Doctor Who: Terror of the Autons / Planet of the Spiders

This month sees a noteworthy pair of classic Who stories hitting the silver platter, including Jon Pertwee’s swansong, “Planet of the Spiders.” But before getting there, let’s first travel back to 1971.

Though “Terror of the Autons” kicked off producer Barry Letts’s second season, it was the first story he had a solid hand in guiding. (The previous year had been crafted in large part by outgoing producer Derrick Sherwin.) Letts wanted to bring a warmer feel to the show, so out went the Doctor’s scientist companion Liz Shaw, and in came the bubbly Jo Grant (Katy Manning), as well as the dashing Captain Mike Yates (Richard Franklin). The pair, along with the Doctor (Jon Pertwee), the Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney) and Sergeant Benton (John Levene), helped Letts bring the “family” to UNIT. But there was one piece of the puzzle missing, and Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks surmised that the relationship between the Doctor and the Brigadier had grown into a Holmes/Watson dynamic, so they felt the show needed a Moriarty, as well. Enter the Master.

Letts claims that Roger Delgado was always his first and only choice for the Doctor’s arch-nemesis, and from the moment he appears onscreen, it’s easy to see why. Right off the bat Delgado is, in the words of Frank Booth, “one suave fucker.” He looks like he’s been playing the part for years rather than minutes, and as a viewer you immediately understand him and get where he’s coming from. Yet the Doctor doesn’t seem to view him as an immediate threat, and frequently in the story it’s almost as if he’s looking forward to sparring with someone who’s an equal.

Read the rest of the DVD review for "Terror of the Autons," as well as "Planet of the Spiders" by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

Being Human: Season Three

Of the Season Two finale of Being Human, I wrote that it “sets up a third season that will either be brilliant or a disaster.” Well, I’m both sad and happy to report that it is neither. Much happened in the last two episodes of the second season – the Box Tunnel massacre led by Mitchell (Aidan Turner), the resurrection of Herrick (Jason Watkins), and most importantly, Annie (Lenora Crichlow) being forced to go through the door into Purgatory, and Mitchell vowing to retrieve her. All of these elements play heavily into Season Three to varying degrees of success.

Now, Mitchell’s trip to Purgatory sure seemed like it would make for great television and the series wastes no time getting him there. It turns out to be nothing more than a drab house full of strange rooms that recall moments of Mitchell’s checkered past, and a slightly annoying woman called Lia (Lacey Turner), who foretells that the vampire will be killed by a “wolf-shaped bullet.” Oh, and she also happens to be the ghost of one of Mitchell’s Box Tunnel victims. When he finally finds Annie, it doesn’t take much to get her back to the corporeal world, and given how bland Purgatory was, one wonders what all of her fuss was about in the first place. Based on the images we saw of her screaming through the TV, you’d have thought she was burning in Hell.

Meanwhile, back in Wales (yes, Wales – the group has moved from Bristol into an empty Welsh B & B), George (Russell Tovey) and Nina (Sinead Keenan) appear to be doing just fine, and dealing with the complexities of being a werewolf couple without too much trouble. Until the full moon comes along, that is, and they end up in the same cell together for the night, and the werewolves get jiggy, and next thing you know, Nina is preggers. Perhaps their baby will come out looking like Eddie Munster, but that may be asking too much. And it would be too much, but not outside the realm of possibility, because if there’s one problem with the first few episodes of Season Three, it’s that the show appears to have lost its fine balance of horror and humor.

Read the rest of this Blu-ray review by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

Doctor Who Recaps for Season Six

Hey readers -

If you've come here looking for recaps (or links to recaps) of Season Six of Doctor Who, I'm afraid to say that I won't be doing them regularly this season. Really, after writing up nearly every episode since the show first (re)started back in 2005, I need a good long break from doing it. If you've ever tried to recap a series on and on, year after year, it becomes a drag after a while, and takes a big part of the fun out of the show for the person doing the writing.

However, I will very likely do a lengthy piece for Bullz-Eye after the mid season break, in which I'll ramble on and on about what I thought of the season so far. There will, of course, be a link to the piece here at the Rued Morgue, so please check in around that time.

Thanks for your interest!

Treme: The Big Uneasy

Nobody can accuse HBO of not doing its part to shed light on the plight of New Orleans. They got behind Spike Lee and his mammoth documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, and have since financed a follow-up doc from Lee entitled If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise. The former painstakingly covered the days and months in New Orleans after Katrina, while the latter traced the rebuilding of the city, the Saints winning the Superbowl, and the BP oil spill. Now, for most networks, this would have been enough. Some suit, when pitched the idea of an Orleans-based TV series, would've said, "We already devoted hours on the subject to Spike Lee. We did our part." Thankfully, HBO isn't that kind of network. If it were, we wouldn't have the chance to bask in David Simon's and Eric Overmyer's post-Katrina slice-of-life series, Treme.

Treme just kicked off its second season on HBO, and being HBO, there are still opportunities to catch the first episode, "Accentuate the Positive," in case you missed it. The show has now moved its characters fourteen months away from the storm that devastated their city, and instead of things looking up, it sees the storyline going into darker areas than it dared to in its freshman year. Dave Walker, TV critic for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, has lived in the city since 2000, so he not only knows a thing or two about Treme, but also what life's been like for residents since Katrina, and how the increasing level of violence in the second season isn't a TV gimmick, but a true case of art imitating life. Bullz-Eye spoke at length to Walker, who's got a great deal to say about the show's new season. "It's dark because those were very dark days in the city."

"The headlines got pretty grim in the time that they're depicting," Walker continues. "The recovery just seemed to be dragging. Violent crime had returned to the city, after basically being non-existent for a long time. In a perverse way, it may be better television, because it has events and activity that people are more used to seeing in television drama. We didn't exactly hail those elements as something that would improve narrative inertia at the time we were living through them, but I think for people who are just trying to watch TV, it may be stickier, it may be more compelling, because it's got stuff they see in other shows. I don't know. It's a weird show to handicap for viewers who are watching outside of New Orleans."

Lucia Micarelli, who plays up and coming violinist Annie Tee, talks of the sometimes unsettling nature of the manner in which the show is put together. "Annie's not so far away from me. So much that it's creepy. I was talking to Steve Earle a couple weeks ago, and he was saying how the show is so much art imitates life imitates art. It's really strange." She continues on, almost aghast, with a reminiscence revolving around a scene from an upcoming episode – one which is rooted in a real life tragedy. "A couple months ago we were shooting the funeral of a young musician who had been shot. And they got his actual family to be in that scene, and recreate the funeral, and say their eulogies. I remember when I found that out, I was like 'This is fucked up!'" Her personal feelings aside, Micarelli recalls the sequence as being almost cathartic for the family members involved.

Read the rest of this article by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

Doctor Who: Kinda / Snakedance

Search far and wide through the back catalogue of classic Doctor Who and you’ll be hard pressed to come up with a double bill that’s as rewarding as “Kinda” and “Snakedance.” The former is not just one of the greatest Who stories of the 80s, but one of the best in the entire canon of the series. The latter is… well, it’s a damn fine sequel. Both tales were penned by a guy named Christopher Bailey, who not only never wrote any other entries for the series, but after working on Who, never wrote for television again! This seems quite a travesty in light of how well this material has aged. Both tales are from the Peter Davison era, and both revolve heavily around the Fifth Doctor’s companion, Tegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding, who really delivers in both installments).

“Kinda” begins with the TARDIS having landed on the lush planet Deva Loka. The crew doesn’t appear to be in much of a hurry to do anything but relax, and soon enough, during a leisurely stroll through the forest, they encounter a mysterious display of enchanting chimes. Tegan, seemingly hypnotized by their spell, falls asleep beneath them while the Doctor and Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) wander off, deeper in the forest. (Sarah Sutton’s Nyssa is written out at the top of this story, and doesn’t reappear until the close.) Also on Deva Loka is an expedition from another planet – colonialists searching for a new home. Their team is quickly losing members, however, and only three remain: the militant Sanders (Richard Todd), his subordinate Hindle (Simon Rouse), and the scientist Todd (Nerys Hughes).

Standing in the way of any potential colonization are the inhabitants of Deva Loka, known as the Kinda, a telepathic tribe of mutes who may or may not be more dangerous than they appear. But the real danger lurks in the dark corners of the mind, where Tegan meets an entity known as the Mara in a bizarre, hallucinatory dream state, and it’s able to emerge into the waking world through her, and then later through one of the Kinda, giving a mute figure voice for the first time in his life. And with voice, comes power.

Read the rest of the DVD reviews for “Kinda” and “Snakedance” by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

Friday Night Lights: The Fifth and Final Season

Here’s a box set that’s a bit of a TV on DVD anomaly: Most fans of the series haven’t yet had the opportunity to view these episodes. If you watch Friday Night Lights on NBC, and you’re thinking, “Hey, did I somehow manage to miss the fifth season?,” the answer is no, you didn’t. This block of 13 episodes won’t begin airing until later this month on network TV. They did, however, play on DirecTV late last year and early this year, and now somebody, somewhere, has decided to go ahead and release this season on DVD before it plays on NBC. Given that this is the final season of this great series, that must make this set mighty tempting to the people who haven’t seen this material.

The big question, no doubt, is, “Does it deliver?” From this fan’s point of view the answer is “Most definitely.” But that’s a loaded answer that requires detailed – yet spoiler-free – explanation. If you didn’t care for the manner in which the show rebooted for Season Four, then there’s a good chance you’re not going to care for most of this season, either. Last season introduced four new major characters along with a slew of peripheral figures surrounding them, and this season continues on with those storylines. In many ways it feels less like a new season, and more like a continuation of last season’s stories; as if Seasons Four and Five combine to make one mammoth 26-episode story. It would be utterly useless to watch this block without having seen the year that preceded it, as that setup is imperative to appreciating what’s served up here.

Now, taking the above equation into consideration, the first three or four episodes of Season Five have a pretty unexpected “noodling” vibe, as if they’re the vaguely weak middle of this long story, and they’re biding their time until it begins ramping up for the big finish. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible the writers, led by Jason Katims, knew the ending they wanted, but weren’t sure of how to get there. I dub this the Hastings Ruckle Conundrum.

Read the rest of the DVD review - and find out more about the Hastings Ruckle Conundrum - by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

Treme: The Complete First Season

Let’s talk about not only the most important TV series you’re not watching, but also the most entertaining and rewarding. It’s called Treme, (pronounced Truh-MAY) and its first season aired on HBO last year, but hardly anybody tuned in, including, it must be admitted, the writer of this piece. Well, I did watch the first three episodes, and while I liked the idea of Treme, something about it didn’t quite grab me enough to keep me tuning in. Once I was blind and now I can see.

Treme, from David Simon and Eric Overmyer (who previously worked with Simon on The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street), deals with the city of New Orleans three months after Katrina. It’s about how various citizens attempt, against the odds, to reclaim their home and start again. If that sounds at all dreary, let me tell you, it most certainly is not. Here’s a series that’s filled with equal amounts of joy and heartbreak. A character may experience a profound sense of despair, only to turn around and learn how to live again. The aftermath of the hurricane and the subsequent flooding of the city is merely a backdrop to draw rich, layered characters that quickly begin to feel like neighbors you know and love.

In many ways it reminds me of the rich tapestry Armistead Maupin accomplished with his Tales of the City series back in the 70s and 80s, only that was through prose (although eventually miniseries were made from his first three books). Maupin’s Tales have become integral reading for those who live in San Francisco, and in time the denizens of New Orleans will feel the same about Treme, assuming they don’t already.

Read the rest of this Blu-ray review by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

Doctor Who: The Seeds of Doom & The Ark

This month’s Doctor Who DVD offerings, from a storytelling standpoint, have virtually nothing in common. One is a contemporary earthbound tale about an invader from space, while the other takes place far in the future, on a ship taking a vast voyage across the stars. One is a nice looking color production from the 70s, and the other is a creaky black and white yarn from the 60s. One of them is very, very good, and the other is, well, not. Aside from being Doctor Who, the two do have one other thing in common, and that’s that their titles are similar to some other Who stories, both of which have been previously released on DVD. Seven years before Tom Baker battled the Krynoid in “The Seeds of Doom,” Patrick Troughton squared off against the Ice Warriors in “The Seeds of Death,” and nine years after William Hartnell defeated the Monoids in “The Ark,” Tom Baker fought the Wirrn on a different ark (albeit one on a similar journey) in “The Ark in Space.” Hopefully nobody will get either of those arks confused with “Arc of Infinity,” but it is a possibility. If you’re confused, I apologize, because that wasn’t the intention.

Having previously praised two other stories (“Planet of Evil” and “The Brain of Morbius”) from Season Thirteen, it’s nice to have the opportunity to gush about its season finale, “The Seeds of Doom.” Yet another entry from the superb Philip Hinchcliffe produced era, “Seeds” sees the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) coming into contact with a nasty form of alien life called the Krynoid. As the Doctor so succinctly puts it, “On most planets, the animals eat the vegetation. On planets where the Krynoid gets established, the vegetation eats the animals.”

Read the rest of these DVD reviews by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

ReBoot: Seasons One & Two

It behooves those of us who write about pop culture to occasionally come clean, and admit that a TV show or a movie has flummoxed us. ReBoot, for me, is one such concept. That I was felled by a Saturday morning cartoon isn’t something that sets easy with me, but I feel as though I have to state it upfront, as it’s the only way I can be sure that this review will make sense. Otherwise, long-time fans of this cult series will no doubt read these words and have good long belly laughs at the newbie, and his failure to grasp what to them probably seems simple and obvious.

ReBoot takes places in a computer world called Mainframe. Its inhabitants refer to the unseen User as a sort of god, I suppose. Guardian Bob (Michael Benyaer) is the central character, and together with his friends Dot Matrix (Kathleen Barr) and her little brother Enzo (Jesse Moss, and later, Matthew Sinclair), the trio do battle primarily against two viruses named Megabyte (Tony Jay) and Hexadecimal (Shirley Millner). Megabyte and Hexadecimal are themselves frequently caught up in battles of their own. There are a seemingly infinite number of other little critters of all shapes and sizes running around Mainframe; some are good and some are bad.

Read the rest of this DVD review by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

The Cable Guy

It could be said that the most amazing thing about The Cable Guy is how largely ignored it was by domestic audiences and how shabbily it was treated by critics. What’s even more amazing, though, is how good of a film it really is, and how it’s aged extremely well over the past 15 years. Point two feeds point one, but never mind, you get the point.

The movie is a dark comedy, and oh how I hate to describe it using the “d” word, because every review ever written about The Cable Guy calls it dark, sometimes unflatteringly so, as if that’s a bad thing. It is dark, but it’s darkly humorous, and crammed with laughs. Yet the film’s roots aren’t in comedy, but rather the pulpy stalker genre. Producer Judd Apatow and director Ben Stiller freely admit to watching stuff like Bad Influence, Unlawful Entry and Single White Female in preparation for the shoot. In fact, on the commentary track, many different movies are mentioned as reference points, but none that I can recall were comedies. One scene, featuring a karaoke party populated by elderly folk, was apparently inspired by the end of Rosemary’s Baby. Heh.

The script, written by Lou Holtz Jr. (who seemingly never wrote anything that got produced either before or since), is practically a carbon copy of every stalker flick you’ve ever seen. Steven Kovacs (Matthew Broderick) is having problems with his girlfriend Robin (Leslie Mann), so he’s moved out and gotten his own apartment. Enter the Cable Guy, Chip Douglas (Jim Carrey), who refuses to take the hint that Steven isn’t looking for a new friend. The rest of the film is almost play for play the kind stuff you’ve seen in all the classic stalker films, only you’ve never seen the material played like this. It occurred to me on this viewing that perhaps the film wasn’t even written to be a comedy, but that maybe there was just something off enough about the script that somebody thought it had comedic potential. Remove Carrey’s over the top performance, and tweak a couple scenes and ideas, and all of a sudden the movie isn’t all that funny anymore (at least not intentionally). Even as is, there are several scenes that border on the disturbing.

Read the rest of this Blu-ray review by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

48 Hrs.

Man, 1982 was one hell of a year for movies. In doing some research for 48 Hrs., I came across a list of flicks released that year. Here are just some of the titles: E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, First Blood, My Favorite Year, Night Shift, Pink Floyd: The Wall, and Poltergeist. Still not convinced? Try on Blade Runner, Porky’s, Sophie’s Choice, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, John Carpenter’s The Thing, and Tootsie. That’s still not even close to all the cool films that came out in ‘82, but they are some of the most memorable. 48 Hrs. is, of course, another of those films, and even amongst all those titles, it somehow managed to be the seventh highest grossing film of the year. This was back when an R rating wasn’t the box office equivalent of a scarlet letter like it so often is today. A big movie loaded with skin, guns and four-letter words could be released and people didn’t freak out and postulate the end of civilization. Instead, they went to see it. Better days I guess, or at least different times.

48 Hrs. isn’t necessarily a great movie from today’s vantage point, but it was a highly influential one. It’s generally credited as the flick that jump-started the whole “buddy cop” formula which has been beat into the ground hard enough over the past 30 years that we might as well call it a dead horse. Funny thing about 48 Hrs. – only one of the buddies is a cop; the other is a convict, who in the film’s most famous scene impersonates a cop. But that’s probably just splitting hairs, because the tone, structure and writing are all Buddy Cop 101. If one were to see 48 Hrs. for the first time today, there’s a good chance they’d be underwhelmed, and wonder what all the fuss was about back in the day. The film’s been ripped off so many times over the years that all the originality it once possessed is nigh impossible to spot. Halloween is another good example of this.

Read the rest of this Blu-ray review by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

All About Eve

In our celebrity-obsessed culture, it’s possible that All About Eve is more important than ever. Scratch that. How about it’s more entertaining than ever? It’s debatable whether Eve has ever been an important movie, at least outside of its place in film history, but the one thing it’s always been is entertaining. That this 60-year-old film can still amuse, enlighten, move and make us cackle in our living rooms all these years later isn’t something to be dismissed, nor is its Oscar track record for that matter. Until the release of Titanic, it held the record for the most Academy Award nominations with 14; now the two films are tied in that department. All About Eve went on to win six of those awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. More on Eve and the Oscars later.

The movie traces the calculated theatrical rise of Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), as she lies, backstabs and claws her way to the top. She starts out claiming to be nothing more than a fanatic for celebrated stage actress Margo Channing (Bette Davis), whose life she quietly insinuates herself into, but soon she becomes Margo’s personal assistant, and she doesn’t stop there. No, not Eve; she’ll do whatever it takes to become Margo, or at least someone very much like her. There are obstacles in Eve’s way, however – theatre folk she must navigate her way through in order to attain her goals.

She must gain the trust of Karen Richards (Celeste Holm), the wife of Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), the playwright who pens the productions Margo stars in; Lloyd she must merely impress. Then there’s Bill Simpson (Gary Merrill), the director and Margo’s steady. Bill’s a little trickier than some of the others. He isn’t wowed by Eve in the same way everyone else seems to be. And finally, there’s Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), the acerbic theatre critic who knows and sees all. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, DeWitt steadily unloads on Eve: “Is it possible, even conceivable, that you've confused me with that gang of backward children you play tricks on? That you have the same contempt for me as you have for them? Look closely, Eve. It's time you did. I am Addison DeWitt. I am nobody's fool, least of all yours.”

All About Eve is loaded with some of the most incredible dialogue ever written for a film. Were it all broken up and used in little chunks in 30 other screenplays, they’d all be elevated from average to memorable. Instead, it’s all here in this one movie, and nary a line is wasted on words trivial. The actors chew on the English language and spit it back out for our pleasure. It’s fitting that a movie about people who devote their lives to the craft of theatre should be such an actor’s piece. While nobody can accuse writer/director Joe Mankiewicz of not knowing his way around a camera, he’s clearly not obsessed with creating fanciful shots that distract from the real star of the film, which is his screenplay.

Read the rest of this Blu-ray review by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

Doctor Who: The Mutants

Interesting tidbit about “The Mutants”: Salman Rushdie mentions it in his famously controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, although not by name, but rather by bringing up the Mutts from the story and offering up a few observations. Some fans have derided Rushdie’s brief commentary as misinterpreting the messages of the story, but that’s a debate for another forum. What’s noteworthy, though, is that Rushdie was paying close enough attention to see any kind of message at all. It’s not that the messages are muddled, so much as they’re covered in enough layers of sci-fi that they don’t dominate the story. Ostensibly, “The Mutants” is something of a metaphor for colonialism, Apartheid and xenophobia, although one can hardly claim the story beats you over the head with any of these ideas. Certainly the messages are no more prevalent than in dozens of other similarly structured Who stories, but if somebody wants or needs to see them, they’re definitely there.

The action unfolds in the 30th century, and the Doctor (Jon Pertwee), with Jo Grant (Katy Manning) in tow, has been sent on a mission by the Time Lords to deliver a message to an unknown person on the planet Solos. Solos has for hundreds of years been under the rule of the Earth Empire and the indigenous population has long since grown not only restless, but rebellious even. But something else is happening to the Solonians – they’re mutating into a new race, which the humans refer to as Mutts, and they look something like giant cockroaches that walk on two legs. Why is this happening? Does it have anything to do with the poisonous atmosphere on Solos, or is it just a natural stage of their evolution?

Maybe the real reason this story gets singled out for its political content is because it feels more mature than not only other stories from its era, but also much of classic Who in general. The characters are complex and layered, but not always in the most engaging of ways. Likewise, the story either takes numerous needless detours to get where it’s going, or it’s a genuinely multifaceted piece of work. After two full viewings, I still can’t decide which, but I’d imagine much of one’s take on it would depend entirely on how much enjoyment one gets out of it. The tone of it frequently doesn’t feel as much Doctor Who as it does another great ‘70s British sci-fi series, Blake’s 7, and while viewing “The Mutants” I kept imagining Blake, Avon and the rest of the crew from the Liberator in charge of fixing the situation.

Read the rest of this DVD review by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol

For the first Christmas special of his era of Doctor Who, nobody can accuse Steven Moffat of playing it safe. That’s not to imply that he delivered a piece of holiday fare that’s in any way dangerous, but rather that he broke so far away from the types of stories that Russell T. Davies served up for the holiday season that some viewers may have found the resulting tale to be a tad disorientating. But if there’s a major hallmark that Moffat has stamped on the series so far during his brief tenure, it’s disorientation. You’ve either got to get onboard or be left behind. My advice would be to go with the former, otherwise you’re liable to miss out on what should be some great Doctor Who when Season Six kicks off in (presumably) a couple months.

“A Christmas Carol” is not a direct riff on the Dickens tale, but rather an adventure that’s directly inspired by the Doctor’s (Matt Smith) awareness of Dickens. As you might recall, the Ninth Doctor met Dickens way back in Season One, and he professed to be his biggest fan. And although that meeting is never mentioned, clearly Moffat has taken it, and the Doctor’s fandom, into account.

The action begins on a crashing space liner (which has a very Star Trek: The Next Generation feel to it), aboard which is Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill), who are celebrating their honeymoon. Moffat isn’t above throwing some innocent kink into the mix by putting Amy into her kiss-o-gram uniform and Rory into his Roman soldier digs, which is all good clean fun, and the sort of stuff Moffat revels in. The ship barrels down onto a planet with about an hour until it hits the surface, but the Doctor can’t lock onto it with the TARDIS, so he must head down to the planet and work from there. He discovers a world that appears Victorian, but in reality is an advanced Earth colony, lorded over by a horribly selfish man named Kazran Sardick (Michael Gambon).

Read the rest of this Blu-ray review by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

I Spit on Your Grave (1978) vs. I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

Submitting yourself to either version of I Spit on Your Grave requires that you have a cast iron stomach. The original is one of the most notorious horror films in movie history (or at least it was back in the 80s), although I sometimes wonder if that has more to do with the infamous movie poster than the film itself. Further, I also wonder if either film is really deserving of the label “horror.” Just because a movie contains horrific imagery doesn’t necessarily make it a horror film. What these movies really are is exploitative exercises in cruelty and humiliation. They’re for folks who thought that The Last House on the Left or its remake of the same name played it too safe.

The core plot is the same in both versions. A young female novelist from the big city named Jennifer Hills rents a cottage in the backwoods for the summer. There she encounters a group of redneck men intent on getting their mentally slow friend Matthew laid for the first time. Their mission spirals disastrously out of control, and at the hands of them, Jennifer is repeatedly beaten, kicked, shamed and raped, although not necessarily in that order. The second half of the film follows Jennifer Hills on her mission of payback, in which she methodically and cruelly offs each one of the men, and in the process loses something inside of herself (although maybe that’s just my take on the material). The differences between the two films are in the details.

The original focuses more heavily on the rapes, as Jennifer is passed around from one guy to the next. She escapes, they find her, and another assault occurs. Lather, rinse, repeat. One particular incident, which takes place on a rock, is one of the ugliest, saddest things I’ve ever seen portrayed in a feature film. In the remake, the rapes aren’t quite as front and center, but the emphasis on humiliation is almost unbearable. Either way, the material’s played, it’s thoroughly atrocious fare, and quite frankly I feel unqualified in trying to find a way to explain away such differences. If I were reviewing Deliverance and its inevitable remake (come on – you know it’s bound to happen sooner or later), it might be another matter entirely.

Read the rest of the DVD reviews for both films by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

Doctor Who: The Movie (Special Edition)

At this point, after five seasons (and change) of dazzling new Doctor Who, it’s almost difficult to remember how lean the years were for the show after its cancellation in 1989. If I really project myself back to that time period, it reminds me that I shouldn’t take the new series for granted, because it can’t last forever. For a young fan in his twenties, each passing year with no new Who began feeling like an eternity. After seven years, we finally got something, and the results were this TV movie, which was co-produced by the BBC, Fox and Universal, and it aired on Fox in May of ‘96. Of course, seven years is nothing compared to the 15 years it’s taken for the TV movie to get a home video release in the U.S., and most fans had pretty much given up hope for any kind of domestic issue until last August when it was suddenly announced that the rights issues had been cleared up, and a R1 DVD loaded with bonus features was imminent. Who-ray (but not Blu-ray)!

Those aforementioned feelings of desperation were brought up to help illustrate how incredibly monumental the TV movie felt back in 1996. Not only was Doctor Who back, but it finally had boffo production values, there was the tease of a possible series provided the movie snagged some respectable ratings (which in the U.S. it did not), and perhaps more than anything else, Paul fucking McGann was playing the Doctor. I’d been a Withnail and I fanatic for several years already, and to my mind there was no better actor suited to bring the Doctor back to life. Indeed, I even recall telling my then-girlfriend a couple years prior during a Withnail viewing how McGann would make a great Doctor Who someday. I was likely stoned out of my gourd at the time, but that matters not.

So as you might guess, I have an enormous affinity for this film, despite its numerous problems. But it’s also interesting to note that nostalgia doesn’t necessarily have to play a part. I was talking with my Bullz-Eye compadre Will Harris the other day, and he was recalling how when he was a kid, he watched some Doctor Who, and knew instinctively it was something that he should like, yet it never really clicked for him. That all changed for Will in ’96 when he saw this movie and it turned him into a fan in one sitting. Of course, these days there are plenty of folks who really only know the show in its current incarnation, and one wonders how somebody who’s only ever seen new Who would react to this film. I’d like to believe favorably, but then again, it requires adjusting to a whole new Doctor, and some new series fans are slavishly devoted to some of the current Doctors to the point where they can’t be bothered with the concept if David Tennant isn’t on the screen.

Anyway, it’d probably be a good idea at this stage to talk about the actual film. Though it takes place in San Francisco, it was shot in Vancouver, and though it was filmed in ’96, it’s set on New Year’s Eve 1999. Right off the bat this presents a minor problem, simply because the planet went Y2K-crazy that New Year’s. The folks who made this movie did not have a time machine of their own, so they didn’t foresee the Y2K hysteria, and that’s something of a shame because it could’ve worked beautifully in this story. The Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) is transporting the remains of the Master back to Gallifrey after his arch-nemesis was put on trial for his crimes by the Daleks and they exterminated him. It’s a fairly absurd piece of exposition, especially since the Daleks aren’t well known for their legal system, but it gets the story going, so whatever. As the Doctor kicks back in the TARDIS drinking tea and reading H.G. Wells, something goes wrong with the machine, and the Master’s remains, in a kind of ooze-like form, escape from their urn and infect the console, forcing the machine to make an emergency landing in San Fran.

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Santa Sangre

To label Santa Sangre a mere horror film does it a great disservice, but ultimately that’s where it’ll end up filed nine times out of ten, if no other reason than because so much of its imagery is horrific. But then even, the label horrific does much of that imagery the same kind of disservice, because it’s also dreamy and beautiful. Clearly this is not an easy movie to describe, and that’s probably the highest compliment that can be paid to it. To really get Santa Sangre, you have to immerse yourself in it, and if you can do that and come out the other side unscathed, well then, you’re my kind of people.

Take for instance one of the film’s most unnerving sequences. A circus elephant lays dying, blood pouring from its trunk onto the ground. When it finally passes on, its carcass is moved into a giant, ornate casket. A funeral is held for the beast, and it’s transported through the town, circus folk and carnies solemnly trailing behind. The procession ends up on the edge of a cliff. Hundreds of the poor stand around waiting, until the entire thing is tipped over and tumbles down into a filthy, disgusting junkyard. As soon as it hits the bottom, the crowd descends upon it with axes and the like, and they crack open the casket and begin dismembering the beast, tossing out huge chunks of its flesh to one another, presumably for food. Now, I don’t know what kind of movies you’ve been watching, but upon first seeing this spectacle 20 years ago, such imagery was entirely new to me. And this is just one scene of many, many in a film that seems to pride itself on outweirding itself one moment after the next.

Read the rest of this Blu-ray review by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.

Dallas: The Complete Fourteenth and Final Season

By 1990, the ‘80s nighttime power soaps were on the way out, and new types of soapy television, like Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place, were either on the air or on the horizon. Dynasty and Falcon Crest were gone, Knots Landing only had a couple seasons left in it, and the one that started them all, Dallas, was kicking off its final season. What on earth was there left for this show to do that it hadn’t done in the 13 seasons previous? Having successfully revamped the show in the previous year (at least artistically, even if not commercially), the producers now had to find a way to end it all. The core cast had dwindled down to only three characters that had been there since the start: J.R., Bobby and Cliff. And yet, if you’ve got those three guys, you’ve still got quite a bit to work with, and while the final season is never going to go down as a Dallas highpoint, at least it doesn’t go out like a bruised, whimpering puppy with its tail between its legs. Well, not quite.

When last we saw J.R. (Larry Hagman), thanks to his son James (Sasha Mitchell), he was being hauled off back into the looney bin where he’d been conducting some unsavory deeds. In this season, that story continues on for another five or so episodes, as he finds himself sinking deeper and deeper into an unhealthy state, although for perhaps the first time in his life, J.R. finds himself making actual friends. Meanwhile, Bobby (Patrick Duffy) and April (Sheree J. Wilson) are honeymooning in Paris, and no sooner than they get off the plane than they run into Susan Lucci. Now, it’s a shame that soap characters are forced to live in a bubble, because as a viewer you’re yelling at the screen, “That’s Susan fucking Lucci! She’s evil!! No good can come from this. Stay away from her, Bobby and April!!!” Of course, they do not, and terrible, terrible things happen, but since the production has moved to Paris for an extended shoot, at least the proceedings look nice.

Back in Dallas, Cliff (Ken Kercheval) is angling for a government position as Energy Czar of the U.S., while at the same time romancing Liz Adams (Barbara Stock), a lady with a few secrets of her own which revolve around a slick, macho blowhard named John Danzig, a.k.a. Johnny Dancer (Ramy Zada). Sooner, rather than later, Dancer ends up deceased. But who done it? Cliff? Liz? Carter McKay (George Kennedy)? Plenty of people had a motive, but everyone’s got an alibi. Also lurking on the sidelines is Michelle Stevens (Kimberly Foster), and she’s got some serious payback in mind for J.R. after he shipped her away last year. Enter Lee Ann De Le Vega played by none other than Hagman’s old I Dream of Jeannie co-star Barbara Eden. Stunt casting? Perhaps. I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for the duration of the Lee Ann storyline which in the end fizzled out to at least some degree. Credit must be given to the writers for stifling the urge to work in any Jeannie references or in-jokes.

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Dark Skies: The Declassified Complete Series / Interviews with Bryce Zabel & Megan Ward

TV history is littered with the bones and carcasses of shows killed off before their time. In fact, if we were discussing living, breathing creatures rather than little collections of filmed or videotaped entertainment, we’d have long since moved past the term epidemic. On the flip side, there are plenty of shows that lived for too long; fare that far outlives its usefulness, while so many other programs that deserve chances don’t ever really get them. Dark Skies, which NBC unveiled back in ’96, is one of those programs that deserved better. Much better. After 19 episodes, it wasn’t so much cancelled as it was “not renewed.” (Don’t you just love that kind of TV exec jive double talk?)

It’s the story of two bright-eyed innocents in 1962 who are dragged into a world of nasty, violent aliens and sinister government cover-ups. John Loengard (Eric Close) and his girlfriend Kim Sayers (Megan Ward) move to Washington D.C., idealistic like you are in your mid-20s. He works for a congressman and she gets a job in Jackie Kennedy’s office. When John is sent to look into some areas for government budget-cutting, he stumbles onto Project Majestic, which is led by Captain Frank Bach (J.T. Walsh). Even if this show had nothing else to offer but Walsh’s performance, it’d be worth watching for his work alone. This is 19 episodes of Walsh being a real fucker. He died less than a year after his work on this series, and if you have any love or like for him as an actor, you simply must watch this show.

Read the rest of this DVD review by clicking here to visit Bullz-Eye.

And be sure to check out my interviews with Dark Skies co-creator and executive producer Bryce Zabel and Dark Skies co-star Megan Ward.

The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Complete Third Season

Here’s a show that’s immensely frustrating to review. No matter how tied it is to the current series of Doctor Who, there’s no getting around the fact that its target audience is pre-teen and younger, and that’s a demographic of which I’m simply not a part. Nor do I have a kid that age in the house to gauge a reaction through. I’m pretty sure that if the show had existed when I was 10, I’d have thought it was incredible. But I am, as they say, pushing 40, and so to appreciate it I’ve got to be awfully forgiving, or maybe understanding is a better word. This isn’t like a Pixar movie (or even Doctor Who, for that matter), where the material is operating on several levels. Nope, this thing is made for kids.

If you’re unfamiliar with the show, it details the exploits of the Doctor’s old companion Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), her adopted, genetically-engineered-by-an-alien race son, Luke (Tommy Knight), and two other teenagers – Clyde (Daniel Anthony) and Rani (Anjli Mohindra) – who come along for the adventures, which typically involve some kind of alien invading Sarah Jane’s suburban neighborhood. By this point in her life, Sarah’s got all kinds of cool gadgets, including sonic lipstick, a super-computer called Mr. Smith, and occasionally the robot dog K-9. When it comes to fighting aliens, she knows far more than the average human, so she’s pretty well equipped to deal.

Read the rest of this DVD review by clicking here and visiting Bullz-Eye.