The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)

“…And with every evil rooted in its stones…”

Yes, I know. Five film reviews, and all of them horror films. The next one will be different, I promise, and this time I mean it. Honest.

The opening scenes of the lands belonging to House of Usher, the eerie and claustrophobic setting within which the whole film is to be set, are great. There’s no attempt at realism, of course; this is a heightened reality of smoky mists, gnarled, dead trees and eternal dusk. It looks more like a theatre set than anything you’d see in real life, but so it should. These scenes not only set the tone but signal to us that we’ve entered a heightened version of reality.

It’s a heightened version of reality we see indoors, too. Not only is the house itself an increasingly sinister presence, but the claustrophobic mood is enhanced by the fact that the entire film has a cast of four. You don’t get more American Gothic than Poe, of course, but I think there’s something distinctly American about the eerie mood of this film, especially to this British viewer. For a start, there’s a real sense of isolation. The comforting normality and life represented by Boston, representing “our” world, are a long, long way. The wide, open spaces of America (yes, even New England, from a European perspective) are used here to emphasise the isolation, a trope often and successfully used in American horror films of all kinds. And the existence of aristocratic families such as the Ushers and the (real life) Winthrops, with their grand homes and butlers and inherited wealth, looks particularly decadent and decayed in the context of this young republic (Poe wrote the short story in 1839, and the costumes indicate a similar date for the film. The United States was sixty-three years old).

The isolation and alienation of the setting is carried much further than in the original; Poe has his short story narrated by an old friend of the narrator, which adds a certain touch of cosiness. The writer here (Richard Matheson, no less) gives us a protagonist, in Philip Winthrop, who is in a position to be as unsettled by his surroundings as we are, being a stranger to the house. He’s the fiancé of Madeleine Usher, with whom he fell in love in the happier surroundings of Boston, but a stranger to Roderick, and the house. We first meet him traversing the bleak lands of the house, approaching the large, intimidating doors, and using one of those big, iron ring-like knockers which always appear in films like this. He’s accosted by a sinister butler, Bristol- there’s another horror trope- and warned that his employer will not accept visitors. It isn’t long, though, before we meet Roderick Usher- Vincent Price is sublime in the part- and the beautiful yet doomed Madeleine.

We begin slowly as the mystery is gradually and unsettlingly established. We know that Roderick Usher, and the his sister, are unable to bear any strong sensation with any of their senses- which indicates that Madeleine would probably not make the best of sexual partners for Philip! This kind of medical condition is also, of course, the sort of thing which affects those with money and leisure suspiciously more that those who need to work for a living…

We learn that the sinister Roderick is unwilling to allow either himself or his sister to leave the house or, worse, beget children. For the moment, the sense of dread is dialled down. But it isn’t long before two incidents- a falling chandelier and an unsteady railing on the stairs- make it clear that there’s something very unnatural and eerie about this house.

We get hints early on- an Usher family history of madness, ensuing superhuman strength, a dark family history meaning the family line should not be perpetuated- but the opening scenes centre on a to- and fro between Philip and Roderick over the doomed Madeleine. But things ratchet up after Madeleine shows Philip the family tomb, with places for herself and her brother. This horrifies Philip, who is by this point explicitly having a parallel experience of the film to the viewer.

At last Philip confronts Roderick and gets an explanation. The speech is poetic and so wonderfully delivered by Vincent Price, whose performance is simply astonishing. Not only does the family have a history of moral dodginess (although not all of the ancestors described by Roderick, and painted in that strange Goya-cum-Graham Sutherland style, are all that irredeemable, surely?), but it seems the house, and its grounds, are a metaphor made literal; the grounds have become tainted and infertile, while the house is rocky, unstable and, Roderick believes, actively trying to kill Philip! This echoes the earlier references to the “settling of the house” by Bristol, a butler of sixty years who appears to essentially be an integral part of the house himself.

Of course, Philip is appalled by such superstitious nonsense, and immediately convinces Madeleine to come away with him. She starts packing immediately but, alas, seems to die while arguing with Roderick. A disconsolate Philip helps her brother to bury her in the crypt. He’s about to leave until Bristol’s casual mention of “catalepsies” brings him to a horrible realisation. It’s evident that the Americans of the early nineteenth century had a much wider medical vocabulary than the British of the early twenty-first!

Madeleine has been buried alive! Horrified, Philip rushes to her coffin and finds that it’s empty. He confronts Roderick, who glumly confesses that he deliberately buried his own sister alive, but refuses to tell where he left her coffin. Tiring himself after searching for hours, Philip settles to sleep. Roger Corman’s directorship has been superlative up to this point, but the ensuing dream sequence is inspired and extraordinary. It’s an abstract, tinted, sepia dreamworld, evoking the imagery of silent film and the surroundings of 1920s German Expressionist film in particular, with some extraordinary out-of-focus shots of various ghostly Ushers, who look like something Lon Chaney could have portrayed during the 1920s. This sequence raises the dramatic stakes; as Philip wakes, we know this is the climax.

An initially calm Roderick confesses to Philip that he has heard every scream and every scratch of Madeleine’s bloody fingernails as he listens to her slow and horrible death. Finally, Madeleine appears, mad, and strong enough to have ripped the coffin lid from its hinges. The house begins to fall apart as Madeleine strangles her brother. Both of them are crushed by burning masonry as Philip barely escapes the house which crumbles around him.

Extraordinary; the script, the direction, the set design and the central performance from Vincent Price are all of the very first class. This is one of the best horror films I’ve ever seen and certainly the best I’ve watched for this blog so far.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

“I’m the Chosen One. And I choose to go shopping.”

OK, I know. This is four horror films in a row, sort of. It’ll be something very different next time, I promise.

I’m saying nothing about how soon I’ll be reviewing Buffy and Angel on TV for this blog(!), but suffice to say that I’ve seen every episode before, although a few years have passed. And that makes this film a very odd experience indeed. And I’m not just talking about the presence of an absurdly young Hilary Swank and David Arquette.

For a start, there’s the absence of that theme tune. This is film, not TV, so exposition needs to be over with quickly; hence the flashback at the start. We quickly move to the present day, though (well, the early ‘90s) and to Southern California, although not Sunnydale.

I’m sure that for most Americans reading this blog, the institution on the American High School was a formative experience in your life. But to me, a foreigner, it’s something defined entirely by popular culture, and a huge chunk of it Buffy-related. All the tropes of the American high school- cheerleaders, strange sports of which I know nothing, those strange jackets, jocks, nerds, stoners, senior proms, homecoming queens (whatever they are) are just that: tropes from film and TV.

And we start right in the middle of this sort of thing, with a bunch of cheerleaders and some teenage boys playing basketball. Even in the early lines in these scenes it’s apparent that we’re going to get a very witty script indeed, which should come as no surprise as the writer is Joss Whedon. In fact, I’d argue that the script is pretty much entirely brilliant, and the film’s many shortcomings are due to other factors, but more of that later.

Anyway, Buffy and her friends are, like, totally a bunch of Valley Girls, with dialogue which sounds like it could have come straight from that Frank Zappa song (which is, as if it needed saying, my soundtrack to writing this!). I could listen to them talking all day.

It all looks a bit cheap, though, and there’s little focus to the succession of scenes we get; vampires, Rutger Hauer as “The Master” (that gets re-used!), Pike and Ben. In fact, we’re introduced to so many different similarly-aged characters that it takes some time to get used to who’s who.

Eventually Buffy meets her Watcher, Merrick, played by Donald Sutherland, whose accent seems all over the place. Is he trying to sound British or something? Is he even attempting the same accent in every scene? It doesn’t feel like it. He’s certainly phoning in his performance, which is a shame; like everyone else in this film, he gets great dialogue. Kristy Swanson, on the other hand, is actually quite good, but her performance it pitched too far towards pure broad comedy. But that’s the main problem with this film; Joss Whedon’s scripts are invariably funny, but they’re more effective if played mostly straight.

Merrick exposits at Buffy until she’s convinced, and tells her of Lothos, the “Master” we met earlier. He shows her some real vampires and she stakes them. This being a low budget film, though, they don’t disintegrate. They just fall down rather unconvincingly.

Ben is vamped, and calls on his friend Pike. Fortunately for Pike, he doesn’t invite his former friend in, because he’s acting weird. By floating in mid-air, for one thing, although this apparent ability of vampires is never referred to again.

We get the usual sort of plot for this sort of movie, really; protagonist gets called from humdrum life to do Great Things; protagonist refuses but is persuaded to continue; protagonist meets Big Bad and gets arse whupped; mentor figure gets killed; protagonist gets big final showpiece battle. But here, the fact that we pretty much expect all this to happen means the emphasis can go on witty dialogue such as “All I want to do is graduate from high school, go to Europe, marry Christian Slater and die.” It’s a shame the characters feel so wooden, and I don’t think that reflects any fault in the script.

Merrick persuades Buffy to continue by showing her that she has superhuman strength and reflexes, something which she’s unaccountably failed to notice until now. We then get an unintentionally hilarious montage scene, complete with rubbish music, which goes on for aaaaages.

At last she gets a proper vampire fight, or at least the nearest we’re ever going to get in this terribly directed movie in which all the fight scenes are slow, ponderous, entirely lacking in oomph and full of characters standing around talking mid-fight. Here she discovers that “My secret weapon is PMS!”, and Merrick discovers that Buffy can’t even make a decent cup of tea.

Buffy then rescues Pike, who by this point is obviously going to be the love interest. After pausing to see Rutger Hauer about to eat a little kitten (awww!), we then get shown how alienated Buffy is becoming from her rather shallow friends. Still, that night, she chooses cheerleading over slaying. I think my favourite character in the film is the team coach (“Assert your personhood! Actualise! Actualise!”), the most stereotypical Southern Californian ever.

Soon a vamp comes on to the pitch, or court, or whatever it is that basketball gets played on, and Buffy gives chase, with motorbikes and everything. Here she meets loads of vampires and the Master himself, but for some bizarre reason they don’t actually want to kill her as she’s “not ready”. How very sporting of them.

Merrick, who has suddenly turned up, gets suddenly killed and, in a rather bathetic scene, dies in Buffy’s arms, telling her with his last words to keep doing it “wrong”. It’s such a shame this doesn’t really work. Yes, it’s badly directed, like the whole damn film, but there never was any chemistry between the two of them.

After this, Buffy has a crisis of confidence, and gets a bit of a pep talk from Pike. It’s a nice reversal of the usual gender roles from Whedon’s avowedly feminist script but, again. It would be nice if there was some semblance of chemistry between the two of them.

It’s obvious that the school dance is going to be the scene of the final confrontation, and it’s a scene that could have only taken place in 1992 and no other year. Even the DJ looks like he should be a member of Faith No More. Buffy’s not happy; her boyfriend has humiliated her by publicly dumping her in from of her smug and mocking friends, but Pike has gatecrashed the party. She’s glad to see him, they dance together, and they kiss. Inevitably, this is when the vampires attack- and I notice this is the exact point where the music suddenly changes to the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Rob Halford. If this is the effect that vampires have on music being played on dancefloors, then frankly I think there should be more of them.

Fortunately, Pike has remembered to take all Buffy’s stuff, and we get a series of long, talky and uninvolving fight scenes. The Master suddenly turns up playing a violin, which makes me momentarily feel that we’re about to segue into the music video for Come on Eileen. This is a very silly scene for something that’s meant to be a climax; the annoying vamp’s slow and “ironically” badly-acted death is just embarrassing, and for someone who’s supposed to be the Big Bad the Master poses absolutely no sense of threat whatsoever. He even dies with an “oops”.

This film is entertaining enough, but this is entirely due to the excellent script. Not only is this badly shot, you get the sense, from the fact that many of the actors here are perfectly good elsewhere, that the big problem with this movie is a director who simply can’t give direction to actors. A sadly wasted opportunity. Fortunately, though, there was to be another chance…

The Mummy (1959)

“He’s a foreigner!”

“Well, he can’t help that, poor chap.”

This will be my last Hammer horror film for a bit (there’ll be plenty more, but this blog needs a bit of variety- perhaps a Western next?). It already feels different, though; the specific areas in both Egypt and England (an area where all the working class people seem to be Irish) may be fictional, but this is a far cry from the vague Mittel-Europa settings we’ve seen thus far.

This is the first time I’ve seen a proper mummy movie, but it amuses me how many of the tropes I recognise from popular culture, and not least certain episodes of Doctor Who. It isn’t the best Hammer horror but it’s entertaining enough once it gets going. This takes some time, though. This is a no-frills journey through the standard tropes, played dead straight, sort of. Like other early Hammers, there’s definitely an element of camp ironic humour, but it’s as deadpan as deadpan can be.

We begin in colonial Egypt, in 1895. Archaeologist Stephen Banning, his brother Joseph, and John, his son with a gammy leg (Peter Cushing) have spent ages looking for the hidden tomb of Ananka, an ancient high priestess. An Egyptian chap in a fez (cool!) played by the splendid George Pastell delivers the sort of warning of dire consequences which are de rigeur for these sorts of films, but this doesn’t deter John. He enters the revealed tomb, and it’s completely undisturbed. The inside of the tomb, incidentally, looks magnificent.

It all happens very fast; we hear a scream, and suddenly we’re in England three years later. Stephen is in a mental institution, John has an even gammier leg and none of them seem remotely capable of going more than ten seconds without lighting a cigar or pouring a glass of whisky.

After years of being completely out of it, Stephen wakes up and warns John of “the mummy”. Other things are afoot, too; that Egyptian chap is nearby, and we discover that drinking and driving was rife in the 1890s. Tsk. This leads to their cargo, a mysterious Egyptian casket, falling into a conveniently placed swamp. This seems not to upset the Egyptian bloke, though. Look at his face. Is he bovvered?

Later, Egyptian bloke reads the scroll and brings the mummy to life. It’s rather muddy and visually engaging. It seems such a waste of Christopher Lee to just put him in bandages like this. Still, the following scene, a nice bit of exposition from John, quickly segues into an extended flashback where Christopher Lee gets to play Kharis, during life as an Egyptian priest, and not only gets a good few lines but ends up looking really rather cool. Still, it’s always a shock to see how small a role Lee tends to play in these early Hammers.

These scenes of Ananka’s death rites feature some genuinely horrifying scenes, and this is where the film starts to wake up. The scenes of the handmaidens calmly bowing their heads, awaiting decapitation and death so they can serve the princess in the afterlife, make quite an impression as the camera cuts away and instead we hear the swords strike. The horror grows as Kharis returns at night, blasphemously, to attempt the resurrection of the woman he secretly and illicitly loved. He is caught, and doomed to an awful fate. The scene where his tongue cut out is the most horrible thing I have ever seen- the camera cuts away as the sword hits the tongue, but the process up to this point is quite graphic.

Kharis is sentenced to be buried alive, ready to be brought back to life to avenge any desecration of his beloved’s tomb. And, the backstory now revealed, the mummy is sent forth by Egyptian Bloke to kill Uncle Joseph. John fails to stop him, but manages to let off a load of gunshots which, naturally, entirely fail to kill the mummy.

Then we get the really shocking bit: John casually admits to a police inspector (with an uncanny resemblance to Nicolas Sarkozy and an inexplicably North American accent) that he shot the murderer several times, and there’s absolutely no suggestion of any legal trouble whatsoever. Even more incredibly, he tells the inspector everything and, while the inspector is at least sceptical, you’re left with the impression that the police are extraordinarily deferential to country gents on Planet Hammer.

John knows the mummy is after him, though, and we’re not surprised to see the Egyptian Bloke send it to kill him. At this point John’s wife, Isobel, the only woman in the film, finally gets the first of what must be less than a dozen lines. The character is a complete doormat. John “orders” her to lock herself away while he waits for the mummy. It’s feminism gone mad.

Oh, and John’s wife is the very image of Ananka, it seems, and the mummy promptly buggers off for a bit. It there anyone who’s seen this film and didn’t immediately guess the entire rest of the plot at this point?

Conveniently, the inspector has been making enquiries which lead him now to believe John’s story. He tells John that under no circumstances whatsoever should he make contact with Egyptian Bloke so, naturally, he does exactly that. It seems his actual name is Mehemet Atkill, which sounds Turkish rather than Arabic, but never mind. It’s amusing to see John’s staggering lack of tact in scoffing at those who worship the god Karnak- in real life not a god at all but a temple complex near Thebes. I don’t think John realises that the man facing him worships this god; he’s just not very bright, is he?

Inevitably, Mehemet and the mummy come after John, but he’s expected. The mummy is about to kill John, but again he sees Isobel. When Mehemet tells him to kill Isobel, he is casually killed, and things start to go all King Kong as the mummy takes Isobel into the swamp. This is a bit of a weird love triangle- I wonder which of them Isobel prefers? Probably the mummy. I can’t imagine John would be much good in bed. Alas, he puts her down, and gets riddled with bullets.

It’s a film of two halves, really, this. But it’s probably short enough to be worth seeing.

Dracula (1958)

“Sleep well, Mr Harker…”

We get a statement of intent very early on, with some blood spattering on to a coffin- these early Hammer horror films certainly like their bright Technicolor red blood!

We're in some vague part of Horror Film Mittel-Europa in 1885. As with Curse of Frankenstein, this is a stylised and intentionally vague setting.  Jonathan Harker is heading to Castle Dracula and, in a slight nod to the epistolatory nature of the novel, this part of the plot is narrated through his diary. The inside of the castle is at the same time luxurious and bleak, with the large rooms marked by harsh straight lines and a total absence of carpets or any hint of softness.

After a brief and disturbing encounter with a woman whom Dracula is apparently taken prisoner, Harker finally meets Christopher Lee’s Count who, although sinister, appears polite enough, to the point of complimenting a picture of Harker’s fiancée, Lucy Holmwood. It seems Harker, a scholar, is to work as his librarian, but it soon becomes apparent that Dracula is only available during the hours of darkness, and that Harker’s door is locked during the night.

But Harker, we learn, has ulterior motives, and is here to kill the notorious Count, who from this point on ceases to be a character and just becomes a monster, never speaking another line for the rest of the film. But poor Harker is doomed; he agrees to help the temptress he met earlier, and gets bitten in the course of a vamp-fight between her and the, er, vampire. Both she and Drac look great, and there’s lots and lots of blood.

Harker, himself doomed to become undead, manages to make it to the crypt before sundown, but chooses to stake the woman before the Count himself. WHY?

The inevitable happens, and we cut to Peter Cushing in one of those Hammer inns where all the locals stop talking as soon as a stranger enters. Still, armed with Harker’s diary, he’s soon delivering the news of Harker’s death to Arthur Holmwood (played by Michael Gough, later to play the Celestial Toymaker in Doctor Who and Alfred in Tim Burton’s Batman), brother of Harker’s fiancée, and his wife Mina, future star of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s splendid The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He receives a frosty reception, however, and Lucy can’t be told the news as she’s very ill with anaemia.

We soon see the reasons for this, however; Lucy is delivering her windows open at night and removing her crucifix, allowing Dracula to come in and bite her, night after Night. The erotic charge is so electric here that I’d be tempted to say “get a room, you two” except… they have. For the first time in the film we have the obvious use of vampirism as a metaphor for sex, and as we’ll see this tells us quite a lot about the sexual mores of late Victorian times as opposed to the late 1950s. On the surface this is an unhealthily puritanical message about sex but I don’t think the film is quite playing this straight. Like Curse of Frankenstein there’s something camply humorous about this film, even if it’s played very, very deadpan.

It’s a bit jolting to see Van Helsing listening to audio recordings of himself, even if it is from an ancient-looking gramophone and even though his butler seems to be amazed. There are plenty of audio recordings from the 1880s on Youtube (look for Gladstone and a very drunk Robert Browning!) but none of them have anything approaching this sound quality.

Van Helsing uses this rather obvious expository device to inform us that vampire bites are addictive and that this eventually results in death through loss of blood. Consulted by Mina, he soon discovers that this is what is happening to Lucy. He orders the windows to be closed and Lucy’s bed to be surrounded by garlic, but this is not adhered to and the girl dies.

Van Helsing now has no choice but to let Arthur into his confidence, especially as the undead Lucy is now walking the grounds of the house, threatening their daughter Tania. Arthur catches the undead Lucy the following night, and is only saved from being bitten by Van Helsing. These scenes are atmospheric, effective, and really bring home how this film is set in a dreamlike, stylised world of cemeteries, castles, inns, sleepy border guards and nothing else, which feels culturally German, Slavic and Romanian all at once, and vaguely evokes the cultural mix of Habsburg Austria, yet is full of characters with English names.

Lucy is stakes, and Van Helsing and Arthur have a bit of a chat in some comfy chairs with some brandy, as gents in Hammer films are wont to do. It seems that vampires cannot in fact turn into bats; evidently the budget won’t stretch that far. But, just as our heroes are beginning to get a grip, Mina is lured to Dracula’s base of operations, and from that point onwards is under his spell. Again, there’s a sexual subtext here, and in this case it’s a rather emasculating one for poor old Arthur; apparently he’s not satisfying her. Actually, given the blatant eroticism of what can only be described as the sex scene between Dracula and Mina, I’m not sure the word “subtext” is entirely appropriate…

Arthur’s implied emasculation is even more tragic as he’s clearly a decent and loving husband, as we see him selflessly donating an alarming amount of blood to save his wife, who presumably shares the same blood group. Understandably, he’s a little sapped after this, but Van Helsing has some sound medical advice: “Now, you need plenty of fluid. Tea, coffee or, better still, wine.” Yes, that’s right, Van H. Wine isn’t in any way dehydrating, is it?

We finish with a chase, incorporating a bit of comic relief at the border, and Dracula’s final gruesome death by sunlight. An excellent film, this- atmospheric, just erotic enough, just gory enough and very well-acted indeed.

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

“Pass the marmalade, Elizabeth.”

Right then, here begin the movie reviews! And we start with, er, some text in a Gothic font. And then the credits, and the music, and the picture quality, and the vistas- definitely not TV! Interesting from the start that, although nominally set in Switzerland, this is a stylised and not necessarily realistic Mittel-European setting. The outdoor scenes seem to be sets at least some of the time, and any vistas of Alpine scenes are not really intended to look natural.

Peter Cushing is fantastic as Victor Frankenstein, and it’s interesting to see how straight he plays it, as he dominates the film such as to set the whole tone. Of course, the whole thing is, deep down, terribly camp, and feels as though it is intended as such, but it’s a very, very deadpan sort of camp.

The film is told in flashback, with the main narrative bookended by scenes of a desperate Frankenstein awaiting his execution. We then cut to scenes of him as an intelligent, enthusiastic but rather cold young man, who uses his vast inherited wealth to ensure that he gets the best scientific education money can buy, striking up a close friendship with his tutor, Paul.

But all this starts to fall apart as soon as the pair succeed in bring a dead dog back to life. The cracks immediately begin to appear in their relationship; Paul thinks only of the medical benefits this could bring, while Victor immediately shows signs of Evil Genius Syndrome, interested only in his own knowledge and personal glory. And the morally dodgy decisions start here; first he steals the body of a hanged man, then he buys a pair of eyes, and then he robs the grave of a celebrated sculptor for his hands! Interestingly, though, towards the end of the film Victor protests that all doctors rob graves, for the benefit of humanity, and Paul doesn’t demur. This is a rare moment of moral ambiguity.

The part played by Victor’s doormat of a cousin, Elizabeth, is disturbing. Firstly, because they plan an incestuous marriage (eurgh!). Secondly, this is the second quarter of the nineteenth century (going by the fashions), and yet no one raises an eyebrow at the two of them living together. But she is so naïve, not questioning Victor’s obsession with his experiments or his extreme neglect of her. The only one who genuinely seems to care about her is Paul.

Victor’s even worse than that, though; he’s having an affair with his maid, Justine, and has promised both women that he’ll marry them. From this point on, having established that he’s a cad and a bounder, the film shows him becoming more and more morally repulsive.

The visit from Professor Bernstein highlights an odd thing about this film; why is it that the main characters speak with Received Pronunciation while the minor characters all sound a bit German? Aren’t they all supposed to be speaking Swiss German? Also amusing is the scene where Elizabeth naively bemoans the time her fiancé spends in the laboratory,, and we pan to the two men with their brandy and cigars. The gender roles in this film are quite hilariously antediluvian at times.

Be that as it may, Victor’s casual and shocking murder of the Professor is a huge turning point. Of course, the Professor is then buried in Frankenstein’s family vault, from where he can cheerfully obtain the brain. This film’s version of Baron Frankenstein is much more villainous than is usually the case.

Paul, by now, has huge scruples and, in a scuffle between him and Victor, the brain is apparently damaged- although we only ever have Victor’s word for this. It isn’t long, though, until Paul is persuaded to help. But the monster has unexpectedly been brought to life, and it looks very effective indeed. Christopher Lee’s make-up looks nothing like the Universal version, for legal reasons, but this is a real strength.

The argument between Victor and Paul after the monster escapes is interesting. Paul wants it killed, but is it not a sentient being? This monster has nothing of the pathos of Karloff’s version, though. He simply terrifies the blind man and (implicitly) kills him, while the child by the lake (in this version a boy) apparently survives.

The scene where Paul shoots the monster is visibly shocking and horrible, with plenty of blood, but that’s it. The monster’s dead. Paul can now leave. Except--- has it not been foreshadowed that Frankenstein can bring the dead back to life.

Victor further demonstrates his utter caddishness in cruelly mocking the pregnant Justine, whom he had promised to marry with no intention of doing so. Now he simply dismisses her, very possibly to a very grim fate. The power imbalance between them, in terms of both class and gender, is huge. She looks for evidence in the lab with which to prove his crimes to the authorities, but he locks her in with the monster; his second murder.

Paul finally returns on the eve of the wedding to see the monster, resurrected and pathetic, reduced to spending its life on the end of a chain, obeying simple and pointless commands from its master. Paul, appalled, resolves to go to the authorities but, while they remonstrate, the monster escapes, heading to the roof for the climax. In the end it is Victor, threatened by his own creation, who shoots the monster.

We return to the cell, where Victor begs first the priest and then Paul to support his story that it was the monster, not he, who murdered Justine. But he is, of course, being disingenuous; it was he who locked her into the room with the monster, and in any case he was already a murderer by this point. A last scene between Pauil and Elizabeth strongly implies them to be a future couple, as our last shot lingers over the guillotine.

That was good, albeit with a lack of irony that would be impossible for such a film nowadays. The ethical dilemmas look a little different, too, in these days of stem cell research. A good start for Hammer horror, though. I’ll have to watch the Universal version soon…

A Quick Note...

I've been occasionally doing a film review on another blog for the last couple of months or so, but I've decided I might as well close that down and move all my film reviews (only five so far!) to this blog. I'll still keep reviewing the occasional movie, but there doesn't seem much point in maintaining a second blog.

There will be rather a lot of posts tonight!

Torchwood: Miracle Day (Part Five)

“Who’s with Anwen?”

“No one. I left her with petrol and a cigarette lighter.”

That opening text thing is starting to get annoying, but never mind. This episode is superb; tense, fast-moving and really pushing the overall story into another stage, with some unexpected shocks.

Vera Juarez is told that the medical panels are over; their conclusions are to be used for establishing legislation defining the three “categories of life”, an ominous phrase. Vera is sufficiently appalled to immediately phone a rather smug Rex. This has to be stopped, and she demands to be involved.

After an off-screen journey right across America, Vera arrives in Venice and meets the team. This is a good opportunity for exposition, and that’s exactly what we get: category one means you’re so badly injured or sick that you’re unable to function yet unable to die; category three means you’re pretty much healthy; and category two is anything that lies in-between, a particularly murky and subjective category. And yet anyone defined as category one or two is sent to one of these mysterious camps. Oddly enough, this all seems to be a result of the medical panels in Washington DC, but seems to have been implemented throughout much of the world, including Europe. Er, not sure about that.

Gwen is off back to Wales to rescue her dad, and her scenes with Rhys are some of the few moments of humour in this uncharacteristically sombre script from Jane Espenson. She has an important mission to undertake, as her mother reminds her in no uncertain terms. The conspiracy runs deep; Phicorp, a private company, is apparently taking over the entire NHS!!!

The scene between Esther and Jack is a nice little character moment. Esther is still struggling with her confidence, as we also see in the following scene, but we also later see her carrying out her mission perfectly effectively. The subsequent discussion is fascinating, too; as Rex points out, there’s no objective way of deciding which category he belongs to. It’s an arbitrary decision, to be made by those with the power to do so. As Vera says, no one should have that much power.

It seems that every camp is equipped with “modules”, which are hidden from view in every photograph. The group quickly plan to infiltrate one, with Rex being taken away in an ambulance complete with hidden recording equipment. I love Jack’s parting words to him!

Oswald Danes, meanwhile, is to speak at a sinister-sounding “Miracle Rally”. Bill Pullman and Lauren Ambrose again show themselves to be the two best actors in this series as Oswald and Jilly Kitzinger argue over the contents of his speech.

Rex discovers the camps, inside, are cold and dark, and that there doesn’t seem to be enough room for the apparent demand. Meanwhile, Vera, posing as a kind of inspector, infiltrates the camp where Rex is being held, where she encounters the rather arrogant and unpleasant Colin Maloney, with his sneer and his golf buggy. And she becomes increasingly horrified by the conditions she finds.

Gwen, in parallel scenes, finds her dad at a similar camp in South Wales. A lot of care has been taken to make this look very different from its counterpart in California- the lighting is much darker, and the camera is certainly much more hyperactive. The atmosphere is unbelievably tense as Gwen and Rhys try to get Gwen’s trusting dad out of the camp. But catastrophe happens from an unexpected quarter; the stress gives Geraint another heart attack. Escape is now simply impossible and Geraint, now no longer conscious, is reclassified to category one. As we shall see, this is going to have horrible consequences.

Vera shows her inexperience with this kind of undercover work as the increasingly awful conditions she uncovers lead her to lose her cool and start a shouting match with Maloney. Tragically, she threatens to have him arrested and prosecuted, showing a touching faith in the authorities which will very shortly turn out to have been horrifyingly misplaced. Maloney, who has consistently exhibited psychopathic tendencies, responds by shooting her, several times. This is a massive shock, but it’s not the first time that a member (sort of) of Torchwood has been unexpectedly and cruelly killed in action. If the word “killed” is appropriate, that is. Things look ominous, though; after a messy cover-up, Vera is quickly put into a module, with the “category ones”.

Jack has been spending this time following Danes, and we get a scene in which he urges him to instead read a speech of his own devising, exposing Phicorp. Sadly, though, pairing John Barrowman with an actor of Pullman’s calibre doesn’t exactly make him look good. He’s a competent actor, although his range is limited, but he doesn’t really belong in this exalted company. Certainly, Pullman brings off the speech magnificently. Danes delivers the message intended by Phicorp, but in his own way.

We end with the shocking revelation that the “modules” are ovens, and that the camps are extermination camps. It’s the Holocaust all over again, on a massive scale. Suddenly Torchwood is dealing with some very, very big themes.

Blake's 7: Sarcophagus

“I think I will accept your ship as your gift to me.”       

This is an interesting one, nicely structured and with lots of very interesting and thoughtful characterisation for all of our regular characters. But it leaves me with the impression that there are subtexts I’m not getting, and although I can recognise a lot of quality here I can’t quite say I particularly enjoyed it more than other episodes, less laden with meaning and subtext, at least on first viewing. Still, I’d like to see more from Tanith Lee, and Boucher’s policy of getting established sci-fi authors to write episodes is certainly a great idea.

The extended opening sequence is extraordinarily weird. Female-only cultists carrying torches on bleak alien landscapes is already a Blake’s 7 cliché, but this- several minutes of no dialogue in which a series of masked, colour-codes female figures are summoned into being, seemingly by magic, to perform rituals- is baffling, very odd indeed and must surely have alienated the viewing audience. After one viewing, and deliberately not reading up on the episode until after my review, I have no idea what any of this symbolises. I’m guessing it’s something pagan and on the theme of the feminine, but I have no idea.

We then switch to the safe and familiar territory of the Liberator, although admittedly by means of a very unusual camera zoom outwards from Cally’s eye in close-up. We have dialogue at last, and Tanith Lee proves herself to be rather expert at it, as well as depicting all the regulars as fully-rounded characters and saying interesting things about all of them before the episode ends.         

The chat between Avon and Cally is extremely interesting; both of these characters are somewhat broken after their sufferings during the last two episodes, and its clear there’s a bond between them. For all Avon’s aloof manner, he’s genuinely kind and comforting to Cally here, because he cares about her. And it’s obvious that she knows this. And it’s interesting in this light to later see this episode’s obligatory fight between Avon and Tarrant for the spot of alpha male of the pack; it starts with Tarrant accusing Cally of hiding something and Avon defending her.  

In fact, this particular Avon / Tarrant scrap is very interesting indeed. Tarrant is the one who lets rip, saying some very hurtful things about Avon while Avon keeps his cool. But Avon is the clear winner here; no one has thicker skin than he does, and he’s the one who ends up looking like an adult. Even his deferral to the majority vote on exploring the mysterious alien ship nearby makes him look strong, and indisputably the leader; he can afford to be magnanimous. As we shall see, Tarrant ends this episode considerably diminished, and quite low down on the Liberator’s pecking order.     

Avon quietly asserts his superiority over Tarrant by leading the search party himself. He, Cally and Vila find what appears to be a tomb, complete with grave goods, adrift in space like an Anglo-Saxon ship burial. It’s a trap, of course, which gives us something of an exciting sequence, but ultimately the team end up bringing two artifacts aboard the Liberator; one large, obvious and immediately studied, and the other a ring hoarder by Cally, who is clearly beginning to come under some influence.    

Night falls, everyone goes to sleep, and things become very creepy for most of the rest of the episode. “Night” may well be an arbitrary concept for a spacecraft (and how come the Liberator only ever gets chased by Federation pursuit ships when everyone is awake?) but we’re certainly made to be afraid of the dark. Firstly Orac describes the artifact as “irrational”, then asks to be disconnected. Then Zen, whilst being drained of power, warns that there’s a malign power on board the ship. We get some very eerie poltergeistiness before the artifact seems to age rapidly and collapse. Cally, meanwhile, is clearly under its baleful influence.         

Then things really get weird. Vila’s magic trick (a nice nod back to The Keeper) actually works, and that weird space lute thingy starts playing itself. Both Vila and Dayna simultaneously exist in two realities, one of which has them hooded and robed in strange surroundings.    

Dayna and Tarrant find Cally, and Dayna reveals she was knocked unconscious by a being which looked exactly like Cally. Tarrant responds with an excitable babble of theories. Then Avon turns up- calm, collected and organised, having been rather sensibly observing everything that’s happened. He cautions Tarrant against a “cavalry charge”. Tarrant, being Tarrant, doesn’t listen. And gets utterly humiliated and diminished as a result.

The being is gradually absorbing Cally’s life force to fashion a body based on hers. It may be ancient, but it is also childlike, simply demanding anything it wants, including the ship’s crew as its “pets”: Dayna as musician, Vila as fool (ha!) and Tarrant (no doubt sarcastically meant…) as “protector”. It is perceptive, though, saying of Vila that “This one interests me. He has a very high IQ and yet he behaves like an imbecile.”

Avon, who’s been conspicuous by his absence, now returns to do the heroic thing and reaffirm his place in the pecking order. He goads the being into killing him, knowing that Cally won’t let her; interestingly, we get confirmation here that Cally has feelings for him. He then declares that “You’re beautiful when you’re angry”, and suddenly kisses her- a surprisingly misogynistic moment for a script by a female writer. He then uses the distraction to grab the ring, my precious, which is the source of her psychic power. The being then ages, horribly, and fades away to her awful fate of fully conscious nothingness. It’s all very bleak, but elegantly put.

The episode ends with Avon most definitely as top dog, with Cally and Dayna both seeming to be well above Tarrant in the pecking order. Will this last…?

Blake's 7: Rumours of Death

“Oh. Don’t tell me, let me guess. You only ever followed orders?”

This episode is extraordinary. Simultaneously the finest character study of Avon we’ve yet seen, somewhat disorientating in its cleverer-than-it-looks structure, and also managing to be an “arc” episode, this is a showcase for the massive talents of both Chris Boucher and Paul Darrow.

The beginning is a shock; Avon, in a suitably grotty cell, with sounds of unpleasantness in the background and signs of mistreatment conveyed by Darrow’s performance. He’s been there for five days, and has finally attracted the attention of the chief torturer, Shrinker. Then, the tables are suddenly turned, as Avon stops transmitting his signal. Dayna and Tarrant suddenly teleport into the cell, and the three of them force Shrinker back to the Liberator. It’s a brilliant reversal, and a stand-out scene.

What follows is almost as good. Inevitably, the torturer comes in for some baiting from Dayna and Tarrant, but Cally refuses to join in, realising that behaving in this way can lead to a very dark place.

Meanwhile, Servalan is about to take possession of her presidential planet with is on Earth and, inevitably, somewhere that looks an awful lot like Hertfordshire. We see a rather senior married couple, Chesku and Sula, discussing how “Earth and the inner planets are once again united” under Servalan; once again we learn of the limited range of her authority as “president”. But this scene is also, if less dramatically, upended, as Sula turns out to be in league with rebels, shooting her husband dead. Meanwhile, we’re introduced to military double act Granlee and Forres (David Haig), some rather well-drawn and acted characters who are the framing device for much of what follows.

The crew have agreed to carry out Avon’s intentions from last episode; to track down Anna Grant’s killer. There’s a reason for the kidnapping; teleporting down with Shrinker to a subterranean cave, Avon eventually learns more than he’s bargained for, as do we, the viewers. There’s a flashback to Anna Grant, and we have two surprises. Firstly that Anna, apparently the great love of Avon’s life, calls him by his surname(!) and, secondly, that she’s played by the same actress as Sula and is thus the same person. Well, one surprise for me as I didn’t actually notice the big revelation until it was rather more blatantly pointed out later on…

Shrinker convinces Avon that he never met Anna, and that Avon was always being “run” by a Federation agent known as “Bartholomew”; it seems this person may be the killer, and it’s possible that Servalan would know more. With that, Avon abandons the torturer to die in the cave, his mercy extending only to giving him a gun. It’s a graphic example of how, behind Avon’s carefully maintained sardonic exterior, are some very, very passionate feelings.

Servalan, meanwhile, is on film in a posh house, about to host some posh dinner as president. Her presence is making our two surveillance chaps nervous, and rightly so; the rebel plan is being executed very competently indeed, and when the final attack is sprung it works perfectly. Both of our surveillance chaps are shot, and David Haig’s light relief character is the one who’s killed; this tells us something about what we can expect from the tone of the rest of the episode.

The rebels’ moral dilemma of what to do with Servalan nicely mirrors the scene with Shrinker earlier, in the Liberator. It also indicates that their position is not so secure now that they’ve completed their immediate objective; what do they do now? The consequences could be grave, especially as a dying Granlee calls for help.      

The contrast is with a fairly united Liberator crew; for all the quips from Dayna, Tarrant and Cally, they care about Avon because, deep down, they know that he cares a lot for them. Again, passions underneath the cold exterior. 

They find the palace under occupation, with Servalan chained to a wall (kinky!), in obvious distress and showing signs of physical violence. She’s a distressing sight; Jacqueline Pearce is great here.    

Sula’s arrival is a crushing moment for Avon, of course, as he instantly recognises her. Flashbacks of Shrinker’s words reverberate effectively as she tries to convince him she still loves him; she is Bartholomew, and was always using him from the beginning. Only when she tries to kill him does he shoot her, and he’s a broken man. “I let you go, my love”, she says, dying. “No, you never let me go, you never did,” he replies, allowing us a glimpse at those deep, deep passions. Avon is such a more complex and interesting character than he’s often taken for.                                              

Torchwood: Miracle Day (Part Four)

“We are everywhere. We are always. We are no one.”

A rather serious episode this time, which seems to feeds us a few pointers about the general shape of what is going without actually revealing much. That’s clever. For the moment I’m enjoying being teased like this, but it looks as though next episode things will start to shift gear.

This one’s by Jim Gray and John Shiban. I don’t know anything about Jim Gray but Shiban has apparently written a lot of episodes for The X-Files which makes sense, given the tone this week. Jane Espenson it ain’t.

We heard about Esther’s sister, Sarah, last episode, and this time around we get to see her, all shut up in a boarded-up house with her two children. This is a disturbing scene, and among other things it shows us that Esther is far outside her comfort zone. The situation with her sister is a sort of synecdoche (sorry; I’m a pretentious git, I know, and I’m wondering if I still use the word correctly!) for Esther’s difficulties in adapting to the new and very stressful situation she finds herself in, not only having to deal with the new world reality but with a fugitive experience which is far from her experience. As we’ve seen, Esther is an extremely competent and resourceful person, but now she is adrift from the world she knew. Understandably, she makes mistakes, making a snap decision to report her sister to social services- with uncontrollable consequences- and allowing herself to be tailed by a mysterious hostile agent by making the elementary mistake of visiting a lone family member. Rex may not show much sympathy when this eventually comes close to compromising the mission, but Esther is very much the audience identification character. I suspect it’ll be interesting to use her as a yardstick for the whole series.

Anyway… Venice Beach! I’ve been there! It’s nice to have somewhere a bit nicer to look at than Washington D.C. at night. Just because it’s nice and sunny doesn’t mean there isn’t plot stuff going on, though. For a start there’s this “Dead Is Dead” business, pushed by one Ellis Hartley Monroe. Jilly Kitzinger calls her a “darling of the Tea Party,” which presumably indicates she’s based on some combination of Sarah Palin and the even more disturbing Michele Bachman. I’m sure I recognise the actress from somewhere. Anyone know what else she’s been in? She’s chilling, anyway. Her plans for putting the “dead” in camps have obvious parallels, and another parallel is drawn out by Rex’s discomfort with her talk of “segregation”.

Torchwood have a place to live, Gwen wants Rhys to get her dad out of hospital, and Gwen has been spotted by the same bloke who saw Esther earlier. All of these plot beats happen so quickly that you just know they’ll be back to bite our heroes later.

With a base of operations later, the team do a spot of rather impressive research while Jack regales us with allusions to George Eliot and Middlemarch. (I was born in Nuneaton, y’know.) Jilly’s making plans too. She isn’t completely amoral; she’s as disgusted by Oswald Danes as anyone but she’s professional enough to do her job. Although Danes is rendered slightly less evil by comparison once Piers Morgan is mentioned.

Esther, showing how competent she is when operating within her comfort zone, establishes that Server 113 is what they need to discover more, and she’s the prime mover in formulating the plan. There’s some alpha male squabbling between Jack and Rex on who should lead the mission, but this time Rex backs down rather more easily. He’s clearly more subdued than he has been. And he’s affected enough to pay a visit to his estranged father, something which means what he later says to Esther is rather hypocritical.

I love the rather clever scene in which Gwen and Jack obtain Nicholas Frumkin’s voice pattern, fingerprints and eye print, even if another person later on isn’t so nice. Gwen’s American accent actually sounded ok-ish to my British ears, but I loved her embarrassment (“Hot diggity!”). This contrasts with the later scene, of course, in which Frumkin loses a hand and an eye, but “no one dies”.

Vera Juarez, meanwhile, acts as our eyes and ears as we see how horrible things are getting in the hospitals, and how something like the camps can come about. Monroe is gaining ground, much to Danes’ horror. “The moment I lose my platform, I get thrown back to the mob”, he says, in a pithy little summation of his basic motivation. He’s led to hijack Monroe’s television news conference by very visible entering the hospital and swearing to help his fellow “dead” people. “I have risen with unending life”, he says, and speaks of “rapture”. Gosh, you don’t suppose there’s a certain allusion being made here, do you? It seems to work, though. Monroe (“Get a hold of Fox”) is instantly eclipsed and, no longer of use to her mysterious masters, is drugged unconscious. Those who live by the sword…

Unfortunately, the plan to switch the servers has been compromised ever since Esther started to be followed, and Gwen and Jack are finally caught and tied up by this mysterious bloke who’s been skulking about all episode. Incidentally, there are a lot of women being tied up in this episode, aren’t there? He’s an assassin, rather frustrated by the recent turn of events, and quite the psycho. He’s about to reveal something about the identity of the big bad when Rex, inevitably, arrives and shoots him in the throat.

Monroe’s fate is truly horrible; left inside a car as it’s crushed. The moment where the camera looks inside the tangled mass of metal to find a living, moving eye is horribly evocative. And the ending is ominous, too; Gwen’s dad has been taken to a camp, and it’s too late to stop it happening…

Blake's 7: The Children of Auron

“The trouble with the people of Auron is that they all suffer from a superiority complex.”

Is it me, or does Servalan look particularly ravishing in this episode with that gorgeous make-up? Then again, I do have a bit of a predilection for evil women. She’s back, anyway, complete with mutoids and fractious underlings, and this time she’s more heinous than ever, planning to unleash a plague on Cally’s home planet of Auron.

Meanwhile, aboard the Liberator, Avon (who seems to be more or less top dog at this point) has decided they’re all going to Earth to “execute” Anna Grant’s killer. This is a far cry from Blake’s idealism (although this, as we’ve seen, carried its own big problems), and I think the sheer crudeness of this desire for revenge rather appals Cally, who spends this episode uncharacteristically at odds with him. But this stuff, of course, is only here to be contrasted with the motivations Cally is soon to acquire, which will cause Avon to be outvoted.

Servalan “rescues” an Auronar pilot (Michael Troughton) and infects him with a nasty pathogen before sending him on his way, and he duly infects the planet. This is the first time we’ve got to see Auron, a planet we’ve heard so much about, and it’s a crushing disappointment to behold; a control room staffed by people in dull space uniforms, an equally dull laboratory, and a bit of location footage shot in an industrial complex. That’s it. And, aside from the fact that for the last three decades they’ve reproduced by cloning (why?), they’re a bit telepathic (although we only actually see this with Cally and her sister, although it’s only the younger, cloned, generations that seem capable of this), and they’re strictly neutral, we get absolutely no impression of their having any kind of culture or hinterland. It’s a terrible waste of an opportunity.

Conveniently, Cally has a twin sister, Zelda, and Zelda’s telepathic abilities are apparently capable of traversing many light years instantaneously to reach Cally. So, er, telepathic vibes can travel faster than light then? Oooo-kaaay…

Avon is unable to persuade everyone that it’s a trap, so off they go. It is a trap, of course, but it’s more than that. Servalan wants to use their cloning technology to reproduce- asexually, with all the children being young copies of herself. It’s interesting to see Servalan showing a maternal instinct, but there’s something cold and sexless, not to mention genocidal, about how she intends to fulfil it.

I realise this is going to make be sound incredibly stupid, by the way, but it’s only when Avon suggests consulting Orac about what to do that I realised that Orac is transparently intended as a kind of “oracle”. How thick am I? Never mind. It’s also revealing to hear the Auronars refer to Servalan as merely the “president” of a “faction” of the “ex-Federation”. It seems her powers are not as great as her fancy title might imply.

Everyone, aside from Dayna, Vila and, if he counts, Orac, teleport down, and it’s not long before they and their rather wet hosts are taken prisoner by one of Servalan’s squabbling underlings. Servalan is now in a position to bargain with Vila for the Liberator by threatening to kill everyone. Unfortunately, her plan fails miserably because for some reason she forgets Dayna exists. It’s nice to see Dayna kicking some arse, incidentally. She’s being written with more personality than lately, and I like her- smart, loyal, fond of administering a good kicking but ultimately kind and caring. Plus Josette Simon is rather attractive, I have to say…

As usual, Servalan’s plans unravel, and the subplot between Servalan’s two underlings becomes interesting; Ginka, the junior underling, lies to Servalan, claiming that his superior officer destroyed her own offspring and replaced them with his. This means Servalan no longer has any reason to blow up the room out heroes are hiding in. They all manage, with Dayna’s help, to teleport away, complete with incubators containing the genetic material for five thousand babies. Inevitably, Cally and her sister (who inevitably meet, although only through glass; the budget won’t stretch to split screen!) can’t both be allowed to live due to the strains this would place on the special effects budget, so Zelda has to rather pointlessly sacrifice herself.

Servalan instinctively knows that her own “children” are blown up (er, quite), and is genuinely anguished by this, instantly killing both of this episode’s underlings.

It’s not clear how this ends for Auron- there’s to be a new Auronar colony with a disturbingly young median age, yes, but what happened to the survivors on Auron itself? This is a fairly rubbish script from Roger Parkes, really, and the Hanna Barbera ending is possibly the worst bit of all.

Blake's 7: The City at the Edge of the World

“I am surrounded by cretins!”

So. This is it: the last episode of Blake’s 7 that I’ve seen before. From now on it’s all uncharted territory for me. Exciting, eh?  Know how the series ends, obviously, but aside from that rather huge exception I’m completely spoiler-free.

As Chris Boucher is wont to do, we begin some way into the story, after Tarrant has already done a bit of sniffing around on the planet below. He quite horribly bullies Vila into going down to do a job for the natives, alone and unarmed, in return for some unobtainium crystals, while nobody’s looking. This is fascinating, for two reasons. Firstly, it’s becoming clear that we are not meant to like Tarrant. Secondly, this episode makes him look like both a bully and a pillock; he’s definitely taken down a peg or two.

It’s interesting, in this light, to note how comparatively concerned and caring Avon is made to look in contrast, just before Vila teleports down. It’s Avon who tries to plant a tracer on Vila for his safety, and his disapproval is clear. He and Cally are very much the anti-Tarrant double act here, and Dayna’s not impressed either.

Tarrant is also shown to be naïve and rather stupid in assuming the natives are harmless. It’s not long before Avon (significantly in the context of what seems to be a developing conflict between Tarrant and Avon; this one Avon definitely wins) safely detonates an intended booby trap. And when the rather silent natives finally deliver Avon to his destination, a ruined city, it’s revealed that Tarrant has in fact made a massive, massive cock-up. There are no unobtainium crystals. But there is the splendid Bayban the Butcher, splendidly hammed by the wonderful Colin Baker, and his comedy henchmen. But there’s also, er, a henchwoman, Kerrill, who seems cute and vulnerable beneath the harsh exterior.

It seems there’s a mysterious portal Bayban wishes to penetrate, and he’s conned Tarrant into supplying him with the best locksmith around. The locals (represented by a taciturn Valentine Dyall) apparently say that “It contains this world and the next”. If we’re paying attention then we’ve already guessed that it leads to another world. But all this exposition is delivered amongst a lot of highly entertaining lines from the great Bayban. I love his annoyance at being only second on the Federation’s “most wanted” list after Blake!

Vila has one hour to open the portal, or things look grim. Fortunately, though, he’s a bloody good thief. If this were D&D he’s have a dexterity of 18, without question. He’s not as unlucky as things might seem, especially as Kerrill re-appears, having just happened to put on some rather alluring clothing. Vila quickly manages to impress her by cleverly working out that the portal is in fact a force field, designed to resemble a solid object, which will throw back any energy fired into it. All he needs is a low energy probe, too subtle for it to detect. In love Vila’s sense of rivalry with his opponent.

Suddenly, it opens, and they both go through. And, as every viewer knew it would, it simply closes again. Still, Kerril is getting rather tactile, so Vila is still not necessarily having such a bad time, even if he is becoming rather conscious of being used. He’s about to go back, but her scream brings him back, and the two of them have a lovely little cuddle. They’re aboard a spacecraft, next to the skeletons of two of their predecessors, when they suddenly hear a voice from thirty centuries ago. The planet’s civilisation is at the height of its power, but some local Hari Seldon-type chap has been insisting that for some reason they’re about top collapse into barbarism. The ship is a kind of ark, programmed to find a suitable planet, and the remaining natives have been genetically engineered with a Quatermass and the Pit-style race memory to ensure they continue to behave in ways their rather controlling ancestors would approve of. Once the other end of a teleport is set up, the entire race can migrate. Talk about pushy parenting…

Unfortunately, the ship seems to be in flight, and the air will therefore soon run out. There’s only one thing for it; to have what I imagine would be some lovely, slow, gentle sex. Never mind the fact that, in true TV fashion, the two of them later wake up fully clothed! Still, they’re alive, they’re a really sweet couple, and the ship has landed, after all. Oh, and there are unobtainium crystals everywhere. Shame the planet so obviously looks like a papier-mâché set.

Meanwhile, Avon and co all teleport down, although not before they give Tarrant a hard time. It’s noticeable that Avon is the one in charge as they all rather efficiently work their way towards Bayban. It’s nice that Dayna at last gets to re-use at least one of the character traits established in her first appearance, making use of an exploding remote controlled car that she’s invested. More of this, please: in every episode since Aftermath she’s seemed like just another generic female character. There’s a big fight, and Bayban is sent packing.

Kerrill and Vila are so cute together, but it can’t last; we know that Vila’s a main character in this serial, and that reset button is going to be pressed. It’s done very well, though, with lots of sadness. Especially as Kerrill tells Vila that she loves him. Besotted though he is, he isn’t quite able to say the same; perhaps in the long run they wouldn’t have been so good together. Still, it’s a great episode for Vila; not many end with him being told that he’s “a clever man, and brave”. A wonderful episode.

Torchwood: Miracle Day (Part Three)

“You’re a member of Torchwood now, whether you like it or not.”

This is the first time since I started this blog that I’ll be reviewing an episode written by Jane Espenson (here’s a hint as to where things are headed after I finish reviewing Blake’s 7; there’ll be many, many more episodes by her!). As you’d expect, the characterisation and the dialogue just sparkle. This is where we get past the set-up and into the actual story, and it’s looking exciting. Of course, I have no idea where any of this is going. But that’s all part of the fun.

We start with a scene which looks towards how things are going to develop- Oswald Danes, again being interviewed on television, modestly declines the title of “expert” but nonetheless goes on to opine on the necessity of “free drugs” for all. We then look back to the last episode as Rex confronts Newman- er, Friedkin, threatening him rather sadistically. We learn that Newman has been paid for “decades” by some mysterious agency, but the only thing he knows about them is a phone number which turns out to be untraceable. All of this is a rather smooth operation by the “new” Torchwood team.

Gwen comes across the massed ranks of the “Soulless”, with their rather fetching masks, in central Washington, and quietly shows her competence in arranging for the practical needs of their little underground group. I love the throwaway comment about Jack’s bank account having loads of money because it’s been gathering interest since 1906! There’s some witty and amusing stuff about transatlantic translation difficulty. I love Gwen’s line about the flat lemonade!

A bit of skirmishing between Jack and Rex about which one of them is the alpha male (to be continued) is interrupted by a mini-crisis of confidence on the part of Esther; she’s used to being behind a desk, and has no experience of dealing with anything like this. But we’ve already seen (especially at the end of last episode) how resourceful she is. It’s nice to see the character getting properly fleshed out.

The team finally follow the clues to a massive warehouse, which turns out to be “bigger on the inside!” The warehouse belongs to Phicorp, which is apparently a massive multinational pharmaceutical company. And the place is full of a newly developed painkiller, one which has no narcotic side effects. It’s here in such large numbers that Phicorp must have been expecting the “Miracle” for at least a year. The plot most definitely thickens. I’m loving this.

Meanwhile, Dr Juarez and Jilly Kitzinger, during one of those serendipitous outside conversations that makes me sort of miss my smoking days, more or less accepts an invitation to a “meeting”, about which much more later. Rex, meanwhile, gets a valuable lesson in how absolutely none of his CIA contacts can be trusted any more. We then get another confrontation between him and Jack over who has the biggest cock, after which Rex buggers off. He might be the alpha male type, but he’s still had a very stressful few days and could probably do with a bit of time to process things. Also, a bit of sex would probably help. Conveniently, that’s very much on the cards as he visits Dr Juarez. Rex is not exactly a paragon of chivalry here, but the two of them end up in bed together and Rex plants in her mind the idea of acting as Torchwood’s “spy” at the Phicorp meeting. She immediately refuses and throws him out but, as we’ll see, her own tenacious nature makes the offer impossible to resist.

Jack, stopping off at a gay club, gets some action of his own in scenes which the BBC has rather obviously and clumsily edited. He insists on using a condom with particular vehemence, an interesting reminder of his new-found mortality. His semi-drunken post-coital phone call shows up the character’s extreme loneliness, though. He has no real connection with the bloke he’s just copped off with, and needs to speak to Gwen for some real emotional reassurance. But Gwen, as soon as Esther manages to connect her to her husband and daughter, just abandons the phone call halfway through.

Oswald Danes, after a bit of police brutality which shows us how unpleasant it must be to be him, conveniently meets up with the very interesting and rather attractive (I like bad girls!) Jilly Kitzinger for a trip to Dallas. They’re not the only people going to that meeting, though; Gwen still has those famed Torchwood contact lenses, and Dr Juarez has decided to help Rex after all. Gwen immediately spots Danes and Kitzinger, and it’s obvious that this is no “meeting”. A presentation soon starts, and a congressman starts pushing the idea of legislation to abolish the need for prescriptions for drugs. It’s immediately obvious who stands to benefit from this.

Gwen has a narrow escape from Kitzinger’s room, but amongst the others watching there are other problems. For one thing, Jack has disappeared. For another, Friedkin’s phone rings, and the ensuing scene is played in near-total silence, with no incidental music, and we hear nothing but Rex’s side of the conversation.

Jack, it turns out, has gone to confront Danes, at gunpoint. Jack, of course, knows what it is to murder a child and to crave forgiveness, and immediately sees the falseness of Danes’’ supposed repentance. Bill Pullman is again magnificent here, taking pleasure in goading Jack with the pleasure he takes in his crime. “She flaunted it,” he claims, and insists it was the best moment of his life. But it also seems he has a death wish; he longs for execution.

This is a trap, though; Phicorp agents seize Jack, destroy his recording of the conversation, and give him a good kicking before throwing him out. Danes appears on television again, ending the episode as it began. He comes out rather strongly in favour of private heath companies, i.e. Phicorp, and spouts some rather scarily right-wing stuff about private companies rather than “Government” (a big, abstract, capitalised proper noun with no definite article, of course). What’s in it for him…?

That was bloody good- witty, entertaining, and the story is unfolding nicely with just the right number of mysteries developing.

Blake's 7: Harvest of Kairos

“But first there is the question of that degrading and primitive act to which I was subjected in the control room.

I should like you to do it again.”

Another new writer, then: Ben Steed. IMDb tells me very little about him, but he’s come up with one of the finest scripts I’ve ever seen on Blake’s 7. We begin in media res as the Liberator faces attack from four Federation pursuit ships while Avon and Vila are on the planet below. In previous episodes this sort of scenario has formed a central part of the plot; here, it’s a mere curtain-opener.

Servalan (still on that space wheel thing even though she’s now president), while supervising the attack, is told by this week’s underling, Dastor, that a construction worker called Jarvik has mocked her constant failure to capture the Liberator. Interestingly, this is conveyed by the phrase “They say you’re afraid of Tarrant”. This is interesting; as per last episode, it’s interesting to speculate on whether or not Avon is still in effective control of “his” ship. I shouldn’t jump to conclusions, of course; one again, Tarrant doesn’t order Avon about as he does the others, and Avon does at one point explicitly comment on Tarrant’s famed skills as a space commander. It’s possible that Avon is simply delegating combat to the most skilled member of his crew, but it doesn’t feel that way, especially as Avon spends the entire episode being somewhat detached, obsessing over some rock he’s found.

We meet the construction worker, Jarvik, as Servalan demands an explanation. All she gets is a “Woman, you’re beautiful,” and an unexpected and unsought kiss! This, and the quote at the top there, are… interesting. Is the script, as opposed to the character, being misogynistic here? This isn’t just kinkiness, which would be fine; it’s non-consensual. And Servalan’s reaction might be thought to send out worrying messages that all women “want” it. I suppose the power relations between the two of them, with Servalan being an absolute dictator who is implicitly always in control, are a satisfactory mitigating factor as far as the character of Servalan is concerned; I can believe her reaction. But the subtext is still worrying.

Anyway… Jarvik gets to look clever by making snide comments as Servalan’s attack inevitably fails. And he correctly predicts that Tarrant will take the Liberator to Kairos, for its harvest. (At this point, deciding where to take the Liberator, Tarrant seems to be blatantly acting as leader. Yes, he takes a vote, and yes, Avon declines to comment when asked, but he’s taking charge.) The planet is hostile to human life for some reason, except during “harvest week”, where the fantastically valuable Kairodan crystal can be found; under Avon and/or Tarrant, the crew of the Liberator seem to be, up to a point at least, thieves interested in personal wealth. With Blake and the Federation gone, so has any clear political aim.

Our two newbies are developing in opposite ways here; Tarrant is competent, warm, and less annoying, while Dayna is showing fewer and fewer personality traits.

It seems Jarvik once knew Tarrant, and was in fact once his superior officer before being downgraded to construction worker for crimes which are, interestingly, unspecified. He’s very much the no-nonsense alpha male type, intelligent but appreciative of the textures and pleasures of life, and very much against computers; this seems to be a running theme this series. Servalan is intrigued by him, both cerebrally and sexually, temporarily promotes him to acting major, and gives him three modern pursuit ships to see if she can capture the Liberator.

Servalan gets to show how deliciously evil she is by ordering the harvest ship on Kairos to abandon the labourers to certain death so she can fit more Kairodan on to the ship. There’s a great scene as a guard gloats at their inevitable deaths, until he realises he’s being abandoned too!

Servalan observes and commentates, despairingly, as Jarvik carries out his cunning plans. That it is, until Jarvik tells her to “Lie there and keep quiet until I tell you otherwise!” Tarrant and co teleport to the cargo hold where the Kairodan is being held, where they are ambushed. In a brilliant scene, Avon then rouses himself briefly from his study of the rock to casually rescue them all, stating, devastatingly, that “They were an obvious possibility, Tarrant!” But, of course, this is a ruse; the real trap is in the crates, a sort of Trojan Kairodan. Servalan is on the point of arresting Jarvik for failure when the capture of the Liberator is reported.

Servalan demands that the ship register her voice pattern on pain of killing the crew one by one. Tarrant naturally refuses, but Avon is very clever indeed. Forcing Servalan to order Zen to drop them off on the nearest planet, he seems to have outsmarted her, until it turns out that the nearest planet is Kairos, and the harvest is over.

Jarvik rejects command of the Liberator and, although television convention dictates that we next see them fully clothed in bed, quite obviously proceeds to have some rather good sex with Servalan. For motives which are by now almost entirely sexual, though, Servalan persuades him to teleport to Kairos and grab all of the former crew’s teleport bracelets, “If you’re to me man enough for me.” Jarvik agrees, and insists on going alone, cos he’s well ‘ard.

On the surface we see an archaic landing module- lucky, that, as it turns out- and the secret of the planet: some extremely large grubs have hatched. Passing over the awkward fact that they look rather less convincing than the pantomime horse off Rentaghost, we learn that they eat Kairodan, and will kill anyone who’s touched it. There is fighting and macho posturing aplenty as Jarvik arrives, and he returns from his mission with all of the bracelets plus Dayna as an added bonus. Servalan orders the local area of the surface to be bombarded, and our heroes are in very big trouble.

Appropriately, it’s Avon who saves the day, with the rock. Its means of self-preservation is to convince any attacker that it’s a slightly bigger and better version of itself. Zen is convinced that this tiny little capsule is, in fact, a massive and far superior ship, in spite of the scanner image showing that it blatantly isn’t. Jarvik isn’t fooled, but Servalan is, and she calls off the attack. Jarvik’s accidental death by friendly fire is a little contrived, but this doesn’t really detract from an outstanding episode.