In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

I did something I've been meaning to do for a while today: grabbed Wikipedia's list of Hammer films and went thought it bolding all the ones I'd seen and additionally noting those I've seen in the cinema (well - on a big screen, not always in a traditional cinema). The answers are that I've seen 68 out of 175, mainly but not exclusively gothic horrors, of which 16 on the big screen. I am not going to try to link from this list to the other posts where I have reviewed many of them here. That's too big a task. But I will keep updating this post as I go along!

( Complete list under here )

The pandemic has put a bit of a hole in my movie-watching, mainly because I was doing so much of it with lady_lugosi1313 before it started, but also because my Lib Dem chairing duties make it very difficult to ring-fence the time to sit down and watch a movie on my own without the prompt of a friend wanting me to do it with them. There's almost always an email to write, an agenda to put together, a printing task to do or some other chore accompanied by a weight of obligation that I tell myself I should get that done this evening, and then maybe watch something nice tomorrow. Guess what has always happened by tomorrow, though.

The same problem rather applies to writing about them too. It's always postponable until I have just sorted out X, Y and Z - but in fact the alphabet never ends. Anyway, I feel physically pretty under par this weekend and just need to ignore the to-do list for a bit. Let's see if I'm up to briefly recording some films I've watched instead.


4. Twins of Evil (1971), dir. John Hough

This is a Hammer vampire film whose reputation as being more concerned to titillate its audiences than tell a good story precedes it. As such, I went in with rock-bottom expectations, and therefore quite enjoyed it when it turned out to have a reasonably coherent storyline after all. I won't rush to see it again, but I have seen worse Hammer films. Speaking of which...


5. Moon Zero Two (1969), dir. Roy Ward Baker

Yeah, this was extraordinarily bad. It's a futuristic sci-fi story about mining on the moon, presumably released to capitalise on moon-mania sparked by the landing that year. I watched it on 9 May 2021, because that is the day when the story begins, plus I knew it would be the day after the local election count finished, so I would be knackered and very much in need of a brainless story to watch. But despite that attempt to create a feel of special timeliness around my viewing, I just could not get into the story. There were a few fun retrofuturistic costumes, including some ladies with excellent purple curly hair, but the whole story was just too reliant on boring dialogue about mining delivered in static indoor settings by characters I didn't care about.


6. Ghost Stories (2017), dir. Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman

This is a recent British ghost story anthology film which is overall good and delivers some nice scary thrills along the way. It's filmed in Yorkshire, which meant I recognised the locations, including scenes of a stage psychic shot in the City Varieties Music Hall in Leeds. Given that the one time in my life I have actually been there was not long before the pandemic to see a spoof psychic with lady_lugosi1313, that was pretty cool. The individual stories are tied together by a connecting narrative in which each is told by a witness to a sceptic investigating reported ghost sightings and trying to discover the truth behind them. It seemed to be going a bit silly towards the end, but the silliness then turned into a quite effective deconstruction of the connecting character, who ( spoiler ). It centres issues of discrimination by making the connecting character Jewish, showing how his childhood was marred by bullying and his father flying into a rage about his sister's Muslim boyfriend, and including a black priest in the first story. But it's also almost entirely male-centred, with women featuring only as monsters or distant, one-dimensional mothers / wives / daughters appearing only briefly to further the men's stories. A pity, because other than that it was pretty good.


7. Dracula Reborn (2015), dir. Attila Luca

I watched this one last night and it is extremely bad! The plot is supposed to be about a group of journalists from Vancouver and Paris who are trying to track down a vampire cult led by Dracula, and follow it to Transylvania. Unfortunately, the vampires themselves are styled in silly cheap cloaks and clown-white make-up which just makes them look like grotesque clichés. The editing is also often quite bad, and the logic of the plot set-up is ill thought-through. We hear news bulletins saying that the Dracula clan are like celebrities and the press are too scared to attack them. But we never see anything of this celebrity - how is it manifested? What hold does it give them over the press? Are they able to use it to draw in their victims? Instead, a string of bloodied corpses is left all over Paris, and we're shown individual killings being reported in the news. Shouldn't the press be collaborating in suppressing those reports if they're supposedly so in thrall to the vampires? Also, if the vampires are like celebrities, why is it particularly hard for the journalists to track them down? And what do the journalists think is going to happen when they do track them down? They keep saying they want to find and interview a missing girl who they believe has been turned into a vampire, and / or interview members of the vampire cult. But they also know that everyone who comes across the vampires in any way is brutally murdered, increasingly including their own contacts, and yet don't seem to try to do anything to find out how to protect themselves against the same fate. Literally none of it makes the slightest bit of sense, and it's only worth watching at all as an object lesson in the difference between a superficially cool-sounding concept and a genuinely well-developed story.

I'm planning to synchro-watch another Hammer film with the lovely lady_lugosi1313 this evening, so had better get the last couple written up first!

This one is a black and white Hammer mystery / SF film which I recorded off TPTV ages ago (and which they coincidentally broadcast again recently anyway). What I knew about it when I started was that it starred Oliver Reed as the ringleader of a Teddy Boy gang, and that it had been strongly recommended to me by a member of the Dracula Society several years ago as being very 'ahead of its time'. But that was all, and that was probably the best way to watch it. It does indeed start off with Oliver and his chums in a Brighton Rock style narrative, but they turn out to be only part of the context for a gradually-revealed SF story - which I guess is what my DracSoc chum meant about it being ahead of its time. It certainly kept surprising me as the story unfolded, which was fun.

Oliver and his gang are good value in their own right. Their patch is Weymouth rather than Brighton, but they have the motorbikes, the black leather, the post-war teen attitude and the mindless violence. Ollie carries a curved-handled umbrella in a way that reminded me of Alex's bowler hat and cane in A Clockwork Orange - but actually even the book of that wasn't written until after this film had finished production (in 1961), so I guess the use of that sort of characterising device for gang members originates somewhere earlier. His sister, Joan, helps to target the gang's marks by pretending to respond to their perving and luring them down quiet side-streets - and of course Oliver Reed's character is obsessively, jealously protective of her, which acts as a plot driver when she decides she likes one of the marks more than she likes him. She is played by Shirley Anne Field, who also played the titular character in Beat Girl (1960: LJ / DW), which made it easy to slip straight into the correct early '60s rebellious teen culture mode while watching her - presumably part of the point of the original casting.

The characters involved in the SF side of the plot are gradually introduced in parallel with Ollie, Joan and the gang at first, but then the two strands of the story come together as Joan escapes Ollie with the help of an American tourist whom she had previously targeted on behalf of the gang. They find themselves in a hidden bunker in a cliff below a military base, inhabited by nine children who are strangely cold to the touch - and baffled by Joan and the tourist's own warm skin. We've already seen these children receiving lessons over a television screen (very COVID-esque!) from the leader of a team of scientists observing them, and after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing it gradually emerges they that were born of mothers affected by nuclear explosions, and are radioactive themselves. They desperately want to escape their bunker and see the real world they have been taught about in their lessons, but their radioactivity makes them dangerous, which is why they are kept inside the secret bunker. The scientists are bringing them up in the hope that they alone of humanity will be able to survive a nuclear holocaust - naturally considered inevitable, given the time when the film was made.

The set-up was clearly designed to create a tension between the scientists' desire to do something to save humanity from protection and the lengths they're prepared to go to for this 'greater good'. This includes not only keeping the children locked up in the bunker but ultimately destroying everyone who finds out about it or protests against it, including Ollie, Joan, the American tourist and a female artist who is the lover of the lead scientist and has been making sculptures at the top of the cliff where the children are hidden all this time. The film closes with the scientist gunning her down in order to protect his project, which I quite liked as an unambiguously bleak ending. But overall, I wouldn't say it entirely lived up to the enthusiastic recommendation which my DracSoc friend gave it.

I'm uncomfortably aware that I haven't written anything other than WIDAWTW posts for over a month, or indeed commented much on other people's entries. The approach of term coincided with the local constituency party that I am chair of having to go into high alert due to the likelihood of a General Election being called at any moment, so it has all been teaching-related activity and campaigning. Last weekend, though, I took myself down to London for an epic weekend which combined delivering a talk on Dracula and Classical Antiquity to the Dracula Society on the Saturday evening with going to the immersive musical version of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds the following day - and today I finally have a day off to write about it.

( Dracula and Classical antiquity )

( Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds - the immersive experience ) Then at the end, we were invited to pose in our pairs for pictures in front of a green-screen, of which this was very much the best final result for me and Fiona, pretending to be menaced by Martians:


I'm normally pretty cynical about that kind of add-on money-making ploy for an experience which you've already paid quite a considerable amount of money for, but given that it had actually been a really enjoyable afternoon, and that the full set of pictures came complete with a digital download code which meant that we could both access them, I decided to go for it. All in all, A++ would fight my way through red weed again.

This book was my response to the 'Doesn't belong to me' prompt when I did the book a day meme back in June. I hadn't actually read it yet at that point, but had spotted it on my Dad's bookshelves, and felt it deserved to be read in this year of all years. The cover looks like this, and was at once promising and off-putting:


I mean, on the one hand that's a great example of a hand-painted pulp SF cover; but on the other in my experience novels with that sort of cover tend in practice towards jet-packs and misogyny. Thankfully, now that I've read it, I can confirm that the latter expectation was entirely unfair. This is actually ( a very thoughtful vision of what the future might look like from the standpoint of 1957 ) All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by this book, not to mention somehow comforted to find that as badly as we seem to be fucking things up here in the early 21st century, someone in the 1950s imagined nothing very different and possibly something worse. Glad not to have disappointed too badly...

Starburst magazine ran a film festival in late August 2016, which I went to with friends and wrote up on my 'starburstff' tag (LJ / DW). It was badly advertised and organised, but actually the films, the guests and the friends I went with were all great, so we had a brilliant time - something I particularly needed back then, as it was still less than two months after my Mum had died. They attempted to put another one on about a year later, but I guess got even lower take-up than the previous year, so that it ended up being cancelled. This time, though, they hit upon the cunning ruse of giving away the tickets for free, which of course meant people snapped them up and it went ahead this time. (Clearly their business model does not really depend on box-office takings.) Andrew, Extinction65mya, lady_lugosi1313, planet_andy and I went along and enjoyed a mixture of brand new and vintage films and the delights of the local food outlets, while periodically boggling out of the windows at the snow swirling upwards between the towers which make up most of Manchester's Media City area, and wondering nervously how we were going to get home. Thankfully, all trams and trains were running smoothly today in spite of the weather, which is more than I can say for Friday when I travelled over. So I'm now safe and warm on the sofa, and able to write up what I saw:


6. The Gatehouse (2016), dir. Martin Gooch

This is basically the story of a ten-year-old girl called Eternity who likes digging in the woods. Eternity is the kind of girl who, when she digs up what looks like an eighteenth-century lady's pistol buried in a tin box, steals a book on guns from the library by stuffing it under her coat (but does give the girl on the desk a cheese sandwich on the way out), finds out what she needs to restore it to working order, talks her Dad into taking her to the hardware store and tells the man working there that it's none of his business when he queries what on earth she wants all this stuff for anyway. And not only is she the central character, but the motifs and logic of the story are those of an imaginative, strong-minded ten-year-old girl too, involving magical stones, a horned god roving the woods turning people into trees, a secret chamber under her house, people who appear to have been shot dead turning out to be fine after all (possibly the blood that looked like jam really was jam?), and her playing a central role in helping the horned god to sort everything out. In fact, it’s a lot like the sort of story my six-year-old niece Eloise tells me when we play with her story-cubes. And while a film matching that description could be dreadful, this one really wasn’t, because all of the characters were so believably written and played (very much including Scarlett Rayner as Eternity, in what I see was her first film role), the horned god was shot just on the right side of obliquely enough to keep him mysterious and stop him looking too much like a guy in a suit, and actually the whole thing was very impressively framed and edited and shot, making very good use of some nice British countryside.

The trailer is a bit misleading, because both Eternity and her Dad are troubled by post-traumatic bad dreams following the death of her mother (in a highly-implausible boating accident which also comes across like the kind of story dreamt up by a ten-year-old), and a lot of the soft shocks which the trailer chooses to foreground are actually those dreams rather than the ‘real’ (insofar as it tries to be anything of the sort) main story. Meanwhile, it entirely misses delights like local teenagers Poppy and Daisy’s drunken walk home from the pub, Poppy's folk-Gothic Lithuanian-accented tarot-reading friend, or Eternity’s Dad teaching her to call up (imaginary) Roman legionaries to help see off the school bullies. Actually the Romans were bumping about quite a lot in this story, not only as Eternity’s personal bodyguard but also as the people who supposedly first built a structure on the site of the gatehouse which she and her Dad now live in. For a moment at the end, Eternity called up her imaginary legionaries to protect her against the horned god, and it looked like we might actually get a stand-off between the might of ancient Rome and the spirits of the British woodlands, which I would have been very interested in. It was not to be, but a great film nevertheless, and in my view the best of the new productions I saw during the festival.


7. Black Site (2018), dir. Tom Paton

The festival schedule had a different film by the same director lined up in this slot, but as the editing on this one had just been completed this week, he decided to treat us to a test screening of the new piece instead. I was a little bit sad about this, as the scheduled film (Redwood) was about vampires in the woods, but then again this one was very solid and it's always exciting to see something absolutely brand new which hasn't reached the general public yet - so I didn't mind too much in the end.

Black Site draws on Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, but the format of the film is 'trapped in an enclosed space with something bad', as per (for example) The Thing or (as Extinction65mya pointed out) Die Hard. The enclosed space in question is the Artemis complex, an underground military facility used to deport Elder Gods who have returned in weakened form to our universe (I think - I'm not sure I fully followed that bit). Once they have been tracked down by field agents and ‘bound’ into human bodies, they are brought to the Artemis complex for deportation back to hell - a complex process which requires a deportation agent to recite a text which he has memorised. Most of the time, though, it’s a quiet place run on a skeleton staff, which only comes into action when a deportation candidate is brought in. As as result, it's not as secure or well-maintained as it should be, so between that and the complexity of the deportation process, there is plenty of scope for things to go wrong.

Our main character is Ren Reid, who saw her parents killed by the Elder God Erebus as a child, and is now working at the Artemis complex, desperately trying to qualify as a field agent and get out of there, but constantly failing her psych test because of ongoing trauma from her childhood experience. Then one day Erebus himself is brought in for deportation, along with the deportation agent (a rather clueless public-school type) and closely pursued by a group of cultists who want Erebus back so that they can carry on drinking the blood of the succession of human vessels they had been trapping him in before the field agents bust in and took him from them. Chaos ensures, and most of the film then consists of Ren fighting her way through the cultists while protecting the clueless deportation agent, so that she can get him to Erebus at the centre of the complex and complete the deportation.

It was a well-paced, well-crafted story making excellent use of a well-chosen location. I particularly enjoyed the confrontation with Erebus at the end, which proved not to be fighty at all (as he was held safely captive behind an Electronic Light Field - ELF, geddit?), but instead focused on dialogue in which he told the humans just how insignificant they appeared from his out-of-time perspective, and eventually revealed that he had set the whole thing up from the beginning because he wanted to be deported anyway in order to be reunited with his love, Nyx, deported 20 years earlier. (So it was only the cultists getting in the way of the Artemis complex's normal procedures after all.) I am a real sucker for supernatural beings whose power is such that they are simultaneously dangerous to humans and yet also possessed of insight and perspective we can only dream of (it's a lot of what I also like about vampires), so this ticked my boxes in a big way - and all the more so for tagging it onto real-world ancient Greek mythology.

It was also good on female representation. Besides Ren, it also features two other well-defined female characters who are far from constrained by gender roles - her savvy, hard-headed boss and the samurai-trained leader of the cultists. A conversation between Ren and the boss about her career prospects secures a Bechel pass, while we all enjoyed a trope-aware scene at the end in which the deportation agent tried to suggest to Ren that as the 'hero' of the hour, he should get the girl, and she snorted and told him it was never going to happen. It didn't do so well on race, though. It gave Ren a black friend / mentor, but of the four main good human characters (along with Ren, her boss and the deportation agent), he was the only one not to survive the film, and the way this played out was definitely tropey - heroically trying to protect others and then entirely focused on motivating Ren to carry on as he dies. We were also under-whelmed by the American accents which the actually mainly British cast had been asked to adopt. On the whole, though, jolly good and a worthy follow-up to The Gatehouse.


8. The House of Screaming Death (2017), dir. Alex Bourne, Troy Dennison, Rebecca Harris-Smith, David Hastings and Kaushy Patel

This, by contrast, was just terrible! It was meant to be an homage to the great British horror films of the 1950s-'70s, and had adopted in particular the Amicus speciality of the portmanteau format. The framing narrative consisted of Ian McNeice, sitting down to tell an audience whom at first we couldn't see some stories from the bloody history of 'Bray Manor'. You'd think you couldn't go too far wrong with something that had Ian McNeice in it, and the trailer had conveyed a generally promising impression. It's also worth saying that the films of Hammer, Amicus, Tigon and the like were all low-budget and contain much which is rough around the edges. What they do offer, though, is decent acting, characters, stories, period settings, direction and dialogue - which this did not.

Would you, for example, enter the pub in a village where you are staying, and, on the back of having been (rather improbably) told earlier by the local priest that several local people had disappeared about a year ago, announce at the top of your voice to the entire assembled company, without any preludes or introductions, that you wished to express your sympathies for their recent losses? No? Well, a character in this film did. He also turned up in the village without a hat, stood at the bar in shirt-sleeves with no cuff-links, said 'OK' and ran past visibly-modern radiators, even though it was all supposed to be set in 1888. Meanwhile, another story featured a character explaining how she had once murdered someone using a stake from a fence in the process of construction while we saw a flash-back of the action, except that in the flash-back she was very clearly wielding a garden fork, not a fence-stake. Plus all of them relied heavily on scenes of people standing still and delivering exposition to one another, while we had got a good twenty minutes into the film before a single woman spoke.

At the very end the framing story offered the chance to excuse the utterly inept period detailing at least, since it turned out that all of the main characters from the stories were gathered together in one time and place as the audience listening to Ian McNeice's narration, after which he proceeded to murder them all. So maybe they had never 'really' inhabited the various time-periods when their stories were supposed to be set at all, and were actually just the modern victims of a modern serial-killer. But that is to cut the film a lot of generosity for something which it gave no convincing sign of having thought through in advance, and I personally didn't have any such generosity left to give after everything we'd sat through for the previous two hours. Not actually the worst film I've ever seen, but very, very disappointing.


9. Tremors (1990), dir. Ron Underwood

Our final two films were oldies, so I won't bother with plot précis. I've only seen Tremors the once before, on TV when baby-sitting around the age of 15 or so. I wasn't expecting much from it, but I remember getting sucked into its silly fun at the time, and can very much see why now. For what is essentially a wild west film (but with worms instead of armed bandits), it's not bad for diversity either. Finn Carter as the geologist, Rhonda, has a purpose and agency of her own, isn’t overtly sexualised, contributes plenty of good ideas throughout and indeed is seen by the two main male cowboy characters as an authoritative source of information. Sure, Kevin Bacon's character does ‘win’ her at the end (in exactly the trope parodied in Black Site), but there's a knowingness about it even here in the way he doesn't do it in self-assured alpha-male fashion, but is clearly pretty nervous and has to be chivvied along by his friend. In the racial diversity stakes, we have a Chinese store owner who dies, but a Mexican character survives, and like everyone else in the cast gets to make his own contribution to the rescue effort by having the idea to set a tractor running to distract the worms, and the bravery and physical skills to do it. All in all, it's one of those films which actually just ends up reminding you how little progress we've generally made on diversity in film almost thirty years later (for all that the past few years have served up some stand-out exceptions). Probably my favourite moment of this viewing was sitting next to Extinction65mya, who is a palaeontologist, when Rhonda observed that there are no fossils of anything like the worms threatening the town, and that therefore they must 'pre-date the fossil record'. She head-desked. I also kept thinking Kevin Bacon would end up riding one of the worms, but I guess I was getting that mixed up with Dune. His cliff-face grand finale defeat was great anyway.


10. Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), dir. Ed Wood

Another very special genre classic, which I last saw a little more recently that Tremors, but only by about three or four years. As Extinction65mya observed, you've had one hell of a film-watching day when (thanks to The House of Screaming Death), this is definitively not the worst film you've seen. But of course the reason everyone loves it is the surreal charm of its particular form of ineptness, underpinned by a sort of cheerful exuberance which somehow carries you along for the ride. We howled with laughter throughout, in a fond and appreciative way. My only real disappointment is how little Vampira really gets to do in it, and I'm now keen to watch some of the other films which Maila Nurmi played in her Vampira persona, so that I can enjoy more of her obvious excellence.


With that, we called it a day, and lady_lugosi1313, planet_andy headed off for a terrifying white-out drive along the M62, while Andrew, Extinction65mya and I merely walked across the square for dinner at Prezzo. Here's hoping we're all back in Manchester before long for more from the Starburst crew - but ideally without the snow!

3. Mary Shelley (1818), Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

I read this in preparation for a trip to Geneva with the Dracula Society, organised to mark the bicentenary of the famous wet weekend in the Villa Diodati which gave rise to it (and to Polidori's 'The Vampyre'). I never wrote about the trip here in any detail, because it came half way through my Mum's final illness, and just at the point when we were really starting to realise that it was final. I spent a lot of the time while I was there worrying and checking my phone for updates, and then all the time after I got back just trying to cope while also carrying a pretty heavy load of work commitments. So the trip itself was a rather strained experience; but what I did get out of it was very much enhanced by my pre-holiday reading. I believe in the case of the novel it was my third time reading it, the first and second times being once in my mid-to-late-teens and another in my mid-twenties. Both well pre-date my habit of book-blogging here anyway, so as far as LJ / DW is concerned this is the first time. That makes it a pity that I didn't manage to do so while it was all fresh in my mind, but I did actually make a few notes about this one while reading it at the time, so I can do a slightly better job than with most of these catch-up reviews.

Obviously, it is a great novel. That isn't to say it's perfect. My mental red pen was particularly exercised by the way Justine was introduced: in the middle of a letter from Elizabeth to Victor, where she takes it upon herself to recount the entire story of how Justine came to be part of their household, even though Victor would of course already know all of this. I could see him as he read it turning over the pages in bafflement thinking "Why the hell is she telling me all this? Get onto something I don't know!" But hey, Mary was only 18 when she began writing the thing, and did it all in longhand while on the road through Switzerland and Italy. Let's cut her some slack. What she created here was innovative, genre-defining, gripping and incredibly cleverly put together.

Reading it now, I'm much more aware of its literary and historical context than I think I've been on previous encounters. Previously I think I have just accepted it as a gothic novel because that it how it is usually marketed, and also viewed it through the filters of its many film adaptations. It certainly is in the gothic arena, as you would expect given that Mary started writing the novel as an entry in a ghost story competition. It draws on established gothic tropes like descriptions of wild landscapes and huge, powerful storms; Victor's great moment of inspiration for how to build his creature happens in a charnel-house (what more gothic?); and he later uses a vampire metaphor to describe the effects of the creature on his family, saying that it is as though he himself had risen from the grave to murder them (exactly what Byron's vampire in The Giaour is condemned to do, as Mary must have known). But I think I understand the Romantic movement better now than I did when I first encountered Frankenstein, and I see now that its central themes of man's hubris, the rejection of technology and the nostalgic glorification of nature make it a Romantic novel more than anything else: again, totally unsurprisingly given who Mary was hanging out with while she wrote it. It's also frequently touted as the 'first Sci-Fi' novel, which of course isn't in the least bit incompatible with the other genres: it can be a Romantic novel which draws on gothic tropes while also sowing the seeds of something new. On the SF front, I was struck in particular coming to the book after many years of film adaptations by how very little scientific detail Mary provides about the creation of the creature. All those big set-pieces with sawing-and-stitching montages, lighting storms and of course bubbling equipment are entirely a product of the movie industry; Mary in fact skims very lightly over the creation process and gets on to its consequences instead. But SF-ness doesn't just lie in sciencey-science and techno-babble. I felt that her use of the creature's perspective to consider what our world might look like to an adult intelligence dropped into it without prior knowledge did justify describing it as an SF novel. In any case, certainly speculative fiction.

I think I was also alert to issues around social class this time in a way I haven't been on previous readings. For all Mary's radical family background, she certainly believes in a strong overlap between high social status and inherent worth. It's noticeable that her idealised family in the cottage turn out to be from a fallen 'good' family, rather than just being normal working people, and her account of how the Frankenstein family 'rescue' blonde aristocratic Elizabeth from the dark Italian peasant family who have taken her in practically slides into eugenics. More interestingly, though, there is a lot of anxiety detectable here. The narratives of the cottage family, Elizabeth and Victor's mother are all about people of once-high status who have fallen on hard times; a theme which must have felt potent for Mary after having thrown in her lot with Shelley at the cost of her father's disapproval and constant financial instability.

As for the characters, have I realised on previous readings what self-absorbed whiny little fuck Victor is? I'm not sure, but I found him almost unbearable this time around. He actually claims his suffering is worse than Justine's when she is about to be executed for a murder she didn't commit, on the grounds that at least she knows she's innocent. Fuck off! I've always known the novel was written to explore both sides of the creator / created relationship, inviting our sympathy for the creature as much as Victor, but on this read I massively preferred the creature, in spite of his cottage-burning anger management issues. I'm sure Mary intended us to find them both flawed, but at least the creature seems to start off with basically decent instincts, only to be drive to murderous extremes by the way other people treat him. Victor has no such excuse that I can see, creating his own woes, exacerbating them by behaving like an absolute wanker to everyone who tries to help him, and crying about how hard-done-by he is all the while. No to that, thank you very much.


4. Andrew McConnell Stott (2014), The Poet and the Vampyre: the curse of Byron and the birth of literature's greatest monsters / 4.5. parts of Daisy Hay (2010), Young Romantics: the Shelleys, Byron and other tangled lives

This was the other side of my pre-holiday reading: historical background about the famous Diodati weekend and the authoring of Frankenstein and 'The Vampyre'. The book by McConnell Stott I bought myself after Googling for something to help me understand the context for our holiday, and I definitely chose well. It is very much focused on the Diodati weekend and what came out of it, but includes plenty on the run-up and aftermath as well. The one by Hay was lent to me by the lovely lady_lugosi1313 and offers a broader general take on the Byron / Shelley phenomenon, so I just read one chapter and a few other snippets which dealt with the relevant material.

I hadn't realised before starting on either just how well-documented the movements of the people concerned actually were. More or less everyone involved was busy writing diaries or letters about what they did, which is why such detailed accounts of the events of the Geneva trip are possible. Stott made really good use of these, quoting from them at length and providing proper scholarly notes at the back of the book which I appreciated. His style is far from dry and academic, though – often his book reads almost like a novel in its own right, and I felt very engrossed and involved with all the characters. I won't try to recount everything I learnt from it, but I will note down the one thing which struck me most powerfully: viz. that Claire Clairmont is an absolute bad-ass! She is so often either left out of accounts of the Villa Diodati weekend altogether, or portrayed as the ditzy one who was just there to fuck Byron and wasn't on the same intellectual level as the others. But her surviving letters and memoirs make it very clear indeed that this was far from the case. Yes, she did want to fuck Byron, but for a girl of her age in the early 19th century to conceive of that goal and travel half-way across Europe to make good on it frankly isn't to be sniffed at. As for her intellect, she was brought up alongside Mary in the same radical intellectual household, and she clearly benefitted from it. Just because she didn't become a published poet or novelist doesn't mean she was thick.

Anyway, Mary and Claire got the last laugh in the end, outliving all the ridiculous, self-obsessed men in their lives by several decades each. Claire even wrote a set of memoirs in her old age hauling both Byron and Shelley over the coals, and not without cause. She was absolutely part of it all, and I'll never stand by and let her be erased from the Diodati story again.


That trip to Geneva

As already mentioned above, I never did write this trip up at the time and I can't now in detail, but I may as well include a few notes about it while I am looking back over the relevant reading material. We were there from the 3rd to 5th of June, c. ten days before the 1816 night of the ghost story competition (16th June), and at a time when the full party had all already arrived in the Geneva area. On the first day we went to the Villa Diodati itself, of course, followed by a bicentennial exhibition about its occupants at the nearby Bibliotheca Bodmeriana which was absolutely amazing: they had portraits of all five of the Diodati contingent, practically the whole of Mary Shelley's manuscript for Frankenstein, absolutely loads of other personal documents and effect of those concerned, and tons of fascinating material about the later impact of Frankenstein - e.g. play-bills for early theatrical versions of it. Then on the following days we went to Chillon Castle at the other end of Lake Geneva, which Byron visited and wrote a poem about, and which had its own bicentennial exhibition focused primarily on him, and then to Gruyères, of cheese fame, which also had a very nice castle as well as a festival going on in the medieval village and cows lounging about on the hillside just outside. These are a few pictures, showing all of us at the Villa Diodati, the boat arriving to take us home from Chillon, and me in the castle at Gruyères with a huge downpour bucketing down behind me.

Start of term = busy = also tired when not actually busy = still haven't finished writing up the Starburst Film Festival I attended in late August. Friday and Saturday are covered at the links; the schedule for Sunday is here, with what I did below.



( Space-flight and puzzle games )

( Interview with Toby Whithouse )

( 23. Aliens (1986), dir. James Cameron )

( Red Dwarf series XI: exclusive first episode preview and interview with Doug Naylor )

Finally, it was time to depart, sad that it had already all come to an end, but already making plans for future fantastic film-related adventures as we bid one another goodbye. I'll certainly come back for another Starburst festival if they do it again next year.

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As if a genuine Smell-O-Vision film and an unfilmed Hammer Dracula script hadn't been enough, last weekend's journey of cinematic wonders ended on the Sunday evening in Bradford with 2001: A Space Odyssey, seen as it was originally intended to be seen - that is, in the full glory of Cinerama. I watched, rapt, alongside minnesattva, magister and Andrew Hickey, as the wonders of space opened up before us, and pondered idly what it must have been like to live in those heady days of the late '60s White Hot Technological Revolution, when the world of normalised space travel which it depicted might really have seemed like a plausible likelihood for the far-distant future of 2001.

I have seen the film before, of course, but believe me when I say that seeing it in Cinerama is an entirely different experience. Kubrick designed it specifically to be seen on a curved screen, and once you see it that way it becomes so painfully, searingly obvious that he did that you realise you simply haven't experienced the film he thought he was making until that moment. This was perfectly clear to me already in the first half, when I realised exactly why the location chosen for the ape-creatures drinking from their water-hole was a rounded geographical bowl, and why so many scenes of the lunar landscape are designed the same way - because, of course, in Cinerama they would appear to be actually curving out towards the audience, as though we were sitting ourselves on the far side of that very bowl. In Cinerama, when the idea occurs to one of the ape-creatures for the very first time to pick up a large thigh-bone, and use it to smash up the smaller bones of the animal skeleton lying in front of him, the pieces which fly up into the air appear as though they are coming right out of the screen at you. And as for the space stations and planets which cartwheel by to the music of the Blue Danube - watching them is like looking out from the bridge of your own vessel, as vast bodies thousands of miles away float balletically across your field of vision.

Then in the intermission, Andrew too commented that he had never realised before just how much of a Cinerama film 2001 was. Fresh from having seen The Best of Cinerama that morning, he meant something more than my simple observation of curves, space and quasi-3D. Rather, as he pointed out, Cinerama travelogues of the type he had seen that morning regularly introduced their viewers to a rather surreal combination of the wonders of nature, followed by the wonders of technology - exactly like the early ape-creatures followed by the pirouetting space stations we had just seen. What's more, although 2001 was not shot using the three-strip camera technique which The Best of Cinerama used (and which I have experienced myself for The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962)), he had noticed that some of the shots were composed as though they were going to be - that is, with strong verticals positioned 1/3 and 2/3 of the way across the screen, exactly where the joins between the strips would have been visible. I settled down for the second half with his comment in mind, and he was absolutely right - for example, Kubrick had shot the room on the Discovery One containing the three EVA pods exactly and precisely with its two far corners at the 1/3 and 2/3 positions, just as I remember noticing for every scene which ever featured a room in it during The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. I wasn't particularly surprised later on, when checking the Wikipedia page for the film, to learn that it was indeed originally planned to be shot in three-strip Cinerama, exactly in line with what Andrew had noticed.

Truly, truly spectacular, then. A film with an almost boundlessly-ambitious vision, making the fullest possible use of the technology available in its day, stretching it to create a cinematic experience which would actually do justice to the nature of the story. In fact, we were lucky enough to enjoy not only the film, but (part of) an after-show chat from Douglas Trumbull, who did the special effects for the film, and who articulated exactly the vision Kubrick was trying to create. He explained that Kubrick wanted to create a film which was less concerned than usual with the characters on screen, or the experiences and dramas they are having. In fact, this was deliberately minimised by pointing the cameras relatively little at the actors, and having only fairly limited and largely banal dialogue. Rather, he wanted to put the audience and their experiences at the forefront. This is particularly clear at the climax of the film when the last surviving crewman of the Discovery One, David Bowman, comes face to face with the monolith in orbit around Jupiter, and falls into the strange and psychedelic star-gate which it opens up. During this whole sequence there is actually very little screen-time devoted to David's reactions, and as Trumbull put it, this was because Kubrick didn't want this sequence to be about David experiencing the star-gate - he wanted it to be about the audience, in the star-gate. And in Cinerama, boy, is it!

Even without the Cinerama, though, the care, detail and ambition put into the model-work and the special effects is so impressive that even now, almost 50 years after its release, the only thing which really gives the film away as not having been made this year are some of the fashions worn by the female members of the cast. I'd love to say the treatment of gender was a give-away too, given that women appeared almost (though not entirely) exclusively in subservient roles (daughter, mother, air-hostess, receptionist), and that by the time you get to the elite crew of the Discovery One, they have (of course!) vanished altogether. But the sad truth is that there are more films which still do exactly that today than don't. Only two years ago, Geena Davis (Thelma of Thelma and Louise fame) suggested that modern Hollywood films consistently depict women to men in supposedly mixed groups at a ratio of 1 to 5 or 17%, and that what's more men perceive this as a 50:50 balance, and anything more as female-dominated. Here, too, I noticed that in the board-room scene where Heywood Floyd explains to the Clavius base personnel why it is so important to maintain secrecy around the monolith found on the moon, there were two women and ten men: exactly the 1 to 5 or 17% (to be precise, 16.67%) ratio which Geena Davis pointed out. So, in other, words, the gender balance of 2001 may be heavily patriarchal, but it certainly isn't dated! We're still doing it, just the same. :-/

That is on us, though. While we're working on it, a late 1960s film which makes you feel as though you are actually floating in space remains very much worth watching, and I am once again awed by the power of Cinerama.

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I saw this about a month ago with big_daz, nigelmouse and his chum called Andy (I think), and hugely enjoyed rediscovering what a classic it is. It isn't just that it has all the standard elements of a good film (plotting, direction, acting, character, dialogue, setting and that little bit of magic which makes them all work together). It has an energy and freshness which has stood the test of time really well, and packs huge riches of detail and ideas into its two short hours.

I think it has gained something with the passage of time, too. Watching it in 2013 inevitably means ( approaching the film itself as a form of 'time travel' back to the 1980s )

Lots could be said about all sorts of elements within the story, but I am sure they have already been written about on the internet somewhere, so I will focus on just two particular things which occurred to me on this viewing, but which I had never really thought about before.

One is the portrayal of ( the black character, Goldie Wilson )

My other line of thought was to wonder more generally what we should make of a story in which ( the 1980s try to fix their problems by going back in time to rewrite the 1950s )

Anyway, like many an SF or fantasy classic, I think there are good reasons why this film has become something of an icon over the years. It's fun, yes, but has some surprisingly good thinky mileage in it to boot. Here's looking forward to its thirtieth anniversary in another two years' time, when we really will stand in exactly the same relation to 1985 as the film did to 1955.

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