EarthboundVisitant

Another year, another streaming service remakes a beloved flick that's only a few decades (well, at least it's not a series this time!).

But why? Do movies reflect the society they're in, like today's music? Barker's Hellraiser and the lower-budgeted (but bigger-tentacled) Hellraiser II: Hellbound were iconic because they came from the bloody heart, were made with grit and gristle and were by a man who 'gets' horror and the Lovecraftian craft of how to tell an entertaining adventure into a netherworld.

This remake - like so much in society now - is mediocre and synthetic. Streaming is (generally) the fast food of film, and this is the IKEA of horror. Ubiquitous, machined with slick tools but not made to last and leaves you with a bland feeling.

Why can't filmmakers do what they did with less decades ago? I think the answer is money has completely taken over the industry and creators no longer get any say. Directors and writers (and rewriters, as is so common now) are merely the cogs now.

If you haven't seen them, I'd recommend 1991's The Resurrected (flawed but fun) and Amityville 1992: It's About Time (by Hellbound's director) as they share some of Barker's energy. Necronomicon (1993) is up there too, especially the last story.

Want to know where Clive Barker's idea came from? Check out the short story The Teakwood Box by Johns Harrington (readings on YT).

Yes, Sex and the City could be vapid but it had escapist, weekend-morning charm and captured a fun zeitgeist - the TV version of flicking through a fashion magazine and trying the perfume samplers.

Sadly - predictably - this 'new chapter' is as welcome as a wardrobe malfunction at a Very Important Presentation with your leery boss - and, unintentionally, speaks volumes about what's wrong with today's city dwellers.

Is it too easy to compare the semi-gentrified (but still accessible) late '90s-early '00s NYC from the original seasons to this plastic (and I'm not talking about the cast) über-rich-only 2020s version where we must all worship Saint Woke?

Surely they wouldn't 'do a Will&Grace reboot' to us again?

Oh. The makers spinelessly obeyed all twelve Twitter warriors who claimed the original wasn't 'diverse' enough (perpetually offended who don't know the terms 'entertainment' and 'TV show').

Callous producer business thinking or own goal because they misunderstood the show's conceit? Clearly, the latter. The men are all senile and there's built-in ageism from the girls to the girls - female empowerment is so 1998.

The shoehorned-in (with an XXL sledgehammer) gender studies lectures, narcissism to make Patrick Bateman proud and consumerism (you're worthless without surgery, and then you're still a politically incorrect dinosaur!) make this a perfect 'why liberals ruin everything' study piece.

Samantha must be spinning round the London Eye rejoicing at her escape!

After a while, I had to check this was sponsored by one of those cringeworthy online publications serving endless, meaningless life advice. I should've checked that it was really listed as a comedy.

The real life iterations of these characters are doomed to live perpetually empty with debt and objects; here it's championed (Yasss! Ahem, how many cats?)... or am I getting too deep?

As disposable as Mr Big and blandly shot (the original's glitzy Marie Claire sheen lost), this is staid like the Botoxed-to-death cast (during dull parts, I considered how it'd work as a zombie show), who sit so rigidly they could quite possibly be AIs for all I know - and now adopt men's mannerisms from recent bro-'comedies'.

Death Becomes Her, bitingly waspish early 90s satire, seemed to be mocking Hollywood outliers - now, it's prophetic.

Is that the point this series is making? No, it's too busy lecturing us to be so knowing.

And, just like that, I pressed stop and remembered how they used to say politicians are failed actors.

Now, I'm wondering if failed politicians become film and TV writers.

HANDSOME, blonde, romantic-at-heart, pizza-loving, thirtysomething LA photographer (with own neon sign) who specialises in swimwear shoots looking for the girl of his (murderous) dreams. Ride on over and surprise me.

Part 80s lingerie catalogue, part foreigner's Cali love letter, In the Cold of the Night probably isn't what most film buffs consider good cinema... yet, it's got everything that makes cinema good... for the right audience.

Greece's one-man-movie-machine Nico Mastorakis (had his hits and misses, but you can't say he's unambitious), made this along with a bunch of straight-to-video genre flicks in the late 80s-early 90s. For me, it's his most accomplished thriller.

A Skinemax, De Palma and Hitchcock homage (it even STARS Tippi Hedren!), it's filled with 80s style (satin sheets: check, nouvelle cuisine: check, neon bikinis: check, men's short-shorts and Reeboks: check, Venice Beach, Laserdisc... you get the idea). If you love Brian De Palma at his most indulgent (think Femme Fatale or Passion) and late-80s Italian giallo (Nothing Underneath or Too Beautiful to Die), how could you dislike this?

It even features the decade's underused icon Brian Thompson in his usual 'hunk-with-the-one-liners' role ("you ever get the desire to make it with your mother?") who looks fresh off Fright Night II. Shannon Tweed's here, too (in the waterbed), giving a surprisingly tender performance.

Adrienne Sachs (1986's Miss Brazil), looking every bit the high fashion model, takes the Deborah Shelton-in-Body Double role and carries the sexy, mysterious female lead fairly well. Jeff Lester, coming across as the poster-boy from a menswear catalogue, is likeable but wooden as the photographer weekend sleuth.

While it never manages De Palma's flair, is light on story development and lags in the middle, it's still entertaining enough to warrant a great night in - if you're a fan of the erotic thriller and want one which makes a good stab at actually being a thriller.

Make sure you've got 80s cocktails, are appropriately (under)dressed and have a camera watching over you when you go to sleep.

Like an iconic motorcycle, it's stylish and flashy but hard to maintain (although it's a great ride).

I think Doppleganger (1993), by Israel's Avi Nesher (a man whose career is somewhat similar to Mastorakis) shares a lot of this flick's lets-go-to-town DNA.

Heavily hyped and sounding really interesting (I'm also a sucker for 50s settings), I couldn't wait to see this.

After a great (but too on-the-nose) 50s Twilight Zone-homage opening, my heart fell as soon as the action started on an ultra-annoying opening conversation (seemingly inspired by Brian De Palma's Nicholas Cage Snake Eyes intro but nowhere near as clever), where two increasingly grating characters literally won't shut up yapping about nothing for 20 minutes as they walk through near darkness.

Just as you think the action's finally about to start it descends - yet again - into more talking, which takes so long to get to the point that my brain started wandering by then!

Throughout, there's great attention to period detail (especially for an indie flick) and there's a clever, worthy-of-De Palma tracking shot through the town and performances are above average but the protagonists are so un-fleshed out and annoying that it doesn't matter.

All action takes place in conversation and phonecalls. It never feels like cinema.

The lighting's often too dark (at some points the screen deliberately goes black for no reason), scenes are overlong and it sometimes cuts to filmed-from-a-TV-screen mid-scene for anyone's guess.

A lot of the music cues seem to be building up to... something (which never comes).

The Vast of Night's like a visualisation of a radio play with an interesting concept behind it which didn't seem to translate to the final film. They talk about it (and a million other things), but we never see it.

However, based on the technical prowess in many scenes (especially for the low budget), the writer/director and co-writer are definitely worth keeping an eye on, but I can't recommend this for an evening's viewing. It's just annoying people talking and, in parts, slightly pretentious.

Summary: Endless talking, filmed too dark, infuriating characters, nice period detail and one good tracking shot. An anti-climax, anti-entertainment movie that should've been a short film. Return the popcorn to the cupboard because there's no movie night here. A vast waste of time. 2/10.

Produced by, and with strong ties (no pun intended!) to "Britain's worst director" (and convicted fraudster) Richard Driscoll, this film, which I first saw near its original release in the 90s, has curiously been resurrected from cinema's dustbin for a recent Blu-ray.

Booed off the screen (literally!) upon its limited release in 1990, this fictionalised 'true story' of the Dennis Nilsen serial killer case from north London in the early 80s is told with zero subtlety or respect. Massively re-adjusting events (for titillation, I'm guessing. For example, 'Nilsen' visits a female prostitute - something which never happened and only seems an excuse to show crude T&A) and the barely-a-feature film includes an insulting, confusing end caption.

It's hard to say what director Fhiona Louise (sometimes styled as Fhiona-Louise -- which is it?!) intended, but the stodgy dialogue and delivery has Driscoll written all over (see, or really don't, any of his other epics like The Comic or Kannibal) and the filmmaking looks like something unsure film students would do, complete with awkward camera half-moves and bit-parters delivering unintentional comedy (a senile neighbour shuffles back to his room like it's a comedy-act and we get lines like "oh s**t!" about a blocked toilet uttered with zero self-awareness).

The whole film only succeeds in capturing the grim reality of Bedsitland at the time (purely by coincidence as many parts of the now gentrified North London were still like that at the time), becoming a period piece in a way.

Ultimately though, it has nothing to say, no care for the victims and generally seems concocted as a quick cash-grab.

Ironically (or why it was rereleased when nobody was asking for it?), a big budget ITV dramatisation of the Nilsen case was also shown in 2020, the same year as Arrow's Blu-ray Special Edition. Unlike Cold Light of Day, it decided to avoid all of the gruesome aspects and position itself as a generic detective drama with a smattering of stock-footage for confusing context.

Those wishing to find out more about the real case are better off seeking out the thorough book Killing for Company.

There's also a BBC Two short film from the late 80s called (viewable on YouTube) called The Monochrome Man which says far more - with much greater assuredness and panache - than this amateurish film ever could.

After being severely hyped by various mainstream media outlets for years prior to showing, I was eagerly awaiting and had high hopes for this series.

Having been aware of but not having seen any of Russell T. Davies's seminal work before (Queer as Folk's influence was so great at the time it was next-day playground talk among my schoolfriends in the early 00s), I had no reference point so arrived with a completely open mind.

Disappointingly, it's a derivative and sanitised.

Riffing on and ripping off multiple aspects (and scenes) from the soapy and groundbreaking 90s BBC drama This Life, this is supposed to be a serious, unashamed look at gay London life in the 80s, but turns out to be yet another load of sugar-coated, modernised inconsequence. I hoped for better from Davies, considering his pedigree and that he clearly has good intentions.

Where's the anger, the edge? Doesn't he remember how society and especially the press treated gay men during the AIDS crisis? I wasn't even alive at the time but even I know!

Ignoring the obvious anachronisms (and there are many, including throughout the props and set), most of the characters have modern and 'social media mannerisms', which are completely out of place for the era. I half-expected them to be whipping out their Polaroid to snap food pictures.

Not only that, but the characters are, as usual, your typical middle-class, well-off cliches swanning around without any real life troubles. There's also subtle-as-an-iceberg telegraphing in the plot.

What continually grates is that if anyone working class is shown, they're always one type, as if working class or whatever means you have to be an Albert Square cardboard cutout character. Don't they know anyone from these backgrounds and just assume we all speak and act the same?

Same tried and tested story: suffocated, misunderstood small town kid escapes for liberating city life (but with the AIDS backdrop). Why did they decided to use such obvious, tired tropes to tell a story which should've been told 25 years ago? I guess that's what you have to do to get a primetime slot on Channel 4 nowadays. Channel 4, by the way, is the once edgy channel which has morphed its schedule into utter tripe and blandness over the last few decades.

The mainstream press made a fuss about the 'episode one sex scene', which actually made me laugh. It plays out is like A Clockwork Orange done by some internet cash-grabber selling racy pictures. OK, credit where it's due, it's presented in a refreshingly upbeat and guilt-free light, but it's also completely devoid of reality and eroticism.

Much fuss was also made about pop band frontman Olly Alexander's (of Years and Years, a very mainstream band with somewhat artistic credentials) big leading role but I feel like he could do so much better with experience. He just plays himself (and far too 2020).

A few other big names turn up to 'play themselves', rather than getting into character.

The soundtrack also plays the over-heard 80s pop hits. Where's the stuff that was really played in Heaven at the time?

I suddenly got it: this show isn't for people who've lived through - and in - the inescapable (even today) shadow of the AIDS crisis; this is for your average viewer, sanitised and sugarcoated, without any of the real drama involved.

Following the pre-release press coverage about the show with great anticipation, a radio show interviewed a called handler from a British gay men's switchboard at the time and it struck me that would've made a much more interesting starting point for this series. Imagine if it had been told from the switchboard operator's POV (and the characters connected to the calls from it) as the crisis slowly unfolds?

Ultimately, there IS a story to be told here, but it's not this. This is just too bland and derivative, no matter how noble the creators' intensions.

If you're interested in this era, I recommend seeking a documentary from the time called '40 Minutes: The London Lighthouse'. There, you can see the real stories and people on the frontline, and get a feeling of how devastating it was (and realise how bland this is).