Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, Dir. John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein, 2023, 134 mins, HD

This wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great, but nobody really expected it to be, surely. Its a bit of sometimes funny, sometimes spectacular fluff with some likeable characters, and uninspired casting (Hugh Grant playing another treacherous toffish cad? Quelle surprise!). The films poster has the tagline “No experience necessary” which is likely a reference to RPGs use of experience points to level up characters and gain skills/proficiency, and sums up the irreverent approach the film has towards the RPG it’s based on. Elves, bards, wizards, dwarves; don’t take this stuff too seriously folks, this isn’t Tolkien.

Its an approach that works, making the film easily accessible to folks who’ve never heard of or played RPGs or Dungeons and Dragons. There’s jokes, woefully  predictable plot turns, reasonable acting, big CGI eye-candy, action sequences… no real drama or tension, but hey, you’d go elsewhere for that anyway, wouldn’t you?

It’ll come as no surprise to anyone that I used to play Dungeons and Dragons... well, okay, I actually played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, but I know that makes me sound more po-faced and nerdish than I really intend. No, I didn’t dress up as an Elf. Yes, I did collect and paint the miniatures. It was way back in the day before all that stuff (even dressing up as Elves?) became popular and mainstream; AD&D was still a TSR product in my day- there’s something that feels wrong when the the film announces itself as ‘Hasbro’s Dungeons and Dragons.’ The name Gary Gygax still means something in these circles, folks. Look it up if you need to (I’m tempted to suggest that if you need to look it up, then this film is made for you, but that’s only deeper into nerdish terrain, so forget that).

So anyway, yes, I admit it, I used to be a rabid role-player back in the early-eighties; Traveller, RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Judge Dredd, I played all kinds of RPGs and the main one was always our first,  Advanced Dungeons & Dragons– I played a few seperate campaigns over the years and ran one myself as Dungeon master. Had a hell of a time (indeed, spent TOO MUCH time, really), on all that. I first read about the then-underground pastime of Role-Playing Games in a feature in the American Fantastic Films magazine, and shortly after when I entered Sixth-Form found out that a few of the guys in the art class a year above me had a D&D group going, so I joined in. Back then it was really niche over here on the UK, but it soon became big business. Some people made fortunes selling and producing RPGs.

Which is all a long way of suggesting that I may be eminently qualified to give an opinion on this film… but then again, maybe not. When I played AD&D with my freinds it was far less Tolkien and more Robert E Howard, which is to say, think something more Game of Thrones than Lord of the Rings. You wouldn’t see any bards in any of my campaigns, no sir. Thieves and scoundrels, crazy religious zealots, maybe, but we clearly took things a bit serious, certainly more so than the guys behind this film. Which is perfectly fine, fantasy means all sorts of things but Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves is nothing like the RPG I used to play.

So anyway, there’s a fair bit of fun to be had with this Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves nonsense but it absolutely lacks the gravitas you’d find in any GOT episode or one of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies… in tone its rather more towards Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, but with more humour. Its an approach that does seem to have worked, getting some popular success considering its fairly respectable box-office of $208 million, at least until  you realise it somehow cost $150 million to make. Does that make the film a failure, or just suggestive that films cost too much to make these days, at least while cinemas haven’t properly recovered post-Covid to support such massive budgets. I suppose Barbie proves me wrong on that last point, but Barbie seems less a movie and more a cultural phenomenon.  Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves was hardly going to set social media on fire.

How I’d have done it? I’d have split the film 50/50 between the real world, of the nerds playing the game, and the fantasy world that they are role-playing. Still play it largely for laughs in both worlds, but add a bit of commentary on the frustrated lives of the nerds and how their fantasy world fulfils them in ways the real world doesn’t. Which is a woefully stereotypical way of portraying folks who play RPGs but if done well, it could have said something about why the lads thought playing beefy warriors was cool, or how girls could play those beefy warriors just as well too. Hell, these days with how gender-fluid things are, it practically writes itself and STILL has something to say. After all, I’m told Barbie has plenty to say. Why not Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves? In a world in which the individual is largely inconsequential and powerless in an arena of corporations and ineffectual politicians, the appeal of fantasy RPGs is that they offer both escape and an illusion of agency- characters can be empowered in their fantasy worlds in ways the players never will in their real lives. You could shoot that film for less than $75 million and tell something meaningful or that resonates a little while giving some laughs.

Spooky Changeling fizzles out

The Changeling, Dir. Peter Medak, 1980, 107 mins, Amazon Prime

For a good length of its running time, Peter Medak’s supernatural horror The Changeling is one of the most accomplished,  genuinely spooky ghost stories on film that I’ve ever seen. It has atmospheric cinematography, a moody and effective score, a fine script loaded with creepy mystery and a great cast that elevates it somewhat from typical b-movie horror- George C Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas…  I’d say for 80% of its running time I was wondering how I’d missed watching this brilliant horror film.

But then it rather falls apart in its finale; so much so that although it clearly wasn’t, it felt like a studio-mandated reshoot (indeed, in this regard it feels a very modern film, rather than  one some forty years old). Once the central mystery of the film’s ghostly goings-on is solved it leaves the film with nowhere to go, the story is done but there’s another reel yet to run.  There’s a part towards the end where Scott’s character yells at the unseen spirit haunting the house that he’s done all he can, that there’s nothing left to be done, and it sums up the film, as if the actor is pleading to end the film now, it can only go downhill from hereon. It may not have been the perfect ending for a traditional film but its the moment the story is indeed largely done.

I can almost imagine the director and writer panicking, thinking they have to raise the stakes, throw in some scares and end with a big finale. That old man has to pay for his fathers crimes! We need to put the woman in jeopardy! We need a big conflagration! Of course, all of the ending was surely part of the original plan and script, it just FEELS tacked-on and unnecessary.  For a large part the film avoids gore and jump-scares, leaning towards unsettling mood and atmospherics, so it feels almost like a cheat when it falters at the conclusion, pandering, as it were, to the usual horror movie tropes. The climactic attic explosion is so out of left-field it feels like its from some other movie.

Almost as if the film ran out of ideas? Mind, its a tricky thing, ending a horror film that has raised the stakes during its running time and has to pull off a satisfactory ending in its final reel – films like John Carpenter’s The Fog and John Irvin’s Ghost Story were great effective horrors that were scuppered by their anti-climactic endings. Clearly the film needed a resolution, some absolution or justice for the spirit haunting the mansion, but really, the father that deserved to suffer had died decades before, had escaped the punishment and justice. I almost felt sympathy for the Melvyn Douglas character, who I suspect didn’t know about the original son’s murder and who sincerely believed he was the natural son, only realising at the end what was the truth.

But The Changeling remains a very good horror- Claire was watching it largely from behind her fingers so its dark atmosphere  and tension is definitely effective, clearly an indication of a superior horror.  There’s a few surprising twists and turns, a feeling of dread throughout. Its just a shame it didn’t reserve a few extra twists for the ending, but as I have noted, the film is not alone in this regard.

Back to 1976 with Spanish Fly

Spanish Fly, Dir. Bob Kellett, 1976, 96 mins, Talking Pictures TV

This film is so way off my street as regards the kind of films I usually watch that I actually found it refreshing fun, even though its a pretty poor, low-budget British sex comedy in the vein of those bawdy holiday postcards long since banned. It is so very 1976- lots of smutty comedy, pinching women’s bottoms, lots of breasts, some pretty dire disco music and an infuriatingly catchy theme song. It hasn’t aged at all well but for someone like myself who grew up back then does have a certain nostalgic charm in its dated sensibilities.

What caught my attention in the TV guide was Terry-Thomas in the credits, an actor who has always been a favourite- nobody could play caddish bounders quite like he could. In Spanish Fly he is perfectly cast as Sir Percy de Courcy, an aristocrat fallen on hard times but continuing to live beyond his means, in debt to everyone while maintaining the pretence of being a rich English lord. Accompanied by his butler/personal assistant Perkins (Graham Armitage, familiar from many 1970s/1980s Brit TV shows) he is currently on the beautiful island of Minorca, hatching a foolish scheme to buy 100,00 gallons of cheap local wine then repackage it as luxury French wine and sell it at a huge  positively criminal mark-up. Unfortunately for Percy, the local wine is horrible, described as worse than cats’ piss, so he entrusts Perkins to figure out a way to make it more palatable.

Meanwhile back in London, British businessman Mike Scott  (Leslie Phillips) complains to his doctor (Frank Thornton, another stalwart of 1970s/1980s TV like Are You Being Served and Last of the Summer Wine) about his worrying impotency. Mike’s fashion designer wife Janet (Sue Lloyd, from TVs Crossroads for crying out loud) is sending him to Spain to supervise a lingerie photo-shoot involving  four beautiful models and Mike bemoans the fact he’s not up the opportunity to fool around that this affords him. Predictably the film allows the four beautiful women to be frequently shown in various states of undress, as if that’s the entire point of the movie. Its basically a Carry On movie at heart but rather raunchier than those- I was very surprised to later learn that the film was certified a tame AA, when I’d expected it to be an X; we were more liberated than I remember back in 1976 (but then again, I was just ten years old).

In Minorca Mike stumbles upon Sir Percy, who is an old school chum. Sir Percy realises Mike’s wife is rich and decides he is an easy mark. Perkins has improved the undrinkable wine by adding various herbs and spices but also, accidentally, dead flies- Spanish flies, which result in making the wine a potent aphrodisiac. Hosting a dinner for Mike and the fashion models to show off the wine, it results in Mike’s libido being returned with a vengeance and a few raunchy incidents with the horny models- launching the second part of Sir Percy’s lecherous scheme, in which he tasks Perkins to photograph Mike bedding the models so that he can blackmail Mike into buying all his wine.

Spanish Fly is pretty excruciating at times and often politically incorrect –Talking Pictures preluded the film with a disclaimer about outdated attitudes etc so as to warn viewers of fragile sensibilities, something I always balk at. I’m always wary of censorship of films deemed inappropriate for us poor viewers. Films are products of their time, and some of it can often be as amusing as alarming, in this case giving Spanish Fly some unintentional laughs. I did cringe at one line in which a character suggests that it seems the wine has cured the gay photographer when he is seen with a woman. Surely even at the time nobody would treat women as sexual objects/ servants of male desire the way there are in this, especially as seen here with creepy older men bedding such beautiful young women. Its just wish-fulfilment and cheeky Benny Hill-era humour rather than anything harmful, or maybe I’m giving it too much credit and should heed the Talking Pictures TV warnings more.

Here’s a bit of trivia- one of the beautiful fashion models, the Australian, Bruce, was played by Andrea Allan, and I was surprised to learn afterwards that despite her convincing accent and manner wasn’t Australian at all, but actually born in Glasgow, of all places, and having appeared earlier in Gerry Anderson’s UFO series (in which she played one of those Moonbase operatives in purple wigs, so little wonder I didn’t recognise her).

It is always such a pleasure seeing Terry-Thomas again, particularly in something ‘new’ as this one was – admittedly the film is beneath him, and while he’s not at his best (at the time he was unwell, diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease just four years before this film was shot) he manages a solid and charming performance throughout the film, and is clearly the best thing in it. Unfortunately Terry-Thomas would only make a handful more films before forced to retire from acting in 1980. What happened afterwards is very sad: he would spend the subsequent years losing his fortune to medical expenses and treatments until left penniless, finally living in an unfurnished charity flat in London courtesy of financial assistance from the Actors’ Benevolent Fund. To think that the actor  who was so great in How to Murder Your Wife (my favourite film he appeared in, and endlessly entertaining) would end his final years like that is just heart-breaking and unfair.

To Live and Die Again

To Live and Die in L.A., Dir. William Friedkin, 1985, 116 mins – 4K UHD

By grim coincidence I was watching this film pretty close to the recent passing of its director, William Friedkin, a man who directed The French Connection and The Exorcist. I mean, how do you follow two genuine classics like that? Terrence Mallck chose to disappear for twenty years following his Badlands and Days of Heaven, but Friedkin just kept on making films. To be sure, To Love and Die in L..A. is no French Connection, no matter what the film’s poster suggested, but its a pretty strong film and one that I think improves with age.

I first saw To Live and Die in L.A. on a VHS rental. Very often you’d rent stuff back then knowing very little about a film- most of the time it’d simply be  the appeal of the artwork or maybe of an actor’s name above the title. There was no internet to guide choices or spoil movies. So very often you’d take a punt based simply on the title or an interesting cover- I suppose in that respect, it was a little like perusing the record-store racks, where an album cover might catch your eye and tempt your wallet with something new.

So it was with the VHS box for  To Live and Die in L.A.. The film’s original poster remains a great piece of art design, an arresting, moody neo-noir image of a figure hidden in shadow, suggesting mystery, with that iconic blazing-orange sunset behind, and the bold title typography.  It promised much and the fil delivered. I always liked that poster and thought it a perfect representation of the film, certainly far better than any poster did for Blade Runner. Some film posters just nail it, and this one did. I saw the video box in the rental store, figured ‘this looks good’ and took it across to the counter. It was the summer of 1986, I think.

The film blew me away. THAT ending though…

Actually, considering how much I liked the film, its odd that I’ve only watched it maybe twice in over thirty years , and even then only back in the VHS era (I never bought it on DVD or Blu-ray). I think something about the films coldness held me back from embracing it the way I did other films. Andy bought the film on VHS back in the very early days of video sell-through – I remember it had that great poster on the cover. But considering some of the films I have watched several times, its a curious thing that I never went back to this film until now, with the Kino 4K release. I think its THAT ending. Even today, watching the film again after so many years that ending remained pretty damn shocking (I’d forgotten the details, so it was the same bolt out of the blue this time around as it was back in 1986). Its a grim film to be sure, but that whole ending, and what happens to the remaining characters afterwards, its just so damn dark. To Live and Die in LA takes no prisoners. Its the definitive neo-noir. If the film were made now, the ending could be summarised as the definitive ‘Box Office Poison Cut’.

Mind, how the film gets to that ending is pretty tough. Re-watching To Live and Die in LA after all these years… well, I’m a different person, obviously, and informed by all the films I have seen since, particularly all the film noir (because this film is very much a noir).  I’m not going to suggest its perfect, indeed there are moments where the film oddly skews towards the amateur, but the good easily outweighs the bad and there is something hypnotic about how grim and fatalistic it all is. There are no heroes: bad cops, bad lawyers, cheating crooks, people who break the rules, and a ‘hero’ who seems to have a wild self-destructive impulse that pulls those around him into his doom. Richard Chance (William Peterson) is Bad News for everyone, especially himself. The opening sees him recklessly taking a jump from a bridge attached to a safety line,  establishing that unconsciously or not, he’s out to dare/cheat death until his luck inevitably runs out.  Its no mistake that the film’s car chase nears its climax with Richard ignoring the signs “WRONG WAY” and “DO NOT ENTER.”

Highlight of the film for me this time around was Darlanne Fluegel who plays parolee Ruth, blackmailed by Richard for information and also, it seems, to have sex with him in a strange relationship that is decidedly dysfunctional and contrary to any judicial code. Fluegel was great in her previous film, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, in which she did a lot with very little playing a gangster’s moll. In To Live and Die in L.A. she has a much better, meatier role and clearly goes at it with relish.  It reminds me a little of Jane Fonda’s turn in Klute which only makes me wonder why she never went onto greater success in films afterwards.  I don’t think the film did very well at the box-office and I guess some people’s careers suffered by association? Or maybe its Hollywood’s sad tradition of under-serving actresses regards great roles. Mind, this time I recognised Jane Leeves as the scantily-dressed dancer- Leeves of course would later strike it big earning millions playing Daphne in hit sitcom Frasier. I had no idea she was in this. Just wonder what Niles would say….

Some of the film is brilliant; the car chase is amazing; a reverse of The French Connection, in that this time the cops are the one’s being chased, a pursuit that increasingly descends into chaos. The look of the film is compelling, Miami Vice gone ugly, if you will, which is weird because the soundtrack by Wang Chung sounds like Miami Vice, as if trying to fool us that the film is going to be one thing when it turns into quite another.

Almost back home with Babylon 5

Babylon 5: The Road Home, Dir. Matt Peters, 79 mins, 4K UHD

Unlikely as it sounds (I would never have believed it just a few months ago) J Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 returns as an animated movie and on the whole its a joyful nostalgia trip. I watched it and loved seeing those old places, those old faces, suddenly remembering what I used to love about the original series – its so hard to believe the original show ran as long ago as 1993 – 1998.  Its funny how the mind works sometimes; the series still feels recent, but I was buying episodes on VHS –  Babylon 5 is older than I like to think (we’re ALL older than we like to think)..

Babylon 5: The Road Home, as a love-letter to original fans, and an affectionate tribute to those of the cast who have passed away in the years since, works really well indeed. The story isn’t as dark or gritty as the best Babylon 5 episodes,  but is pretty good at what it tries to be. It certainly works at bringing back those familiar places and faces, and offers glimpses of alternate possibilities, even explaining away a few of the series continuity goofs, finally ending in a clever way that slyly sets up in organic fashion the long-mooted reboot of the show. Its no mean feat.

But it isn’t perfect. Its Babylon 5, so even the most earnest of fans wouldn’t expect it to be.  Back  when Babylon 5 aired, there was nothing else like it; I can’t explain just how much of a breath of fresh air it was at the time. We learned to love the show for all its grand ambition (basically its The Lord of the Rings by way of Golden Age science fiction, and as anti-Trek as it gets)  while accepting its flaws – of which there were more than we like to admit. There’s much about Babylon 5 that can be picked apart, from dodgy dialogue to dodgy acting to dodgy sets and props, but there’s so much more that works spectacularly well.

Very often, I’ve found, less is more. It happens all the time and my main issue with this film is just that.  Using computer animation removes some of the old shows limitations and for me, the films one miss-step is how it depicts the B5 series’ biggest enemy/threat. One of the successes  of the original show, for all its then-state-of-the-art computer graphic visual effects,  was how mysterious and intimidating the Shadows were, simply because we couldn’t see them properly.  It was an understandable case of production/budget issues curtailing the frequency and clarity of their  appearances, but this always ramped up the tension; what were they, where were they?  But here they are featured by the thousand, like those alien critters of Starship Troopers, suddenly becoming ordinary and, curiously, weaker and a reduced threat. They are supposed to be a terrifying Elder Race for goodness’ sake but here we see so many of them and they become just countless drones, like Giger’s alien killing machine from Alien being turned into a mindless pack of xenomorphs in Aliens.

Also, some of the individual character design, while generally very good, does slip up at times, particularly regards the female characters – I was never certain, for instance,  if I was looking at Ivanova or Lockley until they spoke and I was able to deduce who they were. I wonder if it caught anyone else out as much as it did me.

But the good outweighed the bad by a fair margin, and I had a ball watching this, so much so that as soon as it was over I watched it again, this time with the commentary track. I don’t do that at all often these days. Now I just have to wait a few months for the original series to come to Blu-ray in December, and try give that original show a rewatch. Who would have dreamed that 2023 would be the year to take us back to Babylon 5?

What I’ve been watching lately

I’ve been finding it hard to manage the time and energy to put posts up so this will be a round-up in lieu of maybe fuller reviews later. For instance, ‘ve been trying to get a review of Oppenheimer up since I saw it weeks ago. I liked it but with reservations; I’m used to the love affair going on between film critics and anything Nolan but am quite surprised at how popular the film seems to have been with the general public. It’s not that the film  doesn’t deserve that popular success but nonetheless, its surprising; after I saw the film I thought it might prove a tough sell a week or so after release once all the Nolan aficionados had seen it- but hey, shows what I know.

On a related note, while I thought that Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One wasn’t up to the standard set by the previous Fallout, I was alarmed to see its Box Office numbers fall the way it did. I would have expected it to have done much better (and I’m sure Tom Cruise and Paramount hoped the same). Mind, one has to wonder how the studios schedule their film releases, its like it eats itself sometimes. And the public always surprises: who’d have reckoned on Barbie being so huge, passing $1 Billion? Mentioning Barbie of course brings me to Margot Robbie and is a nice link to-

Babylon, 2022, HD

Damien Chazelle had such a great run – Whiplash, La La Land and First Man, that it was inevitable he’d be due a fall, and I guess Babylon was his. How ironic that a film so fascinated by excess, abuse and gratuitous over-indulgence would become a meta-narrative about itself. An exercise in what it condemns, so to speak.  Actually, I quite enjoyed the film, once all the silly attention-grabbing nonsense at the start is done with. It doesn’t really work, of course- its story about the Silent movies era and the dawn of the Talking Picture,  what it did to Hollywood and some careers, well, its been told many times before and better (with Singing in the Rain for one, so obvious that Chazelle acknowledges it)- and the film doesn’t manage to pull off its ending, clutching for transcendence regards a life-affirming sentiment about how important films are but falling well short. I found myself enjoying it, mind, but maybe that’s low expectations again- might even buy the 4K disc when it comes up in a sale someday.

The Six Million Dollar Man Season One Episodes 1-4, TV (Legend)

Hey its 1974 and all is fine, I’m eight years old and I’m watching my favourite TV show. Except… well, some things don’t age like fine wine do they? A new run of daily airings on Legend caught my attention, having not seen these episodes since, well, they first aired here in the UK all those decades ago. Watching episodic television is less demanding than films, certainly time-wise and with everything going on lately at work and at home (another family health crisis) chilling for an hour with some simple viewing fits the bill.

In all honesty, it seems that The Six Million Dollar Man has not aged very well and those memories of being eight, nine, ten years old thrilling to Steve Austin’s latest exploits (and yep, I had that action figure) are evidently viewed with rose-tinted nostalgia. To be fair, these first four episodes are not likely the show at its best, as Legend are understandably using the syndicated versions which have split the original TV movies into two-parters. This seems to have resulted in lots of endlessly repeated shots to pad the running-times, so much so that any pacing is utterly non-existent (and then some scenes seem to be weirdly cut short so tight that it feels like actual lines are being cut mid-delivery).  Watching the first pilot movie was a particularly odd experience because of the (surprise for me) casting of Darren McGavin, a favourite actor of mine from Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Martin Balsam  (of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three)  who would be characters replaced or recast or in the series proper (the role of Rudy Wells would be recast yet AGAIN in the second season, how did audiences back then keep up?). I think there’s one more TV movie to be aired as another nauseatingly slow two-parter before the series proper starts, so I’ll stick with it for another week. If nothing else, its a sober reminder of the days when the distinction in quality between films and television was starkly evident.

Fringe Season One Episodes 1 – 6, Blu-ray

Regards that last point, by the time Fringe came around in 2008, that distinction between television and film was largely gone, and with better shows like this, watching an episode was often like watching a mini-movie, at least as regards production quality was concerned. That they managed this over twenty-two episode seasons is no mean feat, either, considering how so many shows of eight-or ten-episode seasons struggle these days. Fringe ran from 2008-2013 and is one of those shows that just seemed to get better every year, certainly more ambitious in its scope, becoming a  vastly different show by its end from how it started (it began pretty much as an X-Files wannabe and became something else entirely over the course of its five-season run).  The only fly in the ointment is that, like Babylon 5 before it, it struggled with ratings and reduced  budgets and getting renewed, so that some fans think it eventually lost its way somewhat – not me mind, I loved it till the very end, and appreciated that it DID get a ‘The End’.

That X-Files analogy being said, Fringe seems superior to that show pretty much from the start, partly thanks to its great actors and characters: John Noble’s Dr Walter Bishop is an endless delight (role of a lifetime for Noble, no doubt) and its clear that Anna Torv as the series nominal lead, Olivia Dunham, grows into her part as the series progresses -it was nice seeing Torv again recently when she turned up in the early episodes of The Last of Us. Of course there is also the great, late, Lance Reddick playing Fringe Division boss Philip Broyles- it is a very good cast (Leonard Nimoy turns up later on)  and boasts some strong writing and production values; its one my favourite television shows.

I was quite surprised watching these first five episodes again just how gory and graphic they were, considering this is a network show and not from one of the streamers. Part of me thinks I should try writing episodic reviews as we go along but there’s no chance of me managing that.  Maybe I’ll highlight specific episodes, that may be a fair compromise.

When I used to watch TV shows that I really enjoyed, like with films, I used to buy them on disc when each season came out. Well, I say ‘used to’, I’m still doing it, having bought House of the Dragon and the last season of Westworld, for just two recent examples. But naturally if rewatching films on disc is rare enough, whole seasons of television shows are even harder to manage (hence full sets of Fringe, Person of Interest, Chuck, The Leftovers etc sitting unwatched). I’m just kidding myself that I’ll manage to rewatch the entire Babylon 5 run when it comes out on Blu-ray this December, right?  So anyway, we thought we’d give Fringe a try, see how it goes. It isn’t lost on me that while doing this that I should cancel a few (or all) my streamer subs.

House of the horror greats

House of the Long Shadows, Dir. Pere Walker, 1983, 102 mins – 

I’ve written before about my quest to watch all of Peter Cushing’s films at least once. Well, to be honest, usually once is quite enough. While I’m a huge fan of Cushing’s work, mostly because he never failed to be excellent, never phoned in a performance, not once in any of the films he featured in – certainly as far I can tell. I have to admit, however, many of his films are pretty terrible, or haven’t aged well. No, the irony is that no matter how brilliant Cushing often is in a film, sometimes the film is pretty dammed awful and doesn’t deserve him.

Curiously, his brings to mind composer Jerry Goldsmith, who could write such amazing music for bloody awful films (for instance, does Star Trek: The Motion Picture really deserve that fantastic Goldsmith score?).  One has to admire the professionalism of someone like Cushing or Goldsmith, professionals who always raised their game and never took the money and ran. Their names on credits always inferred quality. True, that promise didn’t always extend to the film they were working on, but hey, you always know when you see their name in the credits at least one thing in it will be good.

Such is the case with the absolutely woeful 1983 comedy/horror House of the Long Shadows. To be honest, the first clue is the Cannon Films credit at the opening of the film: hardly an indicator of cinematic gold dust.  Today the film is mostly remembered only because of its cast, as it features four greats of the classic horror films of an earlier era: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price and John Carradine, but at the same time this weighs the film down with expectations it cannot fulfil (not that it really tries).

At least Cushing and Price are great: Cushing is charming playing a convincing,  drunken coward, Price hams it up magnificently as ever (“Don’t interrupt me while I’m soliloquizing!” is both a line and a delivery thereof that is worth suffering through the entire film for). Lee, meanwhile… well, maybe I’m being a trifle unfair, but Lee was smart enough to know when he was in a bad film and  would deliver the half-hearted performance it deserved with a visible disdain. Carradine really doesn’t have much to do and struggles even with that.

The House of the Long Shadows is a film that isn’t as funny as it  thinks it is, while it tries to claim it doesn’t have to be scary as its really all for laughs. Instead its caught somewhere in-between,  the producers unable to decide what kind of film it was intended to be.  The script is bad, and largely nonsensical, the supporting cast genuinely terrible.  Without its notable four stars, this film would have been universally derided when released and long since forgotten.  Instead, its a film that gets by as a source of curio trivia- that its the twenty-fourth and final film that Cushing and Lee appeared in together, that its the only film all four horror actors appeared in together. Other than that, its really just one of those cinematic disappointments, a wasted opportunity. Indeed, I chalk this one up as another of those terrible films where Peter Cushing, poor man, really deserved better, and having watched it once, well, never again, I think.

The Right Stuff, circa 1954…

Riders to the Stars, 1954, Dir. Richard Carlson & Herbert L. Stock, 81 mins

Talking Pictures is a channel here in the UK that has carved some success for itself as a provider of older material you won ‘t find elsewhere (I swear some channels won’t touch anything black and white now, or that wasn’t shot in widescreen). On Talking Pictures you’ll find lots of 1950s and 1960 TV shows, current examples being stuff like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-1960), The Outer Limits (1963-1965), The Champions (1968) and Fireball XL5 (1962),  and numerous old black and white movies. It isn’t perfect; 4.3-ratio programs are often ‘zoomed-in’ to fill a 16.9 frame, so it can easily incur the wrath of purists I suppose, but it remains a treasure trove of old favourites and real oddities. Its seems to me that’s something BBC3 or BBC4 should be doing, surely, rather than chasing the youth market that is totally NOT watching television anymore. Weird finds come along like this one: Riders to the Stars, an early 1950s sci-fi adventure. From its premise – astronauts are sent into space to capture meteors and bring them to Earth- I really didn’t expect much, especially considering it was evidently a b-movie that had escaped my knowledge completely. So when I noticed it in the guide I set the timer to record it and give it a try.

I‘m so glad I did. Turns out this cheap old sci-fi adventure is no classic but it is surprisingly effective and curiously ambitious. The science is as unlikely and horribly dated as one would expect,  the film’s claim that cosmic radiation melts all metals  preposterous even at the time (the observation that meteors seem impregnable to cosmic rays the reason to go capture a few). And yet at the same time, the film depicts zero gravity and the mechanics of space travel quite effectively, particularly the training and testing of would-be astronauts. Its tempting to summarise it as  Philip Kaufman’s  The Right Stuff for the 1950s, and considering its limitations its surprisingly authentic, right down to footage of rats in zero-G, missiles and rockets being prepared and fired (it utilises stock footage very well) with impressive-looking hardware/space suits etc. One has to remember, we weren’t even in space by 1954, and films like this (such as  George Pal’s more popular Destination Moon) were really pushing the envelope guessing how things might someday look.

Okay, some of it is horrible: the opening credits don’t inspire confidence with a cringe-inducing song “Riders to the Stars – that is what we are every time we kiss in the night. Jupiter and Mars aren’t very far anytime your holding me tight….” and naturally the film betrays its age with the usual sudden romance,  constant casual smoking etc and the film is very much a b-movie regards budget limitations, but on the other hand its got a woman in a position of some authority, and, as I’ve noted, some actual ambition to it. There’s even some tension to it when it throws three astronauts in rockets up into space in some desperate  kind of Hail Mary shot in the dark; it always makes it clear that space travel is dangerous.

The copy Talking Pictures has hold of is black and white, and I was surprised to learn the film was actually shot in colour. While it was usually sold to television networks in black and white editions (back in a time before colour televisions were even a thing, remember) some rare showings of the colour version do occasionally surface. I’d like to watch it again, but in its original colour, someday.