I Love the Silurians!

The Horror Channel's Doctor Who repeats have been an absolute godsend for me; wallpaper TV I can write to without ever. having to concentrate too hard. All of the Pertwee and Baker era storylines knock the modern era into one of those "cocked hat" things - whatever is a cocked hat FFS - and the fact that most episodes appear to have been dug out of a bog make it easier to ignore, or indeed enjoy, the daft costumes, sets, and rubber suited monsters.

So. Doctor Who and the Silurians. I knew what the Siluruans were, roughly (things to get confused with the Sea Devils) and I knew they were among the best loved monsters. But I had never seen their 1970 story until now.

It is, or rather they are, fantastic.

The thing is with these Silurians is that they are not really monsters at all. They may be up to no good, but it is only initially in reasonable self preservation...their leader even has a sense of burbling charm...no mere evil green blobs on wheels, these fellows. Their high intelligence shines through.

Achh, who am I trying to fool? The charm is in the daft turd brown rubber suits; the fluttering eyelashes; the aforementioned burbly voices that make them sound like "The Fifth Element" Mondushawan on acid; they have a funny stumbling walk as if their arms have been strapped by their sides while their amphiboid heads bob back and forth; they have a light in their foreheads which have a duel purpose of killing people and moving coffin like hibernacula around; their faces are silly, and as ever when they do have a plan to hatch for the usual earthling killing purposes, it is far too long winded and complicated for it ever to work, especially when they set it out to the Doctor beforeheand in the tradition of every movie bad guy.

I love them, for every single on of those reasons, and more.

FX and FX2 - The Deadly Y-Fronts of Illusion

I managed to pick up both of these very 80s thrillers - with a loose element of sci-fi - at Oxfam over the weekend for not much money, and was looking forward to watching both of them. Neither of them seem to crop up on UK television much these days.

I was initially stunned to see Lalo Schiffrin's name turnv up in the credits, but the super heavy 1986 analogue synthesizer tunes won't appeal to "Bullit" fans.

The plot of "FX: Murder by Illusion" is actually pretty clever - special effects genius Bryan Brown (THE Australian actor in the 80s, apart from Mel Gibson who wasn't actually Australian) is hired to fake the assasination of mob boss Jerry Orback (Law and Order ahoy!) so he can join the witness protection programme. But the good guys turn out to be not so good, and Bryan finds himself fighting for his life as innocent passers by, and his girlfriend, are iced in the crossfire.

None of this is as alarming as the two standout scenes in the movie; the first when we are treated to a glimpse of Brown in his white Y fronts of a morning, and a second where he descends upon a bad guy like one of those flying squirrels.

Luckily, he overcomes these nightmarish visions to win the day, with the aid of some classic analogue FX tricks and chubby Brian Dennehy, playing the same sort of lumbering cop he played in the Skorpions favourite film, "Gorky Park". Both end up waltzing off into the sunset with 15 million dollars of mob money amid some jarring tourist film of Switzerland.

Onto FX2 "The Deadly Art of Illusion", and we find Brown still battling corrupt cops AND District Attorneys in league with the Mafia as an FX stunt to trap a sex killer goes wrong and the father of his girlfriend's child - hello Rachel Ticotin from Total Recall! The money, and moustache having all ran out for Dennehy, he teams up with Brown again to see off the bad guys with the aid of a terrifying movement micking robot clown, and an early sighting of virtual reality in the cinema.

Dan Brown must have written the bit of the script dealing with stolen Vatican gold medallions

 

 

The films are horrifically dated now, although there are less rolled up jacket sleeves and big hair on view than you'd expect. I found them an entertaining afternoon, but I shant be reaching to the back of the DVD shelf to watch them again any time soon.

 

I have no wish to see the robot clown again, let alone those Y-fronts...

 



Junk Shop Sci Fi DVD Hunts

Amazon et al has taken a little of the fun I get out of looking for sci fi movies.

Sci Fi movies are difficult to find on DVD. They may be shown on TV a lot, but even major films like "The Forbidden Planet" are a swine to find in the UK.

But that's what makes the finding of them so exciting when you do.

To me Amazon and the Internet is cheating, and judging by the difficulty in finding the said "Forbidden Planet" on Region 2, not that much use for some of these films.

Instead, I plough through markets, charity shops, junk shops, and pawn shops. Sure, Cash Converters may be full of what the downtrodden and addicted have discarded during society's downward spiral and is thus full of mainstream action and JCVD and Seagal, but heck I picked up the admittedly non-classic Species 2 there for 75p the other day. And Zardoz, way back when, nestling amidst "Wayne Rooney's Golden Goals" and "Carp Tips".

My profit in the misfortune of others.

Market stalls are great too. There's a couple of great ones that visit my home town...one where the DVDs are a bit more expensive and loosely sorted by genre - hello "War of the Worlds" 1953 style - and another one that is a hodge podge of plastic boxes stuffed with movies so tightly you can't actually look at them without trapping your fingers.

Another trader offers electric guitars and DVDs, got 2010 here wild admiring a really nice classic red Stratocaster. Another has horror DVDs a plenty, but I only buy classics, not "Boy Meets Girl Who Then Nails Her To A Spiky Chair" type material.

I still haven't found what I'm looking for

You can get all sorts of great stuff at Charity Shops, but I often find the obscure ones have the best stuff, and even then you have to be quick - "Quatermass 2" disappeared from "Save the Children" in the time it took me to go 5 minutes to an ATM. Oxfam have great stuff sometimes, but folk know to hunt there, among the classic vinyl and Skorpions albums with horrific covers. Lesser known charities in out of the way places can often be the best.

Junk shops are great too. Most don't really have movies, but you can be lucky if someone has got fed up and emptied their house of media on a whim. I love these places anyway, the owner often ignorant of the wonder he has, the dust, the oddities, collections of random ephemera.

But, none of them ever has Forbidden Planet

Copyright BloodyMulberry 09/07/14

Jason of Star Command

A memory of this show wormed its way into my brain as I sat writing of something else, or rather trying to write of something else; an unclear mind wandering as light streaks of rain on the window superimposed themselves on the stunning variety of greens the park behind me provides.

I saw Jason of Star Command at a friend’s house during my junior school years. He loved it, which was just as well as he was a huge fan of Doctor Snuggles as well, which even the 8 year old me knew was dippy nonsense.

Jason on the other hand was sci fi, and the opening titles excited me, as it reminded me of the even longer ago Space 1999 – i.e people in cool costumes flying awesome spaceships. How young eyes deceive us eh?

Jason and his rather constipated looking crew

Of the show itself I can remember next to nothing, I didn’t even remember that James “never had beam me up Scotty said to him” Doohan was in it. I just thought it was a random fat space guy with a beard. Jason was a bit chubby too for a space hero, and any peril he was ever in was solved by him getting out a little pocket robot called “Wiki” and using it to laser open cell doors etc.

"Is that my agent? Get me on Buck Rogers NOW!!!"

And presumably look up which Popes were Spanish, or the diameter of Pluto, in his spare moments.

I remember that eventually Jason’s boss became a boring man with a blue face.

Serve you right for stealing Mr Wonka's bubble gum

What perhaps remained in my memory most was the one eyed enemy Dragos, and his asteroid spaceship that looked like it had giant satellite dish arms reaching out towards you. Scary stuff!

Dragos, disguised as Voltan from "Hawk the Slayer"

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 28/12/14

Farscape - The Peacekeeper Wars

Just turned on the (rather lacklustre these days) SyFy channel, which has taken a break from showing Asylum mockbusters or American shows that last one "season" to giving us a late festive season  repeat of "Farscape - The Peacekeeper Wars".

It's episode 2 tonight.

It was a wonderfully welcome sight when it happened; who can forget the ruthless cancellation of the show on the apparent cliff hanging disintegration of Crichton and Aeryn. Actually Farscape had long since past its best at the halfway point to series 2, and I thought series 3 was bobbins, with great characterisation abandoned in favour of utter confusion. But the final series was moving in the right direction, and folk were mighty unhappy when the Sci Fi channel decided to cut its throat.

So, three or so years later, after a Fan campaign etc etc, we got Peacekeeper Wars. I enjoyed watching it at the time, but now, well, it hasn't lasted well.

I think the problem is the story. Seemingly the writers compressed the 22 episode arc for the intented Season 5 into the 4 hour format, and did so in such a way as to leave the actual storyline incomprehensible. It's also very weakly written, and really rather soppy too.

Farscape was initially like a Blakes 7 with tentacles, nobody wanted to see weddings and kissy kissy and mawkish scenes with baby's being named after bravely deceased characters. Sikozu's treachery is completely inexplicable and unexplained in any satisfactory way, and no-one gives a monkeys about the peacegiving jigsaw faced aliens. Or Stark. Especially Stark.

And how does Aeryn manage to give birth without removing her leather one piece outfit? How? Probably in the same way they managed to shove every single character that had ever been on the show ever into the script, and never mind if they were dead! Oh look, and now there's more slush, between D'Argo and his son Jothee this time. Get off!

In truth Crichton's shtick and pop culture referencing had long since begun to irritate me. But luckily, we still had Wayne Pygram's Scorpius - one of Sci-Fi's great anti-heroes - or is it an anti-villain? - and Rygel, one of Sci Fi's great characters full stop. At least someone had remembered how to write for them.  And the Worm-Hole ending isn't bad, really. But then they have to go and ruin it with the baby stuff.

I will leave you with one thought. The interesting resemblance between Captain Bracca, and Richard Hammond from Top Gear.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 05.01.14

Shark Attack!!!

I was reading yesterday that a new mobile phone app has been released for the purpose of warning against shark attacks.

My first thought was that it would only be much use on a waterproof phone – Sony Xperia Z users, may your legs ever remain unsevered! - and would presumably flash up huge letter warnings saying “SHIT!!! BEHIND YOU!!!”

By which time it would probably be too late.

Of course, we know now that you don't just need a shark attack app in the sea, oh no. Sharknado shows that if you are caught in a tornado, you'd best turn on the shark attack app instead of the weather warning one. Caught in the desert? Don't bother with google mapping for an oasis; whip out your i phone and check for a shoal of sand dwelling white pointers. And now it seems that a shark attack app is needed as much for skiers as swimmers; avalanches are a habitat for deadly ocean predators.

Heading for Venice? Don't forget the shark attack app, and for the love of god don't take a temporary job poleing gondolas about. Don't forget the app if you are visiting a facility where octopus DNA is being experimented on, and steer clear of swamps, prehistoric times, and John Barrowman. And if you are Samuel L. Jackson, I'm not sure any app could save you.

In fact, just keep the shark attack app on the go at all times. Even sitting on your sofa. For you never know, even the safest looking DFS sale bought corner unit could house a deadly mako or hammerhead, just waiting to leap out from the chintz and devour you, anus first.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 30.12.13

Terror of the Evaporation Chamber

Back in the day, the very late 70s or perhaps the early 80s, there was a time when children were actually catered to in the daytime schedules on BBC1.

At Christmas, Easter, and most excitingly in the long summer holiday, children's TV was shown in the early morning AS WELL AS in the afternoon by the Beeb. It was superior stuff too, because instead of the childish Play School, and to me the earnest, boring and tedious Jackanory and Blue Peter, you got action!

By action, I mean staples like Champion the Wonder Horse (“like a something something arrow from a bow”) - in which use of the dog Rebel was the most interesting thing to me – and Eastern European seeming stories like “Down on the Danube Delta”, “Silas”, ummm, the one with the cities at war; where all the children were dubbed into posh prep school, and all adults were as gruff as Tommy Vance after a Fisherman's Friend. Heidi was also doing the rounds at this time, but I dismissed that as far too girly and cissy.

The big treat however, for a young boy who thanks to an eccentric sea captain from Scotland was already a massive space fan, was a showing of Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars. I think I was possibly staying with my grandparents near Sellafield (true!) when the 15 or so 20 minute episodes from the 30s were shown in morning matinee fashion, with the voiceovered cliffhanger at the end.

I don't really remember the storyline of this at all, but the penile rocket ships with the drone of a World War 1 aircraft and a sparkler for an engine were present and correct. So was Ming, Dale, Aura, Barin, and I think the Hawkmen too. There might have been sort of “clay men” living in underground caves too. The presiding Flash was Olympic swimming gold medalist Buster Crabbe with his immaculately stylish hair.

For a children's show, there was something quite horrendous thrown in. 1930s torture porn in a sci fi sense. This was seen in the shape of the terrifying “Evaporation Chamber” where Flash, Barin and Co found themselves thrown in more than once for Ming's pleasure.

What was evaporating about it, I'm still not clear about. It resembled a sort of electrical playroom which General Pinochet's secret police would have had massive wet dreams over. Huge Tesla coils crackled and spat bolts of electricity between their arcs, and these conical devices shot showers of sparks over our writhing heroes.

Whatever the evaporation was, it was clearly very painful and I certainly didn't want it happening to me. I had nightmares about it a few times, and I was always afraid that I'd go into a big shop and find those big Tesla Coils waiting for me.

These big shops were already scary enough to a child. They had those slowly moving cameras that looked like Death Star Imperial pain droids. Brrrrrrrrr....

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 27.12.13

H2G2 versus (H2G2)2

This afternoon, after running outside in a howling wind, I decided to settle down under my duvet and have the pleasure of watching the original BBC TV production of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".

I first remember seeing this when I was a very small boy, thinking it was going to be some sort of boring programme about travelling, like the sort of thing you'd see with Cliff Michelmore or Frank Bough in Holiday 81. But as soon as I heard the music, and saw the opening titles of an astronaut travelling through the letters, I was hooked. My mum was sympathetic to my love of Sci-Fi, and allowed me to watch every episode despite it being on late.

I loved the two headed alien, I loved Marvin - me and a couple of other kids at school were impersonating him saying "I'm just going to stick my head in a bucket of water" for weeks - I loved the space cow that wanted you to eat it, and I loved the Vogon poetry, even though I had no idea what "micturitions" were or why they should be funny.

I got older, and devoured the books. I remembered the TV show but it hardly ever got repeated on TV, much to my disappointment. I got hold of a DVD of the series in about 2001, and loved it all over again.

Sadly Douglas Adams died, and the film he had been working on came out. I'd never seen it all the way through until I bought the DVD for a pound at Cash Converter.

It is, in the main, charmless, and terrible. Hammer and Tongs are fantastic at making Blur videos featuring animated milk cartons, but they evidently realised early on that they were never going to match the TV series, and so altered absolutely everything to put their own stamp on it, as you would expect to be fair. Problem is at no point does it match up to the TV series, except that I'd rather have Zooey Deschanel than Sandra Dickinson as Trillian anyday.

Martin Freeman is boring and bland in entirely the wrong way as Arthur, Mos Def is miscast, the Humma Kavvula sequence is baffling even if Douglas Adams created it specially, supposedly, and none of the design - Marvin, the ships, the Vogons and other aliens and the book - works on 100 times the budget the BBC had.

Worst of all, however, is Zaphod Beeblebrox as played by Sam Rockwell. Setting aside the second head down his neck which is again Hammer and Tongs being different for the sake of it, the idea that Zaphod is some kind of redneck General Custer idiot on speed, rather than the cluelessly louche Mark Wing-Davey properly two-headed interpretation of the character.

The American market was bet on, and the wheel came up red instead of black.

So I will stick with my TV version thank you very much, and hope that Radio 4 Extra broadcasts the radio one at some point at Christmas, as well as repeating Neverwhere. I will never watch the film again, unless I'm somehow desperate for a fix of Zooey Deshanel.

I'm not a Douglas Adams obsessive by any means, but the film is one heck of a crashing disappointment, and frankly, I don't see how it was ever going to be anything else. Such a pity.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.12.13

Design Classic - The Buck Rogers Starfighter

When the TV show "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" arrived on British TV screens in 1981 or so, I was captivated. Not by the storylines, which even as a young child I could see were rubbish. Nor by Gil Gerard, who sporting what a friend of mine later described as a "utility haircut", was a long way behind S and M clad Avon and his grittier Blake's 7 chums. And as for Erin Grey's charms, well they only became apparent much later, in a post testosterone influx kind of way.

No, it was the spacecraft - the beautiful starfighters, with their twin pointy noses and excitingly angled fins, and different look - that caught the imagination of this viewer. And better still, even to a klutz like me, the basic shape was easily copiable through the medium of lego. When I finished my classwork early, which being a spoddy sort of kid I always did, I always got first crack at the lego and was chruning out various variants of Buck and Wilma's starfighters in chunky handfuls of coloured bricks.

They populated the never ending Aspergerish stories of my imagination, although sadly they haven't done so for a long time. I wished I had a toy, but when it appeared - and a couple of my rather more spolit schoolfriends got their mitts on them - I was gutted. Why oh why, did it have an ugly bar between the nose prongs THAT WAS NOT THERE ON TV!!!

Hah Corgi, you lie! I never saw a toy that looked like the one on the left there. You only got the version that looked like a spaceship designed for slicing vegetables, not cutting through the interstellar medium. It put me right off them, and they disappeared behind X-wings and Colonial Vipers in the stories of my mind.

Corgi! You destroyed a small piece of my childhood!

WORDS COPYRIGHT BLOODY MULBERRY 18/05/2013

Knightmare and the Helmet of Truth

A lot of folk are excited that here in the UK the classic adventure game show "Knightmare" is being re-shown on the Challenge TV channel.

Rating as one of the best things ever put out on ITV - yes I am a BBC snob - I never got to see it as much as I would have liked, as initially I never got home from school early enough, and then I was at university for a large chunk of its run.

Various things stick in the memory though. The fact that to conceal the fact that the young adventurer was actually doing his dungeoneering in a bare green screened studio, he was forced to wear "The Helmet of Truth" - essentially a bucket with horns on it, as can be seen here;

The bearded, slightly psychopathic looking chap here is Hugo Myatt as Treguard, the guide, the dungeonmaster, much given to saying things like "Life force is becoming critical" and "But team, where is the trumpet to blow down the Walls of Jericho?". He would sit with the other members of the team, three classroom spods with pencils and paper who would shout "FORWARD! LEFT! LEFT! NO LEFT!" like someone playing a ZX81 text only adventure with a voice recognition system. They also had to cast spells, getting the spelling right, as some kind of educational sop to the "quality television" brigade. The watching kids, of course, thought this was a load of pointless bullshit getting in the way of the action.

And all the while, as the be-bucketed one struggled to get a key in a lock, or dispose of a troll, thumping heartbeat music would sound ominously, and a graphic of a face would appear in the corner of the screen. This would slowly disintegrate into a scary looking skull with bits of meat on it as the lifeforce ran out, always reminding me of the life indicator in the old Spectrum game "Atic Atac".

The show ran its course, as they always do, as even with some location footage mixed in and some updated graphics Knightmare began to look underpowered compared to the latest in Snezzy Megasony home video game technology. However, the charm of this and the earlier BBC2 "The Adventure Game" is unmatchable to any retro low tech lover like me!

Early Thoughts on Blake's 7 Reboot

Lots of chat about possible casting in both SFX and Digital Spy for this new crew of "One Innocent and Six Criminals" the showrunners have released. Obviously mainly about Avon, who I suspect given his unavoidably English anti-hero persona will get the Damian Lewis - Andrew Lincoln - Johnny Lee Miller second-level-brit-actor-in-usa-tv-show-to-give-it-gravitas position. But they won't want him to overshadow whoever they pick to play Blake, who is going to have to a rather tougher character to justify the show being about him. The original show was "Avon's 7" very early on in the piece.

Perhaps the rest of the casting will have the BSG formula of altering race and gender, and note they also have to find an extra character from the beginning to properly make up the 7 who escape en-oute to a penal colony - they are keeping the start of the story the same evidently. Zen could appear as a Bishop style Android perhaps, or an early entrace for Tarrant or more possibly Deyna.

And there is also Servalan to consider as it is unimaginable such an iconic female character should be missing from this reboot, but Morena Baccarin has just essentially played a rather similar looking character in V, so they might have to go in a slightly different direction from Jacqueline Pearce's unforgettable creation. But I hope they don't.

Above all, the show must be kept gritty and dark, but without the seeming self importance that has always put me off BSG. Do we have to ram Post 9:11 and Iraq slash Afghanistan metaphors into everything?

Let the story tell itself, without signposting "ALLEGORY! ALLEGORY! ALLEGORY!" over every damn thing.

The Adventure Game - a Joy of my Childhood

The Adventure Game was always something that filled me with excitement when I was a kid. Along with Blake's 7, which I'm sure it used to share an evening with in the early 80s, it was something I'd wait to see with all the childish excitment my body could muster.

A feeling I never have any more, ever.

Some wonderful person has been putting episodes online! Here's a bit of the first one ever made, with the charming Juilan Bream and John Williams theme tune, and a somewhat familiar looking future newsreader on duty as a shape shifting dragon.

This is obviously the earliest incarnation of the show - the evaporating floor seen in this clip would be replaced with the more familiar "Vortex" challenge of later years. I remember in particular the "Drogna" - the currency the dragon residents, or Argonds, of Arg. Little plastic discs with a coloured shape on, their value was derived from multiplying the number of sides with the colours position in the "Richard of York Gave Battle" mnenomic - hence a red circle was worth 1, and a blue pentagon was worth 25.

I was so obessed with the Drogna it was a mainstay of my internal aspergic head stories for years.

I used to love the computer game sequence, where early on the team's alpha male would sit at the keyboard of an Apple 2 to play a little text only adventure, where the command "SUBTRACT ADDER" sticks in my memory for some reason. Later on came the BBC model B, and the game Dogran Hole, where a little grumpy space dog would go into a hole in the wall, to be guided by the bloke, again, in a 3D Monster Maze type game. Thus the team would be distracted from failing to work out Lesley Judd was the evil mole, as happened every week.

I was thrilled as anything when Paul Darrow, the immortal Avon from Blake's 7, showed up one week, although his beard was offputting and he met a dismal evaporation fate for failing to remember a "PENTAGON-RED" tile sequence or some similar slip up.

I miss this show. Of course, The Crystal Maze was similar in conception, right down to the idea you progressed by winning crystals, but its charm was negated by the fact the contestants were a bunch of dimwitted yuppie cretins in boiler suits, as opposed to clever people like Heinz Wolff and Johnny Ball. Nowaadays, we have Dale Wintin camping it up at dimwits on lottery garbage output.

The joy of childhood can never be returned. Seeking it drives you mad, but watch these clips and be reminded of it for a little while...

As a final treat, here's David "The Chinese Detective" Yip taking on the Vortex in a later series.