This time last year, we had a thought. Were there any of you out there who, in time for Halloween, had carved yourself a pumpkin with a geeky edge to it. You did not let us down.
Thus, as Halloween rolled around again this year, we wondered: could you do it again? Could you take a simple pumpkin, and turn it into something quite majestic. The results you can see for yourself here.
Just look at them, too. You've been inspired by everything from Sin City and Batman through to The Bride Of Frankenstein and The Evil Dead.
A massive well done and thank you, then, to our crack team of carvers, who have ensured that the pumpkins here didn't suffer for no reason. And if you want to inspect any of the work here, just click on the picture to make it bigger.
Happy Halloween...!
The Internet hasn't been shy of pictures of the Captain America production on its travels around the UK, but we can now take a first official look at Chris Evans in the title role of next summer's blockbuster.
The image has arrived courtesy of Entertainment Weekly, who has run the image as its latest front cover in the US. Do we smell a bit of Photoshop work there?
Inside the issue itself, Evans says of the role, "At the time, I remember telling a buddy of mine, ‘If the movie bombs, I'm f--ed. If the movie hits, I'm f--ed!'... I was just scared. I realized my whole decision making process was fear based, and you never want to make a decision out of fear... I can't believe was almost too chicken to play Captain America."
EW also has the following synopsis for the film:
"The year is 1942, and Steve Rogers is a scrawny lad who desperately wants to fight Nazis for his country but can't because he's been deemed physically unfit. His fate - and his physique - is radically transformed when he signs up for Project: Rebirth, a secret military operation that turns wimps into studs using drugs and assorted sci-fi hoo-ha. There's a love interest (Major Peggy Carter, played Haley Atwell), there's a sidekick (Bucky Barnes, played by Sebastian Stans), and there's the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), Hitler's treacherous head of advanced weaponry, whose own plan for world domination involves a magical object known as The Tesseract (comic fans know it better as The Cosmic Cube)."
You can find out more at EW, right here.
It's early summer. Simon Pegg is doing advanced interviews for his incoming film, Burke And Hare. The proviso? We're not allowed to run it until now.
However, it worked out surprising well. We caught up with Simon on the morning of day one of his interview schedule, and found him chatty, engaging and clearly passionate about the film. And, in particular, working with director John Landis. Here's what happened...
John Landis! The fact that he's doing a new comedy is exciting for starters, and that must have been one of the big appeals here for you?
Yeah, absolutely! I'd read the script before I realised John was doing the film, and I liked it. It was one of those things, because I write a lot of my own stuff. I prioritise that, but this came up and I though that's good.
And then I was in L.A. last year, and I was working on Paul, and I got a message from John saying, "Do you want to go out to dinner?" I said yes, of course.
We met when he came to the Spaced screening in L.A. He and Edgar [Wright] have become friends, and he's always been very supportive of us. And so we went out to see Terminator: Salvation together...
This is an insane, name dropping story, you know...
[Laughs] It's ridiculous, but it's what happened! I'm as amazed by all of this. He called, and said, ?" "Do you want to go out and do something?", and I said, "Okay. " It sounds like a date, dinner and a movie. So, we saw Terminator and went to the amazing diner in L.A. where we filmed Heat, and he said, "I'm doing a movie in the UK next year. Do you want to be in it?"And I said, "Yes, please."
So, who was De Niro and who was Pacino?
I think he was definitely Pacino. Or maybe both.
He was in pursuit of you, then?
Yeah. He was definitely Pacino.
When you sit opposite him, there must be an urge to drag out stories from his earlier films? What was yours that you asked about?
You know what, I can honestly say that, with John, there is no need. You never have to ask John to tell you a story. He is a story machine. His career is so varied. In Towering Inferno, he is the guy who jumps out of the window on fire. He was a stuntman on one of the Planet Of The Apes movies. His stories go from there, right through his career, through Michael Jackson, you know. Everything reminds him of something else. He's like "Did I ever tell you...?"
So, we had this amazing dinner. I asked him all about Michael Jackson, I asked him all about American Werewolf, as that was important to me, and obviously it was a big influence on Shaun Of The Dead.
He tells great stories about Trading Places. But you never have to prompt him. He would hold up shooting! He'd stop shooting and tell a story or a joke. His jokes are legendary. Now I just get e-mails from him with bad jokes.
How do you sit round with him, Andy Serkis and yourself, preparing to play graverobbers?
That's what's great about John. He's very much an actor's director. He has ideas. He's got very definite ideas as well. He'll get your input, and then go, "No." He's very collaborative, and wants to take time to get things right.
But at the same time, he works very fast. We'd get together, talk about the scene, and we'd just do it. When he's happy, he'd say "Brilliant, " and then we'd move on.
And from your perception of the film, do you see it as a macabre buddy movie?
That's exactly what it is. You're absolutely right. It's a comedy. John's very cautious about people calling it a horror comedy. It's not a horror. It's not even a horror comedy. It's a comedy, if anything a romantic comedy. It just so happens to be about two mass murderers. And I think it's important that it's seen like that.
It's a black comedy, and there's a lot of sweetness in it. You root for these guys in a way. That's the clever thing about it. You catch yourself sympathising with two murderers.
It's the tagline missing from the poster, isn't it? A comedy about two mass murderers.
Yeah, yeah! I always thought it should be a really bleak picture, and then bubble writing saying "Burke and Hare"!
Obviously, it's got one hell of a cast list too. Ronnie Corbett, for starters.
Ronnie's in it, yeah!
The stuff you've done in Britain has been very ensemble led. Was the thinking here to fuse that with John's experience of American comedy?
Well, I've got to say that he's got a great sensibility, John, generally. He's been over here many times. He knows the culture, he knows the country.
He offered Ronnie Barker the role of Coleman in Trading Places originally [the role that went to Denholm Elliott], and Ronnie Barker didn't do it because he was very happy in the UK, and didn't want to leave. John's been a fan of The Two Ronnies since the early 80s.
So, it was entirely him, you know? He wanted a good ensemble. He wanted to gather together a great British cast. He's an insatiable consumer of stuff. So, when he hired Reece Shearsmith, he watched all of The League Of Gentlemen. He's got a cameo in the new series of Psychoville!
So, he knows his onions. For me, it was great to be someone like-minded.
Can you talk about working with Andy Serkis?
Andy's great fun, but he's very concentrated. He takes the job very seriously, which is great as an actor. He's exactly the kind of person you want to act opposite, for the film to be good. He's incredibly personablE and great fun, and we had a terrific time on set. We got a chemistry very quickly.
Burke and Hare are best friends, and there's a sweetness to who they are. They were desperate men, but they were humans, not monsters.
Just time, then, to ask about one of your future projects: The Boys?
Ah! I thought you were going to go with Star Trek!
I don't know. I was very flattered to be in The Boys, without realising I was! Darick Robertson drew me as Wee Hughie, and I later found out about it. And DC had a panic attack, and thought I was going to sue them for image rights. Which, of course, I wasn't. I'm in a comic! Cool!
I don't know. I know Adam McKay's attached to it. I personally would be very happy to disagree with me, but I may be a bit old for Wee Hughie now. But it's a great story and it would be lovely to be part of it, but it's all up in the air. I'm in it, because I'm in the comic. But the movie? It's about the character. If they're happy for me to play it, I'll definitely consider it!
[We should point out that, since this interview was conducted, Adam McKay has gone on record saying that he's want Simon Pegg for the role of Wee Hughie if he makes the film of The Boys.]
Burke And Hare is on general release now.
It seems as though every release of Smackdown Vs Raw over the last few years has been nothing but a big old list of new or enhanced features, with each revision promising bigger and better content. Shockingly, though, developer Yukes has actually delivered on these promises with most releases, genuinely delivering new content that adds to the whole experience, rather than simply being filler for yet another annual upgrade.
Last year's SvR was probably one of the most notable, introducing a ton of extra user creation abilities including a story creator, along with a tighter fighting engine, sharper visuals and the usual set of refinements. If you think that was impressive, though, wait until you get your hands on this year's grapple-fest.
Smackdown Vs Raw 2011 is, in equal parts, as much about the little things as it is the big, crowd pleasing features, and Yukes has managed to improve upon the series in almost every way this time out. Here we have new game modes, improved match types, new online functions, enhanced user creativity tools and ratings and much, much more, all wrapped up in some of the most polished and downright impressive presentation you're likely to see.
Ding, ding, ding
I'll touch on the basics first, beginning with the all-important combat. 2011 has refined this further than ever before, and although Yukes has decided to alter the control system yet again, it's not a radical overhaul, and the changes actually improve the experience.
A key element to the new combat is the much touted use of Havok physics. Although nowhere near as impressive as the developers would have us believe, and prone to weird glitches, these physics nonetheless add a whole new depth to matches, mainly when it comes to weapons and objects used in the ring, such as tables, ladders and chairs.
Tables now break apart into multiple chunks, which varies, depending on the impact, and they'll also buckle if hit on the edges, or if your opponent isn't worn down enough to put them through a table completely. Likewise, ladders can be manipulated more realistically, and this is all greatly enhanced by the new ability to ‘aim' your throws and grapples.
So, for example, if you're dying to chokeslam the Miz through a table, grab him and, while the move is played out, aim the throw to hit the table dead on. Want to Pedigree Jack Swagger's face first into a chair? Go on, then. This interactivity applies to most throws and grapples, and although it may sound like a bit of extra fluff on paper, in practise it makes a huge difference in tactics and feel.
The actual combat itself feels even tighter this year, and thanks to a more robust reversal and chain grapple system, matches actually flow almost like real bouts (well, as real as real can be in the WWE). Set at higher levels you'll find your opponents do just as much damage to you as you can dish out in their direction, and the AI will use reversals and retaliations, including weapons, quite impressively.
There's now a new four hit combo system that can be used to stagger opponents, setting them up for powerful throws and finishers, and each superstar also has a gut kick that opens up foes to some serious hurt.
This staggering is important to get to grips with, as opponents will reverse your attacks far more frequently, and landing finishers is more difficult that previous outings. To ensure you nail your attacks, you need to wear down your foe, making them groggy, for the best chance of doling out the pain.
Generally, the whole thing just feels right this time, although there are still some hangovers from previous outings. Yet again, the auto-focus feature that targets enemies is pretty flaky, and some manoeuvres are a little overcomplicated and unwieldy, especially some throws. Reversals are harder to execute than in 2010, and some will find that they have to drop the difficulty, or at least the CPU's tendency to reverse your attacks, to make the game a little more approachable.
The AI can still make some very odd decisions at times too, which damages the immersion a little, but on the whole, there's little to complain about if you've played previous versions and are accustomed to the quirks. Newcomers should definitely use the training mode, though, as the controls are very complex. This isn't really a pick up and play game.
Mr Universe
Without a doubt, the most interesting feature included in 2011 has to be the new WWE Universe mode. This mode is always active (unless you turn it off) and is an all-encompassing feature that governs your WWE experience. It tracks matches, results, titles and more. The game uses all of this data to dynamically alter superstar alliances and feuds, rankings and title shots. This is all played out via a well-designed WWE Universe mode that lets you play through randomly generated scenarios following a yearly calendar.
You progress through the WWE year and the game sets up weekly shows of Raw, Superstars and Smackdown, as well as monthly pay per views, complete with match cards and match types. You can play each and every match, choosing the wrestler or wrestlers you want to play as, and all results are noted. If you don't feel like playing a match, you can simulate it for an instant result.
As you progress, superstars will gain rankings and earn title shots, and each and every wrestler will make or break friendships. So, for example, if Triple H keeps beating down CM Punk, their relationship will turn sour, possibly leading to interference in Triple H's matches by Punk. If a wrestler fights matches alongside another superstar and racks up the wins, though, alliances will form.
This is all backed up by an improved interference system. This was introduced last year, but wasn't all that great in practise. It's still not perfect this year, with some odd events and glitchy interference AI, but when used in conjunction with the WWE Universe mode, it works very well, especially with 100 different random events that can happen at any time, such as enemies running into the arena during a match, Mr McMahon forcing you to fight another bout after an already gruelling match, and so on.
The Universe mode also keeps tabs of things if you play standalone exhibition matches too, meaning that you can keep your own WWE world ticking over at all times. I was a little sceptical about the mode when I heard about it, but I can confirm that this mode alone adds an almost infinite level or replayability and depth, and makes the game feel far more like a real living, breathing WWE.
You can also play around with it, if you like, and if you don't want certain matchups, want to change the WWE Championship title holder right away, or wish to trade superstars from one show to the next, you can at any time, and the WWE Universe mode will adjust accordingly.
18-0
The Road to WrestleMania mode returns again, with five new stories, this time featuring John Cena, Chris Jericho, Christian, The Undertaker and Rey Mysterio. As before, these stories chart each superstar's journey to the biggest WWE event of the year, WrestleMania, with scripted sequences and multiple choices that affect your outcomes. However, there's something new added this time, and you're now able to explore the backstage area of the arena in a free-roam section.
Arriving at the arena, you can wander around the various areas like the locker rooms, green room, interview area etc, and can talk to or start fights with other superstars. You can also spend points you earn during the mode to buff up your stats via the training area.
It sounds great, and the chance to explore backstage and interact with other superstars in a real-time open world is promising. Sadly, though, while still fun, it's all filler and no killer. There's little to do while backstage, and superstars have little to say that's worth hearing. I was hoping for a lot more from this addition, but, as it stands, it's a cool little gimmick and nothing more.
The story mode is still a blast to play through, though, but there's no denying that the meat of the game is with the great WWE universe mode, and the online component.
WWE-MMO
Smackdown Vs Raw has always been popular online, and this year it's set to get even more attention. This is thanks to a couple of things. Firstly, all match types are now playable online, letting players customise their own matches, and, for the first time, there's a 12 player online Royal Rumble, a mode that's surely going to be hugely popular.
Again, online matches are a blast to play with multiple players, and creating your own superstars and taking them online is something that will keep fans happy for a very long time.
In fact, the creation tools have also been beefed up yet again, with over 100 new CAW items to use, a new kind of custom finisher (corner moves) a better rating system that ditches the five star system in favour of a more useful grading setup, and an improved story creator.
This story creator, first seen last year, has even more options, including the ability to create branching stories, and you can also create more at any one time. It's still a little tricky to use and you'll need plenty of time and patience, but the results are worth it and add inexhaustible content to an already packed game. Of course, these can all be shared online.
Several of the menus for creation are improved too, making it easier to create finishers, entrances and other content. For example, creating a tag team, a cumbersome job previously, can now be done far more easily. From the team registration page, you can link to the entrance creation, and once done, the team is ready to go. It's a more fluid process and is much better for it.
Spit and polish
I mentioned that SvR 2011 is also about the little things, and this is certainly true. Visually, the game has received a lot of attention, and SvR has never looked so good. Thanks to a new muscle animation system, each superstar looks very impressive, as their limbs and muscles demonstrate more realism than ever before (just watch Triple H's entrance to see what I mean), and the arenas also look great.
Yukes has improved the crowd animation and appearance, added more current arenas, such as Bragging Rights, Elimination Chamber and TLC, and superstar minitrons are also featured. It's about as close to the TV show as you're going to get without spending years in the gym, eating your weight in protein powder and developing an unhealthy fondness for Lycra.
Let's not forget the mammoth selection of match types too, something that SvR has always been blessed with. This year is no exception, and as well as last season's much improved Royal Rumble, this release also features an enhanced Hell in a Cell match, with a larger cell, and the physics make for a big leap forward in table matches, ladder matches and TLC, with each being far more enjoyable, thanks to the greater interaction with the environment. You can also, for the first time, create your very own match types, building them using a selection of ring types, rules and other settings.
The menu systems are also vastly improved, and options like the Superstar management system are integrated into the game far better. In fact, when it comes to presentation, there's not really anything you can criticise here, apart from the game's major weakness, the audio.
Whilst the audio is spot on for the most part, with great crowd reactions, all the superstar entrance music and so on, the commentary is still a lame duck. It's a little more varied, with some character-specific dialog, but despite having real WWE commentators provide the voiceovers, it all sounds a little muted and uninterested. Even when you pull off a mighty finishing move, you get the feeling that the commentators just don't really care.
Likewise, the vocal performances from superstars aren't great, especially when wandering the backstage areas, and more emotion and conviction would help a lot. It's not terrible, but should be so much better.
1-2-3
Smackdown Vs Raw 2011 is a triumph, and it's another offering that does so much more than a yearly update. Sure, there's all the usual things like an updated roster (this year featuring over 70 superstars, with more on the way), tweaked stats and general polish, but there's so much more besides. The creation tools are better, the online mode is better, core combat is more enjoyable and flows more realistically, and the addition of the standout WWE Universe feature is superb.
All in all, this is certainly the best SvR title yet, by a long way, and is a game that'll last a very, very long time. Yukes still has some niggles to iron out, but until next year, you won't find a better wrestling title than this.
WWE Smackdown Vs Raw 2011 is out now and available from the Den Of Geek Store.
Everything has been leading to this. Or so you'd think. Let's be frank, if we've learnt anything from our series of articles revisiting the Saw series over the last week, it's that the franchise is so wrapped up in retcons, flashbacks and time-bending shenanigans that you couldn't really be surprised if this one had turned out to take place in 2003, before even that very first film back in 2004.
At the very least, I assure you that we're not looking at a prequel. This is very much a straight continuation from the end of Saw VI, and some time during the last year, we find Jigsaw's ex, Jill Tuck, has lost a considerable amount of badass points from having vengefully trapped Jigsaw's bungling successor, Hoffman, in a reverse bear trap. A year ago for us, moments ago for her, and yet, after witnessing Hoffman's escape, she rushes to the police for protection.
Hoffman begins a reign of terror, taking games into broad daylight and into the heart of the already decimated police force, and he promises his old colleague, Detective Gibson, that the traps will continue until Jill is handed over to him. Ancillary to all of this, we meet self help entrepreneur Bobby Dagen, whose bestselling book about surviving one of Jigsaw's traps gets him caught up in another game. The final game, perhaps.
A stalwart companion, who endured the Saw marathon along with me, came to see Saw 3D last night. Afterwards, he declared it the worst of the series, hands down. For him, this was the most disappointing and dissatisfying ending imaginable after all of the six films and all of the marketing hype around this being the series' conclusion.
There's certainly a group of hardcore fans, who haunt places like the IMDb forums, and who will declare Saw VII to be the very best of the series and a fitting conclusion. However, I personally find it difficult to imagine this being anybody's favourite Saw film.
It suffers from the same symptoms of the franchise fatigue that plagued the fourth and fifth instalments. The story structure and the progression of the main game are disjointed and disaffecting, and aside from the opening sequence, the much anticipated public trap seen in the trailers, there's the same old lack of imagination.
Most criminally, there's barely any John Kramer to be had. The series has only survived to this, its seventh instalment, because death was not the end for Tobin Bell as Jigsaw. He's the very best thing about this series, and we had a partial return to form with Saw VI because the focus was back on his machinations from beyond the grave.
Here, it's pretty much Hoffman's show, and with how much Costas Mandylor has previously paled in comparison with Bell, that's really bloody boring. More than that, it's a rip-off. Mandylor is reduced to a perpetual grimace as he chases poor Betsy Russell around. She deserved better than this too. Having bided her time as Jill for so many films, she's reduced to the stock scream queen role here, running away and hiding behind cabinets.
Hell, most of the performances are wooden. What would a Saw film be without a little dramatic sawdust billowing around our B-movie players? In my revisit to Saw V, I gave Greg Bryk the dubious honour of being The Worst Actor In Saw, and for his trouble, he makes a small cameo appearance here in a support group for other survivors of Jigsaw. However, he now gets the bronze as two other newcomers make late, but impressively awful turns.
Firstly, there's Dean Armstrong as Cale. Not to give away what goes on with his character, but he gets a silver medal for some acting that had people in the screening I attended laughing out loud. The new worst actor In Saw, however, is Chad Donella as Gibson. Golly, he's bad. Not since Tommy Wiseau's cult classic, The Room, have you seen overacting this stilted, or this far removed from human behaviour.
On the plus side, I really have to praise Cary Elwes. It's been telegraphed by the filmmakers to all and sundry that he's back in this one, finally reprising the role of Dr. Lawrence Gordon to bookend the franchise. He serves almost as the Mount Doom of the series. With him, Saw was made, and only with him can it be unmade. And frankly, he's great in it, despite sounding decidedly closer to his native British accent than the last time he was Dr. Gordon.
On the other side of viewing Saw 3D, I really wish they had kept his involvement a secret until release. If they'd actually tried, it couldn't have been too difficult to just keep his appearance as a surprise, and there's little else in here to faze the gorehounds who've followed the series from the beginning. This is the seventh Saw film. If you're not satisfying your fans at this point, you're not satisfying anyone.
Personally, I'd prefer not to call it Saw 3D, not only for reasons of numbering-related pedantry that I assume fellow geeks can understand, but also because there's no artistry or innovation in the stereoscopy at all. It's simply there to inflate the box office takings. It might be shot in 3D, dodging the curse of the retro-fitted conversion, but it barely registers, except in the usual manner of forced ‘interactive' moments, where someone points a gun from left to right or the trajectory of arterial spillages just happen to coincide with the audience. Saw VII it is, then.
The problem is, if the gross does add up, we might yet see Saw VIII. This supposedly final chapter might wrap up whatever loose ends fans want to see, but it only closes the door. Twisted Pictures could easily enough pry it open, and so this is my pledge: regardless of what happens next, this is my last Saw film. I'm done with the series, and after all this time, I'd like to think it's done with me. I will not watch another Saw film.
As to my friend's reaction, I can't really disagree, except to say that's it's nowhere near the worst of the series. I'd say it's the third worst overall, or to mark it positively, the fifth best. It is a disappointment, though, and a step backwards from the improvements we saw in Saw VI. The writers are just up to their old rubbish tricks, and director Kevin Greutert is on record saying he would rather have been directing Paranormal Activity 2 than another Saw sequel.
With fledgling horror franchises ready to take its place in the form of Paranormal Activity or even Piranha, it goes without saying that Saw 3D should be the last gasp of a franchise that's been running on fumes for a while now. It suffers from the same problems as the worst of the sequels, but enough has been learnt that it's more watchable than those earlier films.
Game over.
3.8 Lochan Mor
After a very long wait, the boys from Charming have finally landed in Belfast. I'm sure I speak for most of us when I shout from the rooftops, finally! I know I've said it a few times in the past, but with this episode we are getting back to the Sons Of Anarchy that we know and love.
The episode was a good fifteen minutes longer than the usual ones, but it was one of the few times this season where I was left wanting more when the credits rolled. This week things have gone a bit Ireland-daft where the story is concerned, and at first it's a little bit nauseating, with one of the Belfast Sons shouting "Welcome to Ireland!" and then the remix of the opening credits music with added flute and bodhran, then later you get the excellent Flogging Molly playing over a fight. But once you get into the swing of things, it's forgivable.
One of the few things that really irritated me in this episode was that the opening dialogue suddenly had Chibs speaking in an Irish accent. If you've watched any episode with Chibs in it, then you will know that he is Glaswegian. After this incident, he switches back to his usual accent. It's baffling and I can only assume that whoever directed the episode assumed that Scottish and Irish were the same thing. They aren't.
Anyway, the Sons manage to get about three minutes into the episode before getting into trouble. They are stopped by the police, a scuffle entails and it emerges that the police were paid by someone to take the Sons into custody and deport them. Naturally, everyone assumed that it must be Jimmy. When the Sons are caught in a drive-by shooting later, it is also assumed that it must be Jimmy.
I really like how Kurt Sutter has taken it from season one to slowly turn Jimmy from a friend of the club to some sort of comic book villain, but the portrayal is also a bit irksome. His reasons for cutting out the Sons are genuinely interesting, but for anyone who doesn't know much about The Troubles, it must be a lot to take on. I can't imagine how complicated it is for someone who isn't from the UK or Ireland to follow.
I get the feeling now that the writers actually know where they're going with the rest of the season, which is very reassuring, as I wasn't convinced prior to this episode.
Jax finally gets to meet with Father Ashby, and is reassured that he will get Abel back very soon, but first he will have to get rid of Jimmy. We are shown Abel being picked up by a family at the same time and it is pretty clear that he is being adopted. Whether the Sons will ever find Abel, I'm really not sure.
There were a lot of themes in this episode regarding children. Back in Charming, Tara takes Lyla for an abortion and is told by her boss that Lyla is doing the right thing, because the child would grow up in an unstable environment. Whilst at the abortion clinic, Tara books herself an appointment. I guess what is being implied is that any child she would bring up with Jax would also be an unstable environment.
Abel hasn't had the easiest upbringing either. His mother has barely been mentioned since season one and he witnessed Half Sack being killed. I'll be very interested to see what happens next with that particular arc.
Kozik and Tig are back together for some comic relief back in Charming. After last week's joyride, Tig has had his license revoked for two years, and as a result, Kozik has to drive him around. There's a very small hint that the animosity between them has something to do with a girl and, as always, when Kozik and Tig get together, there's an opportunity for them to knock lumps out of each other.
One of the strangest things about almost all of the Sons leaving for Belfast is that they have left themselves wide open to any sort of attack from other gangs. The fact that Tig was left behind was just circumstantial, as he did what he had to. As always, Jacob Hale is cooking up trouble, and is yet again trying to buy Lumpy out of his boxing gym. He initially asks Darby, but Darby shows his sensitive side in an unusually tender scene between him and Lumpy. There's an incredibly powerful moment in the scene where Lumpy looks at Darby's swastika tattoo on his chest and his own concentration camp ID on his arm and tells Darby that he can't make many friends with that kind of hate on his chest. After Darby changes his mind, Hale brings in Salazar to smash up the gym.
Salazar has become something of a comical character and his plans to destroy the Sons usually end up in him being a laughing stock. I'd imagine there will be serious repercussions for destroying the gym and hitting Lumpy. In fact, I'd be really surprised if Salazar was even alive by the end of the season.
The Sons did leave a prospect in charge to defend the gym should anyone attack, but the prospect hid, and then ran away. I found it hard to believe that the Sons would recruit someone so cowardly. I would have thought that surely there'd be some sort of screening process to join a biker gang.
So, all in all, this week's episode was certainly a step in the right direction. The writers finally seem to know where they are going. While this is a relief, I really hope that next season we can go back to ‘Hamlet with bikers' and leave this below average arc behind.
Read our review of the episode 7, Widening Gyre, here.
This article contains spoilers. Also, it was written before seeing Saw VII, so here goes...
Hurtling towards Saw VII, it has to be said that we don't seem to be building towards a climax in Saw V or Saw VI. Then again, what the franchise transforms into is a series about how the nasty Jigsaw's legacy has been taken over by the nastier Hoffman, and how Jigsaw kills people differently to Hoffman. If you're keeping up, then kudos to you.
There's more time bending with Saw V, which partly serves as 'The Secret Origins of Hoffman!' to the previous instalment's exploration of original Jigsaw, John Kramer. It opens on a copycat kill perpetrated by Hoffman before he ever met John, as vengeance against his sister's murderer. Back in the present, Hoffman doesn't seem perturbed, either by John's posthumous warning or by Agent Strahm's investigation getting closer and closer to the truth.
Instead he drops five (geddit?) new victims into a game together, based on their connection to an arson attack that killed eight people. This is by far the least prominent part of Saw V, becoming an ultra-violent police procedural, rather than a horror film.
After four films, the audience is going to have developed a tolerance so great that none of the traps can faze them. That was very much what happened to me when I rewatched all of the series for this retrospective.
In the main game, there is one thing that really deserves special mention. Greg Bryk is my personal selection for the absolute worst actor in the series. Good golly, he's terrible. He plays Mallick, the guy who set the building alight at the behest of some of his fellow victims, and he's encumbered with such winning dialogue as "Nobody cared? The families of those eight people cared. The feds cared. Look at my fucking arm. I cared! I cared!" And he delivers lines like that in a similar fashion to Darren Ewing in Troll II. We salute you, Greg Bryk. You're bloody awful.
Anyhoo, the police drama elements of Saw V wrap up with Hoffman clumsily framing Strahm as Jigsaw's apprentice, diverting attention away from himself by compressing the hapless FBI agent to death in one of the series' most elaborate traps. That's elaborate, not innovative. The series is definitely running on fumes at this stage.
It's still solely concerned with its own mythology, deploying flashbacks to insert Hoffman into past instalments. Even with the surfeit of material shot for the purpose, you'll only believe he was there all along if you believed that was real footage of Tom Hanks meeting John F. Kennedy in Forrest Gump. It's a clumsy retcon, and one which only serves ancillary purposes, like the answer to that burning question of who stole Dr. Gordon's pen in Saw. Important stuff.
It's definitely a bit better than Saw IV, in my estimation, because at least it's possible to follow it. It obviously lacks the requisite amount of John Kramer, for reasons of death, but Saw VI would improve upon that considerably.
In the sixth film, John's ex, Jill, is the main beneficiary of Jigsaw's last will and testament. Where most would leave some money, or some prized possessions, John left another trap. In the event of his death, he wanted to put his crooked medical insurance company through the wringer, focusing on William Easton, (Peter Outerbridge).
Jill delivers five of John's six folders to Hoffman, who duly sets Easton up to go through the usual run of progressively nastier traps, passing judgement over his co-workers with the hope of freeing his family. There's supposed to be some manner of cathartic enjoyment in this recession-era brand of Saw, where the victims are all money lenders or corrupt insurers, and somehow, in a way I can't really explain, the traps have weight once again.
The whole thing is helped massively by Tobin Bell's presence. The idea that he planned this game before his death means that it's more logical than Hoffman's works. Hoffman spends most of this film trying to stay out of trouble because he's left a ton of incriminating evidence left, right and centre.
When he's told that Strahm could not have killed the victims of Saw V because forensics suggest he was already dead before their time of death, Hoffman kills the forensics people and two more cops, before using Strahm's disembodied hand to frame him for those murders too. This man is deceptively dumb, and it's all I can do not to cheer when Jill sticks him in the reverse bear trap at the end of the film. He lives to carry on being stupid in the next film, though.
With John's presence, it's like the writers kicked it up a notch. It's like they have two settings. They coast along when it's Hoffman setting the traps without the need for logic, reason or rhyme, and they have to actually think when John's involved. There's a neat final twist, even if they're still too preoccupied with retcons and the contradictory idea of the subject of the game judging others.
You never feel like the subjects in these games actually learn anything in the latter films. Saw had the characters show remorse and understand why they were being subjected to this ordeal. The latter films go for stock horror stereotypes, played by actors like Greg Bryk, to go through the meat grinder.
Considering how this all could have ended with Saw III, which is still the most profitable of the films even after IV, V and VI, it's easy to say they lost what made the original film so interesting. Symbolically, you notice how the titular saw in the first film was a hacksaw, and how it's invariably a rotary saw from then on. It's noisier and faster, basically, but not always better. That said, Saw VI is easily the best since Saw III, wringing a little more point and purpose out of a series that's undeniably running out of steam.
Whether the 3D bolstered returns of Saw VII will make a difference at the box office remains to be seen, but I can hope that the seventh instalment is the final instalment. Hell, we know they originally planned to make it eight, but Dunstan and Melton condensed down their plans for the last two films into one finale.
That willingness to distil suggests to me that they know they've been stretching the story too thin, so I have high hopes that Saw VII will be at least a partial return to form as much as it will be an end to the Jigsaw saga. All of its mythology and retcons almost make it like the horror fan's Harry Potter, but with more gore than An Inconvenient Truth.
Whether you love it, hate it, or have a morbid fascination with the thing, that's the Saw series, fully revisited and up to date. Only one remains...
Saw V
Saw VI 
As the first series of Psychoville demonstrated, writer/performers Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are unusually good at combining comedy and horror. Through memorable characters such as David and Maureen, blind toy collector Oscar Lomax, and delusional nurse Joy, the series managed to provide laughs, intrigue and unpleasant surprises in equal quantities.
In Psychoville Halloween, its writers have allowed their imaginations to run riot, the occasion providing the perfect reason to demonstrate their knowledge and enthusiasm for the horror genre. Taking the form of an Amicus-style portmanteau horror, the hour-long Halloween special introduces four separate, macabre stories all tied together with a single overarching narrative.
Set in the crumbling halls of the now empty Ravenhill Hospital, the focal point for so much of the first series’ intrigue, Psychoville Halloween introduces Drew (Alex Waldmann), a young man who has dark memories of the institution and its evil warden, Edwina. He’s returned to meet with Phil Walker (Shearsmith) a producer who’s scouting for a suitably atmospheric location for his new TV show, Dale Winton's Overnight Ghost Hunt.
The two then regale one another with a quartet of spooky stories, each featuring characters familiar from the first series – misanthropic clown Mr Jelly, Lomax, Joy and David and Maureen all make a welcome return.
To describe what happens in each tale would spoil the surprises they contain, but I can say there are some remarkably frightening moments in each of them. Mr Jelly’s brush with the supernatural is particularly unnerving, as are the results of Oscar Lomax’s eye operation, which references Japanese and Korean horror in a way that is both funny and occasionally unnerving.
In fact, every scene is packed full of loving references to classic horror, from An American Werewolf In London to Ring. The Exorcist films are the subject of a cutting exchange in one story, where Mr Jelly pronounces his hatred for John Boorman’s The Exorcist 2 in no uncertain terms.
Psychoville Halloween’s dialogue is superb throughout, and there are several lines I’ll probably end up quoting endlessly during pub conversations. “They’ve put a rat in me Pringles and cockroaches in me chocolates” is just one of them. There’s also lengthy, bewildering discussion about recycling bins that provides the episode’s biggest belly laugh.
Ending on an intriguing note that provides a hint of what we can expect from the next season, Psychoville Halloween works brilliantly as both a stand-alone special and a bridge between the first series and the second, while at the same time providing an ideal primer for anyone foolish enough to have missed the show on its original run.
Psychoville Halloween screens on 31st October. You can read our interview with Reese Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton here.
I loved Halloween when I was a child. As the cold autumn nights drew in, and the memories of summer receded, my mind turned with glee to thoughts of apple bobbing, and gingerbread in the shape of pumpkins or bats. Growing up in the mid-80s, I looked forward to wrapping myself in tissue paper or a bin bag, and becoming the world’s scariest mummy or wizard.
It was thrilling for me that the whole country was revelling in all the things that on any other night would have kept me awake, with the bed sheets pulled over my head. It was all about fantasy and costume and make-believe, and I loved it more than any other night of the year.
Some things don’t change. I still love Halloween, and it is still the pleasure of fantasy and make-believe that draw me to it. Nowadays, however, it is the fantasies on the silver screen that keep me interested. It has become a celluloid night. Halloween is still a time to indulge the imagination, but as an adult I rely on Hollywood to take me out of the real world of laptops and bus stops, and into a world of nightmares.
This year, however, the cinema’s Halloween offerings have had trouble summoning up this essential sense of imagination, and things are looking bleak for my romance with horror. In Halloween 2010, it is the genre itself that is in peril.
A lot has been made of Hollywood’s appetite for the bankability of remakes and sequels in the current harsh economic climate. I’m not normally as bothered by this as others have been. I can really enjoy a good sequel as long as it has something new to offer.
The problem comes when a franchise begins to cannibalise itself, searching the bodies of previous instalments for a morsel of a plot idea, instead of breaking new ground. Sadly, horror franchises have a particular poor record of this (Halloween, Friday The 13th and A Nightmare On Elm Street, I’m looking at you).
Recently, my anxiety levels have been particular high as a result of the decision to put Scream 4 in front of the cameras. I’m holding my breath, but after Scream 2 failed to differentiate itself from the original on anything more than a superficial level, and Scream 3 only just managed to teeter on the edge of respectability (and maybe fell into the chasm here and there), I’m gripped by a creeping sense of inevitability about the next episode in the franchise.
This model of diminishing returns, so common in the horror genre, has unfortunately been writ large by in recent years by the lamentable fate of the Saw franchise. I was not always a Saw detractor. The first film was a revelation for me, as my first experience of the new breed of visceral and discomforting body horror that has flourished in recent years.
Saw II worked within the format of the original, but expanded it, moving the focus from individual to collective terror by trapping its victims together in a booby-trapped house. This was something new for the burgeoning franchise, a reshaping of the basic plot structure that allowed the sequel to step out of the shadow of its forbear, and show us something that the previous film had not.
Then it started to go wrong. Each successive Saw has, essentially, returned to and repeated the franchise’s first entry, year after year after year. People are abducted and faced with an horrific punishment, where torturous decisions must be made, literally torturous in most cases. And that is largely it.
The entire Saw franchise in twenty words. There have been a few plot twists here and there, even the odd surprise. But nothing radical has been done to this basic format in any of the five sequels since Saw II to stave off the creeping sensation that we have seen it all before.
Headlining 2010’s Halloween season, then, is Saw 3D, the seventh (!) film in the series. After the disappointing (or relieving, depending on how you look at it) box office receipts of Saw VI, this instalment seems to be the final nail in the coffin for this most stunningly repetitive of franchises. The addition of 3D does little to distract from the fact that this film is essentially a cinematic zombie constructed out of the body parts of its predecessors.
The Saw franchise’s inability to break new ground, to stretch its premise and provide new shocks and thrills, has seen it fall from being one of the most exciting developments in horror cinema of the last decade, to being little more than an annual disappointment.
The lack of imagination shown by Saw 3D is something of a sad trend at this year’s Halloween box office. I don’t simply mean that horror sequels are currently failing to move their franchises forward, though that is arguably the case with the unsettling but deeply derivative Paranormal Activity 2. But rather that horror films, sequels or not, seem to be stuck in a rut.
Watching John Erick Dowdle’s Devil, for example, felt to me like sifting through the remains of any number of superior horror films. It picked its characters off one by one like the best slasher films of the seventies and eighties. It promised a new and bloody method of dispatching each victim like a toned down version of the recent spate of splatter, or so-called ‘gorno’, films. It drew heavily on religious mythology in an infinitely less successful way than The Exorcist, or even Stigmata. It confined a small group of people to an enclosed and dangerous space, much like 2001‘s The Hole.
It even mirrored the cycle of long periods of brightly lit safety, followed by the coming of danger in the dark that formed the basic structure of Paranormal Activity. It must have sounded like such a good idea during the planning stages of this film, but crafting Devil out of the most successful bits of earlier films only ensured that it did not match up to any of them. Just like Saw 3D and Paranormal Activity 2, Devil failed to do anything new or interesting. and lacked the essential creativity needed to scare an audience well-versed in horror movie clichés.
Aside from its derivative streak, or perhaps as a consequence of it, the other key trend in the horror cinema of Halloween 2010 has been high concept films. For some, such as Paranormal Activity 2 and Saw 3D, this is a result of their franchises already being entrenched in a particular concept. Paranormal Activity 2 repeats its forerunner’s ‘demon invades suburbia as seen by video camera’ premise, while Saw 3D is still a ‘victim in gruesome traps’ movie. For all that it borrows from other films, Devil also has a high concept at its heart. As crazy the ‘Satan in a lift’ concept may be, at least there is a spark of originality somewhere in the film.
Sadly, however, each of these films deploys its concept as a mere marketing tool. ‘Demons caught on camcorder’ and ‘Beelzebub in an elevator’ serve as useful sound bites to generate vital word of mouth, but when the movie itself cannot develop its concept into gripping substance (and I am not persuaded that any of these films did), the end product will always feel less than the sum of its parts.
In this respect, however, horror has been pipped to the post by one particular thriller this Halloween. The highest concept of them all this year came from Rodrigo Cortés’ staggering Buried. Hitchcockian in its execution, this film never wavered from its ingenious ‘Ryan Reynolds buried alive in a box and nothing else for an hour and a half’ premise.
It shouldn’t work. It should have been a static and deeply tedious exercise in self-indulgence. Thankfully, that was not the case, and the film was brave enough to follow through on its basic premise. There were no fancy distractions, no Kill Bill style impossible escapes. Buried was a simple, brutal and deeply affecting piece of high concept cinema, that used its inherent claustrophobia to deeply unsettle its audience. This was a film more horrifying than any of this Halloween’s horror movies.
While Devil, Paranormal Activity 2 and Saw 3D felt old and tired, Buried was, ironically given its setting, a breath of fresh air. For me, the difference was that, in contrast to these other films, Buried saw its underlying concept not only as a means of getting cinemagoers into auditoriums but as the genesis for crafting a taut and well executed film. It was the most stringent of all of these films in fulfilling on the promise of its premise without giving in to the demands of Hollywood clichés.
The lack of creativity within the horror genre, coupled with the privileging of concept over substance, means that this has be a disappointing Halloween season for me. Unfortunately, that is not unusual, given the dominant trends in horror in recent years.
The last big idea to emerge from the horror stable, the ‘gorno’ film, has been run into the ground by endless repetition. Where it was once thrilling and visceral, now it is predictable and just a little bit nasty. Like the slasher revival of the nineties that prefigured it, this cycle of films has lost its ability to scare through the endless reproduction of the same basic format. It is time something new came along.
Last year it looked like Paranormal Activity might escape its obvious similarities to The Blair Witch Project and be just what I had been hoping for. But now its sequel has fallen into the same trap as the Saw franchise by failing to provide anything original or exciting to expand the format. The next big thing in horror is, I am sure, just around the corner, but at the moment this genre has stalled between cycles and is producing very little worthy of note.
Until it recaptures its essential imagination and transports me back to the cold October nights of my childhood through the thrill of the scare, I will be the man asleep on the back row this Halloween night.
Third-person survival horror epic Dead Space was inarguably the most nightmarish game of 2008. So nightmarish, in fact, that I could only play it in fifteen minute bursts, swiftly followed by a calming cup of tea and a quick go on Bubble Bobble.
Breathing a much-needed sense of urgency and fear into the ageing survival horror genre, Dead Space was inarguably one of the best games of its type since Resident Evil 4, and its setting – the USG Ishimura – was an unforgettable backdrop for its deep space horror.
Dead Space 2, therefore, has some big shoes to fill, and Visceral will have to find some way to top the sense of threat the first game’s Necromorphs brought with them, particularly now they’re a now familiar opponent.
The latest video, which you can see below courtesy of GameSpot, certainly looks as sinister as its predecessor. Revealing a new location called The Sprawl, an outpost situated on one of Saturn’s moons, it’s once again filled with shadowy, Lovecraftian creatures.
Dead Space is due for release on 25 January for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.
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"For who could ever learn to love a beast?"
Well, me for starters. And many before and after me.
For it's probably best I declare my bias right at the start. Beauty And The Beast is one of my all-time favourite films. I'm a Disney animation nerd at the best of times, but this, for me, was the one that really got me started. Yet I first saw it when I took my five-year-old cousin on an outing to the cinema for the first time.
I was 16 at the time, not hugely interested in the film, but intrigued enough to agree to watch it. And I was utterly blown away. So much so that I went to see it two further times during its original theatrical run. And it flamed a passion for the Disney animation back catalogue that's been burning ever since.
"Dismissed. Rejected. Publicly humiliated."
Back to the film, then. It's hard to conceive it any other way, but the original thinking with Disney's Beauty And The Beast (a project first initiated under Walt Disney's stewardship), arguably the last of the classic fairy tales for the studio to adapt, was that it wasn't to be a musical. This was the film that followed the terrific The Little Mermaid, and one that's gone on to be a Broadway musical in its own right. Yet, it was first conceived as having no songs in it whatsoever.
When you consider just how strong the music in the film is (and I'm going to come to the score individually, as it rarely gets the credit in isolation that it deserves), it's surely impossible to imagine the film without it now. For this is Disney at the peak of its storytelling song powers.
Take a look at the breathtaking opening number, Belle, so wonderfully lampooned in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. It's not only a masterclass in getting across a lot of information, it's also a flat-out brilliant piece of musical work. And yet, it nearly wasn't in there at all. Nor was the Broadway-inspired Be Our Guest. The quite brilliant The Mob Song. Nor the goosebump-inducing central Beauty And The Beast song and sequence itself.
But then Beauty And The Beast was, at one stage, very much a different animal. This take on the project originally got under way in London, and it took some time for Disney to tune the direction it wanted. One director went by the wayside, before first time helmers Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale landed the job, with basically six months to prove themselves. It was one of several pivotal moves on the project that, as producer Don Hahn has said, led to a "perfect storm" of the right talent at the right time.
For prove themselves they did, and then Disney animation boss Jeffrey Katzenberg gave them the green light to carry on. And the course was set for a production that would result in the first animated feature to garner a Best Picture Oscar nomination.
"Something's lurking that you don't see every day."
I'm going to go a bit further than the Academy here, though. I'd argue that Beauty And The Beast is the best Disney animated film, full stop. I say that as someone who loves The Jungle Book, 101 Dalmatians, The Little Mermaid and many more. But never has music and narrative gelled so compellingly as it does here.
It gets through an awful lot of storytelling, too. Many animated films introduce a collection of characters, whose names you struggle to remember come the end credits. It's massive testament to the screenplay of Linda Woolverton that the supporting cast, from the tremendous and witty double act of Lumiere and Cogsworth, through to Chip the cup and even Le Fou the sidekick, all get enough space to develop as distinctive characters in their own right. Put simply, everything fits, and leaves room for a full, three-act story, too.
Yet the magic here is in the central pairing of Belle and the Beast, two characters you can't help but really care for. Disney, of course, already had an unusual and successful love story in Lady And The Tramp under its belt by the time it embarked on Beauty in earnest. And that was a film that avoided all the mawkish trappings that the story could have led the film makers into.
"There's something in him that I simply didn't see."
Beauty And The Beast's masterstroke, however, was to make this the Beast's story. That's perhaps the less obvious thing to do, and in the first act of the film, it's not apparently clear that that's the direction the film is going. The focus for the early running time is firmly on Belle, and her resisting of Gaston's advances. In fact, much of the early investment of the script is in establishing Belle as a rounded, intriguing character, and it looks to all intents and purposes to be her that's going on the biggest journey throughout the film.
But it's not. Instead, while both Belle and the Beast have to change throughout the film, it's the latter that has to undergo the biggest transformation. And it's a delicate tightrope that the film walks. The trick? That he's kept sinister enough to work as a threat until reasonably late in the film, and that he feels unpredictable enough to jump between comedy and rage. He's consistently subtlety challenged by Cogsworth and Lumiere in the first half, but it's only when he's basically forced Belle to flee his castle that these little nudges result in any kind of action. It's, ironically, when he's had his most beast-like, fighting off wolves, that the other side of his character emerges. Other films? They might have him singing a song to camera, to push across that kind of transformation. But not here.
Instead, here's where the genius of music as storytelling kicks in. There's incredible efficiency in the song of Belle at the start, but surely the track with the heaviest workload is Something There. In two minutes and 19 seconds, it gets across just how the position and feelings of the characters have changed, in an utterly convincing and un-mawkish manner. It lays the path for the jawdropping ballroom sequence (can you see the early work of Pixar in there?), and the superb Beauty And The Beast title song ("bittersweet and strange, finding you can change").
I've always felt that both Something There and Beauty And The Beast as songs work because the two characters aren't on screen singing directly at each other. It allows the character animation focus to be on subtle little changes in expression and stance, and it's a masterclass in getting across emotion, without having to bludgeon the audience with it. Everyone who makes an animated film that has a love story at the heart should watch this.
And while they're there, they also should school themselves, if they haven't already, in the incredible work of the late, great Howard Ashman.
"It's my favourite part, because you'll see..."
Ashman was not a well man when Beauty And The Beast was being made, to the point where much of the production had to come to him. He died of AIDS-related illnesses before the film was finally locked, and, tragically, would never get to see the massive commercial and critical impact the final cut would have. But heck, the film owes so, so much to his brilliance.
If I had to pick one of the many elements that Ashman fused into the film, though, it's the lyrics to The Mob Song (Kill The Beast). Ashman, I'd argue, is a lyricist whom Disney has never been able to replace, and arguably never will. The tightness of his writing on the songs of The Little Mermaid would be enough to top 99.9% of careers (and let's not forget too that he co-wrote Little Shop Of Horrors with Alan Menken). With Beauty, though, his work gave my 16-year-old self goosebumps when I first saw the film, and has done pretty much every time I've watched the film since.
His creative input extends far beyond the songs here (it was reportedly him, for instance, who identified that this must be the Beast's story), but I just want to focus on the lyrics of one of them anyway. And I am talking about the Kill The Beast sequence, which, as Don Hahn recognised, features the lyrics of a man fighting an illness with such a stigma attached to it at the time. "We don't like what we don't understand, in fact it scares us, and this monster is mysterious at least," the crowd chant on the way to the castle to try and slay the creature of which they know nothing, but have been rallied to fear.
Heck, this is a Disney film. The same Disney that too often gets unfairly criticised for taking a safer, softly approach to material. Yet, here it was, at the start of the 90s, with subtexts that other films wouldn't go anywhere near, with a dark underbelly to its story that it's rarely given credit for. Granted, most people didn't notice, but that didn't matter. There's ambition from top to bottom here, and Ashman's genius is surely at the heart of it.
"Very different from the rest of us."
And let's, while we're here, give Alan Menken some of the credit he really deserves. Working with Ashman, he'd already sent a jolt into the heart of Disney animation with his Caribbean-inspired music to The Little Mermaid.
But I wanted to just commend his broad, excellent score that underpins Beauty And The Beast. It's emotive in itself, able to seamlessly knit the songs together, yet particularly in sequences such as the transformation at the end, it manages to quickly change direction when needed. It's often Menken's song work that gets the bulk of the attention, but I do urge you to keep the second half of the soundtrack album playing if you get the chance. Because Mr Menken is on absolute fire here.
The transformation, however, does give me the chance to mention the one element of the film that never quite worked for me. And it's hard to see how it could have been got round.
For I've yet to meet a single human being on this planet who warms to the prince that the Beast ultimately turns back into. It feels odd. It has to happen, but it's the Beast we've spent 80 minutes getting to know, and even though the prince only appears briefly, he never feels like the same character to me. No wonder they dress him up in the same outfit as the Beast for the final dance. It's about the only way we could really emote with him.
But that's my quibble. For while you can look back and say that animation techniques have come on a lot in the 20 years since Beauty And The Beast was first screened (although the ballroom sequence still looks superb), only Pixar manages to raise a torch to the sheer storytelling skill and character work on display here. And Pixar hasn't even attempted to tackle a musical project on this kind of scale. Nor, interestingly, has it until lately even attempted to tackle a central villain. (I could pen a whole piece about how Gaston is easily one of the most unconventional and effective characters to fill such a role in an animated movie.)
It's not surprising. Because Beauty And The Beast, for me, set a quality mark so high that, quite simply, nobody who's followed and tried to make something of similar ilk has stood a chance. Partly that's down to the loss of Howard Ashman, certainly. But there's also the behind-the-scenes passing of the baton from the old animators to new, the fearlessness of filmmakers who have never had a chance to tackle a project like this before, and a marriage of animation, music and storytelling that I'd genuinely be amazed to see topped in my lifetime.
It was, quite simply, the right film, for the right people, at the right time.
Finally, my nerdy mistake spot. In the opening scene, Gaston flicks through Belle's book and declares there aren't any pictures in it. When Belle is sat down reading the book? We get a close-up of a spread with a picture on it. Just saying...
Beauty And The Beast is out on Disney Diamond Edition Blu-ray right now.
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3.9 Turas
One of the most difficult things a writer can do is create a story in a setting that is completely different from what they are accustomed to. This week in Sons Of Anarchy, we're still in Ireland, and whilst I have no complaints about the story this week, Kurt Sutter's portrayal of the Northern Irish/Irish people is a little embarrassing.
Last week's cheesy remix of the theme tune is still there, and I suppose they'll hold onto it for the rest of the season. There is more music from Irish-American punk bands played over footage over motorcycles driving past green fields. What jars most for me is the number of times the words "Irish" and "Ireland" are used, particularly when Fiona threatens to put a bullet through Jimmy's "thick Irish skull". People don't talk like that.
After building up this particular aspect of the plot for eight episodes, I would like to think that the audience would know that the Sons are supposed to be now in Ireland, and I say "supposed to be" because it's pretty clear that a lot of it was shot in America. Whilst I appreciate that shooting a TV show with a huge ensemble cast like this one can get expensive, the crew shouldn't be going around before the season began saying it was "filmed on location", because it feels like they may have only had a few days in Ireland and then shot the internal shots along with some of the external shots back in America.
Now that I have that off of my chest, I'll get onto what actually happened in this week's episode. The Sons go out on a protection run across the border with their Belfast brothers. If there was every any doubt that SAMBEL weren't out to screw over SAMCRO, it would certainly have faded with this episode.
When crossing the border, SAMBEL are clearly hoping that their American brothers are arrested, and when that doesn't happen, they have a little explosive surprise prepared for them. When the Sons arrive at the depot, one of the SAMBEL guys sets off an explosive in the truck. It's incredibly obvious that it has been one of them, as the guy in question returns just after the explosion and says that he was "having a shite" when it happened. Obviously, it seems that the Sons aren't buying it. A few of the Irish guys are killed in the explosion, mostly ones that were half-introduced last week.
The aftermath of the explosion was a highlight for me. When Jax is knocked over by the blast, he sees John Teller coming towards him before the image straightens out and we can see that it is Clay. This has been the first time that we have seen John Teller in a moving image. We have seen him in pictures and heard his voice, but this is the first time he has been seen moving on camera.
While the Sons are out in the Republic of Ireland, Jimmy arrives at the Ashby's house. One of the first things he does is drag a man into the house and shoot him in the head. One of the problems of having a huge ensemble cast is that it can sometimes be difficult to remember who everyone is. So, on this occasion, I wasn't sure if I was supposed to recognise the man who had just expired. I didn't.
While Gemma and Fiona are being held at gunpoint, Trinity comes upstairs firing a gun. Things quickly change around so that Gemma is pointing a gun at Jimmy's head, and has the best opportunity of the whole season to take him out. She hesitates and Fiona then points a gun at Gemma's head, saying that she is saving her life, as, if she kills Jimmy, the entire Teller family will be killed. It's a very tense scene, and given that it takes place in a tiny kitchen, it really adds to the suspense.
Towards the end of the episode, there's a moment where Jax and Trinity are sitting together and he puts his arm around her. Whilst I appreciate that they are completely unaware that they are half-siblings, I really don't think that the show needs an incest subplot. Not now. Not ever. There were rumblings of it in last week's episode with some flirting between the two and I really hoped that it wouldn't carry on. Gemma knows that they are related, so I hope that she tells Jax, even if it ends the hero-worship of his father.
There was very little happening in Charming this week. After doing some "cop shit" (to quote Tig), Unser discovers Hale is corrupt and very probably behind last week's unpleasantness with Lumpy. Salazar continues his beef with the Sons by blackmailing Salazar into getting the name of Tara's workplace.
I said this last week, and I must emphasise it again: it really wasn't a good idea to send almost the entire club out to Belfast and leave little in the way of resistance in Charming, in case anything happens.
This week's episode ends with Salazar kidnapping Tara, and also her supervisor, Margaret. The reason he took Margaret as well really came out of nowhere. When Salazar lifts Margaret's shirt, there is a faded club tattoo on her back. It is hard to make out which club it is, as the only words that can really be seen are "rock and roll" and "my love". This came out of nowhere, as Margaret always seemed very straight-laced, although she did stick her neck out a little too far for Tara whenever there was trouble.
So, this week it was a pretty good episode. One thing that really seemed a little off was that there was barely any mention of Abel at all. It's starting to feel that the ending of season two, where he was kidnapped, was only written in so Sutter could get all of the characters in Ireland and have stereotypical Irish gang subplots.
Still, with only four episodes left, the season is starting to have some direction, so that's reassuring. Despite the fact that I know Sutter really wants us to be really excited about the Belfast storyline, I just can't look past what's going on in Charming at the moment. Next week's instalment with Tara and Margaret should be a highlight.
Read our review of the episode 8, Lochan Mor, here.
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The first trailer for Zack Snyder's upcoming movie of Sucker Punch was a showreel for the director's style, all condensed into one incredibly stylish teaser. It wasn't going to turn anyone who didn't warm to his films of 300 and Watchmen in his direction, but it sure managed to make an impact.
Now, we've got the fuller trailer, ahead of the film's release next March, and similar rules apply. The extended running time of the trailer allows Snyder time to pace things a lot better, though, and his visual stylings are quite exceptional. Personally, I can't wait to see some of the visuals blasted onto the biggest screen I can possibly find.
Here's the new trailer right below. And don't forget, once Snyder has wrapped on Sucker Punch, he's off to revive the fortunes of Superman. We might just be seeing and hearing a lot of Mr Snyder in the year or two ahead, then...
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We've given up counting how many days are left until the new Harry Potter film arrives in cinemas, but we're sure that our good chum Emily (who, fact-fans, is most partial to a glass of Vimto) will be along with the news in double-quick time anyway. Before she does that, we figured we should bring you the latest clip from the film.
It's a minute of Ron and Harry having a natter in the middle of a field, and they both look suitably earnest. Expect a lot more of that when the film arrives on 19th November. And, truthfully, expect more exciting footage than this snippet we're showing you below...
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There's been a mixture of reaction to Syfy's announcement that it's killed off its Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica, before its first season has finished broadcasting. And with the remaining episodes shuffled to some anonymous part of 2011 for transmission, Syfy is instead focussing its energies on a new, presumably more action-packed BSG prequel, Blood & Chrome.
However, as is now traditional when such a genre show is cancelled, the campaign to save it has begun. This all stems back to when the show Jericho was granted a second season, after fans bombarded CBS with peanuts, eventually persuading the network to give it a second shot. Yet, what CBS discovered was that a fan campaign doesn't equal great ratings, and thus the second season of Jericho didn't bring in the numbers either. Hence, no campaign since has worked (although we did wonder if Veronica Mars may have won a reprieve at one point, but sadly not).
With Caprica, a similar tactic is nonetheless being deployed. This time, fans are being urged to send apples to Syfy's offices in the States. Unlike peanuts, too, apples have a habit of going off, and thus Syfy would presumably have to deal with them quite quickly, to avoid having quite a niffy post room.
You can find more details of the campaign at the Save Caprica blog right here.
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There have, as has already been well charted elsewhere, been significant ramifications already following the last set of revelations about Mel Gibson. In film terms, the most obvious casualty had appeared to be Jodie Foster's fascinating-looking upcoming movie The Beaver, which was yanked from the schedules in double-quick time at the point where most declared Gibson's career unsaveable.
The Beaver is a film about a man who walks around with a beaver puppet on his arm, and it looked, at face value, like one of the most interesting movies of the year. But it also looked as though it might just be snuck out quietly a long time in the future.
However, the eagle-eyed folks at Coming Soon have caught wind of the first teaser poster for the film, which they spotted at the American Film Market. Of course, this is no guarantee that the film itself will still get a wide release, but it is the first tangible sign in a while that a cinematic release is being built up to.
We've got the poster for you here, and if you head over to Coming Soon, it also has a snap from the equally interesting-looking Source Code, too. Here's the link.
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The first attempt to bring Silent Hill to the big screen didn't, in the eyes of many, come close to breaking the curse of the movie-based-on-videogame. But it did, to be fair, have quite a good go. It also did enough business to inspire chatter of a sequel, and finally, it seems, the greenlight has been given.
Over at Bloody Disgusting, it's been revealed that the new film will be called Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, and from that title, you can work out too that it will, indeed, by made in 3D. That's for definite.
Also, Michael J Bassett has signed up to write and direct the film. Bassett was the man who brought the really quite impressive take on Solomon Kane to the big screen. And from where we're sitting, he sounds a fine choice.
You can read more on the project right here, although it's unclear as of yet when it'll be heading before the cameras...
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An interesting story has popped up over at Bleeding Cool, which is suggesting that Marvel Studios is looking, not for the first time, to tighten the budgets on the upcoming Avengers movie as much as it possibly can.
Marvel is rarely a studio to splash cash around, and, if you remember, it's this approach that reportedly almost cost it the involvement of Samuel L Jackson in its projects at one point. In the case of its ensemble feast, The Avengers, Bleeding Cool is saying that Marvel is looking to get the budget close to Sony's original outlay on the first Spider-Man movie. That'd put the cost of The Avengers somewhere around the $140/150m mark, firmly in the mid-range for a modern, big budget blockbuster.
As such, those working on the film are apparently being told to "get it all done on the relative cheap", which has reportedly led to changes of personnel behind the scenes, with some walking off the project. The impact of this is that pre-production on the film has been delayed, although time is still very much on Marvel's side here, as it looks to get the film out in time for the summer of 2012.
In other The Avengers news, Robert Downey Jr has been talking about Joss Whedon's screenplay work on the film, and it seems he's mightily impressed. It does, of course, suggest that a shooting screenplay is pretty much in place for the film, dependant on the sign off from important people in quite expensive suits.
Here's the link to Bleeding Cool's story, while Robert Downey Jr has been talking to MTV right here.
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