Passages

[Gregory]

Hollywood Reporter article

[colinr0380]

I know it is going to be Star Trek all the way, but I fondly recall being traumatised for years in my early teens after my parents rented out Moontrap (NSFW) in which Walter Koenig stars with Bruce Campbell(!) as astronauts fighting against cyborg-creating moon aliens! I was similarly traumatised by LifeForce around the same time, and Moontrap has many of the same features that gave me sleepless nights, with its dessicated zombies, biohazards breaking containment and copious amounts of boobs being flashed!

[dwk]

Tom DeSimone

[CSM126]

Susan Saint James

[flyonthewall2983]

Donnie Iris

[colinr0380]

Susan Saint James

Perhaps most famous for the Kate & Allie sitcom, but also the love interest in the George Hamilton as Dracula comedy Love At First Bite (I still fondly remember Channel 4's "Blood Lust" vampire season over the Christmas period(!) of 1997, which featured a wildly eclectic selection of Love At First Bite, Cronos, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Lust For A Vampire, the first showing of the Photoplay-Bernard Herrmann scored version of the 1922 Nosferatu and Mr Vampire II! That was the kind of film programming that made a viewer such as myself think that the breadth of what cinema could do with its subject matter was astonishing in scope!)

[Orlac]

Susan Saint James

Perhaps most famous for the Kate & Allie sitcom, but also the love interest in the George Hamilton as Dracula comedy Love At First Bite (I still fondly remember Channel 4's "Blood Lust" vampire season over the Christmas period(!) of 1997, which featured a wildly eclectic selection of Love At First Bite, Cronos, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Lust For A Vampire, the first showing of the Photoplay-Bernard Herrmann scored version of the 1922 Nosferatu and Mr Vampire II! That was the kind of film programming that made a viewer such as myself think that the breadth of what cinema could do with its subject matter was astonishing in scope!)

I remember the Christmas Eve/Day storms in Dorset spoiling my recording of Dracula: Prince of Darkness!

[beamish14]

Peter Medak

This is a real gut punch. He was such an iconoclast with a wide, varied CV in both film and television. I knew he wasn’t in the greatest health for a while, and he looked quite frail when he attended an American Cinematheque retrospective of his work. It was a real honor to sit feet away from him while watching the heartbreaking Let Him Have It

[colinr0380]

The Changeling may be in contention for one of the best ghost stories ever made, because in the end it is more about the living people than the ghostly events that occur. The Krays and Let Him Have It are probably the biggest Medak titles in the UK, getting regularly repeated and acting as a premonition of the Guy Ritchie wave of "British Gangster" and "True Crime" films that were to come in the late 90s. But speaking of crime films, not much can beat an unhinged Gary Oldman being out unhinged by the ultimate 'sex as a weapon' femme fatale (beyond even contemporaneous contenders in Sharon Stone or Linda Fiorentino!) Lena Olin in the manically paced Romeo Is Bleeding!

And I have to get around to watching Species II at some point to reassess it, as I remember being rather repulsed by the 'rebirthing' scene early on of that film! It certainly came across as a much more brutally callous film that the first one, at least as far as I remember, and weirdly influenced by elements of Tobe Hooper's LifeForce too.

It was great to see Severin and the BFI in the past few years (also Indicator with A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg) unearthing a lot of his earlier films with Negatives and the black comedy about ordering up an assassin only for the killer to be too committed to his task to be called off, 1978's The Odd Job starring Graham Chapman and David Jason! That was a film that I remember showing in my ITV region at around 2 in the morning in the mid-1990s and then never aired on television (or received a home video, DVD or Blu release) before Severin brought it out, so that was great to have a chance to see again. Its the kind of thing that anticipates Michael Palin's hapless assassin in A Fish Called Wanda by a decade too!

Now we just need Criterion to get around to updating The Ruling Class!