in Horsley Hill and I never realised that it was in the thrall of the Nestene Consciousness.  That said, the malevolent tendrils of Shub-Niggurath's Polymos-based mannequin-animating spawn wrapping ever tighter around the brains of the town's inhabitants would explain my older sister's recent inexplicably stupid pro-Nigel Fartrage's RefUK Facebook activity; she's clearly not herself, it's the aliens doing it.

Sunny South Shields: twinned with Wuppertal and Innsmouth.

Anyway, I'm bored and the piece I was hoping to have up this week is taking a little longer to finish than I thought and have a few minutes waiting for the kettle to boil so here's my brief capsule reviews of this year's season of Doctor Who:

Young Team: not just a Mogwai album

'Space Babies' - Fun, slight, mid-season episode. Baffling way to open a bloody season though. WTF, RTD? Mynde yew, I've spent 18 years saying the same thing about 'New Earth'. Y U keeping doing dis?

'The Devil's Chord' - Loved it. Menacing, colourful and fun all at the same time. Jinkx Monsoon's Maestro was a great villain. Fave bit: probably where the sound drops out and we have a minute of silence, broken by the tuning fork. Melodia from SilverHawks would approve.

'Boom' - Nah, mate. I usually really enjoy Moff's Who (with apologies to Claudia Boleyn and Sophie from GallifreyBase and everyone else who has spent more than a decade reiterating their seeming allergy to his writing, I just enjoy his writing [mostly]), but this was just Moffat by numbers. Usually I'd be fine with that, but in an eight episode season - two of which hardly feature our new Dr Who - I ain't got time for dat shizz. Weakest of the season, even if not actually bad.

'73 Yards' - Yes! Moar of this type of thing! Favourite episode in ages, with M.R. James-y folk horror trappings (I'd bet my old mate Jim would have loved it - he's the guy who got me into reading authors like Thomas Ligotti and Arthur Machen, bless 'im) completely carried by Millie Gibson. Why'd you let her go, Russ?!!? Ruby takes on a Welsh Greg Stillson from The Dead Zone.

Also, it led to me making this meme:

Which amused me, anyway.

'Dot and Bubble' - Two Doctor-lites back to back? Maybe organise the season layout better in future. But a good episode with a great gutpunch at the end (even though I knew it was coming, Ncuti and Millie sell it so well); peppy little racist Lindy Pepperidge-Farm, murderer of pop stars, I cannot unsee as being a fascist version of Bryce Dallas Howard's version of Gwen Stacy from Spider-Man 3.

Gwendy: probably saying something racist

'Rogue' - Great fun. Always love a (pseudo-)historical even if this is no 'Villa Diodati'. Herron and Redman can come back and co-write an episode any time. Everyone rocks the frocks, and Indira Varma seems to be having a good time chewing the fantastic scenery - though I'd have loved her to guest in a more serious-toned episode. I never, ever want to see Bridgerton though due to it being mentioned so many times the word has just become an abstract fridge-buzz noise.

'The Legend of Ruby Sunday' / 'Empire of Death' - Guess who's back, dawg? Alright, Typhonian Beast. Very much a game of two halves (sick as a parrot and other footballing analogies are available), with a magnificent build-up and reveal in the first part - I was grinning for ages afterwards. I can't remember being quite that excited about a cliffhanger in years. Of course true to form the second part would largely fail to sick the landing. I mean, I enjoyed it but if you're going to reveal that Ruby Rey is just an ordinary person with ordinary everyday parents, maybe don't give her unexplained magic Jedi snow and music powers in the first place?

I blame the midichlorians.

Sutekh is a good doge. Much death. So sand. Such jackal.

That was a bit more detailed than I meant to write. Going to have to boil the kettle again now. Grrr.

Looking forward to this cuppa. Am singing 'mint selenium' in my head to the tune of 'My Delirium' by Ladyhawke.  Apologies for the half-arsedness of this, all.  For a Doctor Who thing that I put a bit more time into, there's this here.  For a Who-related thing I knocked off for a laugh whilst drunk that is inexplicably one of the most read things on here, click here and sap my soul.

I promise there'll be a better-written piece up soon.  Honest.

Oedipus Rex ([a.k.a.: Edipo Re] Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967)

A blind beggar, incongruously sporting dark sunglasses, stumbles around the streets of ancient city begging for alms when he recognises the steps of a friend approaching.

Oedipus: "Hey, Josephus!"

Josephus (high-fiving the blind man as he passes): "Hey, motherfucker!"

- Ronny Graham and Gregory Hines, in Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I.

There's little so awkward as a joke that a child has to explain to their parents, except one that involves mythological incest.  Still, a joke that very much amused my school age self (probably my second favourite in the film, aside from Torquemada's auto-da-fe musical sequence ["It's what you oughtn't to do, but you do anyway!"]) due to lazy afternoons at the library guzzling volumes on Greek legends and history - long before actually studying Sophocles' Oedipus Rex at college: possibly the most famous out of the hundred and twenty-something plays 'what he wrote' (not that anywhere near his 124 or so canon are still extant).  Dude was a dramatic powerhouse: he was entered into theatrical competitions around thirty times, of which there is a historical record of him winning at least twenty four.  Imagine being nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award thirty times, and coming home on twenty four of those occasions with the Oscar.

The story of everyone's favourite mother-loving Theban monarch had been dramatically adapted before Sophocles set quill to parchment (or stylus to slate, or whatever) by Aeschylus in his Oedipodea - a trilogy comprising his plays Laius, Oedipus and Seven Against Thebes; the latter of the three is the only extant text, the prior two (as well as the comic satyr play Sphinx) being lost to the mists of time.  Perhaps the ancient archives had their own Pamillus Nashus gleefully burning all known copies of prized dramas.  Archive BBC TV fans will know what I'm talking about, at least.  Euripides, too, would turn his hand to an Oedipal oeuvre (Antigone, Oedipus and The Phoenician Women) which eerily followed the same pattern of only the third instalment surviving - the first and second surviving only as fragmentary scraps.

Betwixt Aeschylus and Euripides, Sophocles would craft his own Holy Trilogy, the famed Theban Plays - the second of which to be written (but the first, chronologically, like some prequel of antiquity) was Oedipus Tyrannus, alias Oedipus the King.  Previously committed to celluloid in 1957 by Tyrone Guthrie, in a Greek theatre style production with cast sporting masks like the tragedians of old, the play would also be adapted for the screen in English in 1968 - the year following the film with which we are here concerned - by veteran director Philip Saville (who not only directed my favourite Dracula adaptation, the 1977 BBC Count Dracula,  but also 1964's Hamlet at Elsinore, 1986's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil [containing a retina-scarring scene featuring TV's Doctor Who Tom Baker that can and did warp at least one young mind], 1988's First Born in which Charles Dance was a monkey's uncle, and the 1997 Metroland with Christian Bale and Emily Watson - quite the C.V.) with Christopher Plummer and Lilli Palmer getting jiggy with it.

Leftist firebrand auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini - whose 1975 abduction, torture and murder (most likely at the hands of the fascist-allied criminal terrorist organisation Banda della Magliana) still remains unsolved and unlikely to be reopened under the current far-right Italian government - had already established himself as one of the premier enfant terrible of Italian cinema by way of his scriptwriting talents for movies such as Federico Fellini's 1957 Nights of Cabiria and the 1960 'posh people reeling around a fountain' classic La Dolce Vita before making his own directorial debut with 1961's Accattone, starring his future fated Theban monarch Franco Citti as well as Silvana Corsini and - in a small uncredited voice role - Modesty Blaise herself Monica Vitti.

By 1967 Pasolini had made movie magic such as Mamma Roma with Anna Magnani (there's a Morrissey song in that, probably) and The Gospel According to St Matthew but only just graduated from monochrome to colour with his segment of the '67 portmanteau film The Witches (the other stories in the compendium being helmed by luminous luminaries such as  Luchino Visconti, Franco Rossi, Mauro Bolognini and Vittorio De Sica) before taking on Sophocles' play as his first full colour feature film.  

Opening with an original to the film prelude set in early 20th century Italy, we meet an unnamed couple (Silvana Mangano, star of much classic Euro cinema but forever - to me anyway - Reverend Mother Ramallo from David Lynch's classic 1984 adaptation of Dune, and Luciano Bartoli) who find themselves saddled with a newborn child much to the chagrin of the jealous father who elects to abandon the baby boy in the wilderness - a very rocky Morocco, standing in for some null-space hinterland betwixt wartime Italy and Ancient Greece.  The child is of course found bound hand and foot and taken in by King Polybus of Corinth (Ahmed Belhachmi) - who, like other monarchs seen in this movie wears a tall stacked golden crown more suited to Renaissance popes than a basilieus or wanax of late Bronze Age Hellas - and his Queen Merope (Alida Valli, again and even more so than Mangano a star of many cinematic classics but will always be remembered firstly by your correspondent as Madame Blanc from Dario Argento's 1977 horror opus Suspiria [more on which here for anyone interested]) and raised with the name Oedipus for his swollen feet.

Upon reaching manhood, the princeling (Franco Citti, voiced by Paolo Ferrari) leaves Corinth and, true to the tale, is predicted by the Delphic Oracle (played by an unknown performer, and sadly this particular Pythia lacks either a serpentine sidekick or anything to do with Gallifrey) to kill his father and make love to his mother.  Resolving to dodge his fate by not returning to Corinth, Oedipus instead heads towards Thebes where he encounters his natural father, Laius (Bartoli again), upon the road to the city whee an early instance of footbound road rage leads to Laius' death when the arrogant monarch refuses to give way.  Arriving in the city itself to find Thebes plagued by the Sphinx - though anyone expecting a leonine human hybrid or winged chimaera,  as I did, will be greatly disappointed at the monster's appearance as a loinclothed man in a wickerwork witch doctor-style mask - our hero slays the beast and is granted the boon of marrying Queen Jocasta (Mangano, again in a double role).

After wedding and bedding his quite literal own MILF (repeatedly, for she is one hot mama and legend tells us that their incestuous loins bear fruit with four children-siblings: Antigone, Ismene, Eteocles and Polynices), Oedipus reigns over Thebes as god-king until the blind prophet - a seer without sight - Tiresias (American actor Julian Beck, the terrifying Reverend Kane from Poltergeist II, appearing ) reveals the truth and prophesies that the king will end his days as a blind itinerant beggar wandering in foreign lands.  After initially refusing to believe and engaging in one last big motherlovin' bag session with Jocasta, Oedipus has the Oracle's prophecy confirmed and goes quite round the bend when his mumsy wife hangs herself over the revelation.  Gouging out his own eyes, he leaves the city he ruled bleeding and cloaked like a beggar heading out on the lonely road.

Which will lead, eventually, to Colonus.

Talking of ancient Greece, we've all surely heard of the Ship of Theseus (also perhaps known better to the average British person as 'Trigger's Broom', in honour of Roger Lloyd-Pack's legendary Only Fools and Horses character) - this being the maxim about whether or not a thing can remain the same thing if it is gradually rebuilt and replaced - but not many I wager will have heard of the Boat of Eckert.  Eckert's boat is legendary at least round these parts for always standing in the guy's front garden, like a prize someone would have won on Bullseye; though this town is at least on the coast - most of the time the participants in that TV show would win a speedboat and have to take it home to some landlocked part of the country like Birmingham.  My brother used to go fishing with Eckert in said boat, quite often along with our erstwhile next door neighbour Brian who later died of an aneurysm - or, as my brother and I put it, "Brain's Brian exploded!".  So now you know.  And you can't not know.  Sorry about that.

Sapphire and Steel: Assignment One [a.k.a.: Adventure One, or 'Escape Through a Crack in Time'] (Shaun O' Riordan, 1979)

As I write this introductory paragraph, it is the morning of the 26th of September 2023 and I woke this morning and turned on the television to see on the rolling news tickertape at the bottom of the screen the words "British actor David McCallum dies at 90"; the first thought that came into my head was "Steel has been reassigned".  An actor with no shortage of iconic roles on his resume - from the Russian secret agent Ilya Kuryakin in seminal Sixties spy-fi series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. to Dr Donald 'Ducky' Mallard in the perpetually spinoff-spawning N.C.I.S. - McCallum has been a perennial presence on the small, and occasionally silver - screens for six decades, but to me will always be the acerbic elemental Time Agent Steel; solving temporal conundrums, dimensional incursions, chronic hystereses and all things timey-wimey alongside the luminous Joanna Lumley's beguilingly beautiful and equally inscrutable Sapphire.

The pair's initial assignment - which used to be titled 'Adventure One' on the VHS covers (my first memory of being cognizant of the show was seeing these video tapes on the shelves of HMV [or it might have Forbidden Planet, maybe, it was quite a long time ago] and thinking this was a show that I should probably check out, but the chunky size and chunky price of the double tape set of 'Adventure Two' put me off beginning the journey at that time) but has since been renamed the perhaps more appropriate 'Assignment One' for DVD, and given the fan moniker 'Escape Through a Crack in Time' for the type of fan (me) who likes serials to actually have titles - begins very simply.  It begins with a house.

The house stands across a body of water, as we later find - an isolated country house, perhaps on an island off the mainland.  In the house we meet young Robert Jardine (Steven O' Shea, giving a good and likable child performance in an era when the likes of Matthew Waterhouse's Adric and Ian Sears' Brendan were rotting up genre TV), sat at the kitchen table diligently doing his homework, while his parents (John Golightly and Felicity Harrison) put his younger sister Helen (the absolutely chronic Tamasin Bridge - I was not surprised that this was the final entry on her short C.V. [I know it's a bit much to overly criticise child actors, but seriously]) to bed.  As they read the dreadful child nursery rhymes, Rob works away to the ticking of the many timepieces in this house of clocks.  A sudden strange windless wind whooshes through the house and all the clocks seem to stop.  Time change.  You lose, you gain.  But maybe those frozen hours are about to melt the universe's nervous system and seep out of the pores.  

As the house grows eerily silent - no time, no voices from upstairs, suddenly stifled mid-Ring Ring-a-Roses - and Rob anxiously rushes up the staircase calling for his parents we dissolve to a shot of the sparkling stars of outer space, and through the vasty deep of the cosmos booms a disembodied voice (allegedly that of Hercule Poirot par excellence David Suchet, though maddeningly I've never found it confirmed) proclaiming:

"All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension.  Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life.  Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel.  Sapphire and Steel have been assigned!"

As we return to coterminous time in the house, Rob arrives at Helen's room to find the traumatised child alone, and their parents mysteriously spirited into the aether - "Just went away" as she puts it.

As the terrified tykes try to make sense of the evening's eldritch happenings, suddenly there comes a rapping at the door - these particular visitors entreating entry from the Plutonian night are a taciturn man in a grey suit (McCallum) and a scintillating blonde woman dressed in blue (Lumley).  The strangers enter the house unbidden and immediately take charge of the strange situation, assessing the house as old and full of old things, inhabited by a family with an old (Norman French) name; seemingly this confluence of old things has created a weak point where the malevolent forces of Time can try to break through.  Taking one of the carriage clocks up to Helen's bedroom, Sapphire and Steel recreate the circumstances of the parents' disappearance down to Sapphire reading aloud the nursery rhyme 'Ring a Ring o' Roses'm causing strange phantasms - seemingly period appropriate to the 17th century by their clothing - to appear in the room, and for the far wall to zoom off into the distance; a horrifyingly scarred and cloaked figure credited as the 'Countryman' (Ronald Goodale) shambles towards us up the corridor of eternity chanting the rhyme:

"Cattle in the meadow, lying fast asleep..."

Banishing the spectres by reciting the rhyme backwards to reverse the effect, they tear the page containing that rhyme out of the book, Steel giving the order to burn it, and barricade the door of the bedroom to buy them time to formulate a plan against Time.  In the interval, they make mention of their previous adventure, when they tracked an incursion to a ship in the middle of the ocean - a ship that they casually mention as being named the Mary Celeste.  Of course, we all really know that the Daleks caused that.  Though I suppose 'The Chase' counts as a temporal event doesn't it?

When Rob is lured to the boarded up door of the shuttered room of the shunned house (how many H.P. Lovecraft references can you get into one sentence challenge?) by an entity purporting to be his lost mother crying for help, his misguided attempt to release her allows a fragment of temporal maleficence to escape - through a crack in time one assumes, given the fan-bestowed title.  This latest incursion manifests through the nursery rhyme 'Goosey Goosey Gander', taking the form of Puritan Parliamentary soldiers from the English Civil War ascending and descending the floors of the house.

"Upstairs and downstairs..."

The paranormal pair attempt to explain these ghosts as "visual refractions... an anachronism", whilst the fragment itself (appearing as a moving, flickering patch of light) is described as "a scion... a descendant, a successor, a child".  The thing gets into an old painting upon the wall (the picture in the house, there's another Lovecraft-ism!) and draws Sapphire in with it, into an old cottage redolent with echoes of terrible past happenings; a rope hanging from the ceiling and a meat cleaver glinting in the periphery of her vision (here comes the chopper to chop off your head) giving clues to her imminent fate from the distant past.  Steel manages to rescue her from this anomalous and perilous situation at great risk and cost to himself by lowering his own body temperature to near absolute zero, thus putting himself temporarily (temporally) out of action, and so whatever mysterious aegis they work for dispatches another agent into the field to assist.  This is the hulking and powerful Lead (American actor Val Pringle, who was sadly murdered by intruders in his home in 1999), here to serve as Steel's backup and "insulation".

Our three adventurous elementals and two mere mortal children proceed to clear the house of all the antiques that they can (old things being the 'triggers' for the weaknesses in the fabric of the continuum); paintings, boxes of books and nicknacks removed to the "youngest" place available - the outhouse recently added by the father.  Unbeknownst to the others, the sinister force appears to young Rob in the shape of his errant father, drawing the callow youth down into the basement.  Down, down, deeper and down to the earliest foundations of the building and backwards in time to the eerie twilit evening when the builder's cornerstone was first set in place.  It is here, at the building's very beginning, that the elementals must pit their wits against the force to fight for the boy's freedom and banish the evil forever. 

"And hide his head under his wing, poor thing."

A truly timeless testing trial against Time itself, and a wonderfully weird (in the best uncanny meaning of the word) introduction to the adventures of the intrepid titular Time Agents - or, at least, agents against Time's agency - portrayed by a pair of screen legends.

And legends always live on.

(Just in case it's not obvious from the opening line of the review, it's taken quite a bit of time between me starting it and finishing it.  Though not as long as my All Hallow's Eve review)

All Hallow's Eve (Damien Leone, 2013)

"That, to me, is the essence of true horror - the clown, at midnight." - Robert Bloch.

The pantheon of horror icons has its obvious famed and feted members: Elm Street's Springwood Slasher Freddy Krueger, Camp Crystal Lake's hockey-masked Jason Voorhees and Haddonfield's Halloween boogeyman Michael Myers inarguably occupy the upper echelon with others such as Leatherface, Pinhead, the Tall Man and others (the Wishmaster, Pumpkinhead, the Leprechaun and so on) making up the lower tiers like some inverted choir of unholy angels of death. A recent addition to this roster in the last decade is Art the Clown, the daemonic clown star of Damien Leone's Terrifier series.  None of which, I must here admit, I have yet seen.

I know, I know.  I'm such a bad horror fan.  But, y'know, there are loads of genre films from the 1910s I haven't seen yet, so it might take me a little while to get to everything released in the 2010s.  That's my excuse anyway - the curse of being a completist of any kind is that these things take time.

I have, though, seen the hellish harlequin's debut appearance; not in 2016's initial installment of Terrifier (which I will get round to, I'm not avoiding them despite a slight case of coulrophobia which I'm sure stems from my mother placing an intensely menacing porcelain clown doll opposite my childhood bed whose haunting white enamel face would stare at me in the dark if I ever awoke during the night.  Cheers for the psychological warfare, Ma) but in Leone's debut feature: 2013's portmanteau horror film All Hallow's Eve which I purchased on 101 Films' DVD - thanks to a review in The Dark Side, my long time magazine of the macabre of choice, which intrigued me - in about 2014.  The film's first viewing had obviously captured my attention enough that me of a decade ago had scrawled down some comments in one of my notebooks that I only came across yesterday having long forgotten about it.  Yesterday being Beltane and everything (and a very happy belated Walpurgisnacht to all of you at home), a rewatch of a vaguely Samhain-themed film seemed appropriate if I were to refresh my aged (I'm 45 now, you know) memory enough do decipher the scrawled scrip and transcribe the review I obviously meant to do a decade ago.

We open with an evocatively '80s-style title sequence with red credits on a black background with vintage-style film grain to accompany the retro synthy score - the same kind of weaponised nostalgia that the Duffer Brothers would deploy with Stranger Things' title sequence, getting people like me deep in the feels and triggering a reflexive grin - reminiscent of early 1980s genre fare; redolent of the forbidden fruit of the Video Nasties list.  Inside a house appropriately decorated for the Samhain season (although the exterior house establishing shot [down a shot if you're a fan of the Horror Geek Youtube channel and read the words 'house establishing shot' in Mike's voice] is quite tight [again: "Hell yeah!" No, not like that, you pervs], belying the film's low budget - obviously they couldn't decorate the surrounding houses) we meet Sarah (Katie Maguire - who would go on the feature in Leone's Terrifier and its sequel as Monica Brown), who is babysitting precocious sprogs Tia (Sydney Freihofer) and Timmy (Cole Mathewson).  Babysitting on Halloween is an obvious Carpenter riff to go alongside the other classic horror references - Carpenter and Hill's bogeyman masterpiece did, after all, go by the original working title of The Babysitter Murders - but echoes other chaperone-centric gems of the video store such as When a Stranger Calls.

When Timmy realises that his trick or treating bag has been bestowed with the unexpected gift of a mysterious VHS tape in lieu of candy, he and his sister goad their badgered childminder into playing it and find that it contains three short and weird vignettes - for this is indeed a portmanteau horror flick, of the like possibly first espoused by Fritz Lang in 1921's Der Mude Tod a.k.a. Destiny (though I'm sure I'm probably wrong and there are earlier examples of the subgenre; please do comment and educate me if so) and perfected by Amicus productions in the '60s and '70s (more on whom in a future piece I'll hopefully get finished this year!). 

In the first story, we meet main girl Casey (Kayla Lian) who is alone in a train station at night when she is confronted with the terrifying - I mean, it's his USP right? - sight of Art the Clown (Mike Gianelli, who originated the role; very much the David Ross to David Howard Thornton's Robert Llewellyn in this equation [I like that, with my last post being Red Dwarf, it almost seems like there's an internal consistency or logic to this]) who progresses from weirding her out to injecting her with a roofie and dragging her down to... if not hell, then something very close.  Definitely hell-adjacent, as the title of this segment is 'The Ninth Circle', and is actually a 35mm short film that Leone had shot in 2008 and was both the debut appearance of Art the Clown and, along with 2011's follow-up 'Terrifier' (not to be confused with 2016's full-length Terrifier) the genesis of this movie - the second segment and wraparound story being crafted to include the two shorts.

Waking in an underground tunnel-cum-dungeon (not a cum dungeon, that's something different probably), Casey finds herself shackled and chained along with fellow prisoners Sara (Minna Taylor) and Kristen (the awesomely-named Melissa Wolf) who inform her that there was another inmate who hasn't been seen since she was dragged away screaming into the darkness.  The sequence feels reminiscent of the women-in-brutal-danger so-called 'torture porn' genre such as Eli Roth's Hostel crossed with the Brian Yuzna adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Whisperer in Darkness' in 1994's Necronomicon.  In this daemonic domain into which the hellish harlequin has spirited them, Kristen is soon hacked to pieces by a cleaver-wielding creature resembling a cross between penultimate stage Brundlefly and the Incredible Melting Man, whilst strange pig- and bird-human hybrids cavort presided over by Satan and a witch that looks like a Carrionite stirs a cauldron.

What a trip.

After putting the sprogs to bed and trying to reassure them that such clowns don't exist (cue Edward Van Sloan emerging from a curtain to point and say "There are such things!"  That doesn't happen in this movie, it just should), our intrepid childminder ventures on with the next - and weakest - segment.  I see in my decade-old notes I scrawled "Possibly filmed last, lower budget?" without having known anything of the circumstances of the film's making, but it's nice that I was pretty spot on.  This tale entails a woman named Caroline (Catherine Callahan) who as all on her own at night in her isolated house, a very big house, in the country.  Sadly, rather than Blur and Joanne Guest turning up to party, her particular visitor proves to be an unwelcome extraterrestrial played by Brandon DeSpain.  This grey-style Whitley Strieber refugee seems intent on achieving some kind of violent communion, resulting in an alien vs human prey chase through the old dark house.  The whole affair is very minimalist with only the aforementioned pair of performers present, and the other two named characters  - Caroline's absent artist amour John and her friend Dee - being voice only roles performed by actors playing other parts in the movie doubling up.  The only other connection to the surrounding movie is the reveal that the painting that John had been working on is a portrait of the de rigueur Art.  Art art, I suppose.

I have no idea how to refer to that second segment - the first and last stories have titles but I can't find one for the middle one.  'Alien' would maybe be blandly appropriate, but I think Dan O' Bannon got there first.

You know what?  I've lost all interest.  Let's chat instead about 'John'.  This has nothing at all to do with the film, but with the fact that my friend John once wrote into Commodore Format - or maybe Zzzap - magazine, and the editor's reply referred to him as 'John'.  With the quotation marks.  Like, so-called 'John', if that is in fact your real name.  What the fuck was that about?  He was quite upset and incensed about it at the time.  My only theory is that his dreadful handwriting was to blame, and they misread his surname, thinking he'd put "John from South Shields" as a weird pseudonym.

Anyway, that whimsical diversion aside, where were we?  The third and final story is the aforementioned short 'Terrifier', which involves an unnamed woman (Marie Maser) who we know only by her stated occupation of 'Costume Designer'; she's making her way home at night from a work assignment on Halloween when she's forced to pull over at a gas station (well, a petrol station - it doesn't sell clouds of gas, but we're using the American vernacular for petrol in a "when in Rome" type way).  Like the first short incorporated by Leone into the movie, it has a '70s grindhouse feel, with visual flickers, sprocket holes and film splices.  Arriving to find a situation wherein the attendant (Michael Chmiel) is threatening to call the police on Art the Clown, who has been smearin ghis own faeces all over the station's toilet in some kind of fit of anarchic coprophilia, once Art has (apparently) departed she gets filled up by the attendant (not like that!) and is asking for directions back onto the Interstate from the back roads she's found herself on when a noise causes the attendant to investigate.

When he doesn't return, and she decides to look into it herself, she walks into an amazing scene of gore: Art kneeling over pieces of the guy, the diabolical pierrot grinning as he happily dismembers that late attendant with a hacksaw.  Fleeing for her life, she finds herself in a nightmarish cat and mouse chase both on and off the road as she comes across some of Art's previous victims (and she will know him by the trail of dead) whilst being pursued by the seemingly unstoppable and impossible - he appears to be everywhere, even crawling out of the soil like a zombie looking for his cake at one point - creature until she awakes in his hellish realm with him cackling over her as she realises that all four of her limbs have been cut off and choice insults such as "PIG", "BITCH" and "SLUT" have been carved into her naked flesh.  He's a nice pro-feminist guy, is Art.

Altogether, a bit of a mixed bag of stories ( the middle section in particular being the weak link) but certainly a memorable debut for a modern day horror icon who - whatever else one might think - makes quite an impression.

Red Dwarf USA (Jeff Melman / Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, 1992)

 It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere...

In 1992, during the lacuna between the fifth and sixth seasons of Red Dwarf, something truly monstrous was born.

Throughout the history of international televisual relations between the USA and the UK, there has been a relationship as 'special' in its one-sided way as the toxic abusive battered-wife syndrome relationship of a political alliance. While the UK has always happily hoovered (in a vacuum cleaner sense, rather than a Herbert or a J. Edgar sense) up many a US TV export and presented it in its original unexpurgated glory to the Great Unwashed British Public, our Stateside cousins have generally opted to remake British TV shows tailored to more Americanised (or 'Americanized') tastes, with the Anglo originals relegated to PBS (with very few exceptions: back in the dim and flickering shadows of the 1960s the antics of Steed and Mrs Peel in ABC's [Associated British Corporation] The Avengers may have aired on ABC [the American Broadcasting Company], but this was a pretty rare exception).

There is a long litany of popular UK sitcoms being reinvented for American TV over the decades, some with great success (Galton and Simpson's Steptoe and Son switching race to become the highly popular African-American Sanford and Son, the bigoted Alf Garnett of Johnny Speight's Till Death Do Us Part translating into Archie Bunker of All in the Family and Man About the House spawning the popular Three's Company and its spinoff/continuation Three's a Crowd) and some less successful (even the star power of Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman, failing to help the quickly-canned Viva Laughlin! achieve the success of its Lancastrian forbear Blackpool - while the Indianapolis-relocated Men Behaving Badly made the twin errors of casting Rob Schneider in the lead Martin Clunes role and underestimating the prudishness of the mainstream audience).

So when the popular BBC2 sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf made the leap across the pond (facilitated by vice president of MCA Universal's Comedy Development department Brad Johnson) and the Mancunian originators and co-writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor found themselves nonplussed in a writer's room and branded "The Wave" - short for "The Wave of Negativity" - for not meshing with the culture of emitted braying false laughter at every attempted gag being pitched around the table, signs and portents were not great for the Stateside incarnation of a show trumpeted as being a smash hit on PBS that was watched by a avid fans such as Bill Clinton and Madonna and had Star Trek: the Next Generation's Patrick Stewart phoning his lawyer to sue over copyright infringement.  The first couple of these factoids were of course exaggerations and untruths partially put about by Grant and Naylor themselves, the last is - bafflingly - apparently true.

And so the ill-fated pilot (well, pilot and a half - it'll all make sense, probably) episode of Red Dwarf U.S.A. was born, like the scion of the cripple and the idiot.  Please note before cancelling that this is a Red Dwarf reference and not some kind of bizarre outburst of bigoted ableism on my part, yeah?  And thus it was that the first attempt at an American take on Grant Naylor's space sitcom - bizarrely spawned from a viewing of John Carpenter and Dan O' Bannon's film school project Dark Star via the radio segment Dave Hollins: Space Cadet - begins:

Our twenty five and a half minute (four and a half minutes shorter than the original Red Dwarf opening episode 'The End', presumably to incorporate corporate commercial breaks) pilot opens with the same gag that had opened the show's third BBC season three years earlier: the ludicrously speeded-up Star Wars style scroll, here utilised as a scene setter rather than to gloss over cast and set changes and hastily resolve a cliffhanger.

"Red Dwarf

The story so far...

By the latter half of the twenty-second century, huge space cruisers powered by hydrogen ram-jet drives had colonized the outer fringes of our solor [sic] system.  Human kind was poised to explore the dark mysteries of deep space.

We wish we could have told you stories about those brave men and women but we couldn't afford it.  Instead what you're getting is this.

This is the story of a beat-up old mining ship which ambles between Earth and the moons of Saturn, transporting raw materials which are badly needed by someone.

Is it just me, or does this sound really tedious?  No one's going to like this.  A show about people who move rocks from planet to planet?  Intergalactic rock movers?  Who are we kidding?

I didn't even want to be a writer.  Do you realize how hard it is to type this fast?  My fingers are bleeding.

Uh oh.  Looks like we're slowing back down.  I'd better start making sense again, so all the cheapos who don't have a VCR with freeze frame will think they really missed out on something important.

Ahem...

...Which you really need to know to understand this story."

Yeah, not as funny as the original version, is it?  There'll be a lot of that.

We then get a title sequence that mixes the footage of a space suited Lister painting the outer hull of the ship that opened the first two seasons - but scored not with Howard Goodall's original slow opening theme that communicated the lonely vastness of a godless universe, but instead a sort AOR/MOR soft rock monstrosity courtesy of Todd Rundgren, who really should have known better - and various model shot of the small rouge one and Starbug with inserts of the new cast, all take from the upcoming episode.

Writer (and 'developer') Linwood Boomer's script isn't simply a straight Americanisation of 'The End', but instead takes the general outline and main story points of the series' genesis and mixes in elements of Grant Naylor's debut novel Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers.  We are introduced to the Jupiter Mining Corporation vessel Red Dwarf (apparently a Class 5 miner/freighter with a cargo capacity of 47 cubic miles), replete with Zocalo-style shopping arcade and zero gravity sporting amenities, by the ship's computer Holly 6000 (Frasier's Daphne Moon herself Jane Leeves [though she wouldn't land her most famous role for another year, and wouldn't have if this show had been picked up so it's best for all that timeline was aborted really], who is the best of the recasts and seems to be having a blast in the role).  We then meet the ships holographic crewmember Officer Munson (Michael Heintzman), taking up the plot role of George McIntyre and expositing to camera; oddly, here the holograms are marked out not with an 'H' emblazoned on their forehead but with a circular red dot.  It was bad enough coming across a Quora conspiracy theory about Chinese people not believing in skeletons (because of China's censoring of certain video games), we don't need one about all Hindu people being dead!

We then meet service mechanoid Kryten, played as always (well, not always; everywhere except in the character's eponymous debut episode where he was portrayed by David Ross) by Robert Llewellyn.  Llewellyn would be the sole actor from the UK show to make the transition, though Chris Barrie was asked to reprise Rimmer but balked at signing the standard US TB five year contract.  Llewellyn gives his normal Kryten performance, complete with Herman Munster walk and expressions, though the make up job doesn't look quite right even through the haze of a crappy nth generation copy.  Making his way through the ship's corridors in search of the commanding officer Captain Tau, Kryten encounters Dave Lister (Craig Bierko, probably the most controversial recast as the slobby everyman Lister is played by an actor who almost landed the role of Joey Tribbiani in Friends; it's odd to see Lister as a square-jawed all-American hunk, though Bierko's likeability and charisma is great) and Arnold Rimmer (Chris Eigeman, who plays all of Rimmer's nasally, prissy dislikeability without Barrie's shades of pathos - but it is weirdly fitting to have Lister and Rimmer played by actors named Craig and Chris respectively) as they fulfill their important function of maintaining the craft's chicken soup machines.  When Rimmer is called away on a confectionery-related emergency via his beeper - because this a very late '80s/early '90s 22nd century - Lister takes Kryten and explains his backstory: how he had to sign up aboard the ship after he got drunk (in Detroit, rather than Liverpool) and woke up on the fourth moon of Saturn, material cribbed from the Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers novel.

After on again-off again girlfriend Christine [sic] Kochanski (Elizabeth Morehead) renders their relationship permanently off due to his lackadaisical coasting through life, Lister takes Kryten into his confidence about Frankenstein, the cat he had illegally smuggled aboard in contravention of space quarantine after rescuing 'him' from a being served up in a Titanese restaurant - Kryten has to point out that 'he' is pregnant rather than just gaining weight from all the beer Lister's been putting in the cat's drinking bowl.  Lister asks Kryten to hide his feline friend from detection by Holly and the captain.  Alas, the subterfuge is captured on the security cameras, and Lister and Kryten are hauled up in front of the captain (Lorraine Toussaint).  When Lister refuses to talk, and Kryten self-destructs after being ordered to disclose the errant cat's whereabouts (giving a pretty amusing sight gag - in all senses - of his eyeballs landing in a crewmember's cup of coffee), the punishment is meted out of Lister being frozen for six months in suspended animation.  When he's finally released from the stasis booth by a far daffier than usual Holly, he takes a while to grasp the situation.

"There was an accident, Dave.  A radiation leak.  The entire crew was subjected to a lethal does of Cadmium 2."

"Is everyone okay?"

"Everybody's dead, Dave.  That's what 'lethal' means."

Finding himself the last human alive almost three million years in the future ("My baseball cards must be worth a fortune!") with an eccentric computer and a holographically resurrected Rimmer for company, Lister is happy to discover the sentient but still disassembled Kryten, whose head has been stuck on a shelf whiling away the millennia by reading the fire exit sign opposite him.  Meanwhile, an 'alien' life form has been detected down in the cargo hold - which is introduced in a slightly janky matte shot that seems to aim to replicate the closing shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark - the same part of the ship that Kryten concealed the cat.  Venturing into the hold, they encounter the humanoid Cat (the sadly recently departed Hinton Battle, probably best known to genre fans as the musical demon Sweet from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 'Once More, With Feeling' instalment), the last mutated and evolved scion of Frankenstein's line.  Assembling in the drive room, this ragtag crew try to help Lister overcome his existential ennui ("I started out with absolutely nothing... and I couldn't hold on to it!"), and are aided in buoying up his spirits by a quick visit from their future selves - with Kochanski joining Lister, Cat and Kryten in Rimmer's place in a weird foreshadowing of Red Dwarf VII five years early.  Lister resolves to get them back home to Earth, even if the road back entails encountering "parallel universes, time warps, black holes... y'now... space stuff!"

When the decision was made by the higher-ups to fire not only Boomer (is it so wrong of me to hope that the memo he was sent regarding his dismissal began "OK Boomer"?) but most of the cast except for Bierko and Llewellyn, Grant and Naylor decided to helm the second attempt themselves.  Instead of a full second pilot episode - a 'Where No Man Has Gone Before' to Melman's 'The Cage', if you like... what, you don't like?  Bloody sod the lot of you - the Grant Naylor effort would take the form of a short promo reel to convey the idea of the projected new series and spotlight the main characters (including fresh recasts).

Shot as a 'promo reel' rather than a full-blown pilot episode, this second go contained quite a bit of footage from season V's 'Terrorform' as well as new sequences including bookend scenes of Lister and Rimmer (now played with more authentically Rimmerish traits by Anthony Fusco, with the hologrammatic 'H' duly reinstated rather than the red circle) recording a message on the ship's black box - scenes which bear an uncanny similarity to Llewellyn's Kryten linking narration on the Smeg Ups VHS.  We get a recreation of the opening bunkroom scene from 'Backwards' with Fusco's Rimmer taking the place of Danny John-Jules' Cat in the 'Wilma Flintstone or Betty Rubble?' discussion, as well as scenes of Bierko and Leeves from the first pilot, with close-ups of Fusco spliced in to replace Eigeman.  Lister then introduces us to the new female version of Cat (Terry Farrell, in the same year she was on the big screen in Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth and a year before starting his long stint as the Trill Jadzia Dax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine [which as any discerning viewer knows is the best Star Trek]), descended from "a common alley cat" with nine lives, a fearless warrior ethos, a slinky predatory sexuality and back-combed hair.

We then get a selection of scenes "from future episodes" (feel that optimism) including recreations of 'Marooned' (with "Cup a Noodle" substituted for Pot Noodle) and a reformatted version of 'The Last Day' retitled 'Shutdown' that gave Fusco's Rimmer and Farrell's Cat a good dialogue exchange that would later be used for the Barrie and John-Jules originals in season VI.

In all, a very interesting doomed experiment and a glimpse into a parallel reality that was never to be.  Jane Leeves is a great Holly, and after getting over the initial shock of such a different portrayal of Lister Craig Bierko is certainly charming and likeable and doing well with the material.  What we see of Fusco's Rimmer is much closer to the 'proper' portrayal and could have worked well, and Farrell's Cat is certainly an interesting - if totally different - take on the character that's valid in it's own right.

 

Maybe if they'd reshot the pilot with this cast it would have been better; then again it's impossible to argue with Craig Charles' comment that it would have been White Dwarf with nary a non-caucasian cast member.  So maybe it's better for everyone - including Leeves and Farrell's careers - that it didn't happen.  After all, we might never have got Red Dwarf VI if this had worked out.

And a universe without 'Gunmen of the Apocalypse' in it scarcely bears thinking about.