Author: Chris Scullion

Chris Scullion is a Scottish video games journalist who's been covering video games professionally for 16 years. For the first six years of his career he worked at the Official Nintendo Magazine in the UK, then became the Games Editor of CVG before its untimely end. After setting up his own site, Tired Old Hack, Chris then joined Video Games Chronicle (VGC) where he is currently Features Editor. He has a passion for retro games and cataloguing their history, hence his ongoing series of console encyclopedia books (search his name on Amazon).

The Company Of Wolves (1984)

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Director: Neil Jordan

Starring: Sarah Patterson, Angela Lansbury, Micha Bergese, David Warner

“Never stray from the path, never eat a windfall apple and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle.” (Granny, The Company Of Wolves)

Director Neil Jordan is perhaps best known for his contributions to the vampire genre (Interview With The Vampire) and the “chicks with dicks” genre (The Crying Game) but in the ‘80s he also lent his directorial skills to a nifty little werewolf film called The Company Of Wolves, a film so rich in imagery and metaphor that its ideas and themes are still heavily discussed more than 25 years after it was originally released.

"Sorry, I'm currently feeling a bit ruff"

While the prologue is set in the present day, the vast majority of The Company Of Wolves takes place in the fairytale setting of a girl’s dream. In it, a small village lives in fear of the wolves that roam the woods nearby. Rosaleen, a twelve-year-old girl, is caught up in this hysteria when her older sister is killed by the wolves and she’s sent to stay with her granny for a while.

There her granny tells her a bunch of stories, which play out one by one over the course of the film – some told by granny, others recounted by Rosaleen to her mum later on. Eventually, Rosaleen herself becomes the subject of one of the tales – a werewolf version of Little Red Riding Hood – and is confronted with one of the beasts in her granny’s house.  Continue reading “The Company Of Wolves (1984)” →

Demons Never Die (2011)

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Director: Arjun Rose

Starring: Robert Sheehan, Jennie Jacques, Jason Maza, Ashley Walters, Reggie Yates, Tulisa Contostavlos

“The truth is we’ve all thought about it at some point – death that is. Life can be painful, we’d like to know that we can end it all if we had to. The warning signs are there if you look hard enough. Those pretty girls who seem to have everything – smiles on the outside, but inside they’re broken.” (Bates, Demons Never Die)

Slasher films have been ten-a-penny since the early ’80s but Demons Never Die is to be commended for trying something different – it’s a slasher film where the victims actually want to die.

Set in London, Demons Never Die tells the story of a group of college students, depressed for various reasons, who have all agreed to carry out a suicide pact. They decide that they’ll all meet up somewhere in the near future and overdose on pills together. While they’re in the process of arguing the whens, wheres and hows of this grim little arrangement however, someone in a mask is offing them one-by-one anyway, annoying the other members of the group who think their chums are killing themselves on their own instead of sticking to the pact.

Here's the lovely Tulisa, double-checking the script to see if she's really only in the first two minutes of the film

It’s an interesting idea (at least initially), but one that throws up its own problems. Many slashers suffer in their inability to make the audience feel empathy for its characters – in between all the killings and screaming it’s often hard to develop a character enough that the person watching grows to like them and doesn’t want them to die. Since the characters here all start off wanting to die anyway, it’s very hard to build up some sort of sympathy for them and think “oh, I hope they don’t get killed”, since you know they’re going to run off and have a hundred Nurofen later anyway.  Continue reading “Demons Never Die (2011)” →

Humanoids From The Deep (1980)

Published on by Chris Scullion3 Comments

Director: Barbara Peeters

Starring: Doug McClure, Ann Turkel, Vic Morrow

Also known as: Monster

“It’s my theory that these creatures are driven to mate with man now in order to further develop their incredible evolution.” (Dr Susan Drake, Humanoids From The Deep)

When all’s said and done, you can’t beat a good Roger Corman film. Corman is the godfather of B-movie cinema and has produced well over 300 low-budget films over the past 50 years, the vast majority of which have been cheesy horror films heaving with gore, titillation or both. Humanoids From The Deep falls into the “both” category and is silly fun, though there it does have one or two questionable moments.

It’s set in the small fishing resort of Noyo, where the townsfolk are in the process of celebrating the announcement of a salmon cannery which is to be built there, greatly increasing the fishermen’s productivity. Good news!

"I think your dog's got worms, mate"

Oh, except for the fact that the company building the cannery is also responsible for experiments in salmon growth hormones, which have spread into the sea and somehow led to the creation of bizarre slimy half-man half-fish monsters that like to swim out of the sea and onto land, ripping the faces off any men they find and raping the women. And, in case you hadn’t guessed, it’s here where Humanoids From The Deep gets a bit iffy.  Continue reading “Humanoids From The Deep (1980)” →

Twilight (2008)

Published on by Chris Scullion7 Comments

Director: Catherine Hardwicke

Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner

“I hate you for making me want you so much.” (Edward, Twilight)

I’ve spoken of my dislike of a Twilight film before when my girlfriend dragged me to see Breaking Dawn Volume 1, but since then said girlfriend has become a fiancée and as such the values of compromise, sharing and such bollocks are reinforced more than ever. It’s for this reason then that I was recently sat down in front of Twilight, the first film in the interminable Twilight saga and the only one I hadn’t had the “pleasure” of seeing yet. Needless to say, my thoughts on the series haven’t changed after watching this 110-minute prologue.

Not everyone has nearly two hours to watch a bunch of fannies jumping about and pretending to be vampires, so I’ve decided to present you with a slightly rewritten version of the Twilight script. I’ve basically taken out all the needless romance stuff and left you with the core story. Enjoy.  Continue reading “Twilight (2008)” →

Beware: Children At Play (1989)

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Director: Mik Cribben

Starring: Michael Robertson, Rich Hamilton, Robin Lilly, Lori Tirgrath

“Tear her to pieces! Bite through the bone! Gulp the blood! Gobble the flesh!” (Glen Randall, Beware: Children At Play)

The fine people at Troma specialise in making and distributing incredibly low-budget films that, while lacking in spectacle, certainly aren’t lacking in ambition and sheer balls. Beware: Children At Play is one such movie, one with a plot so taboo there’s no way it’d be distributed by a big studio.

It tells the story of John DeWolfe, an author who specialises in crime and the paranormal. He travels to the countryside with his wife and daughter to visit his friend Ross, who’s a sheriff in a tiny country town. Ross’s daughter has been missing for weeks, as have many of the other children in the area, and he wants to know if John has any ideas on how to find them.

It's so much like Children Of The Corn they've even got a corpse up on a cross

What they don’t realise is that all the missing kids – Ross’s daughter included – have formed an odd group of feral children who, under the leadership of an older, manipulative teenager, roam the woods killing and eating anyone who steps onto their turf. Sometimes one of them will head back to the town to lure adults into following them into the woods and to their death, or at times if it’s a woman who’s been trapped the older teen will rape her to try and keep the evil seed going. Or something, I dunno. It’s just an excuse to get some baps on the screen, though it’s pretty dodgy.  Continue reading “Beware: Children At Play (1989)” →

Netflix – How to live the American Dream and get the US library in the UK (or Canada)

Published on by Chris Scullion28 Comments

Netflix launched in the UK last month. For those not in the know, Netflix UK is a service that lets you pay £5.99 a month to access a wide variety of movies and TV shows and stream them to your PC, Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, phone or tablet.

So far I’ve been very happy with it, but there’s one thing Netflix hasn’t sorted yet in the UK – the size of the library. There’s a perfectly good reason for this – while Netflix has been going for a long time in the US and has spent years building a bunch of license agreements with various film and TV studios, in the UK they’re basically starting from scratch again and so they have to sort out all these licenses all over again.

This is why Netflix UK has, for example, around 80 movies in its horror category, whereas Netflix US has 1680. Little do some people know, however, that there is actually a way to access the US Netflix library in the UK.  Continue reading “Netflix – How to live the American Dream and get the US library in the UK (or Canada)” →

Aliens (1986)

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Director: James Cameron

Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, Carrie Henn

“We’d better get back, cause it’ll be dark soon and they mostly come at night. Mostly.” (Newt, Aliens)

It’s very rare that a sequel not only offers a complete change of pace from that of its predecessor but also manages to match it in terms of quality. Aliens is one such film, one that has a very different feel to Alien but is still a fantastic film regardless.

After her epic battle with the Alien at the end of the first movie, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) takes a well-deserved rest in her ship’s hypersleep chamber. Turns out she was a little too tired though, because she remains asleep in suspended animation for 57 years and by the time she’s found by a salvage ship and brought back to the company she used to work for she’s told her 10-year-old daughter has died of old age.

Safe to say, Ronaldinho's dentist had a hell of a job ahead of her

The company doesn’t believe Ripley’s stories about the parasites they found on the planet in the first film, explaining to her that there’s a colony of people living there now and they haven’t reported any problems. They suspend her from her duties for destroying their pricey mining ship in the first film, and tell her to go see a psychiatrist. That is, until a few months later, when they come crawling back and tell her that they can’t get in touch with the colonists on the planet and have the feeling something’s wrong. Hmmm, wonder what it could be, hope they’re alright.  Continue reading “Aliens (1986)” →

Alien (1979)

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Director: Ridley Scott

Starring: Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, Veronica Cartwright

“We’ll move in pairs. We’ll go step by step and cut off every bulkhead and every vent until we have it cornered. And then we’ll blow it the fuck out into space. Is that acceptable to you?” (Ripley, Alien)

It speaks volumes of Alien‘s masterful construction that 33 years after its initial release it’s still one of the most effective sci-fi/horror hybrids ever made. While many sci-fi films of its era look dated beyond belief these days, Alien‘s unique style and pacing ensure it still holds its own (and usually comes out on top) among today’s similar offerings.

It tells the story of the Nostromo, a mining ship that intercepts a strange SOS signal from a nearby planet. Waking from hypersleep, the crew of the Nostromo land on the planet to investigate. There they find a deadly parasite that infects a crew member and uses his body as a host to infiltrate the ship, at which point it begins systematically killing the rest of the crew.

"Come on, the dinner wasn't that bad. I used Uncle Ben's for fuck sake"

The key to Alien’s scare factor is Ridley Scott’s clever use of the “Jaws technique” – by showing as little of the monster as possible, Scott has the viewer filling in the blanks themselves, adding what personally scares them and making something much worse than could ever possibly be shown on-screen.

When the Alien is eventually revealed however, it’s to the credit of Swiss surrealist artist HR Giger that his creation is still terrifying in full view. Its long head and extending teeth are as close to a killer penis as you can get, and as the crew members are offed one by one and the film’s heroine is slowly revealed to be Ripley, you can almost hear the amateur psychologists in the audience feverishly scribbling down “inherent fear of penetration” in their mental notebooks.  Continue reading “Alien (1979)” →

Slaughter High (1986)

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Directors: George Dugdale, Mark Ezra

Starring: Caroline Munro, Simon Scuddamore

“They say he still roams the nuthouse, ever hopeful of a chance to escape, so he can take his evil revenge out on us all.”  (Skip, Slaughter High)

After Friday The 13th made the cheap slasher movie popular, a slew of imitators were quickly churned out over the following years. One notable example was Slaughter High, which was originally called April Fool’s Day but had a quick last-minute title change after it was noticed that Paramount had its own film called April Fool’s Day set for release that year. The moniker modification came so late, in fact, that the film’s title card still says “April Fool’s Day” with a hastily added “AKA Slaughter High” superimposed on the bottom! Turns out Slaughter High was a much better title anyway, because not only is it actually set in an abandoned high school, you can also do some tinkering with your video box and change the title to the far more appropriate Laughter High fairly easily.

Jamie Oliver's cookery class for forgetful people didn't go too smoothly

Slaughter High begins with a flashback in which the implausibly nerdy Marty (Simon Scuddamore) is coaxed into the girls’ locker room by the school hottie, Carol (Caroline Munro), for some apparent sexy times. What he doesn’t realise is that it’s April Fool’s Day and Carol and her friends are actually playing an elaborate practical joke on him. After an extremely embarrassing incident involving a surprising degree of male nudity and inappropriate touching, Marty flees to the emotional security of his beloved chemistry lab to continue his school project. Unfortunately, there he becomes the victim of another, harsher practical joke, one which sets the lab on fire and leaves Marty hideously scarred for life.  Continue reading “Slaughter High (1986)” →

Dawn Of The Dead (1978)

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Director: George A Romero

Starring: David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger, Gaylen Ross, Tom Savini

“You know Macumba? Voodoo. My granddad was a priest in Trinidad. He used to tell us: “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.” (Peter, Dawn Of The Dead)

While once-legendary horror director George A Romero has let his talents go a little wayward recently, the man will always be best known for his Dead trilogy. No film series has inspired more amateur horror filmmakers than Night Of The Living Dead, Dawn Of The Dead and Day Of The Dead. They were the first contemporary zombie movies, the films that wrote the rulebook and laid the foundations on which countless zombie movies, comics and video games in the decades since have built upon. While Night Of The Living Dead was the film that started it all off and created the modern zombie as we know it, its sequel Dawn Of The Dead is the film that many argue is the best of the trilogy. I’m inclined to agree.

Davina McCall zombie and Richard Pryor zombie were first in line at the Next sale

Taking place a short while after the events of Night Of The Living Dead, the original spate of reports of the dead coming to life has now escalated into a full-blown epidemic in which zombies roam the streets and buildings of Philadelphia. Two workers at a TV station realise things are starting to get out of hand and, as they try to escape a building being overrun by zombies and SWAT team members, they meet two soldiers who also think it’s time to bail. They head to the roof, “borrow” the TV station’s helicopter and go in search of a place where the locals are decidedly less bitey.  Continue reading “Dawn Of The Dead (1978)” →