I occasionally lapse into talking about The Politics on this blog, and it says a great deal about me that this usually happens when I'm trying to talk about the plot of an episode of Magnum PI and not when there is an actual General Election in this increasingly awful country.
Can you blame me, though? The politics of a Magnum PI episode at least won't send a sane person screaming from the room like they've just watched a tentacled thing unfurl itself from a lower dimension like an origami swan made of rotting meat but anyway the election's nearly over and I guess in a week or so we say goodbye to the NHS, as the Americans come to improve it like they improved Bolivia, Chile, Afghanistan, Iraq - you know, all the other places they went to and made better for the inhabitants.
The NHS has not just made life materially better for us all but also made altruism a part of the country's DNA rather than the racism, atrocities and enabling of American corporatism's never-ending war on the poor that's pretty much the only other thing that's a constant about our failed empire. We are at heart not a good people, I am sad to say, because we are descended from conquerors and their servile playthings and nothing good can come of a nation that is proud of this rather than angry or ashamed - but for a time, we had the NHS. People would come from around the world to learn in the halls of its hospitals how to care for the sick and the disabled, and they knew this was the only place they could learn it because all they would learn elsewhere was how to deliver the most cost-effective treatment rather than the best. We sent forth from our shores the best doctors, the best nurses, and being a country that spawned this wonderful institution which contributed not just to the treatment of the sick of this country but the betterment of humankind allowed us to lie to ourselves that this terrible, hateful nation was not a thing that needed to be scoured from the Earth and its patriots mocked for the damaged children they were and driven into the sea to be eaten by crabs or bummed to death by the Innsmouth people, because we were the British Flipping Isles and the worst thing about us was that occasionally we would produce one of Richard Curtis' films.
And now we're just the country that invented concentration camps.
In Yarl's Wood we refined positive spin for concentration camps because we knew that when people thought of concentration camps they thought of open-air prisons full of skinny people and ringed with barbed wire, and not anonymous red-bricked warehouses in a random corner of a business park in Bedford. Through the finest British ingenuity that gave us 11,000 dead Kenyans, we've not just rehabilitated the image of the unthinkable but made it a profitable business model to export. We laugh at the Americans' clumsy caging of brown children and then just letting any old senator with a camera walk in and take pictures because we don't even let our elected representatives through the front gates of our concentration camps - we do it right and hide them like the shameful secret they should be.
We may be a small-minded, racist nation of bull-necked gammon that will
not stop until we hear only English spoken on our high streets and only
white people have our dreadful low-paying zero-hour jobs because we are the British Fucking Isles and we are going to Hell and we're taking you all with us, but for a time, we were a people that helped.
Let's take a look at a list of the utter garbage I've been shoveling down my mental gullet with all the awareness and distinction of a pig at a trough this last week or so, shall we?
Bull - a US tv show about a rich guy who tries to get money from other rich people who aren't as nice as he is and give it to poor people, because rich people only care about money, and not the important things like family and... puppies. This is a show with a confusing set of priorities and a smug lead character that often confuses being an arsehole with being clever and/or right, though that's pretty much every lead character in an American tv show, and has been for quite a while.
Some thing with Jimmy Smits whose title I can't be bothering Googling but which clearly did not make a lasting impression: see above. A law thing where Jimmy "HOLY" Smits plays the dad of a lady lawyer but it was so ham-fisted I can't even remember if she was the idealistic one or if her dad was, or which one of them had to convince the other to use their law powers for good - well anyway it's another Jimmy Smits winner.
I don't know why I'm being sarcastic - I like Jimmy Smits. Make me a Bail Organa tv show, Disney, you cowards.
Magnum PI and also
Hawaii Five-0 - these are essentially interchangeable shows set in Hawaii about ex-marines tackling violent crimes while surrounded by underwear models. Occasionally they help a sad child with a problem that involves either parental involvement in crime, or sexual trauma, they have big muscles and salute the flag at least once an episode. Now and then a gay person will appear and they will be totally cool with that person's sexual orientation - most likely they will even take time to lecture someone about loving gay folk unconditionally, and then possibly within the same episode or even the same scene someone will make a homophobic gag of some description, usually implying that a male character is in some way too effeminate.
There was a recent episode of... uhhh.... let's say it was Magnum, not that I or anyone else really knows the difference, and there were some Hawaiian protestors doing their protesting about Hawaiian things that I know nothing about but I will still lay good money it boils down to something white people did wrong - because if you follow the news in even a cursory fashion it always is - and a Hawaiian character makes an appeal to some police officers who are also Hawaiian to consider their heritage and not arrest all the peaceful protestors who are doing nothing but occupying private land meant for property development and the cops take all of a hot second to decide they have their orders, and no kidding, "only obeying orders" is not challenged or redeemed at any point because these are shows 120% in the tank for both the military and militarised policing. The unambiguous message is that cops will absolutely mess you up if you challenge capital, but they will do it "with a heavy heart", which as anyone who's been following British politics lately will know as the rallying cry of bougoisie bastards like Brian Cox and Robert Webb who are off to vote Tory on December 12th.
Okay I think I might be letting my personal politics get in the way of enjoying perfectly good Western capitalist propaganda, but getting back to these shows, they really are interchangeable to the point that the Halloween episodes of both shows were about escaped lunatics, and someone in one of the shows actually says "what are the chances of there being two escaped lunatics on Halloween night?" even though this happens literally every year, and is an annual Hawaii Five-0 event. Yes I am steeped in Hawaii Five-0 lore - I might be an irredeemable communist but I'm still addicted to bullshit tv shows.
This will come as something of a surprise to the (checks view counter) three people who read this unpopular and despised blog, but I tend to watch an awful lot of really bad television and films.
I don't mean "bad" in relation to their objective quality or production values, though a lot of them certainly aren't good when evaluated in those terms, I mean in their philosophies and in what they contribute to culture, and what they say about us as people. Years ago, I stopped watching US medical shows for reasons I didn't fully understand as I hadn't explored my own political views in any meaningful way, though I assumed I was some kind of limp-wristed liberal because I liked Star Trek, but it's only recently as I've slipped to the dark side - the left - that I've come to understand that my objection to American medical dramas stem from an understanding of one of the fundamental principles of anarchist political theory: that all cops are bastards.
I will assume you are not aware of the underpinning philosophy and explain: not all cops are actually bastards by dint of incomplete lineage or in the vernacular sense of being a troubled individual with histories of questionable morals and/or actions, but all cops, in being cops, are representatives of an oppressive mechanism of control that acts in the interests of capital rather than the interests of the populace, and are - through collective guilt - to blame for its failings which at worst manifest in the widely-publicised actions of "bastards", thus all cops, in their active support of this system and its bastards, are bastards themselves, hence "ALL cops are bastards."
I realised that I had stopped watching medical dramas made in the US because all American doctors are also bastards. Interestingly, this is not purely because they support one of the worst healthcare systems in the world that is essentially a glorified kidnapping racket in which paramedics roam the streets abducting the vulnerable and pressganging them into a life of debt slavery, though obviously a good person would never condone this atrocious state of affairs let alone actively participate in it, no, I mean they are bastards because they act like it.
I don't think that real-life American doctors are as big a bunch of assholes as the doctors on tv, but to be fair, I am pretty much certain that this is not possible as it takes literally dozens of overpaid writers months of creative back and forth to make doctors in American medical dramas as utterly unlikable as they are, and some schlub just out of medical school hasn't got the time or energy to replicate that kind of effort on top of managing their work-life balance while staring down the barrel of their own lifetime of debt. Anyway, the doctors on US tv are assholes obsessed with money, so that's why I stopped watching medical dramas, but there is also a case to be made that since they support and materially benefit from a system which preys on the poor, they are not just assholes personally, but collectively.
Ugh I am pretty sure I started out this post trying to figure out if I should stop watching American cop shows because they're just propaganda - is "copaganda" a word? It should be - for a corrupt imperialist nation of warmongering capitalist psychopaths but this is the kind of thing that distracts me now, and I just made you read about it. So who is the real asshole? Impossible to say.
A rather rude journalist once asked Gabriel Byrne why he stars in so many terrible projects, and Byrne responded "no-one tries to make a bad movie", and if he was saying that he does his best that is fair enough but... man does he ever star in some absolute shite. Why yes, I did watch the French War of the Worlds television miniseries, why do you ask?
I powered through this in two days because there's only 8 episodes and I knew I wouldn't come back to it if I didn't see it all in one go because it is painfully apparent very early in the show that this is not very good. What it most reminds me of is those BBC efforts in the 1990s and 2000s to dip a toe in the waters of popular genres from elsewhere in the tv world, particularly those daffy attempts to outdo the Americans in recycling dated sci-fi ideas and getting mixed results like that toss Invasion thing with Fred Ward, or that banal Survivors remake (although I did enjoy the second series a bit more). So what's wrong with this adaptation of HG Wells' War Of The Worlds, then? Well for a start it doesn't seem to have very much to do with HG Wells' War Of The Worlds, though these days that doesn't seem to be a particularly big problem with adaptations, and some of the changes like the "Martians" not being from Mars and not being tripods aren't necessarily deal breakers, but when there's no large-scale destruction and just extras laying around the street, you're arguably putting enough distance between you and the source material that you'd best have some ideas beyond cruising on the tired old "human nature under crisis is ugly" grimdark nonsense that stuffs pretty much every sci-fi show now. Anyway, this wasn't very good, but it was nice to get back to something other than horror after the dreadful washout that was spooktober, and say what I might about this show, but getting back to watching rubbish sci-fi is a nice way to cleanse the old media palette.
26th OCT - LEPRECHAUN 6: BACK 2 THA HOOD... To be fair, this is no worse than the last one, and if anything feels a little more focused. I also recognised Trish from the Lethal Weapon tv series, so it's not like the movie is full of complete nobodies.
Originally to be about the Leprechaun visiting a tropical locale to terrorise politically-correct spring breakers while putting on a Jamaican accent which I am sure we would all have been happy to see, the producers didn't fancy paying for outside shooting so instead we get another poverty safari to the inner city that Hollywood only seems to take a passing interest in once in a blue moon despite it being literally a mile from their damn door, and for some reason it's only this time around that we get to see the role of the police in the oppression of the poor, leading to an enjoyable sequence in which the Leprechaun beats two cops to death.
Apart from that, it's not terribly interesting or insightful, and probably a good place to call it a day with these films, just like Warwick Davies did. Maybe next year I'll get to Leprechaun: Origins, in which the villain is played by a professional wrestler - clearly the people who own this series have not heeded the fable of proud Icarus...
27th OCT - HALLOWEEN 2 which I have somehow not seen before, even though it picks up right where the first one left off. No John Carpenter this time around, though he co-writes the script, and the movie veers more into the familiar slasher territory of OTT murder scenes than the relatively restrained original, though what's here seems pretty tame compared to the kind of stuff that would follow it not just in this franchise, but in the genre it helped create.
There's still the creepy first person view of events from the eyes of the killer, and tense tracking shots that follow him as he silently closes in on his latest victim, but this is overly-familiar territory to me, really, and while I appreciate the odd bit of craft here and there, I didn't get a lot out of it.
28th OCT - AN HOUR OF TERRIFYING SCI-FI over on the Youtube DUST channel, a content host for sci-fi short movies that to the untrained eye - ie: mine - look suspiciously like scenes from a larger work rather than complete stories in and of themselves, but apart from the sci-fi horror segment DEDALO, these six stories with a horror bent stand on their own pretty well.
29th OCT - INSIDIOUS more like InSHITious, amiright?
This is an odd fish, as it feels like a found footage movie that has instead been shot as a regular multi-camera film. It's not the best horror ever, but for the first hour or so it's at least passable, even if the characters are remarkably thin even for this genre, but once it gets to the proper paranormal stuff it just becomes funny.
I criticised Halloween 2 for being overly-familiar, but it didn't feel like it was lapsing into parody of the genre in the way that this does as it ticks off the checklist of cliches from jump scares to gross dudes licking a lady's face. The story is your basic demon possession stuff in which the non-supernatural believerer has to do a supernatural to save his son from Darth Maul and his new legs, who clearly don't have a lot going on in their lives if this and a cameo in SOLO were all they could manage.
It certainly looks like they spent a few bucks on it, but that just means it's expensive rubbish. I did like that they went with dry ice and a bloke wandering around with a lantern at the end, as it gave it an unashamed sense of old-school melodrama only undone when actual spooks show up.
30th OCT - US is a great example of why Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone is so naff - he's kept all his A-material for projects like this and isn't wasting it on CBS' sad attempts to revive its roster of IP to pad out its ghost town of a streaming service.
US isn't actually that original or inventive, it's just well-made and does its job without lapsing into parody, which is why it's such a great antidote to crap like INSIDIOUS. Tense, scary, and bursting with potential for allegorical readings of the material, I would recommend it to anyone.
31st OCT - BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY: SPACE VAMPIRE is the crown jewel of any horror marathon and I watch it every Halloween.
The comedy parts are irritating, the acting is hammy, the sets are clearly the same few plastic sheets spray-painted different colours, the fx are terrible, the action scenes are ludicrous, and the story is full of logic holes, but by golly is it entertaining tosh. A riff on Dracula sets things off as the Starship Demeter crashes into the isolated space station where Buck and Wilma are planning on abandoning their (let's not kid ourselves) sex robot, Twiki, so they can go bone on a pleasure planet, so the station has to be locked down while everyone is checked for Space Fever! Unknown to everyone but a particularly wooden Buck, a creature who is just like a vampire in every way is feeding on the hapless idiots that cross his path by doing the heavy metal devil horns sign on their necks, which either makes them temporarily dead, or temporarily super-sexy, depending on whether or not it's Wilma who gets the horns.
Do you want to watch Gil Gerard's stunt double fight a hoard of space zombies? Of course you do, you are a fine and upstanding member of the science fiction horror understanderer's club and this is what we do.
I also watched AN ALIEN AFFAIR and ZOMBIE MASTER, two terror-themed episodes from the daffy CENTURIONS kids' sci-fi show from the mid-80s that has not become a gritty and underrated masterpiece with the passage of time, even with scripting talent like Gerry Conway and Michael Reeves, Jack Kirby and Gil Kane working on visual concepts, and the incomparable Udi Harpaz providing the soundtrack. This show is capital-B Bad, but so much so that it swings all the way around on the dial and scoots past naffness to "enjoyable" again.
An Alien Affair is a longtime fave, but I gave Zombie Master a go, too, as I figured I could probably stand zombies for 21 minutes in the context of this particular show, and you know what? Robot zombies I could live with.
But now I am done with zombies.
So what conclusions can I draw at the end of my month of almost exclusively horror-based media consumption?
That I hate horror, mainly.
I mean, I think I realised I didn't have a great deal of interest in sitting down to watch horror movies, but I put that down to most modern horror movies kind of sucking really bad rather than disdain for the genre, but... yep, I think I hate horror as a genre. I guess the writing was on the wall when I realised how much I'd gone off zombies - which I put down to their omnipresence - and shaky footage of ghosts shot on someone's phone while they scream OH MI GOD. I love stuff like Quatermass and the old Doctor Whos that have horror elements, but "pure" horror movies that I adore are few and far between - I could totally watch The Fog, Don't Look Now, Tremors or Night Of The Demon anytime, but these are exceptions rather than an indicator of my taste.
Bollocks to it anyway, I'm off to watch a bunch of CW superhero shows for a few hours to get back into my trash groove.
18th OCT - SUMMER OF '84 is a teen mystery thriller, except there's not really much in the way of mystery and things follow a pretty linear path. I get what the makers are trying to cash in on, but this isn't a particularly good evocation of the era or its sensibilities - the serial killer, for instance, while a known quantity through the actions of real-life monsters, wasn't quite as embedded in early 1980s Americana as a cultural phenomenon as this leads you to believe.
There are dozens of text and video essays online explaining this fetishism of a terrible period in music and fashion much better than I'll ever manage in the paragraph or two on my screen grabs blog, and a good example is this one from the always-interesting Lindsey Ellis:
19th OCT - IT CAME FROM THE DESERT is based on an old arcade adventure game from the 8-bit era of home computer gaming, so as timely cash-ins go, this ain't one of those. It's actually visually impressive here and there despite its obvious low budget, but the actors let the side down, leaning hard into the silliness, and not quite managing to find a balance between that and the po-facedness you need to really make a b-movie work, especially one so obviously looking to mine the silliness of atomic panic pictures like THEM! with its silly giant ant premise.
Still, if you can tolerate the "deliberately-bad" genre of horror movie, this is borderline-watchable.
20th OCT - QUATERMASS 2 is another one from the "I'd watch this even if it wasn't Spooktober" pile of classic horror movies I have to hand, with Brian Donleavy as the world's most unconvincing rocket scientist, but still pretty charismatic and distinctive as the titular Quatermass as he struggles with the notion of malign intelligence from beyond our world, which he speaks about in terms that suggest he's explaining extra-terrestrials to someone who's never been exposed to the concept, reminding you that all of these cliches I sneer at like the post-millenial dog I am were new to audiences at some point.
I was briefly intrigued by the insistence of several characters that "we don't have any police around here", which really does show you how things have changed - no coppers enforcing capitalist hegemony and hunting down illegals? INCONCEIVABLE.
As solid as b-movie shockers get, and always watchable.
21st OCT - LEPRECHAUN I have somehow managed to not see a single entry in this surprisingly lengthy slasher series - 8 movies and counting - so this is the year I finally see why anyone would want to make a horror franchise based on a borderline-offensive caricature of whimsy from the ludicrous theme park that is my home country.
"Wait, aren't you from Tyrone, which is in the North, and thus part of the UK?" I hear astute blog-watchers ask, to which I reply "oh yes, sorry, you are correct in that I'm not located in Ireland at the moment - I forgot it isn't 2020 yet." AND YES THAT IS A BREXIT JOKE BECAUSE GOD FORBID WE SHOULD FORGET THAT'S HAPPENING.
Jennifer Aniston did apparently spend a lot of her career doing things other than starring in Adam Sandler movies, and that includes time in the b-reel mines eking out a meager living playing "The Girl" in absolute horseshit like this. I do wonder if they went back and edited in some extra footage they had left over after Aniston got famous in FRIENDS, because there's some chase sequences late in the film and one or two are just lengthy tracking shots centered entirely on her backside and they do go on for a bit, but that kind of exploitation isn't unusual in this era of film, plus I don't really care enough to look it up, so it's hard to know either way.
The - ...well, we'll call it "the plot" for the sake of argument - revolves around a man who finds a pot of gold in Ireland and the Leprechaun that owns it follows him home to America trying to get it back but is shot and left for dead in an old house for 10 years before being revived by Jenny and her dad, cue bloodshed in some not very inventive ways. It's hard to see why this was popular enough to spawn 7 sequels, to be honest, as it's not even a particularly good example of the type of exploitative trash that the slasher genre had devolved into thanks to the Reagan administration's destruction of the moral fibre of America, and I think the reason it probably did well was because of its audaciously stupid premise, as in the home rental era of movies, distributors would sell movies at trade conventions to retail and rental outlets in domestic and foreign territories, so a movie could - and often did - make back its production costs and even turn profit before it had even been released to the public, which is why you would see movie sequels churned out so quickly that they were obviously in production before the original was even available to rent or buy. This movie sounds so stupid on paper that I think distributors at the time either assumed it was tongue-in-cheek, or self-aware in some way and thus much better than it sounded - or they thought it was so dumb that it stood a good chance of catching people's eye and getting rented.
That's my big insight into the VHS era market forces that made a successful franchise of this and many other terrible films. I think we can agree it was well worth turning up to the blog to read it.
This movie sucked.
22nd OCT - LEPRECHAUN 2: LEPRECHAUN HARDER has a glaring continuity error right off the bat, with the character stating his age as 1000 years old whereas in the previous movie he said he was 600, and almost immediately I wondered what I'm doing with my life.
This is clearly a different Leprechaun altogether, so there are quite a lot of these little bastards knocking about and so it doesn't matter what the rules are for his powers and/or the limitations to how they work, I mean... having consistent rules would infer that there was going to be some point where characters outsmarted the villain with a clever plan based on established lore, but really they just find a certain object that can stab the unkillable baddie and make him for-reals dead and then the movie ends without even the usual "I'm not dead yet" jump scare.
This time the Leprechaun is after the descendant of someone the Leprechaun killed a thousand years ago because he wants to make Leprechaun babies... sigh.
This film also sucks.
23rd OCT - LEPRECHAUN 3: LAS VEGAS LEPRECHAUN and I know this is the third of a movie series based on something that is to a certain nationality what a gollywog is to a black person, but even so, this one is kind of sort of very racist, with the half-pint horror biting off an Asian gentleman's ear and announcing "I love Indian food! It's so spicy!" The same gentleman later lapses into Arabic caricature for some reason, so I don't know what to make of that. We deal with yet another Leprechaun unrelated to the previous versions, this one having the ability to turn those victims he doesn't kill into were-leprechauns, so you get American actors doing Irish accents and there's a bit with a sex robot because it was the 1990s, I guess? I don't know why I'm still trying to make sense of these things.
Does it even matter that this one is set in Las Vegas and that he meets Elvis? It's a bit more knowingly silly than the first two, at least, but still far from good.
24th OCT - LEPRECHAUN 4: LEPRECHAUN IN SPACE welp here are. I can stop watching bad movies now because after this there's little point.
To be fair, this goes all-out to be stupid, with the Leprechaun having a shootout with space marines and regenerating himself by climbing out of a man's penis before turning Godzilla-sized for the finale, so you can't say it isn't trying - which is probably why I'm a little disappointed they dropped the gimmick of the Leprechaun always talking in rhyme. This is gloriously bad, and there are even some familiar faces among the cast like Lieutenant Gruber from 'Allo 'Allo as a mad scientist (complete with German accent), and the gunnery sergeant from Full Metal Jacket as the leader of a corps of marines -fun fact: he was slated to play the part that eventually went to R Lee Ermy.
There's some problematic elements to add to the racism from the previous movie, particularly the misogyny and "man in a dress" humor of the second half, but I actually quite enjoyed this because it finally delivers on the promise of the original that you're going to watch something ludicrously terrible rather than just plain bad.
25th OCT - LEPRECHAUN 5: LEPRECHAUN IN THE HOOD Boy oh boy, given the track record of this series with racial sensitivity I was not looking forward to this one, and sure enough, it has it all: racism, misogyny, transphobia, Ice T's acting - everything about this one is offensive, and it's hard not to see it as being by design.
Although occasionally amusing - such as when Ice T tries to shoot someone without realising his trigger finger was torn off a half hour earlier in the movie - there otherwise isn't much in the way of the inventive deaths that slasher movie fans have come to expect of the genre, with many of the deaths happening entirely offscreen, including a rape/murder sequence that is deeply troubling even without the transphobic element. In a movie that transplants an Irish stereotype to a genre known for its exploitation of African Americans, I suppose it's kind of impressive that the film manages to drag some anti-Asian racism into proceedings too, but apart from this commendable dedication to keep the film focused on something dear to the maker's hearts (hate crime), this is just dreadful.
True, it does star the Third Worst Actor From Star Trek: Enterprise, but even that can't salvage it.
The Horror Diary continues - no, not the op-ed section of the Guardian, I speak of course about my ill-advised attempt to watch horror movies and tv shows every day for the whole month of October. Fun fact: I have realised that horror is literally my least favorite genre.
Still, like Brexit, I can't stop now, so...
8th OCT - THE COLLAPSED posits itself first as a post-apocalyptic thriller, but then edges towards horror territory as it progresses, my main takeaway being "oh dang, this is where Birdbox got the idea."
I kind of guessed the twist a bit too early for the film to have entirely worked, but on balance I would say, middling acting and micro budget aside, this was pretty good. AFTERMATH is a more traditional post-apocalyptic thriller, hitting beats familiar to the genre and its fans, and while not particularly inventive, it's a competant entry in the PA canon. The only reason I watched it was because it came from the Screamfest channel on That There Youtube, which is a good place to stop for horror movies between 3 and 50 minutes.
9th OCT - DOOM: ANNIHILATION is the second live-action adaptation of the game that isn't the first or best FPS (First Person Shooter), but it is almost certainly the daddy. Some scientists find ancient tablets inscribed with satanic runes and decide to jump up and down on them to see what happens. SPOILERS: nothing good.
Actually, "nothing good" is a pretty apt review summary for this. It's like one of those micro-budget Asylum movies about zombies fighting mercenaries, only the sets are nicer: some not-great actors deliver some not-great exposition, then one of them goes "sheeeeeeeeyit!" and does some shooting, the zombies rush at the characters and get shot for a bit, then someone goes "WTF is happening here?" and some more exposition happens, tensions in the group, they try to withdraw to safety but are thwarted, then have to pursue a McGuffin, there's a big fight and maybe a twist about one of the characters being secretly bad, an explosion, then a character goes ARGH at the camera and the credits roll as a rock track goes DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN. If that sounds like a movie you think you'd enjoy watching for the 16th time, this is for you. If not, you might find this a bit poo like I did.
The original Doom live-action movie at least had a visceral and gory charm to it, but this is just rote shooting and zombies going RARG, and despite the demon FX being practical, the director does that thing you see in CGI movies where nothing seems to hurt the CGI monsters, until something does because the script calls for the action sequence to be over. Here, that takes the form of millions of bullets being shot at the zombies and demons and having no effect until the monsters just suddenly keel over, which, the more I think about it, is pretty much how the damage mechanics in the original Doom game actually worked, because obviously the limited graphical capability of PCs and consoles of the era used primitive bitmaps that didn't register any visible damage no matter how much you shot at them, you just kept shooting at them until the death animation finally triggered. However, this is clearly based on the 2016 reboot of the DOOM videogame franchise in which visible damage was a prominent feature, so I guess that kills dead any notion I had of thinking of this as a deliberate homage to the original. It makes me think of that movie Spectral which I have never watched and don't intend to because I saw some clips in which soldiers were shooting at ghosts and I just thought "a whole movie of guys not realising bullets don't work but they keep shooting anyway? Fuck that."
10th OCT - CTHULHU, which can be watched in its entirety on the old internets thanks to its director putting the entire thing online:
It's a work about Lovecraft's cosmic mythos in the same way that those Lovecraft videogames are, IE not very, it just takes some names and ideas and welds them to an original story in much the same way Castle Rock did with the Stephen King mythos, only Cthulhu is nowhere near as smug, unoriginal and irritating as Castle Rock was. At nearly two hours and lacking any special effects shots to speak of, it might not strike many as much of a horror, but luckily Youtube's Hbomberguy - better known as the Donkey Kong-playing and Mermaids-funding arch-nemesis of sitcom-writing transphobic bigot Graham Linehan - has gone and produced a very good video exploring how the film, despite its low budget and lack of name actors and being set in an entirely different century to the source material, nonetheless explores the themes of Lovecraft's work, only swapping out Lovecraft's next-level IRL racism and replacing it with fictional homophobia.
11th OCT - SHERLOCK HOLMES vs DRACULA - available to listen to in its entirety here on that there Youtube, which is clearly doing a bang-up job of stopping copyright infringement.
It's a fun romp about Dr John Watson's outrage at both being sniped by an Irishman in getting a certain tale into print, and at being written out of the account entirely, prompting him to set the record straight on how the prince of vampires met his end thanks to the efforts of the world's greatest detective.
Worth a listen if you want something to distract you from the soul-crushing task assigned to you by your employers, which was how my brother came across it while processing appeals lodged with the DWP against the benefits sanctions imposed by the criminally-incompetent third party contractors imposed on the DWP by our parasitic government, and I'm glad he sought solace in audio dramas while he worked, because I thought Sherlock Holmes vs Dracula was quite the whizzer yarn. Fun story: the third party contractors at the DWP are not just negligent and criminally incompetent - their actions often result in verifiable deaths - but they're also criminally criminal, too, creating fake benefits claims so they can funnel money into their own accounts. It was reported in the local papers over here in Norn Iron recently - particularly the notoriously shit-stirring Sunday World - and rather than deny it, the people in charge of the DWP offices in Belfast launched a witch hunt for the whistleblower and gave the entire building a bollocking about talking to the press, then swept the whole thing under the rug as best they could and moved the guilty parties on quietly because the company they worked for had tendered new contracts with the government and they didn't want to risk them losing out with a minor scandal involving the theft of hundreds of thousands of pounds from sick and disabled people who would later - fun fact - go on to kill themselves and send notes to the DWP staff in Belfast blaming them for the act, further contributing to the air of depression already permeating the building.
Yes, that was leftfield, but you know, it's October and the whole point is horror, and if you can't be horrified at a bunch of dead poors or the criminality that put them in their graves, then how's about this: the Sunday World sells a half million copies every Sunday and its stories are freely available to the mainland press, which means that the BBC and the Guardian etc have deliberately buried this story. Never trust a liberal.
I particularly liked that Van Hellsing rebuffs Sherlock Holmes' aid because he thinks Holmes is an attention whore, and then Holmes and Watson flounce off with a "GOOD DAY, SIR!" lol wat a qween etc. ANyway, it's a fun yarn, give it a listen.
12th - THE HOWLING REBORN is... well, I'm stuck to describe it, as I am pretty sure "this is one of the worst films I have ever seen" has been thoroughly devalued as a critical appraisal through overuse, thanks to the ready availability of streaming services only too happy to put any old garbage up for viewing as long as it pads out the library of available content, but this really is one of the worst films I have ever seen.
I shan't be drawn upon the particulars because that would mean reliving it, but suffice it to say my main qualms stem from unlikable characters, a dumb plot, dreadful dialogue, and a general feeling of a missed opportunity. I can usually get behind even terrible films if I feel the makers tried, but this has all the telltale signs of a quick, soulless cash-in that has devalued an already-devalued brand, and even though a couple of the actors seem to be making a fist of the material, there's nothing they can do. I will say the lead character's transformation into a werewolf is identical to the transformation sequences from the Glen A Larson television series MANIMAL, though. Make of that what you will.
Speaking of getting behind terrible films, PARASITE is a 1982 dystopian sci-fi body horror creature feature featuring an 18 year-old Demi Moore and some sort of toothy turd-like leech monster thing. I am obviously going for ths soft sell here, but this was actually a pretty fun z-movie from the VHS era, featuring some welcome genre subversion like the punks terrorising a small town turning out to have sympathetic backstories, and the almost Lovecraftian offscreen horror of a post-collapse America now run by corporate gangsters - LOL moviemakers in the 1980s were way off on what the future was going to be like, amiright?
Made by Charles Band, who runs a cottage industry producing and directing good bad movies like this, Metalstorm and the Puppet Master and Dollman series, I have no problem telling you I found this enjoyable even if the snob in me still feels compelled to levy the caveat that "enjoyable" and "good" are not synonyms. Pure trash.
MANIAC COP - tagline: "ACAB - BUT SOME MORE THAN OTHERS!" - is also a good bad film, from master of exploitation b-movies Larry Cohen, who for some reason critics got it in their heads was in on the gag more than his contemporaries and so they treated his output as if it was satirical in intent rather than just blackly comic. Cohen is a writer who just takes a concept and runs with it, even if that means the protagonist of the movie takes a dive (in this case literally) around the start of the third act, and the rest of the movie is led by someone who was until now little more than a glorified cameo. I do love Bruce Campbell, but he is not a leading man for this kind of story. Obviously there is a rich vein of commentary to be dug into the premise in which a cop is killing innocent citizens and the actual police force - abetted by the judiciary and city hall - try to deny this is even happening, but really, it's just a trashy and fun movie. I watched this by mistake as I was actually looking for MANIC COP, the story of a depressed policeman with anxiety issues okay this is not true but you try ending as many reviews as this without drying up sooner or later.
13th OCT - MANIAC COP 2 - tagline: "HE'S THE WRONG ARM OF THE LAW!" - because part one was good and I guess there must be a horror fan somewhere in my home town who doesn't lock his house when junkies are on the prowl for some quick cash to score them a hit of that sweet sweet spice melange, because the local CEX had the second Maniac Cop on dvd for the low low price of 50 pence and who am I to say no to a deal like that? The only salve I can place upon my guilt at rewarding crime by shopping in CEX is that theft is merely capitalism in a more pure form and thus I am encouraging... erm... critique? Probably. 50 pence! Robert Zdar returns as the butcher with a badge and makes quick work of the survivors of the first movie before going on to make friends with a serial killer, murder a police station, and break into a prison before being set on fire and head-butting a bus until it explodes. So uhhhhhh more of the same, just on a marginally larger scale with some impressive action setpieces involving a cop shop shootout and a couple of car chases, but the real highlight is surely one of the greatest proprietary theme tunes committed to posterity.
14th OCT - MANIAC COP 3: BADGE OF SILENCE mixes voodoo into proceedings, but otherwise doesn't depart from the formula I'd come to expect based on the last two movies, including an off-the-rails third act.
By the third entry in a series, diminishing returns have usually set in, but this franchise isn't exactly what you'd call high art to begin with, added to which the same writer/director team (Larry Cohen and William Lustig) have been at the helm of all three films, so even when it gets a little slower here and there or heads into more blatantly slasher territory, it's still mostly consistent with previous films apart from a gunfight in a hospital that reminds you that John Woo's influence really was a thing back in 1992.
I argued for Maniac Cop 1 that it wasn't quite as political as people might want you to believe, but now there's three of 'em and in-universe everyone knows there's an unkillable cop walking around murdering at will, so the political reading is pretty unavoidable now. All in all, I really enjoyed this trilogy, and it's a shame Robert Zdar never got to reprise his starring role for a fourth outing, though I fully expect a remake any day now.
15th OCT - NIGHT VISIONS is an early 2000s Twilight Zone knock-off that apparently had a commitment from Gary Oldman to serve as the show's host, but the producers insisted on Henry Rollins, who is shot from the thighs up so you can see his flexed muscles, and you know he's flexing for the camera on account of you can see he's balling his fists like he's ready to fight someone up, which you know that he won't do because it's a pretty open secret that Rollins is a humongous pussy in real life and often spends a lot of the running time of his spoken word beat poetry performances talking about - actually, I probably don't need to go any further than that, do I? Gosh but that reads a bit judgmental.
There's a great old Twilight Zone episode called "He's Alive!" about a racist meathead played by Dennis Hopper who starts taking tips on oration from Hitler's ghost and instead of ending with the words "in the Twilight Zone" as usual, the closing monologue was something like "remember when you hear a name called or a minority attacked that He is alive because through these things we keep him alive" and I thought boy it sure is quite the journey from that to Henry Rollins standing around in tank tops looking like an action figure saying lines like "when you spend all your time being a bastard, sooner or later you'll piss off the wrong asshole." O brave new world.
Anyway, this show kind of sucks. It's not good in the conventional sense, but it does boost some recognisable guest stars, and while a lot of the twists are pretty shoddy, it usually does a good job of creating a spooky atmosphere while getting to that point, often playing with the viewers' expectations of what comes next by second-guessing the conventions of act-based teleplays, like the episode set in a darkened radio station where you genuinely have no idea who the killer stalking the main character might be because the show has just made a point of killing everyone who had a speaking part, or the plane crash episode where you kind of know what the twist is, but the show just keeps throwing other twists at you to wrong-foot you and it gets to the point that episodes paint themselves into a corner and so they just... end really quickly. The twist isn't as important as shitting you up, and I guess that at least differentiates it from Twilight Zone.
Not a great show, but I suppose I did enjoy it while it lasted, and I would argue that dated and naff as it is, it's still better than the recent Twilight Zone reboot.
16th OCT - BODY BAGS, a triple bill anthology featuring directorial input from Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter, the latter of whom doubles as the film's host, which I was not expecting. He does a good job as a sleazy coroner introducing various tales about the body parts which wash up in the morgue, examples of "our national pastime - violent death!". The tales are, frankly, not much cop at all, though I did like the straightforwardness of the gas station segment. Mark Hamill... oh man, Mark Hamill just could not pick a good script to save his life, and in interview he is open about his doubts about going into voicover acting, the career path which led him to create the definitive version of The Joker. Still, he has at least got to do those Star Wars sequels lately - which proves he still picks lousy scripts, but at least he's making some bank.
Also checked out the pilot of the new CREEPSHOW tv series currently airing on the Shudder channel, and it is most certainly a television series called Creepshow. Yep.
No idea what to say beyond "it kinda sucks real bad." A lot of effort clearly went into it, but it isn't good. I had high hopes when I saw the host was a crude animatronic, but then it dawned on me that tv maybe doesn't need yet another horror anthology. Or maybe I don't need to see another horror anthology right now.
I did like the practical werewolf effects in the second episode, and the willful embracing of garishness and harsh lighting, but the silent host really throws things off, as it draws attention to the fact that the makers looked at the old show and saw the giggling ebullience and glee of the host and decided that this wouldn't fit in with modern sensibilities, but rather than depart from the branding they just took out his monologues - though you can still see the script for them in the introductory panels in the fake comic book that serves as the show's framing gimmick. A show that's slightly ashamed of itself is a sad thing to see.
17th OCT - NANCY DREW is the latest attempt at bringing the teenage sleuth to live-action land, but don't get your hopes up as it's a CW show, so 2019's Nancy Drew is more or less guaranteed to be about a diverse gang of 20-something actors playing teenagers who solve a murder while having underage sex, an evaluation of which I am so certain, I am writing this introduction before viewing the actual pilot of the show.
(No, really, I wrote this and then went and watched the show)
Yep, called it.
Anyhoo, what made me take a look was the promise of there being possible supernatural goings-on in the series, and I'll just pull the band aid off this one, the writers and producers have just straight-up lifted the Grand Theft Auto 5 ghost thing and plonked it into their identikit teen show, but it's okay because this is the CW, a network run by middle aged people making television for thirsty teenagers and shame has no place here.
What it most reminds me of is Scooby Doo Mystery Inc, a really slapping kids' show from several years back, in that the general tone and atmosphere is almost identical, though obviously Mystery Inc does not have a very diverse cast unless we want to start a conversation about whether Scooby is black or not.
I often hold that Star Trek Into Darkness is one of the worst films ever made, but that it's quite hard to tell because it's so well put-together - as films costing a quarter of a billion dollars tend to be - and likewise, Nancy Drew 2019 is pretty bad, it's just that it's hard to tell because everything is put together with such studied competence that all you're left to criticise is how corny and unambitious it is, and good luck with selling that as a criticism in a world where easily over 50% of media is remakes or adaptations. I did like that they waited almost four whole minutes before Nancy has her first sex scene of the episode, which on a CW show these days practically makes her a nun. I guess it might be interesting to see how a CW show handles a prudish lead character for a change, but beyond that I don't see what makes this stand out. HUNTRESS: RUNE OF THE DEAD is a Swedish Western but with vikings instead of cowboys and zombies instead of Native Americans. It is not very good. It takes roughly 120 minutes of a 145 minute run time to get to the zombies, there isn't any clear protagonist, no central arc or theme for characters... I am not really sure what the point was. I managed to get this far without watching anything with zombies in it and to be honest, I should have kept that rule going.
