Riddick's Adventures on Crematoria

"The Chronicles of Riddick" is a spectacular looking, but hugely flawed film cursed with some awful scriptwriting and dire acting.

Designed to expand the Riddick universe created in "Pitch Black" and expanded upon in video games, it tanked horribly. Vin Diesel, who has invested so much in the character that made him a star, put Riddick in cryo-sleep while he went a-fast-and-furiousing to get the readies together to make Riddick 3.

Which supposedly is even more disappointing.

The beginning of the film has risible dialogue and acting - hello Thandie Newton - scraped from the bottom of the darkest barrel in hell. But the design is amazing, and the "Big Bads", the Necromongers, are wonderfully designed right from their armour, to their flying mausoleum spacecraft detailed with tortured statues made by an astronaut Hieronomymous Bosch.

The ending is perfunctory, and ruined by a final fight scene that doesn't quite work.

It is the middle section, the section where Riddick allows a squad of Mercenaries, wonderfully led by Nick Chinlund as merc leader Toombs, to take him to the prison world of Crematoria, a "no daylight slam", that really works the best.

Crematoria is beyond hell. It is a super-Mercury ravaged by a merciless star sending out searing radiation onto a landscape of tortured lava towers and rolling fireballs. It's temperature ranges from 900 above, to a rather impossible 700 below, and only deep underground can anyone survive.

It is into this subterranean prison that Riddick is deposited while the mercs argue the price on his head with the guards, a grimy bunch of mixed ethnicity with a French boss much given to spitting and a Russian thug with an acute nose.

Below this, of course, Riddick first's job is to fight for his life against the usual slam tough nuts who want to give him a good beating - or worse. Of course he does so, surrounded by the stem rising from the volcanic interior, and scaring my favourite sub character, a goggle wearing mole apparently sexually turned on by male violence back into the hole in the lava he apparently and unwisely seems to live in. The self appointed "Guvnor"welcomes him to the jail, a rusted iron clattering of cells arranged into a cliff face and populated with a mix of rastas and ginger women, apparently. As well as Riddick's former child mentor Jack, calling herself Kira and now mutated into Alexa Davalos instead of Rhianna Griffith.

Some more great scenes follow; Riddick kills a guard with a tea cup to the heart before shitting the other guards that he can do the same with the key from a tin of pilchards, and then the remaining guards decide to rattle the prisoners with their spiny hell hounds - mutant armadillo cats with spines and a habit of turning scarlet when angry.

They eat most of the prisoners they catch, but no the Furyan Riddick, oh no. They love him!

Upstairs the warden gets wise to the fact that the Mercs have stolen their prisoner from under the noses of the Necromongers, and all hell breaks loose in the weird flying saucer on screws that is their HQ. Riddick leads the Guvnor, Kira and some other prisoners up top, to find most of Mercs dead, the Guards fled, and Toombs dangling on a rope. Riddick takes care of him by locking him in with the hell hounds, and then they deliberate how to beat the guards to the hanger and the one serviceable spacecraft before the Necromongers surely arrive.

And so follows a great set piece; while the guards run the 29.1 km in tunnels, the convicts have to run the terminator between freezing night and boiling day, initially freezing, but then sweat starting to drip as the sun approaches the horizon. They go through a snowstorm of thick black ash, through termite looking towers, across semi melted lava fields, and then finally a harsh climb up a cliff face as the suns rays cremate most of the escapees.

The Guards have beaten the prisoners to the hanger, but not the Necromongers, who make short work of the French and the Russians, while Riddick watches on. Alas he and his convicts get no further either, and he is left for dead as Kira is kidnapped for Necro conversion...

...and then it all goes to pot again, as a bizarre looking Linus Roache appears and expedites massively before burning himself to death rather needlessly, summing up all the problems is a literal flash as he incinerates in a wondrous looking way.

End. But its a great section of a not great film - that I still love because like Dune I can sometimes survive awful writing if the design is good. And in Chronicles, it really is.

The Haughty and Shaved Beauty of Natalie Dormer

I'm not given much to pulpy, pappy, celebrity admiration, but I have to give it up for Natalie Dormer with her head shaved for Hunger Games purposes.

Lori Petty must see this, look back at Tank Girl and wonder where it all went wrong. Probably when she agreed to be in it after Emily Lloyd was fired.

It's interesting how a shaved head affects the perception of a woman. Sigourney Weaver having her hair cut for Aliens was one thing, but having it shaved for the difficult but massively underrated Alien 3 was another. It gave Natalie Portman a previously unseen toughness in V for Vendetta, and GI Jane showed a very different Demi Moore than the one we thought of from Vanity Fair covers.

The transformation is not always viewed positively, of course. Sinead O'Connor was often regarded as at best scary, at worst insane, from the moment she first registered on the collective conscioousness with Mandinka, and Brittany Spears went from being pop princess to Trailer Park Trash with one pass of the barber's clippers.

Perception of beauty will be argued about until the sun turns red giant and scorches the earth before swallowing it. But, to my jaded eyes at least, Ms Dormer's haughty good looks have been rather enhanced by the procedure.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.09.14

Up All Night with American Mary

Normally if I get home late, I sleep the moment I hit the sofa - or bed if I'm lucky - after my late night rum and coke under the stars. I am by inclination both a night owl and a morning lark, a lifestyle that it is always going to very tricksy to maintain, and a normally gruelling work schedule tends to put me into the lark category.

Because only larks have to get up at 530 am to cycle to work in a blue collar dump where hopes and dreams are slowly composted to nothing.

However, I'm on leave at the moment, and found myself last night as insomniac as I used to be when I was 20. I also had two new, well second hand actually, DVDs to watch from the market and decided to do some double ended candle burning to watch them.

"The Wicker Tree" came first, Robin Hardy's sort of follow up to the all time classic "The Wicker Man". I'm sure I've raved about that film often enough on here so I shan't go on about it, suffice to say that it must be rolling in its reputed M3 motorway foundation grave at how bad "The Wicker Tree" is.

Britannia Nicol tried to avoid "doing a Woodward"

Trashy chastity ringed country singer and boyfriend head to Scotland to convert some Pagans, and get caught up in Mayday rituals, with added unfunny comedy tone and breasts from someone who was in Foyle's war and in no way has Willow Magregor's allure. That's it. The film is dreadful, and if it does anything, it shows that the genius of "The Wicker Man" was down to Antony Shaffer's screenplay.

Summer is most definitely not "I-cumin-in"

That over and done with, I was still as awake as a moth on speed, so it was time to deploy "American Mary" on my eyes. As unwatchable at times as "The Wicker Tree", but for entirely different reasons, this film stars Katherine Isabelle, the wonderfully sneery-faced beauty of "Ginger Snaps" fame as a drug rape by her teachers leads her to abandon her medical studies for the world of aesthetic surgical body modification.

The Soska Sister's second film, after "Dead Hooker in a Trunk", the film establishes their brilliance as visualists and conceptualists of a new Cronenbergian Candadian horror, while showing that directing actors, and acting themselves, is not their strong point.

The Soska Sisters need some mods done

With its cast of Burlesque performers and tongue split Vancouver scenesters, the film has a rough and "out-there" tone balanced by the stylish corsets and medical fetish wear of Isabelle as the movie's protagonist. Indeed the movie's most alluring scene, that of Isabelle operating on the twins in black and red scrubs, is incredibly reminiscent of Cronenberg's Dead Ringers with the surgical near-performance art of Jeremy irons as the identical twin surgeons who lose their minds over a woman.

Surgery with style

The film, being what it is, suffers from bouts of awful acting and falls away badly towards its incredibly rushed ending. But the imagination and style behind it is so striking, it inspires you to search the depths of your own mind to see if you can think of anything conceptually better.

And so far, I haven't.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16.09.14

Who Wants to Die in their Bed?

I am by nature a coward, but I have daydreams of having a heart of cold, unfeeling steel.

Some famous writer or other, can't remember who, said “Marriage is the only adventure open to the wary”. Well I disagree. For some even that might be an unattainable goal, some might not find it terribly interesting or adventurous at all, and ultimately there is an adventure we all must take.

Hero, coward, one and all, everyone has to die. And without wishing to spill into horrible mawkish Gandalf “it's a journey we all must take” territory, it is a journey we all must take.

The trick is to make it as exciting as possible. After you've delayed it for as long as possible of course.

So no dying in my bed for me, not like most people.

I rather fancy the idea of being killed in an apocalypse...atomic war, tidal wave, asteroid strike. As a research project, it would be amazing, a literal, actual, once in a lifetime experience to end all experiences...the earth churning up under you, the thundering of a deadly wave, a scorching hot extinction event from the skies.

I w'd want to be there. I'd have to see. I'd have to know.  If it's a fate we'd all share, I wouldn't be worried about dying alone. I'd like to think tat especially in the case of a nuclear explosion, it would be like the climax of “Sunshine” where quantum and relativistic effects made it possible for Cillian Murphy to touch the surface of a re-ignited sun. How could you not want to go like that?

Reality check. The odds are against most of those things happening, in a huge way. I suppose I'll have to settle for being eaten by a pride of lions, ripped apart while I record my sensations into a dictaphone. Or smearing raw meat on my legs and running through a pack of komodo dragons.

How tedious.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 10.09.2014

"My Headaches are Caused by Alien Implants!!!"

Or so I would be saying, if I was a "certain" kind of person.

Yes, I'm struggling with headaches at the moment. Not through hangovers, cheeky reader, but rather the sort of seasonal, heavy wet air, amorphous sinus headaches that come in little waves throughout the year.

But whatever my wishy-washy shilly-shally self diagnosed for reasons for my headaches, I'm not a long standing alien contactee - or abductee as we should probably say these days - who thinks their aches and pains are caused by the dreaded Greys implanting them with devices to monitor their position and medical status, thus making it easier for them to be located for further abduction, and breeding experiments.

This is a long standing trope in science fiction, and was portrayed in reds-under-the-bed movie "Invaders from Mars" back in 1953. In 1957 the first implantation case reached UFO researchers, but the Hill Abduction of 1961 was probably the first major publicity such cases got.

Implantation in "Invaders from Mars"

Later on, Whitley Streiber's "Communion" brought anal probing and Christopher Walken dancing to intergalactic disco to the fore, and of course the X files was just one long story of implantational probular interference by the evil Greys.

As these tales reached popular culture, then the number of people reporting alien implants, and even finding strange bits of metal of supposedly unknown composition falling out of their noses or fished out of their teeth by dentists grew too.

This explains my fascination with UFOlogy not as any real science whatsoever, but rather as a reflection of society's current cultural fascinations, and subconscious worries. Some folk get headaches and think "Sinuses!" - others may think "Brain Tumour!" and a few may think "OH MY GOD I'VE BEEN EXAMINED BY ALIENS!!!!"

So many factors at work.

Having Tourettes and OCD as I do, I am well used to getting panicky about contamination fixation. I wash my hands constantly to avoid flu and the dreaded bete du jour Norovirus, and if ever I get spots on my skin, or any itching, I get really anxious about having picked up scabies or lice. How much time I have spent in my pre medicated days, hunting for evidence of parasites.

Doctors would call this "Neuro-Dermatitis" or "Delusional Parasitosis". But not those who claim to suffer from Morgellons a condition where people believe they have an itch caused by strange fibres embedded in their skin - this always reminds me of "The Fly" or "Ginger Snaps" - and may collect specimens thereof, which usually get identified down the line as the sort of natural or aritificial fibres you'd expect in a domestic environment.

I put it down to OCD. I know what that genuine condition can cause.

This piece, well, it hasn't gone where I expected. A day of bad headaches, and I'm talking about aliens and new but unknown skin diseases. I offer an explanation based on OCD and anxiety, and cultural contamination.

I have no idea if I'm right, but I'm putting it out there.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 01.09.2014