Well, This Seems To Have EVERYTHING!

Stranded after a concert scam, an all-girl heavy metal band and their vampire manager, stumble into a town ruled by a warlock and crawling with cannibals, vampires, sirens, and a monstrous werewolf.

When they encounter a pregnant woman in danger, a search for help turns into a night of supernatural chaos, ranging from Minotaur-run betting rings to brutal creature confrontations.

The band must unleash hidden powers to stay alive, blending heavy metal, dark humour, and creatures into a blood-soaked, chaotic survival ride.

Devour will be available, on demand, from October 13.

Woochi The Demon Slayer (2009)

Korean action-adventure Woochi The Demon Slayer is so jam-packed with geekgasm-worthy awesomeness it almost defies description.

Although it plays around with time and space, for the most part the first act is a fast-paced magic-laden 16th Century wuxia epic of Woochi (Dong-won Kang), a cocky Taoist trainee wizard showing off and fighting shapechanging demon-goblins while trying to get his hands on a magical bronze dagger.

As all this is going on two Taoist masters - one of whom is Woochi's teacher - have been hunting for the Archgod's Pipe, a powerful artifact that the demons also desire.

Unfortunately, one of the masters, Hwadam (Yun-seok Kim), becomes corrupt - although the three bumbling Taoist godlings, tasked with recapturing the demons they allowed to escape in the first place, are oblivious to all this.

Hwadam frames Woochi for the murder of his master and the gods-stuck-in-human-form exile Woochi and his faithful companion Chorangyi (Hae-jin Yu) into a pair of paintings... where they remain for 500 years.

The action then cuts to modern day, in a major Korean city, when the immortal minor gods realise they have to free Woochi to help them capture a pair of goblin-demons and retrieve the Archgod's Pipe.

Without missing a beat the film metamorphoses into a superhero flick of the highest calibre, with the same incredible standard of CGI effects already established in the dazzling 'old world' segment seamlessly transposing to the modern day.

Unfortunately, Choi Dong-Hoon's direction (he also wrote the script) takes its foot off the accelerator for a bit in the latter half of the movie and while it certainly doesn't drag, there's a definite slow-down in proceedings almost up until the extended final conflict.

The range and creativity of the stunts and effects are mind-boggling, with people stepping in and out of paintings, exploding into clouds of smoke, running up the sides of buildings etc Although much of this has been seen in other wuxia movies, it has never been on quite this scale or with this rapidity and grace.

Woochi's particular take on magic alone should be fascinating to Western viewers - the Taoist wizards would certainly run rings around Merlin and Gandalf! Our first introduction to the roguish Woochi is a stunning display of magic and comedy unlike anything I've seen before - how often do we see Harry Potter passing himself off as a god to wind-up some muggles?

All the time, there is a lightness of touch and great humour to the proceedings, but this certainly isn't light-weight with some several, clever, visual plot devices that rival the stylings of Inception and Doctor Who.

If Woochi could have maintained the breakneck pacing of its first act throughout, it would have easily been in the running for recognition as one of the greatest action films of all time; even so it remains an incredible 115 minutes of cinema that puts many Hollywood blockbusters to shame.

MUSICAL MONDAY: Sweet Memories (Atarashii Gakko! featuring アイナ・ジ・エンド)

READING REPORT: Not Much To Report

Honestly, I don't know where this week has gone. Have I been so under a cloud and distracted that it has slipped by me?

I know we had games night, I binged the excellent Reacher spin-off Neagley on Prime Video, and Rachel and I have been to the gym a couple of times, but beyond that it's all a bit of a blur.

Somehow I don't think I read a thing this week: no books, no comics... that can't be right, can it?

However, one definite thing I have "achieved" this week is the acquisition - or should I say "reacquisition" - of the Ace edition of the first volume of the epic shared world series Thieves' World, edited by Robert Aspirin.

In recent years I have been able to corral the subsequent four volumes, but this edition (shown above) was a right bugger to track down, especially when operating on a tight budget.

I owned, and read, this edition when it first appeared over here in the UK, almost 50 years ago, and, as much as I enjoyed the roguish, old school Dungeons & Dragons-style adventures within, it was the cover I was besotted with.

It was no surprise that it was also used on the cover of the roleplaying box set based on the book series, and its central city of Sanctuary, that statted up most of the main characters for a multitude of rules systems.

To my simple tastes, this cover painting is - and always will be - the definitive "you begin in a tavern" illustration. If I could start a campaign, or even an adventure, that gave me the same chills as this book cover I'd be a very happy gamesmaster.

Anyway, I came across this well-read but still in magnificent condition, book on eBay the other day and was delighted to see it listed as a "buy it now". You can imagine how quickly I slammed that button when I realised that even with postage this was going to cost me less than a tenner.

It arrived a couple of days later, well packed and ready to be shelved next to my other Thieves' World books (see below).

I'd been holding off trying to read these latter books because I wanted to start at the beginning of the franchise.

Now I can.

A snapshot of one of my sword-and-sorcery shelves

The Colosseum Was A State Propaganda Machine

Photo by Ceyda Çiftci

In this video, geek architect Dami Lee deconstructs the Colosseum of Ancient Rome, explaining how it operated as a propaganda engine to keep the the city's population distracted from the real issues.

And, yes, she concludes with comparisons to today's mass media...

The Hobbit - The Battle Of The Five Armies (2014)

And so Peter Jackson's epically-padded adaptation of a 300-page children's book into three two-and-a-half hour films comes to end with a concluding chapter that is essentially (as the title suggests) one giant battle.

And, yet, oddly, I found The Battle Of The Five Armies the easiest of the trilogy to sit through, quite possibly because it was just vignette-after-vignette of a massive fantasy battle.

It still suffered from dreadful sub-plot bloat:

• Thorin's "dragon sickness" - which started off as fascinating character development - got worse and worse until he had a fever-vision and then it suddenly got better;
• Any scene with Alfrid, the right-hand man of the Master Of Laketown, was just a waste of celluloid;
• Billy Connolly's Dain was a potentially interesting - if stereotypical Scottish - dwarf to throw into the mix, but then he disappeared from the action; 
• Whatever happened to the giant wormy-things that burst out of the ground and were never seen again? 
• What was the point of showing Beorn being parachuted into the battle if we never saw him again?
• etc  etc

The opening pre-credit sequence - the death of Smaug - should have been the finale of The Desolation Of Smaug and I really could have done without Peter Jackson's obsession with Legolas and his physics-defying stunts.

Moments like this tend to bring home the fact that you're just watching what amounts to someone else playing a very expensive video game - and sometimes the graphics aren't even that good.

Thankfully the misty, blur-o-vision that was so prevalent in the trailers doesn't seep in that often in the actual movie.

As much as I enjoyed the variety of fantasy races and monsters clashing, jumping around, killing each other and so on, for me, the most interesting part came with Bilbo's return to The Shire to find all his property being auctioned off - I could have watched more of that!

The hobbits are the most unique creatures in Tolkien's work and therefore the most interesting as they don't seem to fit comfortably with the rest of rough-and-ready Middle-Earth. That's why, if you're going to pad out a story entitled The Hobbit, I feel there ought to be more about hobbits!

Much like the Star Wars Prequels, I'm sure I'll come round to liking these three movies eventually, but they're never going to come close to Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings, which is a shame.

You have to wonder if The Hobbit might have been better treated as a single movie or maybe two, without all the spurious padding.

The book has stood the test of time without anyone feeling the need to write additional chapters and inflate it to the size of Lord Of The Rings, so perhaps there's a lesson there.

"SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES"

THROWBACK THURSDAY: What Was Gandalf's Handicap?

"...and knocked their king Golfimbul's head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment."

Back in 2012 I decided to reread The Hobbit, both to relax and mentally prepare me for Peter Jackson's new movie (An Unexpected Journey), and the thing that has immediately struck me (and probably explains why I stopped reading the book repeatedly after I grew out of my teens) is just what a clunky writer old JRRT is.

He may be a world-maker, language-crafter and mythology-weaver without equal in the realm of fantasy writing, but even if we ignore the odd similes that refer to 'steam engines' and 'pop-guns', or the fact that Bilbo has a clock on his mantlepiece, or that the 'terrifying' trolls are called Bill Huggins, Bert and Tom (these are the same trolls that turn up as petrified scenery in Lord Of The Rings), there is no excusing the ridiculous sentence that I began this piece with.

Read it again and just think about it. Golf was invented in Middle-Earth, before the time of The Hobbit, and was therefore probably being played during the War Of The Ring!

Did I skip the chapter where Legolas and Gimli worked out their racial differences on the Anfalas greens? Did the war disrupt the scheduling of the Rivendell Open?

And talking of Rivendell, check out this fantastic piece of elfish verse:

"O! tril-lil-lil-lolly
the valley is jolly,
ha!ha!"

And I'm only three chapters in. Makes me almost miss Tom Bombadil...

I adore the world Tolkien created, the life he gave to the creatures and races he peopled it with, but I just find the actual words he uses to tell his stories so laboured at times*.

The Hobbit is an easier read than Lord Of The Rings, of course, because it's written for children, not even young adults, but children too innocent to groan at awful puns and cheesy rhymes.

But surely I can't be the only one who has difficulties believing the world of The Hobbit is the same world that Lord Of The Rings takes place in?

For starters, where are all the golf clubs?

* As a side note to demonstrate how contrary I can be, I absolutely love listening to the audiobook of The Silmarillion (I have both the Martin Shaw and the Andy Serkis versions).

THERE CAN BE ONLY FOUR (ISSUES)

Issue one variant cover art by Brian Bysouth

Previously announced as a single graphic novel, Titan Comics adaptation of Gregory Widen’s original script for 1986's iconic Highlander will now, first, be released as a four-part comic book miniseries, debuting in December.

The adaptation is being written by Widen himself, with Szymon Kudranski on art duty.

A collected edition of Highlander: The Original Screenplay is now scheduled to follow in July.

Issue one variant cover art by Lee Binding

Issue one variant cover art by Szymon Kudranski 

Issue one variant cover art by Claudia Gironi