TV

Mater Lacrimarum revisited

Today, I had the opportunity to watch the English version of Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears. This was my second viewing of the concluding part in the Three Mothers trilogy, after watching it in Italian on Christmas Day. The viewing conditions weren’t ideal (the version I saw was cropped from its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio to 1.78:1), but overall the quality was better than my Italian copy. (A Russian DVD appears to be available now, but it seems to have been the source of the cropped version I saw, so I would recommend holding out for a different release. Medusa will be releasing it in Italy on April 9th, while Optimum are supposedly putting it out in the UK on April 28th.)

In most respects, the English version improves things somewhat, although Asia Argento’s performance is still uneven, closer to Trauma than to The Stendhal Syndrome. With the benefit of the English audio, Valeria Cavalli (Marta) definitely emerges as the best actor of the group, giving a strong and believable performance (the monkey is still great, though). Adam James (who has previously appeared in Casualty and Waking the Dead) is, like Asia, uneven. In some scenes he is quite effective (his final scene is quite chilling), but in others, such as when he is going nuts after his son has disappeared, he comes across as quite weak. Oh, and I don’t really see the big deal about Udo Kier’s performance. A lot of people described it as hammy, but it didn’t strike me as problematic in any way.

On the downside, Moran Atias (Mater Lacrimarum) is awful, and I mean awful. She looks ridiculous and can’t act her way out of a paper bag. She really made me yearn for Ania Pieroni. Her bald, male lackey is also hamstrung by some really atrocious dubbing, and the gothic witches continue to make me cringe. Actually, if anything, they came across as worse rather than better on a second viewing. I knew they were coming this time, but it didn’t make the experience any less painful. Really, Dario, what were you thinking?

On a related note, watching the film again revealed all sorts of squandered opportunities to throw in some of the bravura colours and lighting from the first two instalments. I can only imagine how much more magical moments like Sarah lighting the fire in Michael’s apartment and Marta summoning the spirits would have been had Argento used them as an excuse to unleash some Technicolor brilliance. And what happened to the idea of Mater Lacrimarum’s jewel-studded robe casting primary colours on the faces of her grovelling followers? All we get now is a red T-shirt with glitter writing on it.

My original rating of 7/10 still stands. It’s not a bad little film, but, as a conclusion to what was started in Suspiria and Inferno, it’s a let-down. I never expected it to be on the same level as them, so I can’t claim to be disappointed, but it remains a middle of the road entry in Argento’s filmography - better than Trauma and The Phantom of the Opera but weaker than all his other theatrical ventures (it’s better than his three recent TV projects, though, especially those embarrassing Masters of Horror episodes).

Sex and Death

I would expect a suicide note to be heartfelt and dramatic. Not this one, though. Wouldn’t be very much in keeping with me, would it? I think someone may have forgotten to fit me with a heart. I can’t even think of anything worth writing. I am summed up by three piece of paper: a birthday card from a father who never loved me, a Christmas card from a man who I foolishly thought did, and a visiting order from my brother. My family have to order me to visit them, and still I don’t. What a hate-filled person I am.

It’s not much of a legacy, is it? Maybe I can go down in history as author of the dullest suicide note ever.

I tried to be a good doctor. Really, I did. But it was too hard. It beat me, and I’m so ashamed. I never wanted anything else out of life, so there is no life. I am so sorry to the patients I caused suffering; to their families, my sincerest apologies. I don’t belong here. (Casualty 22.25, “Sex and Death”)

Casualty is now just over half way through its 22nd series, and now seems like as good an opportunity as any to examine its status, particularly given that last Saturday’s episode, the 25th of the series, entitled Sex and Death (a nickname that would be quite appropriate for the programme as a whole throughout its “dark period” of Series 16 through 21), seems destined to go down in history as a real eye-opener.

I previously wrote about how much of a turnaround the two part season premiere constituted, only to be disappointed as so many of the promises of the first two episodes turned out to be empty. By and large, my observations remain the same as they were the last time I wrote about Casualty: the first two episodes were excellent, heralding a real return to form, but, while the standard has, on the whole, been higher than it has been for a very long time, the quality is just too uneven, with every decent episode being countered with a complete dud, and a general feeling that, for all the promises of a return to socio-political issues and medical drama, the most of the current writers (many of whom are more generally associated with soap operas like Doctors and EastEnders, or even, if rumours are to be believed, writing students submitting scripts as part of their annual assessment) just don’t have sufficient skill or experience to cope with this style of writing.

The 24th episode, Before a Fall, brought to a head the ongoing storyline of Ruth Winters (Georgia Taylor), an F2 (a junior doctor in her second year out of medical school) and Lily Allen lookalike (seriously, the resemblance is uncanny - luckily, though, Ruth doesn’t sing). She first appeared at the beginning of Series 22 and, from the start, she was established as cold, rude, arrogant and, for all her textbook knowledge, worryingly incompetent when it came to actual patient treatment. Her actions had already led to two near fatalities, plus the paralysis of another patient, the latter leading to her passing the buck on to the nurse who had been assisting in the patient’s treatment, resulting in said nurse’s resignation (although, given that the nurse in question was one of the worst characters ever to grace the show, I doubt that many people mourned her departure). In Before a Fall, however, Ruth’s incorrect diagnosis led to a patient’s death, which seemed to be the final nail in the coffin, leading to her returning to her halls of residence and hanging herself. The episode ended with the team desperately trying to resuscitate her. (The character is currently in a coma and will presumably make a full recovery, given that the actress has recently signed an 18-month contract.)

Sex and Death, meanwhile, picked up the story where it left off, and, in a radical departure for the normally formulaic Casualty, went back over the previous five months in flashback, filling in many of the events which occurred off-screen and led to Ruth’s decision to attempt suicide. It really was an exceptionally well put together episode, both in terms of Ian Barnes’ direction (the blue-tinged lighting and use of Arvo Pärt’s composition Spiegel im Spiegel, in particular, were gut-wrenching) and Georgia Taylor’s performance, while the script, by Mark Catley (who also wrote the two-part series opener), did the impossible and actually made me feel somewhat sorry for Ruth. Unfortunately, feeling sorry for a character is not the same thing as liking them or excusing their behaviour, which I suspect was the episode’s key aim. Despite clearly establishing the character as a tragic figure (her father was abusive; her mother committed suicide; her brother is in prison; she was bullied at school; she was utterly exhausted from working long hours; the one colleague she allowed herself to open up to rejected her advances; a cancer patient whom she befriended ultimately died), none of this changes the fact that she was a callous bitch who endangered several lives, ruined one co-worker’s career and repeatedly rejected others’ offers of friendship and assistance.

Unfortunately, this seems to be par for the course in Casualty these days: introduce a character as completely unlikeable, and then, a few months later, do an about-turn and heap misery after misery upon them in an attempt to make the audience like them. (A similar technique was used, to an even greater degree, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s sixth season.) The method demonstrated in this episode, using flashbacks to establish a sort of double life for Ruth, almost enters into retcon territory, effectively telling us that what was shown for the last six months was in fact been only half the story. I don’t object to surprise revelations within reason, and, despite it being clear in retrospect that this must have been quite extensively planned from the start (at least judging by the manner in which seemingly innocuous scenes sampled from the previous 24 episodes suddenly took on a different meaning when mixed in with new material), it reminds me a lot of the sort of trick the writers of Angel used to pull all the time, suddenly announcing that an entire episode had actually been a hallucination, or that a character’s behaviour was in fact nothing but a charade, despite the viewers not being given any clues with which to work this out for themselves. Had more hints been given towards Ruth’s mental breakdown throughout the previous episodes, I would probably have looked on this episode more kindly, but as it is, it feels almost like rewriting a character with little or no foreshadowing whatsoever, and it’s hard not to feel manipulated. The Series 12 episode Love Me Tender (my second favourite of all time) did a much better job of revealing the reason for a character’s coldness in a genuinely heartbreaking manner while still having given the audience ample opportunity to work out what had happened beforehand.

It’s an achievement for Casualty if for no reason other than for successfully jettisoning the formula in a way previously only matched by the non-linear continuity of Barbara Machin’s two-parter last Christmas, but I remain undecided on how I actually feel about the end result. Certainly, it was all extremely well put together, and I suspect will remain one of the high points of the current series, but I think that, in resorting to such blatant manipulation and rewriting (or concealing) of facts, the writers have broken a certain unarticulated contract with the audience, which, in a sense, is really not playing fair.

Oh well. Right now, I’m most looking forward to the imminent departure of the pompous git known as Harry Harper (Simon MacCorkindale), whose tenure as the department’s senior consultant has been like listening to nails scraping on a blackboard non-stop for the last six years, and the impending return of Charlie Fairhead (Derek Thompson), who has been on another of his sabbaticals since Christmas. Maybe he’ll find a way to kick this sorry lot into order.

Writerspeak

I’m not sure whether John Kricfalusi was the first person to coin the term “writerspeak”, but his was certainly the first web site on which I read the term. He offers an excellent post pertaining to the writing of dialogue for animation, although I suspect that many live action screenwriters could benefit from reading it as well. In a sense, most of what he says is common sense, but sometimes you need to see things written down to actually understand the logic behind them.

John defines writerspeak as this:

A lot of characters in modern cartoons are simply mouthpieces for the writers. They speak in the writer’s voice rather than the character’s voice, tell the jokes that the writer and his writer friends think are funny, but are totally out-of-character for the character who is actually saying them. This common writer’s flaw is known as “writerspeak”.

I’d like to go one step further. I think there are basically three different categories of bad dialogue writing that can be claimed to be writerspeak:

1. A character suddenly says something that completely contradicts their personality because a writer thought of a funny line of dialogue and wants to show everyone how clever he/she is… even if the character is normally supposed to be a complete dolt. See just about every prime-time sitcom, animated or otherwise. In some shows, such as Family Guy, none of the characters have defined personalities anyway, so whenever someone speaks, it sounds like they’re suffering from schizophrenia.

It works both ways, though. Sometimes, a writer will make a character appear more stupid than they normally are for the sake of a joke. Here’s an exchange from the Season 2 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, When She Was Bad:

Willow: I mean, why else would she be acting like such a B-I-T-C-H?

Giles: Willow, I think we’re a little too old to be spelling things out.

Xander: A bitka?

Not only is Xander’s contribution eye-rollingly unfunny, it demeans the character something rotten. He may not be the sharpest tool in the box at times, but are we seriously expected to believe that he can’t spell the word “bitch”? It’s an excruciatingly bad bit of dialogue, even by the already low standards of writerspeak, because the very joke that the character is sacrificed for doesn’t even work.

2. A character tells us how they’re feeling or what they’re doing, despite it being blatantly obvious what’s happening if you just open your eyes and look at the visuals. Again, the sitcoms, whether animated or live action, are particularly strong offenders. This often manifests itself in the over-explanation of jokes. To quote the recent Simpsons movie, we see Fat Tony and his thugs hauling a bag which obviously contains a body towards the newly walled-off lake:

Chief Wiggum: Uh sorry, sorry, no dumping in the lake.

Fat Tony: Fine, I will put my “yard trimmings” in a car compactor.

Fat Tony and his men now walk off with the body. See, that on its own is quite funny. It’s an amusing sight gag that relies half on the presence of the body (shown visually) and half on the stupidity of Chief Wiggum (conveyed through dialogue). However, not content to simply leave it at that, the writer (one of the dozen or so credited as having worked on the script) has to spell it out for us in case we didn’t get it:

Lou: Uh, Chief, I think there was a dead body in there.

A lot of writers struggle to think visually. They feel that, unless an idea is expressed in dialogue, it won’t register. That’s probably because they spend most of the day staring at text typed up on a screen or on paper. Furthermore, if you’ve ever read a script, you’ll know that it’s much easier to read dialogue than to read descriptive text. For a start, it takes up less space. For another thing, it tends to flow better. Long, descriptive passages of action or non-action can be extremely tedious both to write and to read - it stands to reason, because the written word is simply not suited to describing visuals in a coherent, efficient manner. Scripts aren’t like novels - you don’t have the luxury of spending pages and pages describing a situation in minute detail. (Given that animation is traditionally highly visual, is it any wonder that cartoons written on scripts rather than conceptualised on storyboards are loaded to the gills with writerspeak?)

3. A character tells another something they already know for the benefit of the audience. The Rock contains an absolute doozy:

Chief Justice: This is for the sake of national security.

Womack: No, it’s the sake of national security that got us here in the first place thirty-three years ago. I knew some day this would come back to bite us. Forget it. He does not exist!

Chief Justice: He does exist! We just chose to forget about him for thirty years. We locked him up and threw away the key.

Womack: Oh, and a lot of goddamn good it did us. He broke out of two maximum security prisons, and if he hits the streets…

Chief Justice: He’s not going to hit the streets, Jim! Thirty years ago he was a highly-trained SAS operative. He is my age now, for Christ’s sake. I have to get up three times a night to take a piss!

Womack: We can’t risk letting him out. He’s a professional escape artist.

Before you ask what’s wrong with this exchange, bear in mind that both characters were already privy to all this information before they opened their mouths. It’s only one step removed from those phone calls where you only see one side of the conversation so Character A repeats back everything Character B said. (“Why, I’d love to come to a party at your place at six o’clock tonight. What’s that? You want me to bring a bottle of wine? But of course I will!”) I’m not sure who penned this Shakespearian exchange (Weisberg/Cook? Mark Rosner? Jonathan Hensleigh? Quentin Tarantino? Aaron Sorkin? Clement/La Frenais? They, among many others, contributed to the script, many of them uncredited), but it’s absolutely magical, one of the finest examples of writerspeak and makes me laugh every time I hear it.

I’m not claiming to be some sort of dialogue writing expert. Writing convincing dialogue is hard - I know this from experience. But really, there’s no excuse for some of the travesties I’ve mentioned above… unless they were meant to be intentionally funny, which I somehow doubt.

Proving that good taste is a rare commodity

Demonstrating themselves once again to be a pillar of taste and decency, the notorious Westboro Baptist Church have made it known that they plan to picket the funeral of actor Heath Ledger, who, as I’m sure you know, died on January 22nd.

Apparently, the reason for this “protest” is that Ledger played a gay character in the film Brokeback Mountain, an action that, in the eyes of the criminally insane Fred Phelps and his small band of brainwashed followers, is about the worst thing anyone could ever do:

“You cannot live in defiance of God. He (Ledger) got on that big screen with a big, fat message: God is a liar and it’s OK to be gay,” said Shirley Phelps in a statement sent out by the Topeka, Kan.-based Westboro Baptist Church.

The only thing that amazes me more than the complete and utter stupidity of these people is that Mrs. Phelps actually managed to get through that entire sentence without making a single reference to homosexuals eating excrement, an act which she appears to be convinced is an integral element of the gay “lifestyle”, and one which, according to her, all homosexuals practice (see the Louis Theroux documentary The Most Hated Family in America for more details). Ledger himself may not have been, to use the Westboro Baptist lingo, a “fag”, but he was, in their eyes, the next worst thing, a “fag enabler”, and therefore, as far as they are concerned, deserving of their own particular brand of special treatment (again, see the Louis Theroux documentary for an explanation of how this apparently works).

This is one of these instances where there is absolutely no point in attempting to pick apart what she says or trying to demonstrate why she’s wrong because (a) if you have even a shred of common sense, you’ll know she’s off her nut, and (b) everything that comes out of this woman’s mouth is so whacked-out that it actually defies conventional criticism. To dignify her arguments by attempting to refute them requires you to actually come down to her level, and I’m sorry, but I can’t stoop that low. I’ve got a bad back.

I really shouldn’t be so surprised - that the Phelps clan would leap on this bandwagon was as set in stone as the fact that the sun always rises in the east and sets in the west. What I wasn’t expecting, however (although perhaps that just shows my naivety), was the reaction from Fox News to Ledger’s death:

Fox News’ John Gibson on Jan. 22 opened his radio show with funeral music and mocked a signature line from “Brokeback,” saying, “Well, he found out how to quit you.” (When Gibson was contacted to explain his comments, he declined.)

Again, perhaps this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. I’m all too aware of Fox News’ world view and agenda, but even by their standards this is pretty incredible.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 10: Anywhere But Here

Written by Joss Whedon; Illustrated by Cliff Richards

Ugh. Kennedy’s back. And the manner in which she is drawn conveys all the irritation of her “personality” without the added bonus of sound.

In this episode, Buffy and Willow go flying on what I can only assume is a voyage through a dream state to gain information from some sort of demonic beast with a television attached to its head. It’s a bizarre image, but it works. What doesn’t quite work is the whole “dream logic” thing, which Whedon pulled off with great aplomb in Restless (my personal favourite ever Buffy episode) but doesn’t quite accomplish on the page. It might be that the compressed nature of this single-issue storyline (we only get 25 pages, several of which are given over to Dawn’s ongoing non-storyline), but tonally is seems a lot more muddled than any of the dreams we saw in the original series. It doesn’t help that Christian Bale and Daniel Craig both appear in the dream, something that wouldn’t have been possible on the show - to me, it just seems like self-indulgent pop culture for pop culture’s sake. Not that Buffy ever shied away from pop culture - on the contrary, it positively revelled in it - but here, it feels like poorly written fan fiction. Fan fiction written by the series’ original creator.

At the crux of this issue appears to be a partial explanation of why Willow has been avoiding Buffy, and more to the point keeping Kennedy away from her. Apparently, by resurrecting Buffy back at the beginning of Season 6, Willow feels that she set in motion the events that eventually led to Tara’s demise, in effect choosing Buffy over her girlfriend. Now, she’s concerned that her current piece of ass (that’s all I can dignify Kennedy as, since even in comic book form you can sense the complete lack of chemistry between the two of them) will meet a similar fate (if only), so she’s intentionally keeping her out of Buffy’s reach. Oooo-kay. Not only does this not make the blindest bit of sense, I’m still not getting why it’s taken Willow until now to come to this conclusion. She didn’t seem to have any problem hanging around Buffy throughout Season 7. (They throw in a rather trite explanation that she didn’t realise how she felt until she saw Warren again, but this blatantly makes no sense at all, since she and Kennedy were hidden away long before he showed up again.)

On a side note, this issue was drawn by Cliff Richards, who is apparently something of a veteran of the Buffy comics. His style is similar to Georges Jeanty’s, but with his own individual quirks. He captures Dawn’s likeness much better, and does quite well with Willow as well, but his Buffy is inconsistent.

I don’t know, I’m just not really feeling it. It’s enjoyable enough to read, but once you actually stop to think about what’s going on, it makes less and less sense. I find it hard to believe that Whedon’s heart is in this any more - certainly no more than it was during Seasons 6 and 7 - and none of the character progressions strike me as believable. I’m going to continue to read this series, but more out of mild curiosity than because I actually consider it canonical… which I don’t, even if it’s supposed to be.

At this stage, I personally think that those looking for their Buffy fix would be better served by The Chosen, a fan-written continuation which adheres as closely as possible to the format of the original TV series, and has the added bonus of being free. It’s currently just over half-way through Season 9 (where it has admittedly been stalled for some time, although the writers have given continual reassurances that their plan is to eventually take it all the way to the end of Season 10), and, while re-reading some of it recently, it struck me how much better it works than the official comic continuation. It takes a few episodes to find its feet, but once the writers perfect that Buffy “voice”, it rarely becomes anything less than completely convincing and, 99% of the time, is vastly preferable to anything in Seasons 6 and 7. It even has a few episodes that I think compare to the best of the official series, with the writers taking great pains to right many of the wrongs committed during the final two seasons of the original show. In Season 9, for example, an episode set in an alternate reality gives Anya the closure she was denied in the final episode of the real show. Don’t ask me to explain it, but it works, as a sort of bitter-sweet inversion of The Wish. The writers are also comfortable enough with writing the characters that, when they have someone do something radically unusual (such as Faith and Tara going off to get pissed in the woods in the most recent episode), it still seems natural rather than out of character.

I know a lot of people are some what suspicious of these fan-written continuations, and rightly so, because the vast majority of them are indeed poor, but this one proves to be the exception to the rule and is why, ironically enough, the official continuation of the series feels more like fan fiction than an actual example of fan fiction.

The Year in Review, 2007

Well, another year has been and gone. We’re all a year older, but probably not much wiser. As usual, I’m going to do a brief run-down of various events and issues that I’ve touched on in my news posts over the year. It’s generally not my style to comment on current affairs, so I won’t be saying anything about the murder of Benazir Bhutto, Tony Blair’s departure from office or anything like that. This year, I’ve decided to split things into several sections.

 
Life Itself

Life™ was somewhat different for me this year. The biggest change was, fairly obviously, that, at the end of March, I landed myself a full-time job, working for the NHS on their Smoking Cessation programme. I spent four and a half months working thirty-seven and a half hours a week in an office, entering data and phoning people to ask them whether they had managed to successfully stop smoking, and, while I’m not about to claim that this was the most unpleasant way anyone could ever spend four and a half months, I won’t deny that I was extremely relieved to see the back of the place in August, at which point I went into a part-time Library Assistant position at the Gallery of Modern Art. To say that I find this job vastly preferable to my previous one would be the understatement of the year, and that’s not just because I work fewer hours.

On a not entirely unrelated note, my application for funding for my PhD was unsuccessful, but my four and a half months of back-breaking (I kid) labour with the NHS was enough to pay for my first year of part-time study, and more besides. I started the PhD, on portrayals of gender in the giallo (following on from my MLitt dissertation on the same area), at the end of September and, while illness in November prevented me from making as much headway as I would have liked, the work that I’ve done so far has certainly gone a long way towards getting me back into the swing of things, academically speaking, and I look forward to properly delving into my subject of choice over the next twelve months.

 
Zeros and Ones

The big technological issue of 2007 was the ongoing battle between the two rival high definition home video formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray, and the perpetual game of teeter-totter in which each format continued to vie for supremacy, engaging in a conflict of words as much as sales. A war in which what your opposition doesn’t have is every bit as important as what you do have, the biggest surprise was undoubtedly Paramount’s shock decision, in August, to ditch Blu-ray entirely and concentrate on HD DVD. With no end to the format war in sight any time soon, 2008 looks set to be another interesting year.

For me, my most significant purchase was that of a Japanese Playstation 3, reneging on my single format stance and embracing neutrality. Personally speaking, the balance continues to lie firmly in favour of HD DVD in terms of exclusive titles (a fact only compounded by the aforementioned Paramount decision), but I can’t deny that it’s nice to be able to own and watch high definition copies of Casino Royale, The Descent and Ratatouille.

I also bought three additional pieces of hardware: a new desktop PC in May, an Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive in July (to replace my clunky and oversized stand-alone HD-A1 player), and a Blu-ray enabled laptop in October. In the case of the latter, my original intention was to use it primarily for PhD work, although, in reality, I’ve got just as much, if not more, use out of it as a convenient means of taking screen captures from Blu-ray discs.

 
At the Pictures

Perhaps largely due to my period of full-time employment, I watched somewhat fewer films this year than in the previous two years. By my calculation, I watched a total of 164 films, 77 of which were ones that I hadn’t seen before, down from 216 (99 new) in 2006. Still, I did manage to see several significant films, including the great - 2001: A Space Odyssey, Babel, Black Book, Black Sabbath, the Final Cut of Blade Runner, Blood Diamond, Children of Men, Full Metal Jacket, Grindhouse, Hot Fuzz, Inside Man, Life of Brian, The Lives of Others, Pan’s Labyrinth, Ratatouille, Sicko, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Zodiac - the reasonably good - 1408, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Brokeback Mountain, Brotherhood of the Wolf, The Bourne Ultimatum, Chicago, Crank, The Game, Hard Candy, Idiocracy, Mission Impossible, Mission Impossible III, Mother of Tears, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Red Road, Syriana, Tideland, Transformers - and the guff - Aeon Flux, Fantastic Four, The Fountain, Futurama: Bender’s Big Score!, Hostel, House of the Dead, The Matrix Revolutions, Mission Impossible II, Norbit, Paprika, A Scanner Darkly, The Simpsons Movie and the remakes of Poseidon and The Wicker Man.

Best new film I saw in the year? Either Black Book or Children of Men. Worst? Without a shadow of a doubt, Norbit.

I bought or otherwise received 118 films on disc, 42 of which were HD DVDs, 31 Blu-ray discs and 45 standard definition DVDs. I wrote 44 reviews for DVD Times, down from last year’s 66. Of these, 16 were for HD DVDs, 12 for Blu-ray discs and 16 for standard definition DVDs.

 
Bibliothèque

I read the following books: Legion by William Peter Blatty, The Naked Drinking Club by Rhona Cameron, Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File by Frederick Forsythe, Carrie by Stephen King, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, The Red Dahlia by Lynda La Plante, Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin, Almost Blue by Carlo Lucarelli, The Dead Hour by Denise Mina, The Mephisto Waltz by Fred Mustard Stewart, Odette by Jerrard Tickell, Mercy Alexander by George Tiffin, and The Devil Rides Out, Gateway to Hell, Strange Conflict and To the Devil - a Daughter by Dennis Wheatley. Which, now that I think about it, is a heck of a lot more than I’d expected.

 
Song and Dance

I snagged the following CDs: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Ennio Morricone), Blood Diamond (James Newton Howard), Cars (Randy Newman), The Descent (David Julyan), Grindhouse: Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez/John Debney/Graeme Revell), The Iron Giant (Michael Kamen), Kingdom of Heaven (Harry Gregson-Williams), Mother of Tears (Claudio Simonetti), The Professional (Eric Serra), The Secret of NIMH (Jerry Goldsmith), Serenity (David Newman), This is the Life (Amy MacDonald), V for Vendetta (Dario Marianelli), Veronica Guerin (Harry Gregson-Williams), Why Bother? (Peter Cook and Chris Morris).

 
Well, all in all, I think that’s it for another year. Look back on it, it reads a bit like a shopping list with the occasional personal titbit, but I suppose that’s the way of things in our evil capitalist society. Anyway, here’s to a great 2008 and yet more wanton spending.

Ave Satani indeed…

Omen IV: The Awakening is my first film of the new year. Unfortunately, I can’t say we’re off to a great start…

The Omen is one of my all-time favourite films. Its script may not be a masterpiece, but its tight execution by Richard Donner, stellar cast, including Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, Billie Whitelaw and David Warner, not to mention masterful score by Jerry Goldsmith, conspire to make it a first-rate exercise in horror. Its two sequels, Damien: Omen II and The Final Conflict, demonstrate the law of diminishing returns and, barring a handful of set-piece sequences, are generally not worth bothering with. Still, their flaws pale in comparison to this third sequel, one of the worst and unintentionally funniest films I have ever had the (dis)honour of seeing.

Omen IV: The Awakening eventually made its debut on television in 1991. However, I suspect that it was originally intended for a big screen release, a theory compounded by the fact that the DVD comes with a theatrical trailer, not to mention that the film itself is in a ratio of 1.85:1, which would have been unheard of for American TV in the early 90s. Presumably, the powers that be at 20th Century Fox actually realised that they had, in all likelihood, commissioned a train wreck and opted to let it rot on the small screen rather than risk the end of Western civilisation by subjecting it to moviegoers around the world. And these are the people that deemed Glitter to be releasable.

Can you guess the plot? A married couple (Faye Grant and Michael Woods) adopt an orphaned child from a convent, only for it to emerge fairly quickly that the hapless couple have in fact been lumbered with the spawn of Satan (literally). The child, this time round, is not Damien but Delia (Asia Vieira), but, barring this change of gender, it’s business as usual.

Things begin to go horribly wrong right from the start. “Wait till you see her,” declares a beaming nun, talking on the phone to Delia’s parents-to-be. “She’s a tiny miracle.” Jump cut to a shot of storm clouds accompanied by a thunderclap, then back to the ladies of the cloth, while Mother Superior intones dramatically that “Clouds sweep away the colour. Leaves everything like a black and white photograph.” I don’t know about you, but I’m getting the heebie-jeebies already.

Scene after ridiculous scene unfolds before us. During Delia’s baptism, the child begins to scream and bawl, prompting looks of horror from all and sundry. (I’m not sure why they find this so strange: every baptism I’ve attended has resulted in the victim howling his or her head off. And naturally, for the crime of attempting to indoctrinate the child, Satan strikes the guilty priest down with the sudden onset of a heart attack.) Later, a nanny is pursued by a Rottweiler and then falls backwards through an upper storey window in slow motion. A crowd of carol singers in bad goth make-up lip sync to the “Jesus Christus, Ave Satani” lyrics of the soundtrack. We even have a fervent get-together for born again Christians, in which one of the aforementioned nuns, now welcomed into the bosom of this cult and inexplicably, out of nowhere saddled with a strident Southern accent, hands out snakes to members of the congregation (no, I’m not kidding) and tells them they’ve “got the joy”. Eventually, she predictably ends up being bitten when the snakes turn on her, although the prosthetics work is so bad that it looks as if they are attacking a doll’s legs.

Aaargh! Not the choirboys!

These are actually the high points of the film. The rest of it is so risible that I actually found myself missing The Final Conflict’s hapless assassin priests and their Keystone Kops antics. The absolute worst moment comes about a third of the way in, when Delia gets her revenge on a school bully. In the original film, Damien drove his nanny to suicide with a mere glance. Here, Delia’s ultimate punishment is to cause her tormenter to piss his pants, complete with a tasteful close-up of the urine seeping through his trousers. For a very strange moment, I thought that Delia had somehow wandered on to the set of Problem Child. And I’m not even going to give away the twist ending, which, even though I knew it was coming, had me howling with laughter. Special attention must be given to the phenomenally hammy acting, with Faye Grant taking the prize in the role of the harangued mother. Asia Vieira, meanwhile, has only one tone of delivery - bratty - leaving us convinced that, if she really is the child of the Devil, then Satan really needs to work on his parenting skills and exercise a little discipline.

Of course, given that this is a 90s film, the writer has to throw in nods to non-mainstream “spirituality” in case anyone was feeling a little left out (there’s nothing for the atheists among us, though, I hasten to note). And here’s my problem with this approach: if you’re going to tell a story that presents religion and the supernatural as real, then please do so consistently instead of throwing in this wishy-washy “everyone is spiritual” nonsense. The Omen films ostensibly present Christian doctrine as reality, so why, pray tell, would Delia react with such horror to a “healing crystal” worn around her nanny’s neck, and why would a gaggle of New Age mystics and assorted crackpots, upon seeing her, collectively go wide-eyed and begin opening and closing their mouths like fish out of water? (Incidentally, the healing crystal leads to one of the most hilariously awful moments in the entire film: the nanny reacts in horror as she discovers that the crystal around her neck has turned black, and, hurrying to the bedroom drawer in which she keeps various other trinkets, all of which have turned the same colour. Just in case we don’t understand what has happened, the filmmakers treat us to her exclaiming in voiceover: “They’re all black!” You couldn’t make this stuff up. Still, this is nothing compared to a mystic declaring that Delia’s aura is like “mud and molasses and swirls of red paint”.)

What’s worse, this is effectively little more than a remake of the original film. Barring a handful of minor deviations, the plot is virtually identical, right down to the details. In The Omen, various zoo animals went wild when confronted with Damien; here, Delia drives a crowd of horses to madness. In both films, the mother character ends up pregnant and becomes convinced that Damien/Delia will do everything in his/her power to prevent the child’s birth. We even get photographs of doom, a kooky nanny and a phenomenally badly staged repeat of the iconic decapitation accident. Even the film’s one good element is pilfered: Jonathan Sheffer’s insipid music is augmented by the liberal borrowing of Jerry Goldsmith’s scores for The Omen and The Final Conflict. And, of course, at the end, we’re effectively back where we started, with another Antichrist in the world and the potential for any number of sequels. Thankfully, the decision-makers opted to nip this in the bud rather than let things continue.

I suspect there’s a reason this film was omitted from the initial UK Omen box set, and that’s that, even in comparison with the first two sequels, it’s tragically awful. It is, however, very funny (unintentionally, of course), considerably more entertaining than that dire 2006 remake of the original film, so, oddly enough, I find myself in the position of giving a stronger recommendation to what is, technically, the worse of the two.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of December

• 28 Weeks Later (R2 UK, DVD)
• Blade Runner: 5-disc Complete Collector’s Edition (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• The Bourne Ultimatum (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Four Flies on Grey Velvet (R0 Germany, DVD)
• Halloween: Unrated Director’s Cut (R1 USA, DVD)
• Inside Man (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Jackass Number 2 (R2 UK, DVD)
• Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 5 (R1 USA, DVD)
• Masters of Horror: Season 1, Volume 3 (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Masters of Horror: Season 1, Volume 4 (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Psychic (R1 USA, DVD)
• Running Scared (R0 Germany, HD DVD)
• Sicko (R1 USA, DVD)
• Tekkonkinkreet (R2 UK, DVD)
• Tideland (R0 Germany, HD DVD)
• Veronica Guerin (R2 UK, DVD)
• Wolf Creek (R0 UK, HD DVD)

A pretty shockingly large line-up to send off 2007. I guess I should count myself lucky that several of these were either free or Christmas presents.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 9: No Future For You, Part Four

Written by Brian K. Vaughan; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

Brian K. Vaughan’s Faith storyline draws to a close, and I have to say that, on the whole, I enjoyed it much more than the first four-parter that Joss Whedon wrote. Part of that may be because I like Faith more than I like Buffy (this has got to be the only series I enjoy despite not having much time for its protagonist), but I suspect it’s also because it feels more self-assured and manages to maintain a more consistent tone and focus. Faith’s character is fertile ground, and Vaughan does an excellent job of exploring her conflicted feelings, which make a lot more sense in this instalment than they did in the previous one. I particularly enjoyed her flashback involving the Mayor, given that (a) the Mayor was a great villain and (b) it’s really the first time Faith has actually verbalised how she feels about her relationship with him. Surprise surprise, she’s conflicted.

I also like the ruthless side of Giles that is shown in this episode, and I hope that this will lead to more of an exploration of the inner turmoil he experiences over the issue of taking a human life, particularly given how quickly his killing of Ben in the final episode of Season 5 was brushed under the carpet. The final pages of this issue seem to be foreshadowing Giles’ affections being transferred from Buffy to Faith, which is intriguing, and actually oddly satisfying, given that Buffy and Giles both treated each other like crap throughout Season 7. Faith, I suspect, in her own way, has more respect for Giles than Buffy does, and the thought of them going rogue together does please me considerably.

Oh, and the final page introduces what I assume is going to be the Season’s Big Bad (it doesn’t appear to be either Amy or Warren, thank god). He appears as a big floating guy in a mask not unlike the one Jason Voorhees wears… oh, and his voice is emphasised by the use of a different font for his dialogue. We don’t learn anything much about him at this stage, but it does appear that the end of the world is - dun, dun, dun! - nigh. Again.

The next two episodes appear to both be stand-alone storylines written by Joss Whedon. I’m particularly looking forward to Episode 10, which, judging by the cover, sees Willow, my absolute favourite character, take centre stage. After that, Drew Goddard, who wrote on Season 7, is doing a four-issue arc, seemingly set in Tokyo. Well, it should be different, at any rate.

8/10.

I know where you got those peepers

Source: Mobius Home Video Forum

You know, after his earlier run-in with the law, I would have thought that filmmaker Victor Salva would have been more careful to avoid indulging in any more suspect behaviour. Not so, however, for it turns out that we can add “plagiarism” to his roster of unsavoury deeds.

On YouTube, there is a very interesting video highlighting the undeniable similarities between the first act of Salva’s film, Jeepers Creepers, and an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, a 1980s US television series that re-enacted various true crimes. After watching the clips, I think you’ll agree that this is not mere coincidence but a case of outright theft. It’s certainly given me cause to reconsider just why the first act of Jeepers Creepers was so much better than what followed it.

High definition hootenanny

A handful of discs have landed on my doormat over the last couple of days. First up, on Tuesday, was a check disc for Optimum’s UK HD DVD release of Wolf Creek, replacing the Blu-ray release which wouldn’t play in my Japanese Playstation 3 thanks to a strange bug called region coding. I’ve taken a quick look at it in advance of putting together a full review for DVD Times, and I can report quite categorically that those who already own the Weinstein Company’s US release should stick with it. Optimum have inexplicably decided to encode their version using MPEG2, and the result is a heck of a lot of artefacting. You still get a nicely detailed picture, and some shots do look flawless, but the number of shots that show excessive macro-blocking make this a less than immersive experience.

Oh, and the menus appear to be bugged, at least for Xbox 360 users: the scene selection screen won’t load. The on-screen overlay disappears, leaving the background footage to play in an infinite loop, requiring the disc to be ejected and reinserted.

Then, on Wednesday, while I was out at work, the Blu-ray release of Masters of Horror: Season 1, Volume 3, containing Don Coscarelli’s Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, Tobe Hooper’s Dance of the Dead and Larry Cohen’s Pick Me Up, arrived. Then, today, this was supplemented by the fourth and final volume of Masters of Horror’s first season, containing Takeshi Miike’s Imprint (the episode which so horrified the executives that they refused to air it in the US), Joe Dante’s Homecoming and Mick Garris’ Chocolate. Given that the only episode I’ve watched so far is Sick Girl in Volume 2 (having previously seen Jenifer one and a half times, which was more than enough), it looks like I’ve got quite a bit of viewing ahead of me.

The DVD from Hell

While I was out at work yesterday, my 666th DVD arrived… and it turned out to de the decidedly non-satanic Veronica Guerin. Too bad I didn’t have the foresight to mark the occasion with something more appropriate, he he.

I first saw Veronica Guerin two Christmases ago, when I had taken out a subscription to Blockbuster Online and was sifting through various films that I thought sounded interesting. I enjoyed it greatly at the time, and, last week, when I watched it on TV with the sides of the picture unceremoniously lopped off (damn you to heck, 1.78:1!), was even more impressed by it. Heaven alone knows how Joel Schumacher and Jerry Bruckheimer managed to turn a film like this out between them, but they somehow did.

The DVD itself was a mere £3.99, but, upon popping it into my computer, I was a little annoyed to discover that this is in fact a re-release, which strips out the extras from the original version in order to fit the entire film on to a single layer disc. And this despite the back cover claiming that “layer transition may trigger a slight pause”. Go figure.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of November

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• A Clockwork Orange (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Eyes Wide Shut (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• The Fly (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Full Metal Jacket [remastered edition] (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• The Mario Bava Collection Volume 2 (R1 USA, DVD)
• Pan’s Labyrinth (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• Peep Show: Series 4 (R2 UK, DVD)
• Ratatouille (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Shining (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Soldier of Orange (R0 UK, DVD)
• The Stendhal Syndrome: Special Edition (R0 USA, DVD)
• Tokyo Godfathers (R2 UK, DVD)
• Les Triplettes de Belleville (R0 France, HD DVD)

A good month for high definition, this, and another expensive one too.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 8: No Future For You, Part Three

Written by Brian K. Vaughan; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

I suspect this is a failing on the part of Season 7 rather than Season 8, but I really don’t get why Buffy and Faith are at loggerheads once again, after getting on pretty well during the final episodes of the television series. Don’t get me wrong, I was as baffled as anyone by the fact that Buffy and her friends so readily forgave Faith for trying to, y’know, murder them, but even so, given that the writers decided to go down that route, brushing all of Faith’s past indiscretions down the carpet, they should really have carried this through into the comic book realm instead of doing what strikes me as a massive retcon. Now, Buffy, who happily fought alongside Faith in Chosen, comes across her once again and immediately assumes that Faith plans on killing her.

To be fair, Faith is, at that present moment, in the company of one Lady Genevieve Savidge, who most certainly does plan on killing her, but even so, it seems like a bit of a leap in logic. Genevieve, by the way, has some absolutely delicious dialogue (most of it relating to her bored observation that most of her tutors have been “filthy paedos” - Vaughan has done a pretty effective job of capturing the lingo and obsessions of the inhabitants of the British Isles), but it wasn’t enough to distract me from the problematic nature of the Faith/Buffy relationship. I’m also growing increasingly weary of the use of generic fantasy archetypes in these comics: in The Chain we had fairies, whereas, in this episode, we have a little hobgoblin man assisting Giles.

Some nice artwork in this issue, though - quite a bit more dynamic than the previous couple of episodes. Oh, and the final frame immediately reminded me of Gargh Marenghi’s Darkplace. If you read the comic and have seen that particular show, you’ll probably know what I mean.

7/10.

Two worlds collide

I’ve just discovered that Michael Brandon, who played the protagonist, Roberto Tobias, in Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet, has a guest role in this Saturday’s episode of Casualty (source: Yahoo! TV UK). This strikes me as incredibly weird in a quite fascinating way. Now, the question is, will he play a progressive rock drummer who incorrectly believes that he has killed a man who was stalking him,

Highlight below to reveal spoiler text for Four Flies on Grey Velvet:

Given some of the stories we’ve been getting on Casualty recently, I wouldn’t consider that to be too far-fetched.

Door into DVD

Source: DVD Maniacs

After a fairly lengthy period of inactivity, NoShame Films’ US wing is getting up and running again, starting with the February 26th 2008 release of Dario Argento’s 1973 television series Door into Darkness.

Bizarre cover art aside, this is very good news. The series was released in Italy by NoShame earlier this year, but it lacked English subtitles, and I have yet to come across any reviews of its image quality. Currently, the only English-friendly release was a 2-disc set by German company Dragon Entertainment, which, despite having very iffy image quality (see my review for more information), is now something of a collector’s item. Assuming NoShame have access to better quality materials, this new edition should be a must-buy.

DVD debacle

I picked up a couple of DVDs on my lunch break the other day: Paul Verhoeven’s Soldier of Orange and Series 4 of Peep Show.

Again, sorry for the sluggish updates. I thought I was on the mend, but it turns out I may have been mistaken. The pains in my stomach have now gone, but I’m still getting all sorts of aches from the waist down on my left hand side, and, to make matters worse, last night, while lying fully stretched out in bed, I could literally feel the circulation in my left leg being cut off and the entire limb going to sleep. I was only able to get the circulation going again by bending it at a 90 degree angle - so, as you can probably imagine, I didn’t sleep particularly well last night. Oh, and I’m feeling absolutely rotten again today (nausea and stomach cramps), so I suspect I’m going to try to get another appointment with the doctor tomorrow.

Casualty - time for a reappraisal

Back in September, the medical drama series Casualty began its 22nd series with an opening two-parter that did much to restore my faith in a show that I had been becoming increasingly disappointed by (see my thoughts at the time here). I concluded my appraisal of the season premiere by surmising that the show had been brought back from the dead, and begging the writers to retain the newly-retrenched ideology of hard-hitting medical drama rather than sliding back into soap opera antics.

Ten weeks later, and the show, by my estimation, celebrated its 600th episode last Saturday. I say “estimation” because, thanks to numerous specials and cross-overs with sister show Holby City, it’s difficult to determine exactly how many episodes there have been that are officially counted. A shame, because, back in 1999, when the show celebrated its 250th episode, there was a big hoo-ha with documentaries, “viewers’ choice” votes and so on. Nowadays, though, with 48 episodes produced a year, I suppose there’s not much point in counting such milestones any more.

Anyway, I thought it was about time for a reappraisal, particularly because, so far, the writers have done a piss-poor job of living up to the potential shown in the opening two-parter. While it’s true that the “who’s doing the horizontal with who” element has mercifully yet to return (barring a new character eating a journalist’s face in a lift at the end of his first episode, an event that has thankfully not been repeated), the inconsistent characterisation, implausible plots and poor storyline follow-through have fairly quickly crept back in. (It also doesn’t help that I’ve recently been rewatching Series 13, which, while not a perfect series, and in many ways the one that laid the foundations for the soap period of Series 16-21, at least had writers who had an understanding of how to tell an engaging and satisfying storyline over the course of a not unreasonable 28 episodes, using believable, likeable and consistent characters.)

This is most apparent in the departure storyline for paramedic Josh, who, having been in the show for the past 18 years, was its second longest-running character (and, if this episode truly was Episode 600, then it feels like a fitting time for such an icon of the show to bow out). According to a recent interview given in some newspaper or other, actor Ian Bleasdale actually made the decision to leave two years ago, which makes the unconvincing and slipshod manner in which he was written out all the more baffling. Basically, a storyline was manufactured in which he supposedly fell in love with Devika, a woman he had met while on holiday in India, and decided to jack in his job to head off into the sunset with her and her daughter. All well and good, and, let’s be honest, given the amount of grief that had been lumped on the poor guy over the last 18 years (including losing his entire family in a house fire in a Series 11 episode that definitely belongs in my personal Top Ten), it was about time he was due a bit of happiness.

It’s just too bad it was handled so poorly. Over the course of the handful of episodes in which this storyline was been developed, we were constantly told, by various characters, how much Josh and this strange woman cared for and were made for each other, and yet we were never shown a single shred of evidence to back up this fact. On the contrary, what we did see was Josh paying for an operation for Devika’s daughter, twice asking her to marry him and twice being rejected (the first time because she felt insulted by his suggestion that it would solve the problem of her visa, and the second because she felt she couldn’t leave India). Then, finally, after suffering a panic attack when confronted with a stabbing victim, reminding him of his own ordeal at the hands of a knife-wielding maniac last Christmas (what, would the writers have us believe that this was the first time he had come into contact with a stabbing victim since resuming work in May?), he decided to jack in 18 years of hard work and strong friendships by running after whatshername to the airport and hopping aboard a plane with her. Um, no. It also didn’t help matters that in his final scene with his best friend, Charlie, there was oodles more chemistry between the pair of them than there ever had been between Josh and his bride to be… and that includes Charlie’s peck on the cheek and Josh’s “I love you mate” line! At least this, coupled with Charlie’s line to a gawping passer-by, “He’s left me for a woman,” will give the slash fan writers plenty of food for thought.

As it stands, after having such high hopes for the series back in September, I’m once again finding it difficult to feel anything other than incredibly pessimistic about the show’s future. Having lost what I consider to have been one of its main anchors for the past 18 years, there is now a massive void that I strongly doubt the current managment will be able to fill. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised - nothing lasts for ever, it’s been painfully obvious for some time now that neither Josh nor the actor playing him have been particularly happy in their respective jobs, but still, it’s hard not to feel downhearted at this development. It wouldn’t have been so bad, I suppose, if there had been a whole cavalcade of believable and well-developed characters to take his place, but the sad truth is that there isn’t. Barring the three or four remaining characters that I actually like, the rest are as one-dimensional, clichéd and unengaging as they come. Therefore, while I don’t want to give the impression that things are now as bad as they were when the previous series was at its worst - improvements have definitely been made in most respects, particularly production values and the toning down of the soap elements - we seem to be backsliding at an alarming rate, and once again I’m beginning to find that I tune in on a Saturday night more out of habit than because I’m genuinely looking forward to the latest instalment.

So, whether or not the powers that be actually care to acknowledge the 600th episode milestone, I’m going to recognise the moment by listing my Top Ten episodes so far:

1. Perfect Blue (11.24, written by Barbara Machin, directed by Graeme Harper) - Casualty had done explosive season finales before, but this was the first one to take place over two episodes (much of what transpires in this one is set up in the previous episode, Monday, Bloody Monday). This one sees the team fighting to save the life of one of their own, nurse Jude, after she is found lying in a pool of blood in a corridor, stabbed by a mentally unstable patient.

2. Love Me Tender (12.22, written by Tony Lindsay, directed by Gary Love) - Notable not only for Claire Goose’s outstanding performance (one that I seriously doubt has ever been bettered in the entire history of the show) as Tina, but also for the writer’s bold (and incredibly successful) decision to intercut her recounting being raped in the hospital toilets with scenes of a wife-beater attempting to justify why he does what he does and explaining what goes through his mind when the rage comes over him.

3. Boiling Point (7.24, written by Peter Bowker, directed by Michael Owen Morris) - An impressive pyrotechnics display and an episode that, among all the carnage, also manages to hammer home what the show was all about in its glory period, this one sees the entire A&E department going up in flames after a group of rioters start a fire in its basement. This, the final episode of Series 7, was also the last to be overseen by original producer Geraint Morris, and he certainly went out with a bang.

4. Silent Night (21.16, written by Barbara Machin, directed by Diarmuid Lawrence) - Every time I heap scorn on Series 21, I have to remind myself that, for all its faults, it did contain two of the best episodes ever produced, a two-parter penned by one of the show’s best writers, who came back for a one-off gig after nearly a decade missing in action. While its stablemate, Killing Me Softly (see below) is the more innovative of the two, I feel that this one beats it for being tonally closer to classic Casualty and for several stand-out scenes which, in terms of writing and performance, succeed in tipping the balance in its favour. In particular, Charlie’s eventual confrontation with the deranged guest character Laura (a wonderful performance by Holly Aird), who has stabbed Josh and indirectly contributed to nurse Ellen’s death, is a wonderfully satisfying piece of rage-venting.

5. Treasure (11.20, written by Lisa Evans, directed by Ken Hannam) - The aforementioned episode in which Josh loses his family in a house fire, this one packs an incredible emotional punch, not just because of Ian Bleasdale’s performance as Josh, but also because of how the rest of the regulars react to his loss. The scenes of their desperate attempt to resuscitate his daughter, burned virtually beyond recognition and with her breath coming out in ragged gasps, are some of the most unsettling in the entire series.

6. Killing Me Softly (21.15, written by Barbara Machin, directed by Diarmuid Lawrence) - Silent Night’s partner in crime, this episode employs the unusual (particularly for a stylistically conservative show like Casualty) technique of repeating the same events three times, showing them from the perspectives of three different characters and each time adding a further piece to the puzzle. Also incredibly memorable for its highly effective use of the hymn Miserere by Gregorio Allegri at key moments.

7. Charlie’s Anniversary (22.02, written by Mark Catley, directed by Simon Meyers) - “Don’t even think about [killing yourself]. I’d resuscitate you.” “Why?” “Because I’m a nurse.” This episode, along with 22.01 My First Day, constitutes one of Casualty’s all-time strongest season premieres, and, had both parts been up to the standard of this one, probably the best ever. After so many years in the wilderness, this episode reaffirmed everything that Casualty used to be about, while demonstrating sharper, more accurate characterisation than had been seen for years. At the same time, it employs several highly effective narrative tricks, showing the entire day from Charlie’s perspective and, towards the end, having him, the longest-running character and the only one who has been there since Episode 1, walking alone through the otherwise evacuated department. This, in effect, takes it all right back to the beginning by stripping the show down to the only two elements that have been consistent right from the beginning. Oh, and any episode to feature Charlie answering his mobile phone with the words “No, Maggie, I haven’t been blown up yet,” has got to be worth the price of admission.

8. Burned Out Hearts (14.23, written by Susan Boyd, directed by Tim Leandro) - This episode deals with the murder and aftermath thereof of consultant Max’s son, Frank, and, after Treasure, is as effective a study of grief as I think the show has ever achieved. Once again it succeeds in showing the effect of a death not just on the deceased’s immediate relatives but also on those caught in the crossfire, including the staff, the killers themselves and the woman who called the ambulance. And, of course, just to add a touch of bitter irony to the situation, Max ends up saving the lives of the very people who killed his son after they are involved in a collision.

9. Cry for Help (2.04, written by Paul Unwin and Jeremy Brock, directed by Alan Wareing) - Looking back on it, I have a feeling that this episode probably set the stage for the inordinately high death rate that has plagued the last few series, but back in the day, the sudden and completely unforeshadowed death of paramedic Sandra Mute (just one of Casualty’s many stabbings by mentally unstable patients!), would have been quite shocking. Casualty, in its first couple of series, was very much a game of goodies and baddies, and the goodies (the A&E team) had clearly definied opponents (management, the Tory government). Killing off one of the show’s most charismatic characters at the time was a huge gamble, but it paid off, underscoring the fact that this world was far from cosy and that good people could suffer for no good reason. The final scene, in which Sandra’s partner, Andy, learns of her death (“No, no, don’t say it, Charlie”), is incredibly poignant.

10. Burn Out (3.05, written by Jeremy Brock, directed by Michael Owen Morris) - Creators Jeremy Brock and Paul Unwin had no involvement with the show beyond its third series, and this episode, penned by one half of that duo, shows the programme coming of age with a far more complex (and, ultimately, bleaker) outlook than the first couple of series. Although the most significant moment is probably consultant Ewart Plimmer’s heart attack and subsequent death at the end of the episode, by far the most powerful is his earlier scene with a depressed and disillusioned Megan, where Oscar-winning actress Brenda Fricker delivers an impassioned, powerful and surprisingly convincing monologue about how sick she is of being treated like a second-rate member of the team.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 7: No Future For You, Part Two

Written by Brian K. Vaughan; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

It seems like it was ages ago that I wrote my last Buffy review - so much so that I’d almost forgotten what the ongoing story was, and had to reread the preview issue to remind myself of what was going on.

To tell the truth, these “episodes” are so short that it’s quite difficult to review them on an individual basis: generally speaking, not enough happens in each one for you to get much of an idea of the quality of the storytelling until you’ve read the entire multi-part story (discounting one-shots like The Chain, of course). This issue continues Faith’s mission to infiltrate rogue Slayer Genevieve’s party and assassinate her, as well as briefly hopping back to the issue of Dawn and her giantness. I’m enjoying the Faith plot, even if it seems that they’re retreading old ground at times; the Dawn stuff, less so. Generally speaking, if you’re going to tease a plot out over the course of several months (don’t forget that we’re only seeing one issue per month, if that), it had better be an interesting one. Dawn being huge because she had sex with a Thricewise (whatever that is) is not particularly interesting, and the idea of a sixty foot tall girl mooching around in a Scottish glen is a bit too farcical, even by Buffy standards, to hold up week after week. I sincerely hope they do something with this plot strand before too long.

Still, the Faith stuff occupies 90% of the comic, so my reaction to this episode was on the whole positive, and, because Faith has always struck me as a far more interesting character than Buffy herself, I didn’t object to the titular heroine’s non-appearance for the second time (the impersonator in The Chain doesn’t count). (Actually, a show based solely around Faith, Willow, Giles and Dawn, who are the only regulars to appear in this episode, wouldn’t strike me as a bad thing at all. Well, okay, maybe not Dawn, although it least in comic book form you don’t actually have to listen to her.) As I mentioned before, there’s a certain sense of déjà vu to what the writers are doing with Faith, although to be honest they made such a pig’s ear of her character development in Season 7 that it’s difficult to be too negative here.

Nice shock ending too. I had some idea of what was coming, but the way it was handled was pretty nifty.

7/10.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of October

• Black Book (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Dawn of the Dead (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Day of the Dead (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Fallen Angel (R2 UK, DVD)
• The Fly (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Halloween (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Inferno (R2 Italy, DVD)
• The Jungle Book: Platinum Edition (R0 USA, DVD)
• Masters of Horror: Season 1, Volume 1 (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Masters of Horror: Season 1, Volume 2 (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Mission Impossible III (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Nikita/Subway (R2 UK, DVD)
• Oldboy (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• Seed of Chucky (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• The Stendhal Syndrome (R0 USA, DVD)
• Suspiria: Definitive Edition (R2 Italy, DVD)
• Veronica Mars: The Complete Third Season (R1 USA, DVD)

No question about it, this was a very Blu month. A very expensive one too, although at least I managed to snag three review copies.