Dr Who meets the Scorpion (Richard Roberts & Phillip Roy, 2026)

Strange thing, time.  You wait ages for an appealing and intriguing-looking Doctor Who fan film to come along, and then a few turn up at once, like dimensionally-transcendental buses.

I had thought that the next Who fan film I'd look at would be the second, third and fourth Barbara Benedetti ones from Seattle International Films.  Having covered her debut 'The Wrath of Eukor' a while back (see HERE) and enjoyed it, I was looking forward to at some point wrapping up her tetralogy.  First 'The Masters of Luxor' cropped up (HERE if you're interested) and now just when I was thinking of getting back to the further adventures of the very first female incarnation pf our favourite titular Time Lord, I become aware of both The Unmade Season's 'Doctor Who Reboot' (which already seems to have been taken down from Youtube thanks to a copyright strike - thanks to the machinations of Arran Knight a.k.a. Force Dalek - maybe I did a wrong flip of the coin when deciding which one I'd watch first?  Then again I enjoyed the hell out of this so no regrets) and this project in the space of just a couple of days.  Still, shouldn't grumble: with the mainline show having another hiatus (by my reckoning its third, after the interregna of 1985-86, 1989-96, and 1996-2005) at the mo, it's nice to be spoiled for choice for new Who content all of a sudden.  Hopefully I'll be able too t'other by hoisting the special antenna and sailing the seven seas at some point.  Arr.

Opening with a late 1970s BBC logo (just like the one on the 'Shada' Blu-ray.so I assume an authentic 1979 vintage one; I was busy being born that year and my very earliest memory of seeing Doctor Who is from 1982: Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor standing in a forest [a real one, not a studio set so I'm certain this is a memory of 'The Visitation' rather than 'Kinda'.  I knew that On Safari wasn't Biggins in a real jungle!] with Adric - more on whom anon) complete with ersatz continuity announcement, bearing out the project's promise of being an "attempt to create a fan film with the feel of the 70s/80s classic series".  Methinks we can consider that a box checked straight away.  Straight away we get Daleks, and not just any Daleks, my favourite kind of Daleks that aren't Spider Daleks: Peter Cushing movie Daleks - the red one was always my favourite Dalek of all time - which sort of makes sense of the spelling of 'Dr Who' rather than 'Doctor Who' in the title (a la Cushing's 1965 Dr Who and the Daleks), with their taller statures and larger headlamps and also Cushing-style Robomen straight outta Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.  Taking on the pepperpots is our unofficial new Doctor (co-director, producer and production designer Phillip Roy) who comes across like David Collings playing a rumpled '70s or early '80s TV police detective, like Gene Hunt (I know technically he's from '90s TV in a real world Doylean sense, but I try to never mix my Doylean with my Watsonian.  Don't make me invoke "timey wimey", you bastards) or Eddie Shoestring or Jim Bergerac in a pretty cool leather coat over shirt 'n' tie ensemble.

After a quick pre-titles defeat of the Daleks which involves the Doctor sprinting down a corridor pursued by an explosion - very reminiscent of the Christopher Eccleston "Do you wanna come with me?" trailer that heralded the canonical show's return to television in 2005, we get our title sequence replete with new theme tune rendition courtesy of Phillip Roy and Stephen Ford before meeting our lovely new companion Jennie (Mandy Rose) who is engaging in some surreptitious sneaking around a fitness supplement warehouse at night trying to discover the source of the disappearance of her brother where she has a very 'Rose'-like first encounter with the Time Lord; a 'meet-terror' if you will as they're soon chased by android henchman and brought before Mr Taylor (Brian Smith).  The oleaginous Taylor and his T-800 style D82 robot guards are in the thrall of the green faced and beclawed Mr Scorpion (Lucas Edwards, mugging madly and very entertainingly) who is preparing for "the harvest" (no relation to the Big Finish audio of the same name, Big Finish in my estimation being as about canon as fan films [don't come at me with "officially licenced" and all that]) - I don't know about spoiling anything major, suffice to say if you've seen the Twilight Zone episode 'To Serve Man' you'll get the idea - these protein shakes might be building humanity up for something sinister.

Making their escape, the feisty - as all companions are referred to these days, I assume it's the law - Jennie joins the Doctor in his trusty TARDIS, complete with a very nice rebuild of the late '70s early '80s console room (the one that lasts up until 'The King's Demons', when it was replaced by my own personal favourite from 'The Five Doctors').  Their quest to defeat Scorpion's evil plan takes them to the Excelsior system (presumably discovered by Stan Lee, true believers!) in the Third Quadrant where they must brave an alien jungle (I can still tell a set, even without Biggins) crawling with serpents, scorpions and spiders and crawl through cavers and vents - surely a rite of passage for every Doctor and companion team? - to take on the sinister taloned menace.  Most horrifying of all, they must face their greatest fears: for Jennie a horde of horror film imagery including The Shining style spooky twins and Romero zombies, while the Doctor is confronted by a shambling undead Adric voiced by Matthew Waterhouse himself. 

Aside from a random Phoenix Nights-style vignette in a working men's club, and a Watcher style man in a bowler hat following the Doctor around who's point and purpose I must have missed (a reference to Nick Briggs in 'In Memory Alone' perhaps?) it all held my interest and engagement through its 90 minute runtime, most of those spent with a huge grin of enjoyment on my face.  We close with the James Bondian caption: "The Doctor will return in Dr Who and the Doomsday Weapon".  If, like myself, you would be interested in seeing the further adventures of this Doctor and Jennie Jen-Jen and not let that promise hang in the air forever unfulfilled like my unrequited lust for Elphaba or Buckaroo Banzai vs. the World Crime League, then you too can help fund it via Dr Who and the Doomsday Weapon - go on, chuck 'em a couple of quid and help one of my ambitions come true.  

(Time) Lord knows it would be the first time.

Horror Rises from the Tomb ([El espanto surge de la tumba] Carlos Aured, 1973)

Bring me the head of Alaric de Marnac!

Separated by a decade, the Alaric de Marnac duology comprises 1973's Horror Rises from the Tomb and 1983's Panic Beats to stand as the only ongoing Paul Naschy character besides the enduring lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky.  A diabolical pre-Renaissance warlock with vampiric tendencies clearly based - like Naschy's later character Baron Gilles de Lancre from The Devil's Possessed (Leon Klimovsky, 1974) - on the historical 15th century French nobleman, child murderer and reputed practitioner of the black arts Gilles de Rais, Alaric proves as indomitable as his Rome-conquering namesake by triumphing over death by decapitation to return and feast upon the hearts' blood of the living.

Naschy, better known in the family home as Jacinto Molina Alvarez, was by 1972 well established not only as a silver screen horror star (why isn't there a male term for a star of the horror genre?  Scream King?) but also as a screenplay writer, having penned the scenarios and scripts for many of his films - and would go on to add directing as a string to his bow later in the decade, beginning with 1977's Inquisition.

When producers of production company Profilmes S.A. - a company formed in 1972 by Jose Antonio Perez Giner and Ricardo Munoz Suay with the intention of making genre movies in the style of Britain's Hammer and Amicus and the States' American International Pictures - asked Naschy for a last-minute story idea for a film and he pitched down the phone a suggestion (doubtless influenced, consciously or subconsciously, by the 1958 Will Cowan-directed Universal flick The Thing That Couldn't Die) for a beheaded sorcerer returning from beyond the grave for revenge, he was asked to pen and deliver the screenplay A.S.A.P.  This led to a frantic thirty-six hour period wherein Naschy locked himself away and, fueled by amphetamines, wrote the full script (bar some last minute on set additions and modifications) non-stop without sleep; a situation reminiscent of Patrick McGoohan's completion of the far out finale of enigmatic Sixties psychedelic series The Prisoner, except with speed instead of a bottle of whisky and a ham sandwich.  At any rate, Naschy managed to hand in the script in record time, albeit with his wife Elvira worried that he was going to literally die for his art, and the amphetamine and adrenaline fueled phantasmagoria produced a minor classic of its kind.  Not that there is really a whole subgenre of 'headless vampiric mediaeval sorcerer returns from the great beyond to wreak revenge' movies or anything; we're talking a pretty niche, non-crowded marketplace here.

Also known as Fear Rises from the Tomb (in the English language trailer), and variously titled Terror Rises from the Tomb, Mark of the Devil IV (on the U.S. video release), Blood Mass for the Devil (original German release), Blood Mass of the Zombies or Revenge of the Zombies (1980 German re-release to cash in on George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead) and L' Amour parmi les monstres / Love Among the Monsters (in, or en France), the story begins with a stentorian voiceover atop a prologue detailing the 15th century crimes and execution of the deadly duo of Alaric de Marnac (Naschy) and his Satanist cohort-cum-concubine Mabille de Lancre (Helga Line) - Naschy always did his bit for recycling; never let a good villain name go to waste.

Guided on an oxen-yoked tumbrel across the Gallic countryside of the fifteenth century to the hanging tree in a picaresque scene, the pair are charged by their accusers with such sundry and diverse offences as necromancy, vampirism, cannibalism and being "leekanthropes" (the dub actor isn't attempting an accent, but that seems very 'Allo 'Allo) by Andre Roland (Victor Alcazar, trading under the name Vic Winner) and Armand de Marnac (Naschy again), the accused warlock's brother.  Condemned by the tribunal of Carcassonne, they are beheaded - but not before cursing Andre and Armand and all their descendants.  That just might come back later..

We quickly, in the brief span of the credits, cross oceans of time to the present day of early 1970s Paris - with some nice establishing shots of the Arc de Triomphe just so we're sure where we are both chronologically and geographically - we meet Seventies-vintage de Marnac Hugo(Naschy again, again) visiting his artist and possibly space cowboy and gangster of love friend Maurice (Alcazar/Winner, also in a dual role as his own descendant) with the good news that Maurice's girlfriend Paula (Cristina Suriani) is back in town from Germany.  Maurice, however, fails to be cheered up from his nightmare-assisted artistic funk when Paula suggests that they, along with Hugo and his lady friend Sylvia (Betsabe Ruiz) attend a seance and cries off, leaving the lovely ladies to attend the spiritualist session with grumpy sceptic (or skeptic?) Hugo.  The evening's entertainment goes slightly awry when the proceedings become more phantasmagorical than expected, with the unquiet dead head of Alaric manifesting muttering portents about the cloister and the monastery on the Marnac estate where his caput and corpus lie respectively; something simultaneously experienced by Maurice who by the time the gang get home has painted the sorcerer holding Hugo's severed head.

The merry band decide to take a road trip out to Hugo's ancestral home, the portentously named Villa d Sade, to check out the legend but on driving up through the snowy mountains they find their waylaid by a band of brigands who wreck the vehicle before Hugo negotiates the purchase of a replacement from Govar (Ramon Centenero), the leader of a vigilante gang who dispatch rough mountain justice to the thieves.  Arriving at his villa - actually Naschy's family's estate ("I only hope the chalet my father built is still habitable". as his character says) - they are greeted by the caretaker Gaston (Juan Cazalilla) and his two beautiful daughters, Elvira (the absolutely luminous Emma Cohen) and Chantal (Maria Jose Cantudo), and the next morning they decide to make a search of the estate's grounds for the fabled Marnac treasure.  Maurice, guided by voices, makes a find when he uncovers a buried casket inscribed with the legend "My sustenance will be the human heart - red, palpitating and ignoble.  1454.", which obviously bodes not well.  The chest contains the head (it's a wooden chest, so it's biologically possible, see) of the baleful wizard, who exerts his hypnotic influence first on a would-be robber (Naschy regular Luis Ciges) - making him hack the faithful Gaston to bits with a sickle - before depositing the magician's noggin in a crypt contained within the labyrinthine catacombs beneath the estate; he then kills Chantal, cutting her throat and carving out her heart in a nicely grisly slasher-like scene, before spiriting Paula away into the depths of the labyrinth.

Alaric's living head possesses Paula who gains the powers of persuasion via diaphanous nightgown to tempt and lure Maurice in a scene reminiscent of the vampiric Genevieve's manifestations in Werewolf Shadow, and the pair join the sickle-wielding robber as his thralls to open the coffins of de Marnac's body and the remains of Mabille who is promptly resurrected using the sacrificial blood of Sylvia, and thereby getting the girlfriend out of the way and opening the way for Hugo and Elvia, bringing our evil couple back together. Causing the corpses of Gaston, Chantal and the other victims to rise from the lake like Marshmen or Haemovores and lay siege to the house like like Romero zombies, the de Marnac and de Lancre power couple unleash a reign of terror.  The Night of the Living Dead comparisons are also apt in terms of bleakness as our assumed hero Hugo is blasted in the back by a possessed shotgun-wielding Maurice and left to die by the lakeside, leaving Elvira as the last human standing against the hordes of the undead.

Filmed in the wintery February of 1972, released in Spain in April 1973 and getting a U.S. release direct to television in 1974 through Avco Embassy, Horror Rises from the Tomb is a heady (ha!) mix of black magic, vampirism and zombie apocalypse - a facet played up by its German distributor - that's sure to sate the palate of any connoisseur of Hammer-esque Gothic horror.

Pulse Pounders: The Evil Clergyman (Charles Band, 1988)

Noted racist Howard Phillips Lovecraft (a New Englander with Little Englander prejudices) may these days be widely known for his bad and wrong views, but he could bash out a tale of the wyrd in his sleep.  Quite literally, with a lot of his Lord Dunsany-inspired stories of the Dreamlands, such as 'The White Ship', 'The Cats of Ulthar' et cetera conjured during his twilight hours of R.E.M. - but with more slimy eldritch people than shiny happy ones.  Some quite interesting instances of his incubus-inflicted iterations of oneiric odyssey are to be found not in his professionally published works but in the marginalia.

1933 was a big year for the H.P sauce to be hag-ridden by the night mare and bestowed with eerie visions from beyond, with him not only finally putting pen to paper to transcribe a phantasm that had invaded his dreamscapes five years earlier in the form of 'The Thing on the Doorstep' but also scrawling a missive that included one of his latest phantasmagorias.  Lovecraft was a serial and dedicated corresponder, and many of his letters to friends, co-writers and fans have survived down the decades.  This particular letter - to acquaintance Bernard Austin Dwyer - related a brief outline of a dream in which the unidentified narrator of the piece is shown into an attic room in an 'Old World' town, not London but some coastal town that they forgot to close down (possibly Mummerset judging by the briefly-transcribed dialogue "Ahrrh!  It be 'ee, zur?"), wherein they perceive a vision or phantasm of a clergyman.  This spectre in Anglican garb burns his mystic tomes in the fireplace before meaning to hang himself from the rafters, but upon noticing the narrator begins to glide towards them menacingly before being repulsed by the protagonist's handy-dandy purple laser beam (dreams are the realm of the wyrd and inexplicable after all)   The short dream tale ends with the narrator sighting themself in a mirror and realising that a profound change has somehow overcome them - they are now the evil clergyman.  

The story would see publication two years after Lovecraft's death, in the April 1939 edition of Weird Tales.

Charles Band's Empire Pictures originally shot the story as part of an anthology film called Pulse Pounders alongside a follow-up to Band's 1984 fantasy compendium The Dungeonmaster (a.k.a. RageWar, a film probably more famous these days for spawning the iconic catchphrase "I reject your reality and substitute my own" as perpetuated by Adam Savage on Mythbusters and a phrase that's probably problematic in these days of people decrying anything they dislike as 'fake news' and burying their heads in alternative facts) titled Dungeonmaster II: A Sorceror's Nightmare which was never completed.  Another segment was a sequel to the 1984 classic Trancers titled City of Lost Angels which reunited Tim Thomerson and Helen Hunt as Jack Deth and the lovely Leena, respectively (not that one alas).

Adapted by Dennis Paoli, the short is something of a reunion of the alumni of 1985's Re-Animator and 1986's From Beyond, with not only Paoli backstage scripting but in front of the camera's proscenium arch Jeffrey Combs, the lovely Barbara Crampton (sadly sans the fetish wear from the latter film which may well have triggered my puberty) and David Gale present and correct with David Warner joining in a half decade before he got another Lovecraftian turn in 'The Cold' segment of Necronomicon.

Beginning with a haunting piano theme from Richard Band over a semi-animated title sequence which unforgivably misspells Ms Crampton's name as "Barbra", we have the lady in question as the oddly-monikered Said Brady returning to a former residence to collect some belongings.  The truculent landlady (Una Brandon-Jones, the "miserable pensioner" Mrs Parkin of Withnail & I who doesn't care where you come from) has issues with the rats in the walls - a nice reference there - as well as Miss Brady's loud sexual activities when she lived there with "him"; we learn that "he" ended his own life there by hanging himself.

Asking to be left alone in the upstairs room, Brady is soon accompanied by the disembodied voice of Jonathan ("him", Combs) who paws all over her with spectral hands as we'd all like to, before manifesting in the hungry flesh and removing his dog collar and clerical garb and giving the young lady a damn good ravishing ("Your body is my religion" is such a good line) on the bed, all the while they're being watched by a human-faced rat creature (Gale).

She awakens in the night to find the rat-thing crawling on the bed - Gale perhaps eager for another cunning linguistics lesson like in Re-Animator - and a tall stranger also in religious dress (Warner) who tells her that not only is the rodentine abomination Jonathan's familiar, but that he seduced her in order to take her soul.  Identifying himself as a bishop sent from Canterbury to excommunicate her lover from the church, the man reveals that he was murdered - his head smashed in with a holy chalice - and floats toward her spouting dire warnings.  Assailed by visions of the phantom clerics, including Jonathan's living corpse hanging from the rafters instructing her to "Kiss me like you used to" (hanging from a rope whilst being blown by Barbara Crampton is how I want to go: I now have an auto-erotic asphyxiation oral fixation), she reaches her wits' end and puts her own head in the noose only for her demon lover to take possession of her lovely form.

And so, in a neat inversion of the original tale's ending, the baleful curate leaves the house bound for pastures new in a new bewitching and beguiling body whilst the rat creature lies thrashing its stop motion claymation tail in one of the landlady's rat traps. 

Thought for decades to be lost media, a videotape copy of the workprint was found in 2011 and subsequently restored and released for our edification.  And well worth a tickle from an eldritch tentacle it is indeed.  I R'lyeh mean that most sincerely.

Brimstone and Treacle (Barry Davis, 1976/1987)

"I recall writing (and the words now make me shudder) that the only meaningful sacrament left to human beings was for them to gather in the streets in order to be sick together, splashing vomit on the paving stones as the final and most eloquent plea to an apparently deaf, dumb and blind God." - Dennis Potter

"Tell him it isn't Play for Today.  Tell him it isn't political!" - John Nathan-Turner

Emerging from the same opening Play for Today montage - a flurry of gritty and sombre monochrome photographs of such drama stalwarts as John Hurt looking concerned and/or perplexed - as classics from the same stable such as Robin Redbreast (James MacTaggart, 1970) and Penda's Fen (Alan Clarke, 1974), Dennis Potter's typically idiosyncratic Brimstone and Treacle is a diabolical delight.  What if something truly daemonic walked amongst us, and what if it was polite, respectful and helpful?  What would it profit a man if he gained a carer for his disabled daughter, but to lose his own soul?  I don't know if anyone had heretofore asked that question but here Potter gives us... if not an answer, then at least an amused rumination upon the quandary.

"There resides infinitely more good in the demonic than in the trivial man" - Soren Kierkegaard

Penned by Potter in the lacuna betwixt biographical drama Where Adam Stood - an adaptation of the autobiography of Edmund Gosse starring Alan Badel and Bread Bowell matriarch to be Jean Boht - and his 1978 floruit which saw a star-studded seven-part adaptation of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and hos own musical opus Pennies from Heaven, Brimstone and Treacle presents us with the everyday life of Tom Bates (Denholm Elliott) being interrupted by a seemingly chance encounter with Martin Taylor (a young Michael Kitchen, post rocking to the music of Stoneground in Dracula A.D. 1972 but a long time before hanging around M's office in Bond movies or starring alongside the delightfully named Honeysuckle Weeks in longer than World War II drama Foyle's War).

"A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down" - Julie Andrews

Inveigling his way into Tom's good graces after their not at all accidental meet-Faust, the infernal Martin indulges in some con artist level cold reading and portrays himself as an old boyfriend of Bates' daughter from art college and feigns an anxiety attack-induced collapse on heaing the news of the incident two years previously that rendered her disabled.

Making his way into their home by smiling and being a villain, he meets Tom's put-open and sttessed wife Amy (Patricia Lawrence) and the purported love of his life, daughter Patricia (Michelle Newell, who essayed her Esmeralda opposite Warren Clarke's Quasimodo in the same year's adaptation of Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame for director Alan Cooke at the BBC) who has been reduced to the state of a gurgling vegetable - at least in the harsh words of her father, who opines that the driver responsible for the hit and run that resulted in her condition be strung up.  Volunteering to help with Pattie's care and relieve some of the stress on Mrs Bates, the outwardly charming and on the face of it quite plausible Martin - who insists that he and Pattie were close to being married at one point - beguiles 'Mumsy' as he nicknames her and quite quickly his black magic has her under his spell.

Humans are such easy prey, as Dr Praetorius from From Beyond so wisely and eloquently taught us, and none seem so easily tempted and led as right-wing reactionary types.  Tom's hang 'em, flog 'em rants and racist outbursts mark him out as a mark ripe for the plucking, and Martin preys upon these leanings.  After Tom drunkenly confesses to being a member of the National Front the daemon pushes him toward further extremes of "send them back" and "put them into camps" rhetoric that would make Naziferatu Stephen Miller engorged, to the extent that Tom baulks and forswears his membership - crying that he didn't want anyone killed or hurt, he just wanted to turn the clock back and freeze the past in aspic. Like the sad reactionary he is.

Of course the crux of it all, the "repugnant" climax - so the speak - is Martin's rape of Patricia which has the effect of "curing" her by snapping her out of her catatonia and triggeing a flashback to the night of the hit and run when she caught her father in bed with her "lower class" friend Susan, whom Tom decried as "slutty".  Perhaps the real evil is that which hides behind the doors and net curtains of suburbia and polite middle class manners.  No wonder the devil himself flees that household into the night with his shirt tails between his legs.

"You have to be smug or very frail, to believe that no man has a horn or tail" -  Martin Taylor

Scheduled for broadcast on the 6th of April 1976, it was withdrawn from transmission and remained unaired for eleven years, finally gaining a broadcast on the 25th of August 1987.  Described (or decried) by then incumbent Head of Broadcast Television and future BBC Director General Alasdair Milne as "brilliantly made" as well as "nauseating" and "repugnant", this shadow ban was celebrated by Mary Whitehouse types as "taking a stand" against what the God fearers called a "rising tide" of "filth" and "blasphemy".  You've got to laugh, really.  Potter would have the last laugh however as he not only successfully adapted it as a stage play (premiering at the Sheffield Crucible in late 1977 and transferring the following year to the West End) but also to film, once again starring Elliott as Tom opposite tantric sex fiend, lovely Feyd and model for occult private dick John Constantine Sting (Gordon Sumner to his mam) as Martin.

The 1982 film version had the name of the mother, now played by Joan Plowright, changed from Amy Bates to Norma Bates.  We all go a little Psycho sometimes, I suppose.

Gatchaman OVA (Hiroyuki Fukushima, 1994)

The Battle for the Planet.

The animated TV series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (originally Kagaku Ninja-tai Gatchaman in its native Nippon) may be better known to those of us in the Anglosphere as either Battle of  the Planets or G-Force - something that caused li'l me, ignorant of such things as variant dubs, some confusion when discussing the show in the playground as it turned out that some of my compatriots knew it by one name and some by the other; I think it depended whether you were watching the most recent iteration to be broadcast on TV or caught it on video - and began way back in the dim and distant past of 1972 as an environmentally-minded   Running for a grand total of 105 original episodes from the first of October '72 to the twenty-ninth of September 1974, the series detailed the exciting adventures of the titular five man (well... three men, one woman and an adolescent boy) superhero team as they donned bird-themed costumes and boarded the super-ship the God Phoenix to battle the evil forces of Galactor - an evil organisation bent on conquering the Earth and plundering it's natural resources and mineral wealth (perhaps they'd heard that Greenland has rare earth minerals or something) headed by the disembodied alien intelligence Leader X and the sexually ambiguous genderfluid commander Berg Katse.  The Gatchaman team would fight for humanity and nature against an immense assortment of Galactor's giant mechas - usually animal themed such as the Turtle King (or Space Terrapin in the BotP dub, more on which anon)  - with an assortment of individual weapons and vehicles and hand to hand combat skills, all the while keeping their civilian identities secret.

The leader of the group (not transformed from the norm by the nuclear goop but instead provided with 'cerebonic' implants - at least, according to Battle of the Planets) was Ken Washio, ace pilot and all-round good guy with the Eagle for his avian avatar.  Second in command was Joe Asakura, race car driver and the rebellious bad boy of the team who we all really wanted to be more than Ken (very much the Han Solo to Ken's Luke), designation Condor.  Then there was Jun with her green hair and thigh boots and penchant for pantsu-flashing flips that troubled many a pubescent trouser, callsign Swan.  The youth contingent was catered to - those immune to Jun's charms, anyway  - by the young lad Jinpei, stinking up the place with his adolescent scent and codenamed Swallow (I'd much rather that was his foster sister Jun's codename...).  Finally, there was the portly Ryu - because where there's a Ken there has to be a Ryu, by the law of Hadouken - who flies the ship and sports the Owl costume.  Armed with signature weapons like Ken's sonic boomerang (think Batman's batarang, but more lethal), Jun's deadly yo-yo (cooler than it sounds) and Jinpei's explosive bola and driving personalised vehicles (Ken's glider, Joe's car, Jun's motorbike and Jinpei's dune buggy) they were routinely summoned via their trusty wrist communicators to come together to board the Phoenix to face this week's threat to the Earth and mankind.

"I will always be better than you, Ken."

Confusion would reign due to the multifarious differing dubs would rechristen the team Mark, Jason, Princess, Keyop and Tiny (Battle of the Planets, which would also give Keyop a bizarre speech impediment and add robot sidekick 7-Zark-7 [very much the H.E.R.B.I.E. the robot to G-Force's Fantastic Four] as well as muck more of an intergalactic Star Wars scale rather than the original's more Earthbound remit); Ace, Dirk, Agatha June, Pee Wee and Hooty (G-Force: Guardians of Space) and eventually Hunter Harris, Joe Thax, Kelly Jennar (a lost Kardashian relative, mayhaps?), Mickey Dugan and Ollie Keeawani (there is also apparently Eagle Riders, a third permutation I've never seen but apparently sporting the voice talents of a  young Bryan Cranston in the Joe the Condor role making me glad that he was always my favourite character [Jun aside, obvs.]).  The original series was followed by a sequel, Gatchaman II, in 1978 consisting of a further 52 episodes which was in turn directly followed up in 1979 by Gatchaman Fighter which lasted 48 instalments and had a markedly darker turn than the previous series; it was this pair of sequel series that would later by combined a redubbed as Eagle Riders.

And so in 1994, fifteen years after the ending of the combined 205 episode saga, a reboot occurred in the form of an original video animation (this happens OVA and OVA again you see, which as a bad yolk but I'm basically a good egg).  Playing out over three 50-ish minute episodes, this reinvents the entire Gatchaman story from the start and drags it int the 21st century - both in and out of universe as it gives us a definitive temporal setting of 2066 and gives the characters a modern update on the their classic future-'70s design - like post-Crisis on Infinite Earths DC meets the Star Trek Kelvin timeline in a crack lounge.

Released on the first of October 1994, the premier episode 'The Dragon King' begins as a parallel world retelling if the original first episode 'Gatchaman Versus Turtle King' (or 'Attack of the Space Terrapin' in old Battle of the Planets money) with an updated rendition of an attack on Earth's defences by the titular testudinous mecha, constructed by the long-gestating Galactor who have been present on the planet since their Ice Age arrival.  Dr. Nanbu, who has been given something of a hipster makeover replete with swishy scarf, assembles the Science Ninja Team against the protests of rival scientist Dr. Kessler - an obvious Galactor shill - and so our supreme squadron (each themselves given an updated look: Joe now sports long hair, tattoos and a clothing style - ankh medallion over his bare chest under an open leather jacket - that screams "frontman or guitarist early '90s 'edgy' metal band" and Jun now rocks a short brown bob instead of her old flowing green locks but has been compensated with a more fully fleshed out figure which she flashes while changing out of her swimming costume and into her motorbike leathers.  God I still love her) comes together.

The rogue Republic of Hontworl, led by maverick president Kerry Beoluke who has been described as "the devil" and "the reincarnation of Hitler", has decided to withdraw from the United Nations Security Council and no longer deal with any U.N. bodies.  No real world analogues there I can think of.  No siree.   When was this made again?  1994?  Oddly prescient.  This rogue nation has allied itself with Galactor (who have adopted the very "Hail HYDRA!"-esque call and response catchphrase of "Glory to Galactor!"), Beoluke being one of the many guises of catlike hermaphrodite Berg Katse, to trigger an all-out nuclear conflict among the nations of the Earth on the Darwinist understanding that the survivors will be stronger.  Pain is the price to survive; to evolve.

The chelonian menace is averted by the team boarding it and causing it's burning from the inside like a Bauhaus album, but the Galactor threat - led by the xenomorph Leader X replete with Masonic all-seeing eye just like the dollar bill - lives on to fight another day.

On the first of January 1995 'The Red Specter' [sic], also known as 'Secret Red Impulse', saw the struggle against the alien menace continue with the appearance of the Red Impulse - or Reddo Imparusu - squadron.  This team of top aeronauts (rechristened as fighters from the planet Riga in Battle of the Planets, along with their leader changing to the cool moniker of Colonel Cronos) recurred with their own long-burning storyline in the '70s series that is necessarily drastically telescoped down for a three part OVA.

When a submarine encounters what the crew think to be an underwater mountain or volcano on the seabed only to find that it's Galactor's pyramidal base, it is destroyed.  The pyramidal edifice is hosting a meeting very reminiscent of a Bond movie S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (or rather, Spectra) meeting presided over by Berg Katse, here presenting in their alluring female form with very nice colour co-ordinated nail polish.  Galactor plans to alter Earth's atmosphere to better suit their species - something that will have the side effect of reducing the human populace by 95%.  There are a lot of those sorts of plans around recently: see also my Scream of the Shalka maunderings.

Dr. Nanbu contacts team leader Mark whilst he is visiting his late mother's grave and we get a flashback to the funeral - the last day he saw his father, a distant man of secrecy whose top secret job kept him apart from his family.  Gee, I wonder if that will come up later?  Assembling the team and sent to scope out the enemy's trans-Atlantic intergalactic base, the Gatchaman squad's God Phoenix come under heavy fire from Galactor's blackbird squadron only to be rescued the secretive Red Impulse team led by a man with a mysteriously familiar moustache (obviously Kentarou Washio, Ken's absent father).  The crimson-clad commandos aid our ninja team in defeating Galactor's elite Jupiter Death Squad - another great band name, their early E.Ps were great, probably - but it ends with an inconclusive 'To Be Continued...'.

The saga culminated after another three month lacuna in 'The Final Countdown' (poodle rockers Europe not included, though Joey Tempest is a name that was just made for an anime character) on April the first.  This particular April Fool entails our heroic quintet continuing their heroic fight against the evil forces of the Decepticons Galactor as the enemies' fleet of Space Turtles / Terrapins / Dragons mass above the cities of the world like the Sith Exogol fleet meets the Visitors from V.  

Condor Joe's trailer (because like the '80s and '90s edgy rockstar that he is, he lives alone in a trailer in the desert like some kind of Petrocelli-Martin Riggs where he presumably spends his free time drinking bourbon by the bottle while weeping a solitary tear watching home movies of a family that may not have even been his own and staring angrily at his reflection before punching the mirror like the loose cannon he is.  Or is that just me?) is targeted by Galactor but the renegade gives them the slip to go rogue without the rest of the Gatchaman ninja squad.  Revelations abound as Joe discovers that alien Galactor blood runs in his veins, but that's where their similarity ends as his allegiance is to humanity; he goes on a foolhardy solo mission to attack the Galactor base where he discovers Red Impulse also on a deep infiltration mission - a suicide run.  Meanwhile, Mark and the others join the fray to prevent ecological catastrophe, save their friend and avenge his father's self-sacrifice.

Confession time: I found the (slight) redesign of Berg Katse / Solaris / Zoltar (voiced in the English dub that I watched by Edwin Neal, a.k.a. Nubbins Sawyer the hitchhiker from Tobe Hooper's horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and in feminine guise by Claire Hamilton) with feline fangs over lipsticked lips tres arousing.  Must be all the erotic vampire fiction I've consumed over the years.  I blame Jean Rollin.  Needless to say, if fangs had been incorporated into Jun's reimagining I could not have been held responsible for my actions.  Fangs + lipstick + thigh high boots = exploding crotch time.

This, of course, was not the final end for Gatchaman as a franchise either; 2013 would prove the magic number seeing as it did the start of a new anime iteration, this time in a whole new continuity with fresh characters rather than re-versions of the originals, in the form of Gatchaman Crowds (followed by a second run titled Gatchaman Crowds Insight in 2015) as well as a live action movie directed by Toya Sato with the classic team of Ken, Joe, Jun, Jinpei and Ryu taking on Galactor and Berg Katse on the silver screen.  

Always ready to transmute into new forms, Gatchaman will doubtless survive to continue their duty of protecting the Earth from the evil forces that threaten it: watching, warning against surprise attacks from beyond space.  Always five, acting together as one.  Dedicated, inseparable, invincible!

Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka (Wilson Milam, 2003)

During the long dark of Doctor Who's off-screen hiatus that we know as the Wilderness Years multifarious tendrils branched off from the main trunk of the show; meanwhiles and never-weres that gave us fleeting glimpses of alternative versions of the show's future.  I'm not talking here about Doctor Who Unbound, Big Finish's series of audio Elsewords-style stories that were conscious attempts at "What If...?" scenarios and thus explicitly never intended to be a part of the official 'canon' (in as much as any Big Finish audio stories are canon... Ooh, there's a can of vermiforms opened), I mean the honest attempts to revive the show -in various formats - that proved to be false starts until Russell T. Davies' televisual revival was announced in the show's 40th anniversary year of 2003 and finally made it to the screen starting in 2005.

These flashing glances of chances of bliss - another kiss from a Rose of another colour - included Dan Freedman's ambitious webcast 'Death Comes to Time', which from 2001 to 2002 offered us via audio and flash animation an epic Star Wars-flavoured vision of the show in which Sylvester McCoy returned as the Doctor only to be ultimately killed off at the conclusion and his mantle taken up by Stephen Fry's fellow renegade Time Lord the Minister of Chance; the story would be continued by Freedman (as Dan Freeman) in both audio and novel form as The Minister of Chance furthering this poetic and lyrical iteration of the Whoniverse which I'll probably cover in more depth in a separate review.  

But in 2003, the very year that it was announced that BBC Wales would be returning the live action series to television, there was another.

This particular Skywalker took the form of an attempted animated version of the show (not for the first time: there was also an approach by Canadian animation outfit Nelvana in the early '90s [damn it, that's another one I should definitely write about...]), the first - and given the return of the actual live action show only, though follow ups were indeed planned - story being penned by established Wilderness Years scribe Paul Cornell.  Cornell made his name in the New Adventures novels of the 1990s with such acclaimed tomes as 'Timewyrm: Revelation', 'Love and War' (the debut of beloved companion of disputed canonicity Bernice Summerfield, whose alcohol-fueled archaeological adventures bothered the trousers of many a pubescent sci-fi spod  of the era - including yours truly), 'No Future' and 'Human Nature' - the latter of which would be adapted into a two-part TV story with David Tennant's Tenth Doctor - and was obviously thought a capable pair of hands to steer a new beginning for the franchise in a new medium.

Starring Withnail himself Richard E. Grant, whose Withnail & I co-star Paul McGann he was ostensibly taking over the mantle of the titular Time Lord from and who infamously seemed not all that into it in the contemporaneous issue of Doctor Who Magazine's interview (although he may just have been put off bellendish fandom by interviewer Ben Cook, which would be completely understandable) to the extent that future showrunner RTD would denounce him as "taking the money and running"*, the story begins one dark night with the TARDIS' arrival in the small Lancastrian town of Lannet.  The somewhat vampiric-visaged Doctor (Grant), who seems a little bit pissed off with his current situation of being manoeuvred into a mission by the Time Lords, locks the TARDIS ("like a car", as his Tennanth incarnation puts it in 'The End of Time') and enters the distinctly tense atmosphere of the Slaughtered Lamb-esque local pub where he meets his destined companion Alison Cheney (Sophie Okonedo, future recurring monarch Liz X) who works as the frustrated barmaid of this juke joint that doesn't have any Pachelbel selections on its jukebox (maybe because it's... heh... not 'Canon'?) much to the Doctor's frustration.

This ghostal town that they forgot to close down has been invaded by the alien Shalka, a subterranean serpentine species (sibilantssss!) decried as "one penny jelly snakes" by our dour antihero.  Their cobra-like hoods amplify the sound of their sonic shriek - a Black Bolt style special move that controls the wills of these puny humans.  The TARDIS has been taken by these reprobate reptiles, sinking into the hungry earth (which of course is sour) Tractator-style ad so the Doctor has little choice but to acknowledge the Gravis of the situation and call in the army - not UNIT, the alien fighting military wing of the United Nations as might be expected in such circumstances - just regular squaddies led by Major Thomas Kennet (Jim Norton, Bishop Brennan of Father Ted or Ombuds Wellington from Babylon 5 depending in your frame of reference) to help with the resistance represented by Alison and her boyfriend Joe (Craig Kelly from RTD's Queer as Folk, of "McGann doesn't count" infamy).

Descending into the bowels of the Earth to retrieve his police box property, he encounters the Shalka Prime (Diana Quick, Julia Flyte from the original television miniseries version of Brideshead Revisited) who is a more highly evolved - and now I have the Vines stuck in my head, great - representative of these conqueror worms capable of reasoning a speech (Cornell really was influenced by 'Frontios', wasn't he?), opening a quantum link to their home world as a bridge for a full invasion.  Where would a worm colony be without wormholes, after all?  Inside the TARDIS we find the Master (Derek Jacobi, who would return in the mainline continuity to [re-]essay the same role in 'Utopia' and countless Big Finish audios), or at least an android simulacrum of same, lurking around the spacious Heath Robinson console room; sort of a cross between McGann's TV Movie control chamber and the concept paintings for what ultimately became said film, the Leekley Bible ones complete with mysterious 'Infinity Chamber'.  I'd love to see that set in live action Doctor Who someday.

Working out that the town is built on a plug of volcanic rock and that the magma-dwelling Shalka plan to strip away the ozone layer from the atmosphere (I love a party with a happy atmosphere) in order to make the planet uninhabitable to humans but ideal for them, the titular time traveler along with barmaid Alison and the mecha-Master, must oppose the ophidian oppressors and save Earth from ecological disaster (like the Gatchaman science ninja team - more on whom soon - or Captain Planet's Planeteers) before the ultimate victory and an ending that seems like a combination of 'Robot' (with Major Kennet arriving just as the Doctor departs) and, more presciently, future episodes 'Rose' and 'World War Three' with Alison having to choose between bidding farewell to her beau Joe and traveling on into time and space with the Doctor or returning to her humdrum everyday existence.  Being a canny lass, she obviously chooses the life less ordinary.  Sadly, we would not be privy to their continuing adventures due to the return of yer actual show (though a follow-up was pitched and drafted titled 'Blood of the Robots'), but there was Cavan Scott and Mark Wright's text story 'The Feast of the Stone' in which the Shalka Doctor, Alison and the Master confronted an alien vampire - an encounter during which the Doctor would sacrifice his frenemy's AI (after)life.  There was also Telos Publishing's novella The Cabinet of Light, written by Daniel O'Mahoney, which featured an indeterminate and unspecified incarnation that I among others headcanoned as the Richard E. Grant Doctor (this book also served as a springboard for Telos' Time Hunter series, which I never explored further but sound decent. I just like the idea of  book series having a pilot episode, you know?).

*Russell T. Davies would eventually have a Damascene conversion and relent on his previous opinion and canonise Grant - maybe - by including a specially shot in character picture of him in a holographic montage of past Doctor faces in the 2024 Ncuti Gatwa episode 'Rogue'.  Personally, I'd have included Peter Cushing too, just for the LOLs.

Whittaker, Hartnell, Philippa, Sue... I forget the names

Or maybe it was the snowman-controlling Great Intelligence, also played by Grant, inveigling his/its way into the Doctor's timestream (see 'The Name of the Doctor')?  

Who knows, eh?  Who nose.

Francis Durbridge Presents: Bat Out Of Hell (Alan Bromly, 1966)

Author and playwright Francis Durbridge may be best known for his creation Paul Temple - the iconic dilettante crime author-cum-detective whose adventures (alongside his faithful other half 'Steve') have been portrayed in print and on the radio, as well as the screen large and small - but was also the author of a prolific amount of other, non-Temple related serials for radio and television.

Broadcast in five instalments of twenty-five minute episodes from November 26th to December 24th (a nice bit of a thriller for a cold Christmas Eve) 1966 on the only two years old BBC 2, our taut little tale Bat Out of Hell (the late Meat Loaf not included) begins with an establishing scene of Ibsenesque upper middle class domestic disharmony - the sniping betraying the animosity boiling beneath the genteel veneer of respectability - as we are introduced to the Stewarts; Geoffrey (Noel Johnson, a familiar face to watchers of cult UK television and film - he was a star of both the original A for Andromeda as well its sequel The Andromeda Breakthrough, a twice Doctor Who guest star as King Thous of Atlantis in 'The Underwater Menace' and the treacherous Sir Charles Grover of Operation Golden Age in 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs' as well as the Judge in Pete Walker's Frightmare and the gin-sodden General in Bruce Robinson's seminal and semen-stained Withnail and I; away from the screen he was a familiar voice on radio as Dick Barton) and Diana (Sylvia Syms - I don't really have to tell you who she was, do I?  Oh all right, she was Sister Diana from J. Lee Thompson's wartime ambulance frolic Ice Cold in Alex, Sister Mitya in Ralph Thomas's Conspiracy of Hearts, Mrs Crosby in Michael Winner's Dirty Weekend and Margaret in Martin Clunes vehicle Staggered.  She may have have been more proud of some of those than others.  Of course, she was also a guest star in Doctor Who, essaying the role of Mrs Pritchard in the wonderful 'Ghost Light').  Our couple are locking horns whilst getting ready for a trip away to Cannes, and Geoffrey's employee Mark Paxton (Morse himself, John Thaw, star of not only Inspector Morse and The Sweeney but also Edgar Wallace second-stringers Five to One and Dead Man's Chest, Home to Roost, the definitive Sherlock Holmes Jeremy Brett's version of The Sign of Four as the maniacal monopod Jonathan Small, and the frustratingly elusive Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition which I've still not managed to track down after a decade of trying) calls in to lend a hand and new packing case for the trip.

Before leaving for their holiday, Geoffrey visits Ned Tallboy (Stanley Meadows, who had small roles in Hammer's 1959 The Mummy and Vincent Price's 1964 The Masque of the Red Death before starring in Montgomery Tully's 1967 sci-fi romp The Terrornauts) to confirm their lift to the airport before going to the office to be told by Paxton that a long-vacant country house has found a prospective purchaser and so the businessman - in his suit and tie - goes out to the lonely property and explores the empty edifice until he runs across his erstwhile employee who is waiting for him with a gun.  Mark and Diana have been engaged in an illicit affair you see, and this is their chance.  Shooting Geoffrey and bundling his body into the car, Mark tells Diana that he plans to dump the body in some roadworks which are being filled in with concrete in the morning: her husband will never be found.  Dutifully reporting her husband's absence to the authorities, she is paid a visit by the genial-seeming policeman Inspector Clay (Dudley Foster, another familiar face in vintage telefantasy being jarringly-named space pirate Maurice Caven in Doctor Who's 'The Space Pirates' as well as  guesting in the original '50s Invisible Man, three instalments of The Avengers, and episodes of Danger Man, Randall and Hopkirk: Deceased and Jason King before his sad suicide at the age of only 48) who says that her missing spouse will be looked into - then Diana receives a phone call from a familiar-sounding voice and Mark finds that the corpse has vanished from the vehicle.  This is truly Diabolique-al.  Contacted by Clay to say a body has been found in the roadworks, Diana dutifully identifies the unknown body as her husband as per the menacing telephone voice's instructions.

As paranoia mounts, Diana and Mark begins to panic and unravel under Inspector Clay's watchful gaze.  The Stewarts' family friends Thelma (June Ellis) and Walter Bowen (Emrys Jones, the Master of the Land of Fiction from 'The Mind Robber' as well as Robbie Ross in The Trials of Oscar Wilde) stop by, and Thelma passes on a cigarette vase that was in the pocket of Diana's mink coat that she took to get cleaned - a cigarette case that the shocked Mrs Stewart maintains that she has never seen before in her life, that is nonetheless inscribed:

"To Diana - who came like a bat out of hell.  Geoffrey."  About their wedding night, perhaps?  I  bet she did, you sly old dog.  I bet she did.

Walter warns that Inspector Clay might seem like "he doesn't know his arse from his elbow... but he does".  Perhaps like Babylon 5 no one here is exactly what they seem.  Diana follows more phone instructions from the purported 'Geoffrey' (via Thelma), making her way to the Chichester Motel against Mark's cautioning only to find Clay already there with a cadre of police: the bullet-riddled corpse of the actual kosher Geoffrey has been discovered there; meanwhile Mark is contacted by Miss Kitty Tracey (Patsy Smart, make an 'orse sick she would as the elderly ghoul in 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang') who says she knows what is going on - especially concerning the "bat out of hell"...

As Clay continues to question, it emerges that the dead man identified as Geoffrey was named Ken Harding, and that he was wearing Mr Stewart's clothes and carrying his wallet and notebook - the notebook bearing a number of monetary payments to a 'T' - as well as a note written in Italian translating to the same 'bat out of hell' inscription as on the cigarette case.  Paranoia and fear of blackmail from the cryptic Miss Tracey take Diana to her little shop on the high street, where she finds a bloodied knife and sees Thelma's body;  the shaken and not very merry widow's straightened state of mind is not helped when the very much alive Thelma turns up at her house with her her husband and the Inspector in tow.

Another unexpected complication and Mark ad Diana's otherwise damn fine plan arises in the sultry Italian form of Diana Valesco (Paddy Glynn), Geoffrey's secret side piece to whom he has left the bulk of his estate in his will prompting Paxton to bloody thoughts of murdering the doxy.  Plots, counterplots, suspicions and burning resentments begin to surface in a boiling web of mayhem that some of the antagonistic protagonists shan't make it out of alive.  But fear not, Clay is on the case.

This classic thriller, a somewhat forgotten  gem of '60s television, is currently being run in the UK on the Talking Pictures channel on Monday evenings, which is what finally prompted me to crack open and watch the DVD which I've had for about five years.

The presentation on the DVD from Danann Publishing (mmm... Danann) through Luxin is a beautiful restoration that really showcases the deft direction by Alan Bromly, a prolific TV veteran who also helmed the charming Diane Cilento fantasy The Angel Who Pawned Her Harp (1954) and was eventually driven to the point of a nervous breakdown - allegedly - by Tom Baker's booze-fuelled misbehaviour on the fraught set of 'Nightmare of Eden'.  A nightmare indeed.