My Cultural Life - King of Halloween

What's Up?

There's another reason why I hate the autumn so much. I've talked about Facebook Memories a lot in these blogs and one thing I have noticed throughout the month of October has been the number of times over the last 17 years I have been ill during this month. I mean, I dislike November more, but October has the right to be called my worst month by virtue of how much of it I have spent unwell. 

It has been no exception in 2025, even if my memories won't reflect that next year (because I've not mentioned on Facebook that I've been ill (yet). It started over two weeks ago with a raging sore throat, which then turned into a cold and by this time last week I thought I was over the worst of it. However, by the end of last weekend it had returned with a vengeance - but I told you most of this in the last blog. This isn't me going senile (although I absolutely struggled to remember Carol Kirkwood's surname a few days ago, despite watching her on my TV for nearly 30 years), it's me just saying that last week when I wrote my blog preamble I was kind of referring to the virus in the past tense. Little did I know that by the time the last blog had been live for 12 hours I would feel like a heap of shit again.

Anyhow, I write this on Wednesday. I have a doctor's appointment later today because I need antibiotics and steroids otherwise I won't be fit to do my Halloween quiz on Friday. To quote my old man, "I'm getting fed up with this."

Horror Film

I read The Long Walk - a novella by Stephen King writing under his Richard Bachman pseudonym - in the early 1980s and thought it was one of the grimmest and hopeless (as in without hope) stories I'd ever read. I've reread most of King's novels in the intervening 40 odd years, but I've never gone back to that one. The film The Long Walk is as faithful an adaptation as you will ever see, even if the ending was different, it was still a bleak and relentlessly horrible thing. As a movie it's a quite brilliant adaptation, one that encapsulates all that was harrowing and difficult to read. As films go, nothing I've ever seen was as desperate and heartbreaking as The Road, but this comes a close second...

Set in, presumably, an alternate universe USA, given the strange and anachronistic feel of this country, with it's aging automobiles but high tech equipment. A place where some war has destroyed the country's infrastructure and reduced it to being no longer the great country, but one full of despair, poverty and an authoritarian regime that executes 'enemies of the state' in the street, in front of their families. The actual Long Walk is a marathon of sorts; 50 representatives of each state have to walk until there is only one person left standing, and he will get his heart's desire, while the other 49 are systematically executed if they stop for more than a few seconds or drop below 3mph. It is a really good film and one I will never watch again. 7.5/10

Another Horror Film

One film I'm not watching this week will be The Road (briefly mentioned in the previous review), but it seems this week has started with us watching the grimmest of grim movies and so far both are based on Stephen King stories. Sunday night's fare was the excellent Frank Darabont adaptation of The Mist, a feature that really ramps up the 'people are hell and in hell' quota while shovelling some really nasty creatures intent on killing and eating us. It has possibly the least satisfactory ending of any film ever made, but don't let that put you off...

The Mist is based on a novella (as was The Long Walk) and while the book is a grim and frightening look at what people will do when faced with the unknown, the movie tweaks the book slightly to portray some people as just as monstrous as the unknown. Thomas Jane plays a local artist who goes to the supermarket with his son after a storm damages his lakeside house when, suddenly, everything is shrouded in a thick mist (or fog as we call it). In the mist are creatures beyond our imagination and it becomes a fight for survival against inter-dimensional beings who view us a tasty morsels. It is a relentlessly grim movie, with Marcia Gay Hardin as a religious nutter who manages to get the people trapped in the supermarket believing the Book of Revelations is coming true in front of them. It is a great film, let down a little by some dated special effects, but it's still absorbing and horrific. A truly great modern horror movie. 8/10

Gone Fishing

Time to settle down and watch Bob and Paul go fishing. The joy of Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing is the simplicity of it. Two aging comedians go fishing to idyllic parts of the UK in search of certain types of fish. They chat, tell jokes, talk in funny voices and get chaperoned by Ted the terrier, who is now looking as old as his human companions. The new series was filmed this year, which means it's up to date in terms of the duos ages and health (the series from last year was filmed in 2023 back to back with the 2023 series due to the work commitments of Whitehouse). All episodes are available on iPlayer, but we choose to watch it weekly because we're old and like our light hearted TV in weekly chunks. It's good to have it back. And away... 

The Future is Grim

There's a theme developing and it was initially unintentional. We decided to rewatch an old film, one, which when released felt like a superb adaptation of one of Stephen King's earliest novels, but now feels relevant but extremely dated. The Dead Zone is the story of Johnny Smith, who after a terrible car accident develops precognitive abilities and can see into the future. After a series of events which make him notorious, he tries to live a quiet life as a teacher, but is pulled back into the real world when he shakes hands with a man running to be senator who Johnny sees as being president one day and sets in motion the end of the world. It portrays an America a lot different from today with a very dodgy man running for office who is basically a psychopath - so not at all far fetched and silly then... 7/10

Welcome to Kingville

I suppose we are fast approaching Halloween, so all these King things are probably more than just a coincidence. That said, It: Welcome to Derry was always coming out this week, so it was always going to be on my watch list. I'm usually slightly worried about adaptations and extensions of Stephen King novels and this I was especially concerned about because I never rated It and the two adaptations of the book have struggled to be really great because the source material was so poor (IMHO). This prequel to It really starts off strange has a very long lull in the middle before going batshit bonkers at the end, leaving whoever watched it wondering how the fuck they're going to carry on. Stylistically it's superb, for creepy and weird it knocks it out of the park, but... there's something about it that bothers me, I just don't know what it is yet. It's a promising start though.

Bad Dog?

One of the best things about Good Boy is its 72 minute running time. Don't get me wrong, I love dogs, especially my own, and this was a truly unique horror movie with an equally unique perspective, but apart from the dog - who I feel was underused - it was an absolute load of rancid dog arse. Essentially it's a haunted house fable in which the dog - Indy - isn't even the hero; it's just how he sees it, or rather how it looks from his angle. Was it scary? There was a jump moment, but other than that the creepiness was low key and there was no internal logic to the film at all apart from perhaps one little bit which I can't tell you because it would spoil a film that wasn't that good. However, there was a clever bit of photography being used, which was you never saw a human's face unless that human was dead... 4/10 (7/10 for the dog) 

No Longer A Comedy

The truth will out, as they say, and when it does nothing will be the same again. There was something totally predictable about this week's Chad Powers, but there was also something slightly sinister as well, neither of which I can really go into in any detail else it will spoil it for those of you who watch this or intend to. Suffice it to say, Russ ends up doing something so totally Russ that you hate him for it, but, you understand why he does it. This was a downer compared to last week's riot of laughs, but in no way was this a bad episode, in many ways it's the best one so far. It's just not a comedy any more...

Final Phases

QI:XL is back with the letter W, meaning X, Y and Z are left. Sandi Toksvig, who was seriously ill last year, looks like she hasn't fully recovered and while this is an old favourite, it does feel like it needs to end in the next three years and be put to bed. Alan Davies as usual is Alan Davies and the Whales, Wales, Wails themed opener felt like it could have been a classic but ended up just going through the motions - which, if you watched this, you can have double the points bonus if you catch the reference.

FBI C U

This week's The Morning Show concluded one of the subplots and created a new one because of it. Also Alex does something she's wanted to do for a while and immediately regrets it, while the staff on the show are unimpressed by the new CEO's attempts at a bonding exercise. Chip tells Alex where to get off and Bradley does something really fucking nasty. Meanwhile Yanko faces a huge dilemma and then faces off against Bradley. It was a low key episode but still very, very good.

No Oxford I Know

You know when you look forward to something it often lets you down? Well, considering all the good press I've been seeing about Down Cemetery Road I really wanted to like it, but I pretty much didn't from almost the opening scenes. That said, we watched the first two parts and the wife likes it, so I'm saddled with watching it for a bit longer. She actually said to me that she could tell I wasn't impressed and I wasn't. I thought the plot was hokey, the characters all a bit too overwrought or melodramatic, the story behind the story all seems a little bit too sarcastic and belittling and I don't believe for a second that hospital staff, police officers or even blokes who live down the road who you've claimed to have known for ages can be contract killers. I thought it was a load of tonally awkward bollocks, but we'll see how it goes and if nothing else it'll give me an excuse to let off steam and have a good whinge. Oh and The Guardian gave this a 5 star review, so if anything should say 'avoid' it's that.

American Tragedy

Can you believe that I have never seen Edward Scissorhands? It's true; for some strange reason it has never crossed my path and I've never gone out of my way to watch it. I suppose it has a lot to do with my 'take him or leave him' attitude about Tim Burton. I can admire his work but I don't necessarily like it. That said, this modern day reworking of Frankenstein (versus Suburbia) is quite extraordinary, especially as it was made in a time before CGI and it simply looks fabulous. Johnny Depp plays Edward, a creation of the old man who lives in the spooky mansion at the top of the hill next to an All-American housing estate (that looks like it was designed by the guy who painted Tobermory). 

Dianne West, Alan Arkin, Wynona Ryder, Vincent Price and Michael Anthony Hall are the supporting cast in this tale about acceptance and then rejection by those fickle people we like to call 'Americans' - you know, the people who can find prejudice in orange juice. It is a simply lovely story until we see the true face of America and then it becomes a deeply sad tragedy. Stylistically it is superb, the colours are all very basic, but fresh and vibrant; the people all look like they've walked out of the 1960s but there's talk of VCRs and CDs and it is simply a joy to immerse yourself in. 8/10

Thank Fuck For That

Jesus fucking wept. Or maybe some other exclamation. The finale of Brassic was simply a giant dog turd. I cannot believe that a show that was so good when it started ended up being lodged in the U bend of shittiest TV shows ever. It was stupid and the ending made little or no sense. Please, if there is a god she'll make sure this is consigned to fucking hell...

I'm Smoking A Fag

We decided to watch the portmanteau movie Dead of Night on a wet and blustery Thursday afternoon. The most incredible thing about this film was the amount of smoking that took place; everyone, including the doctor, was sparking up at any available opportunity, it felt more like an advertisement for the tobacco industry than the 'supernatural horror' IMDB claims it is. It's a series of 'spooky' tales with a wraparound story that is without doubt the creepiest of all the stories. But this was made in 1945 and everyone shouted their lines at each other and it was all very 'what what, I say and golly gosh.' I wanted to watch The Colditz Story but the wife 'won' out... 4/10

Secret Bollocks

Our second Johnny Depp film of Thursday was the only Stephen King adaptation we haven't seen with an IMDB rating over 6. There are many we will never watch and I couldn't quite understand why we'd never seen this. Also starring the excellent John Turturro, Timothy Hutton and Maria Bello it's the story of a writer who is confronted by someone who claims to have written a story that Depp has taken credit for. From that point on suspicious and dangerous shit starts to happen and I can't remember reading the short story it's based on but I sussed out what was going on within ten minutes, it was then just a case of waiting for the next hour and 20 minutes to catch up with my correct hypothesis. 3/10 

Return to the Age of Heroes

While I recuperate from the lurgy and try to get myself fit enough to do Friday night's quiz, I decided to watch an old favourite on Friday afternoon. So I watched The Avengers, for what might be the fourth time in 13 years. This is a film I've reviewed probably three times already, so I'm not going to review it as such, I'm going to critique it... Technically, this is a 10/10 movie, but the story only really gets a 6. Why? Let me explain...

As a spectacle it is beyond brilliant. The special effects are phenomenal, but the story, or more specifically the basis of it are wrong. It's like Joss Whedon didn't pay much attention to the previous films, apart from Iron Man. Loki is totally and tonally wrong; this is not the character from the first Thor movie, nor is it the one from subsequent films. The Avengers Initiative was never shut down in the previous movies; this was something that was sprung on us which was pretty unnecessary and simply muddied the waters. There are a number of contrived plot elements, which could easily have been resolved by some simple script consultancy and the script felt forced, with the exception of Tony Stark (one wonders if Robert Downey Jr wrote his own lines). Don't get me wrong, it's one of the best MCU films ever, but it could have been a 10/10 across the board. 8/10

What's Up Next?

Hopefully a few days rest to recover from this fucking virus that has fucked me up for two weeks now. Friday night was another fantastic quiz night at my local, The Wigtown Ploughman, and despite me sweating like a pig (do pigs really sweat?) and having a corking headache, I managed to get through the evening and welcome a new winner. It was a Halloween-themed evening and I went dressed as an unwell serial killer...

Next week, more films, TV and stuff. Woo and indeed hoo.