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After referring to Rod Hunt and Alex Brychta's absolutely brilliant series as "god alufel bif and chip books", even if I knew the anwer I wouldn't tell you.

SBT

Whilst I'm a big fan of RT

ARGH! RT! The bane of my life! Retweet? Radio Times? Rogue Trooper? I seriously have to think this through everytime I see it. Not helped by my dad calling the droid in Star Wars "RT D2". And my dad's name being Artie.

Sorry, just had to vent! 

SBT

Well, isn't that just the kind of lovely, balanced article you'd expect from the Daily Mail? And to think, every time one of their "journalists" appears on Question Time, they wonder why the audience is so aggressive to them...

SBT

Yep, i have a major issue with (not this forum) threads headed 'RIP' featuring deservedly-dead arseholes like this. Ive seen posters banned from forums for daring to suggest scum like Gadaffi shouldnt be here- "respect for the dead, always, or else" runs the mantra. Well, no. The cessation of life doesnt grant you immunity from criticism, or well-placed hatred.

Anyway, yeah he's dead. Yippee!

SBT

Id prefer Tharg to leave well alone- barring the odd gerry finlay-day/ staz johnson one-shot- until it's known for definite whether there'll be a movie.

If there is, then yes, bring the strip back- but set it within the movie continuity. That way it doesnt interfere with the established strip... whichever bit of it you happen to favour, and is effectively something 'new'.

SBT

[John Carpenter's 'The Ward']

Right then... John Carpenter's 'The Ward'. <rolls up sleeves>

It is impossible to explain how much I love John Carpenter. For my entire film-watching life, he has been a constant presence- from those early teenage days continually renting The Thing, The Fog and Halloween, through his less-popular middle period and They Live, Prince of Darkness and In The Mouth of Madness, to his later projects Ghosts of Mars, Vampires and Cigarette Burns. And everything in between: Christine- his glorious collaboration with Stephen King, his unloved comedy Memoirs of An Invisible Man, his Kurt Russell star vehicles and even his student films. The man is a fag-smoking, tight jeans-wearing, laid back genius of the first order. Everything he touches thrills me, and I'm prepared to accept it may be some kind of ungodly man-crush.

There's so much to love: the classic Carpenter hero, Tom Atkins or Kurt Russell (or later, James Woods), his perfect eye for composition, his steady hand on a story, his mastery of the sudden scare- and of course, his music. There's nothing like a Carpenter soundtrack and no film composer can possibly touch him. Ennio Morricone? Pah! Danny fucking Elfman? Carpenter wees on you, while stinking of Brut. And drinking beer.

In recent years, Carp has come under a barrage of criticism for "not being as good as he once was". Obviously, this is the kind of complete bollocks bandied about by shandy-drinking filmschool Knobheads with absolutely no sense whatsoever, that all right-thinking people should laugh heartily at, while smoking fags and stinking of Hai Karate. Not Calvin Klein, like those effeminate strokey beardy gimps.  Yes, his early films had a massive, hammering social impact: Halloween changed the landscape of horror forever, The Thing- after a dismal run at the box office- went on to be in absolutely every intelligent person's Top Five Films Ever, and Escape From New York defined every action film for the next twenty years. But Carp never "lost it". It's just that audiences became inured to his techniques, they were copied elsewhere by lesser filmmakers, the Law of Diminishing Returns hit hard- and his later movies never found the wide audience appreciation that his early ones enjoyed. But Christ, we're talking about some of the best genre films of their decades here- each and every one. Oh sure, he slips up from time to time. I can't, in all honesty, find much to love in his remake of Village of the Damned for example, but even his derided later films like Ghosts of Mars are chocka with typical Carp. Ghosts is a rufty tufty sci-fi action pic that seems to have slipped through time from the early eighties- it should be looked at in the same light as Escape From New York as it features similar themes and resembles it in too many ways to list.

So we come to The Ward- just out on DVD- and positively reeking of Carpenter. Brilliantly, we have a near all-female cast. It's a shame that he didn't cast women in the few male roles, or we could have had a brilliant thematic reverse on The Thing- especially as all the horror here is of the (traditionally female) psychological bent, as opposed to the visceral masculinity of his earlier classic. But he doesn't, so we can only comment on how near it came. Which is a pretty good review of the whole thing, to be honest: It's very nearly great. The comparison to The Thing is doubly apt- but for reasons I can't possibly reveal to people who may not have seen it, but I can't help thinking it's an amusing coincidence that Carp unleashes this- which has so many similarities to his earlier film- at the same time we see that film remade and about to go on release.

We have a female psychiatric ward, in a mental hospital in 1966. Into this comes Kristen, arrested for burning down a farmhouse. She doesn't remember why she did it, but soon finds out the ward is seemingly haunted by a rotting zombie girl, picking off the patients one by one.

And that's basically it- tension is ramped up, we find out stuff, and it builds to a climax that will, as the sleeve says, "set you thinking". All the boxes are, if not confidently ticked, then at least slashed at by a master filmmaker wielding the tools of his trade in an effective manner. The sudden jumps are all present and correct, it's nicely filmed, some bits will make you squirm, the creature is pretty horrible and like I say (without ruining it) there are some strong thematic echoes and reversals of The Thing. The music- here not by the man himself- is very much in his style, and if we can't expect him to break out his Bontempi every time he goes to work, then at least we can be glad others appreciate his music enough to ape it when given the chance to work with him.

Is The Ward going to change the mind of anyone who whinges that "Carpenter hasn't made a decent film in mehmehmeh (makes yappy motions with his hand, while screwing face up to suggest a ponce)? No, obviously not. Is The Ward going to make the man's fans happy and give them the same kind of thrills and chuckles they've loved ever since they first saw his name appear on the screen? Yes, it is.

I may watch it again tonight, just because it's Carp.

7.5/10

SBT

Let's approach this sensibly: Do you have space in your abode to store an ever-increasing collection of progs? How do you view your prog- is it just a transitory repository of thrills before you inevitably "upgrade" to trades? Or do you consider each papery issue a beautiful creature in its own right, to be savered, bagged, and taken out from time to time to just... hold?

I feel you already know the answer to your question. If you've found yourself gazing at your stacked progboxes over the last few years, shaking your head and thinking "why do I do this? I have the stories I want to hand elsewhere. These are taking up space in which I would place new electronic equipment, or a sofa." then start downloading immediately- the paper has ceased to be of value beyond the immediate sentiment. If, on the other hand, like me, you gaze at your boxes and wonder if you should install some kind of quick-release spring catapult mechanism to launch them out of the window in the event of a fire, and are prepared to start fierce arguments with loved ones should they even begin to skirt around the subject of you possibly having "too many boxes of comics", then throw your Satanic iDevice out into the garbage and continue with the comics as they should be read.

SBT

Yes, i was published in the DC dredds... AND in dark horse's dredd vs aliens mini series.

Beat THAT, beard-face!



SBT

Always! im a master at coloring!

SBT

Oh, and if you watched on dvd and not some newfangled online delivery method, did you find The Dead sort of froze in several places? At first i thought it was a stylistic thing, but its obviously not. My dvd player is literally a week old and this is only the third or fourth time ive used it.

SBT

For wantonly mentioning the late, great, Jean Rollin in a public place, i sentence you to endless dull and largely one-sided conversation from me regailing you with my thoughts of why Les Deux Orphalines Vampires is one of The Best Films Ever Made, and how i had dinner with the great man AND accompanied him to a cemetary.

Or maybe i'll just say: yeah, The Dead. Is groovy. And youre the second person to mention it to me today. Hopefully word is spreading!

SBT

Borag thungg Soapywrapper! And may i say, what a great name.

SBT

Contact denise, mr large. When i needed this, they hunted around and found me one. There may be more knocking about up there.

SBT

Well, i AM heterosexual, and my walls were plastered with adam ant, marc almond and duran duran. Plastered WITH you notice, not BY. My teenage bedroom was not some kind of bukkake dungeon, walls dripping with popjizz.

But there's no shame in reading girls comics- i'd kill for a set of Mistys, and the nascent photostories in my guy et al fascinate me now.

And i still wear makeup when i go somewhere good.

SBT

I am currently sporting this fine beauty.

SBT