Not quite sure how I didn’t know that Vincent Price and Diana Rigg started in a film together and that they both considered it some of their finest work. Probably something to do with Theatre Of Blood being a modestly budgeted British film, done half a century ago, and them having over 250 screen credits between them. The important thing is that I watched it as soon as I found out about it, and by reading this So Can You!
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It’s sometime in the future, approximately a couple of years after the environmental apocalypse, and due to overwhelming personal debt generated by the Baby-Boomers, America is now owned by a variety of other nations. Obviously, that makes no sense, but neither does a movie’s antagonists traveling by rollerblade; something that requires the kind of well-maintained streets and pavements post-collapse societies normally don’t offer. Still, this is not a movie that’s going to let such things get in the way of having a good time.
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This is probably a redundant observation to make but Lockdown has been a total arse of a time for most people. Yes, measures had to be put in place to limit the spread and impact of Covid; but the lack of social contact has been utterly exhausting. This is addressed head-on in Growth, a 53-page comic by Jenny Allen.
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According to the blub that came in the review pack “Redshift #1 is a bleak sci-fi mini-series which can best be described as Lost In Space meets The Expanse”. By the second page, we have a dead mother, a few pages further on we have a sinister Ministry controlling Mars, and by the halfway point we have a story-within-a-story that could have been a depressing gut-kick of a comic within itself. So; yes, it’s nice to have a comic live up to its own hype.
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When I was first presented this movie, by Richard DeValmont of Bela Lugoi’s Shed, I assumed that it was both retribution for some vile act I had performed upon him and a test of my willingness to try any movie sent my way. The title and blurb were amazingly uninspiring, the figures on the cover were in the uncanny-valley of anatomical incorrectness, and the rest of the dressing was presumably pinched off a 4th years’ doodles from maths class. The back cover was even worse and accomplished the feat of having an even less realistic alternative poster on it, looking like a softcore BDSM flick, and having six photos from the film that can only be described as “punishingly uninspiring”. But instead of the 85 minutes of boredom I expected, I got the A-Team version of Mad Max, for better or for worse.
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In the latest shopping trip to the cheaper end of DVD sales, I noticed that there were several copies of the 2004 film, ‘Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation’ in every shop I went into. This normally means that either a new box set has just been released or that it’s not a very good film. Given the pedigree of its predecessor, Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 exemplary satire “Starship Troopers”, I took a punt on it being the former. This proved to be wrong. Very, very wrong.
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Giving recommendations on movies from the early part of cinema history is always a tricky thing, because they all have a similar aesthetic that can’t be avoided. For a start, due to a combination of technical restrictions and the shadow of the theatre, the pace is always slow to modern tastes. The visuals of sci-fi and horror were also far more constrained, partly to avoid the censor’s knife and partly as the audience would be disappointed if either saw them in the full eye of the camera. The result of this is that old black and white films often fall into the pigeonholes marked “artefact of genre history”, for those seeking enlightenment, or “kitsch novelty items”, for those who like a good eye roll. Both miss the point that these films can just be fun in their own right. The She-Creature, a 1965 B-Movie originally on a double bill with It Conquered the World, is a great example of this. It’s not a might perfect movie, now as then, but it certainly has charms to offer a willing audience.
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Let’s cut to the chase: does the line “86.5% [cyborg] is still human” send the kind of shivers down your spine that you haven’t felt since you were a teenager, imagining how wicked-ninja-cool it would be to live in a world of corps, cyborgs and corruption? If not, then this bit of contrived more-cyberpunk-than-cyberpunk nonsense from 1992 will bore the pants off you. If, however, it gets you revved up like the first assault rifle you fell in love with whilst thumbing through a hand-me-down copy of Guns and Ammo, then it’s quite possibly the film for you, depending on how much derivative, corny content you can put up with.
Trash or Treasure 