In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

A full list of the 102 films which I watched in 2024, mainly with Joel. Includes 24 films with Christopher Lee in them and 21 Hammer films. My most-watched director was Terence Fisher with 5, while Freddie Francis, Mario Bava and Roger Corman are equal second place with 3 each. There's at least one film on the list for every decade since the 1910s, peaking at 21 each for the 1960s and '70s.

1. Le Frisson des Vampires (1971), dir. Jean Rollin - amazing lesbian vampire film executed with the trippy crushed-velvet excess only possible c. 1970.
2. Daughter of Darkness (1990), dir. Stuart Gordon - not to be confused with Daughters of Darkness (1971). An American woman goes to Romania in search of her father, who turns out to be a vampire.
3. Transylvania (2006), dir. Tony Gatlif - a portrait of the region, focused especially on the Romani people there, seen through the eyes of a Romani-Italian girl who goes there in pursuit of a lost boyfriend. Very rich and human.
4. Il mostro dell'opera / The Vampire of the Opera (1964), dir. Renato Polselli - a vampire haunts a neglected old theatre in which an opera troupe are rehearsing a new production. Not particularly good.
5. Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (2023), dir. Adam Sigal - about this case. Trying to do something about the reasons why people are drawn to belief in the supernatural, including a personal character arc from scepticism to a desperate desire to believe on the part of Fodor, but somehow a bit flat in the delivery and not really that profound in the end. Good to spot location footage in the Victoria pub, Leeds and Whitby harbour, though.
6. The Woman in Black (1989), dir. Herbert Wise - the ITV version, which now has quite the status of a cult classic in vintage horror circles. Very good, and delivering sustained creepy, squirm-inducing scares in a way that modern jump scares can't really match.
7. Blade II (2002), dir. Guillermo del Toro - I didn't think I'd seen this, but it turned out I had. I just knew I'd only seen one Blade film and assumed it had been the first. Good cyber fun, very of its era.
8. Once Upon a Spy (1980), dir. Ivan Nagy - terrible American wannabe James Bond movie with Christopher Lee as a mega-villain threatening the world with a shrink-ray!
9. The Woman in Black (2012), dir. James Watkins - the revived Hammer version, which I saw in the cinema when it came out. Doesn't have the same atmosphere as the 1989 version, and even the jump scares weren't as effective at home as in the cinema. Still, had a good cast and looks nice.
10. Dark Places (1973), dir. Don Sharp - little-known contemporary-set horror film in which a man inherits a house with money hidden somewhere within it, but is haunted by the tragic legacy of the previous owner, with Christopher Lee in a minor role. Pretty solid psychological horror, better than we were expecting.
( 92 more films under here )

So help me, it's a list of every single film I watched in 2023. I've put notes where I could remember anything particular about the film or the viewing circumstances, but haven't tried to do that consistently. This is more about record-keeping than reviewing now.

1. Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher - deliberately chosen as our first film of the New Year so we'd be starting it out right!

2. Fright Night 2 (1988), dir. Tommy Lee Wallace

3. Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968), dir. Freddie Francis

4. Hellboy II (2008), dir. Guillermo del Toro

5. The Vampire Bat (1933), dir. Frank R. Strayer

6. Vampire in Venice / Nosferatu a Venezia (1988), dir. Augusto Caminito - would be an amazing film about decay and ageing, if it didn't also have Klaus Kinski being actively peedy in it.

7. Caligula (1979), dir. Tinto Brass, Giancarlo Lui and Bob Guccione - the fullest, unexpurgated version, seen at Wharf Chambers as a Pervert Pictures screening, complete with a contextualising introduction. It's the logical extreme of the decadent Rome trope.

8. The Company of Wolves (1984), dir. Neil Jordan

9. Dracula Bloodline (2013), dir. Jon Keeyes

10. The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964), dir. Michael Carreras

( There's another 94 under here )

What a pity Doctor Who wasn't broadcast in the autumn this year, as this episode would really have suited a slot around Halloween. Still, the evenings are dark and the weather dismal all the same, and it delivered an excellent dose of Gothic horror, as well as one of the more historically accurate portrayals of the Diodati weekend I have come across. Common canards like having the Shelleys a) married and b) staying in the villa with Byron and Polidori were both not merely avoided but actively deconstructed. And I liked the clever device of delivering orientational exposition in the form of gossip during a dance. Very impressive!

I mainly just want to squee over this episode really, so here is a squee list:

• The shout-out to Ada Lovelace from earlier in the series.
• Polidori challenging Ryan to a duel.
• The nightmarish circular geography of the house, and even better this all turning out to emanate from Shelley's fevered mind.
• Byron hiding behind Claire from Polidori in his scary possessed state (and Claire later calling him out for this - though sadly for her the spell never really was broken).
• Fletcher the valet's eye-rolling.
• One of the fireplaces in the villa having a copy of the Apollo Belvedere over it. (Only really because I, too, have a copy of the Apollo Belvedere over my own fireplace - but it was nicely appropriate set dressing for a house full of Romantic poets.)
• Mary managing to cut through to the remaining humanity of the half-Cyberman just for a while, but not permanently. (It would have been very hokey if that had been a permanent solution - we had enough of threats being overcome by love in the Moffat era.)
• The ghostly maid and child remaining entirely unexplained.

Dramatic tellings of this weekend are all bound to look and feel much like one another, but Gothic (1986: LJ / DW) is a particularly obvious comparator, because it likewise sets out to tell the story as a Gothic horror, rather than merely about the production of Gothic horror. I wouldn't say this story was deeply rooted in Gothic, not least because Gothic has a lot of very sexual, violent and disturbed content which wouldn't be suitable for a family show like Doctor Who. But the prominence in this episode of Byron's bone collection and the way it all culminated in a basement do seem more likely than not to have come from there. There's also the matter of 'Mary's Story' from the Eighth Doctor Big Finish collection The Company of Friends, which I listened to some years ago. I can't say I remember it in much detail now, but judging from that plot summary it's a pretty different story from this one, concerned mainly with different aspects of the Doctor himself rather than any Cyberman.

Meanwhile, this story isn't merely a standalone, but the set-up for the epic two-part struggle with the Cybermen which has been trailed as the season's finale from its beginning. I can't say I have particularly high hopes about that, having seen one too many of New Who's epic final battles over the years. But I did appreciate the Doctor's impossible moral dilemma of being asked to choose between saving not only Shelley but the future contingent upon him and saving all the people involved in that battle - and especially the companions' discomfort when she pointed out the consequences for them. I hope the final two episodes can sustain those shades of grey.

Oops, I've let a bit of a film review back-log accrue again... Let's see what I can do about that this afternoon.

I saw this one with lady_lugosi1313 at the Hyde Park Picture House. I found it OK, with some good performances, period settings and nice camerawork conveying an appropriately Gothic atmosphere where relevant (as in the Villa Diodati) but without undermining the basic realism of the film. Unfortunately, though, it plays pretty fast and loose with the actual facts of Mary's life - which was part of my complaint about The Happy Prince and Oscar Wilde (LJ / DW). Overall, it didn't irritate me anything like as much as The Happy Prince, because Mary simply wasn't a smug, entitled arse in the way that Oscar Wilde was, and nor was the film quite so intent on portraying her life as a tragic work of art. But it definitely did want to suggest that absolutely everything which happened to her before the publication of Frankenstein was all systematically and almost divinely destined to culminate in the production of that book, which didn't actually leave much space for her agency as a human author rather than a passive cork, tossed on the waves of life.

Here are just a few examples of the departures from reality which I noticed, based on the pre-holiday reading I did for our DracSoc trip to Geneva in 2016, and the exhibitions we saw while we were there (LJ / DW):

Film	Reality
Mary meets Percy Shelley while staying with the Baxter family in Scotland, after she has been sent away there by her stepmother.	Mary literally missed meeting Shelley for the first time because of this stay, as he came to London while she was away after securing the patronage of her father, William Godwin. They met only after she had returned, during his regular visits to the family home.
Neither Mary nor any of the Godwin household initially know that Percy has a wife and child, and Mary finds this out to her shock when they turn up outside her father's bookshop to ask where he is.	All of them already knew all about the wife and child well before Mary became involved with Percy, because he had brought them to the Godwin family home to introduce them to everyone (though Harriet did turn up demanding for Mary and Percy to be kept apart once the relationship had begun).
Mary and Claire first set eyes on Byron at a theatrical demonstration of Galvinism, complete with experiments on frogs' legs.	It was actually at a lecture on Milton delivered by Coleridge. Mary's knowledge of Galvinism came later, through conversations at the Villa Diodati.
Percy's friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg sexually assaults Mary in their home, in a move which comes as a complete surprise and (obviously) a shock to her.	Percy had suggested to Mary in advance that she and Hogg should sleep together, and although she hated the idea at first, they corresponded about it. In those letters Mary seems interested but wary, but nothing ever came of it in the end.
Byron invites Percy and Mary to stay in his villa in Geneva and welcomes them as soon as they arrive.	Claire conceives of the whole notion of tracking him down there and persuades the others to follow. They arrive two weeks before Byron and spend the intervening time in a hotel, waiting for him to turn up.
Mary writes the bulk of Frankenstein in run-down rented rooms in London.	She wrote most of it while travelling onwards through Switzerland and into Italy after the Geneva stay.

Many more things are omitted, such as Mary and Claire's other siblings, Shelley bursting into the Godwin family home to propose a suicide pact with Mary as a way of escaping Harriet, and an earlier elopement to the continent by Mary and Percy (taking Claire with them). I am less concerned about omissions, which are necessary to convey a story coherently in the length of the film, but the distortions of reality here actively worked against one of the central claims of the film. On the one hand, it kept trying to show us how her life fed into her work, but on the other it wasn't even presenting her real life, but another fictionalised life which did not in fact lead up to the novel we know.

I could appreciate and give credit for some of what the production team were trying to do in the course of this, such as showing clearly how difficult it was for a woman to be taken seriously as an author in the early 19th century, as well as the brutal and disastrous consequences of the patriarchy generally and Byron and Shelley's notions of free love particularly for women with no access to contraception. But I felt that some other narrative decisions made for serious missed opportunities, and that applied particularly to the real complexities, drama and evident intellectual calibre of her relationship with Shelley, all of which were largely thrown away in favour of a pretty conventional troubled romance story.

In short, I'm glad I saw this (because I was always going to want to) and it's certainly better than The Happy Prince, but it could still have been an awful lot better than it was.

Apologies in advance if these film reviews are not very inspired. I watched the films in question between about February and May of this year, and didn't take any notes about them at the time. So I'm now more or less reduced to reading the Wikipedia entries (vel. sim.) and trying to remember what I thought of them. I'm just noting down that I watched them, really.


6. House of Frankenstein (1944), dir. Erle C. Kenton

This is one of Universal's multi-monster stories, featuring Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and the Wolfman. Somewhat confusingly, Boris Karloff is in it, but not as Frankenstein's monster: Glenn Strange takes that role, while Karloff plays quasi-Frankenstein figure Dr. Gustav Niemann instead. lady_lugosi1313 suggested we should watch it primarily because it includes a portrayal of Dracula, here played by John Carradine in what I think is the first time I've seen him in the role. He's pretty good while he is in it, doing some nice evil seduction stuff on a young lady, but he gets killed off quite early, so that his story doesn't overlap very much with those of the other monsters (or creatures), and he doesn't get much chance to interact with them. The rest of the film was enjoyable in itself, though, with good castle sets and some dramatic deaths at the climax.


7. The Ghoul (1933), dir. T. Hayes Hunter

This is another Boris Karloff film, in which he plays a paranoid ageing Egyptologist who lives in a gloomy isolated house and is nearing death. Taking his inspiration from the rituals and beliefs of the Egyptians he has spent his life studying, he has built himself a huge neo-Egyptian tomb, complete with a statue of the god Anubis, whom he worships and believes will grant him immortality in return for the offering of a magical jewel. For a long time, the film maintains ambiguity over whether apparently supernatural events are 'real' or not: we see Karloff apparently dying, being interred in his tomb and returning as a vengeful ghoul, and the hand of the Anubis statue appearing to become animated in order to clutch the jewel. But eventually all is revealed to have non-supernatural explanations: the statue's moving hand was actually a servant reaching through a hole in order to steal the jewel, while Karloff turns out to have slipped into a cataleptic trance and then revived. Meanwhile, there is a lot of detective work dedicated to discovering what is going on, and plenty of other strange and gothic happenings. Karloff is absolutely superb in the title role and the whole film a real treasure. Definitely highly recommended.


8. Tendre Dracula (1974), dir. Pierre Grunstein

Oh my! This is one bizarre film. Peter Cushing stars as an ageing horror actor, who wants to move from horror into romance roles. Two scriptwriters are sent by their producers to his home, a crumbling chateau, to persuade him to change his mind, taking their girlfriends with them. There, increasingly bizarre things happen to them all. Is Cushing's character playing an elaborate series of jokes on them all, or is he actually somehow imbued with supernatural powers and they are in for some terrible fate? And what sort of film is this even supposed to be? The weirdest moment is when he puts one of the girls across his knee and starts spanking her, all the while continuing with his conversation as though nothing were out of the ordinary. But that moment is not actually shockingly or strikingly weird compared to what else goes on around it - it just edges slightly ahead of the pack. lady_lugosi1313 may have scoffed at me (perfectly fairly!) for watching Eugénie... the Story of her Journey into Perversion (LJ / DW) just because it has Christopher Lee in it, but now that I have sat beside her watching this film just because Peter Cushing was in it, I feel we are even after all.


9. The Monkey's Paw (1948), dir. Norman Lee

This is a shortish (only just over an hour) adaptation of the classic horror story by W.W. Jacobs which lady_lugosi1313 had recorded off the telly. The print quality was a bit smeary, but we both thought it was very good, and probably had looked pretty beautiful in its original condition. It is updated to the present day of the production, so that the son dies in a drag-car racing accident rather than at a factory, but otherwise follows the story fairly straightforwardly. There are some good working-class characterisations in it, and the sense of dread and fear as the unseen Thing knocks at the door to come in was very effective, if maybe slightly over-played.


10. The Legend of Hell House (1973), dir. John Hough

A haunted house movie starring (amongst others) Roddy McDowall, of whom I have been a great fan ever since I first saw him as Octavian in Cleopatra (1963). The premise is that a group of people made up of scientists and psychics agree to stay for a week in a haunted house where terrible events occurred twenty years earlier, in order to try to document and investigate the possibility of supernatural survival after death. Given the genre, the ghosts soon start to oblige, and given the date of production in the early '70s, many of their manifestations are distinctly sexual. That is, it's basically a load of schlocky, sexy, technicolour nonsense. However, much the the cinematography was absolutely exquisite, the score and sound effects were co-produced by Delia Derbyshire (of Doctor Who theme and the music during the resurrection ritual in Dracula AD 1972 fame), and Roddy McDowall certainly did not disappoint. He delivers a genuinely compelling performance of a character at first riddled with anxiety from his own traumas of twenty years ago, but gradually growing in strength and confidence until it is he who confronts the domineering spirit at the root of all the trouble, reveals his shameful secret and thus disempowers and exorcises him. Also includes a surprise cameo appearance from Michael Gough, who is always a bonus, although he doesn't do very much!


11. The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), dir. Peter Weir

Pretty different from the others listed here, and perhaps more accurately described as a cult film rather than a horror film. It's Australian produced and set, so I was keen to watch it partly with a view to my trip there in the summer, but also because it's a classic which I've always wanted to see anyway. It is quite Wicker Mannish in its portrayal of an outsider who finds himself alone in a deviant community, and perhaps also a little The Prisonerish as he tries to figure out what is going on, everyone reassures him that everything is absolutely fine, and he discovers that he is unable to escape. But, unlike those examples, our point-of-view character is pretty naive and lacking in confidence, while there is internal trouble within the community itself, between the ostensibly repectable mayor and his circle and a subculture of punky rebels. It is only after open violence breaks out between these two sides that the outsider character is eventually able to escape. Along the way there is a lot of tongue-in-cheek comedy about small-town / rural Australian life, and some good black humour around the horrific deeds which the townsfolk are getting up to. Far from a run-of-the-mill mainstream movie, this definitely deserves its reputation as a cult classic, and is sure to surprise more or less whatever you are expecting of it.

I'm off to the cinema with ms_siobhan tomorrow, so that's a good incentive to finish off this film review catch-up project first so that I have a clean slate for tomorrow's new entry. The first three of these should always have been reviewed together in the same post anyway, as they were part of a series of Universal Monster Movies which the National Media Museum mounted on Monday nights during October and November.

27. Dracula (1931), dir. Tod Browning
I've reviewed this in excessive detail before, while for us this particular screening came fairly hot on the heels of our own viewing of the parallel Spanish version. But this was my first experience of it on the big screen, and it certainly deserves the detail and grandeur which that ensures - especially for the scenes set in Transylvania, in the darkened garden of Seward's asylum where Dracula lurks, and in his lair in Carfax Abbey. Everything is just beautiful, from the Art Deco bat which supplies the background for the opening credits to the gentle toll of the church bells at the end as Mina and Jon(athan) walk up the curving staircase out of Dracula's crypt. I will never quite be able to come to terms with the opossums running around in Dracula's castle, the piece of paper stuck to Lucy's bedside lamp which was obviously meant to improve the lighting for shots from one angle but was left very obviously in place for shots from the other, or the utter cardboard-cutoutness of Jon(athan) Harker, though.

28. Frankenstein (1931), dir. James Whale
This was the next in Universal's series, and in the National Media Museum's screening schedule. I've seen it before, but a long time ago and never on the big screen. Two main things to say. One, Boris as the creature is amazing. There is a real sensitivity in his performance, successfully conveying a living being with an agency and agenda of its own. His make-up is incredible as well. Forget all the clunky rip-offs and parodies of it you've seen. The original is actually exceptionally detailed and carefully-designed, with the hands and arms to me looking especially convincing as those of a reanimated corpse. Two, the way the human characters treat the creature is downright distressing, and indeed I found the whole moral compass of the film shockingly off-kilter. The biggest problem for me was that the in-story explanation offered for why the creature turns bad is that when Fritz (Frankenstein's assistant) goes to steal a brain for it, he comes back with what is literally labelled on the jar an 'abnormal brain', and which we have heard a medical scientist explaining accounts for the 'brutal and criminal life' which its owner had lived. I know this sort of thinking was rife in the early 20th century, and used to justify a lot of shitty oppression too, but it makes me so angry that I would struggle to overlook it in any circumstances, while in this particular film it anyway utterly destroys the potential moral nuances of the story it is trying to tell. Labelling the creature as an irredeemable criminal before it has even been brought to life quashes all chance of exploring the impact of Frankenstein's thoughtless act on his own creation, and also pre-excuses the appalling behaviour of the humans towards it once it has come to life. In fact, it means there's no real point portraying that behaviour anyway, as the motif of the brain means the creature was always going to 'go bad', however it was treated. So there are half-hearted nods towards exploring the creature's perspective, identifiable in Boris Karloff's performance and the scenes in which the creature is ill-treated, but in the end they have no moral weight because of the pre-destination symbolised by the brain. Meanwhile, the much louder message is the depressingly-simplistic one - "Look, you shouldn't try to play God because your creations will inevitably just be bad and go bad!" At the end, the poor creature dies screaming in agony in a burning mill (again played very affectingly by Boris), and we then just switch straight to the human characters unproblematically celebrating it all with a wedding party. Horrifying, but not in the way intended.

29. The Mummy (1932), dir. Karl Freund
The following week we had The Mummy, which I found much more satisfying. This time, its moral dimension is pretty sound, with some interesting commentary on the ethics of colonial archaeology in particular, and indeed a good understanding of how archaeology works in general (e.g. why simple bits of pottery are often much more important than golden treasures). Just one small complaint on the antiquities front - a priestess of Isis really cannot be described as a Vestal Virgin. 'Vestal' doesn't just mean generically sacred or holy - it means specifically consecrated to Vesta (the clue is in the name). This film boasts an unusually (for the time) autonomous female main character, Helen Grosvenor, who is the daughter of the governor of Sudan but has chosen to live quite independently from her parents in Cairo, expresses disdain for the various men who attempt to court or control her, and indeed ends up destroying the mummy at the end of the film in spite of the fact that she is his reincarnated lover. I've often complained about that particular trope (e.g. here re Blacula 1972), since it consistently strips women of their agency, but here far from it - instead, she actively decides that she doesn't want to be with Imhotep, and uses the resources which are her equivalent to his own magical powers (her connection to Isis, whose priestess she once was) to defeat him. All of this, of course, is pretty easily explained by the fact that story's original author was a woman. Visually, the film keeps up and indeed excels the standards of sets, make-up and costumes from the previous two films, including the wise / clever decision to show Boris in his full mummy make-up only on his first appearance, and after that have him looking more or less like a normal human being, but with a serious skin condition. He gets to speak properly in this film too, using the dialogue to infuse his character with a malevolent charm that I know well from Christopher Lee's roles. His performance is also ably supported by an adorable fluffy white cat - I wonder if he was the first film villain to have one? Finally, I was fascinated to note that in a flash-back sequence where Imhotep shows Helen scenes of their past together in a pool, the images are shot like a silent movie: less crisp than the surrounding footage, no use of close-ups, and the overlay of classic silent-movie style music (in contrast with almost no soundtrack music in main film). Like the white cat, I can't help but feel this must be a cinematic first, as the medium of film was still so new at this time that there can't have been many earlier opportunities to deliberately use the conventions of out-dated film technology to signify 'the past'. Very clever, and very creative.

30. Fear In The Night (1972), dir. Jimmy Sangster
Watched with ms_siobhan round at her place. It's a Hammer production with Peter Cushing, Ralph Bates and Joan Collins in it, but not one of their horror films - rather, a thriller. That said, it does play heavily on the possibility that there might be something supernatural going on for a long time, which of course Hammer's reputation put them in an excellent position to do. The story is set in the time when it was made, which meant lots of very enjoyable Seventies clothes, cars and street scenes, and revolves around a young woman who is experiencing repeated and very unsettling nocturnal physical attacks. The male characters around her dismiss her experiences as symptomatic of an over-wrought imagination, and for quite a long time it looked like the grain of the story might be leaning in that direction too. I began to get fractious, and ms_siobhan had to convince me to stick it out. But then the real truth began to emerge, her experiences were entirely vindicated, and indeed the film proved to be very sympathetic towards those affected by mental health issues - not only the heroine but Peter Cushing's character as well. So a very satisfying watch after all, and I'll definitely want to see it again some time now that I know the 'twist'.

31. Night of the Demon (1957), dir. Jacques Tourneur
Seen with minnesattva, magister and Andrew Hickey at the National Media Museum as part of a series of ghostly stories screened in the run-up to Christmas. I've seen it on the big screen before, and reviewed the experience. Indeed, I see that I spent a lot of that review discussing how it sits alongside Hammer's horror films, and I had similar responses this time. The importance of the deceased Professor Harrington's diary account in helping the characters figure out what Karswell is up to reminded me a great deal of how Jonathan Harker's diary functions in Hammer's Dracula (and in neither case comes from the source text), while the way Karswell turns on and mocks his own mother also reminded me of the relationship between the Baron Meinster and his mother in Brides of Dracula. Since both of those films were made after this (though only just in the case of Dracula), the direction of influence would go from here to Hammer, but that's entirely typical of how they worked - soaking up contemporary stories and conventions and building them into their own productions. Meanwhile, Andrew noted that by making John Holden a sceptical outsider literally flying into an island full of superstitious believers in the supernatural, the story also had quite a Wicker Mannish feel. It is, of course, all quite a long way from M.R. James' original, but I am reconciled to that, especially on a second viewing. In and of itself it is a great movie which deserves to be regularly rescreened.

32. Rogue One (2016), dir. Gareth Edwards
And my last film of 2016, which I saw with Mr. and Mrs. ZeitgeistZero. It was in fact my first experience of seeing a film on an IMAX screen, as well as being a 3D screening, so it was all pretty impressive and mind-blowing both visually and aurally. The story was great, and I've enjoyed all the fantastically detailed articles about its world which have appeared since, like this one about data storage standards and this one about archaeology. Three cheers for stories which inspire that kind of fan-work! It's true that it could have had more women in it, and let's keep demanding the best on that front, but it was certainly epically better for women than any of episodes I-VI, as well as being impressive on ethnicity and disability, so let's also cheer the direction of travel. Much discussion has also been prompted by its use of CGI to recreate characters from the original trilogy, but I'm afraid I found this only technically impressive. Peter Cushing's recreated face was pretty good, but of course CGI cannot capture the unique humanness of a real person's performance - indeed, even a very convincing impression will only ever be a pastiche, missing the unpredictability of the original person. Most strikingly, the voice wasn't his at all, and since that was always such a central part of what Peter Cushing had to offer, its absence was bound to disappoint. Leia I found less problematic, partly because her face was only on-screen for a few seconds, and partly because they had been able to use an old clip of Carrie Fisher's voice from the time - but of course it was also rather heart-breaking to see her at all so soon after Carrie's sad death. Meanwhile, Darth Vader of course did not need CGI to return to our screens, and it was fabulous fun to see him in full-on evil action again. That said though, part of the power and fascination of Darth Vader in the original films is discovering slowly and with increasing horror just what he is willing and capable of doing. (Even if you have seen the films before, the reactions of the characters within the story lead you through the process of discovering this all over again.) Here, he pretty much launched straight into evil machinations and force-choking, leaving no room for the suspenseful frisson of gradual discovery from the earlier films. Still, I guess that reflects the reality of a modern audience's expectations - you simply can't keep redoing the suspense if they're just going to be sitting their with their pop-corn going "Yeah, we know he's evil - cut to the chase!" It's just a pity Darth's character-development won't ever really work now if the films are viewed in story order - but then I guess that was already ruined fifteen years ago by the whole prequel sequence giving away his relationship to Luke.

OK, I am up to date on my film reviews! Now just gotta do the same for books... and Doctor Who... :-(

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The local cultural offerings of last weekend could not have been more perfect for me. Not only did the National Media Museum in Bradford put on a Hammer Horror themed film course, but Robert Lloyd Parry, who played M.R. James in Mark Gatiss' documentary about his life on Christmas Day, was to be found doing live readings of Lost Hearts and A Warning to the Curious in a derelict warehouse in Holbeck on the Sunday evening. Fitting it all in to a single weekend was a bit of a logistical challenge, but I am so glad that I did.

The film course was entitled Sex, Death & British Horror: Hammer in the 1950s, and involved screenings of the three iconic films which made Hammer's name as a horror studio in the late '50s - The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy - each preceded by about half an hour's worth of introductory talks. On the Sunday afternoon, we were also taken into the museum's archive to see some of the most relevant items from their Hammer collection, while each day ended with tutor-led discussions of the films in the Media Museum bar. Seeing the films and the archive was awesome, of course, but I have experienced those before, whereas the chance to sit around with equally-geeky people steeped in the same material and keen to discuss it in depth was in many ways the best part of the weekend for me. Really, that wasn't exactly unique for me either, since many of the most vocal people in both discussions also happened to be my friends already, so I can have that experience almost any time I like - as indeed we did as we walked out of each screening, or on the bus afterwards. But it's still nice to do it in a slightly larger group, and with some extra perspectives and opinions in the mix.

( 7. The Curse of Frankenstein, which turned out to be basically a doomed bromance )

( 8. The Mummy, which turned out to be a serious attempt at cinematic epic, and with strong contemporary political resonances to boot )

( 9. Dracula, which somehow even after all this time and all these viewings yielded up yet another discovery and a whole raft of backstory which can be built upon it )

I was going to write about the effects of viewing the three films so close together, of our visit to the Media Museum's Hammer make-up effects archive, and of the M.R. James readings in this post as well, but it's already got pretty long, and I won't have time to do any more until Monday evening, as I have to spend the weekend at my parents'. So this will do for now, and I'll pick up the rest next week.

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