R.I.P.D. (2013) is the Filmed Comic Book in which slightly crooked cop Ryan Reynolds gets murdered by much more crooked partner Kevin Bacon, then gets assigned to work off his sins in the afterlife’s Rest In Peace Department, which means partnering with Old West sheriff Jeff Bridges to down the unclaimed dead wreaking havoc on Earth. This is a stock premise but the results were entertaining enough; Bridges’ sheriff is a role he could play in his sleep but he gets off some fun lines about shoot-outs (“Old West gunfights teach you to watch for the shooter behind the church steeple.”). ”If not for the RIPD, the world would have been overrun with dead people some time in 1954.”
The past few years I’ve tried and failed to make a local cinema’s Nevermore Film Festival spotlighting indie horror films. This year I did stream one of the offerings, THE HYPERBOREAN (2023). This felt very much like a horror take on Knives Out: the spoilt heirs of a whisky tycoon struggle to explain to investigators how their father’s plan to market 170 year old whisky from a ship lost in the Arctic (as if that wasn’t ominous enough, he had to steal it off Native American land, the fool!) released a mummified body from one of the casks that turns out to be not entirely human … The ingredients are there but this hovers awkwardly between a black comedy and horror and doesn’t quite succeed as either. “I assure you my asthma is 100 percent real.”
The British TV series THE FRANKENSTEIN CHRONICLES stars Sean Bean as Marlott, a 19th-century police inspector shocked that a body washed up on the banks of the Thames appears to be stitched together out of composite parts. Who’s behind this mutilation? Why did they do it? Marlott’s never heard of Frankenstein or seen the stage adaptations but he’s soon going to meet with the widow Mary Shelley and much will be revealed … Similar to The Hyperborean this hovers just below winning me over though Bean’s Marlott is a strong enough character I may be back for S2 (the ending twist is also pretty good). “Would we not defy the laws of god to bring back those we love?”
#SFWApro. Cover by Lucas Marangon, all rights to images remain with current holders.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS (1972) remains a much superior version, never dragging even though it’s almost twice as long. According to TCM host Bob Osborne (I caught part of his narration taping this off the air) Tarkovsky made the film after seeing 2001 and thinking it spent too much time on SF and not enough on the people. Thus this starts out with the psychiatrist (the Clooney role) spending time on Earth learning about what’s going on (which is never clear in the Soderbergh). Despite emphasizing people it feels more science fictional that the later film did; a shame Tarkovsky couldn’t make his Stalker equally good. “In this situation mediocrity and genius are equally helpless.”
This is fun and Beery’s performance is full of energy, but it conforms too much to the Frito Bandito stereotype for my taste. This also leaves out his raid into Texas — while I can understand not mentioning that to an American audience, surely it’s what they’d know him best for. With Fay Wray as one of Villa’s many romances. “There is no need to clutter up the proceedings of justice with trivial details.”
THE WILD CHILD (1970 is Francois Truffaut’s story of the Wild Boy of Averoigne, a feral child (Jean Pierre Cargol)caught by hunters and turned over to a local doctor (Truffaut). The doctor’s mentor considers the boy a lunatic fit only for the asylum; the doctor stubbornly sets out to prove the can learn enough to function in society or at least prove his humanity. As you can see from that terrified face above, it’s not easy.
It’s a good serial that estabilshes once and for all that Daleks can climb stairs. In some ways it foreshadows more recent seasons of the current series: the Doctor is capable of playing a long game and hiding his real agenda even from his companions. Russell Davies has cited the off-screen destruction of Skaro as the beginning of the Time Wars, though as the Daleks have long spread across space, it doesn’t feel like that big a deal. “Saturday television viewing continues with adventure, in a new science fiction series.”
For a Brit of my age, the sweets making up his body are quite recognizable.
THE NASTY GIRL (1990) was a black-humored comedy based on the true story of Anna Rosmus; having read it before, I picked it as our date night movie last weekend, figuring correctly that TYG would like it. The protagonist is a bright German Catholic in the last century (the format is a documentary about her case, though they only stick to it erratically) who decides to report on her town’s history under the Third Reich — their stubborn resistance to Nazi rule, their defense of the Jews, the Church doing the right thing — but it soon becomes clear that the popular history she knows is a printed legend and the truth is much darker.
As 
As a rape/revenge premise this doesn’t make much sense but I agree 
