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he Moving Picture Boy Gallery Gary Numan: An Annotated Six English Filmmakers 322 pages £50 Scrapbook 318 pages £60 / £30 (Conversations with Michael Winner, he Moving Picture Girl Gallery he Warholian talent who Clive Donner, Lindsay Anderson, he Lemon Popsicle Book 220 pages £40 changed the music of the world Mike Hodges, Ken Russell, 302 pages £55/£25 A history of child ilm actors with a single inger. Kevin Brownlow on Chaplin) 286 pages colour £28 / B&W £13.50

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Alien cover art by Peter Wallbank (www.petewallbankart.com) 18

46 08: TERMINATOR: NEMESIS Robert Patrick on playing T-1000 and taking on Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2. 14: THE MUSE AND THE MAD SCIENTIST Denis Meikle looks at the making of Kate Bush’s sci-fi themed ‘Cloudbusting’ video and how it was influenced by Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. 24: SPY-FI PART 2 Jon Abbott grooves on the 60s big screen spy craze and shares a hot tub (and a martini) with Dean Martin. Sounds like he’s In Like Flint to us. 38: THE ALIEN AND I 38 Meet Veronica Cartwright, the other female crew member aboard the ill-fated Nostromo… 48 52 46: THE MAN WHO PREDICTED THE INTERNET Ian Millsted looks at the life and work of the largely forgotten science fiction author John Brunner. 48: MARS ATTACKS Richard Holliss looks back at ’s , as adapted by Hammer! 52: RISE OF THE SUPER-MACHINES Speed is the essence as Jon Abbott puts the pedal to the metal and zooms back to the 1980s, where his haircut will be right back in fashion. Like the Ed’s. 56 62 56: ATTEMPTING RE-ENTRY - 007 IN SPACE Howard Hughes looks at the making of the guilty pleasure Roger Moore Bond movie, Moonraker. 62: BROLLY GOOD SHOW Avengers fan Grant Peabody checks out the best shows from the early years…

05: INFINITY NEWS ROUND-UP 12: YOUR LETTERS AND EMAILS Editor: Allan Bryce Web Master: [email protected] 19: THE DARK SIDE PROMO Design & Production: Kevin Coward Website: ww.ininitymagazine.co.uk 20: TAKE THE HELM - DR WHO Advertisement and Subs Manager: Published by: Ghoulish Publishing Ltd, Yannie Overton-Bryce 29 Cheyham Way, South Cheam, Surrey SM2 7HX. 22: MODEL BEHAVIOUR

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O Printed in the EU by Acorn, W. Yorkshire. Online publisher: Ghoulish Publishing Distribution: Comag, Unit 3, Tavistock Road, 45: SUBSCRIPTIONS ww.ininitymagazine.co.uk West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 7QE. 67: NEXT ISSUE PREVIEW GH PUBLISHING Advertising enquiries: © Copyright 2017 Ghoulish Publishing Ltd. [email protected] ISSN 2514-3654 INFINITY 3 CAN A WOMAN USE A SONIC SCREWDRIVER?

here’s a lot of stuff going on in the world old favourite, this could be just the shot in the arm the right now that is worth worrying about - the series needs. Oh, and Isis take note: the 76 virgins you Tprice of fish for a start - but for some odd are looking for are now protesting outside the BBC. reason countless sci-fi fans are most gravely Anyway, here we are with issue 5 of Infinity, and concerned about the fact that a fictional has once again we’ve packed it full of sci-fi goodness. If regenerated with boobs. you love cult TV you are sure to enjoy Jon Abbott’s fond Unless you’ve been travelling in time yourself and look back at the turbo-charged ‘Supermachine’ shows stuck in the middle ages with no internet you’ll know of the 1980s and my own reminiscences of the Cathy that Jodie Whittaker has recently been announced as Gale years of The Avengers. There’s also a fun interview the new , taking over from Peter Capaldi with Veronica Cartwright, the other female star of when he bows out in this year’s Christmas special. Alien, the movie featured on our cover courtesy of Capaldi says he wants to revive On The Buses an excellent Peter Wallbank illustration. Peter and play ‘Blakey’. I do hope that happens. will be back next month with an equally But what of Jodie Whittaker? She was stunning Planet of the Apes painting, so already a favourite for the role having make sure you reserve your copy early. appeared in Who showrunner Chris As I have said in previous introductions, Chibnall’s , and Doctor Who I want Infinity to be an old fashioned fun won’t be the first time she’s fought aliens. sci-fi entertainment magazine covering Remember her as trainee nurse Samantha a wide variety of subjects that would in Joe Cornish‘s Attack the Block? probably never be found in the pages of more So there we go, she’s a great actress and bound mainstream genre mags. That’s why I immediately to do well as Doctor Who, but only if the writers get said yes to Denis Meikle’s superb article on the making their act together and give her great scripts, because of Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’ video. I think you’ll be that impressed as I was when you read this fascinating is more important than whoever has the central role piece, as always splendidly laid out by resident desig- in a show that is now a tentpole of the BBC’s worldwide nification expert Kev. success. With brilliant storylines a time travelling It was also an education for me reading about sci-fi cow called Doctor Moo could possibly even make a author John Brunner, a man who was one of the leading success of it. British science fiction writers of his time but has now I have to say that some of the jokes surrounding pretty much been forgotten about. He was also a the new Doctor Who casting have given me a guilty leading member of the Hampstead group from which chuckle however, like the one about how insurance the national Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was premiums for the TARDIS have gone through the roof, formed, and if this feature leads you to seek out some and the sage advice that the Daleks had better watch of his work we will have done our job well. Please let us themselves once a month. I know, that’s what we have know what you think. the letters pages for. Bring it on. Enjoy, and I’ll just go off to make sure the TARDIS But come on guys, let’s welcome a new twist on an isn’t double parked. Allan Bryce.

HELP US KEEP UP TO DATE WITH WHAT YOU WANT We value every single reader and they value us, which is why we are flourishing at a time when print magazines everywhere are having a tough time. We want to encourage you all to send in your views on Infinity so we can get a lively letters section going, and if you have news of sci-fi-related conventions, movies, books etc, we will be happy to give you some publicity for them. Most importantly, please tell us what we are doing right and (perish the thought) what we are doing THE MAGAZINE BEYOND YOUR IMAGINATION wrong! You can reach us by via: www.infinitymagazine.co.uk WEB: www.infinitymagazine.co.uk EMAIL: [email protected] FACEBOOK: Infinity Magazine ADDRESS: INFINITY Magazine Ghoulish Publishing Ltd 29 Cheyham Way, South Cheam, Surrey, SM2 7HX 4 INFINITY

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME Name of feature

The Infinity team bring you the latest news on your favourite TV shows and movie franchises, including the latest gossip on Blade Runner 2049 and some exciting conventions on the way…

VALERIAN FLOPS and directed by World War Z’s Marc Forster. The third series is an In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s classic novel Lord of Light (1967) in May of this year, Luc Besson (insert left) which was awarded the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Novel. This series said that as he was making his big-screen is to be written by X-Men: First Class and Thor co-writer Ashley adaptation of the French comic Valerian and Miller, and follows a society of humans where a select few can be the City of a Thousand Planets, he worried granted the likeness and powers of deities, and one former god that the source material would be “impossible” to rises up to challenge the status quo. Let’s hope it’s better than the ilm. It turns out he may have It been right, movie version of Zelazny’s Damnation Alley! too, because the most expensive indie ilm ever made, (at around the $180 million mark) RETURN OF THE CREATURE has proven a costly lop. The budget igure also Fox Searchlight recently released doesn’t take into account marketing and publicity the oficial trailer for Guillermo del costs, reportedly upwards of $60 million. Toro’s The Shape of Water, and it As with Tom Cruise’s The Mummy, it is possible that the movie looks like this one could be a real will perform much better in overseas markets like China, and some winner. The ilm is set in Cold suspect that Valerian could still become a cult favorite and television War 1963, with an American staple like Besson’s The Fifth Element, which also performed poorly high-security government lab at the U.S. box ofice in the irst place but made its money back over hiding a top-secret experiment: the years. Besson has said he is already writing a sequel to Valerian, Sally Hawkins an “aquatic man” (Doug Jones) and with 21 volumes of the comic it’s based on, there is plenty of says hello to her worshipped as a god in the material, but if the irst ilm fails to deliver to investors, it’s unlikely underwater friend Amazon. The creature fascinates he’ll ind the money to inance a second effort, especially one in line Elisa (Sally Hawkins), the mute, lonely with his FX-heavy vision. woman who cleans the lab. Judging by this But even if Valerian causes pain to its investors, Besson’s company trailer, she endeavours to set him free. isn’t in danger of going under, thanks to its library illed with hits like “When he looks at me, he doesn’t know I am incomplete,” she says Lucy and the Transporter and Taken franchises. (in sign language). Reminded that the creature is not human, she says, “If we do nothing, neither are we.” UNIVERSAL SCI-FI TV Del Toro directs from a screenplay he wrote with Vanessa Taylor Universal Pictures have some interesting and the cast also includes Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, treats lined up for sci-i fans on the small Richard Jenkins and Michael Stuhlbarg. Fox Searchlight are releasing screen, having just announced a slate of new this dreamlike Creature From the Black Lagoon-style movie on genre TV shows. December 8th. Prominent among these is Dan Harmon and Evan Katz’s next TV series: Sirens of The future world wants YOU Titan, an interplanetary epic based on the in Blade Runner 2049 1959 Hugo Award-nominated novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The book tells of the adventures of Malachi Constant, the richest man in a future America, who possesses extraordinary luck that he attributes to divine favor which he has used to build upon his father’s fortune. He becomes the centre point of a journey that takes him from Earth to Mars in preparation for an interplanetary war, to Mercury with another Martian survivor of that war, back BLADE RUNNER UPDATE to Earth to be pilloried as a sign of Man’s For those curious about what happened between the original Blade displeasure with his arrogance, and inally Runner and its sequel, some of the gaps were illed on a 180-degree to Titan where he again meets the man video display during the Warner Bros. San Diego Comic-Con panel ostensibly responsible for the turn of in July. events that have befallen him, Winston In Blade Runner 2049’s session during the WB panel, the studio Niles Rumfoord. tricked out a timeline around the room that bridged the last movie’s On top of that, Universal has also revealed post events to the new sequel. The presentation then segued to a plans to adapt three book series, two of virtual hologram of Jared Leto, who spoke about the future. which will air on Syfy: Maggie Stiefvater’s The journey sets up the sequel, set 30 years in the future in a urban fantasy saga The Raven Cycle about dystopian Los Angeles where the police are trying to ind illegal a young girl and a group of private school replicants. The crowd saw a new clip of Ryan Gosling’s Oficer K boys on a quest for a magical power, and walking through a hall of statue replicants where Nexus 08 looks Hugh Howey’s Sand, a post-apocalyptic lot like the super human seen in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. A drama surrounding a family of “sand divers” white-clad woman (Sylvia Hoeks) leads Oficer K to a drawer full of who scour the ravaged remnants of an small glass balls. She places one in a computer which shows a video ecologically devastated Earth for valuable of Ford’s cop from the irst ilm giving a replicant the third degree objects. The latter show will be produced with an eye analysis. by former Rogue One writer Garry Whitta Moderator Chris Hardwick asked the sequel’s director Denis

INFINITY 5

Name of feature INFINITY NEWS

Martin Landau was born on June 20, 1928, in Brooklyn, the son of Morris Landau, a machinist, and the former Selma Buchman. He attended James Madison High School and Pratt Institute, and originally planned to be an illustrator, beginning his career as a cartoonist at the New York Daily News. He would continue to draw for pleasure for the rest of his life but after ive years at the newspaper Marty, as he was known to friends and colleagues, decided to try acting. After a brief but impressive Broadway career he made an auspicious ilm debut at the age of 30 in Pork Chop Hill (1959), before playing the villainous Leonard in the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock classic North By Northwest. “I chose to play Leonard as a gay character,” he later revealed. “It was quite a big risk in cinema at the time. My logic was simply that he wanted to get rid of Eva Marie Saint with such a vengeance, so it made sense for him to be in love with his boss, Vandamm, played by James Mason. Every one of my friends thought I was crazy, but Hitchcock liked it. A good director makes a playground and allows you to play.” Landau was also a respected acting teacher who taught the craft to the likes of Jack Nicholson. In the 1950s, he was best friends Harrison Ford and with James Dean and, for several months, the boyfriend of Marilyn Ryan Gosling in Blade Monroe. “She could be wonderful, but she was incredibly insecure, Runner 2049. This might be quite a to the point she could drive you crazy,” he told The New York Times decent movie… in 1988. His success in Mission: Impossible was a double-edged sword and Villeneuve why he took the job. “I didn’t want somebody else to fuck afterwards he found it hard to escape the spectre of typecasting. it up,” he responded candidly. After too many bad movies and TV shows he found latter-day Ryan Gosling made minor waves for comparing his experience on respect from the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, who cast him in the movie to being “on a football team with the Avengers.” Hardwick Tucker: The Man And His Dream, and Woody Allen, who directed him jumped in to let the audience know that Gosling meant to say in Crimes And Misdemeanours. He earned Supporting Actor Oscar “Justice League,” prompting some laughs. nominations for both ilms. The cast was expectedly evasive when it came to plot details. Then came one of the greatest roles of his career, as the elderly, When asked if the sequel will answer fans’ questions about the morphine-addicted horror star Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, original, Harrison slyly replied, “It doesn’t matter what I think.” and Landau inally took home the coveted Academy Award for Best Later, he teased, “The original ilm explored the ethics of the Supporting Actor. The role also earned him a Golden Globe and creation of replicants and their utility and we further develop many other critics’ awards. those themes in the story… but I’m not going to tell you anything Landau had found a kindred spirit in Burton, who also cast him in about it.” Sleepy Hollow (1999) and as the voice of a Vincent Price-like science But it was an audience question directed at Harrison that got teacher in the horror-movie homage Frankenweenie (2012). “Tim the biggest response when he was asked if his goal is to reboot and I don’t inish a sentence,” Landau told the Los Angeles Times every major franchise. “You bet your arse it is,” he joked as the in 2012. “There’s something oddly kinesthetic about it. We kind of audience roared. understand each other.” The panel also screened a short clip from the movie, in addition In 2001 Landau received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, to releasing new trailers for ’s Ready Player One, and more recently he earned Emmy nominations for playing the Justice League and a irst look at Aquaman. father of Anthony LaPaglia’s character on CBS’ Without a Trace and guest-starring as an out-of-touch movie producer on HBO’s GOODBYE TO A SPACE 1999 LEGEND Entourage. He also portrayed billionaire J. Howard Marshall, the It was a sad coincidence that the cover of 90-year-old husband of Anna Nicole Smith, in a 2013 Lifetime issue 3 of Ininity featured that ine actor biopic about the sex symbol, and starred for Atom Egoyan opposite Martin Landau in his starring role in Space Christopher Plummer in Remember (2015). 1999, because just as the issue arrived Among the countless tributes to this ine and much-loved on newsstands it was announced actor following his death on July 15th, 2017, came that he had died at the age the following from his former wife and Mission: of 89. Impossible/Space 1999 co-star Barbara Bain. Landau was perhaps “If one could examine his DNA, it would best known for playing read ACTOR,” Bain said in a statement. “He chameleon-like master embraced every role with ire and ierce of disguise Rollin Hand dedication. Playing Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s in the popular TV show Ed Wood was his loving tribute to all actors Mission: Impossible, a and garnered him a well-deserved Academy role that he chose in Award. His work was his joy and his legacy.” preference to that of pointy-eared Mr Spock in Star Trek. “A character without emotions would have driven me crazy; I would have had to be lobotomized,” he explained in 2001. Leonard Nimoy became famous in the role of course, and ironically he followed Martin Landau kisses Landau into Mission: Impossible when the his Oscar for playing Bela Lugosi in Ed actor and his then-wife Barbara Bain quit Wood (above) and with the show 1969 over a contract dispute - former wife Barbara Bain in Mission: they both ended up in the UK in Impossible the early 1970s in Gerry Anderson’s Space 1999.

6 INFINITY Name of feature CONVENTION ROUND-UP

“Frying tonight!” Kenneth Williams with lady in red Fenella Fielding in Carry On SCreaming (1966)

CAMDEN TREAT We should also mention that the next Camden Film Fair held by our old mate Paul Brown takes place on Saturday September 2nd, and so you’ll have to be a he convention and ilm fair scene is alive and well in the UK, as bit slippy to get there since Twe have discovered over the last year or so since we started this mag only hits shops taking tables at two of the big events, one at the two days earlier. It’s only £4 Electric Ballroom in Camden and the other at Westminster’s Central admission and £2 for seniors Hall. The latter is the regular home of the London Film Convention, like me, and if you can make run now by the amiable Thomas Bowington, a massive ilm fan who it you can rub shoulders always seems to line up some great guests - many of whom you could with Oliver star Mark Lester have sworn were no longer with us! Now in its 45th year, which means and give him some more it started way before young Tom was even a glimmer in his dad’s eye, (money) to sign you an the next big London convention is on September 16th from 10am to autograph. 5pm at Storey’s Gate, Westminster, London SW1H 9NH. Fenella Fielding will also The theme this time is ‘The Best of British: Bond Girls and Classic be at this event alongside Comedy’ and guests lined up include the gorgeous Luciana Paluzzi, Bond and Hammer girls who you may remember was a bad Bond girl in Thunderball (1966). Caroline Munro and Martine Beswick, both lovely ladies who are We also loved her when she was battling The Green Slime (1968) - happy to chat to their fans. These Camden events are great fun for there’s a medicine you can take for that nowadays. collectors of old movies on DVD and Blu-ray, as well as those in search Also on hand will be the legendary Shirley Eaton, whose most of rare posters and stills at reasonable prices. famous career moment was starring alongside Sid James and It’s also worth mentioning that there’s another Paul Brown/Midnight Kenneth Connor in What A Carve Up (1961). Oh, hang on, maybe Media event being held this October at London’s Conway Hall in getting covered in gold in Goldinger might just edge that, and her Holborn’s Red Lion Square, the home of the Gothique Film Society. Carry On ilms as well. Still love What a Carve Up though, where Sid Guests are still to be irmed up for that one, but we are sure it will be introduces himself to Shirl as ‘A gentleman of the turf.” a fun day out. Hammer-style Horror and the Carry Ons met in the lavoursome Carry On Screaming (1966). Who can forget Fenella Fielding as the COMICS ON ICE femme fatale in red and her request: “Do you mind if I smoke?” Let’s Last but not least we always hope the ire extinguishers are in good working order because she will like pointing out smaller be there too. events that deserve your There’s often a treat for Doctor Who fans at these events and support, and one such event the BBC’s long-running time travelling franchise is represented by is The International Comics the presence of . No relation to Bernard, she played Expo, known to fans the world companion Jo Grant in Doctor Who beginning with Terror of the over as ICE. Autons and ending with The Green Death. She has also provided the This is a one-day show voice for in several of the for the fans now held at The audio dramas. Birmingham Conference Actress Eunice Gayson will also be there signing autographs for £15 Centre on Smallbrook, in a pop. She was in Hammer’s Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) but is Birmingham City Centre next better known for appearing in Dr. No (1962), in the irst scene where to the local comics shop we get to see Sean Connery delivering the immortal line, “The name’s Nostalgia & Comics, one of the oldest and most respected comic Bond, James Bond,” in between pufing on a healthy ilter tip. shops in the UK. The date for this year’s International Comic Expo is The formidable lineup also includes Deborah Moore, daughter of Saturday 9th September 2017. Doors open at 10am for early birds and the late, great Roger and an actress in her own right, and the beautiful 11am general admittance with the main event closing at 5.30pm. Valerie Leon who needs no introduction to us Hai Karate users. Shane This year’s guest list includes some of the biggest names in comics Rimmer and John Wyman will also be there to trade on their former from both sides of the Atlantic including the only UK appearance Bond glory and me and Kev will just be logging stuff and signing our of the decade from Marvel and Star Wars cover artist John Tyler books for free. If you’ve never been to one of these events give this Christopher who will be signing all day for free and superstar one a try, you might like it. Admission is £6, and a iver for pensioners Spider-Man writer Dan Slott. To book your advanced tickets go to: and students. www.smallzone.co.uk/ICEBOOKINGS.htm.

INFINITY 7 Robert Patrick was far from robotic in his role as the T-1000 in Terminator 2. Celebrating the 3D re-release of his classic film, he speaks to Calum Waddell about giving Arnold Schwarzenegger the biggest grudge match of his career…

8 INFINITY THREE DIMENTIONAL DESTRUCTION

ew science fiction films are as iconic as with the charismatic character actor to talk about F Terminator 2. Released in 1991, this is the lasting legacy of Judgement Day… the heavyweight blockbuster that really showed the world the potential for CGI Let me start this interview with a Terminator 2 and – with a thumping rock soundtrack from Guns question you might never have been asked… ‘n Roses – also indicated that a youth audience Good luck with that (laughs) – you can would respond well to a movie that screamed ‘time’ certainly try! and ‘place’. This was a picture that everyone wanted to see Did you get to party with Guns N’ Roses? and there was and is something for everyone in Okay, that is a good one. Yeah, you bet I did! Terminator 2. The male teenagers in the audience no doubt related to the rebellious John Connor And how much fun was that? (played by Edward Furlong), the girls loved his (Laughs) Sure it was fun. But you know, let’s talk kickass Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton, about the fact I still love these guys. I saw them a whose presence in the franchise has since been year ago when they reformed. I still go back stage much-missed) and everyone else doubtlessly and hang out with these guys. They are fantastic – just adored the eye-opening special effects that Axl is a great guy, the band sound better than ever, highlighted the story. Slash is on top form… I love them. Always cool to Add to this a (literally) killer turn by Robert see them. Patrick as the shape-changing futuristic cyborg exterminator, The T-1000, and you have a slice of I will not probe into what their parties were like on the spot. Lo and behold it seemed to be what pop culture that feels every bit as alive today as it in the early nineties any further! Instead, I will they were looking for so I was asked back to do a did in 1991. ask you what the audition process was like for video workout with James Cameron and we did the Certainly, perhaps because James Cameron Terminator 2… same thing again. They gave me directions and stayed well away, the three sequels that followed Sure, well I was a totally unknown guy. My agent I responded. Terminator 2 lack the oomph of that original called me and said, ‘Hey Robert, they are casting It seemed my instincts were right because then follow-up – but there is perhaps more to it than for Terminator 2. It will be the lead villain and it was on to some screen tests, when I finally got to that… after all, when Infinity catches up with the they are just looking for someone with an intense read the script, and I realised then I was probably ever-iconic Patrick to talk about the film it is to presence’. That was what I was told – ‘an intense going to get one of the greatest opportunities that celebrate a 3D re-release. presence’. I said, ‘well do you know anything else my life would ever provide. I sort of knew when my Yes, Terminator 2 is now being redone in 3D about the role?’ And my agent said, ‘Not at the agent first called me I was going to get the role – I and, word is, the end result is far from mechanical. moment but we have said that you are a cross don’t know why, it just felt right. Unleashed in cinemas in a restoration that has between James Dean and David Bowie and they taken a year to complete (and by all accounts was just told us they would quite like to see you’. Were you surprised that they did not want a painstakingly supervised by James Cameron’s Now, okay, that means I might have a chance big name? own production company), Patrick is on the PR (laughs). So I went in and did the audition and did I was but it was lucky for me that they wanted route to once again remember the motion picture the ‘intense presence’ and did an improvisation someone that the audience had no predisposed that made him a household name. As such, on a piece for them where they gave me some ideas and idea about! They already had Arnold so they didn’t stopover in London, we were thrilled to sit down I had to turn these into a performance. Right there want a name actor for the T-1000.

Had you seen the original Terminator or Cameron’s follow-up films Aliens and The Abyss? Yeah, I had seen all of these movies so I was well aware of whom he was. I was also a huge fan of The Terminator and of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Funnily enough, and I forgot to mention this, I was wearing a black leather jacket, a black t-shirt and black jeans when I did the first audition and they responded to that too. That was sort of the look they wanted – so we might have been on the right wave length from the start (laughs). But yeah… knowing I was going to be working with James Cameron? That guy is a visionary. I was hugely excited.

James Cameron, of course, has a reputation for being a rather brutal director to work with… I looked at it this way: James Cameron was the Commander in Chief and I was merely one of

INFINITY 9 NameCALUM of WADDELL feature

From my point of view, I had actually read books about him – so I knew quite a lot about his life and I admired him. He was a man who came from Austria and took advantage of the American dream and made something incredible of himself and accomplished one goal after another. He had and has a huge amount of charisma and became the biggest movie star on the planet, all with a thick Austrian accent. Any way you look at it, it is an incredible story and he is a tremendous force of nature. So on-set for the first few days… Sure, I was in awe of Arnold. However, all the while I was pre-occupied with trying to stay focused on what I had to do for my role and the job that they expected me to do. All I knew was that this was the sort of opportunity I might not get again and I better pull off what they are hoping I can pull off. So I was just keeping my shit together, you know? I remained focused on me and no one else – Arnold can handle himself (laughs) - and I think that approach was important to all of us.

Of course, Terminator 2 was right before the glory days of CGI. Nobody had seen or imagined anything like this before. How did James Cameron help you to envisage what was going to be? We were really stealing from the animal his soldiers. My job was to say ‘Yes Sir’ and kingdom – and that is how he helped me ‘No Sir’ and if James Cameron wanted me to to create this character. My character is so run through a wall I was going to run through animalistic. I am a predator – I am programmed a wall (laughs). I never put up a fight and I that way and I am just artificial intelligence… I collaborated with him all through it. He is a can use my hand and turn it into a blade, I can tough guy but he is tough on himself. He is manifest my limbs into something else… but it driven. He doesn’t accept anything but the best. is all about being a predator. He pushes people hard… but in saying that it I worked very closely with ILM and with was a great experience for me and I will tell on some practical stuff and that you this: I hope one day I am so privileged and helped me understand what the final thing was lucky to get to work with him again. going to look at. The T-1000 was a collaborative effort – it was my input, Stan Winston, ILM and And can you talk a bit about Arnold James Cameron. We all collaborated on it. Schwarzenegger? He was the biggest movie star in the world at that time. Did that play I was going to ask you about the late, great any part in how you treated him or how he Stan Winston, one of the true geniuses of treated you? special effects.

10 INFINITY Did he say he’d be back?

Robert Patrick has actually played the T-1000 in three different feature films: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Wayne’s World (1992) and Last Action Hero (1993). In Wayne’s World he’s a cop on a motorcycle who pulls Wayne over and asks him if he has seen the kid in the picture - at which point Wayne quite understandably screams and drives away! When Danny (Austin O’Brien) and Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger) arrive at LAPD headquarters in Last Action Hero, Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick appear outside the front door as Catherine Tramell (from Basic Instinct (1992) and the T-1000 respectively. Patrick took up the character twice more, once for a theme park attraction T2 3-D: Battle Across Time, a short film filmed in a 3-D process that makes the film appear to jump out at you, and then for a TV commercial!

Oh yeah, Stan Winston was a great guy and I Opposite: miss him. I will tell you a funny Stan Winston Robert Patrick’s T-1000 arrives in story. The first day I got cast I was told I his birthday , needed to go and see Stan Winston. They said, and it’s made of liquid metal! ‘We need to cast your body and Stan has been told to expect you’. So I go to the Stan Winston Left: about twenty I think and one for me – to go to The actor as he studios and he says ‘Robert motherfucking is today the opening night on Hollywood Boulevard. I Patrick’ (laughs). Which is code for ‘who the walked in an unknown actor and I walked out fuck are you and how did you get this role?’ I knowing I had a big hit movie, a career and a was this totally anonymous guy in this huge life in front of me. It was very emotional. I knew movie (laughs). my life had changed and I hoped I was ready for whatever came next. It was a dream come You were obviously instantly iconic after true and a lot of my friends were actors too, Terminator 2. How hard was it to remain and they were struggling, and they were crying anonymous? after the film had finished. One of their friends I think the character was iconic rather than had accomplished what they were trying to Robert Patrick the actor. I don’t think anyone accomplish and they were so happy for me. even knew what I was like (laughs). It was all about the T-1000, right? All people knew was And, finally, tell me about this 3D version. that they liked that creation. So on the one How has the transfer held up? hand I was hugely recognisable but on the other no one knew who the hell I was. Does that older and wiser I embrace it and now it does not I think the film holds up in whatever version it make sense? bother me any more. I guess you get used to it. is screened in. It is all about the story and that is why people keep returning to it. Watching it Yeah, at least insofar as being cast in genre Do you collect the merchandise of yourself? again, none of the effects are in there just for movies and so forth, but what I mean is that Robert Patrick lunch boxes or pyjamas? the sake of ‘Hey look at what we can do’. It is all you must have stopped in the streets all the Oh boy, I have seen a lot of merchandise about telling this great story and that is why time when the movie came out. (laughs). A lot of it! But there is no way I can Terminator 2 still rates as one of the greatest Okay, sure, if that is what you mean then yeah, ever keep up and collect everything. There is movies ever made. It is a story about humanity of course, everyone knew what I looked like. I a shitload of merchandise out there now. A and it is really quite beautiful, The special still have that. Every week, at least, someone shitload. How can I ever get that stuff? effects support that and give weight to it. stops me in the street because of Terminator 2. So let me say that on that note, if ever there Do you get royalties? is a film that should be or could be seen in 3D And you cannot prepare for that, right? No, actually, I don’t see a penny from any of this is the one. It deserves this remaster and Oh no, in fact, at the time I was a little unnerved it! I try and grab some stuff for my kids here it deserves to be in the cinema again. It is a by it and quite scared by it. It is not like the and there, the odd thing I think is cool rollercoaster of a film, a great chase, a thrill ride studio days where an actor was protected and and which offers them a keepsake of their and the 3D makes you a told what to expect. I mean Terminator 2 came father’s life in film. But there is so much of participant all over out and – boom, I can’t leave the house but it out there now. again. people know me, right? And you cannot prepare for that, man, I am telling you. When did you first see Terminator 2? The first time I saw it was a press So how did you? Especially as the film was screening. And everyone was responding fast becoming one of the biggest movies of really well to it, all these critics were all time. in awe. It was a very exciting reaction. You just sort of wing it (laughs). There were and Then I went to the premiere, another are times when you really wanted privacy and great reaction from people. Then James did not want to be recognised. As I have gotten Cameron bought my friends tickets –

INFINITY 11 YOUR LETTERS AND EMAILS

We love Close Encounters with our readers so drop us a letter at 29 Cheyham Way, South Cheam, Surrey SM2 7HX or an e-mail at [email protected] and you have a good chance of seeing your own name in print

Greetings Earthmen Allan World Without & Kev, End is available I’m composing this email from my on a Region 2 bed in Mallorca. I bought Infinity (British) DVD, 1 as soon as I saw it in WH Smith but in a poor and stashed it away so I could transfer in the treat myself to a good holiday wrong ratio, so read. The day before my wife and the imported I left for Sun, Sea and Sangria, region-free issue 2 came out. Double holiday Blu-ray is the bonus read! way to go with I’m so glad I saved them till this one. I quite now. Every day is a new discovery, enjoyed Green (Pulp Science Fiction- Neil Fire too as I Looks like ET better Pettigrew) to warm nostalgia, (The recall. Grace phone his lawyer! Anderson Tapes - Allan Bryce). Kelly’s character I’m especially impressed in that one says: with the concise article by Andy “Well, there’s I would drop an e-mail to you Pearson on building Nautilus kits. always the chance regarding my model Nautilus I never bought Sci-fi & Fantasy that Prince which is 61 inches from tail to Modeller because to be honest, if I Charming may tip of the ram, and is from the had 20 quid spare it went on either come riding down German manufacturer Engle. a model kit or an LP. But I know it off the mountain The model took me was an excellent source mag. someday.” 4 approximately 3 months to build My own little anecdote: I months later she and is a fully radio-controlled remember eating a Dr Who ice met Prince Rainier static diving submarine with lolly back in the 70’s (Dalek Death III of Monaco in quite a unique paint scheme that Ray?) which ran a competition 18 months they employs real rust in the paintwork to win a full size Dalek. I had to have it! To my utter were married! We’ve been looking at and has a lighting system for the horror the small print pointed out that the prize would reprints but they are expensive, probably have to go crocodile eyes and salon windows. I have attached a be awarded to a school. No!!! I couldn’t share that Holy with issue 1 of Infinity first because it sold couple of pictures that were taken by my wife and also Grail of sci-fi collectors with a bunch of sticky-fingered out everywhere! include a few links to my page at you tube, so that if hooligans. I resolved in my heart that one day I would my letter does get published your readers can view own my own Dalek. I’m happy to say that after more Dear Sir, the Nautilus both surface running and submerged. than 10 years in the building process, I have my own I purchased a copy of Infinity and was surprised to Mark Rogerson by email. studio quality “Genesis” Dalek. find content covering all the things I like in science More articles on fans “scratch builds” would be fiction. I have been reading The Dark Side for several Nice to hear from you Mark, will put the links to the great. Can’t wait for issue 3 (The Prisoner especially). years and it is most enjoyable, so a science fiction videos on our website at www.infinitymagazine.co.uk Well done fellas. magazine will double my pleasure. I purchased a rather that print them in the mag, it certainly beats John Cavanagh, Liverpool second copy of no 1 as a collectable whilst the first the Flippy Frogman I used to play in the bath with as one I purchased for reference purposes. Thanks and a kid! Thanks John, you lucky fella - always wanted my own good luck with this new publication. Dalek, almost as much as I wanted my own Elisabeth D.F. Chillington, Northfield, Birmingham Hello Allan, Sladen. I like the model stuff myself so we intend to I’ve been a regular Dark Side reader for the last half keep Andy Pearson’s column going to add variety to Those two copies could have been a wise investment dozen issues, first attracted by the excellent interview the mag. I’ve told Andy he has to build me a Dalek as D.F. We didn’t print anywhere near enough of our and picture spread on Madeline Smith in 179. I also well though. debut issue - in fact I only have a single copy myself! picked up and enjoyed your superb first issue of Infinity and see that you’ll be taking an ongoing Dear Allan, Hello, chronological look at each of Who series I have just read the first issue of Infinity. Great start, I have just finished reading issue 2 of your awesome and Doctors. Done to death of course but you do seem hope it continues. I wonder if you or any other reader magazine, Infinity, after first talking to Andy Pearson to have a happy knack of coming up with new material noticed that the alien on the cover of The Weird Ones at the New Brighton model boating lake where he was or at least fresh angles and oddball stuff. looked remarkably like ET? Did Spielberg ever have watching my Nautilus beating up the lake. Finding So as you approach your first regeneration, Allan, this book? the article that Andy wrote very interesting I thought how about devoting a bit of space to the now mostly Great to see World Without End has surfaced. Is it available on DVD or is it just Blu-ray? I have fond memories of this film on a Sunday night double with Green Fire. They don’t have double bills like that anymore - more’s the pity. Finally, a question. Is there a remote likelihood of a reprint of issues 144 and 145 of The Dark Side? I have every copy apart from those two. Chris Watmore, Grantham, Lincs.

I see what you mean about The Weird Ones, Chris, and I’m sure that 50s pulp sci-fi such as this must have influenced Spielberg somehow, even if unconsciously.

12 INFINITY Name of feature

John Martin Madeline Smith John Martin interviews The Shining Joke the lovely and talented British actress Madeline Smith, MADMAD ABOUTABOUT famed for her What’s wrong work in Bond, Wendy? Something on Carry On and your mind? Hammer movies… TTHE GIRL…

adeline. Smith. Two wonderful words which, too long in a convent, things at home not great, growing up with all when arranged in the correct order, can make the usual pains and everything. So after mucking up the ‘A’ levels I just any man of a certain age go weak at the knees. wanted to get out and return to studies later - which I did, went and got That angelic face, that voluptuous body… she my English degree at London University years later. MMwas the epitome of Hammer glamour. But when I left school, Biba (off Kensington High St) was this typical Madeline also graced those other mainstays little ’60s boutique, owned and run by a very enterprising woman of the British fi lm industry, Carry On (…Matron in 1972) and the named Barbara Hulanicki. I’d completely fallen in love with those little This image: Flying Bond franchise. Indeed, Roger Moore’s fi rst act as 007 was to unzip dresses and everything and I thought the nicest thing I want to do in this the fl ag for British Madeline’s dress with a magnetic watch, serving notice from the get-go world is work there, so that’s what I started doing. beauty, Madeline that he had his priorities in the right order! She then asked me to model for her fi rst Biba catalogue so I took in her modelling Oh no… heyday Always in demand on the convention/ fair/festival circuit, Madeline that and various other photos I’d had done and got accepted by Lucy was preparing for two events when we taped this Clayton. The other thing that was happened, no, everything’s, exclusive interview: a screening of Frankenstein which I think is a lot more fun, is that when I erm… ine… And The Monster From Hell plus Q&A/meet and was 15 I auditioned for the Questors Theatre in greet at Ealing’s Questors Theatre on 15.10.16, Ealing and got accepted for their youth group. kicking off 7.30pm (http://www.questors.org. There’s nobody theatrical in my family at all, so uk/) , followed by an appearance the following where did that come from? I didn’t have any Saturday (22.10.16) at Camden’s Film Fair at the ambition to be an actress at all but I so admired Electric Ballroom (10 ’til 4), where she’ll be fl anked the Questors, which was only up the road from by Caroline Munro and Martine Beswick… talk my school. In the event a rather bitter and strict about a triple whammy of vintage glamour! form mistress wouldn’t let me do it because I was studying for my “O” levels but in a way it all Was there any kind of rivalry between yourself began at the Questors. and ladies like Martine and Caroline, or was there some sense of camaraderie there? Where you’ll shortly be presenting a Oh no, I don’t have any rivalry with anybody and I screening of Frankenstein And The Monster already knew Caroline from back in the ‘60s when From Hell. Things come full circle, don’t they? we were both models, walking up and down New It’s quite extraordinary. Apparently the man Bond Street. I think she was also with The Lucy who’s running the youth group now is the son Clayton Agency, though I can’t swear to that, but of the man I was auditioned by 52 years ago! we were both having very nice careers, anyway. Not John, John… 52 years - and I was already a only that, but Caroline lived in Richmond where I live teenager then! (I was in Kew at the time) and then we discovered that we had both done appearances in fi lms and Time fl ies! Your fi rst movie was, unless I’m stuff. I was fi rst asked in 1967, then a bit of modelling mistaken, Robert Amram’s The Mini Mob. Come on, what and just pottering around really, it all started off in a Well, there was even half an appearance in pottery kind of way, you know, as you do when you something before that, in a fi lm that was then is it? I’ve done all get started. We had both, completely coincidental- ly, played called Escalation. I’m on my way to work at Biba’s, Summer of 1967. I the godamn hotel different kinds of parts in Hammer fi lms, we both did a pilot thing for TV had just got myself the job and a chap came up and asked me if I’d like called The Boo Show, which never saw the light of day but was great fun. to appear in an Italian fi lm for about a week or so and make £30. Yes chores! I have been bumping into and embracing Caroline since the ‘60s and please! So I went to meet them and had a very nice little part in this sort she’s a real friend, we’ve been in each other’s lives for a long time now. of pseudo-Zeffi relli type fi lm, Escalation. It starred a lady called Claudine Auger, who later appeared in a Bond movie, I think. I’ve had the good fortune to meet and interview Caroline so I can confi rm that she’s a lovely lady. Yeah, she was in Thunderball, with Martine. Isn’t she? Martine I’ve only met through conventions, didn’t know her Yeah, very nice. I didn’t meet her, my scenes were with her love interest, before because we hadn’t worked together and didn’t come up through Lino Capolicchio, but anyway, that’s how I started. Biba gave me a week the same channels. I think she’s a “proper actress”, not sure she was ever off and I did it. I left eventually, didn’t want to be a Biba girl forever, and in the modelling game, maybe, but we didn’t cross paths. literally knocked on the door at Lucy Clayton. In the meantime of course I’d got an acting agent. Then I answered an ad on the back of The Stage So there you were, pottering about without any real plan… newspaper, got myself a part in The Mini Mob or The Mini Affair as it now I left school, having absolutely piddled away those ‘A’ levels, had lots calls itself, directed by Robert Amram. of breakdowns and semi-breakdowns and a lot of unhappiness, spent

MADELINE SMITH

50 The DarkSide The DarkSide 51

Well, it’s just that, well, you may have just Overlooked forgotten candidates for the Doctor Who role and please. Infinity has so far included a free poster inside something reflect on what (or not!) they might have brought to it. every issue. Is there any chance of The Dark Side I noticed a pic of you on Facebook reading the Mr. doing the same? I love the old 1950s and 1960s movie Pastry Annual I sent you. I understand that Richard posters for Hammer horror movies, Dracula, Lee and Hearne was a strong candidate to replace William Cushing etc. They were great art on their own. Thanks Hartnell until the producers gradually realised he for my appointment with fear! was expecting to play the character as a Mr Pastry Peter Dobson, Leeds, West Yorkshire. hybrid. Hah! To back-pedal a little, while I bought Dark Side I’m not so sure we will be continuing with the Infinity 179 for the Madeline Smith material, the piece on posters Peter, but we may do the odd one for The Dark The Trollenberg Terror was a nice bonus as I am a Side if the demand is there. Trouble is most people long-time Janet Munro fan, and now a confused collect their mags and don’t want to pull the poster one too. The back cover of the current issue of Dark out. I’ll pass this over to the readers! Side (183) has a small Rick Melton portrait of Munro which appears to be a detail from a Trollenberg Dear Allan, radio, including the likes of BBC’s Journey Into Space, Terror-themed cover. It wasn’t from 179, which I felt I had to write to you, the reason being that I Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, and Douglas Adams featured Trollenberg inside, so where was it from and bought issue 2 of your magazine and was blown away through to the ‘Big Finish’ shows. is that issue still available? If so I’d like to get a copy by it. I thought it was a brilliant mag, well laid out and Here are some other suggestions for features: An of this and any other back issues with Janet Munro with excellent articles and pictures. interview with Bran Trenchard Smith on his career, material. All the best for the success of Infinity. I have been a sci-fi fan all my life and get SFX every including his Australian sci-fi movies. An interview Dave McCulloch, Stockton, Cheshire. month it comes out, but your mag is the best I have with David McCallum, an article about the Fantastic read, which is why I sent for a 12-issue subscription as Journey American TV series of the 1970, a Logan’s Run Rick sent me that Trollenberg Terror cover after we quickly as possible. Your mag covers everything I like, feature and one on George Lucas’s THX1138. had featured the film in the mag, Dave, which was a such as UFO, Space 1999, Airwolf, Thunderbirds, all the I’d also like to see a profile of Arthur C. Clarke, an real shame because I would have loved to have used Gerry Anderson TV shows etc, as well as sci-fi films old article about the Alien Nation film and TV series, and it. You can certainly buy a copy of the image itself and new. I was reading the letters pages and I agree an interview with Chris Perry from the Kaleidoscope TV from Rick’s website at www.stunninglysavage.com, with what Stephen Parry from the West Midlands archives. Please continue to feature the big franchises but it is unlikely it will be used as a DS cover in the said, as long as you carry on like issue 2 I will be a of Doctor Who, Star Wars and Star Trek but remember near future, sorry. loyal reader, and I might even put pen to paper again. to continue your offbeat approach and interview Thanks for a well-presented, well researched magazine senior actors/actresses in the style of Dark Side. Dear Allan, at a very decent price. Long may you continue doing I very much enjoyed the Flash Gordon feature in Firstly can I congratulate you and your team on not such a great job, it’s the mag that the rest of them issue 1 and the Mike Hodges interview - that 1980s just one but now two fine publications. I got into The should aspire to. film keeps getting re-released on DVD, just like The Dark Side about two years ago and it has been my Anthony Riding, St. Helens, Merseyside Wicker Man, and no doubt it will reappear on ITV 4 in must buy each month. I can’t wait for the near future. each issue to be published and it You’ll be giving us swelled heads, By the way, it was recently mentioned that Delia has far overtaken my other fave Anthony. Thank you for your Derbyshire, best known for her electronic music buys, these being Doctor Rick Melton’s kind words and we will do our arrangements of the Doctor Who theme, was awarded superb Trollenberg Who Magazine and SFX. Terror artwork very best to ensure that a blue plaque on her former home in Coventry on June And now out of the blue subsequent issues don’t 15th, 2017. Nicola Bryant and Colin Baker unveiled the comes Infinity. I didn’t let you down! plaque in a ceremony hosted by BBC Coventry and even know this great Warwickshire Radio presenter Vic Minett, but there publication was due Dear Infinity, was no mention of it in my local newspaper! out, though I guess Congratulations on Gary Loader, Coundon, Coventry. I must have read issue 1 of Infinity. about it somewhere. Now is the time for a A disgraceful state of affairs, Gary, but then again Anyway, it’s another companion magazine I don’t even have a local newspaper. Some good good ‘un Allan and I to your excellent Dark suggestions there, and we would especially like an hope it sells just as well Side. Keep a fair mix of interview with David McCallum, so we must chase that as The Dark Side. articles on film, TV, books up. Arthur C. Clarke is planned for an author profile in Just one small ask and the like and don’t forget the very near future too.

INFINITY 13 DREAMING OF ORGANON he Strange Case of he Muse and the Mad Scientist

still dream.. of Organon.’ Denis Meikle, aka The Man With The Child In His Eyes, ‘I —Kate Bush, ‘Cloudbusting’, looks at the making of Kate Bush’s sci-fi themed Hounds of Love (1985) On October 14, 1985, the most original, Cloudbusting video and how it was influenced by inventive and artistically aspirational pop video of the 1980s was initiated by a line reminiscent Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich… of the opening of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and released to cinemas as a warm-up featurette for a new time-travel fantasy starring Michael J Fox, called Back to the Future. The video had been made to accompany the release of a second single from Hounds of Love, the fifth studio album from sylph-like, Kent-born musical muse Kate Bush, whose unlikely storming of the British pop charts had begun seven years earlier with her trilling atonal

Kate Bush and take on Emily Brönte’s Gothic romance of 1847, (below) Austrian ‘Wuthering Heights’. psychoanalyst Bush had gone to extraordinary lengths to Wilhelm Reich provide an appropriate visual accompaniment to the track, which was itself the result of a random purchase in a secondhand bookshop, namely A Book of Dreams by Peter Reich, the son of an Austrian psychoanalyst, sexual revolutionary and student of Sigmund Freud named Wilhelm Reich, who had been prosecuted by the United States Federal authorities during the 1950s over his dabblings in occult science. Among those involved in the film were director and former Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam and the Canadian actor Donald Sutherland. But beyond the human drama of a boy’s memoir about a father lost to him at an impressionable age, the aspect of the Reich story that most appealed to the wistful New Ager in Bush was the scientist’s experiments with a machine that he believed could make rain through the stimulation of a force that he had christened ‘Orgone energy’ in the Ionosphere, or upper atmosphere. Reich’s strange contraption - an array of steel tubes on a mobile platform - had been given a more colloquial name for the benefit of his neighbours in Rangely, in the Northeastern US seaboard state of Maine, who were occasionally privileged (or bemused) to watch it in action, and Bush had employed its derivative verb for the title of her song, and accompanying video: ‘Cloudbusting’. Kate Bush’s music hitherto had been nothing if not eclectic, borrowing from a wide range of cultural sources - the title track from the Hounds of Love album even famously sampled the ‘séance’ sequence from Jacques Tourneur’s black magic thriller of 1957, Night of the Demon, but ‘Cloudbusting’ was a pot-fuelled plunge into the philosophically esoteric, even for a svelte songstress who had trained in dance under Lindsay Kemp and whose influences included the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger production The Red Shoes (1948), the James Joyce novel Ulysses and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.

14 INFINITY A Book of Dreams, ostensibly a recollection of eloquent Kate Bush. Synchronicity…’ childhood spent in the unpredictable shade of an Doyle’s ilm was to have a synchronicity eccentric parent is, contrary to the freewheeling of its own. Bush’s 5-minute audio recording meander implicit in its title, a fastidious mix of had to be expanded to accommodate the memoir and literary iction, its porings over the cross-cutting of the video’s twin themes kind of detail which most mere mortals would and, as a result, the insistent rhythms of have forgotten (or unconsciously altered) in ‘Cloudbusting’ were allowed more time to respect of their own lives owing more to the build to a climax of joyous release. Bush latter than the former. But its precisian prose had not known exactly and illusory nature immediately endeared it to how to end her track, but critics and the artistic community alike when Doyle knew only too well it was irst published in 1971, and Kate Bush how to end his ilm - by had already encountered it during her teenage keeping faith with Reich the were back East, in Maine, there was a years of musical pursuit at the family’s farm in sex-therapist: its 7-minute drought, and all the blueberries were East Wickham before the secondhand bookshop duration matches the drying up. You know, that’s where they reacquainted her with Peter Reich’s elegiac echo length of time established grow blueberries… So these blueberry of JD Sallinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. by researcher Alfred growers heard about the cloudbuster ‘It was just calling me from the shelf,’ Bush Kinsey that it takes for a and called my dad up. They said said of the memento mori. ‘I was very moved by woman to achieve orgasm they’d give him ten thousand dollars the magic of it. It’s about a special relationship during sexual intercourse, to make it rain. Twenty-four hours between a young son and his father... But it’s a statistic subsequently after we worked the cloudbuster, it very much more to do with how the son does enshrined in popular lore by started the rain. The weather bureau begin to cope with the whole loneliness and pain Irving Wallace in his 1969 had said there wouldn’t be any rain for of being without his father.’ novel, The Seven Minutes. a couple of days and then, wham.’ Terry Gilliam had to decline Bush’s request to Some of the simplistic The event in question took place direct what she envisaged as a pop featurette ‘sun with a face on it’ in the summer of 1953 and grew due to an ongoing battle with Universal over the conceits of Bush’s original ixed in the mind of the 9-year-old release of his ilm Brazil (for which Bush had vision had been abandoned who witnessed it: ‘I was along for recorded a version of Ary Barroso’s Aquarela do by Doyle during the shooting that operation and helped crank Brasil) but he had recommended his regular in favour of a more socio-political tone to the Top: Images the levers,’ he elaborated later. ‘A most vivid editor, Julian Doyle. piece, and this divergence in approach continued from Kate Bush’s memory: being aroused in the early morning Cloudbusting ‘Kate came to me with a storyboard, which I into the edit. video, with hours just before dawn and led to an open remember had the sun coming up with a face ‘A conlict developed and I became the the singer as door to observe a steady rain…’ Peter Reich and on it,’ Doyle recalled. ‘I also knew about Wilhelm mediator,’ Gilliam said. ‘Kate knows exactly what and Donald Peter’s rose-coloured reminiscence Reich, because there was interest in him among she’s doing; she knows what she wants. She’s the Sutherland as his/ of boyhood days illed by the wonder of the new women’s movement and I was close sweetest person on the planet but she’s absolute her father! skywatching and aiding his father in strange to the women involved.’ steel inside!’ Above: The experiments beyond his understanding is The video was to be a vignette of Reich’s ‘Kate wanted to change the edit,’ Doyle famous book but one aspect of A Book of Dreams, however; which was the life, contrasting the cloudbusting experiment explained: ‘I thought they were mistakes - so inspiration behind the other is the back story which enabled the with his arrest and ultimate detention by the in bringing in Terry, it stopped her making bad Kate Bush’s 1985 sense of enchantment to begin with and which Federal authorities but ending on a positive note changes as she accepted what Terry said.’ In hit song is only alluded to in the text, as in a child as others take up the cudgel in his place. The deferring to wiser heads so far as the inal cut hearing a snatch of parental conversation location chosen for the siting of the ‘cloudbuster’ was concerned, Bush once again showed herself from the other side of a closed door. And was Dragon Hill in the Vale of White Horse in capable of absorbing inluence from wherever despite her New Age credentials, Bush also Oxfordshire, and the machine itself was designed it sprang, and the result of their joint endeavour chose to forego - or perhaps ignore, for fear by Bush and Gilliam and constructed by art was an epic in miniature that married fact with of being a target of the same odium that had director Ken Hill, while the ictional Reich’s mad fancy to conjure what almost amounted to a come the way of Wilhelm Reich - the real lab was the work of Hill’s son, Bruce. New Age myth in the making: the cloudbuster is rationale behind the ‘cloudbusting’ machine, Given that the video was a promo for her song, positioned high atop a hill and aimed at the sky; which was neither to represent the triumph Kate Bush had to stand in as Peter Reich, but she agents of the state arrest its creator before he of hope over adversity, as Bush has it, or had in mind an actor of stature for Reich himself: can attempt to prove his theory; as he is spirited even simply to make rain, but to engage in Donald Sutherland. Sutherland had turned away, his progeny ires the device in his stead ‘full-scale interplanetary battle’ against the the role down, but Bush had traced him to his and nature responds, rain falls… ‘Energy Alphas’ whose alien craft emitted habitual British haunt of suite 312 in London’s Deadly Orgone Radiation so as to pollute and Savoy Hotel and presented herself at his door. ‘..Every time it rains, you’re here in my heart…’ destroy the Earth! ‘She sat down and said some stuff,’ —Kate Bush, ‘Cloudbusting’, Hounds of Love Now you know. And now ‘Cloudbusting’ Sutherland said. ‘All I heard was “Wilhelm will never seem quite the same again. Even Reich”. I’d taken an underground copy of he video of ‘Cloudbusting’ was inspired by a Peter Reich, in print at least, appears to his The Mass Psychology of Fascism with me Tvery speciic incident in A Book of Dreams have been unaware of precisely what his when I went to ilm Bertolucci’s Novecento in - whether real or imagined is unclear from father’s intentions were: his mention of ‘EAs’, Parma... Everything about Reich echoed through the text (though Peter Reich has since conirmed supposedly an alternative of Wilhelm Reich’s me. He was there then and now he was here. it in interview): while in conversation with a to the more widely-used ‘UFOs’, goes without Sitting across from me in the person of the very boyhood friend, he states, ‘Last year when we further explanation in A Book of Dreams,

INFINITY 15 NameDENIS ofMEIKLE feature

Wilhelm Reich with a patient in one of his steel-box ‘Orgone accumulators’ Below: 2012’s Der Fall (aka The Strange Case of) Wilhelm Reich, starring Klaus Maria Brandauer

in 1938 on the last ship to sail before war was declared, to escape Nazi persecution, and he had set up a clinic in New York specialising in sexual therapy. In the early 1940s, he had tried to establish a working relationship with Albert Einstein but the grand old man of physics was having none of it, rejecting Reich’s advances with the patient disdain of a tolerant tutor for an enthusiastic but unqualified pupil. On the ‘lighter’ side of his scientific endeavours, Reich had indulged in affairs with a number of female associates and had demanded abortion as the price for their unplanned consequences; Peter was the child of his second marriage to Ilse Ollendorf, but he was to divorce her as he had his first wife, Annie Pink, in 1933, hypocritically accusing her of the same proclivity to which he himself was seemingly compelled. The 1950s were a final turning-point for a career which had gone from pioneering medical advance and peer respectability to controversy, mania, increasingly extravagant theories and the derision of colleagues and the scientific community alike. By 1954, Reich was alone - but for his son and the still-revolving door of the casual affair. But something had occurred in the recent past which gave renewed vigour to his theories about the Orgone, and it would set him on a last as does a casual reference to Lieutenant Edward To say that his past - both course of philosophical Ruppelt, the officer in charge of Project Blue Book, personally and profes- investigation, as well as the US Air Force’s Pentagon-authorised official sionally - was chequered enshrine him as vanguard investigation into Unidentified Flying Objects, or would be something of an of an area of metaphysics ‘flying saucers’. understatement. He had which as yet defies any But if the Food and Drug Administration took fallen out with his analytical rational explanation. exception to Reich’s experiments because, in its eyes, mentor, Sigmund Freud, In June 1947, he was committing a large-scale fraud by selling when Freud refused to businessman and his steel-box ‘Orgone accumulators’ on spurious underwrite a fanciful theory experienced search-and- health-benefit grounds, while speculating on the side about orgasmic potency; he rescue pilot Kenneth that he was a quack, a ‘bunko-artist’ or simply mad, had joined the Communist Arnold was in his own what it failed to realise (or did, and tried to suppress Party in 1928, but later light aircraft over Mount it by other means) was that his real madness went rescinded his membership Rainier in Washington far beyond the alleged cures for cancer and sexual when he failed to align the State when he spotted impotence. It stretched out to the stars. theories of Marx with those nine disk-like objects in After his untimely death in 1957, Wilhelm Reich of Freud; he had relocated the sky that seemed to had become something of a cult figure in liberal to Norway, only to find be flying in formation. circles. His pioneering views on female sexual himself the eventual victim When he reported his emancipation had anticipated the sexual awakening of a concerted witch-hunt in sighting, and the odd of the 1960s by some thirty years, and his quest to both scientific circles and the way in which the objects find a universal ‘life force’ had endeared him to the popular press; he had then appeared to manoeuvre same decade’s adherents of mystical doctrine. fled from Austria to the US - like saucers ‘skipped’

16 INFINITY across water, the tabloids soon came up with a cinemas were themselves invaded populist term for Arnold’s aerial anomaly. And by a glut of movies on exactly that the ‘lying saucer’ was born. Flying saucers, theme - It Came From Outer Space, or UFOs (Unidentiied Flying Objects) as they The War of the Worlds, Invaders were later more accurately designated, had From Mars and more. Coincident been around for some considerable time before with this ‘boom’ in interest, saucer Kenneth Arnold and the mass media brought sightings, which previously had them to the attention of a wider public: strange been recorded in the dozens, now lights had been reported in the sky since began to arrive at Blue Book’s the dawn of recorded history, and the 1890s headquarters by the hundred. growing paranoia which reached had borne witness to a rash of sightings of In May 1954, one of those who a peak when a journalist mysterious ‘airships’, whether related to balloon professed to have witnessed UFOs named Mildred Brady penned experiments or simply a delusional side-effect in the sky above his home was a damning article in The New of the publication of HG Wells’s The War of the Wilhelm Reich. More than that, he Republic entitled ‘The Strange Worlds. But in July 1947, only a matter of weeks claimed to have neutralised them Case of Wilhelm Reich’. after the Arnold sighting, an actual ‘saucer’ was with his ‘cloudbuster’. This set in train a series alleged (initially by the US Air Force itself) to According to a biography of events which led to his have crashed in a ield at Roswell, New Mexico; of Reich by Ilse Ollendorf, he built his irst This page: investigation by the Food and Drug Admin- Flying Saucers that sighting was soon debunked and the whole cloudbuster in July 1952; to this prototype were were everywhere istration, over sales claims for his ‘Orgone notion of ‘little green men from Mars’ was added two more, constructed to his exacting in the 1950s, but accumulators’, and the FBI, over his pre-war about to return to the pages of the pulps when, speciications by a factory in Portland, Maine. In Wilhelm Reich visits to Russia and former links to the claimed to have in January 1948, the F-51 Mustang of Captain essence, the machine was a collection of metal neutralised Communist Party. Assailed on all sides, Reich Thomas Mantell was brought down mid-light, tubes connected by lexible hoses to a source them with his became increasingly insular and ever more ‘cloudbuster’ supposedly by a saucer, resulting in of water, which Reich believed was a ‘grounding’ subject to grandiose delusions, such as having Mantell’s death. element able to drain DOR from the atmosphere powerful friends in the American government Two more ‘close encounters’ that year, both - quite a far cry from the Gilliam-designed Heath who would protect him in the event of his of them reported by experienced pilots and Robinson contraption of the Bush video. enemies trying to take him down. corroborated by radar, or witnesses on the A real cloudbuster can be glimpsed in Serbian And all the while, he and his son Peter would ground, stemmed the laughter of sceptics and, director Duŝan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of scour the skies over Organon, their farm in despite the lack of any concrete evidence to the Organism (1971), a polemical homage to the Rangely, for the UFOs that he now believed were support such a contention, lying saucers were doctor which concentrated its docu-dramatic a form of life emanating from our own world suddenly regarded not only as fact but to be of energies on the sexual politics of Reich’s Orgone but emitting negative energy for purposes extraterrestrial origin and to represent a clear engineering at the expense of either sense or as yet unknown. and present danger. sympathy for the scientiic principle behind it. As more and more people came forward to Reich’s mental state that they too had observed strange craft in state had been in American skies, the USAAF established Project question for some Blue Book to investigate the phenomenon of time. He was, by many UFOs. It was the start of the lying saucer ‘scare’, accounts, a charismatic encouraged by a raft of sensational exposés and seductive igure, in print, such as the books by former Marine but to others, he Corps pilot and pulp iction author Major Donald was volatile, Keyhoe (The Flying Saucers Are Real, 1950; unstable, even Flying Saucers From Outer Space, 1953). psychopathic. Films on the subject typically followed, but The rejection, by innocuously so at this early stage: The Flying Freud, of the psycho-sexual Saucer (1950) went with the pervasive rationale theories that he had developed of a secret Soviet spy plane, while The Thing in his search for a fundamental ‘life force’, the From Another World was based on a pulp novel persecution that he had experienced in Norway which had been written by John Campbell Jr before the war, and the later disinterest in the in 1938; not until 1953 did the possibility of Reichian science of ‘Orgonomy’ which had been extraterrestrial invasion really take hold, when expressed by Einstein, had all contributed to a

INFINITY 17 Contraptions similar in concept to Reich’s cloudbuster have appeared under the guise of Durand-Durand’s pleasure-machine in Barbarella (1968) and a real cloudbuster can be glimpsed in Serbian director Duŝan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971)

(This non-ET theory of Reich’s would eventually Contraptions similar in concept have appeared under by half. Like the works of Reich before it, Kate Bush’s catch on big-time with writers such as John A Keel, the guise of Durand-Durand’s pleasure-machine in ‘Cloudbusting’ was initially greeted by a mix of whose own studies of UFOs - Operation Trojan Barbarella [1968] and as the ‘orgasmatron’ in Woody rapture and ridicule: what Melody Maker considered ‘a Horse, The Eighth Tower and more - would expand Allen’s Sleeper [1973], but these are caricatures at dreamy, gentle, intense Sousaesque marching tune’, it into a veritable mythology about ultra-terrestrial, best; the healing potential of the device was widely Record Mirror thought an ‘infuriatingly catchy bit of inter-dimensional entities whose purpose is one of accepted in the early 1950s and mention of it can stringy nonsense’. human deception, like demons of old; Keel is probably be found in the novels of writers as diverse as Evelyn The NME was also predictably out of whack - ‘A best-known outside of UFOlogy circles as the author Waugh and Jack Kerouac.) rotten boring tune and some orchestral wittering,’ it of the source-novel for the Richard Gere paranormal When it came to ‘Cloudbusting’, Kate Bush was decreed. In 1985, Kate Bush was a novelty songbird opus The Mothman Prophecies, made in 2002.) having none of this mumbo-jumbo about Ethereans whose talent had first been proffered to the public Reich elaborated his theory about the ‘invaders’ in and elemental forces beyond the veil of human vision; through a poster that emphasised her cleavage; today, Contact With Space - ‘I had hesitated for weeks to turn what she took from Reich’s philosophical conjectures she is a musical icon if not a national institution. my cloudbuster pipes toward a “star”, as if I had known was the idea of spiritual energy, and what she crafted Many of the great thinkers of history were derided that some of the blinking lights hanging in the sky symphonically from A Book Of Dreams was a hymn to for their beliefs in their lifetimes, only to be canonised were not planets or fixed stars but SPACE machines. the power of positive thinking that exists in each of us. for their insights long after those of their persecutors With the fading out of the two “stars”, the Whether she meant it as such, or merely put Peter had been forgotten. The insanity of Wilhelm Reich cloudbuster had suddenly changed into a Reich’s childhood remembrances to music, Bush’s might have been that of a paranoid megalomaniac SPACEGUN...’ Outlandish this may have been, but stirring anthem to the dream of a brighter tomorrow, - or it might just have been an obsessive intellectual the idea was promptly picked up by the writers of penned at a time of social unrest and political curiosity, banging its tired and tormented head Earth Vs The Flying Saucers (1956), who employed a upheaval, was not just a naive ode to happy endings against the mindset of the mob. Reich has been similar weapon to defeat ’s animated far removed from the harsh truths of life: it was a call recognised for his work on sexual health - ‘Make love, UFOs. Not so easily circumvented, however, were the to arms, struck from the perseverance and dogged not war’, as the counter-culturalists used to have it. apparatchiks of the FDA, in the Red-baiting days determination of her own career, from which all with There is still time for a proper consideration of his of McCarthyism and its Un-American Activities the eyes to see past its fairy-tale disguise could draw search for the cosmic ‘spark’. Committees, who moved an injunction to have Reich’s the inspiration to aspire, and strive, and ultimately Time enough to dream. An eternity, in fact. accumulators trashed and his books on philosophy achieve the goals that their hearts desire. Only John burned. (The parallels with Nazi Germany would not Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ exists on a similar evangelical ‘..I just know that something good is going to have been lost on him then, nor us now.) plane of quasi-religious fervour for the human happen. I don’t know when...’ In 1956, he was arrested and potential to change things for the better. —Kate Bush, ‘Cloudbusting’, Hounds of Love (1985) incarcerated. And in November 1957, Reich’s thinking on sexual freedom has since come having been transferred to the state to pass; his views about the Orgone, or something NB. On a personal note, I was attempting (but penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, akin to it, may yet be proved correct. In his work and ultimately failing) to write a science fiction novel in he was found dead in his cell bed. Reich had his life, like all good scientists, he challenged the 1985 - Lightfall by name - and had researched the passed away during the night, of a cardiac orthodoxy, questioned received wisdom, and set his work of Wilhelm Reich with a view to incorporating arrest. The events of the last few years of face against ignorance, prejudice, preconceptions some of his ideas into the plot. his turbulent life were dramatised in 2012 in and the bigotry and abuse of closed minds. He had As it happened, Kate Bush had evidently been Der Fall (aka The Strange Case of) Wilhelm been a threat to the scientific establishment of doing much the same, at much the same time, and Reich, starring Klaus Maria Brandauer, a Europe, and he became one again in his adopted ‘Cloudbusting’ became the serendipitous musical romanticised treatment of his persecution homeland of a supposedly more enlightened backdrop to a summer of literary pursuit. The jury by the US authorities that was geared more to America. In a country that professes to venerate is still out on Reich’s theory of the Orgone, but promoting the far-sightedness of his various free speech, the words of Wilhelm Reich were something can certainly be said for Jung’s theory of therapies. a freedom cry that was felt to be too radical the collective unconscious… ‘I’m so curious where all this is heading,’ Brandauer’s Reich declares, while staring at the night sky. The same could be said of Antonin Svoboda’s film, which blended fact with much wishful fiction and skirted around the UFO-chasing, but it did at least furnish its viewers with faithful facsimiles of his cloudbusters. (Facsimiles of Reich’s accumulator are another matter.

18 INFINITY

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e trust that you’ve enjoyed this amazing fourth issue of Ininity magazine, and if so then we’d like to AMAZON W WOMAN steer you in the direction of our acclaimed sister SYBIL DANNING horror mag, The Dark Side, which employs many INTERVIEWED of the same writers and has been going since 1990, making it the longest-running (and now biggest-selling) horror-related print publication in the world. Issue 186 is on sale right now and as you can see from our teaser spreads below, it’s a real treat for fans of the genre, especially those who love the classic horrors of Stephen King (who turns 70 this year) and Re-Animator man H.P. Lovecraft, who turns 127! SALEM’S LOT Our central feature this time round is a look RE-ANIMATOR back at the scary 1979 mini-series of Stephen MAN King’s , a real chiller that scared THE HORRORS OF Salem’s Lot HP LOVECRAFT REVISITED the living daylights out of many youngsters back in the day. We bring you the full story of A VAMPIRE the making of the show with many fascinating behind-the-scenes stories and pictures. And CLASSIC if you’re a fan of King’s you also won’t want to miss our feature on the 1990 TV movie of his WITH SOUL! scary clown novel, It, plus an exclusive interview with the director of the new big screen version. readers always enjoy keeping up to FEARS OF A Dark Side CLOWN date with censorship stories, which is why our STEPHEN KING’S regular Choice Cuts feature is so popular. This IT! time round we also examine the scenes famously removed from classics like the original 1933 King Kong, The Shining and Jaws, with photos of what you missed! We usually like to include an interview with one of our favourite Scream Queens and this time round we bring you a fun chat with the legendary Sybil Danning, famed for such hits as Battle Beyond The Stars and Amazon Women On The Moon. You’ll be over the moon when you read it, and wondering how we manage to get

86 all this good stuff together for under four quid an issue. It’s a mystery even to us, but just be 9770960 665076 grateful we do. Go beyond Ininity and come on over to The Dark Side today!

Denis Meikle Great Years in Horror - 1958 Calum Waddell Sybil Danning Denis Meikle

Calum Waddell

interviews the is astonishing and you can guarantee that every one of his stories will contain legendary Sybil at least two or three words which you Danning, one of have never encountered before. This is A M A Z O N not Lovecraft showing off. It is his way the sexiest, most of intensifying a literary onslaught of “You’ll weirdness and horror. dynamic and A LEGENDARY TOME In the irst of a two-part feature, Neil When I was around thirteen or fourteen, commanding an American friend of my parents noticed actresses to Pettigrew looks at ilms based on the that I had an interest in reading horror Enjoy stories. One day he turned up with a book which he said he would let me achieve cult borrow for a while. It was a very large, WOM AN works of master horror writer B-movie queen very heavy volume with an entirely black Howard Phillips Lovecraft… and sinister exterior. I didn’t appreciate status! then the full signiicance of this grand Mr. Barlow. gesture. Because this book was none other than The Outsider and Others, the “It’s impossible to make faithful film adaptations very irst collection of Lovecraft’s work, published by Arkham House in 1939, ybil Danning is a living legend, no question about onlookers commented at how well you have aged. It is a of the short stories of H. P. Lovecraft.” and a now-legendary tome which today it – and when The Dark Side last caught up with back-handed compliment in a way because why should will cost you something in the region of And He’ll her, back in 2007, she was riding high thanks to any woman be expected to deine herself in comparison ten thousand pounds. Clearly this family her cameo turns in Rob Zombie’s Halloween and to what she looked at when she was 18? But, on the other friend trusted me to take good care of it the Rodriguez/Tarantino throwback Grindhouse. hand, I cannot help but think it must be very lattering. t’s a phrase we’ve heard many times. What is really meant is that Lovecraft’s – although it wasn’t until many years later minor masterpiece, whereas the ilm is magniicent. He inds a ghastly creature Above: Yet, Danning’s star has shined brightly for many Well we say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I do what I stories don’t translate into commercial, formulaic ilms of the kind that that I realised that he wasn’t going to take frequently tiresome. imprisoned at the bottom of a dark well, HP and The Necronomicon S decades – taking in such genre favourites as the can to look my best and, honestly, we owe that to our fans Hollywood producers insist on making. Most attempts of this kind have any risks, because he had removed the Screenwriter Richard Matheson never and when he drops his torch in fright, the and, the giallo opus The Red Queen Kills Seven Times and the press as public igures. I do like taking care of myself, been dismal failures, and do a major disservice to Lovecraft. dust jacket and kept that well away from really knows where to take his plot: Debra creature chomps on it! This whole section three-sheet (1972), the Oscar nominated Operation Thunderbolt (1977), though I’ve never been fanatic about anything. I eat pretty But it is perfectly possible to make a good adaptation of a Lovecraft story me. I don’t blame him. Paget wanders around a spooky old is Lovecraft at his best. poster for Enjoy The Haunted Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), Hercules (1983), Chained much everything (laughs). I love a good wine or beer with as long as the people making it are doing it not for proit but because they Even without the dust jacket this book palace, gets scared by some rats, bumps As with many of Lovecraft’s stories, Palace (1963) Heat (1983), The Howling II (1985) and many more! dinner and bourbon or dirty martini is my favourite cocktail are true aicionados of the writer. made a huge impression on me. I became into Lon Chaney (in a thankless role as there is an autobiographical element featured a Remaining insanely busy, Danning was kind enough to let but because they all are fattening, I watch the amount I eat A number of semi-professional and amateur ilm-makers, all Lovecraft enthusiasts, fascinated by Lovecraft’s stories and his a caretaker) and is menaced by some and the eponymous Ward seems to have memorably The Dark Side chat to her about her past and present in the and drink. That’s very important. I work out 3-4 times a week have endeavoured to achieve what so many thought impossible – to catch that mood of universe of Old Ones waiting to return disigured villagers (clumsy make-ups much in common with the author, who salacious tag-line screen business in this interview which has been ten years in depending on time but I am also not fanatic about it. intense horror for which Lovecraft is rightly famous. Because they don’t pander to the and take control of the earth. I even made of characters with eyeless faces, pig-like describes him as “…tall, slim and blond, that didn’t the making! More than anything, sleep is important to me. Sophia whims of Hollywood accountants, these ilm-makers are free to indulge themselves and an attempt to create my own universe of noses, etc). It is hard to believe it is the with studious eyes and slight stoop, appear on other posters. You…” Loren once said to me she always gets no less than 8-9 hours Above: be as faithful to the written word in as they choose. unearthly gods, and gave them all weird same scriptwriter who was responsible dressed somewhat carelessly, and giving Lovecraft will So, my irst question, how does it feel to be so iconic after of sleep. That must be where the saying, beauty sleep comes Howard Phillips This article will take a look at both types - the feature-length, professional ilms and and wonderful names. Above all, reading for the marvelously taut Pit and the a dominant impression of harmless be turning in so many decades in this business? You remain quite a from (laughs). Last but not least, genes also play a big part in Lovecraft (1890 the non-professional short ilms. Many of the latter are now readily available on DVD that book gave me an appreciation of Pendulum (1961). awkwardness rather than attractiveness.” his grave… – 1937), seen formidable and celebrated name in this genre… aging. I’m very lucky to have a beautiful mother, who is now here in 1934 and YouTube. how the English language can be used in Matheson chooses to concentrate on As well as being a sickly recluse, Well, how do I answer that? (Laughs). Certainly, going to 89, with stunning skin, who taught me the eating/drinking extraordinary ways. Lovecraft’s fervent cliché-ridden witchcraft devices rather poor old Lovecraft seems to have also Memorabilia shows gives me the pleasure of meeting my rules she lived by, also believed in sleep and keeping her Right: I wonder how many Dark Side readers have never read anything by H. P. Lovecraft writing style was evidence of his great than explore the Lovecraft potential. One suffered a bad case of low self-esteem. The cover of loyal fans in person. Many of them I see repeatedly at various weight and looks in check. In the end, it’s true, beauty is only The Outsider, (1890 – 1937)? I suspect probably quite a few. If you are one of them, then you are love of language, of stretching it in ways character makes a brief speech about the A publisher once asked him if he had a functions updating me on their lives when time allows which skin deep. We must have love, happiness and peacefulness the irst-ever missing out on one of the genuine pleasures that are to be found in the long history of that no other writer had done. My own Necronomicon, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and novel ready for publication and, despite unfortunately is rarely the case because I am always signing for balance. collection of horror iction. love of writing developed partly as a the Elder Gods, and a green, four-armed having completed The Case of Charles autographs. Lovecraft’s work, The best way to sum up the essence of his stories is to let HPL himself (as he was result of reading Lovecraft, and you monster is briely glimpsed in a pit at the Dexter Ward, he replied that he did not. published in But knowing what my fans love the most, which movies Okay, let’s move on to the exciting stuff - what are you up 1939, and known among his circle of correspondents) explain it: probably wouldn’t be reading this article climax (an immobile prop shot through a I can only think that he wasn’t happy are their favorites and seeing the special memorabilia they to and what are some of your current projects? The Shuttered “All my stories… are based on the fundamental lore or legend that the world was now had it not been for the inluence HPL distortion glass), but otherwise this has with it for some reason. As a result, this bring… sometimes even I have never seen such rare posters, My new comic book, called Ruger, is now out! You can Room, made into inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold had on me in my teenage years. (He’s got little do with Lovecraft. brilliantly crafted work was not published a ilm in 1967 you know? Yes, it is fascinating. ind issue number one and we have issue number two in and were expelled, yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again”. a lot to answer for, Ed). Price is good as Ward, slowly becoming until after his death. I enjoy when they tell me what movies they want me to do development. It was illustrated by my dear friend Stephen B. He created what has come to be known as the Cthulhu Mythos, although Lovecraft possessed by the spirit of his ancestor, and what sort of roles they wish they could see me in again – Scott, who is a marvellous artist at Marvel, and in this age of himself never called it that. It’s a world inhabited by the dreaded Old Ones, by the POE MEETS LOVECRAFT but the role is a contrived and pale CRUDE AND ARTLESS all of this is very valuable to me. It is most gratifying to know digital I and literally all my fans are thankful and totally into monstrous, amorphous Yog-Sothoth, by the malign avatar Nyarlathotep and by great Confusingly, the irst ilm to be based on shadow of other tortured souls which he The second ilm based on a Lovecraft my fans still want to see me after all these years! seeing, touching and feeling a comic book! squid-headed Cthulhu himself. And let’s not forget good old Shub-Niggurath, the Goat a Lovecraft story was given a title derived has played. Much compensation is found story was Monster of Terror (1965), ilmed I’m very grateful to everyone who supports me because I also know a lot of my fans have been waiting for The Red with a Thousand Young. from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe! It was in Daniel Haller’s superb sets and Floyd in and released in the States as without them we performers are nothing. I’ve also always Queen Kills Seven Times to inally come out again, this time Lovecraft even invented a number of ancient books which reveal awful hints of these The Haunted Palace (1963), starring Crosby’s camerawork, both of which are Die, Monster, Die. Whichever title you had a great relationship with the press and them with me. on BluRay and so it did and I’m happy as I know I had many cosmic terrors. Of these, the Necronomicon, written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, Vincent Price, Debra Paget and Lon outstanding. The latter remains one of the prefer, both win full marks for being The press is very important to our careers and I am thankful people waiting for it. Next out is one of my all-time best is the most notorious. If anyone if foolhardy enough to locate a copy, it will reveal Chaney Jr., and its source was The Case few cameramen who knew how to shoot crude and artless. The ilm-makers would to have that. In fact, I would like to take this opportunity to selling movies, They’re Playing with Fire, also on Blu-ray for ghastly clues to making contact with these monstrous beings, and contains formulae for of Charles Dexter Ward, a superb novel horror ilms in colour. have done far better to have used the thank you, Calum, for your loyalty and having me back in which I again did an extensive interview. I’m also currently bringing the dead back to life. Lovecraft wrote in 1927. The ilm’s director Lovecraft’s book, on the other hand, is ilm’s shooting title, The House at the End your phenomenal The Dark Side magazine… co-writing a fantastic vampire movie, with the working title HPL even created a New England university, the Miskatonic, whose library allegedly was Roger Corman, who, having already written with full-on intensity throughout. of the World, or even retained the title of Master Blood. contains a copy of “that damned Necronomicon”. That university is located in the made a lot of money with a number of In most of his stories, his paragraphs run their Lovecraft source, The Colour Out I am sure the editor will be blushing as he reads these ictional town of “witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham”. The people of Arkham are Poe-inspired ilms, astutely decided to to around ifteen lines of intricate prose. of Space. That story is one of Lovecraft’s words, Sybil! And I have been hearing rumblings that you are working a weird bunch, but just down the road from it is an even creepier place – “crumbling, promote the ilm as another in the series. Here they have swelled to 25 to 30 lines, very inest, yet the ilm is full of clumsy, Interestingly, I understand our last interview - with cover with Stan Lee? half-deserted Innsmouth”, another Lovecraft invention, and the people here are The ilm retains the basic concept and he writes with enormous enthusiasm botched moments. How about that feeble acknowledgement and four pages inside featuring me - was Yes, well what happened is that at a recent Hollywood seriously scary (but more of them later). that the title character is a descendant for his subject. scare-scene when Helga the black-robed, very successful. A lot of fans have asked me to sign this for Memorabilia show, Stan Lee and I talked. He asked what I was HPL writes with such intensity that it’s almost as if he believes every word he writes of Joseph Curwen, an 18th-century For example, the long sequence in disigured maid appears at a window to Tony Earnshaw remembers Salem’s Lot them! And I wish you and the magazine continued success. doing and I told him I was developing a vampire movie. Stan – or at least you feel that he wants to. His stories are not for people who like to read practitioner of all manner of black which a character discovers, and then scare Suzan Farmer but of course when was seated prominently next to me and he said ‘I want at speed. With Lovecraft, it is essential to slow yourself down, enjoy every paragraph, arts. But beyond that, book and ilm explores, the subterranean tunnels and Nick Adams looks round, there’s no When I last saw you at an autograph signing a lot of to be in your movie but you have to bite me!’ relish every sentence and even, on occasion, savour individual words. His vocabulary have little in common. The book is a chambers below Curwen’s old cottage, is one there? Or how about an even

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thedarksidemagazine.com and on our Facebook page Dark Side MagazineINFINITY 19 ‘TAKE READER REMINISCENCES THE HELM’INFINITY FANS TELL OF THEIR OWN SCI-FI EXPERIENCES “Is Old ‘Who’ Good and New ‘Who’ Bad?”

Eugene Smith confronts Doctor Who’s most fearsome enemy - which may be his (or even her) fans!

Who history, even bigger than UNIT dating or just exactly what was that Dalek doing in the Thames – the old series versus the current series.

THE NAME’S THE SAME Let’s make one thing absolutely clear. The show

Top image: being broadcast todBuckay is “I can’t stand The the same one which started Creature From The ello. I’m a Doctor Who fan. Even in 1963. Why can’t we just Pit but it would be ridiculous to deny after 12 years of everyone liking call the whole thing Doctor its status as Doctor Who, why is that so difficult to Who? I use the terms ‘old’ Who. And yes, I have got the DVD” Htype? Maybe because of the and ‘new’ only as handy stigma that still attaches itself temporal identifiers. “Nu to being a fan. The stereotype of the socially Who” is precisely the sort of inadequate dribbling fanboy is ever present in phrase that the Doctor would the mind of the lazy journalist. be appalled by, and frankly We fans are not alone. Anyone who votes referring to stories such as The UKIP is a rabid Little-Englander, football Time Monster as “Classic Who” supporters are beer-swilling hooligans, people is a bit rich. Yet many Fans who like Mrs Brown’s Boys have no sense of eagerly express their disdain humour – er, hold on, you know there might be for the current series by something in this stereotyping lark. saying “It’s not Doctor Who”. Even the most broadminded of us will Not since Michael Hayes occasionally resort to social and political looked at the Taran Wood shorthand. It’s how we manage to make it Beast and said “Yes, that’ll through the day. But there’s more to it than this. be alright,” has there been Sad to say, the biggest problem with the general such an absurd statement. perception of fans is, well, the fans themselves. We’re not talking canon Maybe I need to make a distinction here, I’m here – there are valid reasons talking about “Fans” - leading capital - rather why offshoots such as the than the general public who just happen to as a Fan. I need to make something clear, I’m Amicus films (fun though they are), Big Finish enjoy watching Who, or more pertinently normal not having a go at the “traditional” fan. The (frequently excellent) and even the TV Movie fans (I appreciate that ‘normal’ is a relative term sort you’ll see at signings and conventions (a mixed bag) may or may not be considered here). Am I a fan? Absolutely. I spend a fair all over the world. Often dressed in black, canon, but if something is made by the BBC and proportion of my waking life watching, reading, somewhat overweight, awkward around others called “Doctor Who” then what you are watching writing and thinking about Who. If I had applied and clutching stacks of merchandise. Partly is Doctor Who. myself to my studies with equal vigour I’d because enthusiasm and devotion are surely to You might not like it, but don’t make specious doubtless be running the country by now. Mind be applauded in these smart and cynical times, claims about its authenticity. I can’t stand The you, who do you think had more fun, Gordon and partly because that description does sound Creature From The Pit but it would be ridiculous Brown when he was Prime Minister or me when I a bit like me. to deny its status as Doctor Who. And yes, I have last watched Kinda? Yes, they may seem incapable of talking got the DVD. And yes, I have watched it recently. Name any story and I can rattle off at least about anything other than their obsession, but I’m a fan. Choosing to watch something you five interesting facts about it. Since I just in the same way many parents cannot last a don’t like – is there a better definition of being mentioned it, 1) Kinda was recorded before minute without mentioning their children. And I a fan? Peter Davison’s first broadcast story to allow him know what I’d rather hear about. One of the best The inanity of the “Doctor Who ended in to find his feet in the role, 2) Bizarre rumours qualities of The Big Bang Theory is that it has a 1989” contingent becomes even clearer when about its authorship have abounded for years, lot of fun with sci-fi fans, but always retains an you examine their necessary assumption that including Kate Bush and Tom Stoppard (TV affection for the characters. Or in Who terms, it the old series is a uniform product. The Aztecs shows have credits precisely to avoid this sort is never cruel or cowardly. Of the fans that I’ve is about as similar to Inferno as Dragonfire is to of nonsense), 3) During rehearsals Matthew encountered in person or online, 90% of them Turn Left. But they’re all Doctor Who. Waterhouse gave veteran film actor Richard have been genuinely decent people, funny, The tendency of Fans to belittle the current Todd acting advice, which was possibly done dedicated and self-aware. Which does leave us series in relation to the old conveniently ignores jokingly, depending whose version you believe, with 10% who, shall we say, fall slightly short of the fact that 30 years ago the same Fans would 4) It features three future stars of , the mark. be slagging off Sylvester McCoy stories for not including Simon Rouse giving the best Who Perhaps some examples would help define being “proper” Doctor Who. This is another guest performance ever, and 5) The snake at my theory. Or in Who terms, I intend to trait of Fans, they will draw a line and declare the end is no way as bad as you’ve been told it adumbrate typical instances from separate that anything after that is rubbish. The line will is. Hmm, maybe ‘interesting’ is another relative epistopic interfaces of the spectrum. And why entirely coincidentally be somewhere around term. And despite all this, I still don’t identify not start with the biggest bone of contention in their tenth birthday.

20 INFINITY This image: The Tomb of the Cybermen, nominated by some as the official best-ever story. Right: The Power of the Daleks and (below right) the animated version of the same

When John Nathan-Turner said “the memory cheats” he was met with howls of derision, but he was absolutely right. Who is not unique in this respect. In George Melly’s excellent autobiography Owning Up we see exactly the same attitudes displayed by jazz fans in the fifties. “Old Who good, New Who bad” is ridiculous. Not as ridiculous as trying to open the TARDIS doors underwater to flush out the Master, but still ridiculous. “Doctor Who is rubbish these days” often means “I’m not six years old any more, boo-hoo”. Yes, there are some who only have eyes for the current series and of course that is equally blinkered, but contemporary mystery adventure, but now has gone it is nowhere near as prevalent an attitude as the into the realms of absurdity with this silly caveman opposite. I’ve yet to see a facebook group called story. The show is a sad shadow of its former self” - it “Doctor Who Fans Hate The Original Series”. is much more accessible thanks to the internet. I’m not saying that the current series is better When the aforementioned lazy journalists want than the original or vice versa. They’re equally good, an easy story, a quick visit to any forum will provide and equally bad. I much prefer the Fifth Doctor them with plenty of inspiration. And which headline to the Tenth, and would rather watch Christopher do you think most pleases the editor? “Fans hail Eccleston than Williams-era Tom Baker. You might be latest series as best yet…” or “Fans slam latest the polar opposite, which is great. But I’m not going series…” Throw in a few words from an anonymous to tell you you’re wrong. Because it’s your choice, BBC “source”, a photo of Peter Capaldi and hey presto your taste, your opinion. – instant story. never saw it, and you know what, you never will. I did. In the 1980s all we had to contend with was a BRING BACK THE MAGIC Never mind that I was five at the time and hardly at few self-appointed experts going on BBC shows like Fans laying down the law about what constitutes the peak of my critical faculties, I saw it, you didn’t, Did You See? and Open Air to slag off JNT-era Who good or even “real” Doctor Who is not a 21st Century therefore I am perfectly entitled to say it was the because it wasn’t being made exactly the way they phenomenon. As well as upsetting Mary Whitehouse, best. What’s that? Found in Hong Kong? Oh no... wanted it to be. It would be nice for the tables to be The Deadly Assassin prompted a thundering Tomb is alright, but no more than that. Of course turned on these juvenile critics, but that’s never going attack from the then president of the Doctor Who it had been assigned a reputation it couldn’t possibly to happen. Is it Chris? Appreciation Society, who hit his Caps Lock key and live up to and it would be daft to blame the story for One of the reasons I avoid forums is the generally demanded to know “WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE that. But that doesn’t stop present day fans making low standard of debate, which rarely rises above MAGIC OF DOCTOR WHO?” similarly absurd pronouncements. A few years ago the level of “I’m right, you’re wrong”. Whilst this is In the seventies and eighties the elder statesmen a Who forum (I can’t remember which one, I really endemic on the internet in general, it’s especially (and it really was just men) of fandom issued decrees try and avoid them these days) ran an exercise to depressing when encountered in discussions about on the worthiness of certain stories, or at least the determine the best ever story. The result? The Power a hero who preaches tolerance and acceptance. Until ones they could remember seeing. You never heard Of The Daleks. Now this was prior to the cartoon the final episode that is, when he usually blows the about The Smugglers or The Faceless Ones. Maybe version being released, so anyone under 55 had to bad guys up. the elder statesmen’s Mums didn’t let them stay up base their opinion on the audio, telesnaps and book. My last foray into online discourse was daring to to watch those stories. Of course, in the absence of I’m sorry, but you can’t rate a television story if suggest that maybe Terry Nation’s script for Genesis being able to actually see them we believed what you haven’t seen it. You can listen to the soundtrack of the Daleks had been slightly polished by Robert were told. And so it was that a generation grew up and state: “This sounds good, I’d love to see this”. You Holmes, bearing in mind the respective quality of knowing for a fact that The Gunfighters was the worst can read the book and say “What a cracking plot,” their previous offerings. Turns out I was completely Who story of all time. Then along came VHS releases but what you can’t do is say “This is the best-ever wrong and had obviously misunderstood the purpose and the scales fell from our eyes. story”. It probably is at least very good, but until of a script editor. Silly me. Remember how we were told that The Daemons you actually watch it you can’t make a definitive I’m not saying that we should never criticise Who, was the epitome of scary Who? How no horror film judgement. Even if you’ve watched the version with which if we’re honest has enjoyed a fluctuating could come close to the sheer unadulterated terror of the rather sinister cartoons. You can rate that as an relationship with the concept of quality control. But Devil’s End? The somewhat unexpected early nineties animated version, but you can’t compare it against let’s do it constructively. You might hate Delta and repeat on BBC2 revealed it to be great, but not exactly an existing story. Where people have more than three the Bannermen. I love it. Tell me why you hate it, in the bed-wetting league. Undeterred, the elder facial expressions. you’ll be highly unlikely to change my mind, but at statesmen anointed The Tomb of the Cybermen as Although fan militancy isn’t anything new – you least we’ll be behaving like intelligent beings. And I’ll the official best-ever story. What’s that? Weren’t born can bet your life someone wrote to the BBC in early promise to do the same in defending or attacking any when it aired? Oh, poor you. What a story. And you December 1963 saying “Doctor Who used to be a stories. Apart from New Earth. That was shit.

INFINITY 21 HOBBY KIT CRAZY HABITSMODEL BEHAVIOUR

Building models doesn’t have to entail buying commercially available kits and a lot of fun can be had using just odds and ends, as our resident model expert Andy Pearson reveals…

having been traumatised as an infant by the consideration needed to be given to the eponymous Disney animation. adhesives used. For the metal-on-metal Prior to this engagement I had built a review structure of the neck a medium-viscosity kit of Arnie the Cat made by Timepsycle here superglue was fine and also came to my aid in a in the UK and thus had some exposure to the later emergency repair. Indeed, this served very concept of animals as Terminators so the well for much of the construction, although a thought was, if one could be a cat, why not good quality white PVA was utilised elsewhere a fawn? (particularly for detailing) as well as some Above: ne of the fringe benefits of writing At some point over the next twenty-four polystyrene cement. The product that started about model making and related hours The Bambinator was born. The latter worked on the shot glasses but the it all topics is free stuff. A couple of years aerosol can lids were made of some sort of poly- O Shots all round ago I was presented with a diorama thene-like material. The trick with these, I have Below: The Bambinator mat supplied by mig jimenez (their capitalisa- To make the project more interesting (and found, is to roughen the surface to be glued tion or, rather, lack of same). This represented a inexpensive) I chose to create the model with an abrasive paper (120 grade works for me) stony mountain spring and that, indeed, is the using household, or at least readily-available, to give the superglue something to grip onto. name of the product, hence the italics. My task items as far as possible and so the hunt for The lower jaw was a section of something I, was to write a brief review of this (then) relevant bits and pieces commenced. again, found in the spares box and I suspect the new product. I use plastic shot glasses exclusively involvement of an ancient spacecraft kit here The commissioner of the piece asked if I for mixing paint as, despite having an although I can’t be certain. The ears were cut could build something to sit upon the verdancy excessive fondness for pubs, I don’t drink from sections of Evergreen plastic tube. provided and, jokingly I think, suggested anything stronger than tea in the house. Bambi. The seeds were sown. On the drive I’d also got one or two plastic Cocktail sticks home from the briefing meeting I was able tops from The top halves of the four legs were cut from to give some thought to the project and deodorant plastic card with plastic tube spacers at the due consideration to a suitable subject, cans in the hinge points. I held these in place during given that the review was destined for a spares box, along construction with the same brass rod that sci-fi publication. The Bambi suggestion with several plastic would hold them together on the finished would not, however, go away due, in no spheres that had once model. The lower legs were ‘U’ section plastic small part to your correspondent contained children’s toys strip, strengthened with brass rod and from vending machines. enhanced, in terms of detailing, with lengths of Several of my neighbours’ cocktail stick. children and grandchildren are With the basic parts finished, I turned my briefed to hand these over attention to detailing and painting. My local in exchange for a small hobby ‘superstore’ (my quotation marks) seems financial consideration. to have been taken over by the accountants of A combination of these was nested together late which means that anything quirky or odd to create the body and several of the shot has disappeared, leaving it as a great place glasses were cut down to make the basic head to visit if you’re making greetings cards or shape. Having got these main components cupcakes or want to buy seasonal decorations together and test-fitted them, it seemed three months in advance. prudent to produce a simple sketch of the beast One visit did, however, cause me to eat my so that I had some sort of pattern to work with. words to some extent. In a section dedicated to For the neck, I dipped into the modelling jewellery making I found a ‘pick’n’mix’ selection supplies stash and fixed a bundle of armature of beads and related bits and pieces, some wire sections together using small stacks of of which would serve my purposes very well. pressure washers to hold them at Whilst queuing to pay for these I spotted a new either end. Throughout (to me) display of paints marketed under the this process due brand name Gold NC-Acrylic by Montana Cans and made in Germany. Despite the suggestion made by the brand name, there was a wide range of colours and metallics including, if the swatch on the can top was anything to go by, a very nice chrome. Now I wasn’t expecting a spectacular finish but, used on top of a grey primer, this really did work quite well and, if I’d taken the time to rub back the primer, might have been even better. Final detailing involved some cube-shaped

22 INFINITY Name of feature

Left: Arnie the Cat - a source of inspiration Top: The bodywork starts taking shape Top: The work in progress Below, left: The most basic of components beads along the spine, one for the nose, short lengths of ‘L’ section plastic strip for the eye sockets, and other enhancements to leg and body including coated wire ‘cabling’ to the legs.

Some support now required Fitting the beast to the base was interesting. Whilst the model is somewhat sturdier than it looks, fixing on the diorama mat required some planning which, for once, I’d done. I’d allowed the brass rod leg supports to extend some small distance beyond the creature’s hooves with the intention of building a base of expanded polystyrene sheets into which these could be pushed and that worked quite well. The base was then edged with some green felt fabric and the job was done, other than the addition of the red bead eyes. The completion of the model coincided with the UK Garage Kit Show, held in Crewe in my home county of Cheshire each September, so I thought I’d take Bambi along for an airing. This is, perhaps surprisingly, the UK’s only garage kit show and as such attracts participants and visitors who are, for the most part, highly skilled sculptors, painters and model makers…and me. Fools rush in etc. Despite having decapitated the model whilst loading the car, I was able to display it alongside some very impressive work by others and it a least elicited one or two chuckles, which were enough to make my day. I suppose the main point of these ramblings is to suggest that building models doesn’t have to entail buying commercially available kits and fun can be had using just odds and ends. Indeed some quite sophisticated stuff is created using such items and the topic of scratch-building is one that I may return to, Mr Bryce permitting.

INFINITY 23 ECCENTRIC A DECADENT DECADE ESPIONAGE

Part 2 - SWINGING 60s SPY-FI

This page: James Coburn ast issue we looked at the TV spy shows that swarmed in Our Man Flint (1965). The onto the small screen in the wake of the James Bond supercool superspy phenomenon. Most of them have since been the was a parody of victims of horrible reboots on the cinema screen, some James Bond and Doc Savage, and Lprofitable, some not, but of course some of the 1960s spies started an agent for ZOWIE out on the big screen… (Zonal Organization World Intelligence Although the Austin Powers franchise of the 1990s owed a Espionage) huge debt to the Connery Bonds and The Avengers, it more closely resembled in spirit four Bond/UNCLE imitations that were spoofs themselves—the Matt Helm films, the Flint films Our Man Flint and In like Flint, and two TV shows we took a look at last issue, the TV spoof Get Smart, which went there before Mike Myers did, and the UNCLE spin-off series The Girl from UNCLE. Taking themselves more seriously were Britain’s tedious Danger Man, which begat The Prisoner and was known in the U.S. by the dynamic title er, Secret Agent, the suspenseful Mission: Impossible, the classy I Spy, and the infamous misfire Amos Burke, Secret Agent. Inevitably, fourteen of the UNCLE episodes were released in feature film format across Europe, and eventually in America as well, with One Spy Too Many outperforming Thunderball in some markets, but they had competition on the big screen as other studios launched their own secret agent franchises. Britain tried to capture lightning in a bottle twice by casting Michael Caine as the bespectacled Harry Palmer in adaptations of the Len Deighton spy novels The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, and Billion Dollar Brain, in 1965, ’66, and ’67 respectively. In the meantime, the American big screen spy franchises had adopted an altogether lighter tone. 20th Century Fox’s Bond clone was Our Man Flint, and its swiftly knocked-out sequel In Like Flint. They featured The Great Escape’s and Magnificent Seven’s James Coburn as Derek Flint, a karate-chopping millionaire superman in stories and situations that willingly embraced all the worst elements and excesses of the genre and undoubtedly helped to speed up the general public’s tiring of the secret agent fad. As little original thought as possible was put into this name-free but enjoyable confection, which concerns that old favourite the weather controlling device. It’s a plot that goes all the way back to the Republic serials, and they even had the great Howard Lydecker doing the effects. Edward Mulhare of Knight Rider is the bad Brit (yes it’s us again) lurking aboard a submarine that looks suspiciously like a redressed Seaview from Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, a set that also did double time in the Adam West Batman feature (watch out for the Seaview dock in Flint too). Irwin did alright out of the Flint films though—see how many props you can spot in the bad guys’ lair that he nicked for Lost in Space. There was never the The second part of our look at the sci-fi spies of the 1960s, by Jon Abbott, author of Cool TV of the 1960s: Three Shows That Changed the World…

slightest sense of danger, and Flint was arrogant and unlikeable anyway, so who cared if he got his head knocked off? Good fights though. (And cool Jerry Goldsmith music, Ed). It’s a measure of the popularity of the genre at this time that a film this cynical made enough money for a sequel. This time they went for the second oldest plot, a devious evil female conspiracy planning world domination. Exactly why this shower of privileged dolly birds would want to change anything about the western world of the 1960s is a thought never entertained-they already seem to be in complete control of everything! As if in recognition of this, it’s a very half-hearted attempt and a devastating social document of the ‘60s, but slower and even sillier than the first one. A wonderful cast includes Andrew Duggan as the President, Steve Ihnat as the lead bad guy, and Yvonne Craig as a Russian ballerina.

THE SPY WHO COPIED ME For all their failings, the Flint films had aspects to enjoy, but the Bond and UNCLE franchises were, in the early days at least, controlled by people who understood what they were doing and why they were doing it. The copycats were just that, and could only imitate the surface image without understanding the appeal. With the beach party movies on the wane, it was only logical that AIP’s James Nicholson and Sam Arkoff would try to set up Frankie Avalon in a new series of vehicles as a secret This page: Monica Vitti as agent (a bullet Elvis dodged), but it was a Peter O’Donnell’s very half-hearted and short-lived attempt. rather immodest comic strip Completely lacking either pace or logic, heroine Modesty Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine Blaise, with gathers up a small army of girls from the Terence Stamp in Joseph Losey’s beach party movies and puts them in 1966 movie golden swimsuits for an early example of the ‘fembots’-style storylines that were all the rage during the 1960s (watch for new face Deanna Lund, later of Land of the Giants, third in the line-up). Avalon is teamed with sit-com veteran Dwayne Hickman, and for some reason they each have the switched names of their characters in their previous film together, Ski Party. Written by two hacks who started out writing Three Stooges shorts and specialised in this sort of thing for AIP and others (from an outline by AIP guiding light James Nicholson, who wisely declined credit), and directed by old-timer Norman Taurog, best known for various Elvis movies, it starred Vincent “I’ll-do-anything” Price as an evil adversary of the SIC (Secret Intelligence Command—“You’re a SIC man!”). Oops, spoiler alert, that was the film’s only good gag.

INFINITY 25 JON ABBOTT

This page: Susan Hart as the female lead (and Fathom was an Susan Hart stops producer’s wife offscreen) has a great body but entertaining but traffic in 1965’s Dr Goldfoot her acting talent was less impressive. Veteran very ordinary film, the U.S. army in Goldfinger. There and the Bikini comic actor Fred Clark as the guys’ boss and sunk to about were many similarities with Flint in Machine, Raquel Welch as skydiver provides the only real laughs, Jack Mullaney twenty thousand the Helm films, more so than with Fathom Harvill hams it up in another of his goofball buddy fathoms at the Bond, although Thunderball and You in Fathom (1967) roles as Goldfoot’s stooge Igor, and Sam and box office. Only Live Twice, the two most recent and Ursula Andress makes the Cavemen, dressed as cavemen, provide the Even more Bonds, had clearly influenced both. more than just music in the nightclub (well it was the ‘60s). absurd than Flint Once again, the agent worked for that wheel spin as Vesper Lynd Once the guys get into Goldfoot’s lair in the and Goldfoot were a fictional outfit (this time, ICE), in Casino Royale mid-part it swiftly turns into a parody of Price the four Matt Helm and once again he must be persuaded out of (1967) rather than the spy movies, and then closes films from Columbia, starring Dean Martin, retirement and away from his personal harem. with a madcap chase that veers between a popular entertainer of the day who pretty Like Fox’s Flint series, only the supporting obvious doubles in location filming and blatant much played his stage persona as a laid-back casts redeem the effort. In The Silencers, the back projection. Annette Funicello and Harvey womanising drunk in spy format. One of first of four, the wonderful Victor Buono, a Lembeck have gag cameos, and there are lots the famed Vegas ‘Rat Pack’, his image as hilarious ham who ate up villainous roles with of other AIP/beach party in-jokes (Deborah a smarmy self-indulgent boozy hedonist relish and was then appearing regularly in Walley and Aron Kincaid put in brief early (cultivated and perpetuated in a regular Batman as a deranged college professor who appearances), but the real joke was that the TV variety show) was so obviously parodic thinks he’s King Tut, is as wonderful as ever Goldfoot sequel, Doctor Goldfoot and the Girl that few were offended by attitudes which as contemporary Red Chinese warlord, the Bombs, was farmed out to the Italian rip-off would have rendered a less likeable person blue-eyed Tse Tung, as is lovely Nancy Kovack, market, while AIP went back (briefly) to bikini thoroughly obnoxious and unlikeable. Of a familiar face and regular guest star on 1960s films. The following year, Ullman wrote The course that was then; today there’s enough in cult TV, who disappears very suddenly. Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, which this time the Flint and Helm films to make a Guardian Roger Carmel (Star Trek’s Harry Mudd) gets was cashing in on the comedy monster fad. reader implode with horror and cause an a fair amount of screen time playing his usual Everyone loves a trier, and AIP always took full American university campus to faint away like moustachioed scoundrel, but so much time is marks for being trying.

DANGEROUS DOLLS Not all the women in ‘60s spy-fi were evil femme fatales, some of the dangerous dolls were on our side. While Honey West, , and UNCLE’s April Dancer beat up the bad guys on the small screen, the cinema laid on outings for Raquel Welch as Fathom, and Monica Vitti as Peter O’Donnell’s pulp and comics heroine Modesty Blaise. While the latter, co-starring Terence Stamp as her sidekick and Dirk Bogarde as the villain was, like the original Casino Royale, incompre- hensible psychedelic ‘60s tosh, Fathom had its moments. Welch had boldly turned down a role as a Bond girl to take the lead in a rival spy film, which was typical of this strong, determined and career-conscious woman, but this time it didn’t pay off.

26 INFINITY THE ANDRSON TAPES

Stella Stevens saves the Just how This page: day and steals the show, sexy silly were The lovely Monica Vitti as Modesty and funny in every scene. the Helm Blaise, seen with Meanwhile, Buono proceeds films? Well, co-stars Dirk Bogarde and with his half-hearted Dr. No-type Beverly Adams, later Sassoon, wife of Terence Stamp. plans to blow U.S. missiles out of the sky. celebrity hairdresser Vidal, was his secretary, Above, Patrick As was standard procedure in ‘60s and ‘70s named—Lovey Kravezit. I think that says it McGoohan as John Drake, also spy-fi, America and Russia are grudging allies all. (Whoom! There goes another Guardian known as Danger agreeing to disagree, and so Red China is reader). The films also featured another army Man and Secret Agent the troublemaker. of Fembot-types with fully loaded bras known If Flint mocked the Bond films as the Slaygirls! A couple of Doctor Goldfoot’s deadpan, the Matt Helm series was quite girls are among the entourage. openly having fun, and so is probably As with Flint, the makers were confident more fun. The first features a gun that there would be a sequel, and promised given over to singing (Martin’s day fires backwards, thus putting a bullet Murderer’s Row, which duly turned up later job) and dancing (Cyd Charisse) in the gloating would-be murderer, the that year. Karl Malden was a dreary villain, and that at times it almost second one a gun with a five second delay, Henry Levin an even drearier director, but Ann seems like the first secret which means the baffled bad guy is usually Margret saves the day—just. agent musical. Fortunately a looking down the barrel when it eventually The film opens with the faked death of red-headed goes off! the hero, as would You Only Live Twice the

CASINO ROYALE (1967) A waste of time, money and talent, this self-in- dulgent mess mangled Ian Fleming’s spy thriller into a boring two and a quarter hours of lowbrow slapstick spoofery. The only Bond novel that producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli didn’t own should have been a goldmine for Charles K. Feldman, but he blew it in a big way. David Niven is a stuttering Sir James Bond who comes out of retirement to save the world from SMERSH, hindered by the silly antics of his nephew Jimmy Bond (Woody Allen). With a cast that also includes Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, Deborah Kerr, William Holden and many others, this should have been at least interesting, but it’s not. It just goes to show that you can’t have five directors (John Huston, Kenneth Hughes, Robert Parrish, Val Guest and Joseph McGrath) on one movie and come out with a coherent whole. INFINITY 27 following year. Sharon Tate, who is excellent And while as this edition’s female lead. I’ll defend The spy-fi elements may flirting and have been toned down, admiring the but Dean Martin is as female form comfortable in his role as to the death, it ever and the fight scenes has to be said are the best in the series. that the third The best gadget they can in the series, come up with is a portable The Ambushers, mini-copter, as per You gives sex a bad Only Live Twice. It also name. Virtually offers a prime example the entire first of one of my personal half-hour consists bugbears, magic of puerile boob television screens which jokes that would zoom, cut, and edit have embarrassed impossibly acquired the Carry On pictures, and in this cast. As well as particular case, don’t the inevitable even seem to require cameras. Nigel Green bullet-firing bras, The Ambushers features makes a weak villain, and the supporting a weapon that makes trousers fall down. cast is equally uninspired. The film ends with Standards were also falling… the announcement of a fifth Matt Helm film, Fortunately, Albert Salmi, Kurt Kasznar, The Ravagers (which would have been based and Roy Jenson are to hand as the bad upon Hamilton’s 1964 novel of the same title). guys, there’s a high spy-fi content involving However, Dean Martin declined to return levitation guns and an experimental flying for another film, according to some reports saucer that fries male pilots Invaders-style, because he was so upset by the death of his Senta Berger is her usual treacherous self, Wrecking Crew co-star Sharon Tate. and Janice Rule steals the show as Martin’s Needless to say, all this could not go on stunning fellow agent. forever, and some of these films were part of After all this, the mere gold bullion robbery the reason it didn’t. But what a time it was. By This page: Little old wine (and bourbon) drinker Dean Martin as boozy superspy of The Wrecking Crew, the fourth and final 1970, pop culture had moved on and the spy Matt Helm, seen chatting up Ann-Margret in Murderers’ Row. Dino’s Helm Helm film, is a bit of a comedown, but the craze was suddenly no more. was so laid back that even if a nuclear bomb went off behind him he wouldn’t drop his martini glass. If Austin Powers had a favourite movie project is most marred by a dull plot, an Only James Bond was left, last as he was spy series it would have to be the Matt Helm movies… appalling score, and the sad end of co-star first, to carry on.

28 INFINITY SCIENCE FICTION LIBRARY

BLU-RAY, DVD & CINEMA

Review Ratings Allan Bryce and Steve Green cast a critical = Excellent = Good eye over some of the latest sci-fi and fantasy = Average = Below Average movie and home video releases… = Abysmal

the world of England to explore the Harryhausen has a cameo as a man All three movies look amazing tiny world of Lilliput and the giant one feeding the elephants. By the way, the here, but especially the 4K restoration of Brobdingnag. Though completely distance from Earth to Venus is over 23 from the original camera negative missing the satirical point of the book, million miles, but let’s not be too picky! of The 3 Worlds of Gulliver which is the effects are amazing for their day Last and probably least, It Came good enough to eat. On toast. Why did and this sweet fantasy is very well From Beneath The Sea (1955) is a colour look so much more beautiful in made, with a charming music score minor, overly talky early effort of old films than it does in new ones? by the great Bernard Herrmann. It Ray’s, featuring a monster octopus Extras: Fill your seven league will appeal to kids of all ages, the only which causes havoc in San Francisco, boots, Harryhausen buffs. Alongside misstep being the addition of a love destroying the Golden Gate Bridge and archival documentaries, interviews THE WONDERFUL WORLDS OF RAY interest (pretty English actress June the Market Street Tower. This is the and featurettes, original trailers and HARRYHAUSEN, VOLUME ONE: Thorburn) for our hero. film that brought together producer promotional films we get the original 1955-1960. Dual Format Limited Next is 20 Million Miles To Earth Charles H. Schneer and special effects black and white and alternative, Edition Blu-ray. Out September 25th. (1957), a cracking little B-movie legend Ray, starting a professional authorised colourised versions of It Powerhouse Films. Cert: PG. with one of Ray’s most memorable relationship would last until Clash of Came from Beneath the Sea and 20 monster creations. The first human the Titans (1981), the final feature for Million Miles to Earth, which to be Powerhouse Films are fast becoming expedition to Venus returns to Earth both men. honest I think is a nice extra, though one of our favourite home video labels, and crash-lands in the sea off the Being a few squid short on the some purists might object. Don’t and here they follow up their recent, coast of Italy. William Hopper is the budget, Chas and Ray could only afford watch ‘em if you do, that is my sage hugely popular, Ray Harryhausen sole surviving astronaut, and he’s to give the octopus five tentacles. It’s advice. Both of these movies have nice Sinbad box set with more Rays of in company with a fast-growing still much more interesting than any old audio commentaries with Ray. goodness - a trio of the stop-motion Venusian monster, brought to life of the stock human characters on There are also new interviews with maestro’s early efforts featuring by the special effects wizardry of offer, though craggy Kenneth Tobey filmmaker Joe Dante (Gremlins), SFX creatures from outer space and Mr. Harryhausen. This exciting sci-fi (The Thing From Another World) is maestro and Aardman under the sea and an adaptation of adventure may be low budget but it good value as the gruff submarine Animation’s David Sproxton, Peter Lord a literary classic . features some exceptional effects captain hero who walks right past and Dave Alex Riddett. There’s also First up is The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver work - highlights being a fight between a “No Smoking” sign while smoking an isolated score on The 3 Worlds of (1960), a fine (if somewhat watered the monster (dubbed ‘the Ymir’ a cigarette in a marine biology lab. Gulliver by Bernard Herrmann , plus down) screen version of the Jonathan by fans) and an elephant, and the Heroine Faith Domergue is best known promotional and on-set photography, Swift classic, Gulliver’s Travels. While climactic confrontation between the for her star role in This Island Earth, poster art and archive materials and not up to the standard of The 7th creature and the military, which takes and for her relationship with reclusive an exclusive 80-page book with new Voyage of Sinbad it is nevertheless fun place in the Colosseum in Rome. It’s billionaire Howard Hughes. Not the essays, and film credits. This is a from start to finish. Sinbad’s Kerwin intelligently scripted, convincingly one who wrote this issue’s Moonraker limited edition box set of 6,000 copies, Matthews stars as Gulliver, who leaves acted, and very well paced. feature, by the way. so get your order in early! AB.

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THE DOCTORS: THE PAT TROUGHTON YEARS Lela Nelson put their thinking caps on to come up walls are lined with painted egg boxes. (2017) DVD. Out now. Koch Media. Cert: E. with a way of disposing of the alien menace, but Produced by Jack H. Harris, the movie saves frankly, who cares? There are far too many dull money by utilising footage from Harris’s Dark Star Although it was William Hartnell who first guided scenes of people sitting round smoking and chatting, (1974) and Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond The Stars the Tardis on its adventures through space and time, and when we briefly get to see the Phantom at the (1980), as well as sets and costumes from Space most of the credit for the extraordinary longevity end to say it’s a disappointment would be an under- Raiders (1983), Galaxy of Terror (1983) and Charles of Doctor Who lies with its second pilot, Patrick statement. Wilder also made the marginally better Band’s Metalstorm – The Destruction Of Jared-Syn Troughton. Stepping into Hartnell’s role via the Killers From Space, the one with aliens who have ping (1983). Eagle-eyed viewers will also spot one of the ingenious concept of “regeneration”, Troughton pong balls for eyes. monsters left over from The Deadly Spawn (1983). injected it with a much-needed air of whimsy and Phantom’s 1964 co-feature Frozen Alive is a John Carradine turns up in a one-day cameo genuine curiosity, repositioning the Doctor from similarly boring B-movie in which Mark Stevens which could have included a very long lunch break irascible observer of alien affairs to champion of the plays a scientist experimenting with freezing living and there are also swift appearances by sexy defenceless and downtrodden. creatures. He persuades his girlfriend to run some Playboy gal Bobbi Breese (Mausoleum) and a Joining him during the transitional period were tests with him as a guinea pig, but while he is down-on-his luck Aldo Ray. None of them appear to Anneke Wills and Michael Craze, whose recollections frozen alive his wife is murdered, and the police try have much of a clue as to what is going on. of the Time Lord’s transformation into a “cosmic to discover if he was using the experiment to give Though there is a bit of nudity it’s mostly quite hobo” take up the bulk of the first disc, alongside himself a rock solid alibi. Filmed in Germany in 1964 tame and the movie has a strangely old fashioned archive video of Troughton at Panopticon VI in 1985. by Manchester-born Bernard Knowles (no relation to feel, heightened by the use of title cards that make it His later companions, Debbie Watling, Frazer Hines Beyonce), this dull effort was not released in England seem like an old time serial. It’s enjoyable in a tacky and Wendy Padbury, appear on the second disk, until 1967, and then it was shown at a much more way and has plenty of eye candy for the lads, but along with a very brief cameo from Troughton’s comfortable 63 minutes. Both films are framed at whether it deserves the Blu-ray treatment is open successor, (caught in his dressing room 1.66:1 but still look a mite cropped and the quality is for debate. Kino Lorber’s 1080p 1.85:1 widescreen whilst appearing in a play with Padbury). just about on par with a reasonable DVD image. AB. transfer is quite sharp and colourful but the Like the Pertwee volume (reviewed in Infinity #1), camerawork was hardly stellar in the first place and the footage here has been lifted from Reeltimes’ STAR SLAMMER (1986) Blu-ray. the film still looks cheap. The sequel promised in the Myth Makers series, using interviews conducted by Out Now. Kino Lorber. Cert: N/A end credits never materialised, maybe because the Nicholas Briggs in the mid-1980s intercut with new price of egg boxes went up. material shot a decade later (the exceptions being More low budget sex-in-space nonsense from Fred Extras: Trailers for Star Crystal and Freeway Wills and Hines, whom he didn’t manage to catch Olen Ray, this was filmed in 1984 and took two years and an amiable and honest audio commentary by up with until the mid-1990s). This does tend to lend to find its way to home video, which is hardly a director Fred. AB. the exchanges a rather ‘choppy’ feel, and I can’t help surprise really. wondering if they might have proven more effective The silly storyline is set in a future where ruthless MIRACLE MILE (1988) Blu-ray. played in strict chronological order. Ross Hagen is out to get his hands on pantheon Out: October 16th. Arrow. Cert: 15. To fill out the Troughton clips, there are crystals, a valuable energy source, and he doesn’t interjections from producers Shaun Sutton and mind who he has to kill in the process. But he meets One of the best anti-nuke movies ever made, this Derrick Sherwin, writers Victor Pemberton and his match in Amazonian miner Taura (Sandy Brooke), unique, vastly underrated effort from Steve De Christopher Barry, as well as Craze, Wills, Watling, who puts up sterling resistance for a bikini model Jarnatt, the director of Cherry 2000 is a shattering Hines and Nicola Bryant, who’d enter the Tardis a and melts one of Hagen’s grasping hands in acid lava experience to sit through, and it certainly doesn’t further two regenerations down the line. Whilst before she is overpowered. cop out at the climax. there’s little from anyone here which will surprise Framed for murder by Hagen, Taura finds herself E.R,’s Anthony Edwards is a laid-back jazz the hardcore Who fan (other, perhaps, than Padbury’s sentenced to do time aboard the penal colony ship musician who gets a relationship going with coffee aside that she and Hines could have stayed with the Vehement. So it’s a chicks in chains movie in space, shop waitress Mare Winningham after the two show into its next phase had they wished), these where no one can hear you scream “I’ve seen this meet up in Hollywood’s Miracle Mile - the area of volumes remain very much a ‘must-have’ for fans of before!” Yes indeed, our heroine has to cope with the the prehistoric LaBrea tar pits. But then Edwards the original series. Next up: Tom Baker. SG obligatory kinky Warden (Marya Gant) and a very accidentally answers a ringing payphone and gets a poor standard of cuisine. There’s also a head trustee message to say that a nuclear strike on Los Angeles PHANTOM FROM SPACE (1953)/FROZEN ALIVE called Muffin. And with a name like that, you know is only an hour away. Is it a gag or is it serious? The (1964) Blu-ray. Out Now. Retromedia. Cert: N/A. she’s probably not much into men. She’s played by tension builds inexorably in real time to a nightmare Dawn Wildsmith, then Ray’s wife finale, but be warned that it’s a real downer! Two vintage sci-fi titles get a low grade HD Things get even worse with the arrival of the Exceptionally well made, the film features upgrade, starting with Phantom From Space, a vengeful Hagen, who is not at all happy to be saving fine special effects and a particularly strong very boring and low-key invasion from space movie 50% on gloves, and has now gone completely off performance from Denise Crosby as a businesslike masterminded by W. Lee Wilder, Billy’s less-talented his trolley. If Taura wants to survive and get to wear stockbroker who refuses to accept the inevitable. A brother. Dick Sands is the title terror, an invisible proper clothes she must go head to head with fellow box office failure for obvious reasons - it’s hardly a alien from outer space who crashes on earth near an top dog Mike (Susan Stokey), and the two eventually crowd-pleaser - this one’s surely destined for cult American observatory and causes raised eyebrows band together to stage a great escape. Though to be rediscovery, especially now that Arrow have issued it among the locals. Scientists Rudolph Anders and honest it’s not hard to break out of a prison whose in such a fine quality Blu-ray.

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Extras: New video interview and audio has cost her job, her fiance (played by Downton’s brains and even turning them into puppets. commentary with writer/director Steve De Jarnatt. Dan Stevens) and her home. With no prospects, At the centre of this ‘terrorist’ group is a hacker Second audio commentary with Steve De Jarnatt, she returns to the conveniently empty home of her known as Kuze (Michael Pitt), who takes a special cinematographer Theo van de Sande and production childhood and reunites with old school chum Oscar interest in Mira and reveals to her a Government designer Chris Horner. Julie & Harry, an interview (Jason Sudeikis), who’s still holding a torch for her conspiracy implicating people close to her. As she with actors Mare Winningham and Anthony Edwards. and offers her a job in the bar he inherited from starts to re-evaluate her priorites she also begins to Supporting cast and crew reunion featurette. his parents. have flashback “glitches,” making the discovery that The Music of Tangerine Dream, an interview with Meanwhile, half a world away a gigantic Toho-type she might be working for the bad guys - a familiar co-composer Paul Haslinger. Deleted scenes and monster has appeared and is wreaking havoc in plot strand from the likes of RoboCop and The outtakes. Rubiaux Rising, a short story read by Steve downtown Seoul, Korea. Just what this should have Bourne Identity. De Jarnatt. AB. to do with our beleaguered heroine is unclear at first, Putting aside the obvious fact she’s not of Asian but the connection that she makes when watching origin (and you will see why that could be a problem JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH (1959) the news footage is that the monster seems to be from a plot point at the end of the movie) the casting Blu-ray. Out: September 18th Eureka Classics. copying some of her moves. When she falls over of Johansson as the main heroine is a disappoint- Cert: U. drunk the creature does the same, causing vast ingly safe one, allowing her to channel Marvel’s death and destruction, so she had better go on Black Widow and the title character in Lucy. Though Jules Verne’s classic novel was brought to the screen the wagon! she looks great and handles the action scenes with in a colourful fashion in this epic juvenile fantasy Things get even dafter when her frustrated aplomb she is not that interesting a character and made in an age when audiences were a lot more would-be boyfriend Oscar discovers he has the same doesn’t handle the increasing humanisation of Mira charitable towards obviously phony special effects. sort of baffling ability, and he can materialise in with as much conviction as she kicks backside. James Mason is fun as Oliver Lindenbrook, a Seoul as a giant robot! The film is ultra-stylish, heavily influenced crusty but debonair Edinburgh professor who travels The point that Nacho Vigalondo seems to be trying by Blade Runner and featuring skyscraper-sized with goody-goody student Pat Boone to Iceland, to make is that some folk are immature enough to holographic advertising and a robot fashioned in the embarking on a journey to the centre of the earth think the world revolves around them, even though form of a geisha crawling up the wall like a spider, through a dormant volcano. Their descent through a their petty dramas are insignificant when placed in a but its memorable visual flourishes can’t disguise series of splendidly imaginative sets takes them into wider context. You could also take this as a metaphor the basic mediocrity of the narrative and the way the conflict with prehistoric beasts (actually blown-up, for the way Team America behave on the world original Ghost In The Shell has been dumbed down back-projected lizards), perilous rock slides and the stage. The trouble is that the movie just gets sillier for a mainstream Western audience. evil Count Saknussemm, played by Thayer David. and sillier as it goes on and the two main characters As is often the case with stuff like this they spent It’s very corny in places, especially near the are hardly worth rooting for. What we are left with way too much money on it - though it made many beginning where the story stops for Boone to croon is an absurd but nevertheless entertaining homage millions at the box office, the result was still judged a a soundtrack album-selling song. But good location to classic Japanese monster movies which isn’t relative flop. Shame, really, because the movie looks photography in the Carlsbad Caverns and a notable half as much fun when concentrating on its human great and is actually pretty entertaining, so it is well Bernard Herrmann score keep the interest level high. characters. AB worth a look on Blu-ray or DVD. AB. It is a top notch production that looks amazing in this new 1080p presentation from a definitive 4K GHOST IN THE SHELL (2017) Blu-ray. Out Now. STRANGE DAYS (1995) Blu-ray. Out: September restoration. A must for lovers of old-time classic sci-fi. Paramount. Cert: 12. 25th. Mediumrare. Cert: 18. Extras: Audio Commentary with Actress Diane Baker and Film Historians Steven C. Smith and Nick Created by Masamune Shirow in 1989, Ghost in A $40 million sci-fi movie that was a box office flop Redman. New video interview with Kim Newman. the Shell is a Japanese media franchise that will when first released, this underrated James Cameron Featurette on the film s restoration. Original already be familiar to manga fans the world over. It production stars Ralph Fiennes as an ex-cop turned theatrical trailer. AB. graduated to a respected animated film adaptation street hustler who makes a living selling mental in 1995, which launched its own universe of sequels recordings of real-life (and death) experiences - to COLOSSAL (2016) Blu-ray. Out September 11. and reimaginings, and now British director Rupert which some people become addicted. Then he comes Entertainment In Video. Cert: 15. Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman) has been into possession of one particular tape, dealing with handed the task of making it into a big budget the murder of influential rap singer Jeriko One. If Spaniard Nacho Vigalondo follows up his first two feature movie. what’s on the tape becomes public knowledge, then features, Timecrimes and Extraterrestrial, with Set in neon-soaked CGI Blade Runner-type future the city will explode into a colossal, unstoppable race his biggest movie yet, and one that features some where cybernetic enhancement has become the riot on the eve of the new millennium. quite impressive CGI effects. It’s still as beguilingly norm. Major “Mira” (Played by a black-cropped The intriguing script (by James Cameron and eccentric as his previous efforts though, and will Scarlett Johansson) has been so damaged in an critic Jay Cocks) doesn’t quite come off, maybe probably appeal more to the arthouse crowd than attack that her old human form has been chucked because Fiennes is too much of a loser to root for, but mainstream sci-fi buffs. on the scrap heap and she has been ported over into this bombastic movie is always a visual and aural After a short prologue regarding the supposed a cyborg shell. Working for the Government-backed treat, as in-your-face as just about everything that sighting of a giant monster in the Far East a Hanka Corporation, she is let loose to weed out Cameron seems to be involved with. It also captures quarter-century ago, we’re introduced to Gloria hackers and cyber-criminals who have been planting the addictive thrill of virtual reality, particularly in (Anne Hathaway), whose hard-partying lifestyle false memories into citizens’ digitally enhanced the excellent opening set-piece, a bungled robbery

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that is seen through the eyes of one of the hoped for. It’s pretty bad by any standards, and even eminent colleagues to confirm his findings without doomed participants. worse when two annoying little brats are on screen actually divulging the nature of his experiments. The film also features a top-notch soundtrack with supplying unwanted “comedy relief.” Stick with the Once they give him the nod he doesn’t shrink at the songs performed by Skunk Anansie, Lords of Acid, comic books. It has to be said that Heather is a bit of prospect of using them for guinea pigs! Tricky, Deep Forest, Prong, and star Juliette Lewis a babe however. Jim Wynorski apparently shot this in Luckily there are some handkerchiefs around among others. The audio on the disc is especially 27 days. The only question that we have is what took for the shrunken people to fashion into loin cloth impressive and even exceeds the quality of the him so long? AB. outfits, but they have plenty of oversize perils to excellent HD transfer. face, including the menacing Mr. Magoo. The special This movie has sort of disappeared off the radar ELECTRIC DREAMS (1984) Blu-ray. effects are terrific considering their age, and the film for many years but it is certainly worthy of re- Out Now. Second Sight. Cert: 12. still works well as a lavish fantasy adventure, though evaluating, especially now director Kathryn Bigelow one wonders why Schoedsack doesn’t ever give us (no relation to Deuce) has become a mainstream It’s never a good sign when you can remember a shot from the vantage point of the little people favourite. The whole ‘future millennium’ aspect of the theme song for a movie better than you can themselves. Isn’t it about time we had a remake it does date things however. No extras on our recall the movie itself. But having said that, this of this? Image quality is good, and it’s a shame preview disc. AB entertaining sci-fi romance is easily as memorable Fabulous didn’t splurge on a Blu-ray edition. AB. as the jaunty Phil Oakey hit that it inspired. Nerdish THEY LIVE (1988) Blu-ray. architect Miles ( Lenny Van Dohlen) falls for pretty THE MOLE PEOPLE (1956) Dual format. Out Now. Shout! Factory. Cert: N/A. cello player Virginia Madsen, but he has a rival in Out Now. 101 Films. Cert: PG. the shape of Edgar, a living computer (voiced by Bud The late wrestler-turned-actor Roddy Piper is the Cort) that takes over his apartment and then his This typical 50s monster flick would seem to owe its hero of this entertaining but uneven John Carpenter life. Filmed in San Francisco, this has a pleasingly inspiration to the comic books of the times. It tells sci-fi movie. He plays a lonely drifter who arrives laid-back feel about it, and is by turns gentle, of a team of explorers, led by John Agar and Hugh in LA and discovers that the consumer society is whimsical and amusing. Giorgio Moroder’s score Beaumont, who discover a race of strange creatures actually being dominated by aliens, who are forcing supplies a generous amount of electronic passion! living beneath an Asian mountain. Captured by the more and more people to live on the streets. When In one musical sequence, Edgar dreams of electric Mole People (who pull the scientists down through characters put on special glasses they can see sheep jumping an electric fence, whilst Miles dozes sand pits), our heroes are about to be offered up subliminal messages everywhere, like ‘Stay Asleep,’ off to sleep. The scene is quite likely inspired by for the traditional human sacrifice when helped to and ‘Obey.’ The glasses also reveal the true guise of author Philip K. Dick’s (1968) science fiction novel escape by pretty underground-dweller the aliens, who have skeleton-like faces. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - the basis of Cynthia Patrick. It’s basically a reworking of Invasion Of The Body Blade Runner. It’s all very predictable, with cheaper than usual Snatchers for the Bush generation (George Sr. was The film gets a good-looking new restoration in sets and make-up. The unintentionally funny elected just as this came out), though it works just HD 1080p here and there are some decent extras prologue - a sombre lecture by a USC Professor on as well with the Trump generation, to be fair. Scripted including Is This A Story? - a new interview with the possibilities of such a stupid story being true by Carpenter himself under the pseudonym of ‘Frank director Steve Barron, Electric Dreaming - interview - was shot late in the day to pad out the too-short Armitage,’ the film starts out well but soon runs out with writer/co-producer Rusty Lemorande, Miles And running time. The picture-book publication issued of steam, settling for standard action set-pieces and Madeline - interviews with stars Lenny von Dohlen by the Famous Monsters Of Filmland folk makes an interminable punch-up in an alleyway to show and Virginia Madsen. AB. this movie look a lot more fun than it actually is. off Piper’s fighting skills. Comparatively speaking Universal monster movie completists will be pleased though, this is still one of Carpenter’s better DOCTOR CYCLOPS (1940) DVD. to see it on Blu-ray in a great HD transfer though. AB. latter-day pictures, with the lovely Meg Foster, whose Out Now. Fabulous Films. Cert: PG. weird eyes make her look like an alien even with your glasses off. AB. Ernest B. Schoedsack, the director of the original King Kong, was responsible for this RETURN OF SWAMP THING (1989) Blu-ray. excellent movie, the first science fiction Out Now. Screenbound. Cert: 12. film to be shot in three-colour Technicolor. Bald, myopic Albert Dekker stars as the Wes Craven’s original Swamp Thing movie wasn’t sinister title medico, who has his laboratory any great shakes, but it looks like a masterpiece hidden away in a rather studio-bound when compared with this dull-witted spoof sequel. Amazon jungle, near a handy supply of The veggie-man superhero (Dick Durock) returns radium that he uses for his miniaturisation to tackle mad scientist Louis Jourdan, who has experiments. been blending people with animals, and plans to The Doc’s eyesight is failing, experiment on his own chirpy stepdaughter Heather however, and unable to find a Locklear to complete his experiments and give SpecSavers in the vicinity he himself eternal life. Arcane also needs a sample of wears the most impressive pair of Swamp Thing’s DNA to complete the process but bottletop goggles we’ve ever seen. getting a sample isn’t going to be as easy as Arcane To help in his work he invites three

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www.infinitymagazine.co.uk www.infinitymagazine.co.uk THE MAGAZINE BEYOND YOUR IMAGINATION THE MAGAZINE BEYOND YOUR IMAGINATION YOUR BEYOND THE MAGAZINE THE MAGAZINE BEYOND YOUR IMAGINATION IN CINEMAS NOW

ATOMIC BLONDE (15) VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (12A)

dapted from Antony Johnston’s 2012 graphic novel, The Coldest s Luc Besson revealed in the last issue of Infinity, Valerian is ACity, Atomic Blonde is Charlize Theron doing John Wick, and since Asomething he’s been itching to bring to the screen for more than 20 the director of the movie is David Leitch, a former stunt double for years. Er, be careful what you wish for, Luc. Brad Pitt who directed some scenes in the aforementioned 2014 movie, Based on the influential Valérian And Laureline comic strips by Pierre as the late, great Barry Norman might have said, “and why not?” Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières and produced on a whopping $180 The setting is 1989 Berlin, on the week of the fall of the Berlin Wall, million budget, Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets is a grand and Charlize’s ice cool MI6 spy has been sent to the city to retrieve a sci-fi spectacle to be sure, and if I’d seen this as a kid I’d probably have missing list of espionage agents and their real identities. Her contact loved it. With a lot more cynical years on the clock now, I’m not so dazzled. there is station head Percival (James McAvoy), an untrustworthy English It could well grow on me though, as The Fifth Element did. undercover agent who loves to party and who seems to have “gone The sexy French comic book series that inspired Luc - and probably native.” McAvoy also seems to be having trouble shaking off the mul- George Lucas as well - featured a pair of 28th century crime fighters who ti-personality madman he played in Split, but he’s a lot of fun to watch. travel through space and time to uphold the law. Here they are played by There’s a touch of John Le Carre about the setting and you could say pretty leads Dane DeHaan (Chronicle) and Cara Delevingne (Suicide Squad). that Charlize is The Spy Who Came In From The Cold because we see her The former is the weakest link, an annoyingly cocky intergalactic lothario in the opening scenes emerging from a tub of ice, looking a lot hotter who could do with some charisma tips from the young Han Solo. than Richard Burton’s Alec Leamas. You don’t really go to see these kind British fashion model Delevingne makes a better job of her character, of movies for the plot but it’s a shame that the storyline is so convoluted, playing Laureline in a sassy, sexy fashion and bringing an element of fun with more single, double and triple-crosses than you can keep up with. to the proceedings that her co-star tends to deaden down. In between All you really need to know is that everywhere our badass white-blonde bickering among themselves our heroes are tasked with rescuing an haired heroine goes she is assailed by bad guys and ends up animal that has the power to reproduce vital energy-enriched pearls that killing everybody. were once the property of a bunch of smurfy blue humanoids (looking Setting the film in the late 80s allows for a pleasingly eclectic mix of suspiciously like those in James Cameron’s Avatar). songs from that period and Atomic Blonde uses music to pump up the The planet of these Avatar-lookalikes is wiped out in the movie’s action almost as well as Edgar Wright’s thrilling Baby Driver. We’re talking early scenes, but by whom? Surely it can’t have been Cameron himself, the likes of New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’, David Bowie’s ‘Cat People (Putting protecting his copyright? Out Fire)’, George Michael’s ‘Father Figure’ and Nena’s 99 Red Balloons - in As the film progresses it becomes obvious that Valerian is more German of course. interested with presenting us with an ever-changing array of weird aliens Atomic Blonde is a natural progression for Charlize from her role in than it is delivering a coherent script. Ethan Hawke turns up as a grinning Mad Max: Fury Road, where Tom Hardy’s Max seemed merely cheesed off pimp and Rihanna is a shape-shifting burlesque queen called Bubble who in comparison to the way her vengeful Furiosa behaved. It’s impressive seems to be basing her sexy act on Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles in Cabaret. to realise she did most of her own stunts here and Leitch films the action The eclectic cast also includes Rutger Hauer, Clive Owen and to make sure we realize this. There’s one hugely impressive punch-up John Goodman. in the stairwell of a building, where our heroine takes on a small army You have to give credit to Besson for what he has achieved here though, of Russian agents, that looks like it was filmed in one continuous take, delivering an amazing amount of sheer eye candy, and I’m not just talking putting the amazing fight choreography front and centre. about Rihanna’s scene. Some of this is just so mad as to almost defy These fight scenes are incredibly gruelling and you can feel every description, such as a showdown at an alien bazaar which unfolds in two punch and high kick, but Charlize still manages to look amazingly sexy in different dimensions, and a wild chase scene where DeHaan has to blast and out of a great selection of outfits - love those shiny, thigh-high black straight through dozens of walls in a space station to catch his quarry. boots. Being bisexual, she even gets time for some girl on girl action with And there is a fab high-dive rescue mission which is complicated by pesky gorgeous French spy Sofia Boutella (The Mummy), in a scene shot in a aliens fishing for humans with giant poles. leeringly softcore fashion which probably won’t get many complaints In an era when blockbusters like The Mummy and the Star Wars sequels from male viewers. tend to go down the safe route, basically just delivering more of what we One thing’s for sure, if they producers of the Bond films ever go down the had last time, at least Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets has Doctor Who route then Charlize has to be odds-on favourite to step into the courage to be different. And it is certainly a production that needs to 007’s shoes - or red patent-leather stilettos. She’s a natural at this stuff be seen on the biggest screen possible because every frame is a treat. The and wouldn’t need any of those poncy gadgets that Q provides. So go on whole thing is quite an experience, and if audiences don’t ‘get it’ enough and sign her up, 007 supremos, but only after she makes the inevitable today, they surely will in the future. AB. Atomic Blonde 2. AB.

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THE AL

ANDLOVING THE ALIEN I

38 INFINITY HE ALIEN D I

In space, no one could hear Veronica Cartwright scream, cry or slap Sigourney Weaver! Pat Jankiewicz interviews the other female crew member aboard the ill-fated NostromoAlien… in Ridley Scott’s INFINITY 39 Name of feature

ith Alien Covenant bringing one of sci-fi horror’s greatest franchises back, it’s important to remember the impact of the original Alien. 38 years ago in 1979, Hollywood released over 30 horror films. Newsweek, in an Alien cover story, dubbed it “Hollywood’s Scary Summer”. The films included The Amityville Horror, Phantasm, Friday The 13th and Prophecy, but the true gamechanger was Ridley Scott’s Alien - an unsettling sci fi/horror hybrid featuring a battered, second hand Space where interplanetary travel is commonplace and astronauts are working class, blue collar Joes who are more worried about union benefits than what will happen to them on a mysterious planet. Once there, they meet an unsettling, slimy, shape-shifting monster that looked like nothing ever seen before (disturbingly designed by H.R. Giger). As Navigator Joan Lambert, Veronica Cartwright joins the crew members of The Nostromo for an ill-fated trip to planet LV-426, where a rapidly evolving Xenomorph begins picking them off one by one. Lambert is the audience surrogate, so terrified by the relentless creature, she cries. She’s also smart, insisting “I say that we abandon this ship! We get the shuttle and just get the hell out of here! We take our chances and hope that someone picks us up!” In vest and cowboy boots, she’s a realistic, accessible character. Because you like and identify with Lambert, Ripley, Dallas, Parker, Kane, Bret and Ash, you’re more emotionally involved in their fight for survival— something the hundreds of Alien rip-offs that came after forgot. “As Lambert, I am the voice of the audience,” the actress notes. “I’m the wisest one, the only crew member really saying ‘Let’s get the hell outta here!’ even when we draw straws, I‘m scared, I’m the one who wants us to get out. “It’s been copied so much, I don’t think they will ever make another Alien. They can try, but it will never be as scary as ours because it was so visceral. It’s an amazing movie. It ended up being a really great experience, but it was a very tough shoot,” she says, shuddering at the memory. “It was a hard shoot, tough, sweaty, germy and dirty. We were sprayed down every day with glycerine, just gross. ” Lambert is one of the three astronauts to go to the planet with Captain Dallas and Kane, where she learns not to look into Alien eggs. When Ripley won’t let them back in because the facehugger is wrapped around Kane’s head and may be contagious, Lambert snaps “Look, would you open the Goddamn hatch? We have to get him inside!” She’s also on hand for the breakfast scene, where the chestburster makes it’s appearance. In fact, her horrified moans and shocked, blood splattered face give the scene terrible realism. In the climax, as she and crewman Parker are packing Lambert is the audience supplies for the escape pod, she has the misfortune of surrogate, so terriied by the meeting the full-sized adult Alien. relentless creature, she cries. HITCHCOCKIAN HORROR A sweet, cheerful woman full of great stories who has She’s also smart, insisting appeared in numerous movies and TV shows (over 134!), Veronica Cartwright is happy to re-visit her “I say that we abandon this ship! Alien experience. “I liked how you never really see the We get the shuttle and just get Alien through the whole movie, Ridley Scott made it Hitchcockian. You get glimpses of it through the the hell out of here! We take our movie and are forming in your mind what it is and chances and hope that someone what it may look like. Who knew, when it steps out from the tubes that it was in the room the entire time? picks us up!” In vest and cowboy That was just the creepiest. “I got Alien when I went on an interview and read boots, she’s a realistic, accessible for it. I’m British, so I happened to be going over to character… England anyway and I called my agent at the time about a role in Alien. They said, ‘That part’s been

40 INFINITY FIRST ENTERPRISE

cast.’ Originally, I was up for Ripley. That’s the only part I ever read for. I went in when I was in England, met them again and Ridley told me I got the part. I thought I was Ripley! I only found out when I went in to wardrobe. I told them, ‘This isn’t right, I’m Ripley!’ ‘No, you’re Lambert.’ I called my agent back in the States and asked, ‘Aren’t I Ripley?’ He goes, ‘yes’. Even he didn’t know! It was the only part I ever read for. It was Friday, and I had to re-read the Alien script with the idea in mind that I was now Lambert. “We shot it at Shepperton Studios. Everything was connected because there was no CGI, every set was the actual size. John Hurt coming down and finding the eggs was actually John Hurt dropping down from the very top of the soundstage. The desert was in the largest soundstage at that time in Europe; the sand, the spaceship, all of that was actual size in the soundstage and just amazing. Ridley had children in space as us at one point to make the planet set look even bigger,” she says, impressed. “Everything in the spaceship was actually connected; You had to go through the engine room to get to the actual corridor that Clockwise would lead to the breakfast table, everything from top left: was really interconnected. It was kind of The Nostromo claustrophobic.” crew discover The Pilot. “Alien The breakfast table is the scene of one of life form. Looks Alien’s most horrific moments, where John like it’s been dead a long Hurt convulses and literally gives grotesque time.” Veronica birth to the movie’s monster. “I don’t know why with Sigourney Weaver, the crew people have this idea that none of us knew gather to discuss what was going on when we shot that scene,” their plight and Cartwright sighs. “It was obviously in the script! Veronica reacts to John Hurt’s John Hurt was packed up by the special effects ‘chestburster’ department; he had a Plaster of Paris stomach in scene… that scene, the beast was in there, John is sitting on some sort of apparatus so the FX guy could get through. Everybody on the crew were wearing plastic raincoats, all the camera equipment was covered in plastic, there were buckets of offal around and the smell of formaldehyde made you gag. It was horrible, just horrible! blood jet and that’s the shot in the movie! “During the chestburster scene, “I was told “I was totally freaked out because of that and that I would get ‘a little blood’ on me,” she laughs I really said ‘OH MY GOD!’ and backed up. My ruefully. “They cut across the chest when they knees hit the back of the bankette and I flipped realized it wasn’t going to burst right through upside down. All you could see was my two John Hurt’s fake stomach as planned. They cut cowboy boots dangling in the air! It looked like a everything so it would get through and we’re all Mack Sennett silent comedy. I worked with the standing around, wondering, ‘Oh shit, what the special fx guy again years later on some horrible hell is happening here?’ John’s whole body was vampire movie, but he was nice.” covered in blood, kidneys, guts and all sorts of She found Alien director Ridley Scott very horrible things. You’re standing there being told reserved. “Ridley doesn’t say much. His eye is you would get a little blood on you, but the thing totally focused towards what things look like is, they had four cameras so they would get all in any scene. Ridley is a workaholic. Alien was of our first reactions. I was watching what was the first movie I had ever worked on where the going on, so I accidentally leaned right into a crew actually struck, because Ridley would just

INFINITY 41 Jon Abbott

went right into it and she was not a happy camper, but Ridley was thrilled! I think Ridley has gotten a lot better in talking to people, I mean, look at Gladiator, it’s just incredible.: Her favourite scene in Alien “is actually a weird question for me, and I will tell you why. I didn’t realize until I looked at the Blu-ray years later, that there are 11 deleted scenes from the movie and nine of them are mine that were cut out. I think it was because of the slap. When I looked at the Blu-ray edition of Alien and I thought ‘Jeez, I didn’t realize I was in movie that much! It had to be because of that’s what happened in the scene. Maybe she the slap, Sigourney didn’t like had something to do with why that scene was that. Also, when we shot it, she eliminated in the first place. I noticed the slap Images on this keep working and working, at least an hour and was anticipating it and flinching. Ridley wanted scene was the first thing Ridley put back in when spread include: a half after we (the cast) had left. They had to her to look surprised. She didn’t think it was right he did his directors cut of Alien.” A posed publicity shot for the wrap Ridley so they could drive home and they for her character to get slapped and cry, because The title monster is so scary, so unnerving, movie, Ridley weren’t getting any sleep. They warned him, Scott directing and Veronica with they said ‘Next Friday we are going to pull the John Hurt plug at five thirty,’ in their terribly direct British way. Next Friday, the crew waited until the scene was over at five thirty and began wrapping up. Everybody was frantic, trying to keep them from doing that. The crew was told ‘Ridley’s willing to work,’ and one of the crew said, ‘He’s always willing to work! He is an actual workaholic.’”

UNHAPPY SLAPPER A later special edition added a scene where Lambert slaps Ripley. “Ridley doesn’t talk very much, which is why he got really good, competent actors. His direction to me when I hit Sigourney Weaver across the face (a scene that was cut out of the original movie and put back in years later)…Every time I went to hit Sigourney, she would duck or flinch, she was anticipating it. My direction from Ridley was ‘Just get her this time!’ I said ‘Okay’ I went like this,” the actress whips her arm out “and I backhanded her. She

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Name of feature VERONICA’S OTHER FANTASY MOVIE HIGHLIGHTS…

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978 This very ‘70s remake of the Don Siegel classic changes the setting from the small town of Santa Mira to the whole sprawling city of San Francisco, with sleepy-eyed Donald Sutherland playing a health inspector giving a hard time to a Frisco restaurant when he finds rat droppings in their food. A number of weird things begin to happen, and Sutherland’s girlfriend Brooke Adams starts acting strangely. Eventually he discovers that the pod people are in town on a large-scale recruitment drive, and sets out to battle them in their factory in the film’s bleak finale. Leonard Nimoy plays a psychiatrist advocating the takeover, and Veronica shares the screen’s scariest scream scene with Donald Sutherland.

Flight Of The Navigator 1986 This popular Disney adventure tells the story of 12-year-old David (Joey Cramer) who lives with his family in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Veronica plays his mother Helen. When he awakens from being accidentally knocked out in the forest near his home, he finds that eight years have passed. His family is overjoyed to have him back, but they are just as perplexed as he is by the fact that he hasn’t aged. When a NASA scientist (Howard Hesseman) discovers a UFO nearby, David gets the chance to unravel the mystery and recover the life he lost. With Paul Reubens doing the voice of intelligent alien spaceship Max, it’s basically ET all over again and all good family fun. Young Joey Cramer steals the show. Sadly his career didn’t last, because in real life he aged.

The Witches of Eastwick 1987 This loose adaptation of John Updike’s bestseller stars Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer as a trio of desperate New England housewives who dabble in witchcraft and conjure up a very cheeky womanising devil in the shape of Jack Nicholson. Splendid production values, a rousing John Williams score and a most attractive cast - plus a scene-stealing performance by Jack - make this a treat from start to finish, even if the movie can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be a farcical black comedy, a sensual romance, or an out and out horror flick. From George Miller, the Australian-born director of Mad Max, it features Veronica as a prudish local busybody who is sick as a parrot when she falls foul of devilish Jack and his witchy girlfriends.

hid in a closet and turned all the lights off. He stepped out of the closet as I was coming down the stairs to see what was going on and I totally you watch every scene worried about freaked out, it scared me so bad. While I was where he will pop up next. “Bolaji Badejo freaking out, I thought to myself, ‘Remember was amazing as our Alien. Bolaji is part this moment, you’re going to use this one day!’ of the Masai tribe, he was 7”2 and very and I did, that’s what I used it on, I used that elegant, very thin. Very long, his limbs were feeling in Alien!” very long. His hands actually went past Working with the Alien, Cartwright remembers his kneecaps. “They made the suit, a long “I was actually creeped out when I saw him in angular suit that he would literally have to the full costume because it was just disturbing. get into it, his clawed fingers were gloves It was very funny, when we were doing this scene that went over his hands. Once Bolaji was where he comes to kill me and Yaphet Kotto. The in the costume, he was in it for the shoot. Alien had to have this gunk coming out of his Bolaji couldn’t sit down because of his mouth and be very shiny. They had the biggest dorsal spikes and tail. It was Tom Skerritt tubes of KY jelly I had ever seen in my entire life, (Captain Dallas) who said, ‘Hey, this poor these huge tubes. We had the Alien’s dresser, guy can’t sit down!’ They built Bolaji a who we all called ‘Mother’, and Ridley would say, swing so he could finally sit. Bolaji had ‘I need some more shine on his ass!’ Mother says taken tai chi and mime classes, and could ‘I’ll do it!’ and comes running over with this giant move really slowly. tube to rub on the Alien’s ass. It was horrible, “When we did my death scene, all I had but funny! to do was look at him. He would start on the “Every monster and alien in movies after floor and slowly rise up and then make a Alien looked like our Alien, they all had the same move towards you and you would say, ‘Oh shape, even The Abyss, with creatures made Shit!’ and jump back. He was great as the out of water had the shape and even (Roland monster, just phenomenal! He looked so Emmerich’s) Godzilla looked like our Alien! They scary in the costume. I didn’t have to act, finally made a different looking monster when JJ just seeing him as the Alien was terrifying. Abrams’ did Super 8, the first time the monster It totally worked. I had a particularly didn’t look like Alien!” sadistic husband, Rick Gates, who once

INFINITY 43 SEXUAL DESIGNS Lambert’s death changed several times during filming. Her death is never shown onscreen, leaving Ridley Scott to devise a disturbing, implied finish with the phallic scene where the Alien’s tail goes between her legs. “Those are actually Harry Dean Stanton’s legs,” Cartwright reveals. “They fade down the pants and you see that Lambert isn’t wearing my cowboy boots, which I wore throughout the movie! I noticed that right away. That pissed me off because they never finished my death and then they brought me in later and had me hanging from a hook. “That scene seems very sexual with the tail between the legs, but the Alien itself looked phallic. Everything was phallic on Alien, I mean, we walk into a big vagina,” she laughs. “Every design on that movie was sexual.” The scene where Ian Holm’s Ash is revealed as a robot is a cool shock, as is the following when his severed head coldly pities their chances against the ravenous Alien. “Ian Holm was so riveting in that scene where he’s talking as Ash, we were all sucked in by Ian’s speech, just riveted by what he was saying, we were all brought to tears. Of course Ridley didn’t like it and had him cut it in the middle. Ridley didn’t like the ‘fucking silver balls’ surrounding Ian’s head in the scene. They were cake ornament globes, about the size of a pinky. So Ian had to go back in several months later and shoot it differently, which is what you see in the film. “He was always spitting and leaking milk in the scene, but Ridley was unhappy with the silver cake balls. They were in the scene with some grapes and other stuff. I can still hear Ridley complaining about ‘those fucking silver balls’,” she grins. Was she shocked by the impact that Alien had? “Yeah, originally it was looked at as kind of a B-movie, this little $11-million dollar movie. The studio saw about 20 minutes of This image: Trapped by the Alien, Veronica prepares to meet footage and realized they had something major going on and a grisly end. Her character, Lambert was killed sent another $8 million dollars. The whole movie was made for by the Alien whilst gathering oxygen tanks that would allow the survivors to flee the Nostromo in $19 million dollars. Every single thing in that movie was built to its shuttle, the Narcissus actual size and all of it worked.” Below: Despite being R-rated and quite horrific, Alien inspired Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon had worked with Giger on Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s graphic novels, toys and even bubblegum cards. “I don’t even failed adaptation of Dune and remembered his have my own Lambert bubblegum card, but someone even terrifying designs. He gave Alien director Ridley Scott a copy of Giger’s book Necronomicon. In brought me a Lego Lambert! It’s a surprise to get a toy based it, they found the perfect basis for their movie on a character, but it would have been nice to get a piece of the monster, Giger’s Necronom IV, seen here. Alien Below right: Veronica as she is today, still acting action.” in movies - her latest role is as a grieving mother As one of the original astronauts of Alien, what did she think in The Dark Below (2017) of the sequels? “I liked the second one,” she says of the James Cameron classic, Aliens. “I thought there were a few too many Aliens in it, but I did like it. The third one, that was the cave one with the prisoners, and the fourth one with Winona Ryder and the Aliens underwater (Alien Resurrection)? They looked ridiculous in the water, the Aliens looked like a bunch of sperm swimming around! “I thought Prometheus was very well done, but what bothered me, considering that it was supposed to be an Alien prequel, was Michael Fassbender as the robot. When Ian Holm is beheaded, we have to wire him back up and put him on the table to get him to be able to communicate. In Prometheus, Michael Fassbender’s head is over here and his body is over there and he’s talking and talking, but it’s supposed to be 25 years before we had to rewire Ash!”

44 INFINITY

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Right: Cult sci-fi author Ian Millsted looks at the life and work of the largely John Brunner, and opposite are some of his best-known forgotten science fiction author John Brunner works, including the screenplay for the fondly remembered SILVER SPOONS AND LONG SHADOWS case remain but the official verdict was murder (by us, anyway) John Brunner was born into an aristocratic and suicide. Amicus cheapie The Terrornauts! family whose wealth derived from industry. His Despite the sad events, at the time of his great-grandfather, Sir John Brunner, the son of birth John Brunner was still part of a privileged a migrant from Switzerland, had co-founded class. Among his cousins and second cousins Brunner-Mond in the late nineteenth century were M.P.s, members of the Liechtenstein royal and that company had in turn become a family, godchildren of the British royal family, building block of industrial giant I.C.I. when that and the Duchess of Kent. His birth certificate was formed. indicates that his father was ‘of independent Sir John was also something of a grand means’. Brunner grew up in large houses full of philanthropist, donating to the establishment books. Among them he discovered the science and running of schools, libraries, newspapers and fiction of H G Wells and others. other such works. He helped found the University “When I was nine, having run out of stories to of Liverpool. He was also a Liberal Party M.P. for read, I attempted one of my own. I remember “You’d love Brunner. He’s quiet, but deadly. many years, favouring trade union rights, sick pay only two things about it: it featured a Martian Like a curare-tipped blow dart in the back of for workers and an eight hour day. He declined called Gloop (not, on recollection, an ideal the neck.” Harlan Ellison at least one offer to be raised to becoming a choice): and I couldn’t figure out how to put an Lord and was said to have even been reluctant ending on it.” (from a 1988 autobiographical nyone trying to find books by John to accept his knighthood. He was wealthy and essay by Brunner) Brunner in the science fiction section successful as well as being respected for his Brunner moved house frequently in his Aof a mainstream bookshop is unlikely generosity and progressive politics. early years and was educated via a mix of to have much luck nowadays. Maybe But tragedy loomed for the Brunner family. governesses and short stints in various prep a Science Fiction Masterworks edition of Stand One of Sir John’s sons was killed in a swimming schools. Later he attended Saint Andrew’s, on Zanzibar and that’s about it. If Brunner accident in Italy. Another son, Roscoe, the Pangbourne where he was a couple of years is remembered for anything these days it is grandfather of the writer, was the subject of behind David Cornwell (John Le Carre) who likely to be either his prediction of the internet a family scandal about which ‘no one spoke,’ Brunner claimed made fun of him. I contacted and computer viruses in his 1975 novel The even decades later. Roscoe had gone into the Le Carre who, not surprisingly didn’t remember Shockwave Rider or his tragic collapse and death family business and was a successful chairman anything about it. Incidentally another, more at a science fiction convention in Glasgow in of Brunner-Mond for many years. However, after recent, alumni is the Duchess of Cambridge. 1995. But there was so much more to Brunner, losing money in a legal dispute to rivals Lever It was during his school years that Brunner and his own life had enough drama and intrigue Brothers, Roscoe’s star fell rapidly. This happened made two discoveries that affected him for to fill a good length novel. just as a merger of various companies was in the the rest of his life; science fiction magazines John Brunner wrote dozens of novels, offing to create industrial giants I.C.I. Roscoe (including the realisation that people including mysteries and historical fiction, and Brunner, who would have been expecting a wrote and sold stories to them) and music; scores of short stories. He wrote film scripts senior position on the board of the new company specifically jazz. and saw his own stories adapted for the screen. now found himself frozen out This went down On the negative side he also contracted He was a published poet and song lyricist; one particularly badly with Roscoe’s wife Ethel. mumps. “I lay in bed with one testicle swollen of his songs being recorded by legendary folk Ethel Brunner, like her grandson, was a writer to the size of a tennis ball and hurting so badly musician Pete Seeger. He travelled widely and and successfully published several semi-auto- I could scarcely move. As I recovered, it more or took an interest in politics. biographical novels. She had recently seen her less disappeared. I’d been developing normally For a long time Brunner was just a name daughter, Shelagh, married to Prince Ferdinand up to then, but at that point I stopped. I have on the spine of science fiction paperbacks I of Liechtenstein. All had seemed to be going so no hair on my chest, pubic hair in the female browsed through in second hand shops. The well and suddenly it looked like her husband delta rather than the male lozenge, a tendency first thing I read by him was almost certainly was going to be summarily deposed from the to eunuch-old fatness, and bald patches on my his short story ‘Judas’ in the notable anthology family firm. In particular, she seemed to blame cheeks so that I can never grow a full beard.” Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison. I the bearer of the other name in Brunner-Mond, In his last year at school, Brunner sold several read more, mainly the short novels he produced namely Alfred Mond. stories to science fiction magazines as well as in large numbers from the late 1950s onwards; Alfred Mond was the ambitious son of a short novel, Galactic Storm, published under works which, while variable, were often more Brunner-Mond co-founder Ludwig Mond. He the pseudonym Gil Hunt. He had earned £1,000 literate and thought provoking than they was also a Liberal MP and cabinet minister from his writing by his eighteenth birthday. He needed to be for the markets in which they were under Lloyd George before switching to the had discovered science fiction fandom by way published. Only later did I start to find out about Conservatives at about the same time Roscoe of reading sf fanzines and attending the London the man behind the name. Brunner was ousted and Mond became gathering of fans and pros where he met the likes For many decades there have been science chairman of I.C.I. of Arthur C Clarke. He had found something he fiction conventions all round the world at During the afternoon of Wednesday 3rd loved doing and was managing to get paid for it. which authors can, if they so choose, appear November 1926 Ethel Brunner toured the offices Not surprisingly, when his uncle offered him to promote themselves and their work it has of various Fleet Street offices to rail against the opportunity of having a place at Oxford long been possible for fans of the genre to have the perceived injustice that her husband had funded by the old family firm I.C.I., on the reasonably close access to the creators of the suffered. It seems she did this without the proviso that he would accept being told what work they admire. John Brunner was a regular knowledge or approval of her husband. Later he should study, Brunner turned him down. at such events and his public persona was that that day while Roscoe and Ethel were at their Even while completing National Service at R.A.F. of an urbane and intelligent man, often seen in daughter’s house in Roehampton, Roscoe Bletchley, Brunner continued to write and sell the company of attractive, younger women. As shot his wife dead and then killed himself. The science fiction stories. is so often the case, the reality was somewhat bodies, lying in a pool of blood, were disvovered In late 1956, Brunner, now living in London, different and more complex. by the servants at 10pm. Questions about the met a woman named Marjorie. Fourteen years

46 INFINITY his elder, Marjorie was undoubtedly a major work. On the plus side he had two short stories influence on the young writer. Not least, she adapted for the BBC anthology series Out of put him in touch with a psychiatrist to help him the Unknown. The first of these, Some Lapse of address the impotence he suffered as a result Time, was written in 1963 as a psychological sf of male hormone deficiency from the earlier thriller. The television adaptation in 1965 has the mumps. She also encouraged him to join her in distinction of being designed for broadcast by attending the inaugural meeting of the Campaign Ridley Scott, prior to his directorial career. The for Nuclear Disarmament, which would become Last Lonely Man was adapted for the same series one of the great causes of his life. Brunner wrote in 1969. The adaptations are slow moving for the song, The H-Bombs Thunder, which was modern tastes but thoughtfully and respectfully the main anthem of the early CND marches to done. Both are available on the BFI DVD release Aldermaston. John and Marjorie Brunner shared of the series. an open marriage, with both of them taking other Less successfully he scripted two films. The lovers, and lived a somewhat bohemian lifestyle Terrornauts (1967) is a terrible film. Brunner of which Brunner’s family disapproved. wrote the script adaptation of a story by Murray Leinster. It’s available on DVD if you want to THE BOOKS, THE BOOKS find out for yourself. He also wrote at least two Most of John Brunner’s early novels were taken drafts of a full script for Toomorrow (1970), which on first by American publishers, specifically starred Olivia Newton-John, but his name did not Ace, and written within the constraints of the make it to the screen where credit was given to editorial line. But, like Philip K Dick (see Infinity veteran director Val Guest. 1), Brunner was not content to remain within a set formula. He experimented with subject FRIENDS AND FOES matter, completing a well-reviewed but not Accounts of John Brunner the man vary. Some terribly well selling novel, The Crutch of Memory found him a true and loyal friend while others (1964), about sexual impotence. found him difficult or unsympathetic. At one He also started pushing boundaries in terms science fiction convention, on leaving a party of technique and style with novels such as hosted by a prominent fanzine editor, he The Squares of the City (1965) and The Whole caustically thanked him for the ‘cooking’ sherry Man (1964). In this respect, again like Dick, he he had been served. was well placed to ride the crest of the science Sometimes Brunner was more the victim, fiction new wave of the late 1960s. This was a as when he had a glass thrown at him, drawing period when the likes of Michael Moorcock, J G blood, when he was doing a poetry reading Ballard, Thomas Disch and others were trying during a 1970 convention. Many aspiring to overthrow the perceived conservativeness of authors of the era, including Ramsay Campbell both the literary style and social outlook of the and Christopher Priest, found Brunner to be science fiction genre up to that point. Brunner encouraging of both them and their works. was more a parallel figure to this movement than Brunner was a gifted linguist and an inter- actually part of it, but the ten year period from nationalist who enjoyed travelling. He accepted the mid-60s to the mid-70s were the peak years invitations to attend conventions all over Europe for him as a science fiction writer. and beyond. While his literary output declined It was Stand on Zanzibar (1968) that in the later years of his life he retained broad propelled Brunner to the top tier of sf authors. interests. He had a love of folk music going back An ambitious novel combining experimental to the 1950s which manifested in his organising technique alongside traditional, almost pulp folk festivals in the Somerset after he moved style, prose and dealing with social and there from London in the 1970s. He wrote poetry, environmental issues, Stand on Zanzibar earned contributed (without being paid) to fanzines and glowing reviews and won the main science hosted friends. fiction awards for its year. A significant blow to Brunner was the death Brunner followed this with The Jagged Orbit of his wife Marjorie in 1986. As well as being (1969) wherein he extrapolated ideas about his partner in marriage she had acted as his terrorism, paranoia and social unrest. The business manager and he struggled to fill that Sheep Look Up (1972) is a further exploration of role himself, falling out with editors to his own environmental collapse which takes the narrative financial detriment. He married again in 1991, to into the fringes of horror fiction. The Shockwave LiYi Tan. In August 1995, at the age of sixty, John Rider (1975) predicts the rise of the information Brunner suffered a massive stroke and died while revolution and the internet, even originating attending the World Science Fiction Convention the term computer virus, a decade before the being held in Glasgow. cyberpunk movement. LiYi Brunner continues to act as literary These four novels are often grouped together executor of Brunner’s work and his papers as the enduring works of Brunner. They were donated to the University of Liverpool demonstrated a man keen to evolve as a writer where they make up part of the science fiction and unwilling to rehash the same old thing. If collection there. Included are many unpublished none of them ever quite enjoyed the stellar sales manuscripts. In recent years, with the advent success of something like Frank Herbert’s Dune, of e-publishing, many of Brunner’s books have then at least it meant Brunner never faced the been brought back into availability, including prospect of writing interminable sequels, which some new collections and stories. Unlike Philip K he would have hated doing. Dick, he has not benefited from ongoing interest Other notable work from this period includes from the movie world, but nor is he completely Quicksand (1967), a novel very much in the forgotten. Given how much of his output English sf tradition but with flawed and nuanced addressed concerns which are, if anything, characters, and the sequence of Traveller in more contemporary than when they were first Black short stories. published - environmentalism, terrorism, social It was also in this period that Brunner had disorder – perhaps the time is nigh for us to look his main involvement with film and television once more at the fiction of Mr Brunner.

INFINITY 47 Name of feature TERROR ON THE TUBE

The original 1950s BBC serial scared the living daylights out of television viewers, while the 1960s film version is now considered a science fiction classic. Richard Holliss looks back at Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit… MARS ATTACKS!

e first met Professor Bernard British science fiction throughout the 1950s. In fact, Quatermass in 1953, when his private Kneale’s groundbreaking work was frequently imitated rocket group brought a deadly life in television serials, such as The Trollenberg Terror, and form back to Earth, in the highly The Strange World of Planet X, while Hammer Films’ acclaimed BBC television serial, science fiction movie, X the Unknown (1956), is also WThe Quatermass Experiment. Two years later, the unashamedly derivative of Kneale’s style. professor was back, fighting strange parasites from As both The Quatermass Experiment and Quatermass outer space intent on taking possession of our planet, in II were transmitted live, those who missed them had Quatermass II. to rely instead on the later feature film adaptations Both stories were the brainchild of writer Nigel also produced by Hammer Films. Released in the UK Kneale, whose third serial to feature his eponymous under the same titles, (the spelling on the first film scientist also concerned itself with the aftermath of was changed to ‘Xperiment’ to cash in on the then an alien invasion. In Quatermass and the Pit (1958), a controversial use of the X certificate), both movies helped mysterious missile is unearthed on a building site in the to reinforce the popularity of the Quatermass franchise. heart of London. While the authorities are convinced It was inevitable, therefore, that after the television that it’s nothing more than a propaganda weapon screening of Quatermass and the Pit, Hammer snapped left over from the Second World War, Quatermass, is up the film rights. Val Guest (The Day the Earth Caught convinced that strange object is part of an ancient plan Fire, Jigsaw), who directed the first two films was to colonise the Earth. chosen to helm the project, while American B-actor Kneale’s Quatermass serials were so popular with Brian Donlevy (In Old Chicago, The Beginning or the viewers that they emptied pubs and restaurants, End) was asked to reprise his role as Quatermass. But as people rushed home to catch the next ‘exciting’ both these decisions infuriated Kneale, who had already episode. The Quatermass Experiment was the second objected to the director’s tampering with his scripts and collaboration between the writer and BBC director the actor’s “militaristic interpretation of the character.” Rudolph Cartier. It’s success led to a controversial But the project fell through when the studio failed adaptation in 1954 of George Orwell’s novel 1984 and to secure an overseas deal with Columbia Pictures (the a one-off play, The Creature (about an encounter with first two films had been released in America through the Abominable Snowman) in 1955. Quatermass II United Artists as The Creeping Unknown and Enemy followed shortly afterwards and set the benchmark for From Space respectively).

48 INFINITY Quatermass And The Pit

TERROR FROM THE TUBE as he had portrayed the scientist in the original It wasn’t until 1966, that Hammer producer 1958 television serial. Anthony Hinds finally struck a deal with Warner In the end, the producers chose Scottish Pathe, Seven Arts and 20th Century Fox, to actor Andrew Keir, who had already appeared finance the film. Kneale, meanwhile, had been in Hammer’s The Pirates of Blood River (1962), busy editing his six half-hour television scripts and Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966). With his into a 90-minute screenplay. hirsute appearance, the well-built Scot brought The story opens with the unearthing of tremendous gravitas to the role. Kneale was what is believed to be an unexploded bomb particularly delighted with the casting of Keir, during a paleontological dig at Hobb’s End and the two worked together on a Quatermass underground station. When the War Office retrospective for BBC Radio 3 in 1996. calls in Colonel Breen to investigate, Professor Although he was the lead, Keir was given Quatermass reluctantly tags along. Here second billing on the credits to James he meets archaeologist Dr. Roney and his Donald (Lust For Life, The Bridge on the assistant Barbara Judd, who are trying to save River Kwai), who is tremendous in the role the primitive human skeletons found buried of Dr. Roney. Hammer stalwart, Barbara alongside the bomb. Shelley (The Gorgon, and Rasputin, the Mad Quatermass soon deduces, however, that Monk) completes the triumvirate and is the contrary to Breen’s theories, the missile is perfect foil for both Roney’s earnestness and not an unwelcome gift from the Nazis, but a Quatermass’s fiery temper. five-million-year-old spaceship from the planet Julian Glover (Indiana Jones and the on MGM’s Stage 2. At one end of the set, Above: Mars. While its occupants, which resemble Last Crusade) was selected to play the Robinson and his team constructed a tunnel Two scenes from the BBC’s 1958 horned arthropods are dead, the ship itself pompous Breen, while Duncan Lamont, who entrance –complete with railway track – and at production of exerts a powerful influence over all who come had originally appeared in the 1953 BBC the other was an excavation site covered in 50 Quatermass and the Pit, with into contact with it. At the climax of the story, production of The Quatermass Experiment tons of imported clay, including duckboards, André Morell the strange craft, after receiving a surge of as the hapless astronaut Victor Carroon, was building site machinery and mud walls. Nestled as Professor electrical power, unleashes a monstrous energy brought into play the pivotal role of Sladden, in between was a raised platform area, while Quatermass, Cec Linder, Anthony source that threatens to subjugate mankind. civilian drill operator and first ‘victim’ of the the adjoining corridors were decorated with Bushell, John It was rumoured that Hammer producer Martians. authentic movie posters for films such as My Stratton, Christine Finn, and good old Anthony Hinds had suggested to Kneale that a With the cast in place, Hammer, who had Fair Lady and Hotel, as well as current Hammer Michael Ripper as tube station was a better location for the buried recently relocated from Bray Studios to releases, including The Witches, The Reptile an Army sergeant space capsule, than the foundations of an office Associated British Studios, Elstree, had to move and Dracula Prince of Darkness. block. It was an inspired choice, as the cramped to the nearby MGM Studios in Borehamwood Robinson’s authentic-looking set uncannily underground corridors and railway platforms to shoot the film. Both the producer Anthony resembles one of those derelict tube stations provide a suitably claustrophobic and eerie Nelson Keys and the director Roy Ward that can still be seen from the window of setting for Kneale’s alien visitors. Baker were delighted, as the latter offered a passing underground train (if you know As Val Guest was busy directing the James larger facilities and an impressive back lot on where to look). Scenes set in the darkened Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967), Roy Ward which to film the tube station exteriors and station at night have all the effectiveness of Baker (A Night to Remember, The Anniversary) surrounding streets. Hammer’s veteran set a horror movie, particularly after Kneale’s was brought in to direct. Hammer had also designer Bernard Robinson added a pair of script has already unnerved the audience promised Kneale that they wouldn’t ask Brian Belisha beacons, a zebra crossing, taxicabs with descriptions of ‘hideous dwarfs’ and Donlevy, so a number of British actors were and a bright red London double-decker bus to ‘horned demons’. Robinson’s design for the considered for the part, including Kenneth complete the illusion. buried Martian spacecraft is also quite unique. More, Anthony Quayle and Peter Finch. André The interior of the Hobb’s End underground Combining a nautical shape with that of a Morell (then working at Hammer on The station, which included operating lift doors, a space capsule, its aerodynamic appearance is Mummy’s Shroud) was a more likely candidate, platform and white tiled walls, was constructed strangely familiar, yet remarkably unearthly.

INFINITY 49 Name of feature

with photography of dead locusts (which the Martians in the film closely resembled). Unfortunately, the finished result is disappointing and the only low point in an otherwise accomplished production. On-set special effects, such as the truly terrifying moment when drill-operator Sladden, is possessed by ‘supernatural’ forces buried within the spaceship, involved the use of props being suspended on wires and blown about the set by wind machines. When Sladden’s proximity to a tea stall causes total chaos, china plates (actually made of paper) were tossed around by compressed air. Music and sound effects also play a dramatic role in building the tension. Tristram Cary, who members of the cinema audience shouldn’t be composed the score for the Ealing comedy The offended by the suggestion that our long-held Ladykillers (1955) was given the assignment, belief in the existence of the Devil is actually which included a request for both orchestral nothing more than a trace memory of a ‘horned Above: Barbara Shelley, and electronic music cues. The latter was insect’ from the planet Mars. One scene that Andrew Keir and used to accompany the vibrating sound of the Trevelyan particularly objected to concerned James Donald in scenes from Martian spaceship (an effect that alarmed the the electrocuted technician, who is pulled from Hammer’s film censor John Trevelyan). the spaceship after an accident involving a high Quatermass and Carey composed 30 minutes of music for voltage cable. The script suggested that smoke the Pit (1967) the film, but as he was no longer working is seen to rise from his burned body. There is, Right: on the project by the time it moved to the however, no evidence to suggest that the scene Richard Holliss at Pinewood with the editing stage, the head of Hammer’s music was ever shot this way, even though a press film’s director Roy department, Philip Martell, replaced sections of photograph exists showing a body wreathed in Ward Baker his score with library music. This is used most smoke. According to the BBFC website, the film effectively in the scene when Police Sergeant was passed uncut, so perhaps the photograph Ellis (Grant Taylor) shows Quatermass and was just a publicity shot. Judd around a derelict house opposite the tube AN ACCOMPLISHED PRODUCTION station. To underscore the eeriness of the scene, PUBLIC REACTION Filming started in February 1967 and Martell borrowed a track composed by Carlo Quatermass and the Pit was previewed on lasted for seven-and-a-half weeks. Hammer Martelli, for the 1964 horror movie Witchcraft, September 26th, 1967, and made its London regulars included Arthur Grant as the lighting starring Lon Chaney. West End debut on November 9th. A general cameraman, Bert Batt as the assistant director The script had already been sent to John release on the ABC cinema circuit followed 10 and Les Bowie, in charge of special effects. Trevelyan at the British Board of Film Censors days later with the Harry Alan Towers’ Edgar Bowie’s team worked on the miniatures, (BBFC) as early as December 1966, and it was Wallace chiller, Circus of Fear. The film was including model sequences of London being agreed that the general tone and content of released in America in March 1968, under the destroyed, and a climactic scene involving the story was deserving of an X certificate. But, title Five Million Years to Earth. a tower crane. All these effects were shot even with an adult rating, Trevelyan warned Reviews were mixed. John Russell Taylor at Bowie’s Slough studio, along with the Hammer against using gratuitous images in The Times said, “After a slowish beginning, hallucinatory scenes set on the planet Mars. during the purging of the Martian hives, or which shows up the deficiencies of acting and Although seen only briefly, this sequence excess violence in the scenes of destruction direction, things really start hopping when a was achieved with puppets being moved and rioting at the film’s climax. The censor mysterious missile-like object discovered in up and down on rods and superimposed was also concerned that the more devout a London excavation proves to be a relic of a

50 INFINITY Name of feature

Quatermass and the Pit was previewed on September 26th, 1967, and made its London West End debut on November 9th. A general release on the ABC cinema circuit followed 10 days later with the Harry Alan Towers’ Edgar Wallace chiller, Circus of Fear. The ilm was released in America in March 1968, under the title Five Million Years to Earth. prehistoric Martian attempt to colonise military conflicts, and the introduction of Barbara the press pick up on any similarities between Above: Earth. The development of this situation Shelley as a female scientist, film manages to Kneale’s premise about aliens interfering in Barbara Shelley and James Donald is scrupulously worked out and the film is retain interest through suspenseful exposition of human evolution, and the controversial theories on the run, and genuinely gripping even when the Power of Evil the mysterious creatures (Martians).” opined by Swiss author Erich Von Däniken in his a gruesome electrocution is finally shown personified in hazy glowing Some critics compared it to more bestselling book Chariots of the Gods? (1968), scene which outline, a spectacle as a rule more likely to mainstream science fiction films, which that the Almighty (and therefore the Devil?) didn’t go down well with the provoke titters than gasps of horror.’ disappointed Kneale. Being the author of such were probably visitors from outer space! British censors Penelope Mortimer in The Observer was diverse works as the prophetic The Year of the The film’s advertising campaign also played more critical, “This nonsense makes quite Sex Olympics (1968), supernatural thriller The down these aspects of the story, no doubt to avoid a good film, well put together, competently Stone Tape (1972), and the psychological series any unwanted accusations of blasphemy. This photographed, on the whole sturdily performed. Beasts (1976), he never considered himself as a was especially true in America, where trailers for What it totally lacks is imagination.” Richard writer of science fiction, and was often critical the film concentrated purely on the action scenes, Davies in Films and Filming magazine was of programmes such as Doctor Who and Star at the expense of its intellectual content. equally sniffy about the movie, “Combining the Trek. Yet Kneale remained a great admirer of Since its television debut in the 1950s and elements of science fiction with the elements of H. G. Wells, and in 1964 was responsible for its subsequent transfer to the big screen in Gothic bizarrerie seldom work.” he opined, “As a scripting the excellent film adaptation of the 1967, Quatermass and the Pit continues to thrill horror it fails to horrify – overall, as a thriller it author’s 1901 novel, First Men in the Moon. whole new generations of science fiction fans. really fails to thrill. It is all very wild and woolly Interestingly, very few critics, even in It’s a fitting tribute to the fertile mind of author and fails to carry one tenth of the unnerving retrospect, made a connection between Nigel Kneale, whose stories still capture our credibility of the Quatermass predecessors.” Quatermass and the Pit and ’s imagination decades after they were Variety said, “Given the predictable science vs. epic 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968). Nor did first written.

INFINITY 51 THE NEED FOR SPEED

You wait ages for an indestructible crime-fighting machine, and then five turn up at once… Jon Abbott speeds through the classic vigilante sci-fi of the 1980s!

super-powered helicopter shows attempting to follow in the wake of Knight Rider, one, Blue Thunder, a frivolous comic strip adventure based on the more sober feature film of the same name, the other the ironically more successful, more sophisticated, but equally reactionary Airwolf. While Airwolf aspired to higher things with he germ of the idea for Knight Rider, its mostly intelligent dabbling in 1980s Cold perhaps the only idea for a series TV War politics and enough symbolism to keep producer Glen Larson didn’t nick from a a psychiatric convention busy for a week, contemporary movie, was first cultivated Blue Thunder slapped its cards on the table in “Cain’s Cruiser”, a 1979 episode of the series BJ philanthropist Wilton Knight (Richard Basehart shamelessly, ditching any self-questioning and the Bear, a TV take on the late ‘70s craze for of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in virtually elements in the feature film original about the trucker movies. The idea of a computerised car, his final role) and his aide Devon Miles (Edward ethics of a spying, flying tank in the sky linked an adversary for B.J., was then developed into Mulhare, who stayed on for the series). up to police computers and going for slam-bang, what became a four-season run between 1982 All the successful TV heroes of the 1980s were hard-nosed, jut-jawed macho action. and 1986 for Knight Rider, the first and by far the vigilantes and laws-unto-themselves, and the Blue Thunder, says the promo, “prowls the most popular of the five super-machine series of Knight Rider was no exception. A crucial part of city skies at 250 mph” (prowls?), “protecting its the ‘80s. early ‘80s childhood both here on ITV and in the occupants with inch-thick armour”. Its two locator If the kids of the ‘60s had Gerry Anderson and U.S. on NBC, the show was rife with absurdities, lights, we are told, are “three times brighter Irwin Allen, and the ‘70s sprogs had bionic heroes, continuity errors, and assorted improbabilities, than the sun”, which presumably means instant the youngsters of the 1980s look back on The although even the programme makers balked at blindness - not to mention a bad case of sunburn - A-Team and Knight Rider with equally uncritical the abandoned idea of having the talking car fly for any civilian who looks admiringly into the sky! and nostalgic eyes. “I still think this is one of in its second season. Oh yes, it could talk too, long And “Blue Thunder has the awesome power to see the coolest shows ever, and I freely admit that before sat-nav, in the rather prissy C3PO-inspired and hear through walls”. Knight Rider can be pretty idiotic at the same voice of William Daniels, slumming alongside “The aerial technology, weaponry, and time” begins a typical apologetic IMDB review, his more prestigious role as Dr. Mark Craig in the surveillance systems on Blue Thunder exist titled “Who cares what people think, it was still superlative MTM medical drama St. Elsewhere today but have not yet been assembled in a entertaining…”. filming almost simultaneously. single machine...” says the series promo, adding A young and then unknown David Hasselhoff ominously, “but the potential is there…”. Oh, good, starred as Michael Knight, a modern-day Lone WOULD YOU LIKE TO FLY… Google with guns! Ranger given a new identity and a hi-tech Not giving up easily on the flying machine The feature film made much of the Big Brother super-car called KITT by industrialist and front, the 1984-1985 season began with two capabilities of the machine, and the numerous

Above: Don’t hassle The Hoff when he’s driving this nice bit of ‘KITT’ in Knight Rider (1982) Below: Roy Scheider as Officer Frank Murphy in Blue Thunder (1983) and James Farentino with Wayne’s World’s Dana Carvey, Bubba Smith (right of pic) and Dick Butkus in the 1984 TV show

52 INFINITY potential opportunities for abuse by police I guess he had nothing to authorities, all of which were merrily prove at this point in his dispensed with for this decidedly juvenile career. It was a fun show TV series that appeared the following year, if you turned your brain appropriately enough in 1984. off. Most people switched The title Blue Thunder was devised by their sets off instead, and Dan O’Bannon as a parody of former cop and the series lasted only half a pro-police novelist (and apologist) Joseph season. Padding the show Wambaugh’s novels-turned-movies - The New were hefty chunks of the and becomes a hi-tech vigilante who will only Centurions, The Blue Knight, The Choirboys, etc. expensive Blue Thunder accept a government mission if he deems it “I find his image of the police slightly feature film, most of the set worthy. Even more arrogantly, Hawke says he ridiculous” O’Bannon told interviewer Alan pieces from which turned up will return the vehicle only when ‘the Firm’ Jones, “the saintly guys in blue keeping us, during the series’ eleven week agree to find and rescue his older MIA brother, the barbarians, from destroying civilisation!”. slide into oblivion. St. John. Ironically, series lead James Farentino made Of Blue Thunder feature Airwolf made its debut at the height of the several appearances in Wambaugh’s 1970’s film director John Badham, early-’80’s obsession with rapidly advancing TV show, Police Story. O’Bannon prophetically technology and the vigilante renegade hero Accompanying Farentino’s tough inde- complained, “he directs a ‘betrayed by the system’. Consequently, it pendently-minded pilot Frank Chaney were twenty million dollar movie deliriously embraces every single paranoid Bubba Smith and Dick Butkus, two former like a TV episode!” And of delusion, selfish fantasy and self-pitying football players turned actors best known for the vehicle itself, O’Bannon indulgence exhibited by the Rambo mentality their beer commercial double-act and future raged, “they envisioned it as of the 1980s Vietnam vet films that swamped Saturday Night Live and Wayne’s World star a big ponderous thing with crap hanging all Above: the video shelves of that decade following the Jan-Michael Dana Carvey in an embarrassing early role as over it, while we saw it as a fast black wasp Vincent, Ernest excellent First Blood. comic relief Jafo. - compact and deadly”. To his undoubted Borgnine and Jean Creator Donald Bellisario had made the Carvey was so cringingly unfunny that it annoyance, the rival machine in TV’s Airwolf Bruce Scott in Vietnam veteran a TV hero with his stylish Airwolf (1984) was actually a relief when Butkus and Smith most resembles a fast black wasp. Rockfordian detective series Magnum, which came on to do what was essentially a re-run greatly benefitted from honest scripts in the of the old Sharkey and Kowalski bits that used HAWKISH FANTASY early years and a self-effacing performance to pad out Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea The series and its lead were about as by Tom Selleck, but Airwolf showed no twenty years earlier. This was perhaps not too pleasant. In this hawkish hardware fantasy, such restraint. As with the final two years surprising, as the writing team of John and Jan-Michael Vincent starred as moody, sullen of Magnum and Bellisario’s later series Ward Hawkins, best known for their work on and pouting Vietnam vet Stringfellow Hawke, Quantum Leap, there were numerous bizarre TV westerns, worked briefly on both series in a enlisted by the flamboyant Archangel (Alex religious references which at the time seemed supervisory capacity. Cord) of a thinly-veiled CIA to retrieve a slyly parodic, but in the light of the closing Producer Roy Huggins worked on Maverick, super-powerful helicopter codenamed Airwolf episodes of Magnum and Quantum Leap 77, Sunset Strip, The Fugitive, The Virginian, which had been stolen by its evil inventor we must now accept are beginning to look and Farentino’s earlier shows The Bold Ones (David Hemmings). Well, you’d be moody and uncomfortably straight-faced. and Cool Million, coming on board as a favour sullen if you’d been named Stringfellow too. As Bellisario stepped back from Airwolf to Farentino. He also wrote scripts for Alias Hawke retrieves the chopper, but hides it to concentrate on other projects, references Smith and Jones and The Rockford Files. with buddy Dominic Santini (Ernest Borgnine) to ‘Gabrielle’ (Archangel’s assistant, played

INFINITY 53 JonName Abbott of feature

Street Hawk’s Rex Smith was a skilled motorcycle rider and did most of his riding. A stunt double was used for dangerous stunts

grown-ups. Although many episodes dealt with the traditional Cold War/Iron Curtain antics of the 1950s to ‘80s, Airwolf showed a grudging respect for Russia rather than portraying everything east of the curtain as evil and stupid. In 1980s might-is-right fantasies, by Bellisario’s wife, Deborah Pratt), ‘Moses’ mercenaries, arms dealers, drugs smugglers, and ‘Pope County’ etc. gradually gave way to terrorists, and unstable minor-league safer, cornier mythological symbolism, such despots are the bad guys. Warmongering as ‘Zeus’ and ‘Loki’. was out, but policing was still in. Witch-hunts Airwolf was a flawless - and lawless and Watergate had left their mark on the - production, formulaic and beautifully my-country-right-or-wrong mindset, and photographed, with a hi-tech, glossy look dirty dealings, double-crosses and cold and a fabulous theme by Sylvester LeVay. ruthlessness were as prevalent on the U.S. Producing the pilot was Alan J. Levi, who side as the opposition. continued to direct numerous episodes of the In many episodes, stability and a balance series, and stayed on as supervising producer. of power are the aim, rather than wiping Levi had previously worked on Six Million the scourge of the enemy off the face of the Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, The Invisible earth, and so as much as Bellisario’s series Man, The Gemini Man, and The Incredible clearly despise liberal politics and the counter Hulk (all for Universal). As one critic wrote, culture period of the ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, “Alan Levi appears to operate as an effective their influence is there, however abstract, component in bringing kiddie-orientated and the post-Vietnam distrust of self-serving shows to an adult viewer market”. As such, authority articulated by the inarticulate he was ideally suited to Airwolf, which took Rambo movies has permeated every U.S. itself a little more seriously than most of its show of the 1980s, from the classy Hill Street fellow super-machine shows of the period. Blues to the silliest of vigilante fantasies. It was Knight Rider and/or Blue Thunder for Bellisario’s decision to play Airwolf straight-faced was a wise one, contrasting neatly with the opposite direction rival Amazingly, despite being heavily series Blue Thunder flew off in. Airwolf’s armed, and travelling at eye- macho solemnity ultimately gave it the edge, impressing those who took the show seriously watering speed through the city, and amusing those who didn’t more than the lowbrow comic clowning of the supporting there is no carnage. Never mind the cast of Blue Thunder. Who couldn’t resist the famous ‘Airwolf vigilante crime-ighting, study that flinch’, that magical money shot when the airborne bad guy realises that there’s a achievement! missile coming right for him, and no way out?

54 INFINITY EYE-WATERING SPEED Missing no opportunity, Universal’s third and final machine show after Knight Rider and Airwolf was the shamelessly derivative Streethawk in 1985, which stole from everywhere. Hero Jesse Mach is disabled in the line of duty like Knight Rider, rebuilt like The Six Million Dollar Man, and given access to a government-financed prototype as in Airwolf. This hi-tech super-cycle driven by Rex Smith (the first live-action Daredevil, trivia freaks) even emerges from behind an advertising hoarding in an alley, like The Green Hornet’s Black Beauty twenty years earlier. Amazingly, despite being heavily armed, and travelling at eye-watering speed through the city, there is no carnage. Never mind the vigilante crime-fighting, study that achievement! Joe Regalbuto, the fink in Arnie’s Raw Deal, was his nerdy aide back at the lab constantly and futilely berating him for not doing as he’s told, Richard Venture of V was his boss at the cop shop, and Jeannie Wilson of Simon and Simon was the token girl. Smith got the lead role after ABC rejected newcomer George Clooney (who promptly became a star) and Don Johnson decided to take Miami Vice. Many of the writers, producers, and directors who worked on one of the super-machine shows worked on the others. GORDON’S ON THE ROAD For example, producing the first season of The last and loopiest of the super-machine Airwolf was Burton Armus, an ex-cop whose shows was Glen Larson’s The Highwayman, career at Universal started as a bit player and starring Sam J. Jones of Flash Gordon fame, technical advisor on Kojak, who left at the end which came and went in 1988. Yes, Gordon’s of the first season to produce on Streethawk, alive, dressed like a bondage freak, and and then Knight Rider’s later years. driving a massive invisibility-empowered When Bellisario moved on at the end of the truck round America’s desert highways. Yep, second season, Bernard Kowalski, previously I said invisible. And with a built-in helicopter! an executive producer on WWII series The Don’t worry if you don’t remember it, Rat Patrol and Black Sheep Squadron (where because it only lasted eight episodes, Bellisario had got his start) took over. And but what a weird eight they were. “The Kowalski had already directed on Airwolf and Hitchhiker” featured an injured alien at the Knight Rider. When Blue Thunder was axed, site of a crashed flying saucer, “Frightmare” ‘Jacko’ (see what they did there?), he had This page: Sam J. Jones many of the show’s behind-the-scenes people involved a dream machine, “Fire and Ice” apparently made a series of popular battery and Mark ‘Jacko’ moved over to Airwolf, including helicopter was built around an ancient curse, and commercials. This was a bit like putting Jackson as The stunt pilot James Gavin and producer Don “Summer of ’45” concerned the pursuit of a Harold from the Halifax or the CGI meerkats Highwayman and his sidekick Baer. His fellow producer, Jeri Taylor, later nuclear scientist who intends to prevent the into Doctor Who (I know, I know, don’t give Jett. The worked within the somewhat more PC Star discovery of the atomic bomb through a time them ideas). Highwayman’s real name was Trek universe of the 1990s. warp that takes them all to 1945. “Send in Jane Badler of V played the Highwayman’s never revealed Nowadays Streethawk is probably best the Clones” weirdly reunited the supporting liason, the icy Miss Winthrop, no longer in any of the known for its musical theme composed cast of Larson’s quality cop shows McCloud, on a diet of rodents. While the short run show’s episodes by Tangerine Dream and produced by J.D. Cannon and Terry Carter. of The Highwayman has made the series Christopher Franke, a modified version Unfortunately, the producers ditched fairly invisible itself since, Knight Rider, (which was featured in the pilot episode the supporting cast of the pilot and made Airwolf, and even the short-lived Streethawk during the sequence where Mach took the the catastrophic decision to give Sam a have their followers and fans today, and bike out for the first time) appeared on their boorish loud sidekick named Jetto, who DVD indulgence is available for all but The album Le Parc. ruined everything. Played by someone called Highwayman.

INFINITY 55 Howard Hughes looks at the making of the Roger Moonraker,Moore ATTEMPTING Bond movie a fun film that like Roger himself got RE-ENTRY: better with age! SPACE IN

56 INFINITY SPIES IN SPACE

oonraker (1979), directed by Lewis Gilbert, is the eleventh official James Bond film, not counting 1967’s spoof Casino Royale and has several of the series’ classic ingredients. There’s Roger Moore as a debonair, unruffled Bond, beautiful women to hamper and pamper him, memorable bad guys, spectacular stunts, a John Barry score and a Shirley Bassey title song. Moonraker followed The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), which is generally considered to be Moore’s high-watermark for the series and one of the best James Bond adventures of them all. Four films into Moore’s tenure, nobody did it better, so The Spy Who Loved Me would be a erupted in the wake of Star Wars, the box-office tough act to follow. champion of 1977. Listen out for a hunting At just over $33 million, Moonraker had an horn at a grouse shoot that plays the opening eventual budget double its predecessor and three notes of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) light years away from the inaugural Bond and door code panels at Drax’s labs that play outing Dr No (1962), which cost a mere $1.1 the alien theme from Steven Spielberg’s Close million – as director Gilbert noted, Dr No was Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). There’s made for Moonraker’s telephone budget. even a reference to westerns, with Moore The experimental rocket fitted with a riding along dressed as a gaucho, complete nuclear warhead that is trained on London with Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent during a test flight by wealthy industrialist Seven theme on the soundtrack. But for its Sir Hugo Drax in Ian Fleming’s 1955 novel sometimes scattershot approach, there’s much ‘Moonraker’ (the third James Bond adventure to enjoy in this late-‘70s multi-million-dollar published), is now a topical space shuttle, extravaganza for which the term ‘the sky’s the which was in development in the US at the limit’ might have been coined. time. When preparing the original treatment The film begins in fine style with agent 007 (then called ‘For Your Eyes Only’) in 1977, being abandoned in a plane (an Apollo Airways writer Tom Mankiewicz visited NASA’s testing flight) and then engaging the pilot (stuntman complex in Northern California. It became a BJ Worth) in hand-to-hand combat during a standing joke about whether the real shuttle lengthy freefall descent for possession of a would take flight before the film one, but in the parachute. This is followed by a further fight event, the fiction version won. Bond producer with perhaps Bond’s most iconic nemesis Jaws Cubby Broccoli told the crew, “Now don’t forget, (played by Richard Kiel, but doubled for the this is science-fiction as we’re shooting it, but fall by Ron Luginbill), as the nerve-jangling by the time the film’s out, it’ll be science fact”. decent continues. The movie’s Drax (played by Michael Then something strange happens. For the Lonsdale) has high aims and Drax Industries finale of this spectacular sequence – and this makes a fleet of shuttles, to transport Drax’s real-time freefall with stunt doubles, filmed minions into space to his star city, before in close-up, is one of the most spectacular launching 50 globes into the Earth’s orbit – the stunts of the series – the payoff is played for nerve agent they will release causes sterility laughs, with Jaws comically flapping his arms and death. The deadly toxin is made from the and falling through the canvas of a circus big pollen of a rare Amazonian orchid, that is kept top. This jokiness had been an ingredient of in a glass bubble. Gilbert co-wrote a treatment the Bonds since Moore arrived in the hot seat, Above: Top: Roger with Mankiewicz, which was transformed into with moments of tension played as gags – the Moore goes a shooting script by Christopher Wood. pennywhistle effect on the 360-degree car shooting with the villainous Hugo flip on the bridge in The Man With the Golden Drax (Michael DOWN TO EARTH Gun (1974) being the most obvious. In Lonsdale) Moonraker is often cited as one of fact, in retrospect composer John Barry Left: 007 with the most gimmicky of the Bond acknowledged his mistake: “Earlier, Holly Goodhead films, that references and jumps I’d have played it for all it was worth (Lois Chiles), and Richard several bandwagons of the as a really dangerous moment in Kiel’s ‘Jaws’ 1960s and ‘70s. These include true James Bond style. I took this bites through a cable - which was the science-fiction craze that liberty of poking fun and made a actually made out mockery out of Bond”. of licorice

MISSION: IMPROBABLE Bond is dispatched by M (Bernard Lee in his last appearance in the role) and Q (Desmond Llewelyn) to investigate a missing Moonraker space shuttle. At the crash site of the jet that was carrying the shuttle, there is no trace of the Moonraker. If Fleming’s novel didn’t get out of Britain (most of it was set on the south coast of England, between Deal and Dover in Kent),

INFINITY 57 the film adaptation globetrots to exotic and in The Spy Who Loved Me, Bond’s gondola interesting locations, around the world and converts into a ‘Bondola’, first as a speedboat then above it. for a canal chase, then a skirting transforms it Bond investigates Drax Industries’ base into a land-worthy contraption resembling a in California, as Hugo Drax apparently plots hovercraft. Yet again these scenes, particularly the conquest of space. Bond encounters Lois as Bond cruises his 80-foot-long Bondola Chiles’ NASA boffin Dr Holly Goodhead (for through St Mark’s Square, are treated comically science, business and heights, it seems, not (resulting in the worst pigeon double-take in pleasure), who is really a CIA agent infiltrating cinema history). A fistfight between Bond and Drax’s operation (in Fleming’s novel, Bond’s Chang in a glass factory is a smashing set piece ally is Gala Brand, a policewoman posing as (or rather pieces), but ends with a gag – Chang Drax’s PA and statistician). Upon discovering plunges through a clock face into a grand piano Dr Goodhead’s gender, aghast Bond quizzically below. With Chang dispatched, Drax requires exclaims, “A woman!?” a replacement and this reintroduces Jaws, as Chiles wasn’t put off by her character’s played by hulking Richard Kiel fitted with a name: “I thought it was funny. I liked it. I told deadly set of steel teeth. my parents that it meant I was smart”. At the lab, Bond’s almost killed when he’s AROUND THE WORLD trapped in a velocity simulator creating Moore’s sartorial and well-groomed G-force centrifuge in Drax’s research lab, elegance is again to the fore, as when Drax’s suspicious Far-Eastern henchman to be expected from a film with Chang (Toshirô Suga, producer Michael G a credit ‘Roger Moore’s Hair Wilson’s Aikido teacher) is left minding the by Mike Jones’. He’s always control panel. immaculately dressed in the There’s the expected Bond gadgetry, like fashions of the era, including a cigarette case X-ray machine that cracks a a safari suit – but his usual safe, a flamethrower perfume bottle, and a charming charisma is often dart-firing wristband, but here it competes subdued. With his side-track with the wonders of the space-age. There are dalliances, Moore’s Bond some strikingly violent moments too, as when certainly lives up to Gala Drax’s beautiful pilot Corrine Dufour (Corrine Brand’s summation in Clery) is murdered for fraternising with Bond Fleming’s novel: “These and endures a savage death by Dobermans in Secret Service people a misty fairy-tale wood. always seemed to have A lead takes Bond to Venice, to Venini time for sex however Glass, and there’s a funeral boat straight out important their jobs of Don’t Look Now with a coffin concealing an might be”. assassin. To top the amphibious Lotus Esprit Flying down to Rio De Janeiro, the story packs in diversionary love interest for “ Upon discovering Dr Goodhead’s gender, aghast Bond, field agent Manuela (Emily Bolton), a carnival parade, and Bond quizzically exclaims, “A woman!?” a fight on a cable car straight out of Where Eagles Dare (1968) Chiles wasn’t put off by her character’s name: with pantomime villain Jaws, who has gone from a figure “I thought it was funny. I liked it. of menace to a figure of fun, complete with petite, blonde, I told my parents that it meant I was smart…” love-at-first-sight girlfriend,

58 INFINITY KISS KISS, BANG BANG oonraker’s basic plot ingredients closely resemble MDino De Laurentiis’ Italian-US Eurospy movie, Kiss the Girls and Make them Die (1966) which was originally called Se tutte le donne del mondo... (Operazione Paradiso) and was co-directed by Henry Levin and Arduino Maiuri. This spoofy blend of espionage and science-fiction has American CIA agent Kelly team up with British agent Susan Fleming. Kelly is played by future Mannix Michael Connors as a wisecracking, banana-addicted charmer, while Dorothy Provine channelled Lady Penelope from Dolly (Blanche Ravalec). This was a result a US and British agent teaming up) Thunderbirds as Fleming: her outré costumes and posh of the character receiving so much fan mail Moonraker resembles Henry Levin’s English pronunciation are memorable. Their scene of from children asking why Jaws couldn’t be a Italian-US Eurospy movie, Kiss the Girls and one-upmanship, where they compare their secret agent goodie. After the cable car fight, Jaws ends up Make them Die (1966). gadgets – dart-firing shoes and cigarettes, poisonous among the rubble of another failed attempt rings – is replayed in Moonraker. Terry-Thomas’ on Bond’s life with a wheel mechanism INTO ORBIT performance as Miss Susan’s karate-chopping chauffeur around his neck. The film launches into space for the last James is the icing on the cake. He’s very proud of Bond ends up in the Amazon jungle, half-hour and features some fabulous sets as his gadget-laden Rolls-Royce, which can mix drinks, seeking a mysterious black orchid that Drax’s bases. Drax imagines a ‘new world order’, fire machine guns and transform into an advertising seems to be connected to Drax’s nerve populated by his perfect male and female hoarding selling luxury watches (‘Happiness is bringing agent research. There’s another speedboat specimens. His spacecraft is a Noah’s Ark that baby home and getting a Bulova’). chase, deploying mortars and heat-seeking takes them to his ‘Dark Star’ space station, an The agents investigate respectable, rich industrialist torpedo (accompanied by the classic ‘007’ elaborate revolving construction hidden from and orchid breeder David Ardonian (Raf Vallone), who chase music theme first heard in radar. It is from this heavenly space city that has plans to launch a rocket into space containingClockwise his From Russia with Love), as Bond’s he will unleash Operation Orchid. harem of beautiful lovers, who are perfectlyfrom preserved above left: Glastron boat’s roof converts into With Bond and Holly finally captured by in suspended animation. Earthbound mankindCarpenter a hang glider, allowing Bond to Drax, Jaws becomes Bond’s ally, when Dolly meanwhile will suffer a loss of sex drive anddirects face Keith Gordon in fly to safety over the towering is threatened. US marines arrive in outer extinction, thanks to a satellite causing sterilityChristine, via 300-foot Iguazu Falls (Jaws isn’t space and an extra-terrestrial variation of radiation, which is bankrolled by CommunistKaren China. Allen so lucky). No wonder the budget the expected Bond climax, an assault on Ardonian’s HQ in the Amazon jungle, withand its Jeff rocket Bridges in was so big – the Glastron alone, the villains lair, unfolds. It was underwater launch pad, is suitably futuristic. The film’sStarman production, lost over the waterfall, cost in Thunderball, in a volcano in You Only designer was Mario Garbuglia, who workedKurt on Russella range and Kim $20,000. Live Twice and atop a mountain in On Her of Franco-Italian productions, from LuchinoCattrall Visconti’s Bond discovers Drax’s Majesty’s Secret Service – in Moonraker US arthouse costume epic The Leopard (1963)experience to Roger jungle HQ when marines float into action, armed with laser Vadim’s cult sci-fi Barbarella (1968). InteriorsBig Trouble were shot In Little he encounters guns, and Drax is sucked out through a hatch at Dino De Laurentiis Studios (known as Dinocittà)China, gory beautiful, into the infinity of space, as Bond notes “Take in Rome. There’s an amphibious car, Rio Dehappenings Janeiro from Prince white-robed a giant step for mankind”. and Amazon jungle locations, and a fight atopof Darkness the women For tax reasons, Moonraker was a 30-metre high Christ the Redeemer statueand on aliens Corcovado in disguise in straight Franco-UK co-production, which is obvious mountain – only showman producer De LaurentiisThey Live could out of She from its settings and cast. It was co-produced arrange permission to make a stunt like that happen. (1965) by Eon Productions and the French division The super cast of 1960s Eurospy actresses includes and of United Artists, and filmed in widescreen Margaret Lee, Nicoletta Machiavelli, Marilu Tolo, Seyna wrestles Panavision by Jean Tournier. An extravagant Seyn and Beverly Adams (secretary Lovey Kravezit from a plot point makes Drax so wealthy that Dean Martin’s ‘Matt Helm’ films). Ardonian’s henchmen python he’s had a French Palace transported and include albino Omar (Sandro Dori) and bald hitman (not reassembled brick-by-brick in California, Ringo, played by Oliver MacGreevy (famous as the sure which allowed the production to shoot at heavy codenamed ‘Housemartin’ in the 1965 Eurospy which Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte (exteriors) and classic The Ipcress File). breed, it Château de Guermantes (interiors) in France. Their methods of killing include scorpions, snakes could be a The end credits identify Moonraker being and piranha fish. The film has a comic book look, in monty), before shot in a variety of locations, including ‘Outer the style of the best in Italian genre cinema, thanks to Drax reveals his plan Space’, but studio work was carried out in Aldo Tonti’s cinematography. Salvatore Argento (horror to save his vision of France – at Boulogne-Billancourt and Epinay director Dario’s dad) was one of the film’s producers. humanity (beautiful in Paris – where production designer Ken Mario Nascimbene composed the score, including a people Drax has Adam constructed the largest sets ever seen harmonica theme played by John Sebastian and the selected) and wipe out in French cinema. Samba-ish theme song performed by Lydia MacDonald. life on Earth. In this Drax’s Amazonian HQ boasts spacious Many commentators have noted that there are several respect and others interiors and banks of screens, and the space obvious elements shared by Moonraker and Kiss the (the Brazilian station interior was constructed at Epinay Girls – and they make a very interesting double-bill. settings, the Studios. The interior of the command satellite The latter’s scarcity on videotape, DVD and Blu-ray deadly orchids, was a complicated fusion of gantries, tubes, perhaps speaks volumes.

INFINITY 59 of war. You Only Live Twice begins memorably with the US module Jupiter 16 being swallowed whole by an ominous spacecraft, engulfed by its monstrous ‘mouth’ nosecone. The astronauts – creating one seamless image. cat-stroking villains’ lair, where rockets land in The shuttles docking at the space station took a massive Japanese volcano, is one of the great 48 passes of the same piece of film, which is Bond sets. In Moonraker, as the space station wound back though the camera each time. is destroyed, it buckles and breaks up – Ken The space station model concepts were Adam’s Bond sets were usually destroyed for designed by Ken Adam, with detailing by Above: Roger Moore the finale, which always upset him. ex-NASA assistant Harry Lange, who had relaxes with worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey. The some lovely SPATIAL AWARENESS ladies. revolving space station itself was a 20-feet The majority of Before filming on Moonraker commenced, wide model built on the 007 Stage at the women seen Industrial Light & Magic was approached to Pinewood. There are no flames in space, so for as part of Drax’s master race were carry out the visual effects, but the company the finale, the model was blasted apart with Paris models wanted two percent of the film’s profit. Instead real shotguns, which when slowed down looked

Right: technicians worked for 10 months back at authentic. Jaws with his Pinewood Studios, beginning in August 1978. For a love scene, Bond and Holly’s weight- girlfriend Dolly (Blanche Ravalec) Visual effects supervisor lessness was achieved with old-fashioned travelled to Edwards Air Force Base, to see the wires and harnesses. As the film’s final gag, Below: actual $10 billion shuttles having ceramic tiles their weightless lovemaking is beamed live Hugo Drax and Jaws onboard the ramps and different elevations. At one point, attached to them. The space shuttle models globally on monitors to the White House and space station Bond manages to hit the ‘Emergency Stop’ closely resembled their true-life counterparts, Buckingham Palace. The minister of defence button, which causes the station to cease though the largest of the models was only five blusters: “My God, what’s Bond doing?” and Q revolving and induces weightlessness in the foot long. deadpans: “I think he’s attempting re-entry sir”. station’s crew. There’s some really impressive special Derek Meddings, Paul Wilson and John Ken Adam, on his seventh Bond film, found effects work in the film, notably as six space Evans’ visual effects gained an Oscar this by far the most difficult, even when shuttles rendezvous in orbit balletically. The nomination – they lost out to H.R Geiger, compared to a project on the scale of You Only effect shots were created by passing the film et al for Alien (1979). The Live Twice (1967). In that film, also directed through the camera and filming in component consummate skill with which the Moonraker by Gilbert, US and Russian space capsules in turn, which was painstaking, but effective. effects were done had the knock-on effect of are vanishing mysteriously, which increases Component by component, the image encouraging US filmmakers to carry out visual tension between the superpowers to the brink was built up – a model shuttle, a star field, effects work at UK studios. Premiering in the UK on 26 June 1979, Moonraker was released in the US on the 29 June, with posters proclaiming: “Where all the other Bonds end…This one begins”. As was often the case with trailers, the promo for Moonraker featured many alternate angles and outtakes unused in the finished film. Shirley Bassey’s two versions of the film theme, a ballad version and a disco version on the B-side, was released as a single, as part of a raft of merchandise to promote the film, including most famously a Corgi toy model of Drax’s space shuttle. Despite mixed reviews, Moonraker broke all records for the 007 films so far and took $210 worldwide, making the massive initial investment look nothing of a gamble.

Howard Hughes is the author of Outer Limits: The Filmgoers’ Guide to the Great Science-Fiction and co-author of The James Bond Archives.

60 INFINITY THE 28th FESTIVAL OF

FILMS Britain’s longest running independent ilm festival dedicated to science iction and horror from Friday October 20th until Sunday 22nd at the Manchester Conference Centre (The Pendulum Hotel) GUESTS INCLUDE:

Peter Wyngarde Jenny Hanley Camille Keaton (Flash Gordon, Jason King, (Scars of Dracula, (I Spit on Your Grave, Night of the Eagle) The Flesh and Blood Show) Death House)

Lone Fleming George Hilton Ruggero Deodato (Tombs of the Blind Dead, (The Sweet Body of Deborah, (Cannibal Holocaust and showing Return of the Evil Dead) The Devil with 7 Faces) his latest ilm “Ballade in Blood”.)

ONLY £85 for the whole weekend or £40 for Saturday only Contact: Gil Lane-Young (07773 347 864) E-mail: [email protected] or [email protected] www.fantastic-ilms.com The French called it, Chapeau melon et bottes de cuir – which translates as and leather boots. We knew it as The Avengers. Grant Peabody checks out the best shows from the Honor BlackmanB ROLyears… LY GOOD SHOW

62 INFINITY KEEPING THE BRITISH END UP

s a child of the 60s, I have an enduring nostalgic fondness for AThe Avengers, the cult TV classic that I sort of grew up with. The show came out of another series called Police Surgeon, which was made by the Associated British Corporation (remember the little ABC triangle?). This starred as the title character, Dr Geoffrey Brent and its twelve half-hour episodes were broadcast on ITV at 7pm on Saturday nights from 10 September to 3 December, 1960. Police Surgeon was created for ABC by enterprising producer . When it was cancelled, Newman took Hendry and his co-star Ingrid Hafner to a new series: The Avengers. It is sometimes mistakenly claimed that The Avengers was a direct sequel to Police Surgeon, with Hendry playing the same character in both. Although there were There are two more surviving episodes STEED TAKES OVER Above left: similarities, this was in fact not from The Avengers series 1 and they too are In the first series, ’s Steed Patrick Macnee’s with the case. This myth has possibly available on disc. Girl On A Trapeze has Dr. Keel was a secondary character, but as the series Ian Hendry’s Dr. been encouraged because material rescuing a girl who tries to commit suicide by progressed, Steed began to be established as David Keel in a scene from one relating to Police Surgeon is scarce, jumping into the Thames. He discovers that a co-star, carrying the final episode solo. Steed of Hendry’s first and the first episode of The Avengers she is a trapeze artist with a visiting circus was obviously a military man and in Death of season Avengers aired only one month after the final and foreign agents are out to capture her to a Batman, it was revealed that he was with I shows episode of Police Surgeon. force her father, a defecting scientist, to return Corps in the Second World War and in Munich Above: Steed Back in those days nobody ever to his country behind the iron curtain. John in 1945. In the episode The Nutshell, the secret with , played by Honor thought that TV shows were worth Steed doesn’t even turn up here and it’s a fairly organisation to which Steed belongs is shown, Blackman (also preserving, and the ones that were shot on ordinary tale, not a bit like the Avengers shows and it is Gale’s first visit to their HQ. seen below in a glamour shot). videotape were frequently ‘scrubbed’ so that that were to follow. In the 4th season episode The Hour That The actress the tapes could be used again. For this reason, The Frighteners is a more interesting Never Was, Steed goes to a reunion of his RAF extensively Police Surgeon is impossible to see these days. episode and has Keel and Steed rescuing a guy regiment. In reality, Macnee served in the war studied judo while starring Only one episode of the series, Easy Money, from a beating and uncovering an extortion as a naval lieutenant and came away with in the series, is known to exist. This was shown as part of plot which involves a wealthy business tycoon. such a distaste for firearms that he insisted and became so proficient that she ’s TV Heaven season back in the early Even from this early episode it is plain that Steed never use a gun, starting with the performed many 90s and is now available on home video. Steed is far more interesting and colourful 1966-1967 season. of her own stunts Series 1 of The Avengers was also shot on than Keel, and Patrick Macnee’s light-hearted As seen in the videotape, and again, most episodes of this approach to the character is much more surviving episode The have been lost to neglect… notably the very appealing that Ian Hendry’s rather stodgy Frighteners, Steed also first show, called . But the first 20 good guy. had a group of helpers minutes of this are available on a number of scattered among the DVD box sets. This material was apparently general population who discovered in America in 2000 and is very rare provided information, – though it did also form part of Studio Canal’s not unlike the “Baker very rare French Avengers ‘telephone box’ set a Street Irregulars” of few years back. The plot has medical doctor David Keel (Ian Hendry) investigating the murder of Peggy, his office receptionist and wife-to-be, by a drug ring – the ‘Hot Snow’ of the title is cocaine, and accidentally witnessing the identity of a secretive drug dealer seals Peggy’s fate. Enter a mysterious stranger named John Steed (Patrick Macnee) who has been investigating the ring and is working undercover as one of their members. He joins Keel and together they set out to avenge Peggy’s death in a story that runs over the show’s first two episodes. Afterwards, Steed asked Keel to continue partnering him on an as-needed basis to solve crimes. As seen on DVD these days, Hot Snow looks pretty good under the circumstances. We get the entire ‘Act One’ up to the adverts, and the rest of the show is presented to us in text précis form, which is better than just having to imagine what happens!

INFINITY 63 Steed became the focus of the series, initially working with a rotation of three different partners. Dr. Martin King (Jon Rollason), a thinly disguised rewriting of Keel, saw action in only three episodes, as he was only intended to be a ‘transition’ character between Keel and the two new female partners. He appeared in three unused scripts left over from the first series. Rollason later had a regular role on . Nightclub singer Venus Smith (Julie Stevens) appeared in six episodes. She was a complete “amateur”, meaning that she did not have any professional crime-fighting skills as did the two doctors. She was excited to be participating in a “spy” adventure alongside secret agent Steed (although at least one episode - - indicates she isn’t always enthusiastic). Nonetheless, she appears to be attracted to him and their relationship appears similar to that later displayed between Steed and . Her episodes featured musical interludes showcasing her singing performances. The character of Sherlock Holmes. The other regular character Venus underwent some revision during the appearing in the first series was Carol Wilson second series, becoming younger-looking (Ingrid Hafner), the nurse and receptionist in demeanour and dress. Stevens was better who replaced the slain Peggy. Carol assisted known in Britain as a host of various children’s Above: Keel and Steed in cases, without being a part and teen-age television programmes. Cathy in combat and of Steed’s inner circle in the way that Keel was. some colour publicity GALE FORCE shots from the show’s Hafner had played opposite Hendry as a nurse early days in Police Surgeon. The first episode of the second series Production of the first series was cut short introduced Steed’s third partner, and the one Above right: An early TV by a strike. By the time it was settled and who would change the show into the format Times feature on the production could begin on the show’s second it is most remembered for. Honor Blackman series series, Hendry had quit to pursue a film career. played Dr. Cathy Gale, a self-assured, This image: Cathy in a A fine actor, he never achieved the superstar quick-witted anthropologist who was skilled scene from Concerto, one of the best of the early status he so yearned for, but contributed fine, in judo and had a passion for wearing leather Avengers shows menacing performances to Get Carter and clothes. Widowed during the Mau Mau years the classic Sweeney episode, Ringer (“We’re in Kenya, she was the “talented amateur” who the Sweeney, son, and we haven’t had our saw her aid to Steed’s cases as a service to her dinner!”). Hendry later drifted into obscurity nation. and bankruptcy and died penniless at 53, Gale was unlike any female character possibly of alcohol-related causes. ever seen before on British TV and became Macnee was promoted to series star and a household name. Reportedly, part of her charm came from the fact that her earliest appearances were episodes in which dialogue Gale’s innovative leather outits originally were adopted for written for Keel was simply transferred to her. By the start of the third series, Smith was practical reasons, in view of the many athletic ight scenes. dropped and Gale became Steed’s only regular partner. The character was born on 5 October Blackman became a star in Britain with her black leather 1930 at midnight, either in Africa or she grew up in Africa (this makes her in her early-to-mid ighting suit and high-heeled boots (nicknamed “kinky 30s during her tenure on the program, another point of contrast with other female characters boots”) and her high-kicking ighting style. in such series who tended to be younger). In

64 INFINITY “Oooh, missus!” Steed doesn’t seem his usual debonair self in this shot!

Right: Honor Blackman poses in her fetishy leather gear

London, she lived at 14, Primrose Hill. FANCIFUL SLANT The series established a level of sexual The first really ‘proper’ series of The tension between the characters, although, Avengers, without Ian Hendry, included as part of the evolving format of the series, the episodes , Dead On writers were not allowed to let the characters Course, The Sell-Out and Death Despatch. go beyond flirting and innuendo. Despite this, Mission To Montreal is one of the very the relationship between Steed and Gale was best episodes. In this one the famous film progressive for 1962-63. star Carla Berotti’s stand-in is murdered, and In the episode , it is microfilm of the Dew Line - the early-warning revealed that Gale lived in Steed’s flat; her system in North America - has been stolen. rent according to Steed was to keep the The film star proceeds to Montreal on refrigerator well stocked and to cook for a luxury liner. Jon Rollason’s Dr King is him (she appears to do neither). It is also assigned as her personal doctor, and stated, however, that this was a temporary Steed goes undercover as a steward arrangement while Gale (for reasons not while they attempt to find the stated) looked for a new home, and that Steed microfilm. was actually sleeping at a hotel. The episodes Propellant 33, Mr. During the first series, hints were dropped Teddy Bear and Bullseye all feature that Steed worked for a branch of British Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale. Mr. Intelligence, and this was expanded in the Teddy Bear is fun and sees Steed locking second series. horns with the world’s deadliest assassin… Early on, Steed received orders from a who has a contract out on him funded by Mrs series of different superiors, most notably Gale! Propellant 33 is also a cracker and has men referred to only as “Charles” or “One-Ten” Steed and Cathy finding the dead body of the (Douglas Muir). By the third series, however, courier they were due to meet at Marseilles Steed was seen working on his own, the airport . A sample of a new liquid rocket fuel origins of his orders remaining a mystery. has been taken from his body. Facing enemy Another change during the Gale era was agents, Steed and Cathy must get the flask the transformation of Steed from a rather back. rough-and-tumble trenchcoat-wearing agent By this time the series was starting to into the stereotypical English gentleman, develop a slightly more fanciful slant. It was complete with Savile Row suit, bowler hat and also becoming increasingly ambitious in , the latter two full of tricks, most its action scenes. You can see these shows notably a sword hidden within the umbrella were filmed ‘live’ because there are moments handle and a steel plate concealed in the where characters fluff their lines badly, and hat. This is alluded to in the French title of answer telephones before they actually ring! the series, Chapeau melon et bottes de cuir Other episodes from the second series (“Bowler hat and leather boots”). include The Decapod , The Removal Men, The With his impeccable manners, old world Mauritius Penny, Death of a Great Dane and sophistication, and vintage automobiles, Death On The Rocks. The best of these, in Steed came to represent the traditional our opinion anyway, is Death on the Rocks: Englishman of an earlier era. By contrast, Illegal diamonds are swamping the market, his female counterparts (Gale, Peel, King) and a diamond merchant’s wife is murdered. were youthful, forward-looking, and always Cathy finds that rock salt crystals are being dressed in the latest mod fashions. used to smuggle diamonds into the country. Cathy Gale’s innovative leather outfits The Big Thinker is another really good one originally were adopted for practical reasons, about murders linked to a super-computer, in view of the many athletic fight scenes. and features a good role for Tony Blair’s Blackman became a star in Britain with her father-in-law, Tony Booth. is a fun black leather fighting suit and high-heeled episode also, where Steed persuades Cathy to boots (nicknamed “kinky boots”) and her impersonate Hilda Stern, a recently arrested high-kicking fighting style. assassin about to be used by a trans-national

INFINITY 65 attend a fancy dress ball on a train, Steed disguised as a gambler and Cathy as monk and later as a highwaywoman. This show introduces some of the light-hearted ‘dressing up’ themes that became even more popular when joined the show in season four. For straightforward action and excitement, check out the tense episode called Concerto. Brilliant young Soviet pianist Stefan Velika is giving his first concert in London. But somebody is attempting to smear Velika’s name, and this in turn is infringing on important Trade talks between representatives of the Russian senate and their British counterparts. Steed and Cathy are called in to help. The Charmers is another treat. Opposition agent Vinkel has died, and his employers believe that Steed was responsible. Believing it to be the work of a third party, Steed suggests to the opposition that he work with them in order to find out who was responsible, leading to a fast-moving and highly entertaining episode. If we had to pick a favourite, however, it would be Brief for Murder. Here Steed is charged with the murder of Cathy Gale after she alleges that Steed was implicated in a case Above: crime syndicate. When the real Hilda Stern THRILLS TO COME of treason. Steed is defended by two solicitors, Steed infiltrates arrives in London she is arrested and sent Honor Blackman went on to star alongside Japer and Miles Lakin, who had earlier advised a criminal organisation by to Holloway Prison. All goes well until Stern Patrick Macnee in the third series of The Steed on the best method of murdering Cathy! impersonating a breaks out of prison and confronts Cathy! Avengers, and this was when the show really This one carries the seeds of the tongue-in- vicar in The Little Wonders The second series also contained Immortal started to take off because there were now cheek eccentricity that would soon make The Clay, Box of Tricks, The Golden Eggs and School more good episodes than there were duds, Avengers into Britain’s top thriller show – and a Top: Patrick Macnee For Traitors. These are generally weak shows and the chemistry between the stars was hit in the USA as well. and Honor but School For Traitors is the best of them and firing on all cylinders as they settled into After two series in this format, a film version Blackman out sees Steed investigating the apparent suicide their characters. It’s nice to know that Honor of the show was in its initial planning stages on the streets of 60s London of a University tutor who had been working Blackman and Patrick Macnee remained by late 1963. The early story proposal would publicising the on important research. Frogs finds Steed on lifelong friends. have paired Steed and Gale with a male/female show holiday in Greece and investigating the death My own favourites from the third series duo of American agents, to make the movie of a deep-sea diver. The unusual locale and a are the likes of Don’t Look Behind You, where appeal to the American market. But before the twisty plotline make this one of our favourites Cathy is invited to spend a weekend at the project could gain momentum, Blackman was along with Six Hands Across The Table, which home of Sir Cavalier Resagne, an authority on cast opposite Sean Connery in the Bond film, is a classic. In this, Cathy is managing the medieval costume. However, Sir Cavalier has a Goldfinger, requiring her to leave the series. boxer Joey Frazer at Pancho Driver’s Gym. more sinister reason for inviting Cathy to his Enter Diana Rigg… a gal with Man Appeal. Steed believes that this may be a centre for home. Will Steed arrive in time to rescue her? shipments of illegal ambergris, especially In Dressed To Kill, all of the UK’s early Grant Peabody is the author of The after a dead sailor’s body is found in one of the warning stations are alerted for World War III, Stranglers of Bolton, only available from dressing rooms. It’s a good, exciting episode but turn out to be a false alarm. During the East Cheam public library that ends the series with a bang. course of their investigations, Steed and Cathy

66 INFINITY z

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ou are bound to go ape over our next issue because it’s a Planet of the Apes special, in which we will be looking at the ISSUE 5 - LANDING 12.10.17 Ypopular TV series that sprang from the original films, and presenting exclusive interviews with some of the top bananas in the show. See what we did there? We’ll also be meeting The Invaders, “alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it ‘their’ world. Only David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found.” Bring back memories? It does for us, and it will for you when you read our great feature on the famed 60s show, and please do read it because we might get angry if you didn’t and you wouldn’t like us when we are angry… Just like a certain not-so-jolly green giant known as The Incredible Hulk. He’ll be dropping by in the twin guises of Lou Ferrigno and Bill Bixby. And yes, we will be asking how come it is only his shirt that splits when he changes and not his tight pants too. Also presented for your edification and entertainment will be superbly illustrated features on comic book (er, graphic novel?) legend Alan Moore, Doctor Who comics (er, graphic novels?) and the History 0f 2000AD, a graphic comic (like Roy Chubby Brown? Ed). That’s not all of course, expect more of the maddest Italian sci-fi movies of all time, a flavoursome look back at that late 70s TV favourite Sapphire and Steel, and all of the amazing regular features that are turning Infinity into one of the world’s most popular printed SF mags. Make a stardate with us at your local newsagent or better still send us your subs money and we will beam the issue direct to your door.