Character Posters With A Retro-Commercial Difference For The Fantastic Four: First Steps

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Student Survival Kit

Proudly sporting my old school tie before - after a 10 year break - I headed off to university

I was a mature student. In name if not in attitude. I worked for ten years straight out of school, a long stint at the local newspaper (as a reporter, then sub-editor) and then a couple of years at a company that published trade magazines.

It was while I was at the trade magazines that I hit upon the idea that my next career step should be getting a degree, and so I got myself on a course at Bournemouth University, studying Scriptwriting For Film & Television.

Naturally, my colleagues at the magazines were 'heartbroken' that I was leaving and had a whip round to get me a "going away present".

The main gift was the awesome, black, high top, Converse All-Stars which you can see me holding in the picture above (because my co-workers knew those were my favourite shoes), but they also put together the brilliant "student survival kit" shown below.

I think a lot more leeway went into the leaving gift than if I'd been heading off to a job with a competitor; instead I was leaving the industry behind and heading to higher education.

As well as items of stationery (such as a kid's pencil case and a glue stick), the survival kit included the all-important tea bags, mug, baked beans, sugar, ketchup, bottle of beer, shampoo, and toilet paper.

Although I don't remember precisely, I doubt much of this stuff made it through my first term at Bournemouth.

A little piece of Knight family trivia that relates to my time with the trade magazine company: the publishers was based in Wadhurst - in Sussex - and the firm's local was The Red Lion (where my leaving do was held), which had been run by my grandfather back when my parents got married. If I'm recalling correctly, their wedding reception was held there.

At one point, granddad (my father's father) was also the village blacksmith and, during the war, an ARP warden (I still have, and treasure, his ARP warden's helmet).

The Descent Part 2 (2009)

Immediately pissing away the stark, nihilistic brilliance of the ending of The Descent, this continuation of the story - rather than a sequel per se - has Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) somehow escaping the underground cave system, but stricken with that wonderful Hollywood plot contrivance of "amnesia".

Bizarrely then, while still traumatised and barely able to communicate, she is made to return to the caves by cinema's most moronic sheriff.

Sheriff Vaines (Gavan O'Herlihy) makes Rosco P Coltrane and JW Pepper look like the epitome of law enforcement excellence in comparison.

Every word that comes out of his mouth and every decision he makes - particularly when the expedition is back underground - has you praying for a carnivorous cave crawler to leap out of the darkness and rip his head off.

There are moments that come close to the greatness of the first movie but as this part isn't directed by Neil Marshall's expert hand (he's simply executive producer) much of it feels very artificial.

The story is also riddled with inconsistencies that make you question how much care was taken in the movie's production: - for example, the rescue party is supposedly retracing Sarah's steps into an abandoned mine that links into the cave system, but nobody realises it's all blocked by cobwebs and boarded up, so there's no way she could have come that way less than 24 hours earlier; then the cave mouth off of the crawlers' feeding ground is large enough to drag a dead moose through one moment, then suddenly there's barely enough room for a woman to crawl out to freedom.

Certainly more an adventure story than a straight-up horror, as the original was, The Descent Part 2 is an unnecessary 'sequel' to a classic, but is okay as an hour-and-a-half of subterranean thrills and spills to pass the time on a wet and windy afternoon.

Is Red Sonja's Retro Vibe A Bug or A Feature?

Red Sonja is in theaters August 15 and on digital platforms August 29!

Directed by MJ Bassett and starring: Matilda Lutz, Martyn Ford, Robert Sheehan, Wallis Day, Michael Bisping, Philip Winchester, Trevor Eve, Luca Pasqualino, Rhona Mitra

Enslaved by an evil tyrant who wishes to destroy her people, barbarian huntress Red Sonja (Lutz) must unite a group of unlikely warriors to face off against Dragan The Magnificent (Sheehan) and his deadly bride, Dark Annisia (Day).

If this trailer is anything to go by, the long-gestating adaptation of comic book character Red Sonja looks like an '80s throwback to the swords-and-sorcery cheesefests of yore. But will this work in its favour? Will it be so bad it's good or actually good?

Bear in mind that MJ Bassett directed the criminally underrated Solomon Kane movie starring James Purefoy, so she has form with this kind of storytelling. 

I can't see Red Sonja triggering a resurgence in sword-and-sorcery cinema, but, at least, it's keeping the genre alive.

Adding to the movie's "direct-to-video" feel is the fact that on the day this trailer was released the Blu-Ray was already available for pre-order on Amazon (in the UK, at least, with a mid-September release date). So, yes, before you ask: I have ordered it.

The Outwaters (2022)

For reasons that now elude me, The Outwaters has been on my “must see” list for several years.

Now thanks to Shudder I’ve seen it and that’s two hours of my life where I could have been doing something much better.

Four twentysomethings go into the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video in an out-of-the-way place, and instead get tangled up in some very weird and horrific, indescribable, cosmic horror shit. The film we're watching is then presented as recovered footage entered into evidence for a police report on the four missing persons.

I cannot tell a lie: The Outwaters is the epitome of everything I hate about "found footage" films.

On one hand, this aspect has a very solid air of authenticity to it, but that means: migraine city.

Written and directed by the film's main protagonist Robbie Banfitch, this is "found footage" at its most irritating.

For the better part of 110 minutes, we are “treated” to too much camera shake, too many “in your face” close-ups, muffled dialogue and blurred and out-of-focus visuals.

It’s really difficult to follow along or get a handle on any of our protagonists. There’s no one to empathise with or even care about.

This is certainly no Blair Witch or As Above, So Below, where effort was made to present faux footage in a cinematic manner. Even the divisive Skinamarink makes more sense.

The extended 20-minute set-up is really hard going, and a waste of film, as the narrative only starts to struggle into being once the characters get to the desert and hints of the peculiarities-to-come start to manifest. 

The film definitely feels like it's going to pick up once the quartet are in desert and getting spooked by strange subterranean explosions and the mandatory paranormal light shows, but too much is buried under a surfeit of found footage tropes. 

An hour into the viewer's ordeal, the really weird shit seems to kick off, but it's the middle of the night, and it’s impossible to get even a vague idea of what’s going on as all we see are random flashes of light accompanied by hysterical screaming.

Banfinch strives way too hard to find verisimilitude in the footage but instead simply looses his audience quiet rapidly in a mess of blood and strange sounds, screaming red reptiles, all mixed in with some time loop shenanigans, and some kind of demon.

There's even a half-baked attempt to suggest the characters had stumbled into some top secret government experimental zone (à la Stranger Things), but that's just another piece of mud slung at the wall to see what sticks. That and the self-inflicted penile amputation that's way funnier than I think it was supposed to be.

This is the sort of movie that a certain breed of film student will spend ages trying to analyse and dissect, coming up with their own elaborate theorems of what it all means. But, seriously, you could watch a black screen with someone screaming in your face for an hour and come to the same conclusions. 

To be fair, I think I actually get what Banfinch was trying to do by bombarding us with a constant, supercharged sense of extreme disorientation, but he just didn’t do it very well; his David Lynch aspirations got away from him.

Honestly, The Outwaters annoyed me immensely (it's a long time since a film has wound me up quite so much, for all the wrong reasons) and if nothing else is a sterling example of why, as a general rule (with a few exceptions), I find that "found footage" films suck.

Even ones that try to mask their lo-fi offerings as "cosmic horror".

More In-Universe Material For Fantastic Four: First Steps

When Johnny Storm first claimed the hearts of millions as the Human Torch, fanfare around the heated hero exploded. The very first Johnny fan club, the Flaming Hearts, launched the day after the Fantastic Four’s first heroic mission and amassed thousands of loyal members. This ad marked their first major fan outreach.

While admittance to the Flaming Hearts is now closed, fans all over the world continue to find ways to share their Johnny Storm love together.

Complementing the faux magazine appearances of the other three members of the Fantastic Four, Johnny, of course, marches to his own drum and instead is all about promoting his own fan club.

Another wonderful example of Marvel's "in-universe" material for the retro-futuristic 1960's of Fantastic Four: First Steps, which debuts in cinemas later this month.

Deadwax (2018)

To celebrate the resumption of my Shudder subscription I wanted to remind all you horror fans out there about the streaming service's selection of rare grooves and highlight one of its finest exclusive tracks that I unearthed several years ago: Deadwax.

From Indiana Jones's quest to find the Ark of The Covenant in Raiders of The Lost Ark to Norman Reedus tracking down the sole print of La Fin Absolue du Monde in Cigarette Burns, I have always had a particular penchant for stories about the hunt for cursed artifacts, sources of forbidden knowledge. 

Treading similar ground to the Constantine episode The Devil's Vinyl, Deadwax is an eight-part Shudder serial about Etta Pryce (Hannah Gross), a professional "vinyl hunter", who is tasked by one of her rich clients to track down the only pressing of a legendary record, that is said to drive those who hear it insane... or worse.

Etta doesn't always operate 100 per cent within the law, and so turns to her 'mentor', gadget-builder Ian Ullman (Xena's Ted Raimi), who also has contacts within the vinyl collecting world that can help our heroine.

Initially parallel to the main story, then intertwined, we also meet a police forensics officer, Len Perry (Evan Gamble), who accidently hears part of the 'cursed record' while at the scene of bizarre murder.

The mummified husk of the victim has had all the moisture drained from its body, while apparently listening to this particular record on headphones.

Even just listening for a second, Perry is touched by the effects of the mysterious sounds on the recording and his life quickly spirals out of control.

As each episode is only about quarter of an hour long, I'm not sure why Deadwax wasn't edited into a single movie. Unless the creators were trying to emulate the tracks of an LP, in which case they missed a trick in not naming each chapter a "track" rather than a "part".

That said, the strongest of all the episodes, which is almost a stand-alone horror story in its own right, is Part Four, which is a flashback tale about college radio DJ, Tuck Weston (Chester Rushing), and his encounter with the fabled record the whole series revolves around.

This chapter not only delivers some incredible backstory material for the story, but also amps up the strangeness that undercuts everything in Deadwax.

At the quality end of low-budget, while there's some weak rear projection moments on some of the car journey scenes in Deadwax, necessity definitely proves to be the mother of invention for the more surreal and weird effects that really bring home the Lovecraftian horror later on.

I know I bang on about "Lovecraftian" horror a lot, but while the recent Empty Man played to the cosmic horror of this sub-genre, Deadwax leans way more into Lovecraft's fondness for the dangers of weird science, with this story echoing several of his original stories in its ideas.

Written and directed by Graham Reznick, whose CV includes extensive work as a sound designer for numerous films, the unnerving creepiness factor of Deadwax helps gloss over the few cracks in the narrative.

Rather than resorting to cheap jump scares, this is smart horror that relies heavily on its viewer actually projecting themselves into the story and accepting that this could be happening to them.

Historian Rates Nine American Civil War Battles In Movies

Garry Adelman, a historian, rates nine American Civil War battles in movies.

He comments on the Civil War-era artillery and rifles on display in Free State of Jones (2016), starring Matthew McConaughey; and Emancipation (2022), starring Will Smith. 

He explains the use of dynamite and other explosives seen in Cold Mountain (2003), starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and Renée Zellweger; Sahara (2005), starring Matthew McConaughey; and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967), starring Clint Eastwood.

He breaks down the military strategy seen in the battle scenes in Glory (1989), starring Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington; Gettysburg (1993), starring Jeff Daniels; and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, and Tommy Lee Jones. 

And finally, he separates fact from fiction regarding Civil War-era surgeries as seen in Dances with Wolves (1990), starring Kevin Costner.

Adelman is the chief historian at the American Battlefield Trust. He has also been a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg National Military Park for 27 years.

Kingdom of The Planet of The Apes (2024)

Opening up with Caesar's funeral, Kingdom of The Planet of The Apes then jumps forward in time "many generations" (probably several hundred years) from War For The Planet of The Apes, the end of the first trilogy of the stories in the revamped franchise.

Ape society in this post-apocalyptic world has evolved into numerous tribes and the film's protagonists are the Eagle Clan - who tame wild eagles as their pets.

Noa (It's Owen Teague) of The Eagle Clan finds himself alone when violent ape raiders from another clan kidnap his family and friends, leaving him for dead.

In his quest to track them down, Noa teams up with Raka (Peter Macon aka Bortus from The Orville), an orangutan follower of Caesar's teachings, and a talking human, Mae (The Witcher's Freya Allen).

Mae knows where Noa's tribe has been taken, the kingdom of self-proclaimed "Caesar", the bonobo Proximus (genre stalwart Kevin Durand).

He is employing his many captives as muscle to try and break into the ancient bunker complex around which he has set up camp.

This new Caesar wants to get his hands on the powerful human treasures he believes are stored within.

Mae, however, knows exactly what's in there and has her eyes set on a single, important item that she hopes might give humanity its "voice" back.

Narratively this sub-plot is the only real hiccup in Kingdom of The Planet of The Apes.

Mae - and. it turns out. others - seem very knowledgeable about the Old World and so you have to wonder why they waited "many generations" to put their mysterious plan into operation?

It would be a spoiler to go into too much detail, but the huge revelation in the denouement (which does NOT involve The Statue of Liberty) clearly sets up the - as yet unannounced officially - sequel, leaving so many questions unanswered.

This does, unfortunately, mean an otherwise gorgeous and enthralling movie feels slightly incomplete. 

None of which means I didn't love this film. Despite its 145-minute duration, this is a fantastic, engrossing, adventure romp that comes in a close second, in my admiration for the new CGI Apes era, behind Rise of The Planet of The Apes.

Pitched as the start of a new trilogy of movies, Kingdom of The Planet of The Apes is peppered with call-backs to the original films from the 1960s and '70s, from musical cues to homages (e.g. the human hunt sequence) and Easter Eggs.

Massive kudos to director Wes Ball (previously best known for the Maze Runner trilogy) whose love and enthusiasm for this franchise has helped bring out top-notch performances from the primarily primate performers (with guidance and assistance from the legendary maestro of motion-capture Andy Serkis).

Kingdom of The Planet of The Apes is a thing of beauty, blending location shooting with stage sets, inhabited by the breathtakingly perfect mo-cap apes (courtesy of Wētā FX).

The slight problem this visual feast caused me - particularly when it came to the interactions of the ape characters - was the constant hollering from the dark recesses of my brain going "wow, I wonder how they did that?" and distracting me from the unfolding story.