Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo made one of the biggest marks of the New Wave of French horror with this slick, sickly slasher. Alysson Paradis plays a pregnant, depressed widow seeing out the final hours of her labour when a sinister hooded Beatrice Dalle turns up on her patio, malice aforethought.
What follows is a tremendous thriller. My wife was about five months pregnant when I watched this and that perhaps added to the threat (and made me incredibly glad I didn't watch it with her as well) but it's nevertheless one of the more effective home invasion slashers as Dalle's character (credited only as La Femme) turns Paradis' apartment into a killing zone, wiping out potential helpers with a little help from an elastic set of physical laws. Several of the set-pieces are astonishingly visceral and shocking, such as the moment when Sarah is terrorised into accidentally killing her own mother with a hair clip, while others - such as the arrival of a pair of policeman with a delinquent prisoner in tow - are unbearably tense.
The gore is amped right up and the kills are well-thought out while Dalle is plainly enjoying herself as the insane Femme, who eventually gets a motive even if you'd be happy enough without it. Paradis is also very good as she finds something to fight for even as the script never forgets she's nine months pregnant. A cult classic, but don't watch it if you've got one in the oven yourself.
The first of Hammer's long-running series of classic monster sequels and the first to be based on something of an original story after the success of The Curse of Frankenstein the year before. That film was a remake of Universal's 1931 Frankenstein but Revenge of... skips the idea of remaking that film's sequel, Bride of Frankenstein.
After building a fortune producing radio dramas, including The Lives of Harry Lime with Orson Welles (The Third Man was massive in the UK) and a Sherlock Holmes series featuring John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Welles again, Harry Alan Towers moved into mid-budget cinema in the sixties and arguably his most famous work in this field was the Fu Manchu series of films starring Christopher Lee as Sax Rohmer's Oriental terror.
Based on Jack D. Hunter's tale of wartime spin and military corruption, The Blue Max is an odd beast mixing contemporary anti-war sentiment and cynicism with old-fashioned aerial thrills. The obsession with medals - in this case the titular German award - is an interesting foreshadowing of Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron, while on paper there's lots of potential to the had by the character and situation of Stachel, a self-interested climber who immediately meets his match in the exploitative political machinations of Count von Klugerman.
In the current age of digital downloads and streaming, or even physical media like DVD and before that VHS it's basically impossible to imagine how TV worked in the fifties. Even if a show was recorded before or during broadcast the only time anyone would ever see it again would be if there was a repeat, which happened rarely - if you missed it, you missed it. If you loved it there was a fair chance you'd never see it again.
Thunderbirds 2086 was one of my favourite childhood cartoons mainly because being a little bit like Thunderbirds meant Dad tended to watch it with me (though he's more of a Supercar
man). I've long been intending to do something on the site about the
show but faced with some resources consisting of the 1983 Grandreams
annual and about half of the episodes I've never felt particularly
confident doing much.
I've
been itching to post this thing for ages but I thought reviewing my own
custom would be somewhat pretentious and there didn't seem much point
as the only other custom I've ever undertaken is slapping a bit of black
paint on RotF Sideways. So I thought I'd just do a write-up here.
I say "my own custom" but this is probably one of the easiest customs since everyone realised turning Universe Sunstreaker's head and legs around to make Tigertrack.
The very simple steps are as follows: -
1: Pick up this Binaltech Hound
knock-off. It's generally very good quality with diecast parts and
substantial retooling from the original. It's basically a re-shelling to
make the thing look more like a Hummer. Obviously the scale of the
alternate mode is miles off in reality, being the same basic size as the
original Jeep Wrangler (it's actually slightly lower).
There
are only two problems with the KO in itself - firstly it's quite
difficult to get the shell of the enclosed cab all tight together,
usually taking a couple of tries; secondly, the hip joints are very,
very stiff which can cause some problems in terms of balancing the guy.
All in all though I'd say the toy justifies its' price of $16 in itself.
Incidentally I did order my example from Chimung via his site and it
arrived very promptly and in excellent condition.
2: Buy a Hasbro Alternators Swindle or Rollbar.
This retooling of the Jeep mould was actually intended to be
Trailbreaker until some exciting copyright reason or another intervened.
While the toys came out in lousy colours with random names slapped on
the head cast is unmistakably based on a blend of cartoon/comic and original toy
likenesses of Trailbreaker. Get one as cheap as possible - it probably
won't be much because no-one liked either figure and both came out at
the time the line was beginning to warm shelves.
The
only bit you'll need is the head so if you find some junker with no
legs or something that'll do. The heads simply pop off both figures.
There's an easily-accessible screw at the back of the Swindle/Rollbar
head that allows you to open it up and remove the visor. You can then
either paint it red (toy) or blue (cartoon) according to your preference
and just put it back together. The generic head off the KO is all-new,
so if you're a prolific customiser it can probably be used for something
else.
3: Get the Reprolabels' "Classics" Trailbreaker sticker set. The Autobot symbol, windscreen decal and face aren't much use, but the doors of the Movie Voyager Ironhide
toy it's intended for are so close to the Binaltech KO it's unreal. I
had to trim some of the clear edges off and use a little improvisation
around the rear wheel hubs but generally the fit is so good it's hard to
believe they weren't designed for the process.
4: For the final touch I just added the Radar Scanner from the original toy. Well, technically it was the one that came with Encore Hoist.
With very slight whittling to the width of the end few millimetres of
the post it can fit snugly in the screw hole on the back of the head (if
done carefully there's still enough of the post to allow it to connect
to Hoist).
It
can't stay in there for transformation but it adds a lot to the robot
mode. The other change I made was removing the spare tyre as with the
additional roof kibble it makes the legs look a bit too cluttered and it
adds a little more variety when displayed alongside Hound.
A
more accomplished customiser might want to paint his legs and torso
silver - I briefly toyed with transplanting these parts from a spare Hound but
wasn't entirely sure it would work, besides which I've got very used to
the dark green and don't think it hurts the figure.
So there we go - if I can do it, you can do it too =)
The British contribution to the superpowered world has always been a bit of an odd one, and Fleetway were at the forefront of this in the 1960s. The stars of the strip were often the anti-heroes of it all - The Steel Claw, The Spider, The Snake, The Sludge, Grimly Feendish, Mytek the Mighty - pitched against cops and secret agents whose names seem so much harder to remember. Is it any wonder Alan Moore gave us V and Rorschach on the back of this stuff? Of course, sometimes these characters were mellowed... The Spider went to fighting crime, albeit largely to satisfy his own curiosity. And then there was the Steel Claw.
I've read Albion over a dozen times now, and I'm still not sure how to evaluate it. I'll admit I was expecting something a little more straightforward, possibly Watchmen for British superheroes. That said the premise itself isn't really the problem. The central concept is that all the heroes were real, and have been hidden away in a prison in Scotland by the government, while the daughter of the deceased Eric Dolman and a Scouse comic fan named Danny try to break them out. Moreover, this plot more or less works.
Captain Britain was in danger of becoming a failure during the early 1980s. His original series had never quite caught on, largely through a succession of disinterested American creative teams unwilling or unable to move beyond stereotypical British characters, dialogue and settings; the much-trumpeted original Captain Britain comic was cancelled within nine months. The strip itself staggered on for a while in Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain with constantly shifting groups of Marvel US jobbers making the thing before that title too folded, merging with another title but leaving Captain Britain out of print.
Dave Thorpe's run on Captain Britain doesn't get a lot of good press, and in some ways, it's easy to see why. The strips were omitted from the Alan Moore/Alan Davis TPB despite their close connection and received wisdom goes along the lines that Thorpe's writing was so muddled and poor that Dez Skinn had to cancel one of Marvel UK's longest-running titles and bring in another writer in some attempt to sort the mess out. This isn't quite fair. Thorpe does display a lack of discipline and he's certainly not on the level of Moore, but the issues aren't especially confusing. That said having read the Moore material (which does give a more clear explanation for some of the events of Thorpe's run) so many times that it's hard to perceive what many readers found to be so baffling.
I thought long and hard about actually getting this, considering I've seen it described as an atrocity. But a cheap copy came up, and I thought "How bad can it be?". One question that always springs to mind when you read these things is why exactly writers bother bringing back characters if they're going to totally change them... In this way, this thing's a decade ahead of its' time, foreshadowing the damage Marvel and others would do to their characters around the turn of the 21st Century.
Tonka whored the Gobots
brand out to pretty much anyone while the going was good, and this was
one of the odder items of merchandise. Produced by a company named
Tootsietoy, these things were packed on blister cards not totally unlike
regular Gobots figures, and named
as Bubble Man. They were produced in four colours - as well as the red
and blue pictured, there were also green and black versions.
Union Jack has been one of my favourite minor Marvel character for some considerable time, be it cameoing in The Invaders or Captain America or being a semi-regular in The Knights of Pendragon (preferably the first, good series). I was pleased to discover the first issue of this series until I saw the name on the cover - Raab. Ben Raab. A spectacularly untalented man who'd taken the new lease of life Warren Ellis gave to Excalibur and pissed it away by making it the X-Men reserve Team title, effectively jettisoning everyone but Shadowcat, Colossus and Nightcrawler.
Adaptations are a funny thing and as far as I'm concerned The Rocketeer fits that bill. I'm wrong, I know, but sometimes things aren't that easy. The film version, starring Bill Campbell and Jennifer Connolly, was something I watched a great many times as a child and remains one of my favourite films. I didn't know there was a comic until much later, let alone that this was radical difference. Therefore, initially, the Eclipse 'album' (it's a TPB in large-format size, i.e. Eclipse's usual habit of being a bit pretentious, effortlessly combined with their other main characteristic of mucking up trades) of Dave Stevens' original batch of Rocketeer strips didn't go down too well. That it's the original canon can matter little when you're so much more familiar with the unfaithful adaptation.
The final chapter of Stormwatch suffers from not being about Stormwatch. Sorry if I'm sounding like a broken record, but Ellis clearly has nothing but contempt for the characters by this point.
This, for me, is probably the low point of Ellis' Stormwatch. The basic problem is that Ellis is clearly bored of writing the book. On the one hand, fair play, if you're bored you're bored. On the other, why keep writing it? It also doesn't make for a spectacular SW collection. Both of the stories contained within do have their merits, don't get me wrong, it's just that if you've got here on the back of the tight SW characterisation of the previous three books, you're going to be disappointed by this one.
Just a warning, I've tried to steer clear of spoilers for these reviews, but "Change or Die" isn't a set of stories that can be discussed without them, so read on with that proviso.
The second volume of Warren Ellis' excellent Stormwatch run contains arguably the weakest set of stories from the first volume. This is relative, of course, and it's still good stuff. The first three episodes focus almost entirely on single characters.
This is
really where Warren Ellis the mainstream visionary got started. While
his Excalibur run undoubtedly showed his skill for humanising and revitalising
characters, the freedom given by Wildstorm allowed him to remould
a whole series in the space of an issue. When Ellis arrived, Stormwatch
was pretty much a dying book. It was never one of Image's biggest hitters
in the early days and rapidly became one of those books no-one cared
about. The series was hampered by having to keep in line with the 'Images
of Tomorrow' gimmick put in place early in the run, and then by a ludicrous
number of new characters thrown at the book by desperate writers.
