Interview with the Vampire Part II (2024)

Following its UK TV screening on BBC2, Acorn Media are releasing the eight-part second season of the TV adaptation of Anne Rice's INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE on Blu-ray, DVD and digital. They're also releasing a box set of the first two seasons, which is the best thing to get if you haven't seen season one, as you really need to before diving into this.

Season two carries straight on with the story, with Louis (Jacob Anderson) now relating his tale to Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) in the company of Armand (Assad Zaman). It's World War II and Louis and Claudia (now played by Delainey Hayes) are seeking more of their kind in Romania. They succeed, but it's in Paris, France where they get to properly meet more of their own kind at the Grand Guignol-style Theatre Des Vampires, which acts as a front for some very real bloodletting. It's also where Louis gets to meet Armand.

As with season one, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE PART II (the onscreen title) is executed superbly - production design, photography and acting are all top notch, and even if the Anne Rice novel might not have been your thing it's still definitely worth giving the series a look as this really is as good as gothic television drama gets. 

Acorn's Blu-ray set spreads the eight episodes over three discs. Extras include a four minute pre-premiere look with brief interviews with some of the principal cast members, 'insider' featurettes for each episode which last between five to eight minutes, a behind the scenes featurette and a Making Of featurette ('Show Me More') that's 42 minutes, all of which include interviews with cast and crew. There's also a two minute blooper reel.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE PART II is out on 

Blu-ray, DVD and digital from Acorn Media, 

as is a Season One and Two Box set on 

DVD and Blu-ray, on Monday 7th October 2024

Mayfair Witches (2023)

Following on from the success of the TV adaptation of Anne Rice's  INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, Acorn International Media are releasing AMC's version of the author's Mayfair Witches series of books.

Rowan Fielding (Alexandra Daddario) is a neurosurgeon with a mysterious past, and the seemingly new and concerning ability to cause men she gets angry with to have strokes. When her adoptive mother dies, her investigations into her history take her from San Francisco to New Orleans and the powerful Mayfair family, who have been keeping her real mother Deirdre (Annabeth Gish) sedated because of the dangerous powers they believe she harbours in the form of a demon called Lasher (Jack Huston). 

When Deirdre dies in spectacular fashion in a New Orleans elevator, Rowan becomes heir to the Mayfair fortune and all that goes with it, including the supernatural. Ciprien Grieve (Tongayi Chirisa) has been assigned by a secret organisation to protect Rowan from the demon's advances, but as she comes into her full power, there seems to be little he can do to alter Rowan's destiny.

The recent INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE was a rich, complex, well-acted, beautifully designed and engrossing piece of work. It's a shame to report, then, that in almost all respects MAYFAIR WITCHES is as flat as a pancake. One cannot level the blame at Daddario who is surprisingly one-note in this, because all the performances are similarly dull, suggesting a decision made higher up to play things this way. Lasher offers Rowan immense power with all the charisma of someone asking if she'd like to go to Tesco's with him, and Ciprien is so ineffectual then the forces of good are in real trouble if that's all they've got. The only real achievement of his character is to fall into bed with Rowan, but as the eroticism on display here is of the blandest 'keep your bra on' variety there's precious little energy there, either. I cannot comment on how faithful this adaptation is as I haven't read the source but I hope for Ms Rice's sake (and her readers) that it's rather more engrossing and has a less fumbled climax than this. 

Acorn's Blu-ray includes all eight episodes of season one over two discs. There are no extras.

Anne Rice's MAYFAIR WITCHES is out on Blu-ray and DVD on Monday 8th January 2024. It's already available on Digital

Frankenstein: The True Story (1973)

 

A BBC Christmas favourite for a couple of years running back in the 1970s when I was a lad (I never got the chance to see it back then, though) Jack Smight’s epic three hour mini-series in the days before such things had become properly established is, of course, anything but a faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel. However, seeing as it was first broadcast when cinema versions ranged from Andy Warhol’s over the top FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN (marvellous) to Terence Fisher's ambitious FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (also marvellous) to BLACKENSTEIN (not marvellous at all) one can appreciate the desire to do something that got back to basics.

Despite its 180 minute running time, FRANKENSTEIN THE TRUE STORY begins (and ends, for that matter) abruptly. In a series of rapid cuts that make us feel we’ve already missed an episode, we learn how Victor Frankenstein (Leonard Whiting) lost his brother William (blink and you'll miss him Karl Howman) to drowning, offering this as his subsequent obsession with the desire to create life.

Travelling from his home to London on the York to London coach (did Frankenstein truly come from Yorkshire?) he bumps into local surgeon Henry Clerval (David McCallum) who has made a machine that can reanimate the kind of beetle never native to these shores. A room-sized machine and some appropriate body parts, plus the action of sunlight (a nice touch) results in perfect ‘Creature’ Michael Sarrazin. Henry’s brain has gone into the creature's skull after Henry’s health gave out, leaving Frankenstein to rent some rooms and move in with his creation so they can have a lovely time going to the opera and playing in the park. But oh no! The creature starts to ‘regress’ and Frankenstein has to break up with him...er...send him away.

But who’s that lurking in the shadows? It’s none other than James Mason with no hands and the gift for hypnosis. James is Dr Polidori, and he’s kitted out Frankenstein’s old lab so it looks like something from THE MASK OF FU MANCHU with Chinese servants to match. He wants to make a girl, not for sensible naughty doctor reasons but to rule the world, or something. The creature, who has survived his 400 foot plunge off the white cliffs of Dover, brings him the body of Jane Seymour, which no doctor, naughty or otherwise, could possibly object to for their experiments. Pretty soon Polidori’s convinced Frankenstein to help him and Prima is born, only to lose her head in a splendid bit at a ball.

We’re two and a half hours in and Tom Baker, toplined in the credits, still hasn’t appeared! There he is at last, as the captain of the ship intended to transport Victor and his bride Elizabeth (a bit of an unsympathetic performance here from Nicola Pagett). Unfortunately everything goes pear-shaped and Victor and his creation end up at the North Pole, where they laugh and get buried in an avalanche. The End.

FRANKENSTEIN THE TRUE STORY always felt very much to me like something made for an undemanding mainstream television audiences rather than horror fans. Indeed, if your mum fancied watching a version of Frankenstein, this would be a good one to suggest. Jack Smight’s direction is workmanlike and undistinguished, Gil Melle’s music feels like it’s accompanying a Barbara Taylor Bradford adaptation, and while the locations are very pretty there’s very little sense of the gothic evinced by the best versions of this story. James Mason camps it up (possibly a bit too much) while David McCallum is excellent as the grumpy and obsessive Clerval. They should have got him to play Frankenstein. Michael Sarrazin does a good job of doing something different with the creature, and Jane Seymour makes the most of her role as Frankenstein’s second creation. In the lead role, Leonard Whiting is pretty but ineffectual, an individual who is swept along by events rather than the driven scientist horror fans had by this time become used to. Ultimately, any adaptation of Frankenstein is going to stand on fall on its central performance, and, more than its lack of gothic trappings or unimaginative direction, it was Whiting’s performance that had me yearning to watch James Whale’s and Terence Fisher’s versions again.

Fabulous Films have done an excellent job bringing FRANKENSTEIN THE TRUE STORY to a UK audience on Blu-ray. The transfer is superb and there are a wealth of extras as well. You get the option to run through the whole thing in one go, or with the added infamous introduction by James Mason where he wanders through a London cemetery to come across the grave of Mary Shelley, despite the fact she was actually buried in Dorset.

Sam Irvin provides a superb commentary that's thoroughly deserving of its Rondo Award win, tells you everything you could possibly want to know about the production and really could not be improved upon. Mr Irvin returns to conduct three interviews with Jane Seymour (24 minutes), Leonard Whiting (18 minutes) and co-screenwriter Don Bachardy (41 minutes), meaning that Fabulous Films' disc is the equivalent of Shout Factory's Region A Blu-ray. Except we also get a Graham Humphreys cover so that definitely makes the Fabulous disc better and the one to buy. 

FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY was due out on Blu-ray and DVD from Fabulous Films on Monday 27th March 2023 but this has now been pushed back to 10th April 2023

Tales of Unease (1970)

Mention the phrase 'classic British anthology horror TV show' and titles like Thriller, Ghost Stories For Christmas, and Hammer House of Horror will come to mind. But there's also a number of other series out there, ones that often only lasted a handful of episodes and which have remained unseen since their original broadcast. 

One such show is TALES OF UNEASE, produced by ITV's London Weekend Television unit and lasting seven episodes. The title was taken from the Pan anthology series of the same name edited by John Burke and which lasted three volumes. Two of the seven stories broadcast were adapted from stories that appeared in the books (Michael Cornish's Superstitious Ignorance and Jack Griffith's The Black Goddess). Now Network have released TALES OF UNEASE on DVD the question remains - has it been worth the wait?

If you're a fan of the old Pan & Fontana paperback anthologies of the 1970s you'll probably appreciates the short but disturbing title sequence, featuring as it does a crudely fashioned wax head with one eye that emulates the covers of those old books. As for the stories the best, and the one that most evokes the feel of the newer stories that made it into those old anthologies, is Bad Bad Jo-Jo by James Leo Herlihy. Roy Dotrice plays a very successful and even camper and cattier writer whose success is based on the creation of a monstrous psychopathic killer and the old lady who controls him. He is visited by two fans who like to dress up as their favourite characters and want to 'play' with their creator, resulting in a decent, tense bit of studio-bound TV.

Other stories include John Burke's Calculated Nightmare, in which a computerised building is programmed to trap the two men responsible for a series of planned redundancies, Michael Hastings' Ride, Ride in which Susan George plays a ghost who spells death for a motorcyclist, and Superstitious Ignorance in which appallingly Bright Young Things Jeremy Clyde and Tessa Wyatt plan to buy a rotting old house only to find they may never leave. 

Comedy horror arrives in the form of Richardson Morgan's The Old Banger in which an abandoned car slowly makes its way back to its owners, while a writer's neglected wife locks him in his study in Andrea Newman's It's Too Late Now. Finally, miners have to deal with a cave-in in the Rhondda of 1932 in the Black Goddess.

If you're a fan of 1970s TV you'll want to have these. The transfers look as if they are mostly taken from tape transfers of 16mm film and you can see a thumb print at the bottom of the frame for most of one story. But it's classic TV and if you want more stuff that's in the vein of Brian Clemens' Thriller then you won't be disappointed. No extras were provided for review. Here's a trailer: 

TALES OF UNEASE is out from Network on DVD now

Come Back Lucy (1978)

"Classic Stuff"

Wasn't 1970s TV great? You could understand all the dialogue, the music wasn't intrusive, and you didn't have to grab the remote every five minutes to turn it up to understand what people were saying or turn it down because the music and sound effects were too loud. Those who have been nodding at that will no doubt be amongst those delighted to learn that Network are releasing a plethora of obscure British TV goodies from that period in time for Halloween, so it's time for HMC to chill out, leave the remote alone, and kick off with 1978's COME BACK LUCY.

Like a number of kids' ghost stories filmed during the period, we begin with a character being orphaned. Young Lucy (Emma Bakhle) has been living with her Aunt Olive and embracing the somewhat archaic Victorian lifestyle Olive has practised. When Olive dies, Lucy has to go and live with other relatives who are decidedly more modern (for the late 1970s), almost to the point where her new Aunt and Uncle (Phyllida Law and Royce Mills) could be the inspiration for Viz's 'Modern Parents' characters.

Their three kids are 'modern' too but never obnoxiously or irritatingly so. One of the things UK TV of this period was excellent at was creating well-rounded sympathetic child characters and COME BACK LUCY is no exception. The new house Lucy comes to live in has a ghost. A spiteful, spoilt child of around her own age called Alice, and Alice wants nothing more than for Lucy to be her playmate forever, even if it means Lucy has to die for that to happen.

Less well-known than classics from HTV like CHILDREN OF THE STONES or KING OF THE CASTLE, if you liked those then this ATV production is going to be a must as well. Acting is decent, the story doesn't ever drag across its six episodes, and Ken Jones' music theme is so listenable I stayed for the end credits of each instalment. Big kudos to the writing team (and I'm guessing the source novel as well) for wrapping everything up at the end in a way that keeps you thinking about all that's happened.

Extras are on a second disc and consist of 'Coming Back' - a good retrospective making of that lasts 68 minutes and features interviews with some of the key personnel involved including director Paul Harrison, adapters Colin Shindler and Gail Renard, and actor Francois Evans. 'Through the Mirror' is a 53 minute podcast from Jill Nolan and Becky Darke who both admit at the beginning that they usually cover the Point Horror series of books. Actually this makes them ideally placed to discuss Pamela Sykes' novel both in terms of themes and relevance to fiction that came later. Finally there's the German title sequences and a set of German episode title cards. Here's a trailer:

COME BACK LUCY is out on DVD in a two-disc set from Network (order at networkonair.com) on Monday 17th October 2022

Channel Zero: Candle Cove (2016)

"A Slice of Decent, Properly Scary TV"

Presumably aping the format of AMERICAN HORROR STORY, where every series will feature a different, serialised story, season one of Creepypasta-inspired CHANNEL ZERO arrives on UK Blu-ray and DVD courtesy of Second Sight. 
      Child psychologist Mike Painter (Paul Schneider) returns to the home of his birth where, in 1988, his twin brother vanished amidst a number of disappearances of children of similar age. He becomes increasingly convinced that the occurrences were linked to an obscure children's television show called Candle Cove.

Candle Cove was broadcast only once, was impossible to record, and, we are told, made it onto TV 'under regular broadcast frequencies' in a VIDEODROME kind of way. Now it seems Candle Cove is being broadcast again but only children are seeing it, and disappearing again. 

Meanwhile, Mike has problems of his own, and may well be a more unreliable narrator / leading character than we've realised. It turns out he's only just been released from a psychiatric ward, and the bizarre opening bit to episode one makes you wonder from the off how much of what he claims is just inside his own head.

Starting off with a very Stephen King feel and quickly coming up with stuff that would scare the likes of Ramsey Campbell, CHANNEL ZERO is a far more accomplished, intriguing, and downright scary television series than AMERICAN HORROR STORY. That thing depicted on the DVD cover at the top there is made entirely of children's teeth, which it eats, and there are plenty of other nasties in here to give you some delicious, TV-inspired nightmares as well.

Second Sight's two disc set has all six episodes from Season One, plus deleted scenes and an interview with series creator Nick Antosca. 

For those unfamiliar with the concept, 'Creepypasta' is essentially abbreviated slang for 'creepy copy and paste' and describes a collection of scary stories and images put up on the internet and intended to be shared and developed by others without the constrictions of copyright. CHANNEL ZERO: CANDLE COVE has done a fine job of adapting this particular Creepypasta idea to television. It has met with generally good to excellent reviews and has done well enough that the second season, NO END HOUSE is being broadcast right now. It's all well worth catching up with if you fancy some scary TV.

CHANNEL ZERO: CANDLE COVE is out on Blu-ray and DVD from Second Sight on Monday 30th October 2017

Ash Vs Evil Dead Season 2 (2017)

More Colourful, More Gory, More Monsters 

Galore-y!

That's about the level of the appalling one-liners uttered by Ash (Bruce Campbell) in the gleefully knockabout, extremely splattery, and frequently low brow humour-y second season of ASH VS EVIL DEAD, now getting a DVD & Blu-ray release from Starz.

Ash, Pablo (Ray Santiago) and Kelly (Dana DeLorenzo) are living it up in Jacksonville, Florida after the truce called with sexy villain Ruby (Lucy Lawless) at the end of season one. It doesn't last long, however, and this being Sam Raimi's universe that means about thirty seconds before Ruby's 'children' turn on her and try and get the Necronomicon.

She calls on Ash and his friends for help and no sooner than you can say 'The Deadites Are Coming" off we go on another cheery (seriously) splatterthon laced with a degree of innuendo and scatalogical humour that feels less Three Stooges this time and more Carry On Evil Dead. 

If you like that, plus frenetic pacing and gallons of blood, then ASH VS EVIL DEAD will absolutely be your thing. Every episode leaves you breathless and the Blu-ray will have you rubbing your eyes at the eye-popping colour palette. The actors all seem to be having a blast and there's the same sense of outrageously gory fun that the first season managed to maintain. 

There are also plenty of surprises along the way in the form of neat casting choices, returning characters, clips from the original EVIL DEAD & EVIL DEAD 2, and Joseph LoDuca is doing the music again so fans can once again have fun spotting musical quotes from those two pictures as well. 

Starz's two-disc set contain all ten episodes. You also get commentary tracks on selected episodes - the first two have Campbell, Lawless, Santiago and DeLorenzo, the third Rob Tapert, Lawless and DeLorenzo. Three more episodes on disc two get commentaries.

You also get eight featurettes, including Women Who Kick Ash, Up Your Ash (a touch of the Frankie Howerds there, methinks), Dawn of the Spawn, How to Kill a Deadite and others, the titles of which might be spoilers so I'll leave you to discover them. 

ASH VS EVIL DEAD Season 2 is out now on Blu-ray and DVD from Starz. 

American Gods (2017)

Worthy of (Some) Praise

The eight part (so far) adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel gets a welcome UK Blu-ray, Digital Download and DVD release (after premiering on Amazon Prime) from Studio Canal.

When Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) is released from prison he learns that his wife Laura (Emily Browning) has been killed in a car accident. Travelling home to attend her funeral he ends up meeting the charismatic Mr Wednesday (the charismatic Ian McShane) who offers him a job. Shadow says no but Mr Wednesday is not so easily dissuaded. 

By the time Shadow has agreed a contract, sealed over drinks in a bar, it’s just the start of a bizarre odyssey that will reveal that Mr Wednesday isn’t actually a man at all as the two of them journey through a world of old gods and new, where leprechauns still live (and are very sweary and violent) and where Shadow’s dead wife refuses to stay either still or buried. 

The first two episodes of AMERICAN GODS are superb, from the Nicolas Winding-Refnesque NEON DEMON-style opening credits through some excellent psychedelic creative visuals to some great performances. Then it all slows down a lot, to the point where you wonder if heels are being dragged just so Neil Gaiman’s novel can be steamrollered out to two series rather than just the one (which is what seems to be the plan).

But there are some wonderful highlights in the later episodes. Top-billed Crispin Glover swans in for the first time in episode five and effortlessly owns the entire series in a tour de force sequence featuring him, McShane and Gillian Anderson (splendidly, quirkily sexy as Media).

But things don’t really get going in the final two episodes, either. In fact episode seven is even more meandering than the others. Episode eight brings many of the characters together but does little more with them than set things up for Season 2. 

Studio Canal’s Blu-ray and DVD set comes with extras on each of its four discs. These include just under an hour of a panel from San Diego ComicCon with Neil Gaiman, producers / writers Bryan Fuller and Michael Greene along with stars Ian McShane, Ricky Whittle and others. There are separate 12 minute interviews with McShane,Ricky Whittle & Emily Browning, McShane and Whittle and Technical Boy  Bruce Langley. American Gods Origins finds Neil Gaiman in Reykjavik talking about his Norse folkloric inspirations for the book. 

You also get short featurettes on Anderson, Glover and Langley's characters, another on the ‘Old Gods’ seen in the show, ’Book Vs Show’, and ‘What is American Gods’. All these are tiny snippets that only last about five minutes each. 

Visually sumptuous, well acted and with some terrific directorial flourishes, oddly enough the area AMERICAN GODS falls down in is the storytelling department. The publicity has likened it to GAME OF THRONES, but whereas in its first season that show was a display of how to adapt a complex novel to the screen in just the right number of episodes, AMERICAN GODS needs to tighten things up and get its act together for Season 2. 

AMERICAN GODS is out on Digital Download, DVD and Blu-ray from Studio Canal on Monday 31st July 2017