The Summer of 2002. West Virginia, USA. Desmond Harrington, Eliza Dushku and four very pretty young friends take a wrong turn. Stranded in the woods, the kids are attacked by a clan of hideously deformed cannibal Hillbillies, and are horribly slaughtered, one by one. From such inaspicious beginnings a mighty horror franchise was born, and with it, one writer’s love affair with all things Wrong Turn.
However one feels about the franchise at large, Rob Schmidt’s Wrong Turn (2003)is a genuinely solid backwoods slasher movie; Deliverance for teens. Desmond Harrington (Dexter) and Eliza Dushku are an engaging pair of leads, the former showing promise, and the latter delivering a strong and spirited performance as final girl Jessie. The story is fast-paced fun, the kills gory and inventive. The late great Stan Winston’s make-up effects for his deformed Hillbllies look tremendous. Coming at the end of an era in which much of horror was silly and ironic (the post-Scream effect), Wrong Turn was a refreshing throwback. With an explosive finale and plenty of action, it’s a gem in the overpopulated but rich backwoods slasher subgenre – by no coincidence, my favourite horror subgenre.
Wrong Turn (2003)
The immediate sequel is a different beast. It opens with American Idol finalist Kimberly Caldwell (no idea then, even less now) speeding a swanky sports car down a lonely West Virginian road. There she is intercepted by the cannibalistic locals and sliced in two, like a sausage. Joe Lynch’s sequel did not inherit its predecessor’s sense of grit and seriousness, then. Filming a reality TV show in the woods, contestants and film crew alike are beset by the angry cannibals. What its Leatherface wannabes don’t anticipate, however, is Henry Rollins being there to put a stop to their nonsense. Rollins may not be the most accomplished actor, but his Dale Murphy is a presence to be reckoned with. His gory encounter with Three-Finger and the old gas station attendant (Wayne Robson) is a highlight. If one can overlook the horrible acting and rubbish script, there’s a lot of fun to be had. Watching Henry Rollins turn the tables on the Hillbillies is a joy; like a low-rent Dennis Hopper inTheTexas Chainsaw Massacre 2.Wrong Turn 2: Dead End should have been just that for the franchise, but there was more to come. But first, its lowest ebb.
I can barely remember ever watching Wrong Turn 3 (2009),it’s so forgettable. Tamer Hassan is amongst a gang of prison escapees who find themselves lost in cannibal country. “What you don’t see will kill you,” runs the tagline. In this case, what you don’t see will vastly improve your life. The film also managed to kill off most of its human-noshing hicks, meaning that the only way the franchise could go from there was backwards.
Wrong Turn 3 (2009)
Thankfully,Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings (2011)was a return to form. That ‘form’ is only Wrong Turn 2, but there’s little chance of you forgetting about Wrong Turn 4 anytime soon. Especially not during that fondue scene. A prequel which tells how the monstrous man-eaters came to be, Bloody Beginnings is set in a dilapidated old mental hospital in the snowy middle of nowhere, and sees the cannibals – yes, you guessed it – picking off a group of youths one by one. It’s tasteless, unpleasant and shockingly violent.If Deliverance, Southern Comfort and The Hills Have Eyes are prime steak, Wrong Turn 2 – 6 are the equivalent of a greasy burger. You know it’s bad for you, but it tastes so good. With that in mind, you’re probably going to end up with a serious heart attack if you attempt a box set marathon (maybe swap the third instalment for something healthier, like a salad orThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre).
Don’t expect a sudden change in tack from the second prequel,Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines (2012). It’s cheaper, crueller and stupider than ever. In it, the cannibal clan are adopted by local psychopath Doug Bradley. When their mentor is arrested, the Hillbillies attack the unsuspecting town and its residents, picking them off – again – one by one. There’s nothing to match the fondue scene in terms of inventiveness, but the kill sequence here is remarkably mean-spirited. As the only name actor (we’re not counting Roxanne McKee from Hollyoaks) Bradley is fun to watch. It’s a waste of his talent, but he does go around poking out eyes and threatening to cut off people’s “titties” like the Marquis De Sade reborn. Once more, there’s the sense of betraying one’s critical faculties as I enjoyed a movie that I knew was cynical, lazy and not all that good. But then there’s a cannibal riding a thresher over someone’s head, Three Finger feeding a girl her own intestines and the world’s most incompetent cop. Even the filmmakers knew that they were taking the piss with this one. “Another Wrong Turn?” one character says to another. Yes, another, and there’d be more to come:
Finally (until 2021) – Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort. It may be the fifth sequel, but Valeri Milev’s entry in the series gives off heavy reboot vibes. Concerning a young man and his friends taking off to a luxury guest house in the woods, Danny (Anthony Ilot) discoversthat his long-lost family are a clan of woodland cannibals, led by the charming Sally (Sadie Katz). While Last Resort tried to take the franchise in a fresh new direction, it ultimately didn’t go anywhere at all – driving the series into a shallow grave.
Wrong Turn 6: The Last Resort (2014)
And yet, in spite of the flops and the low points, I love the Wrong Turn series. There’s Desmond Harrington, Eliza Dushku, Henry Rollins and Doug Bradley. Wayne Robson is the most perfectly cast gas station attendant in all of horror cinema. There’s an American Idol cut in twain. There’s Stan Winston’s monster designs and an enormous amount of blood and gore. There’s an actor whose name is genuinely ‘Texas Battle’. And, if, if you like that sort of thing, there’s one of the greatest horror movie theme songs ever in The Blackout City Kids’ Wrong Turn.“Somebody help me,” the over-the-top tune goes, “I made a mistake. I think I took a wrong turn.”
The franchise, with every entry, would get cheaper, nastier and dumber. As a film fan and professional critic, I should have hated Wrong Turn and its exploitative, cash-grab filmmaking. But I didn’t, I don’t, and I’ll be rooting for Mike P. Nelson’s reboot to bring it back stronger than ever. There’s a certain somethin’ somethin’ about the series that I can’t help but love. Some people’s thing is The Fast and the Furious; mine just happens to be backwoods cannibals and deformed Hillbillies.
How did I come to feel so strongly about this silly little cannibal franchise? Life choices, probably. It was the first 18-rated movie I ever saw in cinemas, after all. Somewhere in life, I took a wrong turn. And I’ve not looked back since. Long live Wrong Turn.
WRONG TURN will be available on digital platforms to rent from February 26th, and to buy on April 26th. DVD and Blu-ray enthusiasts will be able to own it on disc from May 3rd.
Ah, telephemera… those shows whose stay with us was tantalisingly brief, snatched away before their time, and sometimes with good cause. Dedicated miners of this fecund seam begin to notice the same names cropping up, again and again, as if their whole career was based on a principle of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. What’s more, it isn’t all one-season failures and unsold pilots, there’s genuine gold to be found amongst their hoards; these men are surely the Titans of Telephemera!
GLEN A LARSON
Glen A Larson will always be known for the massive hits he scored in the 1970s and 1980s, with shows like Knight Rider and Magnum PI becoming genuine cultural touchstones, but he also had more than his fair share of shows which didn’t even see out their first season, or even make it past a pilot. A man with so much creativity at his fingertips, Larson also dipped into the TV movie genre, presenting ideas that may have been intended for further development, but which found a slot as heralded schedule fillers instead…
PART 4: MOVIE OF THE WEEK
Benny and Barney: Las Vegas Undercover (1977): At such distance, it’s hard to tell just which projects Larson intended as one-off stories or as backdoor pilots for potential series, but you get a feeling that nothing he did was wasted, and if NBC had greenlit a series of Benny and Barney: Las Vegas Undercover, it would have fitted right in with their late-1970s line-up.
Terry Kiser and Tim Thomerson are Benny Kowalski and Barney Tuscom, two Las Vegas cops who work undercover in the city’s nightclubs and casinos, and that the premise of the film is neatly summed up by its six-word title is either genius or reason not to proceed any further. Tasked by Jack Colvin’s Lieutenant Callan, they pose as late night entertainers to solve the mystery of kidnapped singer Jane Seymour.
With cameos from Rodney Dangerfield and Marty Allen, and a turn from The Addams Family’s Lurch, Ted Cassidy, the movie’s seventy-six minutes must have skipped along, and – spoilers! – they neatly wrap up the case before the credits roll. Kiser moved on to the short-lived roller derby sitcom The Roller Girls, before starring as Bernie in Weekend at Bernie’s, while Thomerson featured in outer space garbageman show Quark, and is probably best known for playing Adrian Pasdar’s brother in Near Dark.
Larson already had Quincy, ME and Switch on the air, and would soon debut The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries on ABC, but that didn’t stop him ploughing ahead with two further TV movies in 1978, The Islander and A Double Life, all the while preparing Battlestar Galactica to air. A busy man, the 1980s would be his heyday, but by the end of the decade the well was running a little dry…
The Road Raiders (1989): Written with veteran Larson co-conspirator Mark Jones (who also wrote the first Leprechaun movie), The Road Raiders aired on CBS in April 1989 and told the story of a bunch of misfits organised by Bruce Boxleitner’s saloon owner to fight the Japanese in World War II Philippines.
Larson and Boxleitner (who had come off a strong run in The Scarecrow and Mrs King) were in search of a hit, but this curious mix of The A-Team and The Dirty Dozen failed to make much of an impact, despite a strong cast which also featured Fright Night’s Stephen Geoffreys, a pre-Wayne’s World Tia Carrere, and the Barbarian Brothers, David and Peter Paul. A comedy Asian child, an “homage” to Jones from the Police Academy movies, and a Murdoch-like mental patient are among the tropes on display here, and Larson regular Richard Lang can’t get much out of the material, although you can judge for yourself on YouTube.
It would be five years before Boxleitner found another series, recruited by J Michael Straczynski for Babylon 5, while Susan Diol was briefly on Days of Our Lives and Stephen Geoffreys moved into gay porn. CBS did not opt to pick up The Road Raiders as a series, as America was in the middle of its reappraisal of the Vietnam War and the channel already had Tour of Duty doing strong ratings.
After the failure of The Road Raiders and Chameleons, Larson took two years off before creating the Greg Evigan vehicle PS I Luv You, which lasted just thirteen episodes, but the mild success of Night Man in 1997 brought him back to the table with a sci-fi double…
The Darwin Conspiracy (1999): What if a bunch of scientists found the frozen body of a prehistoric, yet super-advanced, ape-like human, and began experimenting with its DNA to create a new race of humans? That’s a question you already know the answer to if you’ve seen The Darwin Conspiracy, Larson’s 1999 TV movie for Paramount’s UPN network.
Days of Our Lives and Baywatch’s Jason Brooks plays scientist Jack Ward, with Robert Floyd from Sliders as his brother Andy, and the brothers introduce the ancient DNA into a very modern chimpanzee, with disastrous results that sees said chimp develop telekinetic powers, learn to drive a car, and then crash the car and die.
Undaunted, they continue their experiments by turning to humans, but by this point you just want the monkey back, and it’s hard to see where Larson could have gone from here if he intended to turn The Darwin Conspiracy into a series. Veteran director Winrich Kolbe was winding down his career and while there’s some decent back-up from Stacy Haiduk (who would go on to feature in Brimstone, Heroes, Prison Break, and more) and Kevin Tighe, the film collapses under the weight of its own ridiculous storyline.
That’s fine, though, because surely the other project that Larson was working on in 1999, also for UPN, couldn’t fail to succeed…
Millennium Man (1999): Aired two weeks before the turn of the millennium, Millennium Man must have seemed to casual observers like a cheap take-off of the Robin Williams movie Bicentennial Man, which opened in US cinemas on the same night.
Andrew Jackson, most famous for a long spell on All My Children but also the voice of Prime in the Ultraforce animated series, stars as Jake Adaman, a US intelligence agent who attempts to help his ex-wife escape from her new husband, the dictator of a Latin American banana republic. Unfortunately, he runs afoul of an artificial human named ADAM – Advanced Design Anatomical Man – who has been given the brain of a dead soldier (who also happens to have been a serial rapist), and is killed. The end.
Except it’s not, because the same scientists who are now regretting putting the pervert’s brain in their indestructible robot solider are looking to atone for their error, and put Adaman’s brain in another robot – ADAM II – and send him off to stop the original (and rescue his ex-wife). Added to this, the US government strikes a deal with the local dictatorship to capture both robots for their own nefarious ends…
There’s a lot of story in The Millennium Man, but it’s a mess, and like many of Larson’s projects that aired as TV movies, it’s tough to see how they’d come up with a villain of the week for what would presumably have fallen into the “walking the Earth” trope. Opting for retirement, Larson wouldn’t develop another show, and when Universal approached Ronald D Moore with the aim of resurrecting Battlestar Galactica, Larson was given a writer/producer credit, although he had little to do with the reboot.
Glen A Larson developed over two dozen shows and movies in the course of his thirty-year career, and when he died in November 2014 his contribution to telefantasy was noted in the effusive obituaries that followed. Larson was active during an era when the writer/producer reigned as king on US television, but he was far from alone at the top table. Join us next time for a look at Stephen J Cannell…
Video games and gambling really often crossover. This is especially the case when you look at the fact that casinos are now increasing their efforts to ensure that the games they have to offer are engaging. That being said, video games have been drawing concepts from the casino world for quite some time so it is no surprise to see that a lot of video games now incorporate that feel and experience. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a simple game of roulette or even blackjack because there are many games out there that you can play if you want to get the best result out of your gaming experience.
Witcher 3
Witcher 3 was THE game of 2015. The popularity of the games and source material encouraged a small-screen adaption on Netflix. It had a very complex storyline and it also had some very intriguing gameplay as well. Legions of fans swamped to the game. One of the mini-games enabled you to choose to gamble and play Gwent. In this game, you had to collect cards so that you could build a strong deck. The great thing about Gwent is that it gave you the chance to kill some time between all of your monster slaying, not to mention that it played a key role when you were transitioning through the game world. If you want to play poker rather than Gwent then look up online casino reviews so that you can find a site that is able to give you the best experience possible.
IMAGE SOURCE: Pexels.com
Final Fantasy VIII
If you have never really explored the Final Fantasy Series, you might not be aware of Triple Triad, which is a gambling game and it spans across different formats. Ultimately though, you have a 3×3 grid. You will then take it in turns with the AI and see who comes out with the cards that are of the highest value. When you put down a card, you will then compare it to the next card in the square, with the highest one coming out with the win.
Red Dead Redemption
This game comes from the creators of the very famous game, GTA. Red Dead Redemption was always going to be one of the biggest and most popular games of the entire generation. Rockstar have a lot of consumer trust. Merging GTA-type gameplay and worldbuilding with the Wild West is a dream. While there is a great and sprawling storyline, the side quests and mini-games often take up a lot of attention, as well as general exploration. Gamers love being able to indulge in a convincing world, where they can take their time and do the “mundane” things, like fish. Alongside these exploits, you will have the chance to sit down and have a few games of poker – one of the most popular pastimes of that era, a cornerstone of any saloon. This is done in the traditional format and if you think you can get away with it, you can try and cheat your opponent. If you get caught though then this won’t go down well, so you have to make sure that you are willing to take the challenge.
Sylvester McCoy is still fondly-remembered for his portrayal of the seventh incarnation of the Doctor in the last three years of the ‘classic’ run of Doctor Who and his role as Radagast in Peter Jackson’s epic three-film adaptation of The Hobbit. His latest film, THE OWNERS, is a dark and disquieting ‘home invasion’ thriller with a twist that allows the Scottish-born actor to deliver one of his most disturbing and chilling performances. STARBURST spoke to Sylvester about the perils of modern home ownership…
STARBURST: In The Owners you pay Robert Huggins, who appears to be a quiet, home-loving family man devoted to his ailing wife – played by Rita Tushingham – and living a quiet life out in the countryside. What more can you tell us about your character?
Sylvester McCoy: Robert is a doctor – typecasting, I guess! – and he has a wife who he loves desperately who has Alzheimer’s, and she needs a great deal of care. But every Friday, regularly, as old people do, he and his wife leave their house and go off to have a meal. Their cleaning lady’s son knows about this and she has clearly mentioned to her son that there’s a huge safe door in the basement. He happens to let this spill to his mates in the pub and a new guy in the group, who’s very villainous, decides that they should break in and get all the dosh that’s behind the door. So they break in, but we come back because they took too long to break into the safe, so they capture us and terrorise us.
It’s fair to say that things don’t go as the audience might expect and Robert isn’t quite as he seems. What attracted you to this very out-of-character role?
The fact that Robert turns and I get to play against type! Peter Jackson once said to me ‘Sylvester, you’re too nice to be able to play anything bad and I wanted to prove to him that I could!’ What’s always the dream when playing the villain in any film is to try to find the humanity in him and hang on to it because not everyone is completely bad.
How do you prepare yourself for the rigours of filming days where you, as an actor, need to be very physical and very violent?
I’m afraid I’m not a method actor, I’m more of an instinctive actor. I sometimes don’t know what’s going to happen! I step off the cliff and see if I can fly and I’m blessed in that most times I do fly; something instinctive happens. Someone said years ago that I was a ‘bum actor’ – not that I was a bad actor but that I acted with my whole body and my bottom, which isn’t really the British way of acting, it’s more the American way of acting. It’s all involved with that physicality, some magic happens and I don’t know where it comes from! I became an actor when I was 27 and discovered I was carrying this baggage of physicality that I didn’t know I had, which has led to me playing Buster Keaton – one of my gods – and Stan Laurel, very physical guys and I found it was just there. Stuntmen always hate working with me because I like to do my own stunts but because of my age now I can’t do quite as many as I used to do.
Had you worked with Rita Tushingham who plays your wife in the filmbefore?
SM: No, I hadn’t and I must say it was an utter joy working with her. She’s from Liverpool, say no more, but she’s got an amazing sense of humour! Of course, when you’re making these kinds of films, when you leave the set you tend to go for comedy so we became a sort of double act. The makeup ladies and the wardrobe and the technicians looked forward to us coming off the set because suddenly we had to release the horror and turn it into comedy. I adored working with her, we had such fun.
Maisie Williams is also in the cast as one of the main protagonists. What were your impressions of her?
She was a real ball of energy and was really in her own zone too. She’s got such energy and I predict not only that she will carry on with her vey successful acting career but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she became a director and/or a producer. She’s grown up in the industry and she knows it inside out, she’s wonderful. I enjoyed working with all the young actors, though, they were just great, I was so impressed by them all when I saw the film for the first time. The whole cast and crew were a joy to work with, it was great to go in every day and that’s not something you can say all the time in film and television, but this lot were so nice.
How would you prepare the audience for the experience of The Owners?
Be prepared to jump in your seat in the cinema! It’s a sweet love story but the centre of the sweet is full of violence and shocking surprises.
THE OWNERS is available on digital download on February 22nd and DVD on March 1st.
To save you getting lockdown blues, we’re going to be giving you our picks of what to watch on Horror Channel each week. Here are some of our favourites this week:
Tuesday February 23rd, 9pm – Pacific Heights (1990)
This superb film that unveils the dark side of the yuppie ideal was forgotten for many years so it’s great to have new horror fans discover it. Michael Keaton plays Hayes, a terrifying character who rents a basement apartment from a couple – played by Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith – who are hoping to make a living as landlords. Hayes soon starts ransacking the place while failing to pay the promised rent. The nightmare for the landlords has just begun. Unmissable stuff, directed by John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy).
Wednesday February 24th, 9pm – Deliver Us from Evil (2014)
Sinister director Scott Derrickson turns his attentions to a tale inspired by the real-life NYPD officer who teams up with a priest to stop a possessed killer. Stars Eric Bana, Édgar Ramírez, Olivia Munn, and the always brilliant Sean Harris.
Friday February 26th, 11am – Bermuda Tentacles (2014)
Gloriously craptastic entertainment with an all-star cast of genre favourites including Linda Hamilton, John Savage and Jamie Kennedy. The story involves the President’s plane crashing in the mysterious Bermuda Triangle and the rescue mission coming under attack from a giant monster. At least it’s not a shark this time.
Saturday February 27th, 10.50pm – Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (1989)
The Cenobites are back with a vengeance in this second entry to the popular franchise. It’s directed by Tony Randel this time from a script by Peter Atkins, and features the backstory for Pinhead and introduces several new Cenobites to the canon.
Sunday February 28th, 8.30pm – Tales from the Darkside: Beetles (1987)
Season Four of the ‘80s series produced by George A. Romero kicks off with this tale written by the legendary Robert Bloch (Psycho). The story involves an Egyptologist who is accused of stealing artefacts from a museum, thus evoking an ancient curse.
As we have a new entry into the Hellraiser franchise, Hellraiser Judgement, we caught up for the director Gary J. Tunnicliffe, who has a long history with the series as he handled the special effects on all the films since the third film…
STARBURST: There was quite a long development to get to Hellraiser Judgement. A few different starts in terms of pitches. Can you tell us how you got to this point?
Gary J. Tunnicliffe: Initially, I got called and they said “look, it’s not the film we’d like to offer you, we’d like it to be a bigger budget, it isn’t, its 400,000, and would you like to do it?” And I was like “yes, I would do it for $20, a Big Mac, and a video camera, so I’m in.” I’d had this idea for a script called Judgement, which I’d already written and taken all the Hellraiser stuff out of it because I knew I didn’t own those rights, so there was stuff that was ready to be put back into it. So I suggested Judgement, did a treatment and they were like “no, that’s awful, it’s too weird, it’s too strange, what the hell is all this audit crap? We don’t want that” and I was like “you have to understand Hellraiser needs something a bit different” and they said “ok, go away and rewrite it then”. I rewrote it, sent it to them and they said “no, still too weird, still too strange, we don’t get it.” Third time “no, too weird, what’s all this spitting in the mouth and weird Auditor guy and all this”. So then I said ‘OK, I’m going to write two pitches for you” and I rewrote Judgement and I sent them a thing called Hellraiser: Enter Darkness which was a very traditional Hellraiser tale, and of course, they read it and said ‘We love Into Darkness. It’s fantastic, this is exactly what we want” but it was just a complete retread of Hellraiser. And I said “I understand, but I’m telling you now Judgement is the film to make.” And they said ‘Ok then, if you believe in it so much, here’s the deal. You will write Judgement for us and if we don’t like it, you’re writing Into Darkness for free.” And like an idiot I said ok, and they read it and luckily it was one of those nice meetings and they went ‘we actually quite like Judgement, we get it now; we understand what you want. We have a few notes.” And you’re like ‘oh, fucking hell’ and of course, it begins the period of every writer’s misery which is trying to implement the notes you like into the script and ignore the ones you really hate hoping people will forget about the terrible notes. And that’s all I did for about two months of rewrites. It’s always a compromise but I think the movie is about 65% of what I wanted to do. At one point during the edit process, they asked if we could lose the whole audit scene and Auditor, and I said “are you mad? That’s the stuff horror fans will gravitate towards and enjoy, and it’s what gives a different angle to Hellraiser”. It wasn’t too painful, only a couple of months of rewrites but there was definitely a lot of back and forth.
The auditing bit is what sticks out the most. You’ve expanded more and brought more into it Hellraiser.
I’ve been maligned for it and rejoiced for it. All horror films tend to polarise. There’s definitely a lot of people wondering what the whole audit thing is about, but I felt it was important to innovate and not replicate, which is something I’m trying to do all the time now. Let’s not just rehash the same thing, let’s put a fresh spin on it. And I needed an antagonist who could speak again, and I don’t like having Pinhead just turn up and talk because he becomes a bit of a Bond villain – we all know what’s going to happen – so I thought the Auditor would be an interesting foil, and I like the idea of this other segment of hell. They’re not Cenobites, they’re the Stygian Inquisition as I call them. I thought it would be interesting to be in a hell world and see what goes on in this bureaucratic situation. I also really wanted to bring in the idea of Christianity. I’m not religious personally but in Hellraiser II, Pinhead literally says “your suffering will be legendary in Hell”, so we have to be in Hell and if there’s a Hell there’s a Heaven and I thought the most interesting subjects of the film would be that Heaven runs Hell. They have a hand in it. It’s their dirty IT department and no one wants to go down to the basement to deal with it but they have a hand in it. Clearly it serves a useful purpose for them. If all the bad things in the world are being created by the Devil then God will be like “yeah, let’s do that and do that”. It’s a big advertising campaign to get more people to believe in God.
And the original devils and demons are the fallen angels anyway.
It’s interesting, I spoke with someone the other day and it’s like how do you approach that in film? If you were to take two versions of the Devil that I adore: Viggo Mortensen in The Prophecy, this beautiful, subtle understated character in a black suit, and Tim Curry as Darkness in Legend and you couldn’t have two more different takes on it, and you wonder if those two were to meet, how would they regard each other? So when you’ve got very little budget like I had you have to rely on simpler ideas. So for me, an angel – Jophiel – who’s been around for thousands and thousands of years, she could look like anything she wants. It just so happens in this movie she looks like something out of the pages of Vogue.
We always thought Peter Stormare in Constantine was an interesting and stripped back but memorable devil depiction.
Oh, absolutely. I love Constantine and I definitely feel Japhiel has a nod to Gabriel in Constantine. They had the big budget version but I went for the demure, English speaking version. But Constantine’s a movie I relate to a lot. And both movies are linked by Frank Capello, who wrote them.
With this being the 10th film in the series, and with Hellraiser being so iconic, were you intimidated taking it on?
I didn’t feel intimidated. I knew I was sticking my head in the lion’s mouth no matter what. With Hellraiser movies you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. What I definitely decided to do was rather than be a chef who thinks “now what does the audience want on a hamburger? I’m going to put these things in” I decided “well, fuck that, I’m going to make a hamburger I like and cut half of it off and hand it to them” and if they go “this is a really good hamburger” then that’s all I can do. I’m not going to try to please the fans, I’m going to make something that I think would interest me on a very limited budget. So that’s how I approached it. So I wasn’t intimidated in any way, I was excited. But I knew people would be out for blood and there were some who were out when it wasn’t Doug Bradley. If it’s not him it’s not Hellraiser and they were out from that moment. But it’s been nice because you’ve seen people who were like “10th Hellraiser, how good can it be?” And they’ve been surprised. And if you look at Hellraiser rankings, it’s routinely never at the bottom. It’s five and up and some people put it at third, which is mind blowing and very humbling.
And with Pinhead – did you want to play back to his origins or do something different with him?
The only difference I thought was if Paul was going to be Pinhead, he should be changed slightly so it was his Pinhead. So I felt it was a gracious thing to do to alter the makeup, just subtly. I definitely wanted to go back to the demeanour and the delivery of the original Pinhead. I wanted Paul to give his own little take on it. We looked at Peter Cushing in Star Wars – Grand Moff Tarkin – and that’s why we subtly changed the costume. I gave him the robe over the top, the Leviathan cut over the chest. The makeup is slightly different. I took a cut out of the jaw and we had a floating square at the back. Just little things so that if anyone was looking at pictures they could see that’s the Paul Taylor version, because he does look surprisingly like Doug at certain times. Which was weird for me because I’d be directing him on set and at times he would laugh or do something, and sometimes he would smile and his face would be so close to Doug’s.
It’s difficult with fandoms, and now with the Internet discourse, like you said you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. People seem to want something different but something the same as well. You can never quite balance it.
People will be like “there’s hardly any Pinhead in this movie” but there’s more Pinhead in this movie than in the original. Six minutes in the first one and that’s why it works so well. It’s like anything. I used to describe it as a cake. Cenobites are the icing on the cake, and Clive Barker made this great chocolate cake with this lovely icing on it. There was this whole moist cake with a little bit of Cenobite icing. And immediately the studios get it and just want all icing and a little cake. And it doesn’t work. The villains become less interesting the more you know about them. Leave them wanting. Especially with the Cenobites, the more they talk the less frightening they become. So I’ll have the Auditor be a talky character and then Pinhead can be proactive when we see him. He gets his thing done. He’s the sharp end of the spear.
It’s interesting because it starts with the audit sequence and you think it seems to be Cenobite admin but it’s still so interesting and compelling. That’s where all the good images of the film come out.
That was a nightmare because originally that was where I wanted it. Seventeen minutes at the beginning, no titles, almost no dialogue, just this whole big sequence and the studio said no, start with the detective sequence and we’ll do the audit in the middle. Then when they saw it they thought it should be at the beginning, which was a pain as I’d rewritten everything. But I wanted something that was almost Japanese or European. Just start with a really weird sequence. I literally said, I hope people are watching asking “what is this? What the fuck is going on?” I just wanted to start with this pedophile getting a letter and being invited to this house and that’s how it would start. Then seventeen minutes later you’d get the credits. The audit was supposed to be even longer with additional characters. The bone collectors, the seamstress. It was meant to be this trial almost for the audience. Can you get through it? I wanted it to be strange and bizarre.
Can you tell us a bit more about the Auditor and his back story? Sometimes he came across as an unwilling participant. There’s moments where he shies away or is scared.
He’s not a Cenobite. In the grand scheme, I think there are many, many Auditors. The idea was there were thousands of these houses all over the world and they’re spider’s webs. And masses of letters would get sent out. Ideally you’d have scenes where there’s thousands of these bizarre characters typing letters and they’re going out all the time. I had a scene originally in the movie where there are two kids who kick a ball into the backyard of the house and ask for it back and they’re welcomed in, then later in the movie there’s a deflated ball on the front lawn. I wanted it to be that sinister. Even if someone left a baby on the step, it was like even a child isn’t born without sin. Everyone’s guilty no matter what. As for the Auditor’s backstory, it was strange because two months later I’m watching a movie I love, Schindler’s List, and I’m looking at Ben Kingsley’s character and I go “it’s the fucking Auditor”. He’s got the round glasses, the disheveled look, top button undone, at a typewriter. So I imagined what it would be like if Ben Kingsley’s character had gone to hell and someone said “you were quite good at this in a former life. You were a good accountant” and I think he knows the politics and he’s basically constantly surfing to try and make sure he doesn’t get fired. The reality is he wouldn’t be shocked at what they’re doing when he does that reaction but I had nothing else to cut to and I wanted that push in, and if he’s offended or disturbed by it then clearly the audience should wonder how terrible what’s happening is. And those glasses and that soulless face give you that. To me, it was dark humour. That’s what was fun about the character. I was amazed, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to play the character, I was shocked what you could do with a little tilt of the head and the cut would read massively. A look or a stare would get a response from the audience. With prosthetics, what all people who wear them have to know is that your face is already screaming at the audience. People are trying to digest that.
Schindler’s List was a movie we didn’t think would be brought together with Hellraiser Judgement! What were your influences when shooting the film? We can see Se7en and the Nine Inch Nails Closer video. And you’ve worked with Fincher before on Gone Girl.
I was definitely influenced by him. I think as a DP on horror films you can do some bold things. A lot of the time it was things like the sequence when they’re trying to find the lair. We didn’t have money for a big set, so the best way was to turn off all the lights and have just have flash lights. Find a warehouse with nothing in it and just use flashlights, and we managed to make a fan work. So what Fincher would probably do is he’d have the look in his head and have it built and designed, but I just thought we’d turn it black and make it grimy and that infuses the tone of the movie. And if you look at the colouring, we kept the blue light for the Cenobites, and the Stygian Inquisition were bathed in quite straw tones and yellows to divide the factions. Everything was smoked up all the time. I like horror films to look like horror films. I watched a period drama the other day and they cut to a shot inside and it looked like Blade Runner, it was that smoky in that room. You could see where that smoke was coming from. Whereas with a Hellraiser movie and horror films, you can get away with it. We’ve all seen the shot where the house in the woods has light blaring up behind it. Makes no sense, but it’s a horror film so who gives a fuck? We definitely tried to make it look pretty and Sam Calvin did a great job. Try to make a film look pretty with twenty minutes in-between shots. It’s really hard. So Fincher, and Gilliam as well, the butcher with the baby mask, that’s definitely a tip of the hat to Brazil. I’ve always loved his visuals. And Schindler’s List, really. If I can shoot a movie in black and white I would, I think it’s so powerful. Schindler’s List is without a doubt the scariest horror film on the planet.
I was definitely hands on about everything probably to the point of being a pain to the people in various departments. I obviously designed all the makeup effects, but I knew what I wanted from all the sets. And I wanted to keep all the rooms close to each other so we wouldn’t tire the electrical crew. If you can have rooms close you just turn the cameras round and relight. Your DP can be lighting one room while you’re shooting another, it’s easier than driving to another location. With rooms with the coroners, it’s a tiled room and I said we just need some gurneys and one light, that’s all it needs and a tiled floor. I went in the day of shooting and they’d put furniture in there, and pictures and I got rid of the furniture. It’s great with just the gurneys, its negative space. And no one knows it’s a paper cupboard the characters are coming out of, it doesn’t matter; it could be the doorway to another department. Sometimes things can be overthought. I’d done what I wanted people to wear for the wardrobe. I was hands on. It might seem power crazy but when you know what you want, sometimes it’s quicker for me to do it than explain it. I’ve done it before so I’ll just do it, it’s not a power trip. Stephen Norrington is the same. When we did Blade, he was pushing the snow around with the broom, redecorating for the sequence in Russia. The producer said “at the beginning I would have fought him on it but I now know he can do it and he knows what he wants so why fight him on it?” The most humbling thing was we only shot five days a week but we had the camera, so on a weekend I could just take it and shoot some sequences, shoot some inserts. So I asked the DP if he could come in for a few hours and we’d just do it with a flashlight and some lights. So I said “Saturday, 12 o’clock, I’ll get a pizza or something” and that first Saturday I walked in and there were twelve people there. And they all wanted to come in for free, I was blown away. They just wanted to help, they enjoyed it. And the following Friday they asked if it was the same. I said “yeah, I’ll buy the beers, you bring the pizza” and that was the most humbling thing of all when the crew will come and work for free and help out. And those little inserts and pieces are what make it better. They’re the details you need to make a film look a bit fatter. Hopefully that’s why people look at the film and say “it doesn’t look like $300,000”. Hopefully it looks like a bigger film.
It’s the 10th in the series and a lower budget and you get expectations with that but it’s a lot smoother and better put together than you might expect at that time of a franchise.
That’s exactly what we were trying to do. I know a lot of tricks to get around it. I’ve seen people get it wrong. If they’d told me they were going to give me twelve million dollars, I would have said it would be ridiculous. You don’t need to spend that much money on it unless you’re going to cast a really famous actor. If someone said tomorrow “here’s eighty million dollars to make a movie “I’d say you’re out of your mind. That’s crazy. Why would you want to spend that much money on a film? You’re risking so much money. You don’t need to spend that much, you really don’t. You can cut corners. But sometimes you get more by being creative because of cost cutting. It’s amazing. You wouldn’t have done something if you’d had the money but now you’ve done it like that and it’s spot on or it’s interesting to look at.
You’ve had a long career in the makeup and special effects departments. Did you always want to expand into the acting, directing and writing side as well?
I always wanted to be an actor but I knew I didn’t have the looks for it. So I thought makeup effects would be a good sideline into it but I ended up loving the art of makeup effects more than anything and was lucky enough to live through a time where they were the cherry on the cake. Makeup effects artists were treated differently to how they are now and it was an exciting time to be a makeup effects artist.
How did you get started and get your break? It’s something that not many people know how you can move into.
Well, now it’s a piece of cake. I literally get angry with people if they say they want to do it but don’t know how. Are you crazy? Look at YouTube, there’s a million and one videos on there, and there are courses and everything else. When I and people like me started, people like Mark Coulier, who’s won a bunch of Oscars, and Paul Jones, and Chris Halls who became Chris Cunningham, you couldn’t go online, you had to go to a library. Or read the pages of Starlog or STARBURST and find something that might talk about blue screen effects or makeup effects. I literally started because I saw An American Werewolf in London and The Thing – they blew me away and freaked me out, and I wondered how they did that. I started reading bits in magazines, and library books about prosthetics – Lee Baygan’s Three Dimensional Makeup and Vincent Kehoe’s The Art of the Professional Makeup Artists. A friend of a friend got me some materials from a dentist technician he knew and I made my first teeth casts. Pulled my friend’s eyebrows out and did all that. Slapped latex on myself. Gave my sister my allowance so I could paint her face and it started as cuts and bruises and cat makeup then it became old age makeup. I got this legendary book called Dick Smith’s Do It Yourself Monster Makeup, which was where he’d done all his makeups on his son, and I worked my way literally through the whole book, copying the makeups and taking photos, building up a portfolio. I eventually got the address of Christopher Tucker, who did The Elephant Man and sent him some pictures. He invited me to his house. He said what was good, what wasn’t, what to work on. Eventually, he said I could work with him on a project. He was a complete nightmare, like a sadomasochist psycho who probably endangered my health by having me run appliances in a box room, mixing chemicals that were very dangerous in a tiny room in a giant beautiful mansion in Reading. I managed to escape from him and called Bob Keen at Image Animation. When he heard I did six months unpaid at Chris Tucker’s he hired me and said “anyone who can survive six months at Chris Tucker’s can come work for me”. I went to Image Animation and that’s where I met Paul Spitteri, Shaun Harrison, Mark Coulier, all these people who have gone on to have careers and do great things. We were like a band of brothers. You ate, slept and lived at the studio. But it was a great time and I learned all kinds of effects and met all kinds of people. I was at Pinewood Studios when they did Alien 3. It was a great time and I worked my way up the ladder of the company to eventually become a partner. Bob Keen was the one who gave me my start.
It reminds us of the stories of Bad Taste where Peter Jackson made the masks in his mum’s oven.
Exactly. That’s why we’re a band of brothers. I’ve never met Peter, but I’ve got friends who do work with him. Like when I met Richard Taylor, there was instantly a bond. You have a rivalry with other companies but when you sit down you realise you’ve all done the same thing. You’re all these weird kids who liked monsters and monster magazines, and loved growing up watching Karloff and Chaney and all those guys then gravitated to horror films and making stuff. It’s like anything, you can’t just watch a five-minute video and get it. You’ve got to put in the hours. That’s how you learn. Gravitating into directing, a couple of producers saw me directing effects sequences and asked if I’d like to direct a script they had. They probably thought they’d get all these makeup effects for cheap, that’s why they hired me as director. I did that film – Within the Rock – and looking back on it, I realise now that it was 100% my film school. I thought I knew how to do it, I acted like I did, but the truth is I learned everything on the job. Bullshitted my way into it then learned it all. Then I did a couple of children’s films over the years and while they weren’t well known, they had decent budgets and I got to work with genre legends like Christopher Lloyd, Chevy Chase, Wallace Shaun, James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, Dakota Fanning, Chloë Grace Moretz. I got to direct a bunch of really cool people and learn my craft there. But really, I’m about true blood horror. Making low budget, gutsy horror films that don’t replicate but innovate.
I actually called Clive Barker when I directed my first film. We’d done Lord of Illusions and Bloodline, and I called him and said I was directing my first film and asked if he had any tips. He said “I have two things; one: comfortable shoes. And two: just remember, you’re doing the one job everyone thinks they can do better than you.” Which is true and the amount of times I’ve sat on set wondering what a director is doing. But it was a good film school. Predominantly what I learned was how important the edit is, and how thinking about the edit and transitions makes a huge difference. And what you can achieve in the editing room and what you can get away with. What you don’t need to shoot on set – you can overshoot. I never understand directors who direct a scene then just say ‘go again. Action. And go again, action” and by take five the actors are wondering if they’re doing something wrong or if they’re going to get any notes at all. I like to be with the actors, talk to them, and if we haven’t got it in three takes, something’s wrong, you need to have a discussion. That was one of the ways I could minimise my time and make use of my role as the Auditor. I would shoot myself and do a line several ways in a take then I’d move on and I’ve given myself three different versions. I didn’t need to reset, I’d just do my dialogue in different ways. I sometimes wish actors would do that. I’ve seen De Niro do it on Killing Season. Then in the edit room you’ve got great choices. It’s amazing how different they can make a scene feel.
Editing’s one of those things where if it’s great you don’t notice it, but when it’s bad you do. It’s vital but you don’t always think about what it’s doing.
I’ve directed second unit for a couple of people where they’ve fought me on second unit. With Patrick Lussier and his thought is, he’s been an editor, his attitude is you can’t have enough footage for a scene. So I’d do a list of shots I thought they needed but weren’t asked for. When we’d finished by halfway through the day we would just go and shoot some fun shit like stock shots of the building, or extra little pieces. Patrick would love it. They’re just great little bits you can add to a scene, they’re what make higher budget films look better, it’s the coverage. Coverage is nice and inserts are great to flesh it out. Now what’s amazing, and scares the hell out of DPs is you can run up on a set and I can come up with a phone camera and shoot something. An insert for the movie. You can filter it. And chances are, and this is what director’s need to realise now, especially in pandemic and the ‘death of cinema’, is most people will watch films on their phone or on a laptop. So that’s what we need to shoot for. That’s why I tended to shoot a lot of close ups on Judgement – single images on faces – rather than wide vista shots because I knew it would be seen on that smaller format.
Hellraiser Judgement is available on digital download from February 22nd and DVD and Blu-ray March 1st. You can read our review here.
We’ve teamed up with Eureka! Entertainment to give away 3 lucky readers a chance to win both Mindwarp and Pulse on Blu-ray. Simply read the info, watch the trailers and enter below!
Eureka Entertainment to release MINDWARP [aka BRAIN SLASHER], the post-apocalyptic gore-filled sci-fi horror classic of the early 90s, on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK as part of the Eureka Classics range from22 February 2021. The first print run of 2000 copies will feature a Limited-Edition O-card Slipcase and Collector’s Booklet.
In the future, life will be a dream. And reality a nightmare.
In a post-apocalyptic world, one woman (Marta Alicia) relies on computer fantasies to entertain herself, but a glitch sends her to a far-off wasteland to deal with monsters called Crawlers. She is saved by a young rebel (Bruce Campbell; the Evil Dead franchise, Bubba Ho-Tep), but the pair are later captured and brought underground by the Crawlers. There, an overlord called the Seer (Angus Scrimm; the Phantasm series) presides over the kingdom and tries to make life miserable for his captives.
Eureka Entertainment to release PULSE, the slick, suspenseful techno-horror and VHS favourite from director Paul Golding, on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK as part of the Eureka Classics range from22 February 2021. The first print run of 2000 copies will feature a Limited-Edition O-card Slipcase and Collector’s Booklet.
In every second of every day, it improves our lives. And in a flash, it can end them.
In today’s world of modern conveniences, everything we rely on is run by electricity. But what happens if the power we take for granted turns against us? Old man Holger knows. He claims electricity is a living presence, whose voice can only be silenced by getting rid of anything that can hear it. Bill Rockland (Cliff De Young; Shock Treatment, Flight of the Navigator) however, refuses to believe him. It must have been an accident when an electric spark ruptured the gas pipe that nearly killed Bill’s son (Joey Lawrence). And it’s surely a coincidence when his wife (Roxanne Hart) is severely scalded by their electric water heater. But when his own power tools attack him and an electrical fire turns their home into a blazing inferno, Bill realises Holger may have been right after all, and perhaps the time has come to finally pull the plug!
A VHS favourite, Pulsereturns to home video on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK as part of Eureka Classics.
Ah, telephemera… those shows whose stay with us was tantalisingly brief, snatched away before their time, and sometimes with good cause. Dedicated miners of this fecund seam begin to notice the same names cropping up, again and again, as if their whole career was based on a principle of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. What’s more, it isn’t all one-season failures and unsold pilots, there’s genuine gold to be found amongst their hoards; these men are surely the Titans of Telephemera!
GLEN A LARSON
Glen A Larson will always be known for the massive hits he scored in the 1970s and 1980s, with shows like Knight Rider and Magnum PI becoming genuine cultural touchstones, but he also had more than his fair share of shows which didn’t even see out their first season. Moreover, there were times when, as fantastic as they might have been, his shows didn’t even make it to series. This is the story of his unsold pilots…
PART 3: LEFT ON THE SHELF
Battles: The Murder That Wouldn’t Die (1980): Co-created with Michael Sloan, who would go on to create The Equalizer in 1985, Battles sees former LAPD detective Bill Battles retiring from the force and being hired by Hawaii State University to become their head of security (and in a twist that is something that definitely happens in the real world, coach their football team). Battles is reunited on the island with his brother, but he’s not there a week before his brother dies in a mysterious car accident.
Battles discovers that his brother was trying to solve a forty-year-old mystery and vows to solve the case, and who better to enlist than his student niece and her star quarterback boyfriend? William Conrad starred as Bill Battles, with back-up from General Hospital’s Robin Mattson and singer-songwriter Lane Caudell, who would soon find fame on Days of our Lives.
If the show had run to series – and six more episodes were written before NBC eventually passed – Battles and his unlikely crew were to have solved more cold cases, but although the pilot was aired as a TV movie in March 1980, the network passed. At the time, Larson had The Misadventures of Sherriff Lobo, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and BJ and the Bear on the air, and was developing Nightside, Galactica 1980, and Magnum PI, a show about a detective solving crimes on Hawaii with an unlikely crew.
It’s not difficult to see why NBC passed on Battles, but William Conrad puts in some good work, looking for another regular gig after Cannon ended in 1976, but that wouldn’t come along until Jake and the Fatman in 1987.
Rooster (1982): You remember Smokey and the Bandit, right? How funny were Paul Williams and Pat McCormick as Little Enos Burdette and Big Enos Burdette? I know, right? Glen A Larson was also a fan, and in 1982 he created a show especially for the duo, playing on their comical size difference as a police psychologist and an insurance investigator trying to solve an arson case.
Larson co-created the show with Williams, a songwriter who had transitioned into acting after writing hit songs like Three Dog Night’s “Out in the Country,” The Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays,” and “The Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie. If picked up for series, it would have seen the mismatched pair attempt to solve all manner of confounding mysteries, presumably related to false insurance claims, but ABC passed on the project before airing the ninety-minute pilot as a TV movie in August 1982.
Despite Williams and McCormick’s undoubted chemistry, the wacky plot – which also saw William “KITT” Daniels turn up as the head of a sex clinic, and Green Acres’s Eddie Albert as a flamboyant television evangelist – was just a little too wacky, and it’s hard to imagine how a full series could have kept up the intensity of the zany pilot.
Larson moved on to Knight Rider while Williams returned to the third instalment of the Smokey films, before settling into a career that combined acting and songwriting, providing the voice for The Penguin on Batman: The Animated Series and writing the soundtracks to A Muppet Christmas Carol and notorious flop Ishtar.
In Like Flynn (1985): A curious mix of Murder She Wrote and Larson’s own Magnum PI, In Like Flynn starred Jenny Seagrove as Terri McLane, a researcher for reclusive author Darryl F Raymond, who is sent to exotic locations where she invariably becomes involved in the situations that inspire the author’s stories of his adventurer, Jason Flynn.
The twist is that Seagrove is the mysterious author, and on a trip to the Caribbean she comes across William Gray Espy’s Beattie Woodstock, a Vietnam veteran who is kidnapped as part of some shady government plot. Rescuing him, she inveigles him into her schemes as a cypher for Jason Flynn, and the pair travel the world having wild adventures.
At least that’s how it would have gone if the series had been picked up by ABC, who instead aired the ninety-minute pilot as a TV movie in August 1985. Seagrove, who had made her name in a series of TV mini-series and who would go on to become a regular in Judge John Deed, is sparky and fun as McLane, and this is one of those rare occasions where you know that ABC got it wrong about a Larson project, with plenty of material and a likeable cast that could have been a very watchable series.
As it is, it’s available on YouTube in its entirety, and worth a watch, if only to see Larson regulars William Conrad and Eddie Albert chewing the scenery and having a great time doing it. In Like Flynn was one of a series of failures from Larson in the mid-1980s, and with The Fall Guy and Knight Rider coming to the end of their runs, he needed a hit…
Chameleons (1989): After The Highwayman had failed to set television screens alight, Larson turned to Stephen A Miller, a producer who’d worked on Airwolf, and Larson’s own Simon and Simon and Magnum, PI, and the two created a show about an eccentric millionaire who fights crime in his spare time.
As the show opens, wealthy Jason “Captain Chameleon” Carr has been killed, and his niece inherits his estate, discovering his side hustle as a superhero, and teaming up with his former sidekick – the Paraclete of Justice! – to solve her uncle’s murder.
Crystal Bernard, soon to become a regular on Wings, stars as Shelly Carr, with English actor Marcus Gilbert as the luckily-hunky sidekick, Ryan Delaney, and together the pair go undercover – chameleons, get it? – in search of justice. The introduction of a talking vehicle – the Carr-meleon – can’t save this far too wacky plot, and it’s hard to see where the series might have gone after the pilot, which aired over Christmas 1989 on NBC.
Like In Like Flynn, it’s available for your enjoyment on YouTube, but it was clear that the end of the 1980s also saw the end of Larson’s prime creative period, and it would be five years before he had anything even resembling a hit with One West Waikiki. His career saw more misses than hits, but his hits were huge, and that’s a tribute to his creativity; before we leave that behind, we have one more stop to make on the Glen A Larson express…
We’ve got two copies of Lovecraft Country Season One to giveaway on Blu-ray! Just read on and enter below…
Based on the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country follows Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) as he joins up with his childhood friend Leti Lewis (Jurnee Smollett) and his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) to embark on a road trip from Chicago across 1950s Jim Crow America in search of his missing father, Montrose Freeman (Michael K. Williams). Their search-and-rescue turns into a struggle to survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and monstrous creatures that could be ripped from an H.P. Lovecraft paperback.
Lovecraft Country stars Jurnee Smollett (Birds of Prey, Underground), Jonathan Majors (Da 5 Bloods, The Last Black Man in San Francisco), Aunjanue Ellis (When They See Us), Wunmi Mosaku (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them), Abbey Lee (Mad Max: Fury Road), Jamie Chung (Once Upon a Time), Jada Harris (The Resident), and Michael K. Williams (HBO’s The Wire and Boardwalk Empire). Recurring guest stars include Courtney B. Vance (HBO’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, American Crime Story), Jamie Neumann (HBO’s The Deuce), Jordan Patrick Smith (Vikings) and Tony Goldwyn (Scandal).
The series is executive produced by Misha Green, J.J. Abrams, Jordan Peele, Bill Carraro, Yann Demange (who also directed the first episode), Daniel Sackheim (who also directed Episodes 2 and 3), David Knoller and Ben Stephenson. Based on the novel by Matt Ruff, the drama series is produced by afemme, Inc., Bad Robot Productions and Monkeypaw Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television.
Everybody loves a good movie, and probably a few pretty awful ones as well. Even those for whom movies go way beyond a hobby, the unrivaled opportunity to binge watch recently will have left most people reaching the bottom of the list of things they want to watch.
When this happens, there are two choices. You can either start trawling the depths of the streaming services, down among the ones that got two and a half stars and the ‘big name’ is some past it 90’s action movie star – or you can take a break for a while, and come back refreshed and not nearly as desperate.
If you’ve gone for the second option, here are few ideas for other activities that will give you a breather from that movie binge.
#1 Go for a walk
It might not seem the perfect time for it, but if you’ve been inside watching movies for a while, a bit of fresh air, vitamin D, and some exercise might be almost literally what the doctor ordered. The benefits of all three are well documented, and the lift that a change of scenery can give you cannot be underestimated, as well as being an excellent head clearer.
#2 Play online games
If, for some reason (usually the weather), a walk isn’t on your do list, and you want to stay on the sofa, then playing a game might be the thing to do. You don’t have to have the latest console or a thirst for COD, as there are plenty of games you can play, from matching shapes to running your own island. If that doesn’t float your boat and fancy something a bit more old school, you can play popular classic slots games or board games like Monopoly or Scrabble.
#3 Cook a big meal
The chances are, if you’ve been sat there binge-watching movies, that what you’ve been eating won’t have been on too many healthy eating guides. Your break from the movies could be accompanied by a break from the junk food and a trip to the kitchen to cook something healthy(ish).
This one might take some planning if you want to go for the ‘full Nigella’, or if you only have what’s in your cupboards, then a visit to the Bootstrap Cook’s website might lead you to a new favourite recipe.
#4 Odd DIY jobs
You’re bound to have a couple of odd DIY jobs you’ve been putting off due to lack of motivation. Now might be the time to do them as not only will it give you a break from the movies for an hour or so (especially if you need to pop out for supplies), but the sense of achievement of knocking a couple of long-standing items off of your to-do list cannot be underestimated.
Besides, if things don’t quite go to plan and it turns out to be a bit more trouble than you thought – what better way to relax after completing the job than to sit down and relax while watching a movie!
