-
The Living Dead at the Manchester Festival
One of the most heroic spectacles I ever witnessed on a public stage was that of Stephen Laws conducting an interview with Jorge Grau about his life and films. That’s Jorge Grau, director of the cannibal zombie classic The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue… kind of apposite because this was at the annual Festival…
-
Those Cancelled Golden Globes
“Sadly, it feels like the nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school are trying to cancel the prom. But NBC wants to try to keep that prom alive.”
-
Wallace and Kong
A post header which sounds like it has to refer to the most ambitious Aardman stop-motion film ever… A sequence in one of the Disc One extras on the 2005 movie boxed set shows that Peter Jackson owns a copy of the Edgar Wallace material. It’s used as the prop for the script that Jack…
-
Of Robots and Heroes
While we’re talking about the old-time stuff, and recuts and mashups, and harking back to this earlier post… I still have my Super-8 print of the 1942 Lewis Wilson/Douglas Croft Batman serial, which was only available as six 200 foot silent spools… back in my student days I cut them all together, put a mag…
-
Monster Munch
The 3-disc extended edition of Peter Jackson’s King Kong can be had for around a fiver from all kinds of places at the moment – Amazon, some of the supermarkets – which makes it a pretty good bargain. I saw it on the big screen but had no urge to pick up the DVD until…
-
Independent Filmmaking
This readable, likeable handbook was my bible back in the 70s when its combination of practical sense and friendly encouragement meant that it served both as craft manual and comfort read. Its user’s-view of various Super 8 cameras, wind-up 16mm Bolexes and optical printing techniques may have little-to-no application in this digital age but the…
-
Tony Tenser
I’m late catching up with the news, but British film producer and distributor Tony Tenser died on December 5th. I interviewed Tenser onstage twice at Manchester’s Festival of Fantastic Films, and considered it a privilege to be given the opportunity. Some obits that I’ve seen are characterising him as a producer of nudie exploitation pix…
-
Die Hard, in a Castle
When I was sixteen and ‘doing’ Shakespeare’s Hamlet for A Level English Lit, our English teacher Roy Bateman took the class to a screening of Grigori Kosintsev’s Russian-language film version of the play. It was only a scratchy 16mm print in a regional film theatre, but it blew me away. For me it became the…
-
All Your Past Are Belong to eBay
See this? It’s Yoshiya’s Action Planet Robot. A wind-up clockwork tintoy modelled (unofficially) on Forbidden Planet‘s Robby, it’s one of the iconic tin robots. There are plenty of them about, and recent reproductions can be had for just a handful of change. Back in 1999 someone discovered a horde of unsold warehouse stock and began…
-
Memories of Water
One of the bonuses of BAFTA membership is that you get sent copies of trade publications during the runup to the awards season. Oscar (R) follows BAFTA, which means that the studios can cover both sets of voters with the same ad campaigns. Imagine the upward direction of my eyebrows when I opened The Hollywood…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
