PROMETHEUS (2012)

Now the dust has settled and the weight of expectation dissipated I finally settled down to watch Ridley Scott’s long anticipated PROMETHEUS. A prequel of sorts to the ALIEN franchise its release set the Xenomorph amongst the pigeons for being not very good. Many people were expecting another horror film in space and what they got was an unexpected mediation on the nature of man. Though I have always thought anything is better as long as it is...IN SPACE.

A team of scientists and support crew answer an ancient riddle and find themselves far across space on an isolated planet. When they arrive they find the answer may not have been what they were looking for.

PROMETHEUS is an incredibly frustrating film. All the elements are there for a classic but somewhere along the line it all goes horribly wrong (which is very much the film’s plot but I doubt it was meant to be a meta mediation on the nature of film making).  What is right with this film is the art side. Ridley Scott’s direction and editing is superb as ever. The art design is breathlessly good. There is a lovely sense of retro with the suit designs but combined with modern sensibilities. One of my major issues with science-fiction is the habit of doing pointlessly futuristic versions of things which have not changed in millennium. “This isn't chess this is chess...IN SPACE” and so on. Prometheus keeps it pleasingly simple. Coffee cups look like coffee cups and t-shirts look like they are from Primark. It suffers from the same problem as the STAR WARS prequels did. The film, set chronologically first in the film continuity, have more advanced looking tech than those set afterwards. PROMETHEUS gets away with it by having this as a state-of-the-art expedition whereas the tech in ALIEN was on a run-down space barge and I doubt such matters were a concern for the casual viewer.

What is a cause of concern for the casual viewer is the script of PROMETHEUS is a confused mess.  In theory it should be fine as it is nominally by Damon Lindelhof, Hollywood’s go to man for consistently good sci-fi.  Having read his superior initial draft of the script I wonder if either corporate meddling or Ridley Scott asked for changes which sent the whole work into a blind alley. The initial draft was closer to ALIEN and this film is basically Erich Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods? It is all Ancient Astronauts and secrets from the dawn of man rather than phallic Aliens stalking people around corridors.  In losing the horror aspect it rather loses any point in being linked to the ALIEN franchise.  There are plot holes a plenty, characters act illogically and everybody seems terrible at their jobs. There are archaeologists ripping open tombs with a gay abandon and biologists contaminating samples left and right. Though I concede if they did their jobs properly it would somewhat take from the drama. They could have switched the film’s genres as I would have paid to see Time Team...IN SPACE.

"I'm Dr. Elizabeth Shaw"

PROMETHEUS has one very odd thing about it. I think, on a fundamental level, the reason this film does not work is Ridley Scott has made a DOCTOR WHO adventure and forgotten to put the Doctor in. It is reminiscent of Colony In Space or the Mutants with its themes of industrial arrogance and colonialism. All of the film’s problems would have been solved by Jon Pertwee striding around the place pointing out the obvious. Are your archaeologists being useless? Let the Doctor tell them that and show them what they should be doing.  If your film ends because somebody does something stupid let the Doctor doing something terribly clever and point out the folly of your plan. One of the characters even shares a name with one of Pertwee’s companions: Dr. Elizabeth Shaw.  

"No I'm Dr. Elizabeth Shaw"

PROMETHEUS could have been wonderful instead it is simply, all right. It entertains but it falls apart too much to ever be good. It is a shame they did not realise and embrace their DOCTOR WHO roots as nothing would have been better than if they had landed on the isolated planet to find, waiting in the dark, Daleks.

THE BLACK HOLE (1979)

This is a film which has passed me by over the years. One of the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom films of the late 70s and early 80s it was one of Disney’s rare excursions into darker territory (Both literally and figuratively; the film’s about a Black Hole). THE BLACK HOLE has become something of a curio over the years. Unlike its Disney stable mate Tron it has inspired no spin-offs or calls for sequels.  The only real presence it has in pop culture is V.I.N.CENT, the floating robot which clearly came about as an attempt to emulate R2 D2s success. I had caught moments of it over the years on television but had always missed the first 20 minutes so never watched it through. My SKY TV package had been trailing the new Disney Film Channel for some months but all the trailers had focused exclusively on its animation output so it was a great delight when flicking through the on demand section one night on my iPad I found that it rather more than that. Such gems as One of My Dinosaurs is Missing are out of the remit of this blog so I finally settled on filling my sci-fi film knowledge’s black hole (Ahh see what I did there. I impress nobody)

The research vessel the USS Palomino discovers a long lost ship, the USS Cygnus, on the event horizon of a black hole. Empty except for the scientist Dr. Hans Reinhardt and a crew of mysterious robots the course is set beyond the final frontier and into the black hole.

"R2-D2. Is he famous?"

This is a really decent film and has been unfairly forgotten in the annuls of sci-fi cinema. It is a good story which an interesting cast and great production design but I think I can see why it has fallen from the radar. It has a confused tone as it lacks the rigour of hard sci-fi and the daring-do of space opera. In falling in-between it is not successful as either. I think there was a serious Silent Running esque story at the core of this film but the success of Star Wars led to the introduction of melodramatic elements which might have been left for another film. If you can imagine 2001 with cute robot sidekicks and laser battles you are not a million light years away from this film. Actually that would be a great film – Hal in the body of a golden butler with a psychotic glint and the Monolith at the end transforms into a massive robot with a gun.  But I digress.

The film takes a turn into very 2001 territory at the end with a strange bit of metaphorical madness involving heaven and hell imagery. I dismissed it as quite tame then realised it was fairly bold for more modern Disney. It has that air of darkness which the original Disney films had but became lost once Walt Disney’s vision was replaced by corporate pastiche.

A wonderfully eclectic cast including Ernest Borgnine, Roberts Foster and Norman Bates himself Anthony Perkins creates a great texture to this film playing characters far from the traditional Hollywood archetypes. I cannot think of another large budget film with an aging cast full of scientists and journalists.  Roddy McDowell voices V.I.N.CENT and rather raises the role above that cute robot sidekick. His sarcastic, droll performance gently undercuts the whole thing. He is almost a prototype for Joss Whedon’s knowing characters.

The real stand-out of this film is the production design. It is fantastic on a scale we rarely see these days. Huge physical sets which look like somebody has translated sci-fi book covers into vivid architecture. There’s a reality to it modern green-screening cannot approach. The USS Cygnus is a wondrous thing and I was wondering why it seemed familiar. I think it may have been an influence on the Destiny in Stargate Universe. There are certain similarities of scale and design which seem more than subconscious. Vast industrial spaces illuminated by sulfurous yellow arc lights like a Stoke-On-Trent in space.

This could have been a great film but it does not quite manage to get there. I think it may have been Disney corporate policy which held it back. It is with some trepidation I hear a remake is abroad from the director of Tron: Legacy. There is nothing really sacred in this film, no internet fan voices clamoring for nostalgia which can hamper the best of reboots. I rather hope they embrace the impossible in the remake and make it into the film it should have been.

THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955)

As it is the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who this year I have decided it was time to revisit his immediate fictional predecessor Bernard Quatermass. Invented by Nigel Kneale in the 1950s Quatermass was a British Rocket Scientist who took on unknown alien menaces threatening humanity (well the British Countryside). 

Originally a BBC series the Quatermass Experiment Hammer licenced it for the screen in 1955 and began its success sparked the Hammer Horror genre. I shall be watching the whole Quatermass series and so begin where it all started.

A mission to space, launched by Prof. Bernard Quatermass' British Rocket Group, goes ever wrong and crashes back to earth. Only one of the three astronauts has survived and he begins to change into something else, something inhuman. When he escapes from custody Quatermass realises that what the astronaut is turning into is a threat to all humanity.

This is a frustrating film. I enjoyed it but I do not think I can say it is actually a good film. The script compresses the orginal 6 part BBC drama in 90 minutes which gives it a great pace. However, there is something lacking in this film. Some things happen and then at the end they stop and I never quite care about the journey. The more I have thought about the more I have wondered if it is because it was essentially the first Hammer Horror. It lacks the  vividness and lurid incident of the later films and goes beyond taking itself seriously. Hammer Horrors were never tongue in-cheek, that was a dreadful post-ironic media imposition, but they knew what they were there for. To get the teenagers in on a Friday night on the promise of swooning maidens and horrid monsters. The Quatermass Xperiment comes across as too earnest and it seems like it wants to say something relevant about the space race when it does not actually have an opinion.

"Evening All"

This feeling is not helped by the casting of Brian Donleavy as Quatermass.I do not think I have ever seen such a spectacular bit of miscasting in any film. The character is written as  a questing enthusiastic scientist seeking to push the boundaries of science but Donleavy delivers it like some humourless drill sergeant less interested in the pursuit of knowledge than throwing his weight around. His performance is stiff and lifeless and every time he walks on screen the film sinks. What is even more frustrating is the supporting cast are uniformly excellent with Lionel Jeoffries appearing briefly and being more Quatermass than Quatermass himself. One piece of casting which I did not know about and was a pleasant uprise was Jack Warner was Police Inspector Lomax. Dixon of Dock Green himself plays Lomax with a gusto which draws you in. I see why he became Britain's favourite copper for all those years. He is set up as the counterpoint to Quatermass, the supposed rationalist and intellectual, as a salt-of-the-earth man who believes in the bible. He comes to accept what is happening because of the evidence presented even if he does not think man should be meddling. Clearly there was supposed to be more of an opposition on the character arcs between Lomax and Quatermass. Lomax accepts that the events are going wrong because of the evidence presented. Quatermass who was supposed to embrace the unknown, has his faith in science and progress put to the test by events going wrong, or more importantly, not as he predicted. This is there in the script but Donleavy's stilted baleful performance robs the film of any of it.

"I don't know what's stiffer. This man or your acting"

There are some lovely moments in the film. A wonderfully strange bit when the changing astronaut absorbs a cactus into his body for no discernible reason (well there is a bit of techno-babble why but it never really explains the scene). Later on there is a riff on the scene from Universal's Frankenstein when the Monster encounters the child playing. Unlike in that film there is no real denouement to the scene apart from perhaps indication of the last vestige of the astronaut's humanity when he leaves the child to play. 

But those two scenes alone do not a great film make. This film has more worth as a curiosity than an actual film on its own merits. If you are a fan of Hammer Horror it is interesting to see where it all began and to see the first hero of British TV on the big screen. The film was named the Quatermass Xperiment to cash in on the new X Certificate fad but it never quite lives up to its own publicity. It set the stage for what was come but never really comes to life itself. So an inauspicious start to watching the Quatermass series but hopefully it can only get better from here. I am disappointed nobody has done the Quatermass XXXperiment yet.

DREDD (2012)

Superheroes films are everywhere these days with Marvel's multiple franchises, DCs endless cash-bat with the Dark Knight films and its upcoming Superman reboot. British superheroes have never had much representation in any medium other than the comics they came from. Marvel may be giving us the Avengers and all related to it but we have yet to see House of Dolmann or The Leopard of Lime Street make it to the cineplex. British comics has always had on character which has stood out head and massively padded shoulders above the rest; Judge Dredd. In 1995 Slyvester Stallone attempted to bring the lawman to the screen and failed utterly. The film was an appalling mess and attempted to turn the heavy 80s satire of the original story into a hilarious buddy cop flick. A film so awful it actually made me wish Judge Dredd's method of summary justice existed so I could condemn Stallone's co-star Rob Schneider, to death for the excruciating horror of his performance in the film. Seventeen years later Dredd comes back in a film that almost gets it right.

In the future megalopolis of Mega-City One law enforcement is run by Judges. Street police with the power to act as judge, jury and, if necessary, executioner. Judge Dredd is sent on routine patrol with with the trainee Judge Anderson, a mutant psychic. They end up trapped in a locked down housing complex chased by the suppliers of the latest designer drug Slo-Mo, the Ma-Ma gang.

Dredd succeeds because of the simplicity of its script, it is Die Hard in the future. With the action confined to one location, the slum tower block Peach Trees, the narrative drives forward unrelentingly  Dredd, by the nature of character as the mono-syllabic, faceless enforcer of the law cannot change. He is a constantly frozen figure with a closer resemblance to a narrative macguffin than an actual character. 

The character arc shifts to Judge Anderson as we see her develop from substandard trainee to the newest Judge on the street. By the end of the film all the questions set up at the start are answered and all the characters have changed which is much better than most action films. Even Dredd learns something by the end of the film. Dredd does not change but he finds a new way to look at being the law which is quite the trick to pull off.

"Tonight on Take Me Out"

The acting is uniforming exellent with Karl Urban getting Dredd bang on right. Lena Hedley, who is rapidly turning into the screen favourite evil British woman, puts in a great performance as Ma-Ma. She manages to find a different type of evil to her portrayal of Cersei in Game of Thrones which impressed me.

The film looks amazing. Shot in South Africa it manages to make the best of its relatively limited budget. By stripping back the sci-fi trappings of the comic books it is a successful update. Mega-City One was a projection of Thatcher's Britain full of punks and tower blocks but this takes a different satirical tack. It seems more like a right-wing Daily Mail nightmare of an inner city. Full of unemployment,feral children and tattooed gang wars. It is clever and very well realised. Shot on RED digital cameras the hi-res videography gives it a brilliant sheen. The cinematography really stands out as it seems they have found somebody who can light for RED cameras without making it look like its shot on BBC Drama videotape.

"Judge Dredd? No. Never heard of him mate"

The one thing the film lacks is Judge Dredd's heavy social and corporate satire. Dredd is in an unfortunate position that a knock-off got there first. RoboCop by Paul Verhoevan was ripped off Judge Dredd with a faceless law enforcer who never slept. Even visually RoboCop looks like Dredd down to the helmet and voice activated weapon. Verhoevan filled his film with the kind of satire of adverts, consumer culture and eighties economics which ran rife through the Judge Dredd comics. To take this approach could have lead to accusations of ripping off to rip off. Although I suspect enough time has passed since the original RoboCop they could have got away with it. Given how clever the script was with distilling the essence of Dredd it is a shame none of the strips satire made it onscreen.

This film looks good, its well written and it is a British superhero on the big screen. It is a shame it was not more of success at the cinema. If late night weekend showings still existed I suspect it would be doing a roaring trade given the incredibly graphic levels of violence and slightly bonkers acting. It seems to be doing massive business on download and DVD which makes me hope there may be a market other than the cinema. Many of the downloaders like Amazon and iTunes are investigating original programming and Dredd would seem a good place to start. 

So Dredd you were not quite the success of Batman or Iron Man but it far more interesting and engaging than either. Like most British comic books really.

THE MUTATIONS AKA THE FREAKMAKER (1974)

THE MUTATIONS AKA THE FREAKMAKER (1974)

Students from a local university are being kidnapped and delivered to a madman for experimentation. Meanwhile a dark Carnival shows its new freaks to 70s London. Could they be related? 

An almost forgotten gem THE MUTATIONS AKA THE FREAKMAKER is a film I have been wanting to see for years. Starring the ever present Donald Pleasance I became aware of the film from Doctor Who Magazine. Pleasance's co-star in this, is the Fourth Time Lord himself Tom Baker in what must have been his final film role before he took the keys to the TARDIS. Directed by the great Jack Cardiff this is a unique entry in the canon of British horror and exploitation.

Donald Pleaseance plays Professor Nolter the, as ever deranged, scientist who tests his theories on crossbreeding plants and animals on unwilling students. Tom Baker plays Lynch, the deformed owner of a travelling Freak Show, who abducts Nolter's test subjects. The failed experimental mutants become side-show attractions for Lynch's circus. However, soon a revolt by the circus performers and an escaped mutant brings the freak making to an end.

This film is a horror miscellany with a plot that appears to be cobbled from two different scripts altogether. We have a plot about a mad scientist and his deformed assistant and a plot about a revolt in a circus freak show and neither really have any bearing on the other. It gives the impression somebody watched Frankenstein and Todd Browning's Freaks and decided they should make a beautiful mutant baby. It is such an audaciously odd mash-up it transcends itself. There's a unreal atmosphere which permeates the film helped by the vivid saturated Eastman colour, odd soundtrack and casting actual circus freaks. 

Every box of a horror film is ticked on a lurid register. Young ladies in danger, a dashing hero, a twisted henchman and a mad scientist who has lost sight of his humanity. One of the Professor's mutant experiment's escapes half way through and becomes the eventual hero of the piece.  It creates an almost textbook retelling of Frankenstein with the monster who is more human and humane than his creator. There is also a howlingly clumsy late in the plot romance between two characters who are never developed. I wonder if the producers watched it and decided they needed a romance so just gave some lines to two extras.

However, there is an odd artificiality to the film. Ironically with Tom Baker in the cast if feels more like a Doctor Who version of a horror film than an actual horror film. It is essentially the Brain Of Morbius but without the Doctor and Sarah Jane. 

"The Unexpected Delights of Speed Dating" 

The cast are all wonderful. Donald Pleasance is hardly in it and his performance is almost identical to Dr. Loomis in Halloween. Rumour has it the role was originally intended for Vincent Price which I can well imagine. Tom Baker is always Tom Baker but he puts in a rather more restrained performance than would come as his legend grew. The Circus Freaks like the Human Pretzel, The Alligator Woman and Popeye help to contribute to the films rather arch air by not acting. Clearly chosen because they were freaks rather than actors they give those odd performances only non-actors can. They reminded me of Mick Jagger in Performance, and Tory budgets.

The cinematography is lovely with some fantastic time lapse photography in the opening credits. It is the film's soundtrack by Basil Kirchen which really stands out. Kirchen produced a number of soundtracks for films like The Abomnible Dr. Phibes, and his strange jazz is so mutated from its origins it fits the film. Kirchen was known for an album called "Worlds Within Worlds" where he prefigured sampling and looping by mixing the sounds of insects and autistic children with jazz noodling. It is a suitably unreal soundscape for such an unreal film.

The biggest surprise in this film is the director. In what is essentially an exploitation B-Movie the director is Academy Award nominee cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Jack Cardiff's work spanned silent cinema to the mid 80s. He was the cinematographer on everything to A Matter of Life and Death to Conan the Destroyer. His directorial output was intriguing for a man who had worked for Orson Welles and Powell and Pressburger it was all pretty exploitation. He directed Scent of Mystery (Presented in Smell-O-Vision) and the Dark of the Sun. A long forgotten and incredibly violent account of the Congo Crisis which had the greatest poster tag line I have ever seen "You don't kill for women. You don't kill for Diamonds. You kill because you're paid for it". I hope it was because he was a fan of genre. I revel in very skilled artists and authors who never leave the confines of the genres they love, like Neil Gaiman and Quentin Tarantino. It really is a bit like finding Steven Spielberg making a revenge fantasy about topless Biker babes.

"All-right babes, I wanna spray tan"

I am pleased I managed to finally see the film and it is so very odd that I wish they still made films like this. It would certainly liven up BBC2s late night schedule. There is simply not enough these days about mutants and chemical freaks.  Now if you will excuse me I am off to watch The Only Way is Essex.

WEREWOLF (TV PILOT) 1987

WEREWOLF (TV PILOT)

With vampires back in vogue werewolves have never had much representation beyond film. WEREWOLF was one of the few, an American TV series on the fittingly canid Fox Network in 1987-1988. I had heard of this series for a few years from scant mentions in TV Zone Magazine so it was an unexpected delight when my obsessive trawling of charity shops and market stalls turned up the pilot episode on battered VHS.

Eric Cord is a typically American 30 year old college student whose roommate Ted asks him to kill him after he becomes a werewolf. I doubt this was an intentional metaphor for house sharing but certainly puts the washing-up rota into perspective. After shooting Ted and becoming a werewolf he tries to cure himself by killing the originator of the curse which turned him, a one-eyed, horror cliche of a man called Janos Skorzeny.

Script wise this is actually pretty decent. It betrays its origins as a TV pilot script as it sets up the situation, characters, motive and format all in 80 minutes. It has a pacing to it most modern films can only dream of, with a brevity which reminds me of the very early Universal horror films. It is a cursed by his superpower man-on-the-run format similar to The Incredible Hulk. I suspect the rest of the series involved him drifting from town to town searching for Skorzeny while being chased by a bounty hunter he crosses paths with in the pilot. Unfortunately as he turns into a wolf it does make me think of it as a lychanthropic Littlest Hobo (There's a Moon, that keeps on calling me) which slightly robs it of dramatic tension.

The effects are better than some films but he design work is strange with the werewolves looking more like gorillas than either men or wolves. Skorzeny has a beautifully gross transformation when he literally pulls his skin off which is one of the few instances of that style I can think of. It looks like 90s TV series, all badly mastered film to video transfer and shonky graphics.

The greatest bit in this entire film is the music score. Clearly taking a nod from the Highlander TV series it is all heavy metal and rock noodling.  I have never heard a score entirely composed of a guitar solo but I reveled in how ridiculous it sounds in some places. Axe grinding may be suitable when he turns into werewolf but it is less so when man wanders about a boat marina for a bit.

A nice idea slightly hamstrung by its need to begin a series of episodic adventures. Hopefully we might see a new werewolf series on TV one of these days perhaps merging it with reality TV as The Werewolf Whisperer.