Beckett on Film: Catastrophe (David Mamet, 2001)

The UK's Channel 4 - which thankfully at time of writing remains unscathed from the depredations of Conservative governments, despite the best (?) efforts of the spectacularly dim Nadine Dorries (how did that creature ever hold a remit that put her in charge of the country's culture?) to destroy it for her petty ideological reasons despite not understanding how it's funded - provided me with a lot of educational entertainment in my life, especially in the late '90s and early '00s.  No, I don't mean hungover university Sunday mornings watching Alexa Chung and Miquita Oliver introduce Hollyoaks through a foggy haze - well, that as well - I'm talking about things like the Eurotika! strand that introduced me to such fun as Jess Franco's Female Vampire (if anyone wants to know my thoughts on that gem, I think I did a review on We Are Cult), as well as slightly less prurient but just as great stuff like the Beckett on Film season - a well worthwhile collaboration between Channel 4 and the Irish Film Board.

It was timely, as I was at the time just familiarising myself with the works of Samuel Beckett (who, lest we forget, never made the leap home) through performing, if that's not too strong a word, in Waiting for Godot on my university drama course.  I can't in all conscience say it was any good, but since we'd convinced the proprietors of the nearest pub to the theatre to let us perform it in there - I think some guff about "placing and spacing" was invoked - it was at least amusing as most of the small cast got progressively smashed on Harp and Guinness between scenes.  Durty Nelly's is a nice looking hotel now.  I hope they got rid of the smell of vomit.

Anyway: just as I was plunged into the works of aforesaid Irish wordsmith, this season of the works of Beckett committed to celluloid became a thing that was happening.  The one that I clearly recall sitting down to watch was the brief (under seven minutes) piece 'Catastrophe'.

Our mise-en-scene is a theatre, in which an officious Director (the legendary Harold Pinter, who despite the rumours was not in the Doctor Who story 'The Abominable Snowmen' - though his The Caretaker was obviously far superior to that of Gareth bloody Roberts) barks orders to his Assistant (the lovely and talented Rebecca Pidgeon, no relation to either Forbidden Planet star and gas station blowjob aficionado Walter or to occasional 1970s Doctor Who guest star Frances, but married to playwright and director David Mamet - helmer of this piece.  She's in most of his stuff, before anyone cries nepotism.  Bloody good singer, too: her rendition of 'Wouldn't It Be Nice?' is my second favourite Beach Boys cover; only because Frank Black's 'Hang On To Your Ego' cannot be beaten) to continually rearrange the placing and spacing of the living art installation that stands upon the stage.  This is the Protagonist (legend of stage and screen [and Chelsea public conveniences, being fined £10 in 1953 for "persistent importuning" during the bad old days when men who loved men had to conceal their sexuality in the twilight world of toilet trading.  One hopes it was a tenner well spent - most people only spent a penny] Sir John Gielgud himself, star of Caligula and Arthur 2: On the Rocks and other stuff, in his final role  - dying mere weeks later), an elderly and infirm silent man who remains immobile with his eyes downcast as the Assistant continually adjusts his clothing, posture and stance upon the podium he occupies on the barked orders of the impatient Director who informs us that he has a caucus to attend.

"Sure he won't utter?" asks the Assistant.

"Not a squeak." growls the Director, certain that he has a submissive and acquiescent spectacle for whatever audience is to arrive.

After ordering the indignities of having the old man stripped down to his underclothes and continually posed like a mannequin, the tyrannical Director commands the the flesh be bleached before instructing the unseen Luke (a lighting assistant who - Godot-like - never appears) to show "just the head".

Luke drops the lights and lights only the old man's head on command, at which point the Assistant hesitantly dares to venture a suggestion of her own:

"What if we were to raise the head - just for an instant?  To show the face?  Just for an instant?"

"Raise his head?" roars the Director. "What next?  Where do you think we are -  Patagonia?!?  'Raise his head'...  For God's sake.  No, that's our catastrophe in the bag."

And in the darkness, the Protagonist - silent and unprotesting until now - shifts from the cowed and bowed position into which he has been manipulated by slowly lifting his head and defiantly meeting our gaze.

Beckett - Pinter - Mamet: a trifecta of titans of theatre; the Holy Trinity of 20th century drama, perhaps. 

And perhaps in these current times of the U.K. Conservative government giving increasingly dictatorial edicts and clamping down on such basic rights as the simple freedom to protest, it behoves us to take the message of Gielgud's enfeebled but unbowed Protagonist and defiantly raise our heads into the light and look our oppressors in the eye now and then.

The Making of Monstrous Me: The Earliest Horror Films of My Formative Years (That I Remember, At Least...)

Right... deep breath.  Firstly... are you okay?

Well, hello there. It's been a long time since I've posted here in this crepuscular crypt of cinematic suffering. It's even longer since I had to think of a way to start a blog piece - the last few bits 'n' bobs that have gone up over the years since 2019 have been things I had saved as rough drafts because they had been started and written to a greater or lesser extent before then, and it was just a matter of finishing them off and posting them when I felt able to. Sorry if they weren't up to my usual standard. "Don't be silly," you reply in unison, "you don't have standards!" Quite right. I'm sure most of us have had a rough time of the last couple of years, so I'm not going to harp on about it and relay a litany of woes, but it has been more than a bit shit. So now the illness and grief is over (mostly), I find writer's block a thing. Weird that something you could once do without even thinking about it - even if that meant the results were crappy - can become so difficult and one finds oneself gripped with anxiety when faced with the tyranny of the blank white screen demanding to be filled with words. On which note, if the very nice James from We Are Cult sees this: I shouldn't have submitted the first part of a multiple part piece at the time I did. That Part One must be lonely, waiting all this time for its siblings to join it. Maybe I'll get in the Guinness book for the longest interval between an opening chapter and the rest appearing. 

Procrastination's what you need, if you want to be a record breaker.

So I was wracking my brains trying to think of something to write about to break myself back in to blogging, as well as getting back up to speed to be able to finish the longer pieces I'd been in the middle of before everything went heinous, when I stumbled upon a video on the HorrorHands Youtube channel titled 'The First Horror Movies I Ever Saw'.  A very good watch it was, too - but mostly the concept caught my eye.  Or my brain.  Or my MIND'S EYE, as M*ry Wh*t*h**s* might screech.  I thought "Nice idea.  I'm going to steal that".  Thanks for the inspiration, Bryn.  This is an homage, not a rip-off.

So I'm going to run with that concept and wrack my ailing brain for the earliest examples of the genre I recall beholding.  Since my parents were generally cool with me watching horror so long as it wasn't too extreme by their random standards (as we shall see, there was at least one occasion where a movie crossed their arbitrary line), I decided to make it a Top Eight - 'cause we like a list, us fans, don't we - and also make them all things I saw before the age of eight.  That might seem random in of itself, but I made 1987 the cut-off point for this list because I have very clear memories of a lot of the movies I saw that year and you never know, stuff like Hellraiser, The Lost Boys, Evil Dead II, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Monster Squad might get (a) blog post(s) of their own one day.  If I ever get my shit together.

So, if you're slitting comfortably, we'll begin:

In no particular order, we come firstly to The Burning.

Yeah, it's a shame that looking back at it from a modern perspective it's tainted by the involvement of Harvey Wankstain.  That aside, the tale of Cropsy the incinerated camp caretaker and his revenge wreaked upon the staff and inmates (wait - 'inmates' is the wrong word, and probably just me projecting harshly on unbeloved memories of a week at Thurston as a kid.  Attendees?) of a summer camp is an absolute classic of the slasher subgenre, and in my own opinion the absolute benchmark of the summer camp slasher sub-subgenre.  Sorry Friday the 13th: you might have won the race get to the screen first, but Tony Maylam's 1981 flick is the far superior for my money even if it didn't go on to spawn a litter of variable sequels.  And what a cast, with such 'will soon be too famous for this genre' faces as Holly Hunter, Fisher Stevens and Jason Alexander.  And I'm assuming it was lingering memories of this movie that made me find Leah Ayres so familiar when I saw Bloodsport at around ten, even though I couldn't quite place where I'd seen her before.  It's not like I'd have seen her in anything else.

There's not really a lot to say about The Burning that hasn't been said many times before and more eloquently by others, so I'll just mention the maggoty skull at the beginning that freaked me out, "Like a fucking Big Mac - overdone!", that scene with the canoe and the raft and what happens when secateurs meet fingers, and Rick Wakeman's haunting theme - right up there in my top horror music themes of all time.  We'll be getting to another of them later in the list.  I still have a pre-Video Recordings Act VHS of the movie (hopefully I'm not doxxing myself here as owning something illegal, since the film's now un-banned and available in all its unexpurgated gory glory on DVD and Blu-Ray).  It's not the one I saw before I was five or so, when it was banned; the only way I'd still have that is if my parents had failed to return it to the video shop.  No, it's a copy I bought from a gentleman named Brucie - no, not Forsyth, I'm not that old - at university for a curry and some cans.  Cheers, Brucie.  Less cheers for spiking my drink that night, leading to an incident in which only the fact I was friends with the barmaid meant that the bouncer was stopped from throwing me down a flight of stairs because I was apparently "chewing my face off".  Appreciate the video, didn't appreciate almost being killed.

Glad I got that off my chest.  Apologies for the slight segue.  Back to movies.

At number two we have a bit of a cheat with Wes Craven's 1972 grimy grindhouse grimfest The Last House on the Left.  I say a bit of a cheat because although I definitely saw some of it as a young kid - this being another work that fell foul of the Department of Public Persecution's 1984 'video nasties' banfest - I only saw it as far as the bit where Krug and the gang (they had some good tunes, that band) capture Mari and Phyllis, and the latter is instructed to piss her pants, at which point my dad leapt up and roared "Get this shit off!".  Interesting that although my parents were fine with me watching the other things on this list, enforced urination crossed some sort of line.  Perhaps he found it triggering or something.

And so it wasn't until about fifteen years later that I got the chance to actually watch the entire film.  I like to think of it as the longest intermission in film history.  Most people don't need a decade and a half to go for a wee or get a choc ice.  I understand if anyone thinks that should disqualify the movie from being here since I only initially saw the first... I dunno, twenty-five minutes (?) of it whilst an actual child (you know, if I was doing due diligence and being less lazy I'd actually check how far into the film the peeing bit is, but I'm guessing roughly half and hour-ish), but that scene and the whole incident meant it stayed with me for a long time.  Along with the resentment at not getting to see the rest of it.  My father had been dead for about seven years before I finally got to watch it the whole thing.  I'm not sulking anymore, Dad, we're OK.

Next up, probably the first film I watched enough times to commit the majority of the dialogue to memory: John Landis' 1981 legendary lycanthropic tale of carnivorous lunar activities An American Werewolf in London.  I was always intensely interested in change and transformation in film, making werewolves and shapeshifters in general probably my absolute favourite cinematic subjects.  Of course Rick Baker's groundbreaking and Oscar-winning (an accolade that the horror genre doesn't get to boast very often: off the top of my head the only other Academy Award winners in the genre that occur are Fredric March and Anthony Hopkins; both winning the Best Actor Oscar for 1932's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and 1990's The Silence of the Lambs respectively and showing the gulf of years betwixt the genre getting a nod in one of the big, non-technical categories) make-up has rightly been hailed and lauded; I wonder how much Rob Bottin regrets turning down the gig and letting his assistant do it?

Depicting the change from man to animal (a bit like Manimal, a TV show whose brief run I loved for much the same reasons.  I've still got the annual, somewhere) in visceral and eye-watering bone-crunching detail, the transition was so complete and convincing it allowed the viewer to still see David Naughton's doomed David Kessler in the puppetry-animated monstrous dire wolf that wreaks its carnivorous lunar activities upon the capital in the film's carnage-filled climax, and feel empathy in its unavoidably tragic conclusion.  That bit where the lovely Jenny Agutter tries to talk to the lupine beast in the darkened alley, getting in between the werewolf and the armed police team itching to destroy this thing that was the man she loves, fair broke my little heart.  Still does, every time. 

Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters is the only film on this list to have also ranked on Bryn's video, and for a moment I thought of missing it off but that moment of madness - akin to a politician caught "looking for badgers" on a heath - passed quite quickly when I realised there was no was I could honestly compile this docket of dread without it.  Emerging into the world in 1979 like myself, Zombie Flesh Eaters (or Zombie 2, or just plain Zombi depending upon your regional variations) upped the ante on the shambling cannibalistic undead template set by George A. Romero initial two - and best - entries in his own series by making the anthropophagous revenants truly foetid and putrescent, carrying the rank stench of mouldering burial vaults as they feast upon humanity's warm flesh and blood.  The opening sequence made me very trepidatious about setting foot aboard boats.  Not that we had a lot of cause for going on yachts when I was younger, but if offered I'd have refused lest a burly bald undead (like a cross between Tor Johnson, Quito from Strange Paradise, and Gluttony from Se7en [yes, I still insist on pronouncing it 'seh-seven-en' because I think it's funny]) come shambling at me out of the dark.

And a Fulci film wouldn't be a Fulci film without some eyeball trauma, 'cause Fulci gonna Fulci.  The scene where Olga Karlatos' Mrs Menard has her head slowly pulled towards a splintered piece of wood and the camera lovingly lingers, unflinching, on the shot of her eye being impaled gripped me was fascinated horror.  Movies could do that?  Truly, of all the things little me beheld, this may have been the single thing that warped my tiny mind and got me obsessed with cinema and how it was made.  Responsible for a lot, that shot.  Oh, and the film has an underwater fight between a zombie and a shark.  That short sequence would be the pitch for an entire film these days, though it would be made for SyFy and drenched with crappy CGI rather than drenched with Fabio Frizzi's evocative electronic score (though my absolute favourite of his scores has to be Voci dal Nulla from The Beyond).

Coming in at number five we have Curse of the Devil.  Another werewolf flick, this one if from 1973 and is the sixth (or seventh, depending on whether or not you believe The Nights of the Werewolf  ever existed) entry in the Waldemar Daninsky saga of Spanish horror star Paul Naschy.  Directed by Carlos Aured, who also directed Naschy joints such as the Gothic Horror Rises from the Tomb and the splendid giallo The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (a.k.a. House of Psychotic Women), this differs from the usual Daninsky entries in that it has a late 1890s period setting rather than the present day.  Oh, and in that it was the first of Naschy's films I ever saw.

Rented from the Video Centre rather than our usual EB Video, I distinctly recall choosing this film because I confusedly thought it was The Evil Dead due to their deceptively similar video covers (that, combined with a title and a trailer selected to play up a spurious link with The Exorcist, make it seem like the distributors were desperate to hide the fact that it was a werewolf movie.  I guess the loup-garou was out of fashion for a while until the early '80s double-team of American Werewolf and The Howling) and was a tad disappointed when the movie started and obviously wasn't Sam Raimi's famous video nasty.  In the words of Bob Mortimer, "I did it out of ignorance".  However, disappointment soon turned to joy as the film went on and it began to dawn on me that we had a wolfman on our hands.  Naschy's classic-style werewolf being a sort of Lon Chaney Wolf Man updated for '70s Euro horror with its attendant full colour gore was what I imagined Hammer would have done if they hadn't stopped at The Curse of the Werewolf and had a series of werewolf films to accompany their Dracula and Frankenstein sagas. It would be a few years before I would catch another Naschy film, but I've made up for it since, as I now own... (quickly counts on fingers) twenty nine of his oeuvre.  Still a lot to see, mind.

Baltimore's Don Dohler had already established himself as somewhat of a local cottage industry by the time of 1980's Fiend, after writing, producing and directing a number of shorts in Maryland before breaking into the feature-length scene with The Alien Factor in 1978.  Even though he would go on to make such lo-fi schlock classics as the 1982 Nightbeast (one of the first Troma releases I ever saw, not counting Belgian baffler Rabid Grannies) and yet another 'alien invades the Maryland countryside single handed' flick - Don not being most famous for his variations of storytelling/scenarios - in 1985 with the astonishing The Galaxy Invader, Fiend was the one my sister and I watched as kids and the one that stuck with both of us.

Being I suppose at least a slight spin on Dohler's favourite format, while Fiend deals with an evil entity that descend from the sky at the outset this is a supernatural creature rather than an extraterrestrial - a malevolent glowing thing this floats over a graveyard before inhabiting and reanimating the corpse of Mr Longfellow, who must replenish himself by feeding on the life force of others.  Remembered by Gaynor and myself chiefly for having a red glowing line around him "like an evil Ready Brek man" (boy, that's a dated reference - will anyone get that?), the Fiend himself troubled my imagination long after the tape had been returned to the shop.  Except I wrongly remembered him as having a beard and wearing a cape and top hat instead of a moustache and black suit.  Obviously I caught a glimpse of Jose Mojica Marins' Coffin Joe at some point and mashed them together in my head like a horror movie villain Build-a-Bear.

On second thoughts, it might have been the Hobgoblin from The Moomins.  Yeah, there's more of a chance of that spooky fucker being glimpsed by my child self in the UK of the early '80s than Coffin Joe, probably.

The Incredible Melting Man is a film that I remember far more from the 1978 novelisation by Phil Smith than from hazy recollections of William Sachs' 1977 gloopy grindhouse rendition of a 1950s atomic horror / man into monster movie.  It's amazing, in retrospect, what types of films would get an accompanying paperback novel - from Alan Dean Foster's adaptations of such things as Star Wars and the Alien trilogy to Shaun Hutson of Slugs and Erebus infamy doing his own spin on James Cameron's The Terminator (there was an alternate novelisation by Randall Frakes and Bill Wisher, but I preferred the Hutson, probably just because of the more familiar horror name).

Presumably picked up by my mother while browsing a second hand shop or market stall, said paperback opened with a great scene of a nurse being chased down a darkened corridor by our titular dissolving dude, which my imagination rendered as a kind of Halloween II if Michael Myers had consisted of glistening grisly gristle.  The corresponding scene in the movie was definitely a bit of a let down; the eternal problem of reading the book before seeing the film: it's almost always better lit and directed in the MIND'S EYE.  The photos on both the cover and the inset bunch of pages in the centre of the book (in FULL COLOR) were certainly evocative, detailing the tragic astronaut's gradual gory degradation like an American Victor Caroon.  The film itself couldn't help to be a slight disappointment, despite featuring a small role for the late and lovely Cheryl 'Rainbeaux' Smith - I was too young to appreciate that anyway though.

I definitely appreciated and retained memories of The Keep, though.  Michael Mann's 1983 Nazis versus even more malevolent ancient evil tale was another EB Videos rental just like The Incredible Melting Man (in fact, according to memory, they sat alongside each other on the shelf - along with The Stuff and Street Trash.  Likewise, I recall American Werewolf  being in the vicinity of Caravan of Courage: The Ewok Adventure of all things.  Possibly that was the furries special interest shelf).

Anyway, The Keep and its perils that lay within the tomb of Rasalom (or was that 'The Five Doctors'?) has its own review on this here blog, so I won't waffle on about it as anyone interested in my opinions and thoughts on the movie can see that entry here .  It makes this list mostly for the reason of standing in the video shop and looking at its box art being a particularly strong early memory of mine.

So, there we are: my very own hateful eight (I don't hate 'em, I loves 'em) horror films that I gleefully and ghoulishly reveled in and played no small part into making me the gruesome spectre of the macabre with a fascination for film that I am.  Wouldn't have it any other way.  I'm sure that most of us could recall a litany of the things in our formative years that had an impact on our lives.  This one is mine.

Don't Open Till Christmas (Edmund Purdom, 1984)

'Tis the season, as they say. Whover they are.

As a preface to discussing this little morbid delight, I'd just like to stop, take stock and reminisce (as one is often wont to do at this time of year, 'twixt the Yuletide and the dawning of the new) of the time I almost saw this movie on the big screen. By 'almost', I mean that I was there in the cinema as it unfolded on the silver screen - or at least I was physically present. I don't mean at the time of its original cinematic release, of course: I have no idea how lax cinema staff were in 1984, but I doubt that a four or five year old would have been allowed in. No, I speak of a time about five or six hazy years ago when the Tyneside Cinema was showing it as part of a horror season, and I was showing myself up by going whilst collossally pissed and falling asleep through most of the film. For this rather vulgar display right in the middle of about a decade of pretty solid drunkenness, I'd like to take the time to apologise to anyone who was there at the screening who I may have annoyed by snoring throughout, in particular to Darren Buck who I'd agreed to see the film with and who's evening I probably ruined (soz Daz), and in general to everyone else I've annoyed, alienated and broken friendships with over the past ten or so years. I wish I could make it up to you all.

Still, now that I'm not drinking, let's have some fun. Don't Open Till Christmas is a classic Dick Randall joint (has anyone ever used that phrase before? If not, why not? Answers on a postcard please) with all that entails - following on the heels of the gloriously sleazy Pieces and possibly upping the exploitation a notch from that lovely little slice of grue, we know we're sure to have a fun time.

Directed by and starring former and fading fast almost idol Edmund Purdom - who was on a second wind of his career in mainly Italian-based cheapo cinema at this juncture, including gems like Joe D'Amato's Absurd, Sergio Martino's 2019: After the Fall of New York and the aforementioned Pieces - this is a tale of a serial killer stalking the mean streets of London's Soho and targeting elderly chaps dresed as jolly old Saint Nick for the festive period. After a rather gripping opening sequence wherein a guy in a Santa suit climbs into a parked vehicle (Marty, it's not like I've never parked before) to let his lady love get to grips with his Yule log only for them both to recieve a stabbing, we get a sort of sub-Halloween II title sequence with a plastic Father Christmas slowly melting to the strains of a severely monged rendition of 'Jingle Bells'. We then cut to a Chrimbo do at which another Santa is offed in front of his distraught daughter Kate Briosky (Belinda Mayne, real life daughter of the legendary Ferdy Mayne and star in her own right, as featured in this, Alien 2: On Earth and the titular Chimeron queen of Doctor Who's 'Delta and the Bannermen'. That's all I've seen her in anyway - I'm sure she's done other stuff).

Kate and her street flautist (?) boyfriend Cliff Boyd go to New Scotland Yard's... err... finest, I guess - Chief Inspector Ian Harris (Purdom) and his long-suffering subordinate D.S. Powell (Mark Jones - Keeler from 'The Seeds of Doom'!) to solve the case, as more and more festively-garbed gents are offed in various creative ways such as stabbing, garrotting and shooting right through the gob - possibly the best of which is a toss-up between the genial old horny duffer who meets his unhappy ending in a strip-club wank cubicle whilst talking to the lovely Sherry (Kelly Baker, who's sadly short list of credits includes Randall production Slaughter High, co-directed by this flick's effects supervisor Peter Litten - who never directed a Doctor Who film after all), the drunken Kringle chased by a gang of punk rockers (remember them? I barely do. I think they're extinct now, like glue sniffers and Iguanadons) into the London Dungeon to be terrified and taunted before his ultimate disembowellment, and the stage door Johnny Pere Noel who winds up treading the boards post-mortem as his corpse rises through the stage trapdoor and rather rudely interrupts the divine Caroline Munro (appearing 'as herself') during a storming rendition of 'Warrior of Love'. Bastard.

Throughout, we have the subplot of Sergeant Powell being contacted by a shady character identifying himself as 'Giles' (Alan Lake, who sadly self-departed this realm before the film's release after the death of his wife, Diana Dors) who continually casts shade on Inspector Harris and gets Powell to doubt his superior's real motives before kidnapping Sherry as a sacrifice and outing himself as not only the real killer but Harris' secret brother, driven mad as a child after witnessing his Santa Daddy (that sounds like it's a real sex thing. It probably is a real sex thing) cheating on and then murdering their mother. Understandable motivation, surely. Riven by behind the scenes problems such as Purdom quitting as director partway through shooting, being briefly replaced by scriptwriter Derek Ford (who was then fired and replaced by a pseudomymous Alan Birkinshaw) before returning, Don't Open Till Christmas is a bit piecemeal and you can kind of see the joins once you know. Nevertheless, it's great fun for anyone who can find themselves enticed by the lower grade and gruesome. If one harbours a penchant for '80s big hair, that's a bonus. And I, for one, could watch Sherry running up a spiral staircase in her leather miniskirt all day. She could have played Tegan in 'Frontios'. Look, that's just how my brain works, drunk or sober. We'll both have to deal with that.

Happy New Year.

Baffled! (Philip Leacock, 1973)

A while back I scribbled a piece for the rater wonderful website We Are Cult detailing the various projects that Star Trek's Big Bird Dog of the Galaxy Gene Roddenberry worked on in the 1970s lacuna coil between the demise of TOS ('69, dudes!) and the Trek franchise's silver screen resurrection in the form of Robert Wise's Motion Picture which emerged - just like I did - in 1979. Whilst mulling over mean Gene's assorted abortive efforts such as Planet Earth, Spectre and The Questor Tapes I chanced upon a non-Roddenberry project that I'd never heard of before, but which starred Mr I Am Not Spock himself Leonard Nimoy. This sweet little obscurity carried the delightfully exclamation pointed title of Baffled! (and anything's better if it ends with a bang), and I made a note to track it down sometime. It may have taken over a year to get round to it, but once I set my mind to something I usually do it. Just not anything resembling immediately or ever soon, on occasion. Look, 2020 was weird for all of us and, frankly, I've had a heap of faeces on my plate since about 2016 so it's been a queer old quinquennial. Don't cry for me, I'm already dead.

Made, like the others, as a pilot film for a subsequent series that never materialised Baffled! managed to intrigue me when I made a quick scan of its plot details: a man is involved in a car crash and subsequently finds himself subject to psychic visions which draw him into a supernatural web of crime, mayhem and intrigue? My immediate thought was to wonder a young Stephen King might have caught this airing on television and - consciously or not - filed it away in his brain to come back down the line in the form of The Dead Zone. Superficial sounding similarities aside, however, the adventures of Tom Kovack are very different to the trevails of the troubled Johnny Smith (whether one is imagining Walken-flavoured or of the Hall variety).

Opening with a racecar (palindrome alert!) derby, supposedly taking place in Pennsylvania but shot like the rest of the film in benighted Blighty with standard resident North American actors like Shane Rimmer to add a bit of verisimilitude, we meet racing driver Tom Kovack (Nimoy) hoping to add another win to his current medal-winning lucky streak when strange sounds ("It's Wyndham in Devon, dear" says a woman's voice) and visions(a gravel road leading to a large manor house, a screaming woman) assail his brain and cause him to veer off the track. Surviving the crash miraculously unscathed, Kovack good-naturedly speaks of his psychic experience during a post-race television interview and attracts the attention of watching extra-sensory perception expert Michele Brent (the radiant Susan Hampshire, who had just played the second imcarnation of Elsa the Lioness' mum in Living Free) who immediately gets in touch with him with a view to harnessing his nascent abilities. Demurring at first, Kovack soon has a change of mind that evening when the view from his apartment window suddenly switches from a panorama of nighttime New York City to a daylight perspective of the same Wyndham House in that there Devonshire. After hooking up with the perky Ms Brent, the paranormal pair make their way to ye jolly olde England and book rooms at Wynham House whose owner Mrs Farraday (Rachel Roberts, whose career spanned Karel Reisz' 1960 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to Fred Walton's seminal '79 thriller When a Stranger Calls before her tragic suicide by self-poisoning a year later) lets rooms at the stately home to summering holidaymakers.

Also staying there are a motley assemblage including Hollywood actress Andrea Glenn (Psycho's sleuthing sister Vera Miles) and her teenage daughter Jennifer (Jewel Blanch) who are perplexed at the non-arrival of absent husband and father Mr Duncan Sanford, blustering Italian Mr Verelli (Christopher Benjamin, and if you exclaimed "It's Henry Gordon Jago!" you don't get a prize, but if you said "Potter!" you do) and furtive honeymooning couple George and Peggy Tracewell (Ray Brooks - the boy with The Knack - and OG Demelza Angharad Rees). Also on hand nearby is suspiciously friendly wheelchar-bound pensioner Mrs Louise Sanford (Valerie Taylor, seemingly having a ball giving a dotty and eccentric yet menace-tinged final performance) and a man (Mike Murray) who hangs around the property at twilight having furtive meetings with young Jennifer and claiming to be the father she's never met, furnishing her with a mysterious wolf's-headed amulet which he instructs her to wear secretly without telling her mother of his presence. Soon the occult begins to occur, with young Jenny's behaviour changing from sweet young girl to teen hellion whilst the dowdy Mrs Farraday seems to become younger, more vital and more MILFy cougar keen to get her claws into Kovack with each passing day. When Andrea is poisoned, our dynamic duo find themselves drawn into a kind of cabbalistic Cluedo in a big country house populateed with secretive oddballs with agendas as a truly diabolical scheme unfurls, masterminded by Jenny's fake father - in reality ex-actor, master of disguise and full-time diabolist John Parrish, in a Satanic scheme to transfer life energy and bump of a starlet for her bank balance.

Energetically directed by Philip Leacock, whose career seems to have mainly been in television on both sides of the Atlantic after a flurry of Forties and Fifties films (including 1956's The Spanish Gardener), Baffled! is an interesting artefact of a programme that never was, though it's easy to imagine Nimoy (clad in his very '70s turtleneck sweater and jacket combo a la In Search Of) and Hampshire embarking on a series of paranormal escapades and spooky whodunnits for at least a season. Certainly a diverting and enjoyable ninety minutes of genre-flavoured fun that bears investigation.

Freddy's Nightmares: No More Mr Nice Guy (Tobe Hooper, 1988)

Confessional time: "Father, forgive me, but I never got round to watching Freddy vs Jason. Blesphemy, of course, especially coming from someone such as myself who grew up excitedly renting each instalment of those respective frachises as they hit the video shop shelves (although actually, it would have been my parents doing the renting. Intensely chillaxed about the age certifications the guy in our local shop could be, I think even he would have balked at renting out Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master to an exciteable and bloodthirsty nine year old. Maybe).

Is there a reason I didn't bother with Freddy vs Jason either at the time or in the subsequent intervening years? Well, disillusionment and apathy with both series I suppose. Having found 1994's Wes Craven's New Nightmare interesting but hugely flawed and both previous Voorhees instalments (the 1993 Jason Goes to Hell and 2002's Jason X) shockingly dire I wasn't really in the mood in 2003 - just a year after the spaceborne antics of Jason (wait... Jason Space Bourne?!?) the wounds were too raw for me to contemplate it. And y'know, I was in my early twenties and doing stuff that seemed more interesting at the time. Looking back though, it seems a shame: little kid me would have jumped for joy at the prospect of a meeting between these two titans of terror - like a Bropnze Age version of the Golden Age's Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man or the Silver Age's King Kong vs Godzilla. So I thought maybe it was time. Also, Katherine Isabelle's in it, which is a good if prurient reason for watching. But I thought I may as well make a thing of it. Why not do a rewatch of both franchises to lead up to finally seeing the team up movie? It's been many a year since I've seen quite a few of 'em, and 2021 is sucking enough balls to encourage ignoring it and jumping into some '80s nostalgia. So let's lacquer our hair up big and hit 88 miles per hour to get back in time! And so we begin not with a movie, but with a televisial prequel to the Nightmare series courtesy of the opening episode of the short lived Freddy's Nightmares syndicated anthology show wherein the cackling Mr Krueger would act as the Crypt Keeper style horror host introducing each week's tale. This opening prequel instalment showing the secret origin of Freddy Krueger may have a bit of horror cache by dint of being directed by Tobe Hooper, but we're definitely more in the area of The Mangler Tobe Hooper than Texas Chainsaw (or 'Salem's Lot or Poltergeist or Lifeforce) Tobe Hooper. Shot on shiteo (the late '80s US NTSC TV video is crap enough, made worse by the copy I'd obtained by... uh... scrying glass), we blurrily see the pre-trial hearing and subsequent release on a technicality of Springwood's premier paedophile child slayer Mr Fred Krueger and the mandatory "Is this justice?" outraged parent lynch mob - Mrs Lovejoy would be proud: oh, won't somebody think of the children?!? - as they mete out some good ol' fashioned private justice. Obviously, we don't have John Saxon here, so as a stand in we have police Lt. Tim Blocker (Ian Patrick Williams) who moved out of New York to escape the muggers and the rape and the C.H.U.D.s to take his family to the white picket fences and PTA meetings of Springwood only to have his twin daughters Lisa and Merit (the strangely named Gry and Hili Park) almost becoming the latest victims of Freddy.

Feeling culpable for Freddy's release having not correctly read the villain his rights during his arrest, Blocker at first attempts to talk down the torch-bearing mob of villagers before eventually joining them and taking the lead in dousing Krueger with petrol and burning him alive, as Freddy gleefully laughs and declares that he's "rather burn than fade away!" Obviously, death doesn't quite take and the Springwood slasher soon returns to haunt Blocker in his dreams before driving him to a death via toothache and a dentist's drill-tipped variation on his famous razor glove. Englund's charisma pretty much single-handedly carries this otherwise pretty insipid instalment, which not only drags under the usual demerits of a prequel (having to hew to a pre-laid out road map and therefore somewhat lacking in surprise) but also the strictures of TV and sluggish direction (barring maybe one pretty effective kill scene). Is it canon? The lack of Saxon's Lt Thompson kind of says no. Maybe we can look on it as a sort of 'What If...?' / 'Elseworlds' sort of semi-sequel. A sidequel. Christ, I'm overthinking this.

Constantine: City of Demons - The Movie (Doug Murphy, 2018)

As an avid comic book reader between the ages of around six and sixteen (after that, oh what a falling off was there... I guess I just drifted away from the whole scene in the mid to late '90s; There was a lot of crap around at the time), one of the best things - in my humble opinion o' course - was the DC Vertigo imprint and it's late '80s precursors. Comics such as Swamp Thing, The Demon ("Etrigaaaan!"), Blue Devil, Neil Gaiman's feted The Sandman, Shade: The Changing Man and others piled up upon my adolescent-to-teen self's shelves alongside other favourites like Web of Spider-Man, Ghost Rider and The Incredible Hulk - but one of the firm faves in the firmament of Vertigo's vertiginous variations was Hellblazer. Created by comic book/graphic novel (delete as per snobbishness) doyen (I was going to attempt a "doyen of comics"/doyenne du comice joke, but I think i've been found guilty of more than enough misfiring gags over the years, so we'll leave that particular partridge in a pear tree alone) and full-time maniac Alan Moore during his legendary run on Swamp Thing, the character of John Constantine soon span-off into his own title: a daemonic noir saga of the trenchcoat-clad investigator transplanted to the rainswept concrete mise en scene of Thatcher's late Nineteen-Haties Britain and tackling less the standard gumshoe tropes of marital intrigue and petty murder and more the extrusions into our dimension of primal evil forces from the Outer realms. Which is pretty cool work if you can get it. With a litany of writers over the years including, but not limited to: Moore, Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman and artists numbering among them John Ridgway, Simon Bisley and Dave McKean, Hellblazer was a spellbinding and spell-casting monthly addiction for young me and quite possibly shaped my tastes/warped my fragile young mind (again, delete as per opinion). The character of Constantine - cool, shifty, and dangerous to know - was visually modelled upon Gordon Sumner aka Sting (of not very good songs and Dune's "I WILL KILL YOU!" fame) and his iconic spiked hair and long trenchcoat possibly contributed to my squee-ing when David Tennant was unveiled as the new Doctor Who in late 2005 and had opted to portray another fantasy hero of mine with spiked hair and a long trenchcoat. Shame that he opted to play it with an Estuary accent. If he had to forsake his native Paisley, why not a Scouse twang? It didn't go wrong for Paul McGann. Still, we have Matt Ryan these days, so all is right with the world. (No, of course Keanu Reeves doesn't count. Tilda Swinton ws the only thing even remotely of interest in that non-canon abortion of a film [which is almost exactly what I thought about the Suspiria remake, to a slightly less vehement and venomous extent. At least that film had the grace to do something interesting with its source material]). Oh, on a slight Doctor Who note: as a child it irritated me to look up the titles of previous Who stories and note that there were two stories titled 'The Seeds of Death' and 'The Seeds of Doom' respectively. The similar-but-different dissonance betwixt the twain irked me. Similarly, the redolence of the titles of Hellblazer and Clive Barker's horror franchise Hellraiser got on my nerves, especially when Marvel's Epic imprint began a series of Hellraiser comics that could be found right next to Hellblazer on the alphabetically-arranged shelves of comic stores. If anyone was ever in the Newcastle branch of Forbidden Planet circa 1992 and saw a twelve or thirteen year old boy standing with a comic book in each hand and a scowl upon his face, consider the conundrum of a couple of decades confirmed. Apologies: I can't help having always been an anal fan. By which I mean both a fan who is anal, and also a fan of... Anyway. Let's get on with the review, shall we?

When NBC commissioned the sadly short-lived (only thirteen episodes, we hardly got to know and love thee: though thirteen's a good occult number I suppose) Constantine TV series in 2014 starring Matt Ryan as the eldritch sleuth things seemed to be looking up only to be foiled by network cancellation. Our hero, however, transcended the axe of death and appeared in the CW's Arrow before becoming a fixture in the Arrowverse as a permanent crewmember of the Waverider in the delightfully unhinged Legends of Tomorrow, as well as transferring to animated form (still voiced by Ryan) firstly in Justice League Dark and then in the web series City of Demons, later re-edited into a full length feature. When Constantine is contacted by his old cab-driving pal Chas Chandler (Damien O'Hare taking on voicing duties of the character named after the bass player of Newcastle's own The Animals - my ma was asked out on a date by the real Chas, she reckons. That's my rock 'n' roll claim to fame) after many years with the news that his young daughter Trish has suddenly lapsed into an inexplicable coma - driving his marriage with wife Renee (Emily O'Brien) onto the rocks - John feels the need, weighted mostly by guilt, to try to help. Attending the hospital bedside of the insensate child he summons the aid ("I'm calling in a specialist") of the Nightmare Nurse Asa the Healer (Laura Bailey) - a demon who takes on the rather fetching form of an alluring fetish nurse replete with PVC uniform. Which is nice. (I now have Genesis' 'Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist' stuck in my head for reasons unknown - which is slightly less nice)

With their only lead being the address of '1247 Enstrom, L.A.' Johny and Chas leave Trish and Renee in the hands of Asa who vows to guard the soulless Trish from any malevolent spirits or demons who might try to inhabit her shell, and take the night flight to sunny California where they spot news headlines of a 'coma plague' spreading through Los Angeles as more and more people are being mysteriously stricken. Making their way to the address, they find a mansion wherat they are greeted at the door by a pig butler (I've always wanted a monkey butler myself) who quotes Dracula's "Enter freely of your own will" before amusedly chuntering "I've always wanted to say that". Entering the enchanted edifice, Constantine meets the demon Beroul (Jim Meskimen) - a hellspawn crossbreed of Sydney Greenstreet and Zero the Hutt who admits to being responsible for the wave of comas and taking the souls of its victims inclusing Trish, and seeks to make a deal with our Scouser warlock in exchange for the child's essence. Leaving Beroul's ghoulish pool - a literal swimming pool filled with dismembered body parts - they make their way through the house to the ballroom wherein the demon has arranged a musical soiree: humans being tortured and their essences torn from them to the sound of music played by a band straight from Pandaemonium itself. Some call it witchcore. Agreeing to the terms of the demon who he unflatteringly but accurately refers to as 'Mr Blobby' - that is, to eliminate five demons Beroul sees as rivals to his scheme of reaping the souls of the city - Constantine informs Chas that Trish and the other comatose patients' "souls are fuelling the engine of Beroul's magic, like batteries" and that the deal must be fulfilled quickly. This arrangement is, however, like many a devil's bargain not all as it seems: for 'Beroul' is but a skin suit ("a convenient mask") for the high demon Nergal - Constantine's nemesis who was summoned fifteen years prior in a Satanic ritual in the basement of Newcastle upon Tyne's Casanova Club. This Luciferian liturgy 'neath a Geardie goth den resulted in the young child Astra Logue being taken into the bowels of hell by the beasts of Nergal, an event which sent Constantine to an asylum in Ravenscar and set him on his path of magical warfare against the darkness. After being mysteriously guided to Guadalupe's Bar, John makes an intimate encounter with a seductive being named 'Angela' (Rachel Kimsey), the self-titled Queen of Angels and living embodiment of the psyche of the city itself who asks for his help against Nergal but has in fact made a pact with him and is willing to allow his schemes so long as the five competitor demons are slain. Constantine finds himself having to summon the aid of Mictlantecuhtli (Rick D. Wasserman), the Aztec death god, as part of a stratagem to wipe out the daemonic quintet before having to make a huge sacrifice in order to free Trish's soul from Nergal's clutches. I don't want to go too in depth with spoilers or anything - I highly recommend that anyone interested in the character and/or subject matter check it out themselves. For a comic company who've spent years floundering behind Marvel on the live action big screen, DC have been working absolute wonders in the animated medium. This is another good 'un. In summation - much better and far less disappointing than Penny Dreadful: City of Angels as far as franchise revisits go.

King of the Rocket Men, Chapters Ten to Twelve (Fred C. Brannon, 1949)

 Chapter Ten: The Deadly Fog

...and we get another turn by our old friend the reprise reprieve, as the recap shows us that as Rocket Man shuttles into Durken's decimator death trap, he regains his consciousness and footing enough to leap to safety between Durken taking a dive and the bomb-clock striking ten and taking the truck to bits.  I know it's a trope I need to deal with and get over, but grrrr.

Shrugging off his umpteenth near death experience, Jeff abandons pursuit of the three fugitives (say, that would make a good name for a movie!) and junior birdmans his way back to the cave lab, whereupon he's surprised mid-unmaking by Burt; the wary PR guru making a very gee-whiz "So you were the Rocket Man all the time!" exclamation upon discovering confirmation of the totally bleeding obvious.  Jeff decides to fill Winslow in, prompting a clip show flashback montage from previous chapters of the serial.  This is very much 'The One With The Backstory Of Rocket Man' in Friends parlance, King providing brief bits of narration over the older footage and prompting variations of "So that's what happened!" from Burt as he's gradually brought up to speed.  Practical and probably necessary as a glimpsed once to probably never be seen again part of a thirteen-week run in the pre-video age, but not the best episode to sit through when watching the serial in quicker succession.

The duo do though come to the conclusion that Dr Vulcan is definitely a choice between Professor Bryant (I. Stanford Jolley) and Dr Graffner (Marshall Bradford), and that the villain has been seated at their conference table alongside them the whole time, being part of all their top secret discussions and planning.  Realising that either of their eminent suspects is more than capable of shielding the thromium waves of the decimator and therefore making it impossible to track, they know that time is of the essence in capturing the real Vulcan before he can utilise the device.  Meanwhile, the sinister Vulcan plots in the shadows and informs Durken that he plans to deal with Jeff King once and for all and has to this end arranged for King to take a trip into town on a decoy rendezvous.  As King takes a taxi for his appointment at the Oasis Hotel with Professor Moore on"a matter of vital importance" the cab driver henchman leaps from the moving vehicle, leaving King locked inside as Vulcan taunts him via the radio speaker that he is guiding the car via remote control - as the car fills with clouds of gas - on Jeff's "last ride" and that "even the Rocket Man cannot help you now"...

Chapter Eleven: Secret of Dr Vulcan

...and the reprise reprieve strikes yet again, as we are shown this time how after Jeff had turned down an offer from Glenda and Burt to drive him to his destination Ms Thomas had glanced back to see the cab driver's dive and the pair raced back to their car to take off in hot pursuit of the hackney cab of death.  As the fumes consume Jeff to his doom, Glenda pulls her car alongside the taxi long enough for burly Burt to take the leap between moving vehicles, gain access to the driver's seat and pull over.  As the gasping and coughing King is pulled from the "gas chamber on wheels" as Glenda so colourfully puts it, the consternated Vulcan and Durken watch on as Jeff asserts that their cunning opponent may have finally overplayed his hand - he recognised the smell of the gas as Fuminol: a rocket fuel that will lead them to whomever placed an order for the substance and thus trace Dr Vulcan.  Durken is duly dispatched by his dire director to the Hunter Chemicals factory in order to get there before the heroic trio and destroy all records of the Fuminol purchase order.

As Jeff, Glenda and Burt arrive at the Hunter plant, they are just in the nick of time to catch Durken and a confederate about to leave - leading to the regulation two-fisted punch up that quickly becomes a gunfight.  In the yards of a chemical plant, firing bullets from behind and towards various crates and canisters.  man, these guys really are harbouring a wish for self-immolation.  Good thing Glenda decided to stay in the safety of her car.

Realising that they can't make it back to their own getaway car, Durken and his henchdude decide to hijack the nearest truck and make a break for it with an uninvited passenger as Burt makes his second heroic traffic leap of the day and boards the back of the lorry as the villains pull away and leaving Jeff and Glenda to resort to a vehicular pursuit.  As they race to catch up, though, Burt is swiftly overpowered and Durken lights the incriminating purchase papers on fire before untrussing the canvas roof of the truck so that it flies off in the window and blows onto the windscreen of Glenda's car - blinding her and King and causing the car to veer over the side of the road and into the river below...

...and just when I'm about to sigh and moan about yet another cliffhanger followed by a "but you didn't see this!" resolution, that isn't the end of the episode, and we see King and Ms Thomas swimming to the surface and safety.  Elsewhere, Vulcan receives the glad tidings that the papers have been disposed of, but also the news that his lackeys have Burt Winslow captive.  Spurning the request that Burt be dispatched, Vulcan seems delighted and remarks that he could be of great use as live bait for King, and contacts Jeff with the offer of a meeting if he values his friend's life.  Placing the hog-tied and gagged Burt in a room, the door of which his been rigged with machinery to deliver a massive volt shocking surprise to anyone who enters via that portal, Vulcan and his goons await King's arrival.  But Jeff has donned the rocket suit in order to jet to the assignation early, and enters in through the window (intruder window!) to be confronted by the villain face to face.  As Bryant gloats that he took the name of Vulcan to symbolise his dreams of conquest through "the power of steel" he forces our hero at gunpoint back towards the electrified entrance... 

Last Chapter: Wave of Disaster

...and just as he is about to step between the electrical arc machines, Burt manages to use his freed feet to kick the unnamed (his shirt may even be red for the all the monochrome film tells me) co-henchmen straight past him into the sparks of death, allowing him to leap to safety.  Untying Burt as Vulcan and Durken flee the scene, Jeff determines to alert the authorities as to Bryant's identity and get them to put out a dragnet (Dunn-de-dun-dun - just the facts, ma'am) and Burt informs him that he overheard their plans to utilise the decimator in some fantastical supervillain extortion plot involving the city of New York.  Ransacking the place, they find a receipt for a plane ticket bought by Bryant direct to the city that never sleeps and fear that they may already be too late.

Repairing to Science Associates' administration building, the pair along with Glenda discover that the diabolical duo took off in a small plane heading for the Big Apple, and determine that the authorities there must be warned, and that they might just make it there ahead of the villains using an airliner.  Soaring into NYC, they convince the chairman of the civil defence committee to heed their dire warnings about a weapon that can reduce mountains of stone into running rivers of molten lava just as Dr Vulcan's ransom demand over the city for one beellion dollars (honestly, post-Austin Powers, is there any other way to be able to hear a line like that?) arrives.  Refusing to give in to the blackmail demands of a madman, the councilman determines to wield the entire police force to discover Vulcan's lair.

Landing on his secret hideaway on Fisherman's Island, 300 miles out from New York harbour, Bryant/Vulcan trains the decimator upon the undersea geological faultline between the island and the city, ready to unleash the molten fury of the ocean bed if his demand is not met by 2 P.M.  As time ticks, the police sweep of the city has failed to find any trace and - his ransom unpaid - Vulcan fires the device.  As the resultant underwater earthquake sends a tsunami rolling inland, the panicking authorities order an emergency evacuation of the city, directing the fleeing inhabitants to head to the Westchester hills.  As the incoming wave of destruction causes first the shoreline and then the city's mighty skyscrapers to buckle and fall in an impressive model effects sequence*, Jeff determines Vulcan's likely location upon the island and dons the rocket pack to jet there ahead of the fleet of bomber planes dispatched in a last-ditch attempt to destroy the decimating device.  Taking out first the villains and then the machine (with his trusty ray gun), King takes off again just in time as Vulcan's lair is blown to smithereens and flies from the exploding wreckage back towards the major city whose shoreline and skyline has, like the sky that Ben E. King looked upon, crumbled and fallen into the sea.  Which is a bit bleak, really. 

*A note on the NYC destruction sequences: this was footage originally filmed back in 1933 for the Pre-Code RKO disaster film Deluge.  Republic had purchased the footage (not the entire movie, just the model effects sequences) for use in their own works, and the scenes were incorporated into the self-explanatory 1939 movie S.O.S. Tidal Wave as well as the 1941 serial Dick Tracy vs Crime Inc and eventually this serial.  Not many years later, Deluge was considered a lost film and these effects sequences were all that remained.  Happily though for those of us who mourn the very existence of the concept of lost films, an Italian-dubbed print of the picture was discovered in the 1980s in the basement of a house belonging to Italian exploitation film director Luigi Cozzi.  The subsequent subtitled re-release would have been marvel enough, but as recently as 2016 a nitrate negative of the film with its original English language soundtrack was located in France and the movie was fully restored and released the following year.  Now there's a happy ending.