There’s a very slight oddity in The Tomb of the Cybermen which is all but ignored now, and which is hard to appreciate unless you’re watching these stories in order. It has to do with the Cybermats, the weird robot rat-bugs the Cybermen use as henchmen. This is their first […]
Pop Culture
Succubus (London International Fantastic Film Festival 2024)
Nobody is proud to be on Hinge – least of all Chris (Brendan Bradley), a new father and the conflicted protagonist of Succubus. The film is nothing if not reminiscent of giants of the horror genre in its exploration of cultural unease around sex and vulnerability. In Succubus, R.J. Daniel […]
Outside the Blue Box: A Christmas Carol (2000)
AAll Doctor Who fans know that it’s canonically true that the Doctor knows Charles Dickens. After all, they defeated the Gelth together on Christmas Eve 1869. But here’s a question no one ever asked: I wonder what Charles Dickens would have made of EastEnders? Moreover, can comparisons be drawn between […]
2024 in Review: A Mad Year For Cinema, and For Me
In 2022, I did a roundup of my favourite films of the year, even though I’d only managed to see a small handful of new films that came out. Last year I did the same, and I was fairly proud that I’d managed to see nearly 20 films at the […]
King Baby (London International Fantastic Film Festival 2024) A Royally Horny Romp
Patriarchy, masculinity, the royal establishment, British theatre duo Kit Redstone and Arran Shearing take it all on in this bizarre lo-fi period comedy. The story takes place in a desolate castle ruin in France, the time period is left ambiguous though. In this kingdom live the King, his loyal Servant… […]
Self Revolutionary Cinematic Struggle (London International Fantastic Film Festival 2024)
Gakuryu Ishii’s second movie of the year is half a dozen things at once, with so much going on that it has taken me a week—after its premiere at the inaugural London International Fantastic Film Festival —to begin processing everything it offers. This menagerie exemplifies the ethos I yearn for […]
Classic Film Kid Revisited: Jaws, 8 Years Later (1975)
On November 6th 2016, I started my grand journey aboard The Geek Show with a review of the all-time classic Jaws. The ‘classic’ part was particularly relevant for me as I used to review films as the Classic Film Kid (those words felt nostalgic just to type), judging whether they […]
Doctor Who A-Z #36: The Evil of the Daleks (1967)
Episode one of The Evil of the Daleks sets up an entertaining and unique adventure. For the first time since the Hartnell years – maybe since The Ark? – we pick up directly from a cliffhanger at the end of the previous story as the Doctor and Jamie chase the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #35: The Faceless Ones (1967)
The Patrick Troughton era had no right to start off as well as it did. It’s not just that regenerating the Doctor was an insane gamble to begin with, though it was. It’s that Troughton tumbles into what seemed to be another season of William Hartnell just two stories in […]
Doctor Who A-Z #34: The Macra Terror (1967)
I’ve complained, perhaps a little too much, about the difficulties of experiencing missing stories, so let’s raise our glass to BBC Video’s range of animated reconstructions by looking at perhaps the greatest of their works. By all accounts, the titular monsters in The Macra Terror didn’t look good. They don’t […]