Miss Polly is an example of a now long-dead breed – the supporting comedy featurette, a film not long enough to be deemed a feature but longer than your average short. Once upon a time these programme-fillers were numerous but today the form is dead and the existing examples are hard to come by. Judging … Continue reading
First broadcast by the BBC in August 1974 in the Tuesday Documentary strand, The Dracula Business is an exploration by journalist Daniel Farson of how Dracula, a character created by his great-uncle Bram Stoker, had become big business. It touches on some odd bases – schoolkids excitedly tucking into those peculiar Dracula ice lollies, with their … Continue reading
Whatever you else you may think about him and his films, you can’t accuse Bert I. Gordon of not taking full advantage of his initials. Mr B.I.G. carved a career from an obsession with the over-sized and the gigantic, the B.I.G.ger the better. From King Dinosaur (1955) to Village of the Giants (1965), from The … Continue reading
This first feature length adaptation of cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson’s work (there had been an earlier short, Tomorrow Calling (1993) based on his 1981 short story The Gernsback Continuum, first published in Terry Carr’s anthology Universe 11) was comprehensively trashed by the critical establishment on its release, and not without justification. The main charges levelled against painter … Continue reading
We’d been promised (threatened?) this for years, a whole decade in fact since the climax of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993). It could have been a disaster – two of the best loved horror icons of the 1980s squaring up to each other in a post-Scream world where irony and knowing post-modernism … Continue reading
After Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993), the Friday the 13th series went to sleep, awaiting the much promised face-off between franchise monster Jason Vorhees and wise-cracking rival Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street films. That encounter was still a couple of years away so to reintroduce audiences to Jason, they … Continue reading
Like most of its audience, Paramount gave up on the Friday the 13th franchise after the appalling Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan and the rights were sold back to original director Sean S. Cunningham. He felt that there was still some mileage left in the franchise (God knows why…) and decided to … Continue reading
