Strange New Worlds Season Three

On By ghostof82In 4K UHD, Television1 Comment

ImageStar Trek: Strange New Worlds (TV Series 2022 – ?),  Season Three (2025), Ten Episodes, 4K UHD

A long time ago in a country not so far away….

Many moons ago, back in 1972, I first saw the TOS two-parter The Menagerie and it really messed me up- I was only five or six years old at the time, and familiar as I was, at that point, with Kirk, Spock and Bones, and the bright-coloured uniforms and the slick sets (dated as it all may seem today, for a young kid living in the dismal grey United Kingdom of the time, Star Trek was wondrous), these two episodes, and their glimpse of a strange Enterprise, and a very different crew, proved disorientating.  The Talosians simply scared me witless; even today I only have to hear the music from whenever they appeared onscreen (composed by Alexander Courage, using an electronic guitar to REALLY raise the goosebumps) makes the hairs on my neck raise up and a chill shiver through me.

The flashbacks to an earlier Enterprise were sequences cleverly utilised form the series’ original, unaired pilot that featured Jeffrey Hunter playing Captain Christopher Pike; it proved to be a rather too-cerebral sci-fi for the execs, who commissioned a more action-leaning, ‘Western-in-space’ second pilot with William Shatner playing a new Captain that led to the Star Trek that I knew and loved.

But the strangeness. How retro it looked, and sounded. How alien, this glimpse of another Enterprise that The Menagerie gave us.

47 Years Later….

Already hugely excited by seeing Pike’s Enterprise enliven a few episodes of the utterly horrible Star Trek: Discovery, the news that this updated depiction of Pike and his crew would get its own prequel series filled me with joy, and its title ‘Strange New Worlds’ – hell yeah. This was pre-TOS, when the strangeness that haunted me back as kid could be leaned into, and the ‘New Worlds’ suggested a sense of fresh excitement, adventure, exploring, that later Trek’s seemed to increasingly lack. This was a Trek that could be more retro, less technobabble, more a sense of finding new worlds, with all the benefits of modern film-making tech and massive production values.

Well.

Surprisingly… well, maybe not so surprisingly- I should have realised that the Strange New Worlds that I was envisioning in my head (maybe a bit more Forbidden Planet than anyone would ever get away with) was never going to happen, this being modern Trek, after all. But nonetheless, I still really enjoyed both season one and two of this show. Largely departing from the serial storylines and returning to the episodic television format of the original series roots, Strange New Worlds may not have been perfect, but it was fun, something that Trek hadn’t seemed to be for, well, ages. The characters were engaging, the production values as impressive as I’d hoped for. There just didn’t seem to be many, well, Strange, or New, worlds being discovered by Pike and his crew. This series seemed  focused on introducing and developing arcs for its characters, some new and original, and others being younger variants of the crew we’d love in TOS…. a younger Nurse Chapel, Uhura, Spock, even a younger, pre-Captain, Kirk…..

So Season Three….

Well, pretty much more of the same, for better or worse. With most of the characters established now and the actors fully at home with them, one would think we’d finally get on with that exploring corners of the galaxy where no human had ever been before. But…no. We’ve got that Nurse Chapel/Spock off/on/off relationship stumbling on, complicated by both Chapel’s engagement to (the ultimately ill-fated, if you’re familiar with TOS, Dr Korby) and Spock’s curious involvement with another crew member, La’an Noonien-Sing (really, for a Vulcan, Spock gets around the ladies somewhat). I don’t really mind that so much, they are better characters, frankly, than any from the last few Trek shows, but they do seem rather more, well, self-obsessed than being interested in, well, exploring strange new worlds or new civilizations.

There’s just a feeling that, well, the showrunners still haven’t got the balance quite right.  That the show doesn’t really quite now what it is, yet. Maybe its because they don’t get to write sufficient episodes in these ten-episode seasons. By the time 28 episodes of TOS season one were done, everyone surely knew what TOS was and who its characters were. This last point has been an issue with other shows; the sheer familiarity with characters and variety of storylines that we used to gain with 22-episode seasons, is just not there anymore. Babylon 5, Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Battlestar Galactica reboot…they just had more time, more opportunity. This current trend for smaller, more expensive shows is turning into a creative cul-de-sac. Either its more plot, less character arcs, or more character arcs, less plot; less episodes means you have to make a choice.

Most alarmingly, we’re now three seasons in with only two left, and even those two seasons only entail sixteen episodes remaining, as the fifth and final season only has six episodes. So we’re past the midway point of Strange New Worlds now, and I’m beginning to worry that it may be a case of ‘what might have been’. I didn’t mind the musical episode last season, thought it was a bit of fun, but now I’m beginning to think it was a diversion the series could ill afford- an observation that I think rings true of a few episodes this season:

S3.1: Hegemony Part Two. Concluding the storyline of the season two finale, this one… well, I’m actually beginning to feel bored when SNW goes serious and action-orientated. It seems to lose some of its heart, and the tension is inevitably diluted because we know who’s still around for TOS (its the bane of all prequel shows). I’m also not at all convinced the writers room hadn’t boxed themselves into a corner with that last season cliffhanger: I actually rewatched that episode immediately before watching this one, and it feels like it was written by someone else entirely (was it? I haven’t checked) and this goes wildly off track trying to get to a satisfactory solution. I  hugely disliked the return of that old Star Trek chestnut: technobabble being used to get out of that corner. Like Dr Who‘s sonic screwdriver, technobabble is the deus ex machina that ruins any Star Trek, mostly from the old TNG and DS:9 days, and putting all the Gorn into some kind of hibernation by turning the Enterprise into a star by doing some techno-sorcery nonsense with the ships defectors….Seriously, a bad start for season three for me.

S3.2: Wedding Bell Blues. I actually thought this was more what SNW does well: have a bit of fun and whimsy, and drop in some TOS lore into the bargain, with a wedding planner that turns out to be Trelane from TOS’  “The Squire of Gothos” (and also confirms he is one of the Q continuum) and of course, we have Dr. Roger Korby, who we saw back in the TOS episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” which I always thought was on of the shows strongest episodes, featuring plot points and themes that largely predicted Blade Runner. When Kirk is hanging on for dear life, about to fall to his death, and the giant Ruk suddenly saves him, lifting him up? Man, I choked on my crisps rewatching that episode after Blade Runner came out. I really had a lot of fun with this episode. Certainly cleansed the palate after that noisy senseless first episode. but its one of those episodes which, well, would be great in a 22-episode season, but might seem a bit of a waste when the season is limited to 10 episodes, but its actually one of my favourites this season.

S3.3: Shuttle to Kenfori. At this point I appreciated we were in for a bumpy ride this year. Space zombies? In Trek? There’s some bad writing here, presumably by writers who do not know Trek (allegedly this was written by staff from Star Trek: Discovery so largely confirms this). SNW still continues to waste Klingons, who were always the memorable bad-guys in TOS: here a female Klingon with a grudge/blood feud with M’Benga because the doctor killed a Klingon that er, SHE should have?  Bah. SNW surely had an opportunity over five seasons to set up some quality lead actor to play a Klingon regular who could prove a recurring nemesis for Pike in several episodes. This is one of the season three episodes the show could definitely have done without.

ImageS3.4: A Space Adventure Hour. Well, SNW tries to do a Galaxy Quest and utterly bottles it, abandoning a fun send-up of TOS in favour of a Holodeck adventure that got plenty of fans crying foul over Trek continuity. Regards that TOS spoof: Paul Wesley returns but he’s not playing Kirk- instead he’s mocking Shatner; well, that’s what much of the fanbase reckons, who baulked at a deemed lack of respect. I didn’t mind so much, they were just poking fun at dear old Shatner, I think, and God knows, Shatner’s made a career sending himself up for mockery (did nobody hear those albums he made?) .As for the Holodeck, well, I suppose it at least answers why Kirk’s Enterprise never had a Holodeck. It ultimately proved a fun episode, and would have been a nice diversion, except that this season is already a bit crowded with diversions. Where’s those strange new worlds, exactly?

S3:5: Through the Lens of Time, Aha! A Strange New World at last- at least something close to one, with Dr. Roger Korby returning and the crew exploring buried ruins purported by Korby to be those of an ancient, dead race that were so advanced they may have been inter-galactic and masters of reincarnation.  I like that this hints at Korby’s fascination with immortality, something which proves to be his eventual undoing in TOS, there’s a neat call back there for attentive fans, and his apparent recklessness is clear foreshadowing. There’s a few twists, some interesting visuals and a nice concept of multi-dimensions of Space and Time that needs to be solved before the landing party can escape what is essentially actually a prison for a Great Ancient Evil. I really enjoyed this one, and even the dark tease at the end – at least until it transpired that the last episode of this season returns to this storyline and absolutely ruins it. Damn it.

S3.6: The Sehlat Who Ate its Tail. Yay, Kirk’s back- indeed this one is largely a Kirk-centric episode and really fun. Possibly the strongest episode of the season, albeit it takes a few liberties with established lore, showing a flawed Kirk not as confident or ready for command as he really should be, by this point (the youngest Captain of a starship and he’s apparently so out of his depth here when his Vulcan captain is injured and he has to take the centre chair of the USS Farragut to rescue the Enterprise). Imagine a season where we didn’t bother with space zombies or Holodecks and we had more like this, an episode that is very close indeed to classic Trek. There’s a nice twist near the end when the true nature of the alien menace threatening entire planets runs closer to home than anyone could guess.

S3.7: What is Starfleet? A documentary episode that reminded me of one… wasn’t it in Babylon 5? It was… okay, but surely another one of those largely pointless diversions that this season can ill afford. Its not helped by the fact that the documentarian is some kind of idiot asking inane questions.

S3.8: Four-and-a-Half Vulcans. This is the episode that the season three trailers had fans fearing the most, but I loved it. Its silly fun; TOS did this kind of stuff too so I hardly think its breaking Trek. There’s some great humour, the cast clearly has a blast playing it. Over indulgent, maybe? I just know I really enjoyed it- just like I did last season’s musical entry.

S3.9: Terrarium. Somebody in the writers room must have watched Enemy Mine the night before. Also, it suffers from the plague of modern writing: dialogue that verbalises a characters thinking process, and repeats what’s happening and why its happening. Ortega, still suffering PTSD from the events of Hegemony 1 & 2 is marooned on an alien planetoid with, wouldn’t you know it, only a Gorn for company (the wtf coincidences that have to come together to set this up ruin the episode, really, but are explained by a revelation at the end). Sadly predictable because of course we’ve all seen (the superior) Enemy Mine, which is a shame because its not a bad episode, really- it just needed some better writing to shake things up a bit and be less slavish to the writers DVD collection.

S3.10: New Life and New Civilizations. At this point this episode’s title is taking the pee, isn’t it? Terrible episode, probably the worst this season. I’m definitely getting the idea that SNW simply cannot do ‘event’ episodes and I worry for the eventual series finale. The lack of originality demonstrated in the previous episode manifests again here, as they rip-off “The Inner Light”  from ST:TNG and completely fail to carry any emotional weight with it, despatching Pike’s series love interest Captain Batel in as lazy a way as possible. She ‘sacrifices’ herself to satisfy some obscure destiny in order to save the galaxy from the all-powerful all-stupid Space Gods from episode 5. It betrays this seasons nonsensical bad writing (somehow her being infected by a Gorn leads to THIS? Er, how, exactly?) that there is no emotional depth to any of it, any sense of loss or meaning. Get her starship destroyed by Gorn, or Klingons, set up some kind of loss/revenge storyline to grow Pikes character in ensuing episodes. Technobabble returns, somehow explaining away Ley Lines in Space, and Spock and Kirk mind-melding in order for two starships to do a silly space manoeuvre and both shoot a door open?  I could not believe my eyes or ears. This level of stupidity turned me off Star Trek: Discovery. And this season finale ruins one of the better season three episodes to boot. Agh!

So whatever next….

Image

 

Oh dear. Be afraid. But maybe it won’t be so bad.

Drugs = bad, ‘fifties style

On By ghostof82In Blu-ray, Film noir, Movies, RadianceLeave a comment

ImageChnouf / Razzia sur la chnouf (1955), Dir. Henri Decoin, 105 mins, Blu-Ray (Radiance World Noir Vol.4)

Henri comes back to his France following a successful stay in the United States, where he was tasked with operating the Italian drug trade. He is tasked with now heading up the French operations and making it more efficient and profitable. Given the cover of being the new manager of a nightclub, he sets upon learning the local operation and who runs it. But the police have marked his arrival and seem to be watching his every move… 

I’ve noted before that one has to make allowances when viewing old movies- in this case, while it does seem dated, its very true that this film’s almost docudrama approach regards the importation, cutting and delivery of drugs possibly makes it The French Connection of the 1950s and I’m confident it was likely quite shocking to cinema audiences. Its glimpse of the dark underbelly of society, with even decent-looking, honest people seen falling foul of addiction to hard drugs like heroin, even if it was limited to what censors back then could permit shown onscreen, still packs a punch, even today.  Indeed, its also a reminder that suggestion can often be more powerful than simply graphic depiction. There is, for instance, a sequence in a jazz-club frequented by black men in which a heroin-addicted white woman on a high flirts with a half-naked black dancer and they slip down to the floor for a sexual encounter masked by the attendant crowd that closes in, surrounding them and barring our camera-view, that seems to imply an ensuing drug-fueled orgy involving all the punters. Leave your imagination at the door, I think… but there’s a few moments like this, such as when a chemist who is hired to cut the drugs is ‘corrected’ for his errors by having to watch his wife being raped before his eyes… the rape is offscreen of course, but its all the more effective because of that. What is implied carries weight.

So its a pretty tough film in many ways. Unfortunately the film is totally undermined by a twist towards the end that comes from out of nowhere. Now, I suppose I should possibly applaud a film that doesn’t telegraph a big twist like so many, certainly modern, films would (these days there seem to be a habit of the audience being ‘in the know’ when the in-film characters aren’t, as if modern audiences take some pleasure from it). But in this case its so out of leftfield it breaks the film. It absolutely makes no sense and results in a clearly manufactured and not at all convincing happy ending and positive outcome for the forces of justice and honest joes everywhere (the ending is no The French Connection, for sure). Its nonsense, basically. Maybe the film-makers decided it was expected of them, or it was the only way to get other sections of the film past the censors.

There is also the matter of a decidedly unlikely romance between Jean Gabin and a young woman more than half his age- Gabin was looking every one of his fifty-one years by this point, and the beautiful Magali Noel only twenty-four. In a film that purports to be gritty and realistic, it smacks rather of Hollywood wish-fulfillment for the male audience and is something of a credibility-stretch. Gabin’s certainly no Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart (I remarked on such uncomfortable liaisons in my recent review of To Catch a Thief, and here we are again with another ‘fifties movie suffering the same).

You’ll believe a lass can take out an entire Pirate ship….

On By ghostof82In Amazon Prime/VOD, Movies1 Comment

ImageThe Bluff (2026), Dir. Frank E. Flowers, 103 mins, Amazon Prime

Sticking with Amazon Prime perhaps longer than is wise, we watched The Bluff, the latest (but surely not last) Amazon Original, this one a pirate movie starring Citadel‘s Priyanka Chopra Jones and The Boy‘s Karl Urban (he’ll always be OUR Dredd, bless him). Well, I’ll always find it hard to avoid watching a pirate movie, they are so rare these days- although I suspect we may be seeing a few more tales of Bloody Mary after this, whether it be a prequel (bonus-we can get Karl Urban back, too) or a sequel documenting her further adventures (I’m sure they’ll think of something) or maybe even a spin-off (once her children grow up to be badass swashbucklers like their mum).

Whatever happened to Citadel, by the way? I thought there was going to be some kind of Citadel Universe on Amazon…

Well, maybe they’ll find a Bloody Mary franchise more appetizing, Priyanka Chopra Jones is very beautiful and certainly has the physicality for action roles like this one – something rather undeservedly taken for granted these days, not everyone is cut out for it.  So its a bit of a shame that this is a little lightweight, but maybe that works to this film’s success, there’s a one-note primacy to it and its all the better for that. Its a simple affair of a ruthless pirate (that’ll be Urban’s Captain Connor) chasing down his haul of gold stolen from him years ago by his old partner-in-piracy Bloody Mary (that’ll be Priyanka Chopra Jones) aka Ercell ,stay-at-home-mom-with-a-secret-past, who has long since settled down on an idyllic Carribean island with a family.

Possibly for budgetary reasons, the film is pretty much landlocked, with the crew of the pirate ship disembarking to be stabbed, decapitated, disembowelled, blown up, impaled, burned… I guess Bloody Mary is an open-minded kind of gal, regards how she despatches these desperados. Whatever gets the job done, and she DOES get the job done. Its a little The Long Kiss Goodnight/Jason Bourne in how it plays the whole secret past/ badass killing machine thing, but the pace rarely ever falters and the period details/art direction are very good.

I suppose how much one can stomach of such frivolity depends upon how one can stifle groans of derision seeing a pretty small and slim girl going about her slaughtering business while also ensuring her kids are safe (hey, mums multi-tasking). Her husband, having been captured by Captain Connor in the film’s lone ocean-set scene that opens the film, and having led him to the island will naturally have to be rescued…

There’s a tendency for the film to overly telegraph things, and the dialogue occasionally sum up what’s going on for inattentive viewers, but on the whole its perfectly fine. Some things grated, particularly Elizabeth, Ercell’s teenage daughter (or step-daughter? I think I may have missed that detail amidst all the explosions and bloodletting) played by Safia Oakley-Green; an actress who is very good here but totally undone by her horribly annoying character. I was actually rooting for the pirates to shoot her dead by the end which er, probably wasn’t what the writers intended. Karl Urban does his best as the films big baddie, chewing up the scenery with a suspiciously questionable accent and being as caddish as pirates come; one has the feeling he can play these roles in his sleep, frowning and grunting and snarling as he does. He’s great, as always.

So on the whole, a reasonable effort. A prequel afforded a bigger budget could expand upon Bloody Mary’s hinted-at backstory and REALLY get into the piracy-on-the-high-seas thing that is the one thing this film is decidedly missing. As a proof-of-concept film, I guess The Bluff gets the job done. It just depends on Amazon’s streaming numbers, I suppose, and like box-office, one never really knows how how the public reacts to stuff. As strictly average as it is, I haven’t seen many Amazon Originals any better of late, so I just wonder what the word of mouth is like. So many things are thrown onto streaming, its hard to tell what sticks the landing, so to speak. You could tell easily enough back in the old days, when it was bums on cinema seats (or not).

Yet another Dracula?

On By ghostof82In Amazon Prime/VOD, Horror, MoviesLeave a comment

ImageDracula: A Love Tale (2025), Dir. Luc Besson, 129 mins, Amazon Prime

Less Bram Stoker’s Dracula and more Bram Stoker’s Dracula, i.e. the Francis Ford Coppola film from 1992, which Luc Besson clearly seems to have been utterly infatuated by, so much so that this film often feels like an unauthorised remake, albeit one with a decidedly French twist. The early sequence set in 1489 almost feels like outtakes from the Coppola film- so much so there is a shadow of redundancy that hangs over it which never relents, albeit it the film does shine frustratingly in moments of distinct originality suggesting a film that it might have been, had it been less enamoured with Coppola’s.

The film only really comes alive when its narrative moves to its ‘present day’ of 1889 and the incarceration of Maria (Matilda De Angelis) in a Parisian asylum, with the confirmation that she is a vampire (complete with a bit of convenient reworking of vampire lore regards the role of sunlight affecting them etc). Its like the film suddenly shifts up a gear whenever Maria appears onscreen, De Angelis’ fiery performance just energising the film so much that I’m tempted to suggest that the film would have been better had it been titled Maria and focused entirely upon her character and less on Vlad/Dracula and the ‘love tale’ between him and Elizabeta/Nina that borrows so heavily on the 1992 film.

I think the film would have been far better starting with this sequence in 1889 Paris, and leaving all the 1489 section that starts the film to flashbacks later on, and even then only in moderation – perhaps as Nina gradually recalls her past life as Elizabeta.

Tonally the film is all over the place, Besson unable to decide whether he’s making a romance, a horror, or a fantasy fairytale. So inexplicably daft is this film that many times during it I had to ask myself, what the hell was Besson thinking? So we have CGI gargoyles/imps roaming Dracula’s castle (no, really), the Count moving objects around telekinetically like he’s some Marvel superhero, raunchy scenes in Vlad’s boudoir, a bizarre dance routine that jumps between historical periods, moments of sensitive melancholy… Some of it is quite arresting, for instance a sequence when Dracula worms his way into a nunnery and seduces/ promptly feasts upon all the nuns within, during which there’s a brilliantly OTT shot as he stands atop a veritable mountain of writhing intoxicated nuns. Moments like that, and that aforementioned dance sequence, makes one wonder how great, or at least different,  this film might have been, had Besson fully divorced himself from his fascination with THAT Coppola film. At least the film might then have had a purpose?

The cast is fine- he may be no Gary Oldman, but Caleb Landry Jones is nonetheless a better Vlad/Dracula than this film really deserves, he seems unfairly wasted, really. Christoph Waltz is as precisely tonally adrift as the film is, unable to decide whether he should just stroll around totally aloof or be genuinely involved in the tension as if he were, say, Peter Cushing in a Hammer flick. Zoë Bleu is perfectly fine as Elizabeta/ Nina, she’s certainly got chemistry with Jones’ Dracula, and one can easily appreciate why Dracula is so obsessed with her across the centuries. But as I have noted, its Matilda De Angelis’ Maria who shines brightest. Her high-energy performance really fires scenes up.

I didn’t care for the film’s cinematography at all- the film looks like a TV movie most of the time. Maybe it was due to Amazon Prime’s streaming quality proving problematic, especially with lousy compression in dark scenes (if this is the future of movie-watching then we’ll be lamenting the loss of physical media) or maybe it was a deliberate choice of the film-makers, but it didn’t impress at all. Danny Elfman’s score, however, is exquisite, a real return to form for him and a very good score indeed, elements of his finest past work like his Edward Scissorhands score often coming to mind- Elfman blesses the film with a really fine love theme that lifts the film no end. Indeed, if this film succeeds at all, I think its due to some heavy lifting by Elfman, and a welcome reminder of  how important film music can be regards a film’s success.

And yet this morning when I’ve looked on the Internet, I have noted public comments online such as “This is the best movie I have ever seen in my life. I will never get over this film” (when I read that one, I wondered if it was sarcasm or written by Besson incognito) or “What a movie. It is setting the bar higher, actually” or “!Never been so invested [in] Dracula movies as this one” or “I cried my eyes out'” I’m not demeaning these comments, every film has its fans, and this film has clearly struck a chord with some, but I wondered if they’d seen the same film as I did.

If it leaks oil, we can kill it

On By ghostof82In Movies, Netflix4 Comments

ImageWar Machine (2026), Dir. Patrick Hughes, 106 mins, Netflix

Ranger recruit 81, must overcome present and past demons to survive an Army Rangers training mission gone horribly wrong when his squad are caught in the wilderness hunted by a deadly alien robot. 

High-concept this definitely isn’t – this unabashedly obvious Predator clone is a perfectly fine Friday or Saturday night beer movie; mostly harmless, as Doug Adams would say. But I think there’s just too much content being made, these days, and the overall quality of everything is sinking. Which is ironic, considering that technically films are getting so sophisticated now, regards what they can put on screen, but the writing is relentlessly uninspiring and generic. It’s all so disposable, watch-once-and-forget now, whereas I could thoroughly enjoy another rewatch of the Arnie Predator any night of the week. Few films are like that now, who will care about them in a year or two? Or even next week?

Also, this film can’t help but fall foul of the disease infecting most everything: teasing a further instalment by not actually offering a proper ending. Films seldom seem to actually end, anymore. No sooner has our hero 81 (man-mountain Alan Ritchson) saved the day by vanquishing the robot menace than the film adds an unnecessary coda, in which we learn that the mechanical monster was but one in an army of countless machines that have fallen out of the sky, laying waste to cities all over the world. I suppose the Predator equivalent would have been Arniie leaving the jungle to discover that there’s thousands of Predators hunting down humans all over the planet, but Predator was made in a time when most movies had proper endings and weren’t immediately focused on being episodic sagas. Progress, eh?

I’m mad as hell…. that I’d never seen ‘Network’ before!

On By ghostof82In Amazon Prime/VOD, Movies2 Comments

ImageNetwork (1976), Dir. Sidney Lumet, 121 mins, Amazon Prime

Longtime TV news anchor Howard Beale has been fired due to falling ratings and while presenting one of his last shows has a breakdown live on-air, threatening to shoot himself, which curiously results in a rise in ratings- he is offered his job back and his fracturing psyche results in more crazy outbursts raging at the state of the country, which for his bosses results in ever- improving ratings. Galvanising a public sick to death of the mess the world is in, Beale turns on his corporate masters and their greed, who decide they must destroy the monster messiah they have created. Live. On-air. 

1976 seems to have been a pretty good year for films- there was Taxi Driver, Marathon Man, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Rocky, The Omen, Obsession,  Logan’s Run, Assault on Precinct 13…. I’ve seen all those before, over the years, but Network? Like All the President’s Men, also released in 1976, Network escaped me, I never got around to it until last night (All the President’s Men is still waiting, but I’m sure I will finally catch up with it this year). But I’m mad as hell that Network quite slipped past me for so long, because its bloody brilliant and I’ve quite missed out on a classic.

Unfortunately the years have likely dimmed its impact somewhat, it’s a film that has inevitably dated somewhat over the decades – cable, streaming, the Internet, things undreamed of back in 1976 have radically changed the media landscape so much but the film remains as relevant as it ever did, as important as it ever was. Maybe even more so. What writer Paddy Chayefsky was predicting was pretty much an inevitable outcome from what he was witnessing in the 1970s, in which ratings and ad revenue were the most important thing for corporate television, resulting in a  rush to the bottom as far as integrity was concerned.  As Beale preaches to his viewers  “..You’re never going to get any truth from us (television) you’re never gonna get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you wanna hear. We lie like hell. No matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch, at the end of the hour he’s gonna win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know! You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here! ”  

Its probably very true that the film itself is preaching to us viewers just as much as Beale preaches to his CRT followers. Some of the cast slip into scenery-chewing excess, like Faye Dunaway does sometimes, but her character is, after all, a radicalised convert to the religion of corporate greed and ratings at any cost, so I’ll cut her a little slack. I think the romance between herself and William Holden’s executive producer fails to convince; there’s chemistry there but it never feels real.  I’d forgotten what an amazing-looking actress she was. Holden looks like an actor nearing the end of the line playing a character whos nearing the end of the line, so he’s kind of perfect. But would a grounded, married, old-school career man like Holden is playing really allow himself to be seduced by a beautiful ambitious woman like her? Well, maybe that’s a stupid question.

Some of the dialogue feels stilted, too on the nose with messaging, but its nonetheless powerful. I was so surprised and impressed by Ned Beatty -the guy who would be such a buffoon a few years after Network  in Superman: The Movie, playing Lex Luthor’s idiot sidekick Otis- who here plays a terrifyingly banal corporate monster, Arthur Jenson, who preaches back to Beale the mantra of “there are no nations, only currency!” and that  “the world is a business, Mr. Beale. You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America! There is no democracy!”

Its all pretty heady stuff. I haven’t even mentioned Robert Duvall’s utter corporate bastard Frank Hackett. The film is so blessed with great casting. Wasn’t 1970s American Cinema great?

The February 2026 watched list

On By ghostof82In 4K UHD, Apple TV, Movies, Netflix, TelevisionLeave a comment

Image…so here we are with all the stuff I watched in February…

Charley Varrick (1973)

Fallout – TV series (Season 2) Episodes 2 – 8

Hijack – TV series (Season 2) Episodes 4 – 7

Shrinking – TV series (Season 3) Episodes 1 – 4?

Dogma (1999)

Prometheus (2012)

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Minority Report (2002)

Cry of the Banshee (1970) – 2026.11

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – TV series (Season 1) Episodes 2-5

Alien: Covenant (2017)

The Greatest Showman (2017)

How to Get to Heaven From Belfast – TV series (Season 1) Episode 1

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Kolchak: The Night Stalker – TV series (Season 1) Episodes 1 – 3

To Catch a Thief (1955) – 2026.12

Sisu: Road to Revenge (2025) – 2026.13

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – TV series (Season 3) Episodes 1 -3

Back to the Wall/ Le dos au mur (1958) – 2026.14

Chnouf / Razzia sur la chnouf (1955) – 2026.15

Here’s the catch regards trying to rewatch discs I have in my collection in order to er, better justify actually having bought them as opposed to watching them just once: a truthfully poor month for watching ‘new’ films (I spent most of my free time watching TV shows and dipping into my disc collection)  Considering I’d watched ten ‘new’ films in January, February’s four (that’s what, one a week?) is pretty poor and the quality here is clearly inferior to Januarys top three.  It will also be noted that of what I did watch in February, I didn’t really post anything about much of it, the TV shows in particular. I must try harder next month, and maybe do some catching up.

Or maybe that’s the point of these monthly round ups?  In which case, the second season of Fallout was great (really must try post a review to delve into all that), Hijack‘s second season started great but seems to be faltering off somewhat as it nears its end, stretching things out over too many episodes, a frequent issue for TV shows these days. That said, if this show was on good old-fashioned  terrestrial/network television, it’d be one of the biggest, most talked-about shows of the year, but as its on Apple TV its likely many have never even heard of it.

Another Apple show that has returned is Shrinking with its third season- irritating in the extreme, and nauseating the rest of the time,  I watch it only out of misguided loyalty/appreciation of Harrison Ford, who is genuinely on some other level to the third rate jokers otherwise cast in this, or the well-intentioned (?) writers who raise social issues which are utterly irrelevant to the oddball characters. Its certainly professional; never has anything so vacuous been so… unfortunately watchable. I cannot fathom why I watch it other than the Ford factor.  It does remind me of another show from several years back, The Big C, which starred the great Laura Linney who played a suburban housewife with a terminal cancer diagnosis, and I do think I’m watching two different shows in Shrinking– the interesting one in which Harrison Ford nears the end of his lifelong psychiatric  career due to the onset of Parkinson’s disease (and this season featuring cameos from Michael J Fox, poignant for obvious reasons), and this other show about affluent idiots in that bizarre bubble universe where every problem turns out ecstatically, reassuringly and absolutely Right and Perfect and Wholesome. One of the neighbours has a troublesome, lazy son: he’ll probably end the season discovering the cure for cancer. Every episode is guaranteed to test my gag reflex.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms– brilliant. I’m waiting to watch the sixth and final episode of this first season before I get to write a post about it.

I’m seriously on the fence regards Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and I will explore this further once I’ve watched all of its third season. I had such high hopes for it and on the whole really enjoyed seasons one and two, with some caveats- its not really the show I hoped it would be, but I stick with it because I quite like its positivity and it at least in some small, slim way FEELS like ‘proper’ Trek and not the crap we’ve been fed for the past decade or two.

So anyway, now that quick summary is out of the way, we’ll now look at the best/worst films that were new to me in February, if not new to everyone else (basically, my first-time views, whether it be a genuinely new film or one made sixty years ago) with-

The Top Three of the Month

  1. Back to the Wall / Le dos au mur
  2. To Catch a Thief
  3. Chnouf / Razzia sur la chnouf

The 1958 French noir Back to the Wall shined brightest of, er, just four ‘new’ films, which means that-

The Bottom Three of the Month

  1. Cry of the Banshee

So yeah, what was a bottom three last month inevitably becomes a lone bottom one, because that’s all that’s left. Cry of the Banshee is a pretty lousy movie scuppered by a very poor script and saved only by a few notable members of its cast. On the bright side, of the four ‘new’ films I watched, only one was deemed worthy of hitting the bottom pile, so that’s…. something?

Somehow the best noir plans never work out: Back to the Wall

On By ghostof82In Blu-ray1 Comment

ImageBack to the Wall / Le dos au mur (1958), Dir. Édouard Molinarom , 93 mins

Successful industrialist Jacques Decrey returns home early from a business trip to discover that his wife Gloria is having an affair with a young actor/musician. Gloria is unaware that her husband knows of her affair. Posing as a man named Berthier, Jacques sends letters to Gloria threatening to reveal the affair to her husband, blackmailing Gloria and trying to derail the affair with demands for money she doesn’t have .The web of deceit ties itself into knots however and spirals out of control, into a path of murder and suicide.

Ah, this was bliss. I do love a good film noir. There’s something honest and true about dramas of the dark undercurrent of the human soul. Watching the tortured Jacques attempt to both punish his wife and draw her closer to him in an attempt to ‘fix’ their marriage is something of a breath of fresh air; a narrative of twists and turns and surprises. One roots for the wronged man right up to the end, wincing as his plot inevitably unravels and everything falls apart. Visually the film is absolute noir, with typically expressionistic lighting, deep shadows, and characters trapped within the cinematic frame, one can appreciate how carefully scenes are shot.  But its the story, adapted  from a novel written by Frédéric Dard (who also wrote the source stories for Paris Pickup, Nude in a White Car and The Wicked Go to Hell) that is the film’s best asset, a more grounded narrative compared to those others, which were hamstrung by limits of plausibility.

The twisting narrative certainly gives the very good cast plenty to chew on, and there’s some great characters here- the unhappy Gloria, swept away by the attentions of her passionate younger lover who she knows is unworthy of her, and the (apparently) cuckold private investigator who finds some deeper, honourable cause in assisting Jacques’ scheme, as if for once he’s got a job that doesn’t make him feel dirty. Gloria is played by Jeanne Moreau , an actress I’ve struggled to warm to in the past (The Bride Wore Black), but she’s very good here. Gerard Oury is excellent as Jacques, a character who offers a bit of a moral quandary, I suppose: Jacques is clearly the wronged party but our allegiance is likely intended to shift towards Gloria as her husbands  ‘punishment’ becomes increasingly vindictive; yet I have to admit, I was rooting for Jacques to the end. Maybe that says something about me, I don’t know. Its not the first time I’ve been on the ‘wrong side’ wishing the villain of a noir to succeed in spite of the odds. Censors (and indeed probably audiences themselves) back then would seldom allow filmmakers to portray a ‘bad guy’ getting away with it, so to speak, but that never makes me stop hoping.  At the end of the film, I felt rather frustrated- Jacques doesn’t deserve any of this, does he?

ImageBack to the Wall features in Radiance’s World Noir Vol.4 boxset, and is again like so many of Radiance’s releases one of those absolute joys that unfortunately escapes most people because of its relative obscurity. Basically, its got two strikes against it ever reaching audiences of today- its over sixty years old and is a foreign film (black and white? subtitles?), so who’s interested now other than a niche audience still buying films on disc? Indeed, not just that, but BLIND-buying films on disc, a particular corner of film-collecting that is surely just even more limited. Okay, not all of Radiances (or Indicators, for that matter) releases always work with me- there have been one or two clunkers that I’ve fallen foul of, but that’s the risk one naturally takes blind-buying films, particularly fairly obscure ones. Hopefully the greats outweigh the stinkers.

 

Set a thief…

On By ghostof82In 4K UHD, Movies2 Comments

ImageTo Catch a Thief (1955), Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 106 mins, 4K UHD

I always have a hard time watching Cary Grant in movies- and it’s Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot (1958) to blame for that; specifically Tony Curtis’ performance as Shell Oil Junior, seducing Marilyn Monroe by playing an impotent rich playboy via a Cary Grant impression. Its ruined any film starring Cary Grant because I always think of Curtis and Some Like it Hot, as if Grant is referencing Curtis, and not the other way around, tending to make Grants performances in films seem unintentionally funny (I watched Wilder’s film well before actually seeing Grant in any movie). Its a hurdle for me every time, and so it was with To Catch a Thief.

Another hurdle for the film, and its one typical of its era- the age gap between Grant and the utterly luminous Grace Kelly. Grant was fifty years old at the time, and looked good for fifty at that, but Kelly was just twenty-five. The previous year Kelly appeared in Rear Window opposite James Stewart who was at the time forty-six, so she was well accustomed playing beauties adoring and kissing men old enough to be her father. Its a situation repeated in Hitchcock’s later Vertigo, in which a fifty year old Stewart pursues a twenty-five year old Kim Novak, so To Catch a Thief, as I have noted, is hardly unique, but it did strike me as feeling rather uncomfortable. There’s a scene in To Catch a Thief in which Grant has been dining with Kelly and her character’s mother, played by Jessie Royce Landis, who was a very middle-aged looking fifty-eight at the time, and it struck me watching that scene that by rights, it was possibly she who should have been the romantic interest for Grant’s character rather than her daughter. But hey, that’s Hollywood.

I suppose the truth of it was that, considering what is acknowledged as Hitchcock’s own fascination with beautiful blondes, Grant’s character was, like Stewart in Rear Window and Vertigo, Hitchcock’s surrogate, an exercise in wish-fulfillment. I suppose they are every male viewer’s wish-fulfilment; we’d all like to have been in the place of Stewart and Grant’s characters, romantically involved with the radiant goddess that was Grace Kelly. Hollywood was very good at that, putting dreams and fantasies up onscreen, unattainable beauty, unattainable riches.

The latter is largely what To Catch a Thief is all about; the exploits of the Super Rich in the idyllic rich-man’s paradise of the French Riviera, which is portrayed in glorious VistaVision Technicolour to make it even ‘larger than life’ and spectacular than it really was- and the film really shines on 4K disc, it looks absolutely splendid.

To Catch a Thief is one of those Hitchcock film’s that had inexplicably escaped me, all these years- although, to be fair, other than North by Northwest, The BIrds and Psycho, that was true of most of Hitchcock’s films, other than glimpses during television showings. It took DVD and Blu-Ray to really bring Hitchcock’s filmography to my attention over the past ten, twenty years. To Catch a Thief has plenty of wit and charm but I have to confess, I was always distracted by a (wrong as it turned out) conviction that Grace Kelly’s character was the  mysterious Cat Burglar whose jewellery thefts were being wrongfully blamed on retired burglar John Robie (Grant). Likely one twist too many even for Hitchcock, but it did have me stuck up the wrong alley, so to speak, so I can imagine I’ll enjoy the film much more the second time around now that I’m fully aware of what is actually going on. Its funny how our misapprehensions can spoil ones enjoyment of a film, but I suppose I’m more accustomed to the darker, master-of-suspense Hitchcock and less the lighter, adventurous and escapist Hitchcock of this film – this film is much more The Trouble with Harry than Psycho, to be sure.

 

 

 

 

Kolchak returns

On By ghostof82In Blu-ray, Horror, Life!, Television10 Comments

ImageIt was my birthday last weekend. Alas, it was a…. how does one refer to it…. it was a Big One? At least, that’s how one of my birthday cards described it: “it’s the BIG ONE”; To be exact, it was the Big Sixty (the team at work even put up banners and balloons in the office, the scoundrels, which was very nice).

I must confess, I never had a problem with forty, we even had a big party at a hotel (that’s now full of asylum seekers, how things change in twenty years). Nor did I have any problem reaching fifty, really, even though at that point there’s clearly less ahead than there is behind us, but sixty… well, maybe sixty is the deal-breaker regards celebrating birthdays. I think most all of us still feel just twenty-one, inside, no matter how old we get, and no matter what that mirror in the morning reminds us, but this time celebrating this particular additional revolution around the sun, I have to admit it did give me a moment of… how did this happen? 

So anyway, we had the family around on the big day, and I was lucky enough to receive lots of lovely presents, including some Amazon vouchers which I used to spoil myself with a boxset I’ve had my eyes on for a few months- the Blu-Ray box of Kolchak: The Night Stalker that Imprint in Australia released last year. As the Aussies are the same Blu-Ray region as us, this port of Kino’s earlier Region-A locked edition will work on my player, and the vouchers made its import price less of a pause for thought, and it was even available next-day delivery on Amazon through its marketplace, so… Well, I debated it for a few days, I agonize over every purchase these days. There was Kolchak or the new Thunderbirds boxset. Reaching sixty drives us a little crazy, I think.

Consider it comfort food, a (late? I have no idea) mid-life crisis. A retreat to something familiar and reassuring. More evidence that we try to reach for our childhood as it gets only further away (I’ve watched several YouTube videos of sixty-something men unboxing that new Thunderbirds set like eight-year olds at Christmas).

I love Kolchak. Following two successful TV movies The Night Stalker (1972) and The Night Strangler (1973)  the series originally aired in the US in 1974/1975 but somehow didn’t make it here to the UK until late in 1983, although I think the the TV movies did get screened here well before that- at least, I recall watching both The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler during my childhood on late-night telly and getting scared witless by them, particularly the second film. Its curious to think that the series was possibly considered too strong for audiences over here in the 1970s; why else wouldn’t have it been purchased for UK transmission by the BBC or ITV?  Censorship was a funny thing back then, but considering the success of Dr.Who and shows like Star Trek at the time, I’d have thought Kolchak was a sure thing for keeping the kiddies quiet or hiding behind the sofa.

I love 1970s American television shows, like Columbo, Starsky and Hutch, The Rockford Files, Kojak, The Streets of San Francisco…  cheesy as hell for many, no doubt, but growing up on them all as a kid there’s a lovely nostalgia about them, now, right down that Universal logo/fanfare at the very end of each episode of the Universal shows. I guess you had to be there: the 1970s, for all our rose-tinted glasses of childhood, were pretty miserable here in wet old blighty, and those American shows offered escapism, of a sort; sunny, glossy places, big cars and good guys beating bad guys. A generation earlier, British kids were being wowed by cowboy movies in Saturday cinema matinees; for my generation it was TV cop shows and the like.

So while Kolchak: The Night Stalker never aired here in the UK at the time it was made, its obviously full of that 1970s look, feel and sound (and most importantly, the oh-so-familiar guest-stars of that TV era) that makes it some kind of genre gold-dust today. Darren McGavin is fantastic as the cynical, witty, anti-establishment investigative reporter working in Chicago who frequently gets in over his head with supernatural horrors every week. The basic premise of the show is even sillier than it probably sounds but there is such charm to it that chiefly originates from McGavin’s fantastic performance. Watching his Kolchak, laughing at his one-liners and observations and admiring his endless tenacity one can forgive the fake-looking monster-of-the-week and repeated stock footage – this show was low-budget even for the time, although it did actually shoot its night scenes at night, there was no day-for-night nonsense here.

But there was so much to admire about network television shoes back then, it was definitely some kind of major achievement, cranking out 22 episode seasons every year while maintaining some level of quality. Its inevitable that quality was hit and miss and, production-quality wise, far removed from that of movies. Back then there were movie actors and TV actors, and some snobbery between; that’s something long gone now, with those who might be defined as ‘movie actors’ all too keen to get involved in television shows now that have huge budgets and just eight or ten-episode seasons that take years to produce. Imagine what McGavin and his Kolchak might have been, had it been made today, for HBO or Netflix.

I suppose, though, that what makes Kolchak work today is precisely its cheapness and innocence, a sense of irreverence that is largely lost in genre shows now. That said, beyond the disarming sense of humour it does in its better episodes, maintain some real suspense and tension; there’s an earnest creativity evident that succeeds in spite of its budgetary and schedule constraints. There’s some lovely writing and character beats;  some the shows best moments being less the scares and more its sense of fun, such as in the banter between Kolchak and his endlessly frustrated editor Tony Vincenzo (the great Simon Oakland) and his work-colleagues and other characters. Kolchak suffered in the ratings, ultimately undone by its limited concept proving tiresome for audiences; maybe if it had been made a decade or so later it might have managed some popular success as The X-Files later did (indeed, Kolchak was obviously an inspiration for that show).

I’m certain there are a number of episodes I actually didn’t get to see back when the show aired here in the UK so there’s some ‘new’ treats for me yet to discover, and those I did see I haven’t seen in some thirty or forty years, other than an odd few on DVD. As for watching the series on this Blu-Ray set I’m tempted to watch them on a weekly basis, late on a Friday night in a throwback to the late-night “Friday Night Fright” movies aired on telly during my childhood. Each episode of this set -yes, all twenty of them- has an audio commentary so weekly viewing would likely enable me to listen to the commentaries with every episode, something I’ll never manage if I binge the show or watch a few episodes at a time (tempting as an evening-long double or triple-bill with a few beers seems). We’ll see: I hope to occasionally drop a few posts about my thoughts on the series to spread the love about Kolchak, even if it involves shuddering at some of the worst episodes: I just hope the good outweighs the bad, and all that nostalgia hasn’t blurred the reality after all these years.