One of the questions this rewatch has made me reconsider is this: when did Doctor Who start to make its monsters complicated? In the new series, it’s commonplace: Peter Capaldi’s final season kicks off with five back-to-back episodes where an apparent monster turns out to be merely misunderstood. The trope […]
Pop Culture
Doctor Who A-Z #06: The Aztecs (1964)
There’s a notorious moment in Timewyrm: Genesis, the first of Virgin Books’s New Adventures – stories marketed as “too broad and too deep for the small screen”, remember – where the Doctor scolds Ace for not wanting to be sexually assaulted by a paedophile. “Ace, these trips of ours are […]
Doctor Who A-Z #05: The Keys of Marinus (1964)
The Keys of Marinus is the first Terry Nation story. I know, I know he’s already done The Daleks, and any analysis of the show’s history will rightly record that serial as being more of a landmark than this one. But The Keys of Marinus is the first one that […]
Sayara (Grimmfest 2024)
Fan favourite director Can Evrenol, whose 2015 film Baskin was well-received in horror circles, had a new film playing this past weekend at Grimmfest, and although it’s not a horror per se, there are certainly grim, dark, and horrific parts to it. Sayara is a quiet young woman from Turkmenistan […]
Children of the Wicker Man (Grimmfest 2024)
The Wicker Man (1973) needs no introduction. To many, myself included, Robin Hardy’s folk-horror classic is considered one of the greatest British horror films – heck, perhaps horror films in general – of all time. However, to two of the director’s sons, Justin and Dominic Hardy, The Wicker Man is […]
Doctor Who A-Z #04: Marco Polo (1964)
Watching Marco Polo as part of a chronological rewatch of Doctor Who means confronting three oddities of the show’s 1960s incarnation for the first time. The first, and most glaring, is that this story no longer exists in the archives. During the 1970s the BBC had a crisis of storage […]
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – Season 2 (2024) Round-Up
How big a budget is too big a budget? There’s a lot to be said for being economy-wise with blockbuster IP; if your fanbase rejects the latest mushed-up remix of their childhood, it’s probably better to keep things cheap. In that respect, there’s perhaps no bigger gamble currently in production […]
Doctor Who A-Z #03: The Edge of Destruction (1964)
For its third story, Doctor Who attempted a character-driven bottle episode, a bold move for a show whose characters didn’t have much to bottle at this point. The series needed a quick two-parter in order to complete its initial order of thirteen episodes; the decision to set it entirely on […]
Amsterdam Alert (Grimmfest 2024)
Amsterdam Alert (NL-Alert), played at this year’s Grimmfest, and it’s a hard-hitting, claustrophobic drama/real-life horror sitting perfectly at the 37-minute mark runtime. Directed by Loïs Dols de Jong, this short film tells the story of a young mother in Amsterdam who’s trying to get home to her baby, but during […]
The Black Hole (Fantastic Fest 2024)
The Black Hole, recently played at Fantastic Fest, is a comedy/sci-fi anthology from Estonian director Moonika Siimets. My only experience with Estonian cinema is November (Rainer Sarnet, 2017), a historical, mythic, folkloric fantasy that tells of modern Estonia. However, its cues are primarily identifiable to those familiar with its context, […]