There's this memory I have, of my childhood. It's October 1990, and it's cold. Cold enough that I have to put on a jacket when I go outside to play with the other kids in my street after watching that night's episode of Doctor Who. The serial that month was, you'll recall, 'Lungbarrow', the first six-part serial since 'The Armageddon Factor' and a historic milestone in the programme's history. I'm still thinking of the first episode cliffhanger when I notice that our street sign has been damaged, probably by a car, and absentmindedly kick it.
In my head I am recreating a frame from Frank Miller and David Mazuchelli's Batman: Year One, which I had recently received as a birthday present due to my absolute obsession with Tim Burton's 1989 Batman adaptation. In the eyes of an elderly woman passing by, however, I am clearly engaged in a wanton act of vandalism against a sign which, before I set about it with my Bruce Lee tactics, was completely intact. I am harangued for my alleged crime until I decide I have had enough and go back inside. It's a small, inconsequential memory, but it looms larger in my mind as the last memory I have of things during my teens being normal.
The memory cheats, of course, to use John Nathan-Turner's favourite expression. It's not as if everything went mad the next day: Geoffrey Howe didn't resign, and read the details of what Thatcher knew about what Jimmy Savile had done into the Parliamentary record, until a week later. But I daresay things probably happened to all those wistful Edwardians between their Sunday afternoons in the park and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Like those memories, my image of myself being hectored by a censorious old woman who has no idea what's really going on is what Eliot would call an objective correlative for the years that would follow, and the attitudes that those years would displace.
Similarly freighted images were already forming in front of the cameras on the night that Howe made his speech. Angry mobs in Scarborough and Leeds rioted, spurred to attack Savile's local associates, or animated by rumours that he himself had been sighted somewhere in town. The sight of riot police beating people back from approaching Savile's Roundhay Park flat stayed with many: an image of the establishment protecting its own.
(Because adding 'with apologies to Elizabeth Sandifer' at the end probably won't cut it: as regular readers of this blog will be aware, I am currently working on a book of poems set in an alternate Britain which developed in a way which makes it less disabled by nostalgia than our own. One key feature of this alternate timeline is that Jeremy Brett, rather than Colin Baker, replaces Peter Davison as the Doctor, and Andrew Cartmel takes over as Script Editor a couple of years early, resulting in Lungbarrow being made for television and the British as a whole becoming less hung up on reproductive futurism. It thus proved irresistible to write at least one entry about this alternate Britain [which I am calling 'Albia' as a working label] as a pastiche of a TARDIS Eruditorum entry [indeed the opening paragraph is a straight lift from Sandifer's essay on The Twin Dilemma, lightly edited to remove the reference to 'Doctor in Distress', as the Hiatus never occurs in the Albian timeline, and to tidy up the rhythm of the paragraph after cutting out a large chunk of it]. Needless to say it would be a pale imitation of the original even if it weren't about a version of a serial which never actually aired in the timeline we inhabit, and you should all go and read the original, and Last War in Albion and Neoreaction: a Basilisk too. All three works have been a massive influence on the current project.)
It is January 5th, 1985. Band Aid are at number one with "Do They Know It's Christmas". They remain at number one throughout this story, with Wham! at number two with another Christmas song. Foreigner, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Tears for Fears, and Ray Parker Jr. are also in the charts, the last, of course, with the theme from Ghostbusters.
In news, since we last looked at a story the Miners' Strike has reached a conclusion, rioting breaks out in Wolverhampton, David Jenkins is appointed Bishop of Durham, to the despair of conservative Christians, and the IRA succeed in bombing the Brighton hotel where many top Conservative politicians are staying for that party's annual conference: though they fail to kill anyone they succeed in injuring Margaret Thatcher so severely she has to spend the rest of her time as PM in a wheelchair. This has two consequences for her: the first is, once the initial wave of sympathy dies down and politics-as-usual reasserts itself, a rash of cartoons and tabloid front covers depicting her as Davros, which would never see print today. The second, much more sinister consequence is that Jimmy Savile starts spending a lot more time at 10 Downing Street, showing the Prime Minister the same 'care and attention' he lavished on disabled children at Stoke Mandeville.
Incidentally, in the wake of the attack, the IRA taunt Thatcher with the statement 'you have to be lucky every time. We only have to be lucky once', a statement which later becomes popular on the Internet as an inspirational quote misattributed to Thatcher herself. History is weird like that.
And speaking of history being weird, on television: Time and the Rani. The main line of criticism of this episode is that the Rani doesn't get much of a backstory, and that introducing a new enemy in the same story where the Doctor regenerates is too much to expect that story to do. Which can be easily refuted by pointing at the Pertwee era, specifically of course the fact that the Autons get introduced in Pertwee's first outing, and the fact that we get laughably little backstory on the Master in 'Terror of the Autons' beyond the fact that he's a bad guy and the Timelords need the Doctor's help to stop him. But actually it can be refuted even more easily than that: it can be refuted by the fact that this episode does it.
And it does it in a way that achieves both goals: the Doctor and the Rani's verbal sparring (once the Doctor recovers enough from his post-regeneration/post-TARDIS attack amnesia and realises the Rani is only pretending to be Peri) is used both to introduce the Rani and to establish the character of Jeremy Brett's Doctor. What's interesting is how sympathetic the Rani is in this exchange, with Brett's Doctor giving his lines a tone of sneering condescension towards his intellectual rival, and never allowing the audience to entirely take comfort in the idea that the Doctor is doing this only to get a reaction. Compared with the Fifth Doctor's almost pathological niceness this is a thrilling change, and one which helps establish the tone throughout Brett's tenure. From his earliest meetings with Cartmel and Nathan-Turner about taking the role, Brett had stressed that he wanted to play up the Doctor's nature as an alien disguising himself as a human, and he felt that, as he put it 'in an exchange with another creature of his kind the Doctor would naturally cast off the affectations he puts on in dealing with Earth people - the sight of the Doctor being so obviously de haut en bas towards his equal ought to leave audiences less sure if the way he treats, for example, Peri is true kindness or mere condescension.'
And that gets at another strength of the episode, which is how it helps strengthen Peri as a character after two episodes in which she hasn't been much more than eye candy. Much of the credit for this has to go to Nicola Bryant, who finds a way of giving her scenes with Kate O'Mara's Rani a sexual tension which is nowhere in the script, but which makes those scenes one of the highlights of the episode, and makes the episode historically important in the subtext Bryant would bring to the character from then on (gleefully encouraged by Brett). But Peri is also shown as the Doctor's physical peer, as she is able to successfully restrain him when she thinks he is attacking her. This scene has its detractors, who feel that a human getting the better of the Doctor makes him look weak, but what do they expect Brett to do? Strangle Peri? Spin her on his shoulders as if he were the Mountain Mauler of Montana? No, it's absolutely the right decision to have the Doctor escape by persuading Peri to trust him. And Brett's patient, gentle explanation to Peri is just sufficiently too patient, too gentle that, again, he seems a little condescending. He may be the one in the armlock, but it seems as if he's trying to avoid further violence for Peri's benefit, and not his own. The resolution of this scene, with Brett inviting Bryant to feel for his pulses, is shockingly intimate for children's television, an intimacy heightened by the decision to shoot in close-up. You can see why French & Saunders would choose to parody the scene by drawing parallels with Bob Peck and Joanne Whalley in Edge of Darkness (even if this did lead to the bizarre 'Peri is a ghost' theory gaining traction in some sections of fandom).
These are all great things, and foreshadow even better things to come, but the episode still has some telltale signs that we're going through a rough patch. The Tetraps are a vast improvement on the Nimon as far as monster costumes go, but after an impressive first appearance you start to notice the differences between the one good costume and the ones that are only going to be used in group shots (though at least everyone is believing in their bubble wrap, which helps a great deal). The Lakertyans are one of the wettest alien races we've met for a while, effectively being terrorised by the sci-fi-equivalent of a bully with a beehive and a stick, and their guns which shoot glitter seem more suited to the Movellans' disco armada than to 1985, and things aren't helped by the fact that Donald Pickering has very little chemistry with Brett, such that his Beyus, who should come across as heroic, instead feels pompous and self-important.
Also, as you can probably tell from the fact so much of what I praise in this episode is based on the decisions made by performers, we are still dealing with a Pip 'n' Jane script. Definitely one of the better ones, but a Pip and Jane Baker joint nonetheless, with the usual attendant strengths and weaknesses in terms of ideas versus dialogue. Indeed, Brett performs a vital piece of alchemy on the latter, choosing to deliver the malformed proverbs with which Pip and Jane saddle the Doctor to indicate his post-regenerative amnesia less as mistakes than as Wildean paradoxes which ironically reveal their true meaning.
Which is, on the whole, not a bad way to look at this episode: a pedestrian, programmatic affair enlivened by performances from O'Mara, Bryant and Brett which are, respectively, a camp pleasure, a surprising delight and a disturbing revelation. Though some people see this as one of 'the silly stories' before the Cartmel Masterplan kicks in and the Doctor gets serious (a reading which is also unfair on the other two serials usually classed as 'silly', but we'll get to them presently), the fact is that all the things that are going to be developed throughout this era of the show are already present. Peri is only going to get queerer (or at least as queer as children's television will allow her to be), and as the Sixth Doctor Brett is only going to get more intimidatingly alien. The difference will be that, as the seasons progress, Cartmel will bring on more and more new writers interested in writing for this new set-up, and as Brett's performance brings viewers back to the show during an unprecedentedly chaotic time for the BBC, they start getting the budget to match. The story everyone tells about Andrew Cartmel is of him being given the job of Script Editor after telling Nathan-Turner he wanted 'to bring down the government', but the fact is that by the end of his tenure this would seem, if anything, to have been setting his sights rather low.
...but I know what some of you are thinking. 'All this stuff about horror movies with Timelords in is fun but aren't you supposed to be engaged in some kind of War on Nostalgia, AJ? KCACO isn't going to exorcise itself, you know...'
They will be haunted by our ghosts, our remnant omnipresent consciousness, our stone-taped traces. To them, we will seem like the Great Old Ones. And what will disturb them about us will not be chitinous or squid-like features, but our repulsive mammaries, the uterine matrices that formed our now-disembodied minds, our glandular inheritance.
As they burn our bones, compressed to coal, for light, some among them will shudder at shapes in the fire: a wet red hole pierced with ivory, which screams; a head crowning, smeared with its caul; the sucking nightmare of a human kiss.
And they will be revolted.
So in the first part of this series we compared the Doctor to Bernard Quatermass and ended with a remarkable fantasia about the early arrival of the Cartmel Era making Britain a Utopia; in our second instalment we encountered a charming Sylvester McCoy and a naked, hooting Jim Broadbent; then yesterday we got serious for a moment and examined the cultural insensitivity of 1970s horror. But the greatest revelation has been saved for this post, for
8. There's a movie where the Valeyard fucks a tree
In 'Mel' we first encounter Jayston's character jogging in the woods near his home. This immediately positions him as a figure of suspicion - in the 1970s the only people who jogged in the UK were Jimmy Savile and people planning to overthrow the government in a military coup. The first sign that Jayston's character might be closer to the former than the latter comes when he notices a particularly sexy dead thing by the side of the road - the similarities end there, however, as this turns out to be the corpse of a tree rather than, say, that of a former Prime Minister. An enamoured Jayston takes the tree home with him and sets it up in pride of place in his living room, much to the dismay of his wife, played by Joan Collins. Now, personally, if I had 1970s, in her prime Joan Collins in the house I wouldn't be picking up strange pieces of foliage and taking them home with me, but then again I'm not one of the protagonists in a 1970s portmanteau horror picture.
Anyway, the tree - which Jayston and Collins christen 'Mel' after noticing some graffiti carved in its bark - turns out not to be anywhere near as dead as it seems, and begins working on a scheme to be rid of its rival for the future Valeyard's affections. Eventually, the diabolical dryad succeeds in its aim, though not before we're treated to a dream sequence in which the tree's hand-like branches mangle Collins' breasts - honestly Mel, do you think you're in 'The Mark of the Rani' or something?
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| Britain: where even the trees are bloody nonces |
Angered at the thought of being molested by an animated plant - as all right-thinking people would be - Collins rummages around in her hubby's workshop and digs out his machete (you may think it wild that people in 1970s England could just own machetes, but what you have to remember is the ever-present threat that Alan Bates might emerge from out of nowhere and attack you with his death-shout). As she confronts the eerie elemental, the camera swings over to Jayston, emerging from the bedroom and remonstrating with his beloved. 'What did you have to go and do that for?' he moans, and we then cut to him back in the woodlands, burying something under leaves. Can you guess the twist? That's right - he was burying his wife! As the story ends we see the oaks-orious (I'll get me coat) Jayston entering the bedroom, where Mel is already installed on the divan for a night of human-on-tree loving...at which point the film thankfully cuts back to its framing sequence, in which Jayston is a patient in a lunatic asylum, under the care of Donald Pleasence (who, between this, Halloween and the John Badham Dracula adaptation, is frankly in danger of being typecast). But the implication is clear - the Valeyard shagged a plant. Think about that next time you watch 'Terror of the Vervoids'.
Incredibly, however, Tales That Witness Madness was not the most bizarre film I watched for this challenge. That honour goes to...
9. The Haunting of Villa Diodati (Spanish)
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| Hugh Grant plays Byron. What could go wrong? |
There's a certain kind of horror fan who will scoff at you if you attempt to find common ground with them by mentioning that you enjoyed Tod Browning's 1931 Universal Pictures Dracula. 'Yes,' they say, 'it is quite good. But of course, the Spanish version is much better.' They say this because they are pricks, but it is true that a Spanish version of the tale of the Count was filmed at the same time, and on the same sets, as the Browning version, though helmed by a different director and featuring a different actor, Carlos Villarias, as the titular bloodsucker. Whether this version beats Browning and Lugosi's effort is a matter of taste, but the version exists and is of some significance.
What I didn't know before beginning this challenge is that there is also a Spanish-made version of one of the more well-received episodes of the Chibnall era, 'The Haunting of Villa Diodati'. Well, sort of. That story, of course, portrays Jodie Whittaker's Doctor and her fam hanging out at the eponymous Villa with the Shelleys and Lord Byron (and also, Polidori is there) before getting interrupted by Ashad, the Lone Cyberman. Of course, the events of the famous ghost story session which led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein and thus inventing science fiction have been a source of fascination to many later creators, most notably in Ken Russell's Gothic, but also in the more recent Mary Shelley movie starring Elle Fanning, and 1988's Haunted Summer, which features a sensitive performance from Alex Winter as the put-upon Polidori.
Spanish director Gonzalo Suarez was also inspired by the Romantics' 1816 meet-up, and set about writing and directing Remando al viento a.k.a. Rowing with the Wind, a story in which Mary Shelley's creation comes to life and starts killing off everyone close to her, for some reason. It's never established exactly what the Creature thinks he's playing at doing all this, but perhaps a clue lies in the fact that when he meets Mary, he talks to her by repeating things she has already heard from the men in her circle, suggesting perhaps that the Creature has come to life as an expression of her proto-feminist rage. That said, he is an equal opportunity killer, as happy to take out Byron's daughter as the Shelleys' son, and saving Byron, who surely ought to be one of his prime targets of feminist ire, for last. Oh, and the Creature in the film looks like this:
And...he...talks...in...that...plodding...halting...manner...familiar...from...the...story's...cinematic...adaptations, rather than the Romantic Hero who condemns his creator in long, rhetorically complicated speeches that Mary Shelley actually wrote about.
But focusing on the supernatural aspects of this film risks making it seem altogether better than it actually is: the scenes between the writers at Villa Diodati and afterwards are packed full of dialogue of the 'they say this fellow Faraday has invented electricity!' variety, with Valentine Pelka's Percy Shelly being a major offender in this regard. Hugh Grant (one of those Curse of Fatal Death Doctors, of course) as Byron is the only character who really convinces, largely because he has clearly decided to just take the piss, which lends his performance a properly Byronic insouciance, especially in the early scenes where he torments his doctor and hanger-on Polidori.
Grant's Byron is lucky enough to survive most of the film, though the Creature ominously states that they...will...meet...in...Greece. Incidentally none of the deaths are shown directly, ostensibly to create ambiguity about whether Mary is imagining the Creature's role in events, but also saving the production team from having to put in the effects and stunt work that would be necessary in a realistic portrayal of Percy Shelley's dramatic drowning. Unfortunately for Suarez the way he chooses to handle this offscreen death results in one of the most unintentionally funny camera moves in the history of cinema, as the camera lingers on the boat from which Shelley will fall
- then pans violently to a shot of his funeral pyre. It's jarring and sudden and probably meant to say something profound, but I laughed my ass off. And you will too - that is, if you can be arsed to track down a version of the film you can watch. Because despite having won seven Goya Awards (Spain's equivalent of the Oscars), this film is extraordinarily hard to get hold of. A Region One DVD copy of it will set you back twenty-five quid used on Amazon, and while eBay quotes better prices they're still more than you'd pay for most Blu-Rays these days. If you want to stream it, you're going to have to wander away from Prime or YouTube to the dodgier end of the Internet. It's a Miramax release, so its apparent non-existence might, like that of Dogma, be the result of Harvey Weinstein spitting his dummy out, but I think it's just as likely everyone involved with this film would rather it never saw the light of day again. Still, good giraffe scene, though. And if you're ever at a pub quiz and they ask what film Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley met on the set of, you now know it's this one.
Well, with that, we've pretty much exhausted the notes I wrote summing up this challenge. Everything else either wouldn't stretch to a full entry (like the fact the scariest line I heard all October was Christopher Eccleston saying 'I promised them women' in 28 Days Later) or need their own entry after I've gone and watched a bunch of related stuff (like that piece I'm eventually going to do on the weird similarities between 'Kinda' & 'Snakedance' and Lair of the White Worm). Although actually, there is maybe one more thing...
10. Romana 2 was in a film with Darth Vader
That film is 1972's Vampire Circus, in which Lalla Ward plays a vampire acrobat and Prowse plays an entirely human strongman who's one of the vampires' thralls (as we find out in a scene where a smirking Prowse destroys a cross brandished at him by the hero). It's a fun film, though there isn't really much to say about it - but it does give me an excuse to end this serial with a picture of Ward as a sexy vampire. Really, it's the least I can do after inflicting naked Jim Broadbent on you all earlier. Not to mention Michael Jayston and his tree-shagging ways.
Note: this is the third instalment of a series which began with this post and continued here. Also, as ought to be obvious from the title, this instalment deals with themes of racism and racist imagery pretty much from jump, so if that's likely to be a trigger for you, feel free to skip this bit.
7. The 1970s were A Very Different Time
We ended the last instalment of this series considering Jim Broadbent's debut as a mentally ill cricket player in Jerzy Skolimowski's The Shout, a strange 1979 horror movie in which Alan Bates cucks John Hurt with magic, and how that portrayal of mental illness might seem a little insensitive by today's standards, but that's not the only part of the film that reads oddly today. Early on in the film, we see a scene in which a character who is - we assume from what we learn later - the Australian Aboriginal magician who taught Alan Bates the titular man-killing shout, advancing menacingly towards the camera with a pointing bone in hand. The shot is disturbing in itself: we are given no context for who this character is or what he is doing. He is simply a black man advancing in the direction of the viewer, silently. Even if we don't know about pointing bone magic, the thing in his hand reads as a weapon, and he points it in our direction. This dude is the only black character in the film - if you can call him a character and not just a symbol - and he is explicitly presented as an exoticised figure of menace and threat.
I'm not saying The Shout is a racist movie - indeed, as the excellent folk horror blog We Don't Go Back has argued, the film can be read as a critique of colonialism, with Bates' self-satisfied pseudo-shaman standing in for the British Empire. What I am saying is that the handling of race in some of the older films I watched for this challenge is very jarring to our modern, more progressive sensibilities - and if that applies to a subtle and intelligent film like The Shout it gets even more pronounced when we find ourselves at the more cheap and cheerful end of 1970s horror - by which I mean, of course, the anthology pictures synonymous with Amicus studios, which would bundle a bunch of short horror stories into a buffet of bloodshed for value-conscious 70s punters.
The first such film I watched for the challenge, The House that Dripped Blood, is pretty inoffensive in this regard: its tight focus on events in a single house in suburban England mean that it confines itself to depicting white-on-white violence. The second anthology flick, however - 1973's The Vault of Horror - is a different matter entirely. For a start, one of the stories, 'This Trick'll Kill You', features some pretty rank orientalism (though in the end it sides with its Indian characters against their exploiters), but I want to talk here about the depiction of Haitian Vodou in 'Drawn and Quartered', the story featuring Fourth Doctor Tom Baker as Moore, an artist who learns he has been ripped off by a clique of gallerists and critics, and sets out to seek revenge.
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| Tom was devastated when someone pointed out his self-portrait looked more like Rolf Harris |
Moore intends to obtain revenge by 'buying voodoo' from the most bored-looking houngan in Port-au-Prince. I mean I say houngan: absolutely nothing in the guy's hut (oh yeah, you know this dude is in a hut) marks him out as any kind of Vodou practitioner. No veves, no Baron Samedi-esque top hat, none of the vast amount of sacred ornament that makes real Vodou ritual spaces so visually dense. I'm not expecting a 1973 portmanteau horror picture to have presented an anthropologically perfect depiction of such a space but you'd think they would have come up with something to make it look like more than just a generic witch doctor's shack. The Bond-does-blaxploitation caper Live and Let Die, which came out in the same year, has some moments of absolutely jaw-dropping racism but its producers understood the visual power of a big dude in a top hat with a skull painted on his face. The Amicus guys saw 'voodoo priest' in the script and just thought 'right, black dude with a loincloth, dirt floor, big bubbling cauldron' then knocked off for a pint of Watney's Red Barrel and a Ploughman's Lunch.
Actually that's unfair on the producers because, as stonkingly racist as the juxtaposition of a black man in 'native' get-up and a bubbling cauldron might be, the cauldron is diegetic. To obtain voodoo powers, Moore must - after handing over a substantial sum of money - immerse his painting hand in the boiling mixture therein, which thereafter grants him the voodoo ability to make portraits of his enemies which, when damaged, cause their subjects to be injured in a similar way. Which is, as some of you will be aware, another bit of cultural insensitivity: the idea is obviously a variation on the popular notion of the 'voodoo doll', which is not actually an authentic Vodoun ritual practice but derives instead from European forms of sympathetic magic in which witches would manipulate a doll or 'poppet' of their target to wreak vengeance on or gain control of its human counterpart.
Still, at least the makers of The Vault of Horror were trying to depict a cultural milieu which actually exists, however lazily and inaccurately. The lurid colonialist fantasia of 'Luau', the fourth story in non-Amicus anthology Tales That Witness Madness, is something else entirely.
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| Look! By the horse! It's the Seventh Doctor! |
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| 'Well, fancy meeting you here!' |
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| Never say I give you nothing on this blog. Where else are you going to see naked Jim Broadbent? |
You may recall that in my review of Morbius I alluded to the fact that this year, for the October Horror Movie Challenge I had decided to watch only films featuring actors who had played Timelords in any televised iteration of Doctor Who (including the Peter Cushing films which, though originally released in cinemas, have become a TV staple - and besides, you can't do a horror movie challenge and leave Peter Cushing on the table, can you?). Well, we're now three days into what used to be the ninth month of the year before a couple of Roman nobs got up themselves, the challenge is complete, and I want to get down some things I learned from it. But first, I suppose, I should list the films I watched, in order, and saying which Timelord actors they feature. So:
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| Don't look so worried Tom, it's only 31 films |
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| Quatermass: the Doctor, but actually British and thus depressed |
