GoldenEye 007 (1997)

GoldenEye 007 (1997)

Genre: FPS | Players: 1 – 4 | Developer: Rare

Babylon 5: Season 5 (1998)

The Wheel of Fire (1998)

22 episodes, approx 44 mins each.

"No one here is exactly what he appears. Nothing's the same anymore. [...] I see a great hand, reaching out of the stars. Who are you? [...] Do you have anything worth living for? I think of my beautiful city in flames. Like giants in the playground."

Season 5 is the Ensign Red Shirt of the Babylon 5 universe. Almost everything went wrong, and there are a number of reasons why that was.

The most obvious reasons are studio dithering (see Season 4 post for info of that) and the writing having to be rushed to meet production dates.

Lochley (Tracy Scoggins) taking over as Station head and trying hard not to be perceived as the obvious replacement that she was didn't help. It's not Scoggins' fault she had to fit the powerful female template that JMS fell back on in times of need.

Hellraiser Films: V-IX (2000-11)

Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)

Dir. Scott Derrickson

The first instalment in the straight-to-video continuation of the Hellraiser franchise raises a few questions. The most pertinent being why is this even a Hellraiser movie? Having Pinhead in your story for about three minutes in total doesn't make it a Hellraiser story. Putting him on the cover doesn't make it a Hellraiser movie. The same as how my wearing a Batman tee-shirt doesn't swell my bank balance and make me a target for shallow, gold-digging whores.

In truth, it feels like the beginnings of a TV Series; standalone stories that just happen to feature Lemarchand's box and a brief appearance or two from the lead Cenobite. A quick google after viewing confirmed suspicions: it was an existing horror script that had the nailed-one's role subsequently added.

Big Trouble in Little China: Volume 1 (2015)

The Hell of a Midnight Road

and The Ghosts of Storms (2015)

Authors: John Carpenter / Eric Powell  |  Illustrator: Brian Churilla  |  Page Count: 128

I always wanted more Jack Burton adventures but never actually expected it to happen. Okay, it's not a film, obviously, but it's unmistakably Big Trouble to its very core. If you know the film well you'll be able to fit each character's personality to their respective hand-drawn counterpart. The illustrations are somewhere between caricature and likeness, but everything about the things they say and do feels authentic, even down to the individual rhythms used. Thank the gods of faithful continuations for an adherence to the source.

It picks up the story mere minutes after the 1986 film ends. If you remember, Jack and his more competent pals kicked some ass and shook the Pillars of Heaven from somewhere underneath San Francisco's Chinatown. Jack may have left Chinatown behind, but the denizens that gather there aren't finished with him yet.

Sabbat: Music (1988-91)

History of a Time to Come (1988)

Sabbat blew everyone out of the water when they dropped their début album on the Thrash scene in '88.

When Martin Walkyier's unique vocal style, intelligent lyrics and perfect timing were paired with Andy Sneap's smorgasbord of frantic riffs something truly special was born.

The influence it had on later generations within the genre is impossible to measure. When my faith in modern music wanes, which is often, History of a Time to Come is one of the albums that I turn to to remind me of what was lost.

Halloween: Films (1978-2002)

Halloween (1978)
Dir. John Carpenter

Halloween is more than just another cheap, independent slasher flick. It's a master class on how to create, pace and sustain tension when working with a limited budget.

The unease and sense of foreboding that permeates every crucial scene is in large part due to Carpenter's use of music. Like Hermann's score on Psycho (1960) it has a stabbing, piercing, onomatopoeic quality that keeps your nerves on a knife edge.

The faceless, unstoppable force that is Michael Myers taps into a very human, deep-rooted fear of what's hidden behind the mask we all wear, but Michael's inner evil is so powerful that even blankness can't hide it.

Julia X (2011)

Julia X (2011)

Dir. P.J. Pettiette

What little I'd seen of the promotional material for Julia X seemed to imply a weak teen-slasher flick. From the blatant attempt to appeal to moviegoers who discern with their cock not their brain to the very premise itself, internet dating, summed up in the tagline ‘Sex, Blood, Revenge, and that's just their first date,’ I was turned off.

To make matters worse it was filmed for 3D, which usually means you can expect the first and last twenty minutes to contain things thrusting at the camera lens. Indeed, many of the angles are evidently chosen for that very purpose, they make no sense to the actual story, are visually uneven, existing solely to facilitate thrust.

Despite all of the negative vibes I was getting I watched it anyhow. Why? Because I really wanted the hear the music, which was provided by Japanese musician Akira Yamaoka, composer of the majority of the hugely successful Silent Hill video games. Yamaoka's uncanny ability to pair ambience with unsettling allusions speaks to me on a subliminal level. It gets deep under my skin. He's been known to team up with Mary Elizabeth McGlynn from time to time, on average two tracks per album, and it's the same here, two tracks have Mary Elizabeth performing vocals.