The Clafouti and the Corpse

Part of my morning routine these days is to have a go at the cryptic crossword in the free paper I pick up on the bus. On a good day it holds no mysteries for me, but often enough I end up stumped and end up having to resort to an online cryptic-clue buster. So this morning one of the clues which had me scratching my head was ‘Powerless actor gets suspended (9)‘. Any thoughts? Well, quite, so I put it into the solving programme which promptly came back with ‘Alan Tudyk’, the prolific voice actor and cult favourite thanks to his appearances in Firefly, Rogue One, I Robot and many more. (This was palpably the wrong answer, by the way*.) I would just have put it down to a quirk in the software but for the fact that just last night I went to see a movie with a major live-action appearance from Tudyk, to whom I hadn’t given any thought to years. And then only the next day he turned up as a programming glitch. I know my Jung and some of the science behind what’s going on with these weird coincidences, but even so.

I was slightly surprised to see him in The Trouble with Jessica, directed by Matt Winn (this is the film in question, by the way), as it is not necessarily the kind of thing you would expect to find a recognisable imported American star in (Tudyk nabs the ‘and’ slot in the cast list) – a small-scale British metropolitan comedy drama film.

Tudyk plays Tom, an architect living in a rather nice house with his wife of many years, Sarah (Shirley Henderson). They are having friends round for a dinner which is going to be a bit of a celebration – they have managed to arrange the sale of the house at its asking price, something which will apparently fend off the spectre of utter financial ruin (quite how they’ve got into such a serious fix is ever so slightly skated over, but this is forgivable as the premise of the film depends upon it). Their guests are old university friends, another couple – lawyer Richard (Rufus Sewell) and his wife Beth (Olivia Williams).

However, rather to Sarah’s displeasure, Beth has decided to bring along Jessica (Indira Varma), one of those free spirits you can usually rely upon to wreak havoc in a refined social situation – she is a troubled creative type, a narcissist, a relentless flirt, and – as if all that wasn’t enough – there’s a suggestion she writes a column for the Daily Mail, too. Jessica has just published a confessional memoir which looks likely to be very successful, so there is every chance she is going to be even more unbearable than usual.

A sort of type-specimen bien-pensant London dinner party unfolds between the five of them, with quite abstract discussions of political and moral issues, and a wee bit of raking over of old beefs between the friends. There is, perhaps inevitably, a bit of a row and Jessica goes outside to cool off. It looks like major trouble has been averted until it’s time for the dessert, at which point Beth attempts to fetch Jessica – only to find she has been so indelicate as to commit suicide in the garden.

The friends are shocked, naturally, but as they start to consider what to do next the hard facts of reality intrude. Jessica was a minor celebrity so her death will undoubtedly make the papers – which may very possibly make the buyer of the house skittish, potentially torpedoing the sale and condemning Sarah, Tom and their children to perpetual destitution. So what are they to do? It is Sarah who first suggests that the key fact is what Jessica has done, not where she did it – she might just have easily have killed herself in her own flat, which would be much less complicated for all concerned. So… why not just move the body?

Naturally the scene is set for all kinds of shenanigans, with old grievances coming to light, debts being called in, and some fairly improbable complications emerging – and Sarah’s cherry-based dessert taking on an unexpected significance.

The film’s title inevitably recalls that of Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (a fairly minor work, all things considered), and while the two films are both broadly speaking black comedies, the most obvious point of comparison for British viewers is likely to be something else: the Fawlty Towers episode in which a guest selfishly dies in the hotel, requiring the staff to spring into action and keep word from getting out. This film isn’t quite frantic enough to qualify as the same kind of full-on farce, but it generally manages to sustain a very nice pace without becoming too implausible – there are some nice incidental problems but the bulk of the story is concerned with long-forgotten fault-lines between the four protagonists suddenly yawning open and the characters showing just exactly how principled they really are in a tight spot.

At the time of writing, Wikipedia suggests this film was directed by someone who’s been dead since 1949, which is a not-inconsiderable achievement if true. I suspect it’s probably a different Matt Winn: probably the one who is a film hyphenate, jazz electronica saxophonist, starter of new trends, and useful provider of information about himself via his own website. Winn has done an impressive job as co-writer and director, not least in assembling a very impressive cast of familiar faces (and voices) from things like The Crown, the Harry Potter movies, and various bits of other major franchises. Here, though, they all get to act, and very good they are too – no-one finishes the story as anything like the person they were at the beginning, and the cast put the transitions up on the screen.

Underneath it all is the old idea about civilisation being only three meals away from anarchy – although here it’s more the case that some of the characters might be only one failed house sale away from contemplating murder. It’s a thought-provoking tale of what happens when lofty principles grind up against tough economic realities, not entirely unlike Danny Boyle’s breakthrough film Shallow Grave. The film mines this for humour very effectively.

Apart from a brief excursion partway through, this is a neat little chamber piece that one could nearly imagine being done as a stage play. The problem with this sort of high-concept story idea is how you actually finish it off effectively, and this is the only place in which the film doesn’t impress – it feels like it’s crying out for a final twist, preferably ironic, just to cap everything. As it is, the film ends on an almost contemplative note slightly at odds with everything that has gone before it. But it remains a very funny, very smart piece of entertainment that deserves a higher profile than it currently has.

*Hamstrung.

Class Struggle

Schools teach people many things; there’s lots of highly specific information and skills being communicated on a regular basis. The tendency these days, it seems to me, is to treat young people’s time in education as simply a precursor to their working life, where their priority should be to focus on making themselves more economically valuable and thus improve their career chances. Whatever you think of this, it’s arguably somewhat at odds with the idea of school as a model of society in general – a place for children to learn not just the correct way of using a semi-colon, the date of the battle of Salamis, or the atomic number of tungsten, but how to behave as a decent, socially-functional human being.

It’s this same idea which is at the heart of İlker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge (G-title: Das Lehrerzimmer), currently enjoying a UK release after attracting attention for an Oscar nomination earlier this year (it eventually lost out to The Zone of Interest). The setting is contemporary Germany, though it could be any theoretically liberal western democracy. Leonie Benesch plays Carla Nowak, a principled and committed young teacher of maths at an underfunded state school; as the film gets underway, she clearly has the respect of her young charges, even if her inflexibility in some areas means her colleagues perhaps see her as a bit of a prig.

The school is being plagued by a series of petty thefts and the teachers trying to get to the bottom of this announce an unscheduled search of all the boys in Carla’s class, requesting to check all of their wallets (with a refusal to participate being, it is implied, grounds for suspicion). All this happens despite her misgivings. When a young boy from a Turkish background is found to be carrying a lot of money, the parents are called in – but it seems there is a perfectly normal explanation. Even so, a seed has been sown.

With the teachers themselves finding their cash and valuables disappearing from the teachers’ room, and Carla having witnessed some rather dubious behaviour from her colleagues, she decides to take the initiative and secretly records what happens in the room while everyone is supposedly at lessons. Sure enough, the recording shows someone rifling through Carla’s coat. The proof is not definitive, but the circumstantial evidence pointing towards one of the school’s administrators is hard to ignore. The woman is suspended while an official enquiry proceeds.

But, of course, Carla’s actions have set much more than this in motion. For one thing, the rest of the teachers are not exactly delighted about the staff room being covertly under unauthorised video surveillance, which doesn’t help Carla’s standing within the faculty. And for another, the administrator’s son is a member of Carla’s class, and now the subject of bullying and gossip because of what’s happened to his mother. He quietly tells Carla that if she doesn’t retract the accusations she has made and give a full apology, she will suffer the consequences.

It’s easy to see why this film has attracted such international attention, for in addition to being a compelling piece of drama it engages with many live issues about modern society. In the interests of full disclosure I should reveal that the charge sheet has listed my own profession as ‘teacher’ for many years now, and there are moments in this film which brought to mind some of my own least comfortable experiences in the classroom (and I haven’t taught actual children on a regular basis for many years now). Sensitivities have to be balanced, responsibilities have to be taken into account, rights are also a factor, and if people are going to try and work the system exclusively for their own benefit then it’s most likely not going to end well for anyone taking a more mature and principled view.

That’s what The Teachers’ Lounge is about, really – Çatak is at pains to make it clear that throughout the film Carla is motivated by the highest of liberal humanistic principles, trying to treat each child as an individual, respect their unique essences, and so on – at times she seems almost unbearably saintly, such as when she gets physically assaulted by a student but covers it up so as not to escalate the situation – and yet things inevitably spin slowly out of control and the school slides towards a state of permanent low-level crisis.

It’s a worryingly plausible story, skilfully told and full of tiny, telling details – Carla herself has Polish heritage but is reluctant to actually speak the language at work, for fear of being seen as an outsider. It stays entirely in a naturalistic, almost pseudo-documentary style, with the exception of one brief sequence where it almost looks like the stress is making Carla hallucinate, and the story is carefully staged – very early on there’s a scene where Carla is going to some trouble to emphasise the difference between a theory and a proof. The problem is, of course, that absolute proof is really limited to the realm of mathematics. Human situations and relationships don’t have that same purity and clarity of truth, and the film isn’t afraid to be ambiguous and leave certain elements of the story unresolved.

Benesch leads the film with a strong and convincing performance, especially as events start to go against Carla and her self-assurance erodes accordingly. The ensemble of actors playing her colleagues are also impressively believable, but very possibly outshone by the kids in her class, who provide some of the best child acting I can remember (many of them are playing characters with their own names, which no doubt is a trick designed to help get natural performances). Things naturally escalate a little bit as the film approaches its unsettling conclusion, but there are very few points at which the story is anything other than completely plausible.

In the end, the film suggests the social contract – the set of unwritten rules and conventions which influence our everyday behaviour – is under pressure as seldom before, challenged by political and cultural pressures, entitlement, the influence of modern technology, and many other factors. It doesn’t offer any easy answers, beyond people simply behaving responsibly and generously towards one another – but how to make that happen is a question that no known society has managed to find an answer to. It is, as I say, a challenging and disquieting film, but also a very good one.

Should’ve Gone to Rehab

Reality isn’t a story; stories have structure, meaning, purpose. Turning one into the other is necessarily a process of making decisions that add all of those things; the skill of storytelling lies in doing this well, creatively and appropriately, and  – perhaps – subtly, especially if you’re trying to retell events that  actually happened.

There are various kinds of based-on-a-true-story film and they each tend to have their own conventions. In the last few years, probably because of the enormous success of Bohemian Rhapsody, the pop-rock biopic has been particularly in vogue. What you’re looking at with this kind of film is…

• title shared with one of the subject’s biggest hits, regardless of relevance
• fresh-faced newcomer getting big break in the title role
• tick-box account of rise from humble origins to world-conquering success, with profound subtext that fame and money don’t necessarily make you happy
• unflinching depiction of decline followed by either redemptive comeback or (flashback to) greatest moment of triumph
• delicate and understated handling of final moments prior to untimely death, if appropriate.

And you get all of this stuff in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back to Black. Taylor-Johnson used to be an up and coming artist before having a go at making films (this seems to have become a bit of a well-trodden route, if you recall that Steve McQueen (not the one from Bullitt) did the same thing). Expectations that STJ would make films that were arty and profound were probably not met when she ended up doing the first Fifty Shades movie, which to be fair is something she now regrets going anywhere near (yeah, I can sympathise).

Anyway, now she is back with a pop bio-pic which does not feature a sex dungeon in any capacity. As should be fairly obvious, this is an account of the career and personal life of Amy Winehouse, who is played by Marisa Abela. The film has a somewhat disarmingly earnestness a lot of the time, setting out its thesis quite openly from the very beginning: Amy Winehouse, we are basically told, was a tremendously gifted young woman destined to become a massive international star, a restless free spirit who just wanted a loving and united family around her.

Hmmm, well, fair enough. The early section of the film features some interesting tidbits of information, always assuming they genuinely are true – one of Winehouse’s early romances ended awkwardly when she wrote a song describing her boyfriend as a ladyboy. But a lot of it is pretty on-the-nose – ‘I ain’t no ****ing Spice Girl,’ she growls down the phone to a prospective manager, which is surely heading towards cultural snobbery from the scriptwriters.

Anyway – first album: fairly big hit, but troubles with the record company; Winehouse takes a break and encounters Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), whom the film makes clear is trouble from the word go. But poor old Amy, bless her, is so in thrall to her emotions that she falls helplessly in love with this drug-addicted bad boy. After the first encounter they seldom seem to actually be happy together and when he dumps her she goes off and writes Back to Black, the album that ends up making her an international star.

But Blake comes back into her life, mainly motivated (the film states) by a desire to get a slice of the Winehouse riches and pay off his drug debts. Needless to say his presence, and that of the constantly-circling paparazzi, end up having dire consequences for the singer…

It all sort of hangs together as a narrative, I think, and I’m sure nearly everything depicted has some kind of factual basis. However, it’s impossible not to see this film and suspect it may have been made as a reaction to Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy. Kapadia’s film was brutally direct in suggesting that the worst of Winehouse’s troubles were the result of her closest family resisting calls for her to go into rehab, as this would involve cancelling concerts and other appearances and thus the amount of money flowing in their general direction – which certainly gives a new significance to the lyric ‘my daddy thinks I’m fine’. Winehouse’s father Mitch (played here by Eddie Marsan) reportedly thought the documentary was horrible; needless to say, for the Winehouse family were involved in making the new film, he is portrayed very straightforwardly as a loving, attentive parent.

But you’ve got to have a story beyond blaming Amy Winehouse’s death on a) Blake Fielder-Civil getting her hooked on drugs and b) the paparazzi chasing her around all the time, and the film’s decision is to pin it on the fact that Winehouse supposedly had a persistent inner sadness about not having children. This keeps being crowbarred into the script via lines like ‘I wanna be a mum!’ ‘I wanna have six children!’ (this to Fielder-Civil on what’s effectively their first date) and ‘I wish I was your mum’ (to a very junior fan). What finally and fatally pushed her off the wagon, we are informed, was learning (from a pap, no less) that Fielder-Civil had had a child with his new partner. There is virtually no documentary evidence to support any of this, and indeed some which contradicts it – the film suggests that Winehouse had cleaned up, turned a corner, and was on an upward trajectory prior to her death, disregarding a well-attested account of her complaining to a friend after winning five Grammy awards that life was just unbearably boring without drugs.

So we’re dealing with a rather suspect narrative here – or so it seems to me, anyway. Nevertheless, no doubt it will become the Authorised Version of the Winehouse tale – there were a lot of people of all ages at the screening I attended, most of whom I suspect wouldn’t have seen the Kapadia documentary. And, as a technical piece of film-making, there’s not much to snipe about here in terms of the direction or performances. Abela is very good, doing all her own vocals – this is perhaps her greatest achievement – and people like Marsan and Lesley Manville (as Amy’s nan) are always reliable screen presences. Banging soundtrack too, of course. But all of the film’s obvious virtues become just a bit suspect if you consider that the story it tells may be distanced from reality to an extent and in a way that does its subject’s memory little justice.

Martian Chronicles III

There was a three-year gap between the publication of the second and third volumes of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series, which is hardly surprising considering we’re talking about a nearly 800-page book; it’s probably more surprising that Red Mars and Green Mars came out in consecutive years. Blue Mars is a somewhat different book from the first two, but the trio still comprise a unity, and no sensible person would suggest otherwise.

The story opens with the Martian revolution depicted at the end of Green Mars all but concluded – most of the planet is under native control, the main exception being the lower end of the orbital tower anchored in the Pavonis Mons volcano. The usual arguments are revisited – adherents of environmental puritanism want the space elevator destroyed, thus increasing the difficulty of travelling to Mars from Earth and reducing immigration, while others see it as a necessary and important link between the two planets. For a book which is generally optimistic, and indeed often borders on the utopian, it doesn’t shy away from a pragmatic handling of some of the politics and disputes involved – the matter is settled bloodily, with the Martian population divided on several key questions about their future.

The resolution of these, the path into the future, is one of the main themes of the rest of the story, which the author deftly manages to incorporate on a human as well as a planetary scale. Central to this is the relationship between two of the characters who’ve become increasingly important players in the story – arch-terraformer Sax Russell and primary advocate of an untouched Mars, Ann Clayborn. There’s a sense in which this last volume is the story of how the two of them gradually come to understand one another, achieve an understanding, and ultimately something much more – which, it is heavily implied, proves hugely significant to the future of the solar system.

Of course, there’s much more to it than that, and as before one can almost consider the book as a series of linked short stories and novellas, each with its own viewpoint character. This volume includes two contrasting accounts of a journey to Earth by ambassadors of the new Martian government – one by a native, who finds the home world an overwhelming, ultimately intolerable place, the other by one of the original colonists, who finds the changes which have taken place in previous century profoundly dispiriting. There’s a whole section on the writing of the Martian constitution and the arguments surrounding this; another on the early years of independence, as seen by the first president of an independent Mars.

Eventually the timescale begins to telescope, with decade-long gaps in the narrative appearing between sections. At one point Nirgal, the primary native Martian character, meets a young woman and responds positively to her flirting with him – only to realise with a start it’s the daughter of an old flame, who featured as a baby in an earlier section of the story. If nothing else this allows the book to include what Robinson calls the Accelerando, the colonisation of the wider solar system, driven by hypermalthusian pressures on Earth and enabled by vaulting advances in new technology. There are visits to colonies across the solar system before the story’s end (the main settlement on Mercury is a city called Terminator, which – as the name suggests – exists permanently on the border between the planet’s day and night sides, essentially a colossal train car on immense circumnavigatory tracks).

Needless to say this involves the story covering a lot of intellectual ground too – there are the regular travelogues across the transformed Martian surface which are a motif throughout the series (by the end of the book the characters are sailing across the oceans of Mars and living on great town-ships), in addition to disquisitions on politics and economics, meteorology, psychology, brain science, particle physics, the philosophy of science and more. At the end of the book you feel you’ve been educated as well as entertained – quite probably a lot of the science is fictitious, being the product of 22nd and 23rd century thinking, but it’s described with such conviction and in so much detail you accept it regardless.

Any danger of the book becoming too dry or abstract is kept at bay by Robinson’s feel for his characters, and the way the story keeps returning to them and their personal narratives. The book manages to be moving as well as erudite, as in the section recounting Nirgal’s final meeting with the great love of his life before she leaves Mars forever on a colony ship bound for another star system (only twenty years away with late-22nd-century technology). Most of these stories concern the original characters from the beginning of the story – the First Hundred, or what’s left of them, sustained by the longevity treatment which enables the story to have such a scope. Most of them are heading for 140 years old at the start of Blue Mars, and a main theme of the book is that of how people cope with crushing weight of so much memory, more than the human brain evolved to cope with. Mortality finally becomes an issue for them before the end of the story, together with the realisation that one of the things holding humanity back from a new golden age across the solar system and beyond is the fact that the bloated final generations of the 20th and early 21st centuries are lingering on: that a better world is coming, but by definition they will never see it.

It’s a notion that takes some parsing, but Robinson is never afraid to venture into deeper waters in any of the areas he chooses to explore. But I’ve always been fond of the notion that the core question that all of SF is trying to answer is ‘what does it mean to be human?’ This book, or trilogy if you prefer, is one of the most exhaustive attempts to answer that question that I can think of – in a Martian context, or seen through a Martian lens. Series like Dune and Foundation are routinely praised, but – so far at least – the Mars books don’t seem to receive the same kind of acclaim. Perhaps the science is just a bit too thorough, or the action not quite Ruritanian enough. Whatever the reason, this seems to me to be a serious injustice. It’s been over twenty years since I last read these books, and I regret leaving it so long.

The Horribly Terrible Asylum Grave of Torture

As long-term readers (seek help) will have guessed, that title means it’s time for a look at another one of Amicus’ signature anthology films, on this occasion The Vault of Horror, from 1973. On directorial duty this time is Roy Ward Baker, a veteran of the horror genre. If nothing else this film proves that a good director and a distinguished cast can still find themselves absolutely screwed if the script is no good, and scripting this time round is Milton ‘Check the Gyroscope’ Subotsky, moving spirit behind Amicus and not-very-good writer. Whether the fact that all the stories this time around are adapted from American horror comics just compounds the problem, I don’t know, but there’s certainly something wrong somewhere.

The film opens with shots of boats on the Thames, new modern tower blocks, and so on (this is entirely fraudulent and actively misleading) before we go inside one of the towers where some men are getting into a lift. They are the usual mixture of veteran stars who are perhaps now struggling a bit (Terry-Thomas, Curt Jurgens), fairly fresh new up and comers (Michael Craig, Tom Baker), and one guy who seems to have wandered in off the street (Raymond Massey – well, maybe this is a bit harsh, but he’s less of a well-known face than the others). The lift develops a mind of its own and takes them down to a mysterious sub-basement where couches and drinks await them. The lift seeming to be broken, they settle down to wait for help in comfort, and – as you would – start telling each other about their recurring nightmares.

Up first is Massey, in whose dream he pays a detective to find his sister, who has run away. He then murders the detective to avoid paying him, which really just establishes how moronic most of the script is this time, and goes off to find her. She is living in an unnamed small town which has been plagued by a series of murders, the victims’ bodies being found totally drained of blood. If anyone but Milton Subotsky was writing the script, you might expect this to be setting up a clever twist of some sort, but it isn’t. The town is infested with vampires who have even opened their own restaurant, serving very rare steak, black pudding, fried blood clots, and so on. Nothing exciting or especially interesting happens. Playing Massey’s sister is Massey’s sister (Anna of that ilk), but that’s the most engaging thing about this story, and it isn’t that engaging.

Hopes of something more rewarding arrive with the next story, in which Terry-Thomas’ rich, obsessively tidy bachelor decides to get married to Glynis Johns. Needless to say he has great difficulty in adapting to having someone else in the house who isn’t as meticulous as him, and the marital stress-o-meter is soon rising. It all leads up to a sort of grand guignol sort of ending with a reasonable sight gag about Terry-Thomas’ famous teeth. The same problem pertains here as in the first film, which is that the characters are so cartoonishly written – real people just don’t behave this way – that two experienced and able actors can’t do anything to lift the script.

Jurgens’ segment is on next: he plays a professional stage magician on holiday in India looking for material for his act. Nothing suitable crosses his path until he comes across a girl charming a rope out of its basket like a snake, which he gets very excited about. Unfortunately, the girl refuses to sell the secret, so he lures her back to his hotel room and murders her, taking rope and basket for himself. Even more unfortunately, the rope turns out to have high moral standards, and in a moment which is up there in the anthology-horror annals alongside Fluff Freeman trying to prune a carnivorous vine, John Standing being attacked by a piano, and Michael Jayston going to bed with a tree, Curt Jurgens ends up having a fight with a magic rope. It’s an improvement on the first two segments if nothing else.

Craig gets his moment in the fourth segment, as a struggling writer – ‘there’s no money in horror,’ he grumbles, the most self-aware moment of the script – who comes up with a preposterous scheme to fake his own death for the insurance money. This is a stupid scheme in a film full of people behaving like idiots, and needless to say it ends badly for him and his accomplice (the great Edward Judd is sorely underused). Notable for an appearance by Arthur Mullard as a gravedigger and what looks like an attempted in-joke where two actors famous for playing medical students on TV play medical students here. Like most of the bits in the film, though, it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

I may well be biased, but for me the final story is the one that makes Vault of Horror possibly worth watching. Tom Baker plays an artist on a Gauguin-esque sabbatical (but in Haiti, not Tahiti) who learns that three wealthy men back in London have conspired to swindle him out of the profits from his paintings. Off he goes to the local houngan to get himself voodoo-ed up in pursuit of a suitably poetic justice. Well, if nothing else it makes a bit more sense than some of the previous stories, Baker bringing a strikingly baleful presence to his role, despite being given some shocking costumes, Denholm Elliott plays his chief tormentor, and the gimmick with the voodoo paintings means it works visually too, even some of the story logic is a bit wobbly.

And then we’re back in the basement for the final reveal, which is that – brace yourself! – they weren’t dreams, but confused memories of how they all died. A bit like in Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, written by one Milton Subotsky, and Tales from the Crypt, written by… oh, you guessed. Well, why change a winning formula, or at least a formula. There is some confusion over whether or not a scene was filmed where the characters shuffle off back to heir graves as skull-faced revenants – photos of this exist, but no-one’s ever found the footage, which doesn’t appear in any of the versions currently in circulation (the one currently popping up on British TV is the expurgated one with some of the gorier moments replaced by still images).

Then again, as you have doubtless figured out, much of Vault of Horror is dimwitted and confused, not least in its metaphysics – Jurgens, in his closing speech to camera, reveals that they are here, cursed, doomed to relive their terrible deeds. Well, all right, there are two bona fide murderers in the main cast, plus someone who’s clearly capable of murder for his own selfish ends… but one of them’s an insurance swindler, which isn’t quite in the same league, and the terrible crime of the final man is being a bit of a neat freak.

This is, self-evidently, comic-book horror, lifted to a quite unwarranted extent by the star quality of several of its cast members. It’s the weakest of all the various Amicus portmanteau horror films, and towards the bottom of the pile of Amicus productions generally. It has a sort of schlocky campness that some may find appealing, but even so, most people are likely to be laughing at it, not with it.

Terriblenauts

Let us cut to the chase. I am going to be talking today about the 1967 film The Terrornauts, directed by Montgomery Tully. The critical consensus is that The Terrornauts is an awful, awful film – once described as the worst film ever made by Amicus, which an unkind person might suggest is a perversely impressive achievement, given some of the competition. I am not going to argue with the consensus at all. So this is not going to be one of those reviews intended to assess a film for the benefit of a new viewer. Anyone sitting down to watch The Terrornauts nowadays will surely know what they are letting themselves in for, and even if they don’t, two minutes of the print in general circulation will give them a pretty good idea – it’s badly scratched and faded, and that’s before we even get to the bargain-basement  credits.

So we are not here to decide if The Terrornauts is bad or not. We know it’s bad. What I would like to try to do is to try to figure out why The Terrornauts turned out as badly as it did, given that this is a film with a lot of well-known faces in it, with some talented people behind the camera. Did everyone just have a succession of really bad days?

But first, the plot. Our hero is, perhaps inevitably, a Burke – Joe Burke, a British radio astronomer. Burke is played by Simon Oates, an able actor we have met before in numerous episodes of Doomwatch and The Avengers, and Oates does seem to be trying his best. Burke’s concern is with Project Star Talk, basically a form of SETI, which he has been labouring away at despite the disapproval of his boss (Max Adrian). After years of failure, Adrian has managed to persuade the people funding Burke’s research to pull the plug, giving him only a matter of weeks to get results. (As a part of this, an obnoxious accountant named Joshua Yellowlees turns up to check the books – a rare non-Carry On appearance by Charles Hawtrey.)

But Burke and his team (basically a technician played by bit-part actor Stanley Meadows and a secretary played by Zena Marshall from Dr No, whose last role this was) finally start to get results, making contact with something out in deep space. Shoddy-looking ancient alien technologies activate and a ship is dispatched to Earth…

Burke, his people, the accountant, and the observatory tea lady (Patricia Hayes) are all in the shed when the alien vessel arrives – none of them are aware it’s coming. In a possibly surprising move, the entire building is ripped from its foundations and whisked off into the void – one hopes Hayes has a good supply of tea and biscuits on hand.

The unlikely explorers (NB the word ‘terrornauts’ is never used and is essentially gibberish anyway) arrive at the ship’s point of origin, a heavily armed space outpost on an asteroid. Various tests ensue as they are assessed by what, if we are to dignify The Terrornauts by discussing it as actual SF, is presumably some form of AI. One of the tests involves an encounter with possibly the worst rubber-suit alien creature ever put on screen – it’s not just bad but bizarre, with an eyeball in its armpit. Eventually the truth emerges – a fleet of hostile alien ships is heading for Earth, and the Star Talk team have been recruited to operate a galactic defence system and fend them off…

So: The Terrornauts is based on the novel The Wailing Asteroid, by Murray Leinster, an SF writer of some significance (also the inventor of of the front projection VFX technique) – Leinster is not well-remembered these days but wrote some noteworthy stories, including the staggeringly prescient A Logic Named Joe, which we have discussed before. Doing the adaptation duty is John Brunner, a British writer who won the Hugo for his novel Stand On Zanzibar (presumably written about the same time as this). And yet one gets no sense from watching the film that anyone involved in scripting it has any familiarity with or aptitude for the genre.

Not for the first time one must suspect the involvement of Milton Subotsky, one of the bosses at Amicus and not, one is inclined to think, a man who was especially comfortable with gravitas. Now I have a certain fondness for Amicus’ output, but not because any of these films are particularly great pieces of cinema – but they do have a colourful, knockabout charm to them, and an endearing lack of embarrassment about being pulp entertainment. But they’re never serious – the portmanteau horrors which, along with Doug McClure monster movies, are probably what Amicus is best remembered for, all contain elements of comedy – one of the things that makes And Now the Screaming Starts! such an outlier is that it’s played so straight. Amicus adaptations of other material often getting lightened up – the TV version of Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150AD is an unexpectedly grim metaphor for a potential Nazi victory in the Second World War, but the film version is much more of a garish runaround,

The suspicion that someone else got their hands on what started off as a relatively serious SF script is only heightened by the weird clash of styles – early on there are scenes where Burke and his colleague have credible-sounding discussions about astrophysics and radio astronomy, but soon enough Hawtrey and Hayes turn up, both well-known comedy performers, presumably in an attempt to broaden the appeal of the film – ‘broaden the appeal’ in this case meaning ‘turn it into a broad comedy’. The idea is a bad one, as is the decision to treat the audience like idiots in other ways too – every thing that happens once the shed arrives at the space outpost is accompanied by Burke (or occasionally someone else) explaining very slowly and carefully what’s going on.

Of course, the punishingly low budget and grim production designs don’t help – also The Terrornauts includes some of the worst special effects I’ve ever seen in a professional production. But all this is just superficial. The main problem here is that the script was clearly intended to be a relatively serious piece of slightly pulpy SF, and it’s the producers’ lack of confidence in this idea which so comprehensively sabotaged the production. It is Amicus’ nadir and possibly worth watching just to see how badly actors can be let down by people behind the scenes. But only once.

Ammonids in Our Midst

A country road at night, somewhere in the east of England; an open-topped car barrels along, driven by a young woman, whose boyfriend is in some distress. They nearly hit the only other car in sight and skid to a halt. The other driver is understandably furious, but this turns out to be a highly serendipitous near-miss, as he turns out to be Professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy), maverick engineer and head of the ill-starred British Rocket Group, and this is all the pre-credits sequence for Val Guest’s 1957 film adaptation Quatermass 2. (Fun factoid: this was the first English-language sequel to go with the simple ‘2’ or ‘II’ suffix, apparently, the first worldwide being Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata II in 1945 – though some suggest the nature of how Japanese kanji translate makes this a little questionable.)

The first Quatermass film was such a big hit for Hammer Films that they bought the film rights to the second TV series before it had even been on the telly. This time the famously cantankerous writer Nigel Kneale was more involved in the scripting process, along with Guest, although exactly how the movie matches up to the TV show is inevitably a little obscure given that much of the series has been lost to the ether.

Quatermass learns the couple were near somewhere called Winnerden Flats, once a village but now the site of a large industrial development, when a meteorite landed nearby – it was investigating this that led to the young man becoming incapacitated. As chance would have it – there are a few fortuitous coincidences in the plot here, mainly the result of the running time of the story being chopped in half – Quatermass’ minions at the BRG have been monitoring showers of meteorites coming in low and slow in that particular part of the country.

The prof goes up to Winnerden Flats himself to take a look at the place, accompanied by a colleague (he is played by Bryan Forbes, who went on to have a fairly substantial directorial career, including well-remembered films like The Stepford Wives). Never mind the meteorite showers, Quatermass is staggered to find the industrial site is actually a near-replica of the lunar colony project he’s been struggling to get official support for. But why has someone built a sealed environment designed to keep out a hostile atmosphere in the English countryside?

Well, perhaps they should be worrying about the meteorites, too, as Quatermass’ assistant finds one and it cracks open in his face, spraying a vapour that produces a distinctive blemish. Armed guards appear and hustle him off for treatment, leaving Quatermass to ponder just what’s going on. The official line is that Winnerden Flats is producing synthetic food, but secrecy surrounds the development, and whoever is operating it seems to have friends in high places – friends who usually turn out to have curious blemishes on their hands or faces…

Quatermass II is possibly the least well-remembered of the three BBC serials about the character, and the same is probably true of the Hammer versions of them. Perhaps this is because it’s the one with the least explicit horror element to it – this is much more a piece of paranoid SF, on the face of things owing a debt to American films with similar themes, most obviously Invasion of the Body Snatchers. On the other hand, Quatermass 2 was not without a certain amount of influence – this tale of alien intelligences arriving by meteorite to infiltrate British industry and then the establishment will seem very familiar to many people well-versed in British TV SF and fantasy.

What’s present here which is perhaps lacking from its heirs is a sense of timeliness and social commentary – though made in 1957, it still feels very strongly like a post-war movie, with the country undergoing social and industrial changes, old villages being levelled to make way for new plants and other factories. There’s often a sense of reactionary distrust about Nigel Kneale’s work and the coding of the Winnerden Flats project as alien and sinister is clearly an expression of this. Quatermass ends up inciting what borders on being a peasants’ revolt amongst the non-possessed workers at the plant and it is they, with his help, who end up saving the day – the authorities prove impotent. Quatermass is assisted by a police detective – a returning character from the first film, though played by John Longden this time – and a journalist, played by Sid James (a fairly unlikely bit of casting for modern audiences, though Sid is fine in the part). Final confirmation that this is a Hammer movie comes with the appearance of Michael Ripper as the landlord of the pub where the workers gather (not quite his first role for the House, but still early days).

And on the whole it’s pretty acceptable, as these things go – it’s much stronger on plot and incident than it is on ideas or characterisation, and Donlevy isn’t a particularly memorable Quatermass (accounts vary as to just how drunk he was on set: Kneale claimed he could hardly stand up, but Guest’s recollection is of a functioning alcoholic), but it never slows down enough to get dull and Kneale is shrewd enough to ensure that the story isn’t reliant on visual effects to work – the only crunch point comes right at the climax, where Ripper’s character blows open the pressure domes at the plant and giant amorphous alien monsters briefly rampage (slowly) across the countryside. The ammonids aren’t great, but they’re par for the course in a film of this vintage and it could have been much worse.

The gold medal for Quatermass stories is always going to go to one or other version of Quatermass and the Pit, but the original tale deserves an honourable mention too. Which might make it seem like Quatermass 2 is a minor entry in the series, its final position really dependent on your feelings about the ITV Quatermass – which has great production values and John Mills, but is crippled by some eccentric scripting and Kneale’s reactionary pessimism. Personally I find that particular call a tough one, but even a weaker Quatermass can still be an effective SF thriller. Which, for its period, this film arguably is.

The Early Unpleasantness

Alex Garland first rose to prominence as a novelist, specifically for The Beach, nearly (ulp) thirty years ago. The film adaptation of the book brought him into contact with Danny Boyle and DNA Films, which contributed to his own move into screenwriting and directing. I still think The Beach (the book) is possibly the most satisfying thing of his that I’ve encountered, but it’s hard to deny his position as one of the most prominent writers and directors of SF and horror films this century – his name is on projects as diverse as 28 Days Later and its sequel, Dredd, Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Men, but all containing a fierce, sometimes disquieting intelligence. His new film, Civil War, continues in this vein, and is already being talked about as a possible contender for the Best Documentary award at the 2029 Oscars.

The precise setting is unspecified, but we are in an America which looks essentially contemporary. Nick Offerman plays the President, who at the start of the film declares that the insurgent army of the Western Forces (an alliance between California and Texas, which have both seceded from the union) has experienced a crushing military defeat at the hands of the loyalists. It very quickly becomes apparent, however, that the President is a pathological, self-serving liar (where do they get these ideas from?).

Watching this on TV is hard-bitten photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst), who is in New York City, which is experiencing its own share of violence from the war. Rumours are rife that the rebels are about to make their final push towards Washington DC and implement regime change by force, and she and her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura) are contemplating trying to get there first, in search of the million-dollar photo or quote that will define how history remembers these events – as the current administration makes a policy of having journalists executed, this is not without its risks.

They decide to make the trip anyway, taking veteran New York Times reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and rookie journalist Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) with them – a dangerous journey across the front line of the war. But even away from the fighting they are greeted by horrors of many different kinds, and it becomes an open question as to whether any of them will survive the trip.

So: just a little bit of potential for controversy here, perhaps. It is perhaps worth mentioning that Wikipedia already has a page set up and ready called ‘Second American Civil War’ (currently it just points to examples of speculative fiction like this one); also that serious academics and commentators have been suggesting that something similar to the situation in this film is closer than most people would like to think, or even that such a conflict is already in progress in a very low-key way. The idea of a ‘national divorce’, with the Red and Blue states going their separate ways, is startlingly popular according to some polls, despite the immense practical difficulties involved in such an idea.

All this means that there’s an urgency about Garland’s film, especially in an election year, which wouldn’t be there if he was speculating about something less provocative. You could even argue that by inviting people to discuss the idea of ‘another civil war’ he is even increasing the likelihood of it happening – making a prediction about it, rather than trying to avert it (which I think is more likely the case).

Technically and creatively the film is often extremely successful – most of it is taken up by the nearly-1000-mile road trip, through a landscape often devastated by the war (I suspect some of the imagery here owes a debt to the sort of thing Gareth Edwards was doing in Monsters, back in 2010). It’s terrifically photographed and composed – I was thinking ‘what a beautiful country’ at one point, and then I noticed the bodies hanging from the bridge in the shot. This kind of juxtaposition of the everyday, familiar America, and the stuff of nightmare, is really what fuels the film.

This is never stronger than in the final act of the movie, with gunships and tanks prowling the streets of Washington DC and vicious room-to-room fighting within the White House itself (this recalls, perhaps intentionally and certainly inevitably, the attack on the Capitol building in January 2021). It’s viscerally gripping, shocking stuff – but at the same time you find yourself wondering what the point of it is, what Garland is trying to say with his movie.

You would expect it to be cautionary – a message to those who talk rather too easily of ‘national divorce’ and use violent rhetoric much too comfortably, of how it would really be. You would expect the film to be trying to avert a civil war, not just comment on it. But this is Garland, whose films always have a chilly detachment, a tendency to treat their characters as experimental subjects. It feels like the director is indeed trying to depict what would happen, but he seems somewhat indifferent about the morality of such a calamity.

Even if the film is trying to do something to avert the escalating divisions in the USA, it’s really hamstrung by the very fact that the country is so polarised now. The script does its best to be absolutely apolitical – we never learn the President’s name, let alone his party allegiance; there are mentions of how he is in his third term, and has dissolved the FBI, but this is not an attempt at satire – there are no characters obviously based on real people here. Likewise, no information is given about the particulars of how the country got into this mess – all of this, no doubt, done with a view to not alienating half of the audience.

As a result the film seems curiously abstract, examining the micro-horrors resulting from the war rather than the nature and causes of the wider conflict itself. Some of this gap is filled by character material about the journalists, exploring their motivations and interest in what they do (something they themselves question as the story progresses) – Dunst hopes she’s sending a message, Moura seems largely to be just a thrill-seeker, Spaeny isn’t quite sure yet. On this level the film is quite effective, with strong performances from the four leads – apart from them and Offerman, the only significant performance comes from an uncredited Jesse Plemons, who is utterly chilling as a ruthless, bigoted militia soldier (tellingly, the film doesn’t explicitly specify which side he is on).

There’s an awful lot to admire about Civil War, especially its technical virtuosity and the strength of that final sequence in Washington, but there’s a cold objectivity about it which keeps it from being fully successful either as a horror movie (which on some level is what it arguably is) or a cry of warning. Perhaps the very inability of the film to engage with real-world issues without being attacked by one or both sides is symptomatic of the fact that many Americans would rather stick to their beliefs and risk a violent conflict than engage with people they disagree with. It’s certainly a very timely, worryingly convincing piece of work, and appropriately unsettling to watch, regardless of whether it’s intended as a prediction or not.

Primate Suspect

The story is an increasingly familiar one – promising movie, struggling for either development money or a proper release, ends up being bought by Netflix and going direct to stream (it happened most famously to Alex Garland’s Annihilation a few years back). Well, I suppose any kind of release is better than nothing, especially when you’re a film-maker looking to stay in the industry and avoid a telemarketing job, but even so – it doesn’t do the theatrical experience any favours, does it.

Well, let us thank Jordan Peele for going against the tide on this one. What apparently happened was that the big N bought the rights to Dev Patel’s new movie Monkey Man, under the impression it was going to be a stylish, hyperkinetic beat-em-up sort of film, but were somewhat startled to discover the film they’d paid for was a somewhat different animal and very possibly likely to turn out to be a bit controversial. So (and I’m tempted to say ‘being Netflix’), they did a very good impression of people trying to bury the film, even at one point attempting to shop it around to other possible buyers. It was at this point that Jordan Peele saw the film, said ‘This deserves to play in cinemas’ and bought it via his own company. I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about past Peele projects, one way or another, but this sort of thing impresses me no end. (If anyone reading this cares to endow me with several hundred million dollars so I can act as a patron to worthy and struggling films, I will do my best to follow his example.)

Anyway, Monkey Man itself, which is directed, co-written, co-produced by and stars Dev Patel, who apparently only got into acting when his mum made him go to an open casting call. Some guys, right? You might almost expect this to be somewhat akin to Michael Flatley’s Blackbird, in that it sees an unlikely film-making hyphenate trying to establish himself in a surprising new genre. Patel has, to date, seemed to specialise in fresh-faced non-threatening young fellows, but Monkey Man finds him taking the lead in a revenge thriller set in contemporary India. (Though apparently in a fictional city.)

He plays the Kid, who as the film opens is working as a jobber at Sharlto Copley’s illegal underground fight arena (his role is to take a beating from the star fighters and thus make them look that much more impressive). But the Kid has other things on his mind besides just winning the occasional bout – he is seeking to get a place in the lower echelons of a criminal organisation of immense power and influence. But why? This only gradually becomes apparent.

It eventually transpires that the Kid is out for vengeance against a corrupt police official (Sikandar Kher) and his shadowy employer, for a crime committed many years earlier, eventually getting his chance when he works his way up to a stint on the decadent VIP floor of the hotel where he is employed. But not everything goes quite according to plan…

There’s a bit of a sideways look early on in the film, where the Kid is buying himself a gun and the dealer recommends one on the strength of it being used in the latest John Wick movie. Possibly Netflix thought they were getting something not a million miles away from the Keanu Reeves franchise when they put the money up for this, and I suppose if you’re looking for that sort of experience Monkey Man will give you what you’re after – there’s a bit of a slow burn in the opening section of the film, but then Patel cuts loose with an intense extended string of action sequences – there’s a fight in the hotel toilets which (in the time-honoured manner) ends up wrecking everything, followed by a high-octane tuk-tuk chase through the crowded night-time streets (well, as high-octane as you can get with a two-stroke engine, anyway), then a fight with an axe-wielding pimp, then a roof-top chase with helicopters and snipers…

In short, the film certainly delivers as an action thriller, and an occasionally gory one – Patel puts his past side-career as a high-level taekwondo athlete to good use before the end. There’s less gunplay than in Wick, and more of an emphasis on sweaty men smashing their knuckles repeatedly into each others’ heads, but this just adds to the sense of the film being grounded in something resembling reality – it’s an extremely vivid world of the senses that the film creates, verging on the actually impressionistic in places (and with a startling hallucinogenic trip sequence at one point).

There is a sense in which there turns out to be less to the plot of Monkey Man than initially meets the eye – it is just an archetypal revenge thriller, of a type you could imagine Sergio Leone making with a wild west setting sixty years ago. On the other hand, what actually meets the eye is very substantial anyway – a vivid, pulsating world full of life and energy, with its own rhythms and customs and traditions. (For instance, the Kid is known as Monkey Man because he identifies with the Hindu religious figure Hanuman, a simian deity.) This isn’t the India-as-playground-for-westerners you sometimes find in English-language movies, but a place that exists on its own terms, with its own subtleties and issues – some of which the film addresses. (Though not entirely unfamiliar – this was the second film in the same week to have an unlikely appearance by Boney M on the soundtrack.)

Rather surprisingly, Monkey Man hasn’t yet been scheduled for release in India itself, with the cited reason being ongoing discussions within the censors’ office about its level of violence. However, it’s also been suggested that the nature of the film’s main villain, a phoney spiritual leader with ties to industry and a great deal of political influence, may also be somewhat problematic, there being a whiff of roman a clef about this character and with it being an election year and all. Which I suppose only goes to show that Dev Patel seems to have achieved his aim of making something with a bit more significance than just another action movie.

What’s impressive is the way in which it hangs together as a unified movie, not just a thriller with some other bits artfully included to give the impression of depth – entirely satisfying as a crunching, visceral, kinetic piece of entertainment, but much more besides that too. This is a strong debut for Dev Patel.

For Emergency Dial 666

Something odd has happened in the last year or so – the last Odeon standing, where I’ve probably seen more films than anywhere else over the last fifteen years, has been displaced in my affections by the rooftop cinema at the megamall just down the street from it. Now, given the choice, I go to the new place – generally because the other watchers there seem to be better behaved, and the place isn’t visibly falling to bits (plus I’ve never seen mice running around on the floor during a screening). It was a source of slight dismay, in fact, when it turned out a film I wanted to see was only showing at the old Odeon.

Even so, this is the issue I’ve mentioned before – where are all the trashy movies going to find a home if all the trashy cinemas close down? Sometimes you just want to enjoy something a bit rough and disreputable. (Though I should say that the ticketeering minion really ducked the question when I asked him whether the place was really closing down. Mind you, he also said I looked like I was in my mid-thirties when we went though the slightly absurd age-checking process they’ve introduced, so possibly there’s something pathological involved.)

The funny thing is that the film I wanted to see isn’t particularly rough or disreputable, or at least its lineage isn’t – for I was there for Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen, prequel to – oh, you’ve figured it out already. Now, I happen to be a fan of the original 1976 film, even if the fact that the TV blew up while I was watching it on Christmas night 1998 has been taken as an omen itself by some of the more devout members of the family. I doubt the new film is likely to put anyone’s AV equipment in danger, though.

The film is set in 1971. (I was fully under the impression the first film opened in 1966, a la Rosemary’s Baby, but a quick rewatch indicates there is some useful ambiguity here – not that The First Omen never conveniently reimagines bits of the story.) A young American woman named Margaret (Nell Tiger Free, which does seem to be an actual name) arrives in Rome to become a novice nun, preparatory to actually taking the veil. Her avuncular sponsor, Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy), is delighted to see her, as are various kindly nuns at the orphanage and maternity hospital where she ends up working (Sonia Braga plays the abbess).

Unfortunately, Margaret has had a rough upbringing, to the point where she is occasionally troubled by hallucinations – though this turns out to be a plus point for the film-makers, as they can give her a waking nightmare every time the plot slows down. She’s not the only one who’s had a tough time, as she meets a creepy little girl (Nicole Sorace) who keeps getting banished to the Bad Room for biting the nuns.

After a brief flirtation with living it up with her perky room-mate (through some exercise of satanic power, everyone in 1971 Rome is getting down to Daddy Cool by Boney M, even though it wasn’t released until 1976), Margaret finds herself bonding with the creepy girl, especially when they are both bothered by an unhinged nun (I get the feeling this part was written for Mia Goth, and would have been more prominent if Goth had said yes – as it is, she’s played by Ishtar Currie-Wilson).

Then up pops rumbly-voiced Ralph Ineson, playing Father Brennan – this was the Patrick Troughton character in the original film, though once again the character has been fully reimagined and he’s basically now just an exposition monkey. Brennan is convinced that the creepy girl is in peril from a dark conspiracy within the Catholic Church itself, who firmly believe that old line about it better being the devil you know. Can Margaret save the day before someone finds themselves in expectation of a rather significant infant?

Well, the main problem The First Omen has to deal with is that, as a prequel, most people watching it will already know that the answer there is ‘no’, which gives the film a serious problem in the tension and jeopardy department. We all know a baby you-know-who will be popping out in the final reel, so where’s the story leading up to that going to come from? This is a problem the film never quite gets to grips with, despite some valiant efforts including a no-brainer homage to Rosemary’s Baby and a not-exactly-obvious third-act plot twist (although, once again, the identity of the mother as established in the original film is ignored).

However, despite the fact it is essentially inert as a piece of drama, The First Omen is still remarkably watchable considering it’s a big-name franchise extension. It’s clearly been written by someone who’s thought at length about the  themes and setting of the story – a time of social unrest and rising disenchantment with organised religion – and tried to incorporate them into the story. Some of the film’s resulting ideas are rather preposterous, viewed objectively, but if you’re going to do a film about a Satanist conspiracy which is also implicitly critical of the Catholic Church, this is the sort of confusion you’re likely going to end up with. However, at the same time… well, there was a think-piece in the paper the other day looking at First Omen and the other recent nun-centric horror movie, Immaculate, and suggesting they were part of a movement of obstetric horror movies largely brought about by the American Supreme Court’s decision to repeal Roe Vs Wade – which, I suppose, means the real devil responsible is that orange-faced shouty convict with the small hands. This feels oddly appropriate.

Anyway, politics aside, The First Omen‘s considerable strengths include a strong cast led by Nell Tiger Free, a dark, intense presence throughout. Free gives a really quite extraordinary performance and is riveting to watch – one to follow here, I think, whether or not she manages to break out of the genre ghetto. The supporting cast is also very strong – while you sort of wish Nighy was in it a bit more, playing a less predictable role, he’s still very good, and at least he’s around more than Charles Dance, who completes his contribution to the film (a homage to the 1976 scene with the plate glass window) before the opening credits even appear.

The other big plus is Stevenson’s direction, which is highly imaginative and atmospheric – this in its own way is another divergence from the original, which was shot and paced like a thriller for the most part. The new film is much more inclined to take its time, particularly early on, but Stevenson finds ways to make this work, as well as including some very gory bits and really quite startlingly vile moments of gynaeco-horror. One thing I would say is that while the film starts out attempting to be agreeably creepy, by the end it’s reaching for the gag reflex button instead, which to my mind is the low-hanging fruit of the horror genre.

In the end it’s impossible to shake the impression that, if this film does well, they’re going to roll on and remake The Omen itself again, probably a bit more radically than they did the last time. I was somewhat impressed by the new film – the performances and artistry of the thing, rather than the script – but I’m not sure I’d want to watch a whole new version of the original again. (I’m not sure I can afford another TV set, for one thing.) Horror fans, especially of this particular series, will probably find The First Omen diverting and entertaining though.