“What Has Happened To the Magic of Doctor Who?” – A Ranking of the Heart

On By ArthurIn Doctor Who, Fiction, Movies & Television, Science FictionLeave a comment

Too Long To Wait, Long Enough To List

There was no Doctor Who Christmas special this year – in fact, there’s no new Doctor Who on television (not counting Doctor-less spin-offs) until Christmas 2026, which will be over 18 months since The Reality War aired. As a result, in accordance with the ancient prophecy Ian Levine has been loosed from his imprisonment in the Divergent Universe and is currently scaling Bad Wolf tower, batting at biplanes whilst clutching an AI reconstruction of The Space Pirates in one hand.

While we all hunker down in our Christmas-decorated bunkers until he’s repelled, I’ve been prompted to think about my season rankings in my Doctor Who reviews. These are very much weighted towards assessing seasons based on how much I enjoy individual stories; I love every story in Season 26, so it ended up at the top, I don’t think any of the 2022 specials were particularly good so they languish at the bottom.

That’s fine to an extent, but it does end up with results that nag at me. In particular, in my most recent review, I ended up declaring Series 15 to be the strongest that the revived show had ever turned in. I still stand by that assessment… with caveats. In terms of individual episodes I might want to revisit later on to enjoy in isolation, separated from the season arc, Series 15 was a short but sweet collection of real gems. Moreover, I don’t think The Reality War is as big a disaster as some sectors of the fandom make it out to be, though I will admit a lot of my enjoyment of it stems directly from the fact that the hastily-arranged reshoots make the whole epic struggle seem like a bunch of silly busywork which isn’t actually as important as the simple fate of an entirely ordinary child.

In addition, on rewatches it shows all the scars, gaps, patches, and scaffolding that’s inherent to a story that was blatantly conceived with Ruby Sunday in mind as the main companion (Ruby as Poppy’s mother would make much more sense given prior interactions between them in Space Babies), then had to be rewritten when Millie Gibson stepped back her involvement in the series, then had to be rewritten again when Ncuti Gatwa decided that he wasn’t going to keep his career progression on hold indefinitely just because the show itself was in limbo.

And this sort of points into why I’m not sure about Series 15 landing as high as it does; though most of the individual stories are brilliant and I can find value in all of them, there’s stuff going on in the broader structure of the season which aren’t so good for the long-term health of the series, much like eating a whole Viennetta for dinner might be a lovely treat but if you do that for each and every one of your meals you’re going to have a bad time of it. I’m not necessarily talking about backstage production circumstances, though if the Sixth Doctor’s televised era taught us anything it’s that backstage circumstances can bleed over very easily into onscreen problems, and certainly something similar has happened here, with an apparent lack of joined-up thinking and a morass of dangling threads that seemed to be setting up stuff which now will quite likely not be addressed occurring in part because RTD had fallen in love with ideas which cast changes were now making incongruous, in part because he was acting like he was going to get a third season with Gatwa even though he knew full well that there was absolutely no guarantee of such a thing.

Put it this way: different eras of Doctor Who have different vibes. Each period has an atmosphere which permeates it, a sort of texture that’s distinct to it. There’s an infamous fanzine screed by Jan Vincent-Rudzki which emerged in response to The Deadly Assassin whose author closed with the thunderous declaration WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE MAGIC OF DOCTOR WHO? There’s a lot of reason to take issue with the essay, not least because The Deadly Assassin is brilliant, but what makes Vincent-Rudzki’s objections seem so funny in retrospect is that he’s declaring that the show is ruined in the middle of what’s become one of its most revered eras.

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“How long was I in the Matrix?” “Eighteen months, Doctor!” “Eighteen months? That’s too long to wait…”

Vincent-Rudzki’s reaction seems daft if you’re looking at it in terms of the specific story in question – it’d always be a bit silly to declare Doctor Who ruined or saved on the basis of a single story, even the best stretch of the McCoy era had Silver Nemesis and Colin Baker had Vengeance On Varos to his name after all. It’s also been refuted by the passage of time and consideration of the franchise as a whole. But there’s an intermediate scale between these where it does make absolute sense, and that’s on the level of individual eras’ vibes. The Hinchcliffe era might be the gold standard to many, but clearly they didn’t work for Vncent-Rudzki, and thus the magic was lost for him.

If the Magic of Doctor Who resides anywhere, it’s in the vibes, not in specific scripts or particular production decisions or individual cast members, and crucially the Magic of Doctor Who isn’t exactly the same magic from era to era – it changes, like the Doctor changes. The important thing is less that a particular Magic of Doctor Who is being delivered and more that a Magic of Doctor Who is being offered up. A consequence of this is that it’s tremendously difficult as an individual audience member to figure out whether, if you’re not feeling the Magic of Doctor Who, it’s because the Magic of Doctor Who has actually gone away for a while, or whether it’s simply shifted into a form which is flatly incompatible with your tastes, because from the individual’s perspective the experience is identical.

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Doctor Who: The Sonic Salvaging of the Sixth, Part 9

On By ArthurIn 6th Doctor, Alan Barnes, Audio Drama, Doctor Who, Fiction, I: The Classic Doctors, Marc Platt, Science FictionLeave a comment

Last time we checked in on the Sixth Doctor’s audio adventures, the output was split between journeys with Evelyn, the first of his audio-originating companions, and his first couple of adventures with none other than Charlotte Pollard, who’d been inadvertently stranded in the far future by the Eighth Doctor (and was under the impression he’d died for good) in The Girl Who Never Was. In The Condemned and The Doomwood Curse, Charley was simultaneously getting used to a decidedly different Doctor from the one she was accustomed to and also playing coy with information, since her journeys with the Eighth Doctor had impressed upon her the danger of messing with the Web of Time.

Inevitably, the enigma of how the Doctor can travel with Charley now but not remember her when they meet again (or, for her, the first time) a couple of regenerations down the road has to be addressed, because you can only keep the Doctor in the dark for so long before his lack of progress in unravelling the mystery becomes repetitive. The resolution of that would clearly also change the dynamic between them, since Charley’s evasiveness and the Doctor’s gradually increasing irritation with it is so fundamental to this particular character relationship, and whilst you could resolve the mystery and keep them together with a revised character chemistry, it’s probably more elegant to separate them at this point, since you know Charley and the Sixth Doctor have to part ways eventually since she isn’t in Time and the Rani.

Thus, the next chunk of Sixth Doctor releases would detail the culmination and conclusion of his travels with Charley, the end of that being the focus of his first “mini-season”. As I outlined in my most recent Fifth Doctor audio review, Big Finish were shifting the release structure for their monthly range at around this time; instead of jumbling things up so you’d usually get a different Doctor’s adventure from month to month, they were now veering more towards putting out three-story blocks for each of the main range Doctors in consecutive months (with a few stray stories here and there). At least early on, there’d often be something of a plot arc running through these mini-seasons, and the resolution to Charley’s dilemma is the arc for the Sixth Doctor’s first one – but we’ve got a couple of other full-length stories plus a bonus special to get through before we get there…

Brotherhood of the Daleks

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The Doctor and Charley have landed on Spiridon, setting of Planet of the Daleks, where they encounter a Thal patrol who are reeling from a nasty run-in with the Daleks. Far from being glad to see the Doctor, who is a figure of myth to them, the Thals are suspicious – not least because they’ve encountered Dalek replicants used as infiltration and assassination units. (Remember the fake Doctor from The Chase? It’s that sort of deal.) The Doctor, naturally, tries to calm the Thals and get them to be a little less paranoid. Under usual circumstances, this would be exactly the right thing to do.

These, however, are not “usual circumstances”. The problem isn’t that the Thals are paranoid – it’s that they, the Doctor, and Charley aren’t being paranoid enough. For they are not on Spiridon at all, but an artificial environment inside a hollowed-out asteroid – part of an experiment undertaken by the maverick Comrade Murgat (Michael Cochrane), a Thal scientist who on an expedition ended up infected by and fused with a Kyropite plant. The Doctor knows Kyropites of old – they’re the hallucinogen-producing plants he, Peri, and Erimem encountered in The Mind’s Eye during his previous incarnation. But he’s never seen them manipulated and cultivated to the extent Murgat has, to reinforce the illusory environment to the point where even interlopers like the Doctor and Charley don’t realise the “Thal patrol” are a group of Daleks.

Why is Murgat brainwashing Daleks to think they are Thals – and how is he manipulating Dalek replication technology to his own ends? How will Charley keep her secret from the Doctor when these Daleks remember the events of Terror Firma? Can the Doctor stop what is going on here – and should he? And why have the Daleks forgotten their favourite word?

Continue reading “Doctor Who: The Sonic Salvaging of the Sixth, Part 9” →

Console Capsules: A Half-Baked Blade Runner and Two Platonically Generic JRPGs

On By ArthurIn Adventure Games, Console Capsules, CRPGs, Cyberpunk, Dragon Quest, Fantasy, Fiction, JRPGs, Mega-CD, PlayStation 2, Science Fiction, Videogames, Visual NovelsLeave a comment

Time for another entry in my series of brief reviews of console games. This time around, I’ve got a look at a couple of Mega-CD games which I kind of bounced off and a PS2 game I put a seriously unholy amount of time into.

Snatcher (Mega-CD)

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Not so much influenced by Blade Runner as flatly stealing from it, Snatcher casts you as Gillian Seed, a Blade Runner Junker tasked with tracking down artificial replicants Snatchers. Originally designed by Hideo Kojima for the PC-8801 and MSX2 home computer platforms, it’s a visual novel-style game which is replete with references to Kojima’s other work (you get a robot sidekick called Metal Gear) and got a significant upgrade when CD-ROM versions were created for the PC Engine and the Mega-CD, adding in a new third act which expands the plot with material from SD Snatcher, an RPG adaptation of the orignal for the MSX2.

Games generally don’t get convoluted multi-system lineages like this unless they strike a chord somehow, and in the case of Snatcher it is more due to presentation than gameplay. It looks fantastic for its era, is willing to go to gorier and more sexually explicit places than many games of the period, and there’s a lot of dialogue and information to plough through, but when it comes to making actual progress you have fairly simplistic puzzles and shooting sequences, some of which frustrated me. I gave up after I went to a location where it turned out I needed to show people someone’s photo to get them to admit to having seen him, reloaded in the place where the photo was, only to find out I couldn’t take the photo – I don’t think you’re allowed to pick it up unless you’re already run into the issue of not having it, which would make sense if you weren’t playing an allegedly professional investigator who’s trying to retrace the tracks of his slain colleague and might expect to need a photo to jog the memory of potential witnesses.

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Ramsey Campbell’s Kids In Peril

On By ArthurIn Books and Periodicals, Fiction, Horror, Ramsey CampbellLeave a comment

It’s no longer October, and that means Spooky Season is over – welcome back, Genuinely Traumatic Season! Today’s offering: two Ramsey Campbell novels which deal with harm and trauma being inflicted on children. Content warning, gang: these stories involve harm to children!

An Echo of Children

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Coral and Allan Clarendon and their little son Dean have moved to the little coastal town of Barnwell, which Coral remembers well from holidays as a child. Soon enough, the grandparents come to visit – Thom and Jude on Allan’s side, Kendrick and Leigh on Coral’s – and begin to notice disquieting things. Coral and Allan seem to have become much more strict, disciplinarian, and religious than they were before, micromanaging and criticising Dean’s behaviour to the point where his speech patterns have become littered with “please” and “thank yous” because he’s terrified to get it wrong. Dean himself seems to have got an imaginary friend, “Heady”, who he claims is a headless child – and soon others are catching glimpses of a headless shadow.

The grandparents are further troubled when they learn of the history of the area – for Barnwell is no stranger to violence meted out against children. The place’s name ultimately derives from a mass grave, where youngsters who resisted a Viking raid were massacred, but apparently had a dark reputation even before that. Much more recently, it was the epicentre of the Joan and Daniel Day case, in which two religious zealots ended up killing their own child during an exorcism which had included crucifying the kid. The Day house was demolished after the case, but a new house was built on the site – the very house that Coral and Allan have brought Dean to live in.

As the mystery unravels, Jude in particular becomes increasingly distressed, believing the house to be haunted by something – perhaps the Day’s child, perhaps a victim of the Viking massacres, or perhaps the concentrated horror that has been inflicted on the young in the region over the centuries. Thom isn’t so sure about that, but he’s forced to admit that Coral and Allan’s transformation into dour, xenophobic disciplinarians doesn’t seem altogether healthy. But he’s also concerned with how deep Jude is getting into her theories about Barnwell; just how far will she go to see Dean safe? And can Thom live with himself if he’s not willing to go at least that far?

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Doctor Who: Big Fifth-ish, Part 8

On By ArthurIn 5th Doctor, Audio Drama, Doctor Who, Fiction, I: The Classic Doctors, Marc Platt, Science Fiction1 Comment

Time to check in on the Fifth Doctor’s Big Finish audio adventures again, and this time we’re getting to a stage where the main range’s format changed a bit. Previously, the monthly releases in the range jumbled up the Doctors nicely – so you might get a Sixth Doctor story one month, a Fifth Doctor one the next, a Seventh the next and so on. Around 2009, Big Finish adjusted their strategy, and would begin to put out releases in clutches of three or so – so three Fifth Doctor adventures, or three Sixth, or three Seventh, each released over the course of three monthly slots. They wouldn’t stick to this consistently, but it was enough of a pattern that it became the new normal for a while, perhaps in part because it allowed for small multi-story plot arcs to unfold over the span of a few months rather than a year or so.

For the purpose of these reviews, I think three stories is a little short for an article, but equally I don’t want to break up any of these mini-seasons, so I suspect a lot of articles will end up taking in one or two mini-seasons, or a mini-season and a stray extra story here and there. Before we get to the first of these mini-seasons – and the only one, to my knowledge, given a specific title – we’ve got to resolve the cliffhanger we ended on last time…

The Boy That Time Forgot

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Stranded in Victorian London when Thomas Brewster stole the TARDIS, the Doctor and Nyssa experiment with trying to get back to it by mounting a pseudo-séance that is actually a disguised exercise in Block Transfer Computation – the reality-manipulating mental discipline from Logopolis. It works altogether faster and more dramatically than the Doctor or Nyssa expected, flinging them and the dinner party guests (and one servant) they’d brought into the circle to prehistoric Earth – but a bizarre, distorted form of prehistoric Earth that should never have existed, where the main intelligent species are a scorpion-like folk who for some reason have selected a mysterious “soft-body” – a humanoid – as their Scorpion King (Andrew Sachs). Why? Because he has brought them the secrets of Block Transfer Computation, and with it reared a utopian city from which he rules the cosmos…

Continue reading “Doctor Who: Big Fifth-ish, Part 8” →

Scratching My Itchy Bundle: Spooky Offices, Empty Starships, Cheap Diners, and Bloody Rituals

On By ArthurIn Adventure Games, Fiction, Horror, PC, Point-and-Click Adventures, Science Fiction, Scratching My Itchy Bundle, VideogamesLeave a comment

It’s time for another entry in my occasional series where I look through the games in the Bundle For Racial Equality from itch.io and see what takes my fancy. Since the last time I did one of these, Trump got back in office and everything in the US has gotten just that bit more fraught, so who knows – maybe there’ll be another Bundle For Racial Equality coming along soon to match the policing atrocities of the second Trump term.

Location Withheld

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Location Withheld is a simple little exercise in implementing a first-person point-and-click adventure in Unity. You don’t walk anywhere, there’s only one location, and there’s not a whole lot to explore in that location; you’re just plopped in front of a computer with some case files on a string of mysterious incidents, and little do you realise that you risk being the next victim of such an incident unless you unravel the clues which unlock your only means of self-defence. There’s not much to it, but there was never meant to be much to it – developer Bryce Bucher did it as an exercise in proving to himself he could get a game published before he got out of high school. Short but effective, it does the job but perhaps doesn’t quite merit the full price tag, so I’m glad I got it in the bundle.

The Fall of Lazarus

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You awaken from cryosleep onboard the Lazarus, a starship in deep space. What a surprise: something weird and enigmatic has happened to the ship. It can’t wake up the other passengers, you’re off-course, and there’s a weird cube thing in one of the cargo bays. It’s down to you, assisted by the ship’s computer, to try and complete the mission and get away.

The Fall of Lazarus is a walking simulator from No Wand Studios, funded via Kickstarter. There’s a big ominous timer indicating a five hour countdown, though I found I was able to finish it within two and a half hours despite getting stuck on some puzzles (often, annoyingly, the ones which were poorly communicated rather than the ones which were genuinely difficult). It’s a fairly generic concept, spice being added by your protagonist’s snippy relationship with the ship’s computer and the hints of your personal life having unravelled at some point in the past, though the dream sequences and whatnot are incoherent enough that they don’t so much suggest an alternative story so much as they undermine the legitimacy of both layers of the story. Did the protagonist’s partner, Adam, die of old age, or die in a fire, or leave them? What’s the timeline here? Some of the dates on the e-mail logs don’t entirely line up, in part because I think the developers sometimes forgot whether they were using American-style month/day/year dating or the far more sensible day/month/year system.

This is basically the product of the sort of game design process which decides “protagonist is guilty about something = PEAK STORYTELLING“, and the end result is riddled with enough clichés that the game seems to lack a distinctive voice of its own. There’s a hallucination sequence where you’re trying to make your way to a cake you never get to eat, ha ha, the cake is a lie, good grief stop reminding people of better and more original games. I enjoyed exploring the ship here but I didn’t enjoy the storytelling which was attached to it.

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PC Pick-and-Mix: The Cunning of Kathy Rain, the Tepidness of Techno-Bumble-On, and the Brutality of Blackshard

On By ArthurIn Adventure Games, Cyberpunk, Fiction, Horror, PC, PC Pick-and-Mix, Point-and-Click Adventures, Science Fiction, Videogames, Wadjet Eye3 Comments

Once again, it’s time for me to fill you in on some videogames I recently enjoyed. This time around, I’m going to cover two point-and-click adventures and a first-person explore-a-thon.

Kathy Rain

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1995, somewhere in America. Kathy Rain is an aspiring journalist with a punky, leather-clad biker sense of style, in her second year of studies at college. She’s overcome significant adversity in life; when she was six, her father skipped out on her mother, who took her away from their hometown of Conwell Springs – and then her mother turned out to be a harmful, abusive individual with major mental health challenges of her own, to the point where last year Kathy had no alternative but to have her committed. One day, Kathy’s goody-two-shoes Christian roommate Eileen comes across a news article – Joseph Rain, World War II flying ace and beloved local figure in Conwell Springs, has died.

Kathy is rattled, for Joseph was her grandfather; she contemplates skipping out on the funeral, but eventually hops on her beloved bike (the Katmobile) and heads to Conwell Springs to pay her respects, and to finally break the ice with her grandma, who she’s not had contact with since her mother took her away. As Kathy explains how her mother had filled her head with nonsense about her paternal grandparents which she only later realised were lies designed to turn Kathy against them, the two reconcile and reminisce about old times… and then granny drops the bombshell.

You see, it turns out that back in 1981, not too long after Kathy and her mother left Conwell Springs, Joseph met with some sort of horrible disaster; the local sheriff found him in an unresponsive state in the local woods, and doctors were unable to get to the bottom of what was wrong. Initially they assumed he’d had some sort of stroke or other neurological event, but a series of MRI scans revealed no damage whatsoever and they were at a loss to explain why he had gone catatonic. It was a state he’d never recover from.

Kathy decides there’s something worth digging into here, and begins her own investigation into Joseph’s strange accident… if it even was an accident. Bit by bit it becomes apparent that there’s something very, very strange in the woods around Conwell Springs – and the truth about what happened to Joseph will only be uncovered if Kathy penetrates to the heart of it. So begins a journey which sees her confronting otherworldly forces and her own personal history – for the force at the heart of the woods has its own plans for Kathy Rain…

Continue reading “PC Pick-and-Mix: The Cunning of Kathy Rain, the Tepidness of Techno-Bumble-On, and the Brutality of Blackshard” →

Star Trek: Voyager – The Season of Fury

On By ArthurIn Brannon Braga, Bryan Fuller, Fiction, Movies & Television, Science Fiction, Star Trek, VoyagerLeave a comment

The story so far: the Caretaker whisked Voyager to the Delta Quadrant, the Kazon were dicks about it, the ship found itself heading into Borg space and picking up a geek sex symbol along the way, and then Brannon Braga turned in what might be the best season of the show so far, season 5 having had a heady mix of classic-style Trek fare and innovative ideas, deftly balancing humour and thoughtfulness and character moments better than the show ever had before. Braga would continue as showrunner for season six, but as it happens this would be his last ride in that capacity; season 7 would see Kenneth Biller step up to the plate so that Braga and Rick Berman could step up their work preparing for Enterprise, the series with which they’d finally kill off the Next Generation-initiated era of televised Star Trek.

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We kick off with part 2 of Equinox, in which the titular renegade Federation ship is at odds with the Voyager. The Equinox has been squeezing aliens for Go Fast Juice to allow their ship to travel at startling speeds, and they’ve fallen out with Voyager over the ethics of that; having zooted off with an unconscious Seven of Nine and deactivated Doctor onboard, the Equinox has also left Voyager in the lurch with outraged aliens attacking. Can Janeway and the crew survive the attack, catch up with the Equinox, and put things right? And with Equinox‘s Doctor on Voyager, masquerading as Voyager‘s Doctor, does Ransom have a critical intelligence advantage?

Also, Harry Kim is here.

This episode does the best job the franchise has offered as yet of showing what happens when two Starfleet crews work at cross-purposes. It stands apart from more or less anything in Voyager, of course, because outside of the premiere episode and the series finale the Voyager doesn’t exactly have a host of opportunities to run into other Starfleet ships, but it’s also a type of story which The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine could never have done, because both of those take place in settings where rapid subspace communication with Starfleet higher-ups is readily accessible so the conflict between the two ships could never escalate to the point it does here without the top brass laying down the law and telling one captain or the other to back down.

Here, though, it’s just two captains and their crews, each of whom are sure they know what’s right, each of whom end up taking prisoners and going gloves-off when it comes to handling them, with Ransom deactivating the Doctor’s ethical subroutines to try and compel him to perform grim surgery on Seven to get information out of her whilst Janeway goes further than Chakotay can stomach when she puts one of the Equinox crew in a cargo bay and drops the shields that stops the aliens from attacking within that space as a means of interrogation, arguing that it’s a form of justice. (The fact that the Equinox has been capturing and torturing those aliens means she kind of has a point – arguably, this is no different than allowing a Starfleet officer to face the music from a planetside justice system when they commit major crimes, which we’ve seen before.)

What’s really clever here is how both captains end up changed by this episode. Even as Ransom’s encounter with Voyager and its more rigorous retention of Starfleet ideals sees him becoming increasingly troubled by the extremes he has gone too, so too does Janeway pass him going the other way, becoming even more open to extreme measures in the face of extreme situations. Critically, though, by the end Janeway realises she probably did go too far, and that she’s got to keep a lid on that if she’s going to keep Voyager true to itself, so rather than heralding a new, grimdark take on Voyager this episode is more about exploring the limits of just how far it can allow Janeway to go before she becomes unlikable.

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Garth Marenghi’s Threequel of Thrills

On By ArthurIn Books and Periodicals, Cthulhu Mythos, Fiction, Folk Horror, Garth Marenghi, Horror, UFOs1 Comment

The story so far: in TerrorTome, Garth Marenghi introduced us to the terrifying world of Nick Steen, bestselling horror author. When Steen made use of a cursed Chinese typewriter to try and drive his writing to the next level, this led to a hideous encounter with Type-Face, Dark Lord of the Prolix, in the wake of which Steen was left cursed. Henceforth, the contents of his fecund imagination would not be confined to the pages of his novels, but would burst forth into reality to stalk the dark streets of Stalkford, his home town, with only Steen and his long-suffering editor Roz to confront them. Next, in Incarcerat Steen ended up a prisoner of Nulltec, a nefarious corporation intent on harnessing his powers for their own sinister ends. These experiments culminated in disaster when they inadvertently released the Randyman, a Freddy Krueger-esque figure who’s unleashed when you say his name seventeen times. The results of this led to a devastating apocalypse, in the wake of which Steen and Roz were among the only survivors, and setting up a follow-up in a Mad Max-esque hellscape.

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Of course, Marenghi is far too ingenious a writer to do anything that predictable, so the third tome of the saga, This Bursted Earth, sees him declaring the entire contents of Incarcerat nothing more than the contents of one of Nick Steen’s nightmares, because Nick was too passive for most of the book and Roz was the protagonist for one of the stories and, as Marenghi warned his publisher, that just wouldn’t sell. That isn’t to say there’s been no new developments between the final story in TerrorTome (The Dark Fractions) and the opener here, Bonelord. As Nick continues his crusade to banish the fragments of his imagination that have run free, he’s cajoled Roz into quitting her job as an editor and join the police force, so he can have a friendly face on the force assisting in his battle against supernatural evil.

He could certainly do with one – for Police Commissioner Bob Kettlestrom is determined to blame Nick Steen for the horrors that are befalling Stalkford, on the entirely spurious basis that they all come from his leaking imagination. The latest atrocity Kettlestrom wants to pin on Steen is a spate of debonings – grotesque skeletal extractions performed on people by a dark spirit that takes the form of a skeleton with a big moustache. This confuses the hell out of Nick, since he’s never written about such an entity, but then Roz pieces together the truth: when she’d tried to sell one of Steen’s novels to the overseas market, some unscrupulous Italian publishers pirated it, hiring a hack author to muck about with it just enough to get away with it, in the process replacing the werewolf the novel focused on with the figure of the Bonelord. It’s certainly disturbing that the reality-tear at the heart of Stalkford is now emitting horrors inspired by (or plagiarised from) Steen as well as Steen’s own untampered creations, but at least Steen has a buddy to hand – Cliff Capello, who’d helped him in the previous bone-related adventure, Bride of Bone from TerrorTome. Cliff the Italian, with the notably large moustache much like that sported by the Bonelord…

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Italian Horror Beyond the Macabre

On By ArthurIn Fiction, Giallo, Horror, Joe D'Amato, Lamberto Bava, Movies & Television, Video NastiesLeave a comment

I haven’t done a horror blitz for Halloween this year – been too busy with other projects – but that hasn’t stopped me taking in some horror movies. November, that horrid dead zone between Halloween and Christmas, is to my mind a gloomier time of year than Halloween proper anyway, so what better way to bolster one’s morale than to watch some really grim Italian horror to remind you that things can always be worse? Here I’m covering two movies, one from 1979 and one from 1980, which between them offer a snapshot of how Italian horror cinema was adapting to changing tastes and embracing shock value; neither of them are examples of giallo, strictly speaking, but they both feel like they’re in the same general ballpark.

Beyond the Darkness

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Frank (Kieran Canter) is a well-off young man in his early-to-mid 20s. He’s got a solid enough sideline in taxidermy, but most of his wealth is inherited, his parents having died in a car crash when he was young, leaving him orphaned in the carer of his wet nurse Iris (Franca Stoppi), who has entertained hopes of marrying Frank and taking charge of his sprawling house and substantial fortune. Anna (Cinzia Moreale), however, is in the way of Iris’s plans – for she and Frank love one another deeply and are engaged to be married.

No matter: Iris will simply hire a wish to put a death curse on Anna, and amazingly it works. What Iris doesn’t plan for is Frank having very funny ideas about appropriate behaviour with dead bodies. One nocturnal jaunt to the cemetery later, combined with appropriate application of his taxidermy skills, and Frank has soon turned Anna into his very own carefully-preserved cuddle buddy. Alas, people visiting Frank’s place don’t react well – and soon Frank and Iris are both accomplices to murder to cover up Frank’s odd little hobby. And that’s before Anna’s twin shows up…

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