Snow White - Fairest Of Them All (2001)

Snow White - Fairest Of Them All is a ropey, old TV movie that was dusted down and given a new name so it could be rereleased on DVD to co-incide with the cinematic début of Snow White And The Huntsman in 2012.

Using extreme magical logic, it begins with the birth of Snow White and the death of her mother Josephine (Vera Farmiga).

Her father John (Tom Irwin) wanders off into the snow to find milk for the infant, but instead frees a trapped troll (Clancy Brown).

The wish-granting monster not only provides milk for baby Snow White, but makes John a king of his own kingdom.

The troll then transforms his own sister, Elspeth (Miranda Richardson), into a queen for John (as he cannot bring the dead Josephine back to life).

Years pass and Snow White (Smallville's Kristen Kreuk) turns 16, but ageless Elspeth is bored of her enchanted husband and step-child, so seeks fresh meat when young prince Alfred (Tyron Leitso) arrives to woo the princess.

When he spurns the wicked queen, Elspeth turns him into a bear, then charges smitten courtier Hector (Jose Zuniga) with leading Snow into the woods and cutting out her heart.

Snow flees and ends up in the company of the seven colour-coded dwarves (think Teletubbies, but dressed in charity shop cast-offs), who are actually elemental representations of the days of the week as well as weather-sprites.

Miranda Richardson's Elspeth is a delightfully loopy, fairy tale cougar (you can't help but smile when she makes her pass at the young prince and he runs a mile) and definitely comes off best when compared to Kristin Kreuk's hippy, whiny little Snow White.

This story is full of bright colours and wild magic - especially where the Queen's mirror is concerned (it flies, it spies, it transforms people, it shrinks things, it turns them to stone etc etc) - but while clearly aimed at a very young audience, the surprisingly subtle moral of the piece might go over their heads.

Elspeth is given everything by her brother, has access to powerful magics, but is never satisfied and is ultimately brought down by her own hubris. In a sense the traditional story of Snow White is simply a test of character by Clancy Brown's character of his sister.

YellowBrickRoad (2010)

"One morning in New England, 1940, the entire population of Friar, New Hampshire - 572 people - walked together up a winding mountain trail and into the wilderness. They left behind their clothes, their money, all of their essentials. Even their dogs were abandoned, tied to posts and left to starve.

"No-one knows why. A search party dispatched by the U.S. Army eventually discovered the remains of nearly 300 of Friar's evacuees. Many had frozen to death. Others were cruelly and mysteriously slaughtered. The bodies of the remaining citizens are still unaccounted for.

"Over the years, a quiet cover-up operation managed to weave the story of Friar into the stuff of legends and backwoods fairy tales. The town has slowly repopulated, but the vast wilderness is mostly untracked, with the northern-most stretches off limits to local hunters and loggers.

"In 2008, the coordinates for the "YELLOWBRICKROAD" trail head were declassified. The first official expedition into a dark and twisted wilderness will attempt to solve the mystery of the lost citizens of Friar...and reach the end of the trail."

- plot summary from IMDB.

YellowBrickRoad, from the writing/directing team of Andy Mitton and Jess Holland, is frustratingly close to genius.

The powerful set-up (detailed above) had me hooked from the outset with its Lovecraftian overtones and engaging mystery, and this certainly isn't a movie that spoonfeeds answers to its audience.

I love a good mental challenge as much as the next person and films that don't necessarily spell out everything that's going on, but YellowBrickRoad suffers because - in a similar way to Lost - it is ultimately too obscure and obtuse.

While it is certainly a film that will stay with you as you try to ponder what fate befell the inhabitants of Friar - and the contemporary expedition  - I don't believe there are actually enough clues to adequately fill in the gaps.

As the the research team - which includes Smallville's Cassidy Freeman and her brother Clark Freeman (they also executive produced the movie) - get further up the trail, and into the mountains, they hear spectral 1940s music from ahead of them, which gets louder as they head north.

The sounds come and go as the journey progresses, but it appears to be having strange effects on some of the group, including memory loss, increased tension and confusion.

The unnerving suggestion that fixed points, directions and co-ordinates change depending on which way you are heading is the genuine stuff of nightmares.

The cinematography and audio effects are superb, although the editing and direction is occasionally jumpy (this, however, may be a deliberate ploy to heighten the hallucinogenic effects of the trail), that if nothing else makes this a gorgeous horror film to experience (I can only imagine how awesome some sequences - such as the auditory assault on the senses - would have been in a cinema).

We can easily pick up on the effects the music - and possibly even the environment - is having on the walkers, as well as clues such as the co-ordinates of the trailhead, the worn copy of the Wizard Of Oz in the town's picture house, the fact that people in the 1940s sought escape in the cinema etc., which kind of tie-in with the bizarre, rather leftfield ending, but there isn't enough indication of either the 'how' or 'why' to put together our own theories of what is going on.

I think I picked up on all the other Wizard Of Oz references - the scarecrow scene is particularly horrific and well done, but I wish there had been more moments like that (did I miss the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man?).

Not that I necessarily wanted more gore. Great horror can unsettle you by mere suggestion alone (cf. The Haunting) and YellowBrickRoad does do a lot of creepy stuff with its sound effects and surreal disorientation but I think the film was simply too big, too ambitious, for its makers and got away from them in the end.

Stylistically, and thematically, YellowBrickRoad reminded me of two of my favourite horrors - The Blair Witch Project (although thankfully this isn't another 'found footage' movie) and In The Mouth Of Madness - and for the majority its 96 minute run I was convinced that YellowBrickRoad would be joining these two in the ranks of my personal greats.

Then it doesn't so much as fall apart at the end (as I can see where the story was trying to go, with the brief flash of the ghostly images etc) as simply come to a hurried conclusion.

During the build-up I found myself so engrossed in the on-screen developments that I didn't want the film to end and when it did, it did it in a most unsatisfactory, and slightly messed-up, way.

We were left with too many unanswered questions and not even a general suggestion as to where we might find answers.

Yet, for all its faults I can certainly see myself revisiting YellowBrickRoad, just to see if I missed any clues along the way, even though I'm totally convinced I'm never going to get all the answers I'm looking for.

Part of the frustration with this film is that, if you let it, it can really get under your skin. Like it or not, you are not going to forget your journey on the YellowBrickRoad in a hurry.

Rabid (2019)

After an argument with her best friend, vegetarian wallflower and aspiring fashion designer Rose (Laura Vandervoort aka Smallville's Supergirl) is hideously disfigured in a road traffic accident.

During her recuperation, she learns of an experimental private medical centre, run by the not-at-all-sinister Dr William (yes, I see what they did there) Burroughs (Ted Atherton).

After undergoing cutting-edge stem cell treatment and remarkable restorative plastic surgery, Rose emerges full-on Vandervoort gorgeous.

However, upon returning home, she is troubled by crippling stomach pains and increasingly gruesome nightmares.

Unfortunately, for everyone she comes into contact with, they are not nightmares and she is actually patient zero for an outbreak of superfast, mutated rabies which spreads through the city like wildfire.

A retelling of David Cronenberg's original 1977 body horror classic, Jen and Sylvia Soska‘s Rabid is a phenomenal and shocking tale that takes its audience to some surprising places along its visceral journey.

Featuring everything from Lovecraftian mad science to unstoppable plague zombies, this ticks a lot of boxes for me.

As the mayhem escalates - with the mutated strain of rabies engulfing the city - there's almost an In The Mouth Of Madness level of existential dread, which is then compounded by the film's bleak denouement.

The not-too-subtle critique of body-shaming and vanity is wryly amusing, with several of the supporting roles teetering on the brink of being arch.

Nicely paced and cleverly shot, blurring hallucinations (such as the Silent Hill/music video sequence) with gruesome reality, the action in Rabid may take some time to get going but the central performances never fail to draw the audience in.

As well as a number of the characters carrying over their names from the original, the Soska Sisters's Rabid is sprinkled with Cronenberg-related Easter Eggs, such as the use of  the name of William Burroughs alluding to Cronenberg's adaptation of his famous novel Naked Lunch and the red surgical gowns worn during Rose's operation are a clear nod to Jeremy Irons's gowns in Dead Ringers.

Man of Steel (2013)

With the next iteration of Superman just around the corner, I've decided to take a whistle-stop tour through the Snyderverse take on the iconic character. 

I started with my first ever rewatch of Man of Steel, which I haven't seen since I originally saw it on its home video release and was simultaneously awed by the spectacle and disappointed by the story.

Now, removed from that original atmosphere by many years I find myself pleasantly surprised.

Man of Steel is a lot better than I remember it.

However, it still has an unforgivable problem in its finale: the Superman I grew up reading doesn't kill.

He always finds a different way to deal with a problem.

How else could he have resolved the situation? I don't know, I'm not Superman (Henry Cavill).

That's one of the things that makes him Superman and makes him better than General Zod (Michael Shannon).

The fact that he doesn't see that is due in part to the strange attitude his human-father, Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner), tried to instil in young Clark Kent that he had to guard the secret of his abilities at all costs, even if it meant letting people die.

But again, a young Superman should have been able to find a way to save people and conceal his super powers at the same time.

Outside this rather major character flaw, Zack Snyder delivers a fantastic, action-packed, superhero origin story, from David Goyer's scipt.

I had totally forgotten the impressive, alien-realisation of Krypton at the start of the movie, before his biological father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and mother Lara (Ayelet Zurer) send their infant child off into space just ahead of the planet's destruction.

If this Superman had gained better box office traction and been allowed to run through multiple sequels, I would have loved to have seen - somehow - a revisit to Krypton as envisaged by Zack Snyder.

Henry Cavill cuts a fine, square-jawed, figure as Superman when dressed in the red and blue costume, and there are moments when you get fleeting reminders of Christopher Reeve (the definitive live-action Superman).

I even found myself warming up to Amy Adams as Lois Lane. Again, she's no Margot Kidder, but actually following the growth of the character, and her relationship with Clark/Superman, I realised that she was more 'Lois Lane' than maybe I had previously given her credit for.

One of the issues I've had with the Snyderverse was the grey and grim filter everything appears through, but approaching this with an open mind - and eyes - I've come to appreciate the fact that, taking the film as a whole, it isn't as grim as the initial trailers portrayed it.

The film still errs towards Zack's trademark grey palette a bit too much on occasion, and there are too many grey/black costumes for my liking, but the story is much stronger than I recall from my previous viewing. And story, ultimately, always triumphs for me.

Man of Steel is flawed, but it isn't quite the "style-over-substance" affair it was originally painted as.

That said, collateral structural damage has always been a given in comics and films when it comes to monumental superhero slugfests, but the destruction wrought in Man of Steel is off the chart.

Smallville is pretty much laid waste in the initial attack by Zod and his fellow Kryptonians (and a significant amount of it is caused by Superman himself), but then when the fight moves to Metropolis, the devastation gets cranked up to 11.

I know Superman ultimately saved the people of the city (and thus Earth), but, seriously, they need to look around themselves and tally the cost. Who pays for all that damage? I bet 'superhero fight damage' isn't covered by insurance.

I realise that this was his first battle, but you'd think the US Government - or the United Nations - might suggest some kind of training course, to reduce the large-scale collateral damage in any future superpowered conflicts.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Thirty-six years after the events of the original Beetlejuice movie, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) is now hosting her own paranormal reality show, Ghost House, when the death of her father calls her, her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), and her mother, Delia (Catherine O'Hara), back to their family home in Winter River for the funeral.

Meanwhile, in the afterlife, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) finds himself being stalked by his murderous ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci), and he sees Lydia's return to her old home as his possible escape.

Settling in to Winter River, Astrid - a non-believer in the supernatural - is tricked by a malevolent ghost into swapping her existence for his, and ends up trapped in the afterlife.

Unable to think of any other way to rescue her daughter, Lydia calls on Beetlejuice for assistance.

I'll admit that when I sat down to watch Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, while I had high hopes for a Tim Burton movie with this incredible cast, I wasn't convinced that it would be able to recapture the lightning in a bottle brilliance of 1988's iconic original.

But this sequel turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It's chaotic and madcap, with a whirlwind of plot elements swirling around (not all of which make 100 per cent sense or achieve resolution) and sweeping up a legion of memorable characters.

Michael Keaton has lost none of his gnarly charisma as the demonic Beetlejuice, while the three female leads are perfection personified in their roles: Winona Ryder retains her ultimate goth girl crown, Jenna Ortega sidesteps Wednesday Addams to create a wholly believable sceptic in a family of eccentrics, and Catherine O'Hara is, of course, Catherine O'Hara and we can expect nothing less.

It may be occasionally nonsensical, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a hell of a lot of crazy fun, with some great visual gags and a supporting cast as strong as its main cast: from a cameo by Danny DeVito as the afterlife's janitor to Willem Dafoe as Wolf Jackson, the ghost-detective who was actually a B-movie actor in life.

The joyous splattergun approach to the horror-comedy narrative includes the sudden insertion of Beetlejuice's origin story. This caught me totally by surprise, but then again as The Joker of the underworld, was this his true beginning or simply a flight of fancy?

As convincing a yarn as it was, not knowing its veracity certainly adds another layer to the character of the bio-exorcist.

Under Tim Burton's guidance, with a script from Smallville creators and Spider-Man 2 scribes, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice manages, just about, to be simultaneously quite different from the original and very similar.

The Jeffrey Jones of the situation (the disgraced actor played Lydia's dad, Charles, in the first movie) is handled really deftly, through a range of tricks from a claymation death sequence to a headless corpse (and voice impersonator) taking his place in the afterlife.

While, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice mainly stays away from aping moments directly from the original, the climactic musical number - lip-syncing to MacArthur Park - could never reach the enduring heights of the legendary Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) sequence.

That tune does pops up earlier, at Charles funeral, posing a serious challenge to Monty Python's Always Look On The Bright Side of Life as the best tune to play at a funeral.

Given the surreal maelstrom of the denouement, I'm now wondering how long we will have to wait for Tim Burton's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: My (Continuing) Adventures With Superman

My deep affinity for the character of Superman has a poignant origin story. I had this copy of Amazing Heroes magazine, which takes an in-depth look at John Byrne's impending (at the time) relaunch of Superman for DC Comics (post Crisis on Infinite Earths) when I travelled up to Stoke-on-Trent in 1986.

I was visiting my dear friend Matt, who was studying at university there, and I have a vivid memory of sitting on a small hillock in some parkland, waiting for him to turn up.

As I sat there I was reading Amazing Heroes and becoming increasingly convinced that I was going to really enjoy this era of Superman's comic book adventures.

Now, of course, this is also another strong memory I have associated with my gone-too-soon old pal.

I was already a massive fan of John Byrne's work from his stint on Fantastic Four (still a benchmark by which I judge most other superhero books) but I'd only really dabbled in Superman titles up until that point.

I had a few random Bronze Age issues, including both parts of Alan Moore's classic Whatever Happened to The Man of Tomorrow? story (I was a big Alan Moore fan, as most people were at the time, religiously reading Watchmen and Swamp Thing) and this particularly memorable issue of Action featuring Captain Strong (most definitely not a Popeye knockoff):

As Byrne's The Man of Steel (the six-issue miniseries introducing us to all the key players in the key Superman mythos) was published, I knew I had found "my" Superman.

I treasure my original collection of The Man of Steel, for the artwork, stories and memories

As I wrote on Facebook the other day:

"Although I'm a fan of all eras of Superman (with a particular penchant for the wackiness of the Silver Age these days), it was John Byrne's 1986, post-Crisis, relaunch, with The Man of Steel miniseries, that truly sold me on the character. For me, this remains the definitive take on Superman and his supporting cast."

Luthor was no longer a 'mad scientist' but a corrupt businessman

But, of course, me being me it's not just Superman comics I collect (... and films... and T-shirts), it's also the occasional action figure, miniature, and Funko Pop.

For the longest time, it wasn't even a conscious effort to accumulate these artifacts, but as time passed I realised my 'horde' had a definite Superman bias.

I'm not a hardcore hunter of such Superman memorabilia, but if I see something that catches my eye (and I can afford it at the time) I always like to add it to the shelves of my gamesroom:

Alongside Beppo The Super-Monkey, Bizzaro and Doomsday, one of these Supermen
is actually a "Superman Robot" - can you pick him out?

A selection of Supergirls (from TV and comics),
with Krypto and Streaky The Supercat and Wonder Woman

A comic-accurate Kelex, soon believed to be appearing in the new Superman film

Funko Pops of Superman and Lois from the original Christopher Reeve movie

I love my collection of miniature Smallville residents from the Silver Age comics

My shelf of Superman graphic novels and omnibuses - along with a Daily Planet pen holder.