Horror Express Despite some atrocious filmmaking, this was actually pretty enjoyable! Christopher Lee is a scientist transporting a ‘fossilised’ prehistoric ape-man back to England from Mongolia on the Trans-Siberian express. It wakes up and starts killing people, obviously, but it gets worse – the creature is host to an alien life-form that absorbs the memories of its victims and is capable of transferring its consciousness into other host bodies. And then at the end it brings all its victims back to life as zombies. Peter Cushing plays a rival scientist, and Terry Savalas turns up as a brilliantly drunk and aggressive Cossack Captain. There is some… fascinating science in this film.
Continue reading Films I’ve seen recently (Pt.1) →
This year has not exactly got off to a good start, my only achievement so far having been to serve as a host for a particularly nasty and persistent cold virus (thanks for everything nasopharyngitis, it was a pleasure doing business). I take some small comfort in that apparently the more severe the symptoms, the healthier the immune system. If this is in fact true, then as far as concerned I’m practically Wolverine. I had intended to put up a little statement of intent for myself a day or two after New Year so I could look back on it in twelve months time and marvel at how little I achieved. Incapacitated as I was, this slipped a bit. Possibly that was a good thing, as one of the goals I wanted to declare was to blog on a weekly basis. FAIL.
Continue reading Already Behind →
Jeremy Dyson is the fourth member of The League of Gentlemen, the one who doesn’t act. His only appearance in the series is in the fourth-wall breaking League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse, where he’s played by the actor Michael Sheen, putting Dyson in the unusual position of having written dialogue for an actor playing himself. In addition to his work on the League, he co-created the dementedly dark Funland for BBC 3 and was the script editor for The Armstrong and Miller Show. More recently he co-wrote the stage play Ghost Stories with Andy Nyman and adapted several of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected into the play Roald Dahl’s Twisted Tales. He’s also written several books – Bright Darkness, a non-fiction book on the lost art of supernatural horror in cinema, two anthologies of short stories, and the novel What Happens Now, all of which are very good. Clearly a fellow admirer of the macabre, I’m always interested in what Dyson gets up to, however I was particularly excited to see the subject of his latest radio documentary was Robert Aickman.
Continue reading Strange Radio →