Salem's Lot

 Year of Release:  1979

Director:  Tobe Hooper

Screenplay:  Paul Monash, based on the novel 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King

Starring:  David Soul, James Mason, Lance Kerwin, Bonnie Bedelia, Lew Ayres

Running Time:  183 minutes

Genre:  Horror

Writer Ben Mears (Soul) returns to his childhood home of Salem's Lot, a small town in Maine, where he hopes to write a book about the nature of evil, inspired by the sinister Marsten House, the local "haunted house".  However, Ben is not the only newcomer to Salem's Lot.  Debonair antiques dealer Mr. Straker (Mason) plans to open a shop with his mysterious partner Mr. Barlow (Reggie Nalder).  Before long the town is plagued by a mysterious disease and a spate of disappearances.  It quickly turns out that Barlow is a vampire who is feasting on the townspeople, who become vampires themselves.  Soon, it is up to Ben, horror-obsessed teen Mark (Kerwin) and Susan (Bedelia), daughter of the local doctor, to stand against a town of the undead.

Directed by Tobe Hooper, who made his name with the classic horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), this was originally shown as a two part miniseries on NBC TV in America, and it has been released subsequently as a 150 minute TV movie and a 114 minute theatrical movie which lops off over an hour of material and includes more gruesome alternate takes of certain scenes to increase the gore quotient.  The three hour version has a slow start, and is definitely too long, and has some obvious breaks for adverts.  It also pulls some of it's punches in deference of TV standards and practices.  However, sometimes it really works well. David Soul, best known for the TV show Starsky & Hutch (1975-1979), is pretty bland, but James Mason steals the show as the silkily sinister Straker.  The production is full of veterans, such as Lew Ayres and B-movie stalwart Elisha Cook and soon-to-be familiar faces such as Bonnie Bedelia, who is probably best known as Bruce Willis' estranged wife in Die Hard (1988) and would appear in Needful Things (1993), another Stephen King adaptation about a sinister antiques dealer in a small Maine town; Fred Willard who would go on to appear in This Is Spinal Tap (1983) and the Anchorman films; and Kenneth McMillan who would appear as the grotesque Baron Harkonnen in the David Lynch film Dune (1984).  The novel is a solid slice of early Stephen King, and the film follows it fairly closely.  The main difference is that Barlow in the novel is a suave Count Dracula style vampire, but here he is a grotesque, silent monster, inspired by Nosferatu (1921) with blue-white skin, bat-like ears and rodent-like teeth, with shining yellow eyes.  It is pretty slow to begin with, opening like a kind of off-beat soap opera, but if you stick with it, the second half is genuinely creepy,  The floating vampire children, with their shining silver eyes, scratching and tapping at windows, begging to be let in, are memorably eerie.  The decayed interior of the Marsten House is creepy, and Barlow's sudden appearances are quite frightening, particularly when he appears as a small, crawling bundle on a kitchen floor, before rising up to unveil himself in front of a terrified family.  This has become something of a cult film in recent years, and while some may struggle with the length and slow pace, it is worthwhile sticking with it.

Ben Mears (Davis Soul) in Salem's Lot

Twin Peaks (2017 series)

Year of Release: 2017
Director:  David Lynch
Screenplay:  David Lynch and Mark Frost
Starring:  Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee, Michael Horse, Chrysta Bell, Miguel Ferrer, David Lynch, Naomi Watts, Robert Forster, Harry Goaz, Kimmy Robertson, Harry Dean Stanton, Laura Dern
Running Time:  18 one hour episodes
Genre:  Horror, crime, mystery

The original series Twin Peaks, created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, ran for two seasons between 1989 and 1991 and centered on eccentric FBI agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) investigating the murder of teenager Laura Palmer (Lee) in the picturesque small town of Twin Peaks.  The show mixed murder mystery, small town soap opera, cozy comedy and surreal fantasy.  Despite only lasting for two seasons, before being cancelled due to declining ratings, the show was hugely influential and is probably one of the biggest cult TV shows of all time.  The series was followed by a movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which despite being released to largely negative reviews and poor box office back in 1992 has come to be regarded as a major work.  For years Twin Peaks appeared to be pretty much dead in the water, though, with David Lynch going back and forth over whether there would be a return to the strange, small town.  Until a new eighteen part Twin Peaks series was broadcast on Showtime in 2017, every episode written by Lynch and Frost and directed by Lynch.  It could have been that the new Twin Peaks would be yet another exercise in the recent nostalgia boom. 

In fact, it was anything but.  If the original Twin Peaks broke the rules of traditional TV, this pretty much explodes the whole concept of traditional narrative television.  David Lynch has described it as an eighteen hour movie and it kind of is.  Most of the episodes end with a musical performance in a bar, otherwise the episodes just stop usually with no cliffhanger or real conclusion.  There is no real plot either, it's a collection of plot strands, which are picked up and dropped seemingly with no rhyme or reason, but most involve the reappearance of Dale Cooper after 25 years stuck in the bizarre netherworld known as the Black Lodge.  Or is it?  Is it Cooper's demonically possessed doppelganger?  Or is it Las Vegas accountant Dougie Jones (Maclachlan again)?  Or all three? Where as the original Twin Peaks was essentially a murder-mystery/soap-opera with surreal fantasy overtones, in this one the weirdness is central throughout the entire show.  Even scenes that seem to be relatively straightforward are filmed and performed in a strangely off-beat way.  It also opens the story up, taking place not only in Twin Peaks, but in New York, South Dakota, Las Vegas, Texas, and even New Mexico in the 1950s.  Frequently serving up some of the most bizarre and, at times, deeply disturbing images and sequences you are ever likely to see on your TV screen, this won't appeal to everyone.  I would recommend watching Twin Peaks:  Fire Walk With Me first, if you liked that then you will probably like this.  The series as a whole is David Lynch's masterpiece: a fascinating, maddening, funny, disturbing, scary, frustrating, mesmerising puzzle box that lingers in the mind, and makes me for one keen to watch it again to work out the clues that I have missed.

 

It only gets stranger: MIKE (Al Strobel) and Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in Twin Peaks

The Firm (1989)

Year of Release:  1989
Director:  Alan Clarke
Screenplay:  Al Hunter Ashton
Starring:  Gary Oldman, Lesley Manville, Phil Davis, Charles Lawson
Running Time:  70 minutes
Genre:  Drama

London, 1988:  Clive "Bex" Bissel (Oldman) is a 30 year old estate agent, who lives an apparently comfortable suburban life with his wife, Sue (Manville) and baby son.  However when the weekend comes, Bissel is the leader of the ICC (Inter City Crew), a hooligan "firm" (an organised gang who attach themselves to soccer teams and go to matches with the sole purpose of fighting rival gangs).  Bissel has an ambitious plan to unite the rival firms into one for a European championship, with the aim of causing havoc on an international scale.  However the rivalries are not so easily put aside.

This made-for-TV movie was the final work from acclaimed director Alan Clarke, who died in 1990 at the age of 54.  Like much of his work, this is an examination of male aggression and social commentary, which is as much about Britain at the end of the 1980s as it is about soccer thugs.  Hooliganism was a real hot button topic at the time, and these are not the traditional disaffected young men, they are mostly not "victims of society" but middle-class people with good jobs and plenty of money, who commit the violence for the "buzz".  This is an exciting film, shot with a constantly roving camera a times almost shoving the viewer into the middle of these guys, and the film has a real sense of danger (apparently some of the fighting scenes weren't entirely fake).  Gary Oldman gives a terrifying performance as the mercurial Bex, always well-dressed, charismatic and intelligent, but who can turn on a dime and unleash savage brutality.  This is definitely a film about men, and women don't really get a look in, the only major female character is Sue, and Lesley Manville does not have that much to do, but she does appear in a very disturbing sequence that was cut from the broadcast version of the film, but is available in the "director's cut".  Alan Clarke himself was a committed soccer fan and hated the hooligans for ruining the game, the film makes a point of never actually showing any soccer at only one point are any of them seen at a game, and they aren't watching it.  The film periodically erupts into violence, which is sudden, savage and brutal.  It might be a TV movie but it is definitely not for the faint of heart.  A brutal, confrontational work.

Gary Oldman gets bang out of order as the leader of The Firm  

The IT Crowd

Year: 2006 - ongoing
Director: Graham Linehan
Screenplay: Graham Linehan
Starring: Chris O'Dowd, Richard Ayoade, Katherine Parkinson, Matt Berry (season 2 onwards), Chris Morris (season 1) and Noel Fielding.
Running Time: 24 episodes over 4 seasons to date. 25 minutes per episode.
Genre: Situation comedy.

Summary: The show is set in the offices of Reynholm Industries, run by the deeply eccentric Denholm Reynholm (Morris) and, after Denholm's suicide, by his dim-witted, lecherous son Douglas (Berry). The offices, in the heart of London, are a glittering monolith of a building occupied by glamorous, attractive employees "not doing very much work and having affairs with each other". Except in the dingy, messy IT department located in the building's basement. Working in the IT department are Roy (O'Dowd) a workshy nerd who has a reel-to-reel tape recorder playing his standard answer to any enquiry: "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" and his best friend Maurice Moss (Ayoade) who is highly intelligent and knowledgable about science and computers but is completely clueless about pretty much everything else and still lives with his mother. They are pretty much hated or ignored by the rest of the staff and seen as "standard nerds". The newest member of the IT department is Jen Barber (Parkinson) a popular and fashionable woman who lied on her CV that she is an expert in computers when in reality she knows very little about them but manages to work as the "relationship manager" between the IT department and the rest of the staff.

Opinion: This British comedy series created by Graham Linehan (best known as the creator of the popular comedy series Father Ted (1995-1998)) is in many ways a traditional situation comedy which tends to start off the storylines with elements familiar to most people who have to work in offices and then spins them out into surreal extremes. The show is usually extremely funny with clever dialogue that incorporates numerous references to popular culture and most particularly geek culture, including frequent scenes that parody other TV shows and movies. The show features some memorable comedy characters in particular ubernerd Moss and the inept boss Douglas Reynholm (Berry). Unusually every seaon is a genuine improvement on the previous one. The first season was promising but awkward, a prolem shared by many British comedies during the first season possibly due to the short amount of time they get in each block (six episodes per season is usual for British comedy shows). However the most recent seaosn featured moments that were comedy gold. A show that's well worth checking out and sticking with.
A fifth season of the show has been commissioned and an American version is also rumoured to be in the works.

Firefly

Year: 2002
Directors: Joss Whedon, Tim Minear, Vern Gillum, Michael Grossman, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Marita Grabiak, David Solomon, Allan Kroeker, Jim Contner and Thomas J. Wright.
Screenplay: Joss Whedon, Tim Minear, Jane Espenson, Drew Z. Greenberg, Ben Edlund, Jose Molina, Cheryl Cain and Brett Matthews. Series created by Joss Whedon.
Starring: Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Morena Baccarin, Adam Baldwin, Jewel Staite, Sean Maher, Summer Glau and Ron Glass.
Running Time: 14 episodes over 1 season. One 90 minute episode, otherwise 42 minutes per episode.
Genre: Science-fiction, western, drama


Summary: In the year 2517 the human race has moved to other star systems most of which are ruled by a brutal regime known as "the Alliance". Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Fillion), who seven years earlier fought on the losing side of a war against the Alliance, is commander of the Firefly-class transport ship Serenity, which travels among the remote frontier planets searching for ny type of work (whether of the legal or illegal variety) that will keep food on the table and the old ship flying. Also on the crew are Reynolds' wartime friend Zoe (Torres), Zoe's husband and the ship's pilot Wash (Tudyk), violent ex-mercenary Jayne (Baldwin), perpetually cheerful engineer Kaylee (Staite), professional "Companion" (a kind of highly respected courtesan) Inara (Baccarin) who gives the ship a level of respectability and social standing, preacher (or "Shepherd") Book (Glass) and doctor Simon Tam (Maher) who is on the run from the Alliance with his genius but delusional and occasionally violent sister River (Glau), who Simon rescued from an Alliance facility where she was being subjected to horrific experiments.

Opinion: The concept of Firefly was suggested to Joss Whedon after he read the novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, which chronicles the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. Whedon wanted to make a show about people who had fought on the losing side of a war and their experiences afterwards as pioneers on the outskirts of civilization. The show mixes science-fiction with elements from Western movies, with many of the planets visited by the characters being like remote Old West outposts or towns, which I don't think is an unreasonable idea of what those type of worlds could be like. In science-fiction terms, the show is notable for the fact that there are no alien creatures or talking robots or anything like that. Also, refreshingly, they accept the fact that there is no sound in space.
In my opinion Firefly is very possibly one of the best, if not the best, science-fiction shows ever made. The show was well-written, with witty and intelligent scripts. The endlessly quotable dialogue mixed existing slang, invented words, Old West-style dialect and snatches of Chinese (in fact there is a strong Chinese influence in many of the show's set designs and costumes). The look of the show often used highly mobile cameras which in some scenes created a semi-documentary look. The acting was always excellent and helped create many memorable characters with Fillion's Captain Reynolds being the coolest space hero since Han Solo in Star Wars (1977).
So what went wrong? The show was produced by and originally shown on the Fox network who cancelled the show after only eleven of the fourteen episodes that were made had been screened. The network never seemed to care much about the show right from the start. Episodes were screened out of order (although Firefly doesn't really have one on-going story it does have running themes and storylines which run throughout the series) the extended pilot episode, which introduces the shows characters, themes and plotlines wasn't shown until the end of the run because the network wanted a more "action-packed" episode to open the series. Episodes were moved around the schedules and the series was marketed as kind of an "action-comedy" instead of the serious science-fiction drama that Whedon intended (although there is still a lot of action and humour in it). However, after reruns and DVD releases, the show has become kind of a cult series with a hardcore fanbase, known as "Browncoats" (a slang term in the show for the army in which Reynolds and Zoe fought). The show was popular enough on DVD for a movie sequel, Serenity, which was released in 2005 to critical acclaim but sadly not much success at the box office.
This was a brilliant television series which was sadly cancelled far too soon. However what there is of it is totally shiney.

The Tripods

Year: 1984-1985
Directors: Graham Theakston, Christopher Barry and Bob Blagden
Screenplay: Alick Rowe and Christopher Penfold, based on "The Tripods Trilogy" novels by John Christopher
Starring: John Shackley, Ceri Seel and Jim Baker
Running Time: 25 episodes over two seasons. 25 minutes per episode.
Genre: Science-fiction, adventure, alien invasion


Summary: The series opens in England in the year 2089. The planet Earth has been completely taken over by a race of aliens who move around in giant, three-legged walking machines known as "Tripods". The human race is completely controlled by means of a mind-control device called "The Cap" which is permanently fixed to each individual's scalp when they reach adulthood: a process known as "Capping". The Cap removes creativity, subdues intelligence and individual thought and replaces it with a fanatical devotion to the Tripods and the aliens who operate them. It also ensures that human civilization has reverted to the late Middle Ages. Two teenagers, Will Parker (Shackley) and his cousin Henry (Baker), who are due to soon be Capped, decide to escape and undertake the hazardous journey to the "White Mountains" in the south of France where they have been told are a band of "Free Men" who live independent of Tripod control and are planning to overthrow the invaders. It is this jounrey that takes up the whole of the first season. The second season, deals with a plot to send an undercover resistance member, equipped with a fake Cap, into the Tripod City to gather information.

Opinions: "The Tripod Trilogy" was a series of books for teenagers written by Samuel Youd under the pen-name "John Christopher" and consists of The White Mountains (1967), The City of Gold and Lead (1968) and The Pool of Fire (1968). The TV series, which was made by the BBC, covers the first two books. The show follows the books fairly faithfully and frequently the pace suffers from the fact that the scriptwriters were trying to adapt short books into a lengthy TV series. In fact the first season could probably have surprised viewers tuning in late and expecting some science-fiction action in that it seems to consist mostly of people walking around the picturesque countryside chatting with the occasional glimpse of a Tripod to remind viewers that, y'know, they were actually watching The Tripods and not a super-low budget version of Lord of the Rings. The first season suffered heavily from the limited special-effects budget which meant that there were many episodes where the Tripods themselves were barely glimpsed and some where they never appeared at all. To be fair though the Tripods themselves were pretty impressive creations for the time and at times were quite striking. The second season was in many ways an improvement on the first, with more pacing and a genuine sense of danger. The special effects were also improved and the Tripod City itself was an impressive attempt at making a genuinely alien city. However, as is always the problem with special effects, though they were ground breaking in their day, to modern eyes they have really dated badly. Some other aspects in the second season, most notably the costumes that the humans have to wear in the city, and some of the dialogue given to the alien "Masters" were clearly the product of a more innocent age. For all it's flaws though, The Tripods remains an interesting, and striking piece of science-fiction television and it has moments of real brilliance. Unfortunately a planned third season which would cover the third book, The Pool of Fire, was never made. However Youd continued the book series in 1988 with a prequel to the original trilogy called When the Tripods Came. Also the Tripods are due to lumber across screens again in 2012 in a Hollywood movie version.

"The Hell of it All" by Charlie Brooker

Year of Publication: 2009
Page Number: 396 pages
Genre: Humour, non-fiction, reviews, essays, TV, current affairs

Description: This book is a collection of humorous reviews and essays on TV, video games, current affairs and basically anything else that happened to be on Brooker's mind at the time of writing. They were originally published as columns in Britain's The Guardian newspaper between August 2007 and August 2009.

Opinions: Probably due to the origin of the items they are both very short (usually around two and a half to three pages) and very much of the moment to the point when, even though they are so recent, the articles are already starting to feel slightly dated. Also Charlie Brooker is not in any way shy about sharing his opinions and certainly not everyone will agree with what he writes. The thing about Brooker is that he is intelligent, he writes well, and he is extremely funny. His humour is extremely dark, savage and misanthropic. He pretty much machine-guns his luckless victims with bullets of wit. This book should appeal to anyone with a dark sense of humour and an interest in popular culture and/or current affairs, although the fact that it concerns itself almost exclusively with British pop culture may make it quite inaccessible to non-UK readers.