Kinda doesn’t make it easy for you. Normally even the most intricately plotted classic-series Doctor Who story will at least work superficially as an adventure story, but – even with a ticking clock, a giant monster and a madman in charge of a colonial base – Kinda is clearly more […]
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Doctor Who A-Z #117: Four to Doomsday (1982)
Terence Dudley makes his screenwriting debut with Four to Doomsday, but he’s been around for a while. I’m not just referring to him directing Meglos last season, although it is an odd quirk that Season Nineteen contains no less than two writers who started out as directors the year before. […]
Outside the Blue Box: Truckload (2025)
Whenever I’ve done an article for Outside The Blue Box, it tends to be a project where its creator uses Doctor Who to raise their profile. Sallie Aprahamian directed some ambitious episodes of Doctor Who after cutting her teeth on Wolfblood, Jamie Childs cast his partner Jenna Coleman in his […]
Doctor Who A-Z #116: Castrovalva (1982)
One of the morbid fascinations of looking over old Doctor Who is assessing all the moments when the series could have ended – the 1989 cancellation, obviously, and the 1985 hiatus. It could have stopped when William Hartnell left the role, and conversations about the wisdom of keeping the show […]
Panic Fest 2026 – Online Shorts Roundup
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from attending and writing about horror film festivals over the past few years, it’s that the short film selections often end up being more interesting and memorable than the features. I have a real soft spot for short-form horror fiction, and I frequently find […]
DEBONE (Panic Fest 2026)
Is there something in the water at Korean universities? Before Debone kicks off, it states on screen that it’s the work of a remarkable student, which basically means that writer/director Lee Dae-han’s debut feature is of such a high standard that even his old teachers at university applaud his work, […]
Dead Bloom (Panic Fest 2026)
Eco-horror has never felt so timely as a genre. From the rise of AI threatening clean water, to water companies pumping sewage into seas and rivers, there are constant headlines of man-made threats to our environment. At the heart of it is corporate greed and indifference, no matter how much […]
Creature of the Pines (Panic Fest 2026)
From its origins in movies like Cannibal Holocaust, The MacPherson Tapes and The Blair Witch Project, found footage has evolved from a way to imply unreal events took place in the real world into a surprisingly expansive genre. It struggled in the early 2010s when it seemed every other horror […]
Doctor Who A-Z #115: Logopolis (1981)
Like so many generations of fans, my road into Doctor Who fandom was paved with Target novelisations. During the 1990s there were almost no repeats on terrestrial TV, the videos were often expensive or hard to obtain, and the idea of the whole “Whoniverse” on iPlayer was a madman’s dream. Those little […]
Outside the Blue Box: Three Kinds of Heat (1987)
The first thing to note about Three Kinds of Heat, a fairly typical, bargain basement piece of 80s B movie filmmaking from the Cannon Group, is that it’s a film with three kinds of connections to Doctor Who. The first, least obvious connection, is the actor Trevor Martin, who was known for playing […]