HEALTH UPDATE: If It's Not One Thing, It's Another

Image by Alfred Derks from Pixabay

The first - and best - thing that happened this week was rescheduling my steroid injections. This had been the primary motivator of my drastic diet changes and it paid off.

I rang the hospital, spoke to a lovely woman in the Pain Clinic, and told her my new blood sugar count.

She offered me the choice of going on a waiting list for the doctor I had seen previously or an early morning appointment at the start of next month with a different doctor.

What the phrase Pain Clinic always
conjures up in my twisted mind

I really wanted to stay with the doctor I knew (fear of change and all that), but I also wanted to get this matter resolved ASAP.

So, quite heroically I thought, I opted for the Pain Clinic appointment in June.

Hopefully, these shots into my lumbar facet joints will ease the extreme pain in my back so I can do more vigorous exercises to help keep the discomfort at bay for the long-term.

I should also point out that I made the call to the hospital using my mobile phone - like a real 21st Century person.

The night before I'd woken at about 3am in a panic about not having a landline for the foreseeable future and used my phone to log into my mobile account (which I'd never actually looked at before)... and found I had "free minutes" every month.

Yes, I knew about these mythical things, but always thought there was a catch. There isn't. A minute is a minute.

That's put me at ease about both my appointment at the hospital and using my phone in lieu of the landline.

However, that state of contentment didn't last too long as I was getting texts from the NHS eye clinic about my test the other week - but I couldn't open them, either directly on my phone or through the NHS app.

Then I got a severe-sounding message that said I needed to go for a new test at a different hospital... and I overreacted. To put it mildly.

Picture from Pixabay

Fearing the worst (i.e. I was going blind), I catastrophised straight from calm to Def Con Freak Out.

I called Rachel and she managed to talk me back down, then went off to get in touch with the hospital I was being directed to. 

[The extra embarrassing aspect of this was that I talking to Rachel via a video link and so her entire office could see - and hear - my rather lengthy emotional breakdown.]

It turns out the pictures of the interior of my eye that had been taken the other day weren't good enough and therefore I was being sent to a hospital unit with better equipment. 

Rachel was also told that the "portal" the eye service used to communicate with patients wasn't the same as the general NHS one that I was used to using, and could be a bit "temperamental".

As Rachel calmly explained all this to me, I could feel my mental dials turning down to a normal level again. 

I, honestly, don't know what I would do without my wonderful wife.

Annoyingly, my INR was up again (even higher than last week) which means the weekly check-ups will continue for a while.

And I'm concerned that, if it doesn't sink back down into my target range (through subtle changes in the amount of daily medication I take for it), that might also screw up my spinal injections!

I was specifically asked about INR when I rescheduled my jabs - and told I might need to be tested before the procedure could go ahead.

The fun never ends.

Why Aren't These Movies Cult Classics?

WhatCulture Horror presents a selection of classy genre movies, which are all too often mistakenly overlooked. These 10 films should be classed as cult classics, the 13-minute featurette argues, but aren't.

It's an interesting selection, although I firmly believe that the number one film, Near Dark, is a cult classic. I certainly regard it as such.

SAW WEEK: Saw III - Extreme Edition (2006)

Saw III continues the story of Saw II, by showing us the final fates of Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) and Kerry (Dina Meyer), and even bringing back Adam (Saw III scriptwriter Leigh Whannell) for a curtain call.

But, with Darren Lynn Bousman again in the directing chair, this episode in the franchise deliberately veers into torture porn territory as Jigsaw's deranged protégé and Julia Louis-Dreyfus lookalike Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) takes the reins on designing some of the elaborate traps.

She doesn't exactly play by Jigsaw's rules, enjoying the power of putting her captives into death-traps that have no escape route and throwing some Hellraiser-level shit at people purely out of sadistic glee.

One of the set-pieces in particular ("the rack") is so over the top that it transforms into Grand Guignol, having raced so far past good taste that it has emerged on the other side as grim humour.

With the police investigation dismissed early on, the main thrust of Saw III is the kidnapping of depressed but brilliant surgeon Lynn Denlon (Bahar Soomekh).

She is forced by Amanda to operate on her mentor's brain tumour while simultaneously a vengeance-driven grieving father, Jeff (Angus Macfadyen), is put through a maze of tests.

Lynn is told that she must keep John Kramer (Tobin Bell) - aka Jigsaw - alive for the duration of Jeff's "game". If he dies, or she tries to escape, the collar fitted around her neck will blow her head off.

Once again, the plot builds to grand twist, and while very cleverly engineered it somehow lacks the impact of the magnificent reveals from the pervious two chapters in the story of Jigsaw.

However, especially with the resolution of Adam's arc, you also realise that the three films could easily work as a single epic movie (James Wan, while not directing, returns to assist Whannell with the story).

The ending clearly shuts the door on one major plot thread (or does it?) and I'm fascinated to see how the franchise will be milked for five further sequels... and a soft reboot.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Baskin (2015)

If you're looking for a memorable horror movie that feels like it was based on an HP Lovecraft story, but wasn't, then look no further than surreal Turkish splatterfest Baskin.

A generally unlikable, thuggish, group of police officers respond to a call for back-up in a rural area with a bad reputation.

Among the five-man team is Arda (Görkem Kasal), the newest recruit and the ward of the chief Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu).

As the freshest face in the unit, Arda has yet to be ground down, or corrupted, by the obviously hard work the men do.

Unfortunately on the way to the emergency, their van crashes.

The squad has to ask for directions from a strange group of "frog-hunters" they find camped at the edge of the lake their van ended up in.

A quick jaunt through the woods brings them to an abandoned Ottoman Empire-era police station.

The building appears to have been taken over by squatters, who have vandalised it with it peculiar graffiti and left evidence of all kinds of obscenities.

But it's only really as they descend into the lower levels of the building that the true horror of the building's current inhabitants becomes clear.

And the police officers soon find themselves in the clutches of a  terrifying, possibly sub-human, cult.

While Görkem Kasal's Arda is the nominal star of the story, the stand-out performance has to be the amazing Mehmet Cerrahoglu as the cult leader Baba (The Father).

Baba: The Father

A Turkish Clint Howard, Cerrahoglu's incredibly rare skin condition gives him a unique physical appearance that he draws amazing power from here in his first feature film role.

Forget all the splatterpunk Grand Guignol for a moment, Baba is the iconic image of Baskin that will endure.

Baskin (Turkish for 'Raid') was the first full-length movie from Can Evrenol, an extrapolation of his 11-minute short of the same name (which featured several of the same actors, including the magnificent Mehmet Cerrahoglu).

Buoyed along by a thumping, Carpenteresque, score, Baskin is Lovecraftian cosmic horror meets Hellraiser by way of The Void, Blair Witch, The Last Shift, In The Mouth Of Madness, and - for for better or for worse - Twin Peaks: The Return.

Even though it predates David Lynch's most recent visit to Twin Peaks, there's a key scene in Baskin - as well as its ending - that share important thematic, and stylistic, similarities and, I think, will ultimately decide whether you rate Evrenol's surreal shocker or not.

One thing I felt after viewing Baskin is that it is more of an experience than a coherent narrative. It's main purpose is to draw the audience into the mind-boggling ordeals that the policemen go through, rather than explaining too much or attaching it all to a traditional story structure.

Be warned, things do go a bit torture porn once the coppers are captured, but, for me, it's all about intent.

This isn't a bunch of wealthy businessmen torturing 'innocents' for shits and giggles, but an evil cult trying to transform its "chosen one" through arcane rituals handed down from their unknowable ancient deities.

Although the truly weird stuff doesn't start until the half-way mark of this 96-minute film, the pacing and rhythm are perfect so you're drawn in from the get-go, as the tension escalates and you try to figure out what the hell's going on.

Throughout Baskin there's talk about dreams (and dreams within dreams) and one - almost heavy-handed - shot of Arda nodding off in the van before everything goes sideways that I thought was the M. Night Shyamalan moment when the "it's-all-a-dream" twist was given away.

But, and I know some of you may consider this a spoiler, that's not what's going on. If it had all been a dream I would have been very annoyed and not nearly as smitten as I am by this flawed gem.

Much of Baskin has a dream-like nature, and dream-logic to its flow, but - as far as I'm concerned - what was happening to the protagonists was very real.

Having sat through much of the movie inner-monologuing "don't be a dream, don't be a dream", I'm now looking forward to going back and watching it again, comfortable in the knowledge that Baskin avoids that cop out (pun intended).

It is, however, genuinely the stuff of nightmares.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Void (2016)

Late at night, on a deserted road outside of town, Sheriff Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) comes across a wounded man stumbling out of the woods.

The lawman rushes the injured man to the nearest hospital, a fire-damaged building on the point of closure, operated by a skeleton staff, including the sheriff's estranged wife, Allison (Kathleen Munroe).

Within moments of their arrival - and a nurse going insane - the dilapidated hospital is besieged by knife-wielding, sheet-wearing, cultists.

From there The Void is a non-stop, violent, gore-splattered, thrill-ride through Lovecraft country by way of Assault On Precinct 13, The Thing and Hellraiser.

This is a film - whose plot unfolds over a single night - that just doesn't let up. The action kicks off from the opening scene, backstories are sketched in with deft brevity, and the viewers find themselves sucked into the absorbing, claustrophobic, horror.

Malleable architecture, hallucinations, and shapeshifting, tentacled, monsters are just part of the sanity-assaulting fun that the writing-directing team of Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie bombard the audience with.

And it's probably worth drawing attention to a couple of extended scenes that feature bright, rapidly flashing lights that could affect people susceptible to such light shows.

There's a strong flavour of vintage '80s horror here (but delivered with ichor-dripping 21st Century practical effects) that should satisfy any fan of HP Lovecraft's cosmic horror who tends to find the best cinematic realisations of his themes come in films not directly based on his stories (such as the aforementioned The Thing, In The Mouth Of Madness, Event Horizon etc).

It would be a gross exaggeration to say The Void is wholly original, but the diverse recipe of influences tap into so  many of my favourite movies, sub-genres, and ideas of what makes good horror, that I embraced it all the more warmly.

In fact there was a part of me that couldn't help wondering if this script was lifted from a game of Call Of Cthulhu, with pointless gunplay, fire-axe-swinging, and pulp novel machismo in the face of monstrosities not meant for the eyes of man.

Hellraiser (2022)

In this remake/sequel to Clive Barker's definitive, original Hellraiser from 1987, a penniless, former junkie, Riley (Odessa A’zion) and her loser boyfriend, Trevor (Drew Starkey). decide to rob a warehouse, so she can make enough money to pay her brother, Matt (Brandon Flynn), the rent she owes.

Unfortunately, what they end up stealing is a dread magical puzzle box that opens a portal to Hell, summoning demonic Cenobites who demand a blood sacrifice.

After her brother is seemingly taken by the Cenobites, Riley and Trevor's investigation into what they have stolen leads them to the home of its former owner, the - presumed dead - billionaire hedonist, Roland Voight (Goran Višnjić of ER and Timeless).

There Riley must reach an agreement with the leader of the Cenobites, The Hell Priest (formerly known as Pinhead and played exquisitely by Jamie Clayton), if Riley is going to get her brother back.

Part of my problem with this Hellraiser is that Riley isn't a particularly engaging protagonist. Clearly inspired by Jane Levy's Mia from the 2013 remix of Evil Dead, it is, however, almost impossible to have any relatable sympathy for Riley until pretty much the final scenes of this current flick.

The lack of character depth is accentuated in the set-up to the final act - at Voight's elaborately constructed mansion in the middle of nowhere - that plays out like a generic "teens get in trouble and get slaughtered" slasher flick.

And that's my biggest issue with this take on Clive Barker's mythology: the Cenobites are largely portrayed as simply monsters to be fought, actors in rubber costumes that could be interchangeable with vampires, werewolves or any number of other supernatural creatures. 

For me, the sadistic Cenobites work best when shown to be forces of nature, with almost Lovecraftian levels of inscrutability and power, totally beyond our comprehension and ability to combat with fists and physical weapons.

It is only when the 'angels of pain' are more static and still, as the film builds to its glorious climax, and we get to appreciate the porcelain nature of The Hell Priest's flesh and the power of her words (yes, she does get to recite some Pinhead classics from the original) that Hellraiser becomes more than just another monster movie.

For all that, although this film is around two hours long, director David Bruckner, coming off of The Night House, paces Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski's screenplay really well, so the action carries you along and the movie never drags.

Bruckner permeates the film throughout with a building sense of dread, and that most certainly pays off in the end, with a denouement worthy of the original film as we get to witness the horrific creation of a new Cenobite.

While this Hellraiser wasn't on a par with the 1987 one, it was certainly better than the awful avalanche of sequels that followed that, and, actually, I'd be interested to see an inventive sequel to this Hellraiser, as long as the same team were behind the camera and they continued to build on what they established here.