Regular readers of these pages will know that I share a birthday with Kirsten Dunst and for the last two years, I've used this as an excuse to load the blog with eye-candy.Time for a change this year, methinks.I also share a birthday with R&B star Akon, whose hilarious collaboration with The Lonely Island, 'I Just Had Sex', is presented here for your viewing pleasu...
Saturday, 30 April 2011
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Wrapping up two weeks celebrating the work of Shane Briant, it’s worth mentioning his recent second career as a best-selling author. His first novel ‘The Webber Agenda’ appeared in 1994: an old-school plot-driven thriller that you imagine flowing from the pen of Alistair MacLean or Robert Ludlum. It’s fast-paced globe-trotting narrative mirrored the locations Briant was visiting for a movie he was shooting at the time!It was followed by ‘The Chasen Catalyst’ (1995), ‘Hitkids’ (1995), ‘Bite of the Lotus’ (2001), ‘Graphic’ (2005), ‘Worst Nightmares’...
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
A great actor will excel in any medium. Shane Briant earned comparisons to John Gielgud and Michael Redgrave before he’d ever stepped in front of a movie camera. It was a natural transition from the stage to the silver screen. It was also inevitable that he’d shine on the small screen.I’ve already written about his deliciously amoral turn in the ‘Sweeney’ episode “Chalk and Cheese”, but his work for television goes beyond that highpoint in 70s drama.Briant followed his cinema debut in ‘Straight on Till Morning’ with an episode of the long-running...
Monday, 25 April 2011
Posted to commemorate the first anniversary of Alan Sillitoe’s deathPublished in 1959 and one of the few Sillitoe titles (along with ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ and his last two or three books) still in print, this collection of short fiction contains nine stories: ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, ‘Uncle Ernest’, ‘Mr Raynor the School-Teacher’, ‘The Fishing Boat Picture’, ‘Noah’s Ark’, ‘On Saturday Afternoon’, ‘The Match’, ‘The...
Sunday, 24 April 2011
Although the Frankenstein franchise notched up almost as many entries as Hammer’s Dracula series, it never quite captured the popular consciousness the way the caped bloodsucker from Transylvania did. Maybe because Peter Cushing wasn’t as dangerously sexy as Christopher Lee. Maybe because reanimated corpses aren’t as darkly appealing as aristocratic vampires.What the Frankenstein films can lay claim to, however, is that they didn’t suffer the drop-off...
Saturday, 23 April 2011
Talk about potential. ‘Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter’ had all the elements to make it one of the Hammer’s finest horror movies, the curtain raiser to a franchise to rival the Dracula or Frankenstein franchises.The film ticks the right boxes in its traditional period setting, its embrace (and subversion) of vampire tropes, its third act narrative development that links it to the Karnstein trilogy, its bevy of beauties (including Caroline Munro, Wanda...
Friday, 22 April 2011
Thursday, 21 April 2011
Shane Briant’s four iconic appearances in Hammer productions are the main feature of Shane Briant week here on The Agitation of the Mind. But let’s take a mid-week break and consider his deliciously amoral turn in “Chalk and Cheese”, the first episode of series two of ‘The Sweeney’.I’m going to throw out a statement here which might sound like fan-boy rhetoric, but I can assure you it’s not mere opinionism but a statement of fact. Ready? Here it...
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
Technically Shane Briant’s first film – completed with “and introducing ~” credit – although ‘Straight on Till Morning’ ended up being released ahead of it. On the surface, ‘Demons of the Mind’ inhabits a more generically Hammer milieu: a gothic castle, a carriage and horses thundering through the woods at dusk, hidden family secrets, heaving bosoms, grisly murders, torch-bearing villagers and a mad priest.Scratch the surface, however, and it goes...
Tuesday, 19 April 2011
Hammer = horror, right? The way Ealing = comedies, or Platinum Dunes = unnecessary remakes.But just as Ealing also produced gritty crime movies (‘The Blue Lamp’), historical dramas (‘Scott of the Antarctic’), slices of social realism (‘It Always Rains on Sunday’), war movies (‘Went the Day Well?’) and one of the most accomplished horror portmanteau films (‘Dead of Night’) ever made, so Hammer’s output – including Bernard Mainwaring’s lost satire...
Monday, 18 April 2011
Robert Kenchington, the man behind the Shane Briant Tribute Site, recently provided me with review copies of his pictorial biographies ‘Shane Briant: a Talent for Terror’ and ‘Shane Briant: the Hammer Years’. The latter gave me a yen to revisit the four (very different) films Briant made for Hammer between 1972 and 1974. Actually, scratch “revisit”. Two nights ago I watched ‘Straight on Till Morning’ for the first time. It’s one of those films that’s...
Saturday, 16 April 2011
Welcome to St Hilda’s College, less a finishing school for young ladies than a school where young ladies get finished off. It’s an establishment rife with jealousy, petty rivalries and lesbian crushes … and that’s just the staff! Behind this inimically voyeuristic setting and its magnificently lurid title (a literal translation from ‘Nude … Si Muore’), Antonio Margheriti’s pacy and entertaining giallo is a classic whodunit bracketed firmly in the...
Thursday, 14 April 2011
My appearance in today's edition of the Nottingham Evening Post; I'm the one in the the top right hand corner. The one with the facial hair. I'm working with the Alan Sillitoe Statue Fund Committee on various projects to publicize and raise money for a commemorative statue of Alan Sillitoe in his home town of Nottingham. We're hoping to have a website up and running by early next month; I'll post a link when it goes live. In the meantime, The Sillitoe...
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
Thanks once again to my buddy Aaron for contributing a guest review.Edmund (Jonathan Frid) is an accomplished horror author who's referred to as "the modern-day Edgar Allan Poe". He has recurring nightmares about being terrorized by three of his own characters, but the nightmares eventually become a reality for Edmund and his houseguests one weekend when they actually show up at his home and force everyone to partake in a series of sadistic games....
Sunday, 10 April 2011
Posted to coincide with Max von Sydow’s 82nd birthday Broadly speaking, the glory days of the giallo were the mid 60s to the late 70s. But the genre never entirely went away. Still hasn’t. Dario Argento saw in the new millennium with ‘Sleepless’, a rather calculated return to form that gave him the biggest hit in his native Italy that he’d had since ‘The Stendahl Syndrome’ five years earlier. A prologue set in 1983 has world-weary cop Inspector...
Saturday, 9 April 2011
Posted in memory of Sidney Lumet Sidney Lumet had a run of straight-up masterworks during the 70s which included ‘The Offence’, ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ and ‘Network’. All are dynamic, character-driven and provide investigations into their protagonists’ state of mind. In particular, ‘The Offence’ and ‘Serpico’ are probing and disquieting enquiries into police work and moral compromise. Their main characters are a study in opposites. Whereas, in ‘The...
Thursday, 7 April 2011
Let’s call it WTF Syndrome. Mainly because You’ve Never Seen [Insert Film Title] Syndrome is a bit long-winded, and the friend/colleague/family member uttering these words in a tone of diamond-hard incredulity will usually follow up with an equally disbelieving “what the fuck” anyway. We all have WTF Syndrome movies is our lives. Movies that passed you by on their first release – sometimes for reasons that seemed valid at the time, sometimes for...
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