Pop Culture - The Alien Vampire Farmhouse Ghost League Monsters

Death and spoilers... this has them both. 

Film of the Week -1

I can safely say that on May 8th, 2024, I watched the best Godzilla film I've ever seen. In fact, Godzilla Minus 1 [Gojira -1] is one of the best films I've seen this year and was a truly astonishing piece of filmmaking that I really didn't expect. In many ways, it reminded me of Spielberg's Jaws, where the 'monster shark' was on screen for something ridiculous like seven minutes of the entire movie. This is a cracking film and well worth watching. It will confound and amaze you because you will think it's one thing and it turns out to be something else entirely - but it does still have Godzilla in it.

This was a spectacle; a film laden with a mixture of pathos, excellent - but also really quirky - special effects and a story that takes centre stage. This Godzilla film isn't about the monster, it's about the wreckage of WW2 and how some Japanese struggled to cope with the defeat they were handed - not because they lost, but because they were forced into it in the first place. I haven't seen that many Japanese films and I can't tell you if Japanese filmmakers are outspoken about the war and Japan's part in it, but the underlying message here was they - the men of Japan - were forced to do things that were wrong; that defied the people they really were and then after all of that they were burdened with a monster just to repeat the process in a different way. This is a film about shame, pain and redemption and it has a huge fuck off monster in it that trashes Japan and munches on naval destroyers for breakfast.

It starts with a kamikaze fighter failing in his mission, landing on a remote Japanese which is then terrorised by a monster that's about 30 feet tall and destroys the base leaving just Shikishima - the pilot - and an engineer called Tachibana. Shikishima is a disgrace and he gets back to Tokyo a troubled soul; it's here that he inadvertently meets Noriko and the child she has adopted. The three eke a living out in the destroyed streets of the capital, rebuilding their lives while bringing up baby Akiko, who thinks of these two disparate adults as her birth parents. Then, after two years and a nuclear test on the Bikini Atoll, Godzilla returns, except now he's over 100 feet tall and he's vengeful; he's angry and the people of Japan are going to pay for it. What follows is a really riveting and intelligently made film with likeable characters and a pace and narrative like a US film. Yes, the special effects are a mixture of pure genius and very silly, but this is Godzilla. The last thing you'd expect is a Godzilla movie that is actually an Oscar winning serious and sensible attempt to reboot the Japanese franchise, one that achieves it in spades.

This is a quality movie. Do not be put off by the fact there's a 100 foot tall lizard thing causing havoc, because this film isn't about that; this is a film with a story that just happens to have a 100 foot lizard thing in it. It has a beginning, a middle and an ending (of sorts) and it has the right balance of tragedy and happy endings. Absolutely film of the week, probably going to make my top films of the year. I can't recommend this enough.

Of Monsters and Men 

It's been four years since we last watched Love and Monsters, a film that still puzzles me slightly... You see, this is clearly a relatively low budget film with a largely C list or unknown cast and yet in terms of special effects and general feel it pisses over a lot of films made in the last four years with bigger budgets, from major studios, with star names attached.

This is the story of the aftermath of an asteroid heading for earth that is blown out of the sky by missiles carrying - for some strange reason - chemicals to help completely destroy it. And it works! Except it doesn't and the chemicals, presumably transformed at a molecular level, start mutating all living things on the surface of the earth apart from mammals - insects, amphibians and reptiles (of which we don't see any) all become massive, mutated and largely very dangerous. 95% of humanity is wiped out and all the survivors live underground or in shelters. Dylan O'Brien (apparently well known in certain circles, but none that I've been around) and Jessica Henwick are former girlfriend/boyfriend from Fairfield, California, who when the giant mutated monsters attack get separated, but seven years later they reconnect, via CB radio, to discover they're only 35 miles away from each other.

O'Brien's character Joel is absolutely shit at protecting himself or anyone else and has been reduced to looking after a cow and making minestrone soup; he isn't even allowed to help protect himself he's that much of a freezer - he freezes in the face of fear. However, when it becomes clear that he has no real respect or reason for living, he decides to leave his colony and go in search of Henwick's Aimee. His colony friends probably give him less than a couple of hours to survive. However, through some luck and help of a couple of cynical survivors he finds his way to Aimee just in time to help save their colony from food stealing pirates. It's fast, fun and is yet another example of filmmakers doing post-apocalypse with aplomb. The irony is Michael Rooker is one of the cynical survivors and he spent a few seasons on the Walking Dead, yet in the 30 minutes he was in this film he was far more believable as a survivor in a hostile apocalypse than he ever seemed in TWD. This is a great little film with a slightly contrived, simple story with lots of signposts along the way - such as you can tell a good or bad monster by their eyes, etc. If you ever get the chance to see it, it's worth checking out.

This Farming Death

As a vegetarian, certain farming things don't really fall on my radar. I'm not interested in the livestock side because, you know... a vegetarian. I don't eat meat therefore I'm on the side of the animal and that doesn't always work out the way I'd like. Livestock farming is something my vegetarianism isn't going to stop and frankly I don't want to stop it. I don't have prejudices like vegans; if you want to eat meat, go ahead. I'll sit it out.

The fourth episode of Clarkson's Farm was called 'Harrowing' and by God it was. This might be a farming show about a hapless buffoon getting in the way of a farming operation, but if Clarkson hasn't converted people into actually liking him by the end of this series I will be very surprised. In fact, if he's still farming with animals by the end of the series I will eat my neighbour's alpacas (I won't but you know what I mean). The episode 'Harrowing' is about Jeremy's new line in forest reared pigs and he's gone to great expense to obtain pigs, accommodation for said pigs and to get an area of woodland prepared so that the pigs can live safely among the trees and then it starts to go horribly, tragically, wrong and it's literally down to bad luck rather than bad farming. There was no one pointing fingers at Clarkson or Lisa Hogan, his partner, because bad luck, bad weather, unexpected illness and so much death, that by the end of the episode my wife was blubbing, Lisa was blubbing and Clarkson looked like a man who had just lost everything. He became a human being in these 40 minutes, one who said a number of times, 'I can't do this. I can't farm pigs. I like them too much.' He even looked uncomfortable when he took a delivery of pork from seven of his young boars that had reached peak usefulness.

Yes, there's always a lot of contrived nonsense and anyone watching would not believe that Kaleb would get away with talking to Jezza the way he does sometimes. Equally, a lot of ignorant people would probably get Jezza to sack Charlie Ireland, because he gets in the way, far too much and if you start wondering just what Lisa Hogan is capable of understanding at this point you're going to have to be very careful how you say it because she's from Ireland. It is extremely good television even if it's bewildering why.

Goals Galore!

The second episode of season three of Welcome to Wrexham was about goals - the high number of them happening in Wrexham's opening six games of the season - and Ben Foster realising that as a top class goalkeeper he needs to be younger than 42 (he retires after the 5-5 draw with Swindon). It was also about a local photographer, who came across as a self-centred dodgy geezer but capable of taking a good photo. 

Frankly, I sometimes wonder why this programme is so popular, but then I realise that we're talking about real people in a reality show setting rather than people who want to be famous. The footballers are already writing their names down in local folklore and when Wrexham are in the Championship or even the Premier League, these will be the outriders; the men who made the future possible. The people of Wrexham, however, are bearing their souls for the TV show and while it might be a little uncomfortable to watch at times - almost cringeworthy one moment and deeply sad the next - you see that what Rob & Ryan have done is regenerate a town (now a city), give it hope and pride and set it back on the road to recovery. I expect they'll sell the club in the next two years for a huge profit and the main story will end; there are, after all, 91 other clubs in the football and Premier league and what makes Wrexham so special are the celebrities and the people who don't want to be celebrities, they just want to be seen associated with the love of their sporting lives.

*** This week's episode dropped on Friday (the day before this column goes live) and as usual I downloaded it and we sat down to watch it only to be presented by an episode of Black Mafia Family instead - a programme that we weren't aware of and are unlikely to pursue in the future (not for any specific reason other than it seemed to be a badly acted Blaxploitation piss take). However, this particular thing has never happened before - download something and it turns out to be something else entirely. It ended up being quite funny because there's an MPA rating just before it starts and we were warned of 'violence', 'nudity' and a couple of things you do get in Welcome to Wrexham and because Ryan Reynolds has a reputation for being a little bit bonkers, we actually watched five minutes of Black Mafia Family thinking it was such a bad piss take of dodgy Blaxploitation films of the 70s that perhaps it was WTW just hiding...

Homes Under a Mullet

I'd intended to give up on Scotland's Home of the Year after the tedious and slightly boring Christmas Special with the revamped presenting line-up, but the wife is a fan and I don't have to enjoy the presenters to appreciate some of the homes.

The new mega-hunk architect who has replaced the man in black Michael Angus is as dynamic as watching an apple go mouldy. Whereas Angus was erudite and humorous, this new guy is a nerd and fucking boring despite looking like a bodybuilder with dodgy 90s hair. Anna Campbell-Jones has always been the most forthright and least likeable of the original three judges and one gets the feeling this is her baby now the other two have gone. While Banjo Beale, the Australian interior designer who looks like a vagrant bin man is kind of growing on me because two years into his gig he's finally beginning to show a bit of personality. However, I don't really like any of them, to be honest. The new series kicked off with three houses in the North East of Scotland and it's always good to see the least expensive, most home-like, house win in the heats. This is a programme that usually likes to have - per episode - something expensive and old, something expensive and brand new and something you, me and our mates could afford with a garden so small you couldn't lift a cat up let alone throw it around. There is an honesty about the choices and I warm to this show when the cheapest option wins - but we are talking about 'homes' and not 'houses' or any other 'designer' aspect. It's still cheap TV that has deteriorated over the last couple of years.

Reading

Amazingly, I've read two books this year already. The first time I've done this since I moved to Scotland. Obviously this isn't a happy admission because there was once a time when I would have read two novels by the end of January. I usually manage about four a year now - a couple of new ones and a couple of re-reads. I like to sit in the garden and read and this year hasn't been conducive to even going out let alone sitting outside...

The first book was a collection of short stories, but the highlight so far was Holly, the latest novel from Stephen King and featuring a character he created as a walk on extra in book called Mr Mercedes and has ended up featuring in now six different tales. Holly Gibney has changed since her first, tentative steps into the King Universe. Once written as a borderline autistic basket case, she has been developed into almost a 'normal' woman with a few OCDs and a couple of psychological holdbacks from her past. Now in her mid-40s, she's not the marrying kind, but has her extended family around her and she looks out for them like the mother she will never likely be.

Holly is actually quite a light tale in that it's about the disappearance of a young woman and after the police basically fail to even investigate the girl's mother hires Holly to find out what's happened. The girl it seems might have fallen victim to a couple of 'unusual' serial killers; two people who literally live a few miles from Holly's base of operations. Each chapter represents a different period in time, until you get to July 2022 when the different timelines start to converge; each chapter signifying a period where one story moves into the other's plane. Also going on is a subplot about the Robinson siblings - Jerome and Barbara - who are both in the process of making names for themselves as upwardly middle class black writers in a country that sometimes frowns on anything that isn't white.

Compared to The Outsider, the first book I read with Holly in it, this is a huge evolution in the character, but it's also a slight almost silly story that isn't really creepy and, actually thankfully, avoids some of the supernatural elements previous stories have veered towards. I expect we'll see another Holly Gibney story in the next few years, depending on whether King is still able to write - he's 77 in September and while that might still be young for some American writers, you never know what's round the corner...

Wall Flowers

There's a fair bit of interesting TV circling around at the moment - possibly confirming the decision to axe certain shows from the Flash Drive of Doom because, you know, we're never going to get around to watching them - we decided to dip back into the world of The White Lotus again, despite not being blown away by the first series.

This time around we're in Italy with a new trio of holidaymakers: half a family from New Jersey; a couple of rich entrepreneur/lawyer types and Jennifer Coolidge is back this time with an assistant and her newish husband in tow - the guy she met halfway through season one.

As with the first series, we have a bunch of dislikeable people, with the exception being one kid from one of the families. You think the poor browbeaten assistant of Tanya, who is essentially being bullied for being told she had to go on holiday where she is no longer wanted (a situation I can relate to as it has pretty much happened to me), is going to collect your sympathy as well, but she just joins a long list of people in this series that you wouldn't want to meet in real life. The rest of the characters are, as usual, vacuous, full of themselves and snobs. Added to the mix are a couple of young Italian 'hookers', a maitre d who is both the antithesis of the Hawaiian one and extremely alike, while assorted other characters crop up as the series unfolds and like season one this one starts with a dead body... well possibly three dead bodies, so the 'fun' is working out just who dies by the 7th episode. It has wall-to-wall stars in it this time; I mean really much higher profile than season one and there's something about it that 'feels' better than season one. 

A Frozen Turd

Oh no, no, no. You might remember how I really am not a fan of the original 1984 Ghostbusters? Well, I hated Ghostbusters 2 the 1989 sequel with an absolute passion. It was a really very poor film with remarkably bad special effects given it was made five years after the first and it pretty much put paid to any hope/idea/fear there might be a franchise of more Ghostbusters movies.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is much worse than Ghostbusters 2 and that is a real shame. This is all wrong. It's pretty much a remake of the original film with a few post modern twists and less story and considering it was on for almost two hours makes me wonder how something so vacuous was allowed to be made, especially after the relative fun and success of Afterlife. I'm struggling to find anything positive to say about this film; whoever Gil Kenan - the director - is he's no Reitman (Ivan or Jason) and this really felt like someone had made a three hour film then indiscriminately ripped an hour of it away with a pair of sheers wearing a blindfold. Why was James Acaster in it, playing James Acaster? What was the point of Finn Wolfhard again? How come Carrie Coon was in it for most of the film but didn't seem to contribute anything at all? Paul Rudd stopped being funny and became something of a waste of time and even the excellent Logan Kim as Podcast was a huge disappointment. 

It starts with little or no explanation as to why the Spengler family are back in New York, with Rudd in tow and various other characters from Oklahoma and why there are ghosts popping up all over the Big Apple yet again. From the moment they break something trapping a sewer demon the movie starts to imitate the original, even wheeling William Atherton out as the mayor determined to shut the Ghostbusters down despite ghostly sightings all over the city. Then there's this truly unexplained scene where the once brilliant Phoebe decides to go and play chess on her own, in Central Park, in the middle of the night and starts playing it with a girl ghost from 100 years ago, who beats her every time and there's a suggestion that there might be some 'gay' attraction either that or the girl/ghost girl new friendship was just handled badly. The word 'contrived' kept popping up while I was watching it and what was even more bizarre was I remember looking at the clock and thinking 75 minutes has passed and fuck all had happened really. Just the same old shit that hampered the Ghostbusters first time around.

There were lots of trailers for this circulating since last autumn and I think it would be fair to say that very few of them made it into the final cut, or if they did they were so heavily manipulated you recognised the words but not the scenes. In fact the trailers really made this look a lot better than it was, mainly because they didn't feature Winston's new Ghostbuster HQ, the ghost girl, some of the original ghosts, supporting characters who were just making the numbers up, any of the pointless 'why are they even here' ghostly caveats or the fact it had a script that felt like it was written by a AI ghost. 

In the first film McKenna Grace stole it; her character - Phoebe - knocked the ball out of the park as Egon's granddaughter, this time around she seemed to spend a lot of time covering up the fact she's a growing woman. Look I'm not being creepy here, but when she made Afterlife she was a 13-year-old playing a 13-year-old, in Frozen Empire she's a 17 year old playing a 15 year old nerd and she literally spends the film deliberately covering up her growing maturity... She was still instrumental in the closure of this film but the character lost so much of what she seemed to show and literally became a cipher; a pawn in a plot that was given absolutely no lead in; this is why I feel the film has been hacked to pieces because I don't believe it could have been made with such glaring holes in the plot. It was not a good film and that pisses me off because I spent as much time as this just a couple of months ago bigging up Afterlife for being an actually really enjoyable film; this was boring, dull and slightly pointless. The Guardian actually suggested in a recent review that this should maybe be the last in the franchise and I thought this was just another of their reviewers being contrary and a bit of a wanker. I now agree. It either needs putting to bed or, in a neat twist, we get Multiverse Ghostbusters where this mob, the surviving originals and the all girl reboot from 2016 all have to team up to stop some new apocalypse... Okay, maybe not. 

A (Not So) Brief Interlude...

Bob Iger, head of Disney, has been in the news this week, as have Disney, the company that lured him out of retirement. It appears that the company's streaming platforms - Disney+ and Hulu - have actually made money despite being expected to lose money yet again. This has changed the way of thinking at the House of Mouse and has led Iger to double down on a number of pledges, such as better quality products and less frequency...

My 'insider' at Marvel suggests that while things look rosier at the moment it's not going to facilitate 'positive' changes. Disney still has four Marvel films scheduled for 2025 - Captain America: Brave New World; Thunderbolts, Blade and Fantastic Four and people inside Disney, including Iger, still believe that is far too much product to be releasing in a dwindling market. In fact, Disney+'s change in financial misfortunes don't necessarily point to a change to what Marvel product is coming out and we need to remember there are a shit load of projects on the horizon, none of which have been shut down, which suggest that Marvel's output can't really alter over the next FIVE years.

Let me explain: there is no way Disney will allow four Marvel films to be released next year, not even if Deadpool 3 (or whatever it's going to be called next week) is a huge box office smash. The appetite for 'genuine' superhero films has all but disappeared and Iger allegedly said at a meeting in March that in an ideal world the only film that would come out in 2025 would be the Fantastic Four [and boy would that need to be good]. However, the new Captain America film (of which there is a ridiculously low expectation for) has been in the can since 2022 - despite just recently having its fourth set of reshoots - Blade has just been a catalogue of problems and is still shooting and Thunderbolts which is due in 14 months hasn't even got a working script. Disney are also keen to rush through another Spider-Man film/trilogy, despite only making a percentage of the profits. The truth is if anyone really knows what is happening then they're being tight-lipped about it.

My guy suggested that the test screenings for Brave New World are going to be all important. The first batch that took place over a year ago forced Marvel into having extensive reshoots and as we discovered from The Marvels, the more you tinker with something the less coherent it becomes. There is a rumour circulating that there's over FOUR hours of footage that needs to be turned into a two hour movie that Disney has no great hopes for. "No Chris Evans, no hope" seems to be the motto being bandied around. Even Harrison Ford's presence doesn't appear to have made anyone particularly excited and, of course, there's the Israel angle, which has a number of people glancing nervously over their shoulders about - the irony is since this film was announced, we have had very much a 'new world order' and one where public opinion moves like the tides - this film could be so problematic for Disney that they might just cut and run from it. I suggested a year ago that this could end up being converted into an eight-part TV series and I still think this is the best way forward. 

So, to contradict the last paragraph... I wouldn't be at all surprised if we only see two films in 2025 - a reluctant release for Brave New World and the Fantastic Four film. I expect Thunderbolts will be delayed again, possibly even cancelled and Blade will come out early 2026, if at all. Disney might be happier about certain things at the company but I don't think the MCU is one of them; Deadpool 3 is going to be R rated (which means a success will make it easier to schedule Blade) and probably won't even feel like anything that's been released recently. It will not be a true gauge of where the MCU is or where it is going and I'm more inclined to think we'll see Disney selling Marvel off by 2026 than keeping it and ploughing money into a now dead cash cow.

Vampire Weeknight

I suppose the best thing I can say about Abigail is that it wasn't a absolute load of shit. I have seen much worse movies, this week. However, it was still a disappointing film considering it has Dan Stevens in it and given the next film I see him in is going to be the execrable Kong/Godzilla mash up then I think the former Downton, Legion and I'm Your Man star is likely to disappear from my 'actors who never disappoint' list.

The weird thing about Abigail was something the wife noticed during the end credits; it was made in Ireland by mainly Irish people - not that this is a bad thing, but it did seem a bit strange. The next weird thing about the film is how little I have to say about it. It also stars Kevin Durand (who plays Proximus Caesar in the new POTA film) and Kathryn Newton - last seen in that woeful Ant-Man Quantumania bollocks - as well as Giancarlo Esposito (he of Gus Fring fame), Mellissa Barrera - who apparently has been in a few things we haven't seen; some actor who died shortly after making the film - of a drug overdose and Alisha Weir - the only Irish actor in the credits and the person who plays the titular Abigail. This is essentially about a kidnapping that goes terribly wrong. It has an inconsistent story, some poor plotting, very bad accents - especially Stevens as a crooked former New York cop - and it didn't quite know if it was a comedy, a horror movie or a heist film. It was okay, but that's about as charitable as I can muster. I suppose it's okay if you have about 100 minutes to spare and you don't fancy a really long wank or a walk in the woods or a few packets of super noodles...

Dark Sugar

The penultimate episode of the genre-bending Sugar answered a lot of questions, asked a whole bunch more and left us in a place where the final episode has a lot of explaining to do in more ways than one. John's secret is out (to the viewer at least) but it still doesn't explain why the missing Siegel - Olivia - has gone missing or where she is.

John also discovers that his own kind are hunting him or at least appear to be and they're also covering something up regarding Olivia. Sugar does the leg work which eventually leads him back to Ruby's where his 'colleagues' are all gathered with the news that their mission is over and they're leaving very soon. This doesn't sit well with our PI who demands to know where Olivia is and why what has happened has happened. There's also something slightly incongruous about the actions of certain individuals, an inconsistency that takes something away from an otherwise excellent little show.  It appears that someone rich and powerful knows the secret of the alien 'watchers' and that Olivia may or may not be involved in it, but in reality - extrapolating a little - it appears that the rich and powerful who know of the alien presence might also be covering up for a family member who is a serial killer and Olivia might simply be his latest victim, but because the family knows of the aliens, they have warned them away from allowing John to track down the girl, which suggests the family are complicit. Whatever happens in the final part, I don't think our hero is going to be very happy and that might mean more unnecessary violence on his part, which, of course, he doesn't like.

This has been a fabulous little story and sadly even with the unexpected twist I don't think there's been enough of it. Episodes could have done with being longer and while it has been quite riveting viewing perhaps a slightly more linear story with some explanations along the way rather than saving it all for the final episode would have been good. Something tells me there isn't going to be a second season and if that's the case it will be disappointing because I think it works extremely well and it would be great to delve deeper into the whys and wherefores of these characters - that said, who says we won't get full disclosure in the last part. I just can't help thinking that more could have been made of the entire sub-story to make you feel as though the missing Olivia case didn't end up feeling as though it was a footnote rather than the reason we got hooked in the first place. 

Next Time...

The rest of Clarkson's Farm - which did a really clever thing and dropped half the series in one go, waited a week and dropped the episode 'Harrowing' and then dropped the rest of the series the following week. A couple of episodes of Welcome to Wrexham and the last couple of parts of season two of The White Lotus (which is unlikely to be reviewed because, you know, I've told you everything you need to know and short of a staggering event isn't going to make another review anything other than a space filler). We might get around to watching some Severance - we kind of didn't go for it when it came out last year (especially as the Guardian loved it) but as it still has an 8.7 rating on IMDB we figured we should at least give it a go... Oh and the new series of Doctor Who, which I have to admit to being a little underwhelmed about.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is Guy Ritchie's latest offering, which is likely to be our Saturday night film and we're tempted by Patient Zero - a 2018 horror film which has an absolutely woeful score on IMDB - because several other reviews we've seen suggest it doesn't deserve such a low rating. Other than that we're at the mercy of whatever comes out in the next week because there isn't much on the FDoD to set pulses racing (in fact, I've added the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy because it's been over 20 years since we saw these films and we must be due a 400 hour film marathon at some point...

As usual you'll read what is given!