F.R. Jameson's Blog, page 36

Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966)

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I can remember being outraged by DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS when I saw it as a kid.

There’s the title, there’s the fact that Christopher Lee’s name appears first in the credits in bigger font than everyone else’s, and then there’s the obvious disconnect that Dracula himself doesn’t appear until half way through and even then Sir Chris doesn’t utter any dialogue. If I watch a Dracula film, then I want to see that Dracula is actually in it doing Dracula stuff.

The creature in this movie could be any vampire. More than that, it wouldn’t require much rewriting to make this A.N. Other monster. It’s a stock monster, one without character or drama, and is an absolute waste of Christopher Lee in that cloak.

Actually, all that makes it sound like I’m getting angry over it all over again. But that’s not the case. As while I don’t think it’s a classic, DRACULA. PRINCE OF DARKNESS does have more going for it than my young eyes would have ever have allowed.

For starters, there’s no nonsense, rifle wielding kick-ass monk, Father Sandor.

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This is a great character. This is the kind of character that spin-off media was invented for. Why aren’t there films and novels of him touring Europe and gritting his teeth as he takes on other monsters? The Karnsteins, Frankenstein and his latest creature, the Wolfman. There’s a series of films right there. I also greatly enjoyed the fact that his monastery keeps a vampire’s familiar prisoner. Although purely for plot reasons, they don’t keep him prisoner very well.

The other element worth noting, and this takes me back slightly to my TWINS OF EVIL review, is the paranoia that’s afoot after the fall of Dracula. Ten years after his demise at the hands/improvised cross of Van Helsing, we have a community so utterly traumatised that they’re willing to do all sorts of dreadful acts to stop a threat which doesn’t exist. I know THE WITCHFINDER GENERAL went down this path, but it was fertile ground for Hammer as well. Although fertile ground only tentatively explored.

Good ideas then, but let down by a bog-standard plot that sees two couples waylaid in Castle Dracula, and idiotic moments like: “Darling, I know my brother and sister-in-law have disappeared, but while I go and hunt for them, why don’t you wait here alone in these deserted woods?”

It’s not great, but it’s nowhere near as bad as my eleven year old self thought. And, in what’s becoming a recurring theme as I go back and look at these old Hammer movies again, there are some interesting things here, I just wish more was being done with them.

The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King

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In anticipation of the film coming out, here – week by week – are my reviews of THE DARK TOWER novels.

Fantasy and science fiction authors of course have a limitless canvass on which to paint on. If the author establishes that this is a far away world, or some distant future time, then only the boundaries of imagination will limit the wonder of the places and worlds visited.

There are no problems of geography or historical inaccuracy or deviation from the norms of real life.

This is a new ‘real’ world and the author can do anything he or she damn well likes with it.

And that’s why I’m always slightly disappointed when fantasy and science fiction takes a turn into our world. Whether it’s the Starship Enterprise, hundreds of years in the future, repeatedly popping back to the Twentieth century; or a lone gunslinger in the bleak desert of an alternate world, deciding that – rather than explore this wondrous new place – it’ll just be easier to go to New York City.

Having set up the aesthetic of a decaying, but still magical, spaghetti western world in the first novel; King here takes a serious detour and plunges Roland into our world. Ill and wounded, he stumbles across doorways in the desert, and these doorways take him – with increasingly diminishing returns on the surprise front – to New York City.

(It’s one of the things that irritated me most about this book – why through each of the doors is it always New York? Why not New York the one trip, Crouch End the next, then a planet on the outer edges of Alpha Centauri after that?)

Ostensibly it’s a tale about how Roland comes together with his fellow questers for The Dark Tower, but the fact that it takes so long and deviates greatly from what went before (and seemingly from what’s set up to follow) does makes it feel something of shaggy dog story.

However, I nearly always find King a compulsive read, and tore through my copy of this. Some commentators to my original review of THE GUNSLINGER review did warn me that the next book was tricky, and wondered if I’d make it through it. Well, I did get to the other side, but with some reservations

Maybe every Constant Reader feels like this somewhere in the middle of THE DRAWING OF THE THREE. but this seemed like the moment THE DARK TOWER series turned into my own personal quest.

Doctor Who Reviews – Empress of Mars

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Written with no prior knowledge of what’s going to be in the episode – I watch the ‘Next Time’ trailer and make sure I see, hear and read nothing else – and written immediately after my first viewing. This is my unfettered, emotional response to this week’s DOCTOR WHO fare.

Looking back at a list of Mark Gatiss episodes this week, I was reminded that the only three I actually like are ‘The Unquiet Dead’, ‘Crimson Terror’ and ‘Cold War’.

Two Victorians and an Ice Warrior.

So the stars seemed perfectly aligned for him to take on this Victorians vs The Ice Warriors yarn. It seemed so beautifully, wonderfully him. I’ve been looking forward to it all week.

The result though?

I was more than a bit bored.

Having glanced at Twitter, I see that’s not an uncommon reaction. And it’s been suggested – by no less a personage than the wonderful Pearl Mackie herself – that that’s because it has a slower pace like a classic episode.

But I’m a classic series fan. A man whose first memories of DOCTOR WHO were the orignal showings of ‘The Keeper of Traken’ in 1981, and I don’t think that’s true.

The problem here was the characters – there just weren’t any that were likeable. Hell, there weren’t that many that were actually memorable. The stand-outs were the captain and the Empress, neither of whom we were supposed to empathise with. The only other who made his way out of a sea of beigeness was the cowardly colonel, and even he was such a walking cliché that he only made any kind of impression because he appeared from nowhere just when the plot needed him.

Everyone else was dull, dull, dull!

Gatiss as a writer clearly gets a certain thrill from Victoriana: the way of speaking, the slightly archaic phrases. He imagines that the audience gets the same kind of buzz, so has constructed a script crammed full of the proper slang and lingo, while forgetting to give us decent characters – ones we need to care about to make this episode work – to actually spout such dialogue.

The result was an episode that promised so much, but delivered so little.

Not that there weren’t some good points – the design of the Empress was excellent; while The Ice Warrior’s new weapon was a proper horror movie idea. Obviously it’s a family show so they can’t go too far, but if you think of all the breaking of bones and tearing of cartilage that would be required to kill someone like that, then it’s stomach churning. And yes, a churning of the stomach is something that would be required too.

Absolutely I liked it more than last week’s. Yet, even tomorrow, I think this is the one I’ll struggle to remember.

 

Notes

To be fair, I did squeal with delight at the Alpha Centauri cameo. I’ve thought before that if they had the budget to do that design totally in CGI for an episode – as opposed to the polystyrene of the original – she/he/it would be a great addition to a story.
Once again though, in a Gatiss’ Ice Warrior story, it’s a soldier disobeying orders who wakes the creature up. With ‘Cold War’ fairly fresh in my mind, that felt unforgiveably lazy.
Missy flying the Tardis in this episode better pay off to something. If it proves inconsequential in this arc of her’s, I am going to stamp myself annoyed.
I’m being a tad unfair to Gatiss in limiting his good DOCTOR WHO stories to just three. If you’ve never read his Virgin New Adventures novel: ‘Nightshade’, you should. It’s really, really good.
Not DOCTOR WHO, but his Lucius Box novels are also well worth seeking out.

Me, Writing, in 2017

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A small crisis of family illness, Baby Jameson keeping me up most of the night and – yes, I’ll admit it – a certain amount of distraction due to the election, meant that I didn’t get as much as writing done as I’d have ideally liked this week.

However, with the knowledge that I had to bear my soul in public at the end of the week, I knew I had to get something done.

Firstly, I have now plotted out my Wales story. On paper, I’ve knocked up an idea with a beginning, a middle and an end. If there’s a problem I’m not sure how intrinsically Welsh it is as a concept, I could change the character names and locations and set it anywhere quite frankly. However, I do have a second idea for a Welsh story – one that’s more elegiac, and my feeling is that if I do both I’ll cover all bases.

Secondly, I was listening to a discussion on a podcast about how most blurbs on books – even professionally published books – are actually rubbish. So, I did some work on my blurbs. I’ve rewritten THE WANNABES, FOLIAGE and worked on my forthcoming gothic tale. (HELL’S SECRETS, I don’t have as much control over though). I’ll be rewriting them again later today, and Mrs Jameson will cast her eye over them this weekend, so I should have them up soon.

Obviously though, there’s still so much to do.

I’m now at the point where I’ve had enough of quiet contemplation and have to get on with typing up my new novel.

But I’m sure if I limit sleep to two hours a night I’ll get it all done.

The Run-Out Groove by Andrew Cartmel

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I really enjoyed Andrew Cartmel’s first VINYL DETECTIVE novel, WRITTEN IN DEAD WAX. It’s a geeky and blokey book which was lost in its own little world, and managed to be charming even as it was being preposterous. As there’s no doubting the fact that any story which sees the buying of second-hand records in charity shops launch a middle-aged vinyl collector into the middle of an international criminal conspiracy, is not trying to be social realism. Think Nick Hornby meets Ian Fleming and you won’t be far off the mark.

The second in the series is much the same, but somehow less so.

Once again, the hunting of old records leads to the unravelling of age old crimes, murder attempts, theft and the kind of spy/crime hijinks you wouldn’t think would be wrought by old vinyl. Maybe it’s the second novel syndrome, as there is obviously going to be less surprise this time round – but the jokes didn’t seem as sharp in this book, the plot contrivances required lashings of coincidence and the character motivation felt at times baffling. It’s a novel I enjoyed, but one can’t help thinking it would have been so much better with another draft.

This time around it’s not jazz which forms the backdrop to the mystery, but psychedelic rock of the late 1960s. There’s a bit of Pink Floyd/Syd Barret here, there’s a bit of Janis Joplin. For me, it’s a fascinating period and so I was happy reading through and spotting the references and nodding in a smug ‘aren’t I clever’ way. Although, as a man getting more comfortably ensconced in middle age by the day, it’s clearly aimed directly at me and my ilk.

In short, there’s a lot here I like, I just wish I liked it more.

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger by Stephen King

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In anticipation of the film coming out, here – week by week – are my reviews of THE DARK TOWER novels.

I like to tell myself I’m open to new things, and back in 2013, one of the new things I took a leap into was reading fantasy.

For a span of decades I’d refused to read either science fiction or fantasy, as I didn’t see them as “my kind of thing”.

(Whatever that means, as if you’re reading this blog you know that, clearly, I have a great love for genre fiction.)

In 2013 though, I decided it was time to broaden my horizons.

So, I read Peter Hamilton’s VOID trilogy as an introduction to sci-fi (quick review: held the attention, but had a rushed ending) and then I tackled that big part of Stephen King I’ve always avoided –  THE DARK TOWER series.

Why was I, as a Stephen King fan, hitherto so adamant and actually vocal in avoiding THE DARK TOWER?

Let me tell you a story.

When I was eight or nine years old, I had a teacher named Mr Rees. Mr Rees was an alcoholic who didn’t see it as his role to follow the curriculum, all he wanted to teach was J.R.R. Tolkein’s THE HOBBIT. He would, in the morning, teach Bilbo Baggins in a somewhat hung-over way; before departing to the pub for a couple of swift ones lunchtime and then teaching Middle Earth in a more drunken way in the afternoon.

As you can imagine, my parents were delighted by my academic progress that year.

For me, the whole experience left me with a phobia of fantasy – and of bloody hobbits in particular.

But in 2013, it seemed like if I was going to finally tackle fantasy, then THE GUNSLINGER was the best way to ease myself into it. If I’d encountered an elf on the first page I may have run to the hills, but instead there is an intriguing Man with no Name character chasing his nemesis across the desert.

King freely admits borrowing the character from Clint Eastwood in the Sergio Leone films, but the Spaghetti Western influence is also there in the desert and the bleakness between towns and the suspicious faces of the locals. This gunslinger’s quest is to find The Man in Black, but what will happen when he tracks him down isn’t clear to the reader and – if we’re honest – probably to the author either at this point

However, it’s undoubtedly an intriguing and gripping read, even if some chapters are better than others. (‘The Slow Mutants’ was somewhat, well, slow). But the whole does have the air of a prologue, a chamber-piece set in the desert. A small story, so much so that it’s hard to imagine that this is the rock on which a whole book series and now a blockbuster movie are built. But sometimes you never know what lies through even the most unassuming gateways.

The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker

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I can remember one of my English Literature lecturers telling our study group that in literary terms, Bram Stoker was a one hit wonder.

Lately I’ve been wondering whether that meant he just wrote the kind of books I like and one of them happened to break through.

So, I thought I’d try another.

But on the evidence of THE JEWEL OF SEVEN STARS, one hit wonder is a generous term.

I can’t recall the last time I read a book quite as annoyingly tedious as this. Although there is incident, Stoker’s turgid prose manages to suck all drama and excitement from it, so that the book basically becomes some boring people sitting around a house waiting for something to happen.

A few weeks back I criticised the Hammer Horror film, BLOOD FROM A MUMMY’S TOMB, which was based on this, for some tonal inconsistencies. But actually, that film is really interesting. Having now read the source material, I’m filled with wonder at its director/screenwriter for building something good on such bedrock.

Maybe Stoker sold his soul to the devil to be able to write DRACULA. Perhaps that was worth it. But he really should have asked for a two-book deal.

Doctor Who Review – The Lie of the Land

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Written with no prior knowledge of what’s going to be in the episode – I watch the ‘Next Time’ trailer and make sure I see, hear and read nothing else – and written immediately after my first viewing. This is my unfettered, emotional response to this week’s DOCTOR WHO fare.

I’m a tad underwhelmed, to be honest. I’m not sure I’d go as far as disappointed, but my whelm is most definitely lacking.

There were scenes I liked in it:

The confrontation between Bill and The Doctor on the boat was absolute superb. P-Mac, who has not put a little toe wrong all series, has genuinely never been better. It was electrifying acting.
Fair enough, the scene with Missy had so much iconography stolen from the last episode of SHERLOCK, that they might as well have just cut to Benedict Cumberbatch cross-armed and smirking in the corner. But who doesn’t love a confrontation between P-Cap and M-Gom? Basically there’s something wrong with you as a Whovian if you didn’t take pleasure from the sight of Missy draped over a piano like the world’s most deadly chanteuse.
And – okay, I had problems with it that I’ll detail below – but the charge into The Monk’s cathedral/pyramid with headphones on was fantastically shot and sound designed.

However, there wasn’t much between those scenes, was there? This felt a really insubstantial episode of DOCTOR WHO.

Dictatorship = bad. Free will = good.

You don’t say.

Last week it was Bill’s love for The Doctor which doomed the world, in a refreshing subversion of the Nu-Who cliché that love will somehow save all. This week it was Bill’s love for her Mum which saved everyone in a clunking reassertion of the norm.

Nothing felt particularly new, nothing felt particularly exciting – it just felt like a DOCTOR WHO episode that had some good moments but was otherwise just there. Existing but very little more.

For the end of a trilogy, with so much good that went before, this really was a let-down. As I feared, it was ALIEN 3.

And when you don’t have a particularly good episode, you – of course – end up nit-picking.

Why, if The Monks were linked to Bill’s brain patterns, did they need The Doctor to make those videos? What was the point?

There may have been less monks than everyone thought there was, but still, getting in to the most important place The Monks possessed was a bit easy, wasn’t it? It might have been well shot, but from a script POV it was just perfunctory opposition.

Actually, reading the above, clearly I was mightily disappointed with what we got served tonight.

End notes:

Having said all that above, this is a beautifully planned and worked out series. Something which seems to be just a lovely little character moment in Episode One (The Doctor going back and taking pictures of Bill’s mum) saves the day in Episode Eight.
If Chris Chibnall has watched that tonight and is still of the opinion  – as reports suggest – that he needs to have a brand new companion, the man is clearly a maniac. The text/email/letter/postcard campaign starts here. We must save Bill!

Me, Writing, in 2017

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In the end, it was six short stories I worked on over the last week/fortnight, and which I’ve now sent to my friendly editor, Nik.

One longish tale of the gothic, that I hope to have available on Amazon this month.

Four shorter tales that are clearly born out of my own deep-seated claustrophobia and which I hope to have out in the autumn.

Plus, one other gruesome little number that I need for other purposes.

It’s been interesting to go over some of my older writing and see the things I like and dislike about it.

On the like front, I am definitely proud of my scary moments. Perhaps it says something about my psyche, the tumult of my mind, but I have always had a talent for those passages that set out to really twist and squeeze a reader’s nerves.

While on the dislike front, probably like a lot of writers if I can’t get straight to the key emotion of a passage, I do tend to over-write it. As a result, some of going through these stories now was very much a red pen exercise, paring down and finding the core before building back up again.

But they’re done now, and speaking of red pen I’m sure they’ll come back with plenty of markings which I’ll have to ponder the next few weeks.

Right now though, a weekend to Wales beckons. And I’m telling myself I should turn it into a creative opportunity.

I should do what I’ve never done before and write a Welsh set horror story.

Obviously, I have a lot on my plate with stories to complete, a novel to finish and a novella to write all by the end of 2017, but if I can find a good idea then I will definitely go for it.

My eyes will be peeled this weekend for inspiration.

Tales from Development Hell – The Greatest Movies Never Made by David Hughes

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I’m something of a cinema geek, so reading this guide to the behind the scenes rumblings and the roadblocks of trying to get a big budget film made (or not getting a big budget film made, as is mostly the case here) fell clearly in the area marked ‘my kind of thing’. But even primed as I was to like it, this did still feel like a series of magazine articles on the same topic just strung together. And whereas I’d certainly have enjoyed reading one of these in a Sunday Supplement, fourteen of them in a row just seemed – well – too much. You can like coffee, without necessarily wanting a dozen-plus espresso shots dropped into the same cup.

Years ago I remember talking to an old flatmate about Simon Louvish’s generally excellent biographies of silent film/early talkies film stars. Her view was that the books got bogged down relating synopses for films which no longer existed or – at best – were hard to find. Reading TALES FROM DEVELOPMENT HELL, I could see where she was coming from. Page after page is crammed with plots for films that have never been made (and which, we’re told afterwards, were changed at a later date anyway). Although, perhaps, given that David Hughes is the author or twelve unmade screenplays himself, maybe he’s heading down those cul-de-sacs to try and create an artificial sense of frustration, so we the readers can properly understand the endless annoyance of the whole process.

Despite that grumble, it is a fun read, a geeky read and a read which confirmed my worst suspicions that even the people who made Tim Burton’s version of THE PLANET OF THE APES (including Tim Burton) himself) had no flipping idea what was going on in the ending.