2010 – The Year We Make Contact

I'm going to commit a few, unforgiveable, burn-me-at-the-stakes heresies here.

This is another of the sequels that is better than the original.

“How can you say that” you ask, as you stack the wood up and soak it in oil. “How can this workmanlike picture starring hammy old scrotum Roy Schneider be better than Kubrick's mindblowing spectacle.”

The truth is, very easily. Everyone likes 2001, because it is Kubrick, because it has got some spectacular visuals, but because IT IS A FILM YOU MUST LIKE IN ORDER TO LOOK INFORMED – AND OF COURSE, COOL.

This is bullshit. Hardly anyone really likes hard sci fi, and this movie is leaden with it. The film essentially boils down to:

Act 1 – Monkey's throw sticks at each other (witness opening of Star Wars Holiday Special for similar Simian grunting fun). For ages.

Act 2 – Endlessly praised match cut leads into hours of boring space ship stuff set to music by proto Nazis. The most noteworthy event here is a man visiting a toilet upside down.

Act 3 – Two very wooden astronauts do very dull things while watching themselves on “BBC12”. Computer eventually gets so fed up it kills everyone until its building block brain is removed.

Act 4 – Man goes down cool space tunnel while eerie Ligeti music plays; eventually he meets an older version of himself with a face covered in plasticene.

The End.

2010 has some cool spaceships, fantastic sequences involving aero braking around Jupiter, a bit of action, some hard sci fi elements that aren't as dry as dust, Helen Mirren, and John Lithgow playing a homosexual space engineer – this element of his character however is excised from the movie, although it is explicit in the book. OK it also has terrible voiceover exposition from Schneider, a horrible hokey cold war plot, and Helen Mirren doing a terrible Russian accent even though she is Russian while other members of the cast opt for Mr Chekov style “Nuklee-ar Wessels” tomfoolery.

But at least things happen!!! It doesn't bore the arse off you. 2001 is the world's most boring film ever, making Solaris look like Toy Story, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

And what other sci fi film can boast having a future Queens of the Stone Age keyboard player in the cast?

The young Natasha Scheider in 2010

And here with QOTSA for "Lullabies to Paralyse"

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.04.14

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

Splice - A Cronenberg Movie Like Cronenberg Used to Make

Although I have it on DVD, I haven't seen Splice in a while, so it was a pleasure to watch science out of control versus people, interspersed with watching out of control people versus science.

The documentary about the woman who tried to block life saving radiotherapy for her son "Neon" because she wanted to use crazed alternative therapies instead, was on Channel 4 and was equally compelling viewing.

Splice itself, directed by Vicenzo Natali who had showed what could be done with a one room set and a ton of imagination in "Cube" is another spin on the Frankenstein story, with scientists starting off with good intentions corrupted by the scope of their breakthrough. Their creation in this case being a doe eyed, model faced, bunny legged creature called "Dren".

Which always makes me giggle, "dren" meaning "crap" in Farscape speak.

Dren's creators, an ambitious and ever watchable Sarah Polley, and a geeky Adrian Brody, are forced to take their creation to a remote farm after the launch of a previous gene splicing experiment goes bloodily wrong at a media event. And here their attempts to get to Dren to express her human, feminine side over the rest of her varied animal componentry go disastrously wrong after when she seduces Brody, and kills her pet cat to boot.

And after that, things get seriously weird when we throw some transgendering into the ring, and a rape scene that disturbs more than Straw Dogs ever did.

"Splice" is essentially a Cronenberg body horror type movie, taking elements from "The Fly" and mixing in some "Jurassic Park" as well as Dren's genetics fly out of the control of her maker's. Some of the music is even reminiscent of Howard Shore's Cronenberg scores. It ought to be a B movie, by a director who has never really made it to the A's, but the performances of Polley, Brody, and in particular that of Delphine Chaneac as the disturbingly attractive Dren, make it rather more than that.

And it's a story which in a world where our drive for genetically improved food, drugs, and indeed children becomes more urgent, really resonates.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14/08/2013

The Extreme Sinus Problems of Outland

Just been fortunate to find a DVD copy of Peter Hyam's "Outland" for next to no money in the usual shop of ill repute.

Set in a drug addled mining colony on Jupiter's moon Io, it features an excellent Sean Connery in what is essentially a sci-fi update of "High Noon"; a lone white hat surrounded by corruption and having to take on the bad guys unaided.

Making use of the same blue collar vibe as Alien, with added lashings of the ever amusing "music of the future" and oily PVC clad space pole dancers, it's a pretty decent film. But the standout memory for the young me, seeing this movie as a thirteen year old kid or so, are the exploding heads.

People have drug freak outs in Outland. They think their working spacesuits have spiders in them, and they take their helmets off in a panic. Exposed to the vacuum, they undergo a troublesome cerebral expansion...

The fun doesn't stop there of course, and entering a depressurising airlock without a spacesuit is seen to cause major gastric issues.

When the bad guys arrive, despite being alone, Sean Connery is of course well up to the task. This David Crosby lookalike falls foul of the cunning of 007 and a chain smoking comic relief Doctoress.

The special effects, consisting of what appear to be inflateable footballs with crude faces stuck on them, are of course laughable now, as is the science - you don't blow up like Mr Creosote when exposed to a vacuum. But to a teenager, it was damn scary to imagine the panic, the fear, the terror of feeling your face, and eyes, and skin, and tissue, expand out into the unforgiving cold of space and rip you to shreds in a lengthy burst of stretchy agony.

Brrrr. Shivers...

CINEMA - Krell Wonders - The Forbidden Planet

At one point in this classic, vivid piece of science fiction film making, the id-ally challenged Doctor Morbius asks of strong chinned space captain Leslie Neilson "Would you like to see some more Krell Wonders?"

"Hell yes!" he replies, or words to that effect, and off they go to explore more chambers of inconceivable alien other wordliness.

"Hell yes!" I always say too, whenever I see the film.

Promo Poster that doesn't at all reflect the real atmosphere of the film

The child in me never gets to see enough of the Krell; their enormous, mysterious city with its electronically burbling  giant resistors and massive pill shaped "things" moving up and down for no apparent purpose; and the Krell themselves, entities we never know anything about other than the fact they need great broad pentagonal doors and were destroyed utterly by the same psycho-physical terror that Morbius is manifesting.

Yes I know that in terms of the purity of cinema, less is more, and don't reveal your monster blah blah, but my inner child always feels cheated by the lack of actual Krell. And as for their city, well, what else was there apart from the eye searing power source and the great echoing caverns of electricial switching mechanisms? Where did they live? What were their transport systems? Leisure? Agriculture?

The "electronic tonalities" of Louis and Bebe Barron, the first time a film had had such a score, add to the futuristic gloss of the whole production, and leaves you wanting so much more. I love the movie, and I still wonder what the krell world was still concealing from us, when it finally detonated its monsters of the id for good.

Gene Simmons, Tom Selleck, and the Acid Spiders of Runaway

Runaway is a film little seen on the small screen these days, and I've never come across it in all my charity shop and market stall rummages either.

And before you ask, finding it on the internet is cheating!

It's a film that sticks in the memory though. Because of Tom Selleck playing a near future cop trying to establish why people's formerly docile domestic housekeeping robots have gone suddenly rogue? No, I'm guessing that at the time Tom was still kicking himself for not being able to take the Indiana Jones gig when it was right under his nose, and was trying to make up for it by appearing in unsuccessful movies like this one, or the X rated Indy movie Lassiter.

Could it be that the villain of the film, dastardly manufacturer of microchips that turns droids into killers is none other than Gene Simmons of Kiss? No, he makes a reasonably effective villain, if a little monotone and his tongue undeployed.

The reason the movie is memorable is, like The Black Hole with its terrifying bowel churning robot Maximillian, that the movie is stolen by a robot. Or rather robots, and unlike the powerful hovering Maximillian with his whirling blades, these robots are small, eight legged and yet just as frightening.

These robot spiders have a seriously unpleasant, double threat. Not only do they inject their victims with acid to cause agonising pain, as is happening to Mr Simmons here;

they then explode.

They have a sinister, vibrating motion, coupled with an ability to jump like mechanical fleas onto walls next to the quivering necks of their victims...

...before plunging their acid dripping needles into the vulnerable flesh.

The film isn't an out and out turkey, it is watchable and although it never made Selleck into a major action star like he must have been hoping, he does a decent job. But to an 11 year old boy, as I was, the performances and the script just don't register.

What makes the impact is the thought of having killer robot spiders inject agonising, burning acid into your neck, a thought sufficient to make you go to sleep with a pillow over your head for a fair few nights!

Words copyright Bloody Mulberry 04/05/2013

Konga - British Sci Fi does Killer Gorillas

I have just been reading an excellent anthology of writing on British Sci Fi cinema from the days of "Things to Come" in the early 30s, as far as Hardware, the film in which Carl McCoy of flour covered wearing leather hat sporting goth botherers Fields of the Nephilim appeared.

In between it deals with Quatermass, invading space dominatrixes, the adaptations of John Wyndham novels and naughty (and under-rated) space vampire type movies Inseminoid and Lifeforce.

In amongst all that, was a chapter dealing with British monster movies of the 50s and 60s, in which Konga, a 1961 release from Anglo-Amalgamated featured prominently.

Obviously the film takes King Kong as its starting point, but the movie is evidently more influenced by the Toho studios Gaiju films i.e. a man in a monster suit rampages around a carboard city squashing cultural landmarks. Eventually the heroic British army reasserts control of the situation which was initially created by the usual sort of deranged scientist with an axe to grind before being exacerbated BY A MADWOMAN SCORNED. The film thus combines two of the fascinations of home grown sci fi - how science must be kept coralled and controlled lest it destroys Westminster Cathedral, and how women are an inherent bloody menace whether they are space or not. As ever, tea drinking normality is restored in the end.

I haven't seen it, but along with virtually every other film mentioned in this book, I have decided I must. It can't be much worse than Peter Jackson's version, which the carnivorous insect section apart, is overlong and overblown.

Doctor Parnassus and Lily Cole

I watched this movie again this afternoon, in a state of total enjoyment while never quite understanding what the film is about. Which is fair enough, because 1) I'm no superbright student of cinema and 2) I'm not sure Terry Gilliam knew either after Heath Ledger died.

The "Alt Ledger" sequences (Depp, Law, Farrell) do look, understandably, rather rushed. Especially Johnny Depp's sequence through the mirror

It doesn't stop the film from being a highly wonderful piece of cinema just for being there. It just is, and I'm a huge fan of movies like that. It looks amazing, sounds amazing, and is wonderfully cast.

"Wonderfully Cast"? Yes it is. Not for Heath Ledger, who actually with his floating point accent is probably the weakest thing in the movie (HERESY!!!!), but for Christopher Plummer, Andrew Garfield, Verne Troyer and Tom Waits. But especially, Lily Cole.

She can act, for sure, but most importantly she really does look like the sort of god-beautiful-given gift an immortal might spawn as the result of a pact with a particularly suave devil.

I love this film, but she makes me adore it, and if that makes me shallow, then by all means, take a paddle in me.

The Decadent Future - The Hunger Games, and The Fifth Element

It struck me, just before a lampost nearly did, as I cycled to work this morning, how much the capital city sequences of the "The Hunger Games" reminded me of the fabulous Besson and Gaulthier (oh yeah, and Moebius I think) created world of The Fifth Element...

I rewatched The Hunger Games over the weekend, and got stuck into the reasonably generous DVD extras, a rare thing on a plain old DVD these days. The powers that be want us to shell out for our extras on all The Blu Rays no-one seems to be buying. For all its origins as a piece of (horror word) "Young Adult" fiction , the film does end up being highly watchable yarn, thanks to a strong performance by Jennifer Lawrence.

And yes, I know it's a rip off of Battle Royale. Matters not.

So yes, at first that Effie Whatever person appears, and she's got fantastic shoes on, and a wig, and look, she keeps re-appearing in differently coloured wigs, and now Katniss and her drippy pal are in the big city, and everyone is dressed in these Regency inspired futuristic outfits or whatever, and it's all contrasted with the homey peasantness of the naieve kids, and also the gleaming holographic technology.

And yes, it reminds me of the Fifth Element, where the opression is more corporate than fascistic, yet the folks still live in super high rise squalor in apartments so cramped the shower occupies the same space as the fridge; yet folk dress in highly stylised parodies of fashions of many periods, and the entire aesthetically glorious world seems to be entirely populated by models.

There's a story to tell here I think, the comparison just begs to be made. Unfortunately, it isn't me to tell it. I love the idea of writing about film, but I just don't have the language. I want to write about the style and look of the film, but when trying to describe the wigs as I did above, I couldn't think of the right word. Restoration? Georgian? Ah, just go with Regency. That's probably close enough. I could use the word dystopia but it would probably just cause me dyspepsia as I tried to explain properly why it was a dystopia.

And then, actually trying to criticise one above the other, how can I do that without really knowing what the respective directors and designers were trying to state with their visions of the decadent future, and whether they achieved their goals or not. I haven't got any notes either, if I'd known I was going to be seized with the desire to write properly, I should have sat assiduously with notebook and biro making all the oh so logical and pertinent points I was going to make about both films.

I didn't. I was just taken heavily with the notion of writing about this idea as my hands cracked and dripped blood as I wandered upset amongst the endless racks and boxes, seeing the pen as the means of escape, but not knowing quite how to go about it...I love the Fifth Element more, and it looks far better, but why? *shrugs* I can't really explain it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 28/01/2013

Alien Resurrection - is it really so bad?

I needed to tidy, I needed to cook soup. I needed distraction that enabled me to lie under my duvet on the sofa and not do anything.

Not fancying another dose of Hawk the Slayer, I put Alien Resurrection on, which was sitting neglected next to it on a particularly dusty part of the shelf. I thought I might try and watch it with fresh eyes, and see if it is truly as bad as I remembered.


Alien is a classic piece of atmospheric, and let us not forget, sexual, horror. Aliens is a crash bang action fest where the extended cut should be avoided. And Fincher's Alien 3 gets slated by many, but I rather like it thanks to its strong cast and oily, greasy vibe. Where does Alien 4 fit in?

Needless to say, even taking a charitable view, it is comfortably the worst of the 4. Again, it's a strong cast with it's cultish crew of Ron Perlman, Dominic Pinon, and Michael Wincott, and Winona Ryder is not so really out of place. But it's script writer, a certain Josh Whedon, is. "If those things get loose, it's gonna make the Lacerta Plague look like a fucking square dance!" is symptomatic of the "yoof interest" awful dialogue that finds its way into the script. Add to this the endlessly clanged desire to explore Ripley's historic desire for motherhood results in a clearly not giving a toss Sigourney Weaver creeping around like a genetically engineered incestuous abuser, muttering in am dram fashion when she isn't cosying up to xenomorphs for some borderline interspecies nookie.

"I'm the monster's mother..." "You mean....my baby?..." Weaver breathes, and the audience giggles, turning into outright cackles when Brad Dourif's signature oddball introduces "The Newborn", the human-alien iceberg that sinks the movie in many more pieces that the Titanic went down in. Looking like a heavily KY'd Scooby Doo villain, the brain eating space pug dog roars, whimpers and coos through 'emotional' scenes with Weaver that plunge the depths of emetic bathos.

And then we have Jeunet's direction. It seems to me that he feels pretty early on in the piece that his chances of making a visceral masterpiece have been fatally compromised, and so decides to lather the gore on and seemingly stick cameras down people's throats on several occasions, while trying to fit in a bit of humour such as spaceship General chap Dan Hedaya giving a cornball salute before picking his cerebellum out of an alienised hole in the back of his skull. But the nadir is the scene where clone number 8 Ripley meets the previous failure versions of herself, seemingly including Captain Caveman in a jar; and Joey Deacon clone strapped to a bed dribbling "kill me" before meeting a humane and painless death at the end of a..er...flamethrower.

"Kill Me?" "Kill Us" chanted the audience.

Batman: The Dark Knight Rises

I watched some of this too, and like every single other Batman film ever made, I found it entirely un-involving. This was event cinema! I was spending the time setting up a twitter account for my sister and trying to learn a few things about her hTC 8X phone.

I just don't care very much.

I have no investment in the character I think...not that I haven't read a few of the comic book stories and enjoyed them, I thought Arkham Asylum was a wonderfully done and atmospheric piece of work...but I'm not a fanboy and I'm still, perhaps wrongly, of the opinion that all this Young Adult and Comic Book originated film-making is a bit lazy and risk free.

Someone write something entirely new!!!! Find a new story!!! But no, we have to buy into this bloody huge mythos over and over again.

The endless angst about the internal struggle within Batman, this constipated angst, is very off putting, multiplied as it is by Christian Bale's shitting a wardrobe performance and silly growly voice.

He's as rich as Croesus, I don't buy it! He has toys, and pretty girls, and a great life. Tormented? Get to fuck.

Tom Hardy as Bane ought to be a fantastic opponent, but like Batman, his dialogue is often incomprehensible, and when you can hear it it seems like it could have been nicked from Magneto in any X Men movie with an added serving of fruit. Anne Hathaway is gorgeous, but what else?

And finally, as I endlessly tried to find a profile picture my sister wouldn't kill me for, my overall impression of most of the film was watching a man climb a chimney, and falling off, for an hour. This isn't a film, this is the occupation of a seven year old urchin!

Prometheus

Got round to watching this on Christmas Day.

I'd been led to believe it's very bad. It isn't. It's just a wee bit "meh" - with odd sorts of plot holes that either the film, or my own stupid brain, aren't explaining.

Like why is there a Geiger illustration of an alien seen in the Engineer habitat before anything resembling "The Alien"  - which seems to be created by genetic chance event instigated by David the android - exists, and David's motivation for carrying out a little unpleasant human experimentation isn't really explained.

As is also to be fair typical for movies of this nature, characters do daft things for no reason; "ooh look we're in a bit of this unknown habitat where strage creatures are afoot, let's stay here stomping about like idiots instead of leaving." That sort of thing. Other characters seem to have absoloutely nothing to do in the film whatsoever, hello to you most of the Prometheus crew!

The film is pretty. It has great scale. It's not unenjoyable. But the equation "Ridley Scott plus Alien Prequel" provides a lesser answer than what we hoped.

I'd trade my Glave for a Krull DVD

Krull is a very underrated film, I find. It crops up in sad unwanted corners, like the 5* channel on a sunday afternoon, confined to the 19th century syphillitic lunatic asylum of the media while inferior product gets it on on the proper channels.

Sad.

Krull, is of course a typical and utterly banal revival fantasy swashbuckler of the early 1980s - see also The Sword and the Sorceror, Conan, Ladyhawke etc - featuring the never seen again Ken Marshall, an uncharismatic pretty boy who at least isn't wearing a girls skirt like Tom Cruise in Legend; and also the English, but dubbed by American Lindsay Crouse, Lysette Antony who was seen to best advantage not wearing very much in the Depeche Mode video for "I Feel You."

The plot is of the typical "Rescue the princess from evil fascist lizard being" variety, with the usual "Oh no, our primary method of finding the princess has failed what can we do" "Well we can follow this extremely dangerous alternative that probably won;t work but just might even though it seemingly bears no relevance to our problem" "OK then" obstacle.

In the way, are snake brained Barabarellan leathermen called Slayers, who's reptile brain escapes are always censored out of matinee showings much to many a bloodthirsty child's disappointment. They have laser staffs (rather like the Gou'ald in Stargate) which happily can only fire once before they revert to a stabbier use. They serve "The Beast" who lives in a tormentier version of Howl's Moving Castle and who consists of a badly designed creature mixed in with close up library shots of an Iguana.

Yes, it's derivative, and silly, with mystically daft weapon, horrible comic relief and annoying basin haircut child - many of the rules of "How to be an Evil Overlord" have clearly been lifted from this film. But, it has a great strength, a fantastic UK and Irish supporting cast - ALun Armstrong, Liam Neeson, Robbie Coltrane, Freddie Jones, Francesca Annis an, err, Tucker Jenkins from Grange Hill. Their character banterings and bickerings make the film, and indeed save it from the more wooden leads, while "Carry On's" Bernard Bresslaw gets the more lumbering philosophical dialogue to show off his proper acting aspirations.

You can guess if it all ends happily or not! It doesn't for me, because Ive wanted to find it on DVD for ages. Yes, it's on TV all the bloody time, BUT I WANT IT FOR REAL DAMMIT. And I can't.

SHORT FILM - The Drowned World

Is there Life on Mars

Hiding in obscure little canteens at work. The size of phone booths. Populated by me, and a few fork lift truck drivers, an entirely alien race in themselves. Quiet.

And often I had the TV to myself, the fact the remote didn't work is only a minor irritation.

So, a couple of times, I've been able to sit eating my sandwiches (processed hand and processed cheese atop processed bread) and take in a bit of George Pal's 1953 version of War of the Worlds. And you know what, it stands up pretty well!

The colours are lush...the effects astonishing for the time...the spaceships look like they belong on the Paris Metro...the aliens are interesting...Gene Barry is brick of chin but not too wooden...it does follow elements of the book...the heat rays and green ball lightning effects looks great...there are some wonderful stereotyped foreign scientists especially the dutch woman who later found herself in Tenko I must think...buildings being blown up for no clear strategic reason APART FROM SHEER MARTIAN EVIL...look at that water tower go up boys!...Spielberg blatantly ripped off the martians for ET and justice was served when his War of the Worlds turned out to be shit.

It packs a lot into to its 80 minutes. Still deserves to be regarded highly. Although not as highly as a good English set version of the Wells book  would be if it ever got made. And not by Pendragon Pictures.

Doomsday

I bought Doomsday a while back, another "off to Cash Converters" £1.50 spent on a DVD, a DVD sold for god only knows what desperate purpose.

Profiting out of misery. That's what me and Cash Converters do.

Anyway, Doomsday is a film that crops us often enough on Sy Fy and I watch out of the corner of my eye, cut price Angelina Jolie  - but more attractive and less haggard - and former Lara Croft Rhona Mitra throwing some eye patched shapes while coping with Bob Hoskins using the same voice he did in thar Paul Hardcastle song that wasn't "19".

"Fink of the maaahney! Imagine what you caaan do wiv it!"

That one.

The film is from the same team that came up with the far superior Dog Soldiers and The Descent, and large chunks of the cast of those two films are lurking about here in minor to middling roles, leaving Mitra, Hoskins, Doctor Bashir from Deep Space 9, concrete voiced professional Scotsman David O'Hara and Malcolm "Mark of Quality Cinema" McDowell upfront. Sean Pertwee also gets to do his trademark dying before half time shtick.

The film is terrible. It is also brilliant. It is a blatant Mad Max rip off, not only of 2, but 3. The acting is bobbins, the script mainly terrible apart from some decent off beat humour and the plot largely an irrelavance compared to the odd, jarring but decently different jolt from chain saw custom buggy mayhem to Excalibur style sword maiming and a lengthy section that seems to exist only for Adrian Lester to show off his martial arts moves.

But to me, the whole sequence in the cannibal emo stadium makes the movie worthwhile; fantastically soundtracked by Adam and the Ants, Fine Young Cannibals (you'll never hear me say that again) and Siouxsie and the Banshees, a mohawked future death punk serves up crispy fried Pertwee to his minions while yelling great stuff about catching, cooking and eating his enemies. Fishnetted pole dancers strut and sway, and a busty lady in a bad tribal facial tattoo does some serious leering.

It ought to be worse than Tina Turner doing her "Welcome to Thunderdome" chain mail bra routine with Angry Anderson not singing the Scott and Charlene wedding song, but it isn't; the sequence works really well. Which makes me wonder, with the brains behind the movie that there were, the film isn't a whole lot better than it is.

Dreams of Teide.mp4

OPINION - Richard B. Riddick

Every so often I check in on IMDB or Wiki or whatever, to find out what the latest progress on the next Riddick film is.

Now, as I read somewhere else, Vin Diesel now looks like Tony Hart's plasticine pal Morph, but Riddick was a fantastic creation that made him a star. Pitch Black was a superior and innovative B Picture. The Chronicles of Riddick like David Lynch's Dune was hampered by some daft scripting and terrible acting - not by Mr Diesel himself - but was fantastically designed and conceptualised. The section set on Crematoria and in the choking sulphorous prison was great.

My problem with it was that it was just not from the same universe as Pitch Black. That said, I thought the Necromogers were fascinating, and was looking forward to seeing how Riddick's apparent rise to Lord Martial would develop, and whether we would see the Underverse.

Well, we've apparently all died before our due time. The latest little bit  googling reveals that Riddick 3, or simply "Riddick" seems to be a stripped down affair, with some odd sounding casting for a major release - Katee Sackhoff, former WWE superstar Batista?  - with Riddick stranded on an alien world fighting monsters and mercenaries. We're back in a Pitch Black universe, by the looks of things.

Karl Urban's back, although I'm not surprised that Thandie Newton isn't.

It maybe that we will see Furya and Underverse in two mooted sequels, but I'm guessing the backers want to see if the Riddick character flies, financially speaking, before going larger scale.

I hope it does. I love these movies. There's something a shade different about Riddick's universe that deserves a bigger audience.

Hey, I'm writing a Feature Film Screenplay

I've wanted to for many many years, but have always been afraid to.

Now, I'm conquering my fears, my ADHD, my disorganisation, and I'm having a go. Just as an experiment. Just to see if I can do it. The presence of Prometheus inspires. As does watching all the Lord of the Rings special features...the process of creation is such a wonderful thing.

It's an adaptation, of a very very obscure sci fi novel - will worry about rights later, if it ever comes to that. I'm making changes, making it my own, trying to find something new in the story, trying to make it more relevant to 2012, trying to make a stronger story. Because my primary function is as a storyteller above all else.

I'm writing a feature film.

And I'm doing it from memory.

OPINION - Prometheus and the Too Futuristic Prequels

Well, with many other people I sat into the first advert break of Homeland, which I never watch, to see the Prometheus trailer.

I was excited, but stupid-feeling. I had become one of the hated fanboy trailer freaks who sit through a 4 hour domestic drama set on a farm in India in order to see a trailer for the latest Spielberg attraction, while scrawling notes in a jotter at banshee pace.

I've only done it before. Honest. And only because I was keen to see what aforementioned Spielberg's martian fighting machines looked like. But I wanted to part of something; I wanted to be a member of the community of the first, and do my #areyouseeingthis - hello Corporal Hicks was it? - tweets with the rest of the UK, or world, whatever.

And I was going to write about it - ooh that's a very nostromo looking silhouette there, hmm the Prometheus ship reminds me of Serenity crossed with the Betty from Alien Resurrection; or my god Wutani engineered the xenomorphs - HUMANITY BROUGHT IT UPON THEMSELVES!!!!

But no. Leave it to proper film writers, not hopeless wannabes like me.

The point that does occur, with all the flashing lights, colourful spacesuits, super resoloution pictures, flashy computer screens, and a space jockey hologram thing where he looks far too much like the elephant man not to have a slight giggle, the whole film looks too new.

It's a prequel world. Set god knows how many years before the low tech grimey "Space Truckers" of the first Alien movie, the world of Prometheus features rinky dink gesture control displays and neon heads up displays. Alien had  Apple 2 10 pixels per square yard monitors the size of a postage stamp. Is humantiy supposed to have devolved in the same amount of time it factually took us to get from the Wright Flyer at Kittyhawk to the Jumbo Jet?

It doesnt make sense!

Take David, the beautiful nazi wet dream android played by the enviable Michael Fassbender. He is supposed to have evolved into those far more attractive models, er Ian Holm and Lance Henrickson!

Logically, surely the android should thus have started looking like Kirk Douglas' scrotum???

It's a minor point I know. I'm a pointlessly cross silly geek. Of course film makers are going to want to use the nicest tricks, the fanciest shizzle, all their latest effects. But to me, it never rings true. The TV Enterprise prequel emphasised "Hey, No sliding automatic doors!!!" but still looked like it was filmed 400 years later, while the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot prequel looked like it was shot 4000 years later.

And as far Star Wars Episode 1, it was "A Long time ago, in a galaxy far far shinier and newer, than the first one."

My ever lasting prequel bugbear. And may god curse my soul.