We Need to Talk About Googoo.

Spinoffs! Let me tell you, Mister, the Star Warps has one or two - and not all of them are for grown up kids of all developmental stages. Nosiree, mister - there's stuff for the kids, too - like An Earwig Adventure, and Caravan of Carnage: the Bottle Vendor. So, lots. But all the more exciting is that there's a NEW kid-based spinoff coming soon from a galaxy near you - and it's called El Landolorian and Googoo, and it's about Mango the Landolorian and his cute sidekick Googoo, who is really Yoder's baby. I'm going to take you behind scenes on this new space epic....

Googoo. He's irrepressable!

Now, spoilers, but they released some of this during the Superbowler Sports Show last year, and it looks pretty good. It's based off the old TV series El Landolorian and picks up where they got off, with Mango the mysterious Landolorian (tm) collecting Googoo from a space orphanage on Tattoome. No sooner is the space scamp in Mango's ship when our helmeted hero says his immortal catchphrase "Don't touch that", and Googoo is all over Mango's knobs and levers and Whooosh! All hell breaks loose. It's comedy gold!

Whooosh!

Mango isn't having any of that, and so the two friends are soon jumping around from place to place in space and time, landing on strange creatures and meeting all sorts of outlandish worlds. It's retro, so it's great, and a lot of El Landolorian is so retro it uses designs from the original Star Warps designer Rate Myquarry. The effects are superb for television. But back to the story. Mango and Googoo go EVERYWHERE - Tattoome, the imperious world of Cormorant, and all places inbetween. They even visit other friends by jumping into THEIR series - it's like Forest Grump in space!

"You can't touch that!"

So then, they visit the junk-loving Jawers from Star Warps, the diminutive Oddnoughts from Clown City - and even Luke Sandhater, who tries to train Googoo. Chaos ensues!

"Help me, Opie-One!"

Eventually they land in Bobo Fett's series, which is pretty cool because he wasn't doing anything special, and it gives Mango a chance to bond with his father. Oh and Bad Cane from the Clown Warps cartoons shows up, but by then I was confused and switched over to some infomercials to settle myself down. But I'm ready for El Landolorian and Googoo coming this year. I am Hypped for more space mischief! I hope Mango gets some time alone with his girlfriend Ms Landloroian at last.

"You said we wouldn't be babysitting again, Mango!"

But with Googoo around, I wouldn't bet on it! As Hank says, "I'm feeling bad about this..."

Seasonal Bargains of the Witch: Halloween Challenge Night 14

 So far so much straying from Halloween itself. So tonight, Matthew, I've returned to the Sates, to a slightly more modern time for the movie that it's in: Halloween 3 

 Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982, not John Carpenter and not Nigel Neale so stop asking)

Ah, the dreaded threequel. Nigel Neale wrote this, you know. Then had his name taken off it. Tom Atkins is in it – a sure sign of quality with his horror pedigree (The Fog! Monster Squad! Night of the Creeps!) I’d heard this was at best a guilty pleasure, and had nothing to do with the tale of Michael Myers. Was it right? And did it not?

Yes, reader, for if you’ve not dived into the backstory of this movie to date, both are respectively kind of right, and very much on the money. The idea, apparently, was to have Halloween-adjacent and not necessarily linked stories going forward in this franchise, leaving the tale of poor beleaguered Laurie Strode and less-fortunate souls behind to allow the films to spread their batlike wings and take off. Reader, they didn’t.

This is… fine. A take of sinister advertising, mind-controlled kids, electronic puppetry and dubious Halloween masks, it’s cosmetically on point. But its also a bit confused, fumbles the alleged Celtic connections in a way that many many modern horrors do, and the final product is a real mixed goody bag. Charismatic leads, sure – but I missed the Shape of a proper bogeyman. The movie straddles uneasily the slashy Seventies with the more visceral, technological Eighties. Freddy Krueger was mere months away, and ready to reinvent the form. This could only suffer by comparison.

Halloweenometer. Well, it says it on the tin, and the VHS wrapping is very enticing. PLUS I have feelings about serial killers stealing the season from the spooks and ghouls. But I was a bit stratchy watching this one. On theme, but maybe not on point. 

Pumpkinwatch: We're back on familiar ground, and there's plenty to choose from here, including a new fangled digital title sequence! But it's the masks we've come for, so feast your peeps:

Bad Duck! Halloween Challenge Night 10

 When I was a youngster the Simian house was not awash with the comic form. We had, it would be fair to describe, an ‘assortment’ of juvenile reading material beyond an admittedly not bad selection of classic literature courtesy of the Children’s Library collection. But beyond the Robinson Cruesoes and Robin Hoods, your graphic narrative examples were lean pickings: some Disney Time magazines, the odd pickup from a church fair, the obligatory Phantom one-off, and a random assortment of Gold Key Comics, offering such variety as Tarzan, Star Trek, and Disney Characters. It was the latter that held most of my interest – particularly the Donald Ducks and Goofies, two of what I still regard as the heavy lifters of Uncle Walt’s menagerie.

One particular favourite of the Double D's was Trick or Treat, in which The Don met his comeuppance via the agent of Chaotic Good, Witch Hazel which he behaves like an absolute rotter to his becostumed, door-knocking nephews. It’s a great story, told with economy and illustrated by the reliable Carl Barks, and I treasured that issue. We lost it in a reliable Mum Purge in time, of course, but the memory lingered long after.

Recent gob smacking discovery was mine then when I found the ORIGINAL ANIMATION on Disney Plus – complete with jaunty song (which sounded quite unlike the simple mute rhyme in the comic version). It was a thrilling find, matching my memory of the strip so very closely it was as though it had come to life. The reality of course is the reverse – the comic was the adaptation, and even expanded the story – so, maybe a mission then to find a copy…

Donald Duck 'Trick or Treat' (1952)

Trick or Treat in either form is marvelous. The Big D in all his adult mischief and self-righteous rage is the perfect foil and victim because of his unscrupulous trickery to poor Huey, Louie and Dewey, and his apoplectic frustration at being bewitched, bothered and bamboozled by Hazel and her broomstick Beelzebub still had me cackling when I revisited it this evening. A masterpiece, with all of the Halloween trimmings, including some great and memorable detail: the Duck abode having (presumably for one night only) an empty wheatfield within reach to convey the harvest season, the reliable silent abetting of Beelzebub, and the weird but on point rendering of a Junior Duck’s eyes as black spots when dressed as a ghost (he never takes it off – is it makeup?)

So yes, here is possibly THE Disney Halloween joint – ten minutes of your time definitely not wasted, and a vintage Halloween in a catchy wee morsel. Sure, Lonesome Ghosts has the big Three animated characters predicting Ghostbusters years before, and the even older Mickey and the Haunted House is creepy in its own way, but Trick or Treat has the right balance. I’ll be revisiting it again next Halloween, I’m sure.

Halloweenometer: A perfect score!  

… but is there anything from the House of Mouse that could match it…?

Pumpkinwatch: A real beauty - animated and everything!

I Don't Think I'm Ready For This Giallo: Halloween Challenge Night 9

 I watched a giallo tonight. I didn't like it at all.

Much better!

Dark Carnival: Halloween Challenge Night 5

 Time for a ramp-up at last: a movie set at Halloween!

Well, a week before Halloween, to be precise and faithful to its novel origin, but near enough. 

I was absolutely fizzing to read that Disney's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes was finally coming to ratty old Disney+. A decent version of it online has been very hard to find legitimately, and it was that way for many years until sanity prevailed, and this movie joined its twisted early 80s brethren. So I watched it!

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Jack Clayton, 1983)

Disney is a fascinating company, and we'll surely return to them, but for now I'm thinking of that point in the studio's past before the big IP acquisitions, before the superheroes, the star warses, the pixars and even before the new animated classics like The Lion King. I'm talking about Disney's Dark Period(tm). I'm talking The Black Hole, Watcher in the Woods, Return to Oz, The Black Cauldron, and this spooky little moonflower. I'm talking Jason Robards, Jonathan Pryce, PAM GRIER, and a curious decision to make a story previously set in a sometimes 50s a more period piece set presumably pre-Great War . It doesn't ruin anything, and maybe helps sell the film's old world visual aesthetic - although I've always found Bradbury to be a highly visual storyteller, so maybe it's just a point of difference.

So what to say?  It's not the book. The book is sacrosanct. As full of life and mystery as it was when I first read it back in my teens. The cast is great. The cinematography is good, the score is... very James Horner. The production was troubled. It's a blessing we have this at all, so given the odd imperfection, I give it a fair bit of slack. The book is still there, as are my memories of losing myself in that first reading. 

On the Halloweenometer we're getting very close to a great pick. It has the time, the location, and enough retro charm to locate it in a familiar-unfamiliar location. It is utterly American, dark, threatening, but not too dark for family viewing. 

Recommended!

Companion Piece 

We're going local with The Chills (perhaps appropriately named for the spooky season). The late, lamented Martin Phillipps had a few supernatural themed songs in his repertoire, being a fan of the paranormal. 'Ghosts' and the aptly-named 'Dark Carnival' from debut album Brave Words could both be contenders, but for me it's a little more recent, and a deeper cut - a B-Side to 'Male Monster From the Id', complete with Peter Holsapple's REM-ish guitar, and a knowing Bradbury reference in the second line. Marty was a fan of his, too.

The 'Goon Show: Halloween Challenge Night 4

Saturday night used to be Family Movie Night in the Simian household, a tradition which I've been keen to revive, even if I've sabotaged it somewhat with an ongoing D&D campaign with the lads. Nevertheless, with October almost being a bye month, we gave it a crack and I suggested we go Old School black and white creature feature. The choices? James Whale's Frankenstein, Them! or Creature from the Black Lagoon. Long story short, Junior remembered watching the Whale tale on VHS (indeed!), Mrs S thought giant ants were just too silly a concept (little does she know...), and so the Gill-man won out for a tried and true Monster Movie.

Creature From the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954) 

I really like Creature, one of the first non-UFO 1950s movies I familiarised myself with a couple of years ago on a greyscale bender. Jack Arnold's direction is great, the leads are engaging, the sets are multi-layered, the story is attractive and the besuited titular terror is a wonderful piece of kit, dry and wet (but especially wet) The rest of the fam took a bit of convincing that yes, the heroine gets a BIT of agency in this story, and gosh, doesn't the underwater filming look like a ballet, et cetera. I think they were surprised about the grim determination of both species to make this a zero-sum game, all the same. And though the ensnagglement of Julia Adams was somewhat inevitable, Junior noted the Monster-Carries-Girl motif from my seemingly doomed movie pastiche project. So, some appreciation for the finer things.

Highly recommended, even without the Halloween trappings - but is it a Halloween watch? I suppose so, given that back in our courting days a Halloween movie might have been something on VHS that was old but unfamiliar (Evil Dead and Donovan's Brain was one very odd double feature in them days, as I recall) This one's a good one. Thought-provoking, dynamic, and a little bit corny (but not TOO corny - at least not at this stage of the series). It may not scream traditional Halloween fare, but after this week's choices it has an innocence, and sense of wonder and some poetic - nay, iconic, scenes and shots that get it over the line. A good Halloween watch - without hewing too close to the tropes. Plenty of time to come for that.

Companion Piece

Something slimy, something skeezy, something dripping with goofy cool. It could only be:

The Other Side (of the Ditch): Halloween Challenge Night 2

 Welcome back to my nightmare. On the second night of October Mrs Simian and I ventured into the murky depths of some of our free Aussie streamers available through our public library. Beamafilm and Kanopy can be accessed for a limited number of views per month as 'tickets', and offer an interesting range of documentaries, TV series, movies and short form progamming. As you'd expect, there's a heavy Australian bias (as there is in another free channel, Brollie), but that inevitably also means some NZ content gets thrown in, because... our sunburned cousins do me like that.

So tonight's viewing was a documentary, The Darkside. Gorillamydreams is a bigly fan of supernatural reality slop like Finding Bigfoot (they haven't), Expedition X (not ex-enough, frankly), and Scared Stupid. I may have made one of those up. The Darkside is a bit less tongue in cheek, and purports to retell real-life eerie stories with the help of Australian actors (Deborah Mailman, Claudia Karvan, Bryan Brown, Jack Charles, among others) usually straight to camera with some landscapiness thrown in, and sometimes with their own craft helping to interpret things. 

The Darkside (Warwick Thornton, 2013)

The tales in The Darkside are very much Australian stories, with a strong sense of location and history, and told largely from a First Nations perspective, as you would expect from Thornton's body of work (Samson & Delilah being the one I am most familiar with). The stories drift in and out, not linking with one another, nor presenting a throughline, but lingering in places wit some arresting images - a painting of a girl which turns into a landscape, and then back to a girl, stretches of slow camera tracks through dim museum corridors, mist coming in with the tide, and the unflinching stare of the narrators as they tell their stories straight down the barrel. 

So onto the Halloweenometer: I can barely rate this one. We didn't finish it, although I may return. It's eerie, and unsettling in places - but it's not what I'm after for a Halloween watch, and I imagine that Halloween traffic is not what this movie is looking for. The most affecting story - and our checking out point was among those corridors of the Australian National Archive, and the stories of remains of indigenous peoples, inspected, prodded, measured, tested and examined and othered by a white scientists and physicians, reducing them to museum exhibits and dusty remains in indexed boxes.  Genuinely unnerving, confronting and grim. Stories deserving to be told and remembered, but not in this context. 

Hallow, It's Good to be Back. Halloween Challenge Night 1

 BOO! Et cetera. I'm back - and back with a new October Challenge - a Halloween Challenge, no less.

This month, for the whole 31 days, I'm going to watch something Halloween adjacent - and comment on it. Halloween is a special time of the year, and one which I enjoy. But I'm keen to quantify how and why I enjoy it. Everyone's Halloween comes in a different flavour - so what's mine? Something traditional? Something local? Something modern? I'm not sure, so I'm going to ry a few different things and see where it gets me.

Night 1: A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017)

I'm goin in coolish to begin with, as despite the above challenge, I'm not really in the mood for anything too morbid or bleak. A friend died recently, and that's changed a few things for the mean-time. 

I first saw A Ghost Story on a plane returning from a work trip over the Tasman. As I recall I really enjoyed it - I think I had the choice of it and Ghostbusters Answer the Call, which was also okay, but maybe not my flavour for air travel. A Ghost Story works because it's  largely free of dialogue and big action. It's a contemplative, surreal piece, and it even gets a bit metaphysical in there. But it's quite cool, as our titular spook (Casey Affleck) explores an afterlife tethered to place (his last home) and lost love (his widowed partner, played by Rooney Mara) until... well, you'll have to see it. Affleck (presumably it's him) spends most of the film beneath a winding sheet, two holes for eyes, accumulating the dirt and detritus of decades of isolation, and though he never utters a word, conveys an afterlife of longing and loss as his empty remaining slowly forms into a cosmic realisation. As I said, it's a bit metaphysical, but it's also soulful, funny, tragic, heartbreaking, and no, it's really not another stab at Truly Madly Deeply. It is recommended, though, if you think you might be up for that sort of thing.

On a Hallowometer it's the minimum of spooky. Sheets with eyeholes can be expressive, inscrutable, and even scary in places. But this isn't a horror film, just an existential one. And if there's one thing First Year into his BA me could tell you way back when, there's nothing scarier than that.

Companion Piece

Even sprits need company, so here's some Northern Soul for this lost one in R Dean Taylor's crackling number - aided and abetted by Holland and Dozier, too. Yes, the Fall's version is a particular favourite also, but Ghost Week demands a hat-tip to the original. So here it is:

A Load of old Tosche

 When I was a nipper and watched that Star Wars the character I identified with most readily was Luke Skywalker. He had blonde hair like me (at the time) and a strong sense of moral justice. "It's not fair" he'd plead, pleasingly for a hero destined to be The One. As years went by I finally switched onto his brunette mate, who had the lines, the charm, the spaceship, the gun-slinging skills, the bravado, the hairier friend and got the girl in the end - although knowing how that turned out you can forgive young "Wormy" for dodging that particular competition.

Where I did still identify with young Master Luke is in his interest in Tosche Station, where the power converters come from. My eye was always drawn to the background. The sky, the liver-coloured mountains of Tatooine, the strange fluting and Morse Code-like lighting or whatever they were behind  Moff Tarkin's meeting on the Death Star, the grimy walls of the trash compactor, the endless stars, and the sky again. That blue, seemingly endless expanse that promised so much but hemmed Luke in. Against that the promise of Anchorhead and Tosche Station did sound exotic and interesting. Whatever could it be like?

Turns out, much more of the same. Another set in Tunisia (I knew that much about the location even back in the day, despite me calling Luke's home planet "Tattoonie" for probably a good year). We get to see the location, meet some of Luke's friends (well, Biggs we meet again later, the rest are perhaps more fairweather chums) and learn that young Skywalker has a nickname! That didn't last

Perhaps the scene is too long and in the wrong place, but I love it for its blue sky, new scenery, worldbuilding (we finally meet those friends Uncle Owen griped about!) and a bit more of gauche Luke before the whole Rebellion and later Jedi-dom proves such a buzzkill. And Biggs has a sweet space-cape. 

So far, no reinstatement, despite upwards of four revisions of the original by Lucasfilm. Nor any clean-ups or restorations - this scene is D.E.D ded, I guess. Except for fans; so among the considerable number of remounts, remakes and repairs, here's something that blends the missing from the might-have-been to bide us over. Now, about those power converters...

A Call to [Needles in] Arms

 'Defence Against Invasion' (Jack King, 1943)

Not anatomically correct: Disney's vintage vax reel

My mention this week of Grieg's 'In The Hall of the Mountain King'has made me try to think of where I may have heard the music beforehand. I know it didn't appear on the double Classical Music LP that my parents owned and which I'd listen to for hours as a young Simian, so perhaps it was at school? In an assembly hall, darkened with blackout curtains for the Very Serious Business of health education?

Defense Against Invasion was one of a small handful of educational films I and my class were subjected to in Intermediate years, alongside one or two I am Joe's, surely, and one particularly horrifying one about a fire breaking out in a hospital laundry. It was British, of course. DIA was not British, nor horrifying, but it was gripping, and it made a big impression on me, being cheered on when it came up for a repeat viewing some months later. I've looked for it under an abbreviated title for years, and finally found it. never knew it was Disney - makes sense now. never knew it was THAT old - although content-wise there's some sense to that, too. 

So what is Defense Against Invasion? Why, a short film about vaccination, employing the metaphor of the human body in a war-footing to bolster its, well, defences against infection. Or contagion. It's a bit murky, but just go with it. Because it's a charming little slice of wartime Americana, a sort of Why We Fight set in a doctor's surgery, and then in an imagined bloodstream and body styled in a 1940s Fleisher-like complex resembling a city with roads, bridges, factories (you have to have factories) and defensive ramparts. The heroes of the story are red blood cells (er...), and their horrific enemy "bacteria" (um...) taking ghastly arachnid form and animated superbly with near featureless fluidity. Ooh they're awful - massing in vast number, dividing and increasing appalling surety. It's only the introduction of a weaker strain of foe that readies our plucky red shirts to WAR, to boost their armoury, increase their arsenal, and knock this enemy from their borders with ruthless readiness. It's stirring stuff, and given the year is 1943, the parallels couldn't have been more obvious to a child of my age back then - whereas in the early 80s it seemed quaint, but still a little unsettling. 

So here it is in its short glory. I found it and played in on our telly, bringing Mrs Simian into the room knocked sideways by the reawakening of a very dim memory. Because like good antibiotic resistance, it does stay with you.

 

 

World Warp One!

 Star Warps Day, everyone - and peace and goodwill to all, man.

Now, we All Love Star Warps, but I must confess I'm a bit lazy with my adulation and tend to stick to the OG Seventies threesome. That was until I discovered that there was a PREQUEL TRILOGY shot in the 1950s! "ZOMG!" As that blue robot Zomg always says. 

"Zomg!"

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, the 1950s.  And I have to tell you, Fifties Star Warps is the BEST. taking us twenty or so years back to when Opie Benobie was young and discovered the origin of Luke Sandhater's father Unkind Sandhater, years before he fell for the Darkside of the Warps and became Dark Vapor. 

"It's coarse and gets everywhere - it's all Opie-One's fault!"

 Fifties Star Warps is great because even though it's a new story with different things, you're never far from the great Warps characters of the future - like Yoder, See-thru Peyote (C-thru PO), and his diminutive robot chum Artie Detour (RTD-tour) - old, but new, but old again. It's quite something. 

"Blibdoolpoolp!"

But it's the new characters that we remember now, like the Emporio's goon, Dark Moll

and lovable gudgeon Jo-Jo Blinks: 

"Me-so good boy!"

Star Warps. The older, the better!

Blasters to Laser, Mr Solo!

 It's the Fourth of May - Star Warps Day again!

Incredible to think that it was only fifty years ago today that I stood queued outside the Oamaru Majestic Theatre to see Star Warps the Movie(tm) and its EXPLOSIVE end:

Star Warps. It made me the man I am today. 

Drokktober 2019. Day 30

Day 30 is an obvious theme: My favourite Halloween monster/creature as a Judge. So it's Judge Jack, from The Nightmare Before Christmas

Drokktober 2019. Day 12

Today's topic: Chief Judge Hershey

Like Rico, Hershey has a 1995 big screen Judge Dredd incarnation as portrayed by Superman's mother from an adopted planet, Martha Kent- I mean, Diane Lane. As Judge Hershey she was okay - but it was Stallone's show, and so Lane gets lost amongst the Ricos, the Angels, Fergie (urhurhrhr) and the Hammerstein war droid. o I gave her a second life - as Chief Judge Hershey in the Karl Urban Dredd-verse. 

Drokktober 2019, Day 11

Day 9 was Cassandra Anderson. Short of time, I cheated a little and submitted this old thing. Day 10 wasn't an illustration challenge. But that gave me time to work on today's entry: Rico Dredd

Dredd's clone brother gone bad, returned from Judicial prison moon Titan (where he's undergone involuntary surgery to survive the oxygen-free environment), and swearing revenge! I've avoided the usual Mick McMahon version in The Return of Rico and instead gone with a 'what if?' The 1995 Judge Dredd also had Joe's bad brother in the form of a set-gnawing Armand Assante. I just gave him the old comic strip Titan makeover...

Drokktober 2019. Day 9

Drokktober 2019. Day 2

A choice of themes today: Rok of the Reds - a new comic strip by John Wagner, or an Alien Judge

I choose: Alien Judge! Based of course on the Attack the Block hairy beasties, but the illustration a riff on Prog 182's Block Wars cover. Fun to do, and it seemed to go down well on Twitter.

Infogothic: An Unauthorised Graphic Guide to Hammer Horror

This week my good chum Alistair Hughes' book comes out. In fact, it launches today/tomorrow - Halloween in the UK (oops - Sex Pistols earworm!). It is, of course, this very book:

And of course it's a thing of beauty. And wit. And stake-through-the-heart fandom, because Al's book, an infographics coffee table guide to the oeuvre of Hammer Films, is truly a labour of love.

Researched, written and illustrated by Alistair here's everything you might want to know about the van Helsing and Frankenstein family trees, the body count of Carmilla Kanstein, the many creatures of Hammer's prehistoric epics, the lunar rovers of latter-day space western Moon Zero-Seven. Elsewhere are maps - Hammer's middle-Europe, Southern England in locations and settings, a history of the world in Hammer movies - it's all pretty much there.

Beyond that, there are ample diversions - and puns surely ripped up from a grave somewhere: The Rides of Dracula details the various carriages and conveyances of the Count and his pursuers; Stalk Like an Egyptian does the same for the various mummified fiends of Hammer Studios, and The Phantom Dennis covers the various adaptations of the great Mr Wheatley. Where relevant, the works of Hammer are placed alongside other works by Universal and similar studios, placing the Undead Count, the Promethean Man, the Cursed Pharaoh and the Wolf Man alongside their alternative kin. There's no mistaking that Infogothic's focus is on hammer's works, but occasionally the lens pulls back, and there's a context involved as these creatures change and evolve  before and after the rise and fall of the House of Hammer.

I'm biased, of course. Having interviewed Al for Beyond the Sofa last week, our longstanding friendship is readily acknowledged, but I think that even without our mutual interests and history, there'd be enough in these pages to feed my various interests - spaceship plans, magic circles, family crests, imaginary continents and prehistoric languages - there's fodder here for any interested modeller, gamer, fanfic writer or trivia buff - it's highly versatile

It's also splendidly illustrated. Not using official photos has brought the publication price down, but you simply don't miss them, because the line illustrations within are consistent, recognisable, and slavish in their detail. Al's work is simply among some of the best in recent NZ media, and it's wonderful to see it presented here in full colour.

My regret in viewing Infogothic is its necessary limitations - which became the limitations of my own Hammer knowledge. Wisely, Al has contained his scope to the genre-output of Hammer Studios - the horrors, fantasy and sci-fi movies. Man About the House movie fans look elsewhere - but as I mentioned in our podcast chat, reading Infogothic also revealed to me how much I have confused the works of Hammer over the years with other less-celebrated studios, such as the worthy Amicus, as well as Tigon and Tyburn. As it is, Amicus could possibly sustain a volume of its own, maybe also the Roger Corman and Vincent Price adaptations of the works of Edgar Allen Poe; but neither have the breadth nor the variety of Hammer's output (yes, On the Buses included), which becomes a strength of this book as well. Also unrealised to date, a look into the unmade Hammer films - as much as we can know about them. But other guidebooks will do for those, and maybe the fates will conspire to provide Al and us with an opportunity for a revision or a return - I know the author has plenty of ideas still, and hopefully we'll see more of them very soon.

Infogothic : An Unauthorised Graphic Guide to Hammer Horror is available from its publisher, Telos, as well as Amazon US.  For a rather fine peek into some of its pages, check out Al's blog Fasmatodea, and the following video created by Monster Kid Radio:

Justice Denied

Holy cow, how did this happen?

I've been careful since Batman v Superman... and probably since before that, to champion movies where the outcome wasn't entirely guaranteed to be positive. I've felt guilty doing so, and would rather not, but in the wake of F4ntastic Four, Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad, you can understand if I feel somewhat of a jinx.

Whether you're a DC/Warners fan or not, this movie should not have 'failed' as soundly as it did; and yet the numbers are damning - and now I've seen it for myself. And, knowing I should prepare for disappointment, I went in with medium expectations. My paragraph above notwithstanding, I left before the credits came up -  in part because it was a daytime screening on the last week and I had a life to get back to; but it was hardly like being torn from my seat. This movie is a bewildering disappointment.

The fault is not with the characters; the Justice League should sell the movie themselves, most being recognisable now for over fifty years. I do believe Whedon at least worked to rule, if he didn't quite bat his best. 

The back story should be known well enough by now - initially helmed by Zack Snyder, this movie was to be in part a culmination of his three (or five?) story arc, but for a family tragedy which saw him stand down from the production, and Warners to swiftly helicopter in Joss Whedon in to finish the job. The history of trilogies being finished by a new director has been patchy at best - and in the superhero genre you can look easily at the Christopher Reeve Superman movies and Bryan Singer's X Men franchise to see clear and cautionary examples of what happens where there's a disjoint. Whedon had a brief: cut down the run-time to enable more screenings; add more humour; convert the doomladen Snyder vision into an audience friendly Marvel-like one. It doesn't work.

Many of the jokes don't land or just don't fit (an alien anal probe gag would struggle past the Nineties, let alone the Twenty-teens) , scraps of Whedon's script for his unfilmedWonder Woman have been reused, and there's an odd disjoint where scenes which feature in the two trailers have obviously been reshot for the movie. Timing? Grading? Mood? It can't be to add to the story, because al signs point to the Whedon version drastically cutting Snyder's story down to a more chewable (or boltable) size. Like its principal (well, only) villain.

As a threat Steppenwolf comes across as vague and somewhat undersold. He comes to Earth after Mother Boxes, but with no clear motivation after that - is it terraforming? Is it conquest? Who is this 'Mother' he refers to? And who is he talking to?

The frustration lies in knowing at least some of what there could have - or should have been, fed in tantalising scraps  by Snyder's friends and allies.  So what we're left with is this cut-down could-have-been - which has inevitably been compared to the Marvel model and Whedon's bigger, brighter, more confident and much more loved Avengers. But this is not good, and after the mixed batman v Superman, and the financially successful but critically thumped Suicide Squad, this will be a tough move to come back from.

And so is the plight of the DC movies fan: a wild pendulum between moderate success and painful failure. Cynicism and ridicule. I don't know what Zack Snyder's vision might have been outside this botched remix, but it could at least have been a little more complete, and a lot better looking. 

The fans deserved better.  

Wonderful

Wonder Woman (dir Patty Jenkins, 2017)

So this is what winning feels like?

After the turbulence of DC's first three (and largely male-dominated) superhero outings, the time has finally arrived for Diana of Themyscira/Wonder Woman to fully take the lead. Very happily - and despite assurances from too many places that WB could do no right, Patty Jenkins' film is a triumph.

It's not only director Patty Jenkins who is vindicated here, of course. There's the matter of the casting of Gal Gadot by Zack Snyder; set up in BvS and, by all accounts, widely regarded as the highlight of that movie by audience reaction. Gadot's early casting image and announcement was, while not controversial, not without comment from the peanut gallery  and a fair amount of it negative. "Too skinny!" "too dark!" "Not American-looking enough!" (??) "She should be [insert actor from other IP/MMA fighter]. But once again, Snyder's casting eye has been proved dead-on, and our new Wonder Woman is truly a household name. Not bad for an actor on the verge of quitting Hollywood.

Gadot is helped along the way of course by a very capable supporting cast: Connie Nielsen is majestic as Hippolyta, Robin Wright is formidable, Chris Pine every bit his charismatic self as romantic lead Steve Trevor, Danny Huston intimidating as Ludendorf, David Thewlis layered in his role, and Ewan Bremner and Lucy Davis? Just fantastic. The story is straightforward, but not too by-the-books, and I would say perfect for a full-length debut. There are equal pars humour and emotion, and the film's European and WW1 setting is both unusual and novel - we definitely need to see superhero movies escape modern day US more, and with a near-immortal as its hero Wonder Woman was a very good choice indeed

There are a few weak spots, naturally. The setting, as contained as it is, occasionally makes the film seem small in scope, and the CG-heavy finale, while de rigeur, doesn't counteract this. But when used for Themyscira it's wonderful, and the intimacy of the movie actually helps the story (plus Diana and Steve's dance in the snow at Veld looks beautiful)

Foe the moment, though, the big win for Wonder Woman the movie and character is its message. The power of love is a tough sell - even tougher in an age of digital explosions, outlandish set pieces and  epic battles. Unless those things are part of the message (in which case, god help us all), then the story has to go small - but Wonder Woman does it's damnedest to have it both ways, throwing in sacrifice, mercy, and the unforgettable bravery of the No Man's Land scene, and Diana emerges from all of these things stronger, more sure of her purpose, and still the same idealist she was as too adorable youngster back on her island paradise. That's winning.

The next movie is going to have to work very hard to top this.