The 14 Days of A (5)

Ace of Wands – Sisters Deadly

I first saw an episode or two of Ace of Wands many years back on a copy of a copy of a c….opy of an off air VHS recording.  It was occasionally in colour, the dialogue was mostly audible and the advert breaks were rather crudely hacked out.  Then in 2007 the DVD box set came out and I finally saw the rest of the existing episodes and I got to experience the full colour experience.  And sadly there’s a reason it didn’t last much past the three years it got.

For those that haven’t seen it or don’t know about it Ace of Wands is a children’s TV series from the early 70s centred around Tarot, a magician with genuine powers and his various helpers.  The first season is completely lost (as of writing it is anyway), there are audio recordings of season two (I’ve got them somewhere but they’re shockingly low quality) and season three exists in full.  “Sisters Deadly” is two thirds of the way through the season and Tarot is currently accompanied by Mikki and Chas.  There’s also Ozymandias (played by Fred the Owl) but he’s not in this one much.  Chas has been employed to take photos of an old lady’s 100^th birthday party but ends up with memory loss and robbing a post office.  Tarot goes to investigate and finds more old ladies involved in a  rather bizarre plan to kidnap military personnel. It’s all rather weird…

Tarot, played by Michael MacKenzie suffers majorly from a case of the seventies.  His hair and clothes are dated in the extreme which instantly distracts from the plot (not such a bad thing at times).  Chas (played by Roy Holder) also suffers from the bad hair decade but ends up in military uniform and doesn’t suffer too badly.  Mikki, the rather stunning Petra Markham, didn’t strike me as being too badly fashioned but everything just ends up looking rather dated.  DVD picture quality, unfortunately, makes the twist in episode three very obvious from the start of episode one (I could be generous and say that it wasn’t supposed to be a huge secret but I’m guessing that they didn’t intend us to guess straight away) but thankfully Sylvia Coleridge is so brilliantly dotty (isn’t she always?) that you can easily watch the scenes and get diverted from the blindingly obvious.  Nothing can really hide the cheapness of the production though and the film sequences involving the army really make it look as though this country is protected by an undermanned Dad’s Army. 

It’s very hard to watch this and not compare it to more modern productions.  It’s slow and lumbering in places, it tries to make old ladies seem creepy and threatening (the end of the second episode almost succeeds but doesn’t quite work and left me laughing sadly) and the back of the DVD case tries to make it sound surprising this was the last season.  There’s nothing actually wrong with it, a modern remake would probably work exceptionally well, but this is just a little too 70s to be good and not so 70s it’s fantastically awful.  Tarot looks unearthly and I wish I could see season one to find out more about him, but by this third season it’s very much about plot rather than characters.  The booklet with the DVD fills in quite a bit of the back story but it’s just not the same.  I think I might just have got unlucky with the choice of story (picked at random) as I remember some of the others being much better this.  Then again, it could just be the memory cheating again.  Hmmmm, back on the shelf or do I give it another go with a different story…?

The 14 Days of A (4)

And Then There Were None…

Another favourite of mine story wise, but a movie adaption I haven’t seen in a long time.  Not 100% convinced I’ll be watching it again any time soon either, I just can’t quite put my finger on why…

For those who don’t know the story, you might want to stop reading now. It’s definitely my favourite Agatha Christie novel and, quite possibly, one of my favourite novels of all time.  I’ve read it countless times, the ending still chills me and it’s been copied many times but very rarely have those attempts come anywhere near the greatness of the novel.  The version I’ve pulled off the shelf is the third movie version, colour with Oliver Reed and Richard Attenborough amongst others.  Rather than inviting ten people to a house on an island, the house is relocated to the desert.  Diplomacy means the nursery rhyme is about Ten Little Indians (still not got as far as soldier boys though) and yes, as always seems to be the case they’ve given it the “revised” ending.  Gits.  Sorry but it’s one of the classic murder mysteries and yes, I know the ending that the book has would be very hard to film, but the BBC radio adaption managed to stick to the spirit of the original, why do the movie versions have to have such a crappy upbeat ending???

I really can’t quite put my finger on what’s wrong with this particular movie version.  It can’t just be the ending as the other films did the same (as did the stage play from memory) so it must be something else.  It can’t be the acting as the cast list is fairly impressive and they’re clearly all trying their hardest (maybe trying too hard?) and the scenery is definitely spectacular (strangely enough I quite like the idea of the new location as it makes it far more believably remote) so I’m narrowing it down to two things.  The music and the direction.  Neither are particularly awful but there’s something about the film that makes it seem flat.  By the time the first three or four characters have been bumped off there should be a real feeling of unease and fear amongst the characters but they just seem to carry on with little change to the way they’re acting.  The music should, by the end, be heart stopping suspense but it’s just a little too seventies to be able to pull it off.  Oh, and when people are singing at the piano, it didn’t help there was a drum beat out of nowhere to accompany them and make the song sound right.  Orson Welles guest voices as the person reading out the list of murder accusations but even that sequence is too bombastic for it to be terrifying.  There should have been a chill as they were read out but, instead, it’s almost like a headmaster reading out the prize list at the end of the school year.

Ah well.  No matter how flat the film it will always be a remarkable piece of plotting and story.  I’ve yet to see something pull off the “everyone dies” story without clearly ripping this one off or failing to reach its levels of style and charm.  It would just be nicer if they’d actually had the balls to make a movie version that had the very unpleasant and frightening ending that the book has.  Maybe one day…

The 14 Days of A (3)

Alice in Wonderland – “The Original Live-Action Classic”

Okay, I’m a HUGE Alice in Wonderland fan.  Forget being a friend of Dorothy, I’m an acquaintance of Alice.  I loved the story as a kid and it was the first school play I did voluntarily (and really enjoyed doing) so I regularly go back and either re-read or re-watch one of the films.  A few months back, in one of my comfort spending moments, I found the DVD of the version with Cary Grant and Gary Cooper in (amongst many others of course).  Sadly it was also one of those purchases which was made as a comfort spend and then got put on the shelf with the thought “I’ll watch that in a while”.  Well by my standards, several months later is very much within the “while” window (there are DVD’s I’ve had for years and not watched yet).  It also wasn’t a version I’d seen before so, rather than going for the well watched Disney version, it’s back to black and white and 1933.

And already I’m confused and angry… you see I’m very much an Alice separatist.  There’s Wonderland and there’s Looking Glass and I’m never a fan of the mix-and-match approach.  Don’t ask me why, I couldn’t tell you but I just like my Wonderland characters to be in Wonderland and everyone else in the Looking Glass land.  So this film (definitely titled Alice in Wonderland) didn’t do itself many favours by starting with the Looking Glass opening.  Technology being what it was in 1933 (ie largely absent), they’ve done their best to have Alice in the same shot as the white King and Queen and watching this on DVD probably didn’t do it too many favours.  I’m guessing even on a 1930s’ cinema screen the picture quality would have maybe been slightly less than pin sharp and so, to adjust, I watched the rest of the film with my glasses off and it did it huge amounts of favours (I did put them on from time to time to see how certain things looked though). So, slightly pacified over less than special effects and keen to see the Looking Glass story instead of the advertised product… I was rather shocked that fairly soon after passing through the mirror, Alice fell down a rabbit hole into Wonderland!  Really not what I was expecting at all! 

Wonderland, 1930s style, mostly consisted of people in slightly tatty looking animal costumes (glasses taken off fairly hastily when I realised) and people in rather strangely styled masks.  It’s almost like Alice’s Adventures in Bo’Selecta Land at times.  Anyway, the next 2/3 of the film were a fairly faithful telling of the standard Alice story.  Fairly soon I was happily immersed in the land of Hatters, Rabbits, Playing Cards and Queens.  A few times it was fairly obvious they were using slightly speeded up footage to try and create certain effects but all in all they did their best to make Wonderland a believable place.  Until all of a sudden we were back in Looking Glass land and visiting Humpty Dumpty, Tweedles Dum and Dee and more chess pieces.  Quite disconcerting as I’ve not really seen an Alice with such a sudden and blunt transition from one to the other (normally the characters are mixed together).  However, it did mean that I got to see a rather charming White Knight, an animated Walrus and Carpenter and a VERY strange and almost cannibalistic dinner sequence where Alice becomes a Queen in her own right.

The Caterpillar was possibly the only disappointing portrayal in this one (but, as no-one could ever be as good as the definitive early 90s stage performance that a certain person gave in the school production that’s hardly surprising) but the charm of this film carried me through to the end with a Cheshire cat like grin on my face.  Primitive, definitely.  Dubious flying and other special effects, undoubtedly.  A certain sense of child like glee at discovering which characters would pop up next… without doubt and that’s all that really mattered in the end.  Okay, I might not re-watch this one as much as I re-watch the Disney one (that one has songs, therefore it wins) but I can see this one coming of the shelf from time to time if only to see if the talking Christmas pudding freaks me out as much as it did first time around.

The 14 Days of A (2)

The Avengers Movie

Okay, I didn’t post this last night as the wind was playing havoc with my electricity and thus didn’t even settle down to watch the film till stupidly late.  Of course, anything with “stupidly” in the description is probably well suited to The Avengers movie, especially if it’s at the start of the sentence “deciding to put it on in the first place”.  I hadn’t seen it in quite a while, it begins with “A” and well… I had weird memories of actually not finding it too bad at all. As a science fiction fan I really should also have remembered that the memory isn’t always as reliable as you like to think and for 85 minutes last night I found myself playing chicken with the stop button on the remote control.  Would the film force me to hit the button before the end or would I somehow persuade the film to improve as it went along by actually watching it and not turning it off?  I would love to be able to say that, by staying to the end, I’d had some sort of victory but I feel that it was the film that had the last laugh.

It’s one of Hollywood’s more infamous cockups. Take what, by all accounts, could have been quite a good movie, show it to the test audiences and then, when they say it’s too long, hack out the plot and leave the action sequences in place.  And then wonder why no one likes it.  Actually, that’s not the only reason people don’t like it.  There’s the horrendous acting, abysmal music, awful dialogue…  oh and the bitter taste of resentment and disappointment that it leaves in the mouth as well.

The notes that I jotted down during the film were surprisingly short and to the point.  Usually one or two words to categorise what was on the screen and either “yuk” or “no, just no”.  The TV version of the Avengers has one of the most incredible pieces of theme music ever (easily in the top five TV themes of all time).  So the film makers decided that the film should start with rather less than inspiring pop-art style titles played over the top of very bland music.  Once the action started THEN they play in the proper theme music but a rather insipid lacklustre version to accompany a rather neat little fight sequence.  Ralph Fiennes can fight.  He can’t act.  Well, he clearly can in other films but I have no idea what his reference material for playing John Steed was.  Steed was many things through the TV series (and the New Avengers as well) but a rather charmless, upper class business man with a rod up his arse was never one of them.  Even in the tenser moments, the original John Steed came across as quite relaxed and natural.  Ralph Fiennes is just so stilted in his efforts to play Steed it’s beyond unnatural. Where are the smiles, the laughter and the effortlessness?  I’m guessing in a bin somewhere having been surgically removed before rehearsals began.  Assuming, of course, that there was room in the bin for them as Uma Thurman clearly had the same procedure done to allow her to play Mrs Peel so badly as well.  Pretty much everything to do with this film feels absolutely forced. The relationship that they’re trying to hard to capture (which, by rights, shouldn’t be there as it’s supposed to be their first meeting), the banter, the fact you know they’ve shagged senseless and got it out of their systems, nothing in this film has the naturalness of the original.  The only scene that I put something akin to “getting close” to was when Steed was trying to chat up the very young looking Keeley Hawes.

What makes the lack of naturalness even weirder and more depressing is just how much of the film is lifted almost directly from the TV series.  The fencing between Steed and Peel, the House that Jack Built sequence, the weather obsessed madman and even the reappearance of the one off Father from the last year of the show.  I’m guessing that the random use of giant teddy bear costumes is a nod to the Cathy Gale episode “Mr Teddy Bear”.  The fact that it seems to snow inside the costumes is rather strange, either the explanatory scene was one of the thirty minutes’ worth cut after the first test screening (to working class Spaniards apparently) or it was just an horrendous mistake (like so much of the rest of the film). Eddie Izzard’s only dialogue in the film is a good gag but it’s just NOT The Avengers and the closing music clearly wants to try and emulate Bond (perhaps this would have been a better Bond movie?).

There are a few good set pieces, and you know right from the start of the final fight just how Sean Connery’s villain will meet his maker but they’re just not enough to salvage this utter mess of a movie.  Perhaps, one day, someone will unearth a bootleg of the original cut and we’ll see if the missing footage does actually help the plot make sense.  Perhaps, one day, Hollywood will finally forget this atrocity and make a new and better version (unlikely thanks to bloody Marvel).  Perhaps, one day, there’ll be a decent DVD release of it so I can at least watch some extra features.  Or, most unlikely of all, perhaps one day I’ll forgive this film the ultimate crime.  It’s an awful film that I don’t think I’ll ever really want to watch again.  The script, the acting, the music… all terrible.  But when it was over I still wanted to see another one.  I desperately wanted to know if, in a sequel where the characters actually had a “right” to know each other and be banterous together, things might actually work out.  I wanted Steed and Peel back.  And a terrible film that still leaves me wanting more is something I’m really not prepared to forgive easily.

The 14 Days of A (1)

The Avengers

Okay, so starting with “A” means that the start of the two weeks on this letter gets off to an almost guaranteed brilliant start with four episodes of The Avengers.  My original plan had been to go for four episodes I’ve not seen or hadn’t seen that many times but things got a little changed for the second episode I picked.  Anyway, starting with a season two episode (it’s the season I only got on DVD a short while ago and still haven’t fully worked through), I decided it was time for a Venus revisiting. 

Venus Smith seems to get a bad press a lot of the time but I really rather like her.  There’s something about Steed having a singing sidekick that already sets The Avengers aside from other spy series.  The Avengers always had style but what little I’ve seen and heard about season one suggests it might have been far more run of the mill than future years.  Season two, the season of many side kicks, has a bit more of a sense of fun about it (probably because Steed “discovers” female company).  “School for Traitors” is still, at heart, a rather bog standard story of public school, spies, deadly face cream and lizards.  Not in that order and with a few upper class accents in there as well but hell, it’s quite a fluffy romp.  It was chosen mostly at random and I didn’t actually have very high expectations for it but it easily kept me entertained for 50 minutes or so. Perhaps every series should have their own night club singer popping up every now and then to liven things up!

I’d planned to do a Cathy Gale that I wasn’t too familiar with but then I remembered it’s just been New Year’s Eve (how could I forget that???) so I plumped for the rather brilliant “Dressed to Kill”.  There’s a party (there’s always a party in Steed’s life but this time we get to see it), there’s fancy dress, there’s Leonard Rossiter and government secrets.  By season three we’re definitely into the spies with style territory but this one is more Agatha Christie than James Bond but it just oozes Avengers charm.  It also got “reworked” into an Emma Peel story called “The Superlative Seven” so, of course, I just had to watch that one next.  Amazingly, even with the presence of Brian Blessed in the cast, I didn’t have to reach for the volume control once!  Steed’s at another party (this time on a plane rather than the black and white train) and it’s a similar premise (invite from an old friend but everyone got invited by different people) but this one is much more brutal. People get stabbed, shot, run down… all kinds of grisly deaths get delivered in “And Then There Were None” style.  It’s good fun trying to guess who the killer’s going to be (ummmm, if you’ve not seen it before, best forget I just made that ATTWN comparison) and Donald Sutherland is VERY creepy at times. 

Miss King wears a blond wig, well she needs to so that the old and new footage mixes together well to form “Invasion of the Earthmen”.  It’s weird.  Seriously weird.  There’s a training ground with spacemen, students trying to kill each other and a spinning mobile that I’m guessing is supposed to be a solar system but looks more like a Christmas tree ornament. Astronaut soldiers are being trained so that humans can take over other worlds.  Successful solders get cryogenically frozen and unsuccessful ones get fed to snakes.  For a Tara King episode it’s surprisingly dark, well it’s green and purple décor but it’s quite a bleak episode on the grounds I can see it being the sort of thing that certain powers might even consider.  I was expecting lightness and daftness from Tara, I forgot what the original premise had been.  An unexpectedly militaristic end to the night… but a damn good night it was.

Next time…. More stuff beginning with “A”.  Might go for a movie next time.  No.  I couldn’t.  I mean I’ve given up the drink, I couldn’t possibly do that sober… could I?

The Start of "14 Days of..."

Right, I have several New Year's Resolutions and this year I plan to stick to them (sticking to them being the first resolution).  The ones you need to know about are
1) update this blog more often
2) finish Benny
3) go through my stupidly large DVD collection and re-watch loads of it.

1 leads nicely into 2 and I figure that 3 might as well feed in as well.  I could, of course, just pick things at random off the shelf to watch but that doesn't seem to tie in with the way my brain works.  If it works that is. So I thought I'd try and find some sort of way of keeping things mixed up (so I actually keep watching stuff rather than just pick one series etc).  So I figured I might as well do them in some sort of order... alphabetical order.  Ish.

52 weeks to the year, 26 letters to the alphabet... so that's two weeks per letter. And as we've just had the 12 Days of Christmas (well, we're still having them as I write but they'll soon be over) so why not go for "The 14 Days of...."  So, over the next two weeks I'll be randomly re-watching things beginning with the letter A, then the two weeks after that I'll be re-watching things beginning with B and so on.  The two weeks of Q might involve a LOT of Quatermass but we'll see what happens when I get there.  They won't be in alphabetical order within the letter, that would be obscenely complicated.... but random TV and movies beginning with that letter.

I'm also feeling very lazy tonight, so "The 14 Days of A" begins with....