Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season1 (1997) - Horror TV Show Review

I am a huge fan of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, yet I didn't actually start watching either the main show or the spin-off until they were multiple seasons in. I remember in the early 2000's it would be something that just happened to be on TV as me and my uni friends did pre-drinking on a Thursday night. Nowadays I have seen it a fair bit, it's one of those shows that might feel dated now, but it is still a blast. Season 1 consisted of just 12 episodes (all future seasons would feature 22) and it felt like it was finding its feet in terms of characters and the flow of the episodes.

For the few who don't know, Buffy the Vampire Slayer takes places in a universe where monsters exist, but the vast majority of humanity are blissfully unaware of this. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar - I Know What You Did Last Summer) is a slayer; a female imbued with superhuman strength and tasked with killing monsters, specifically vampires. Each time a slayer dies a new one takes on their power, and Buffy is the latest. She moves to the town of Sunnydale with her mum, but unluckily for her the town is built on top of a 'hellmouth' which is a literal gateway to Hell, and so supernatural events happen more frequently than elsewhere. The Master (Mark Metcalf) is an ancient vampire who got trapped in the entrance to the hellmouth hundreds of years ago, and is getting close to finding a way to escaping his prison, which will be a terrible thing for the world. It is up to Buffy and her new friends; Xander (Nicholas Brendon), Willow (Alyson Hannigan) the librarian Giles (Anthony Head - Repo! The Genetic Opera), and friendly vampire Angel (David Boreanaz - Angel) to find a way to stop him.

All of my criticisms that I'm going to mention here don't detract from my enjoyment of the show. Heading back to this first season again I found it supremely interesting seeing how it all originated. Some of the characters here are surprisingly well developed, while others spend much of the season heading down wrong paths, only for their development to get course corrected later on. Xander and Willow are both likable characters, yet in this season their storylines are terrible. It starts with episode one, Welcome to the Hellmouth in which their best friend, Jesse is taken (and eventually killed an episode later). This character is never ever mentioned again, the two friends seemingly replacing him with Buffy right away. Xander spends the entire season in love with Buffy, Willow spends the whole season in love with Xander. Neither of these two storylines go anywhere and it just felt so by the numbers, so it is good that these plotlines later get abandoned. Also with Willow, her defining characteristic being she is some sort of hacker thankfully gets dropped in later seasons. Giles was a great character, I had nothing bad to say about him, not so much his counterpart, Jenny (Robia Scott) who first appears in one of the episodes that had dated the worst, I Robot... You Jane in which a demon gets reborn on the internet. Having Jenny and her I.T students sat around PC's with tiny screened huge monitors and talking about 'surfing the web' was quite cringe in modern context.
While Giles and Buffy are both great characters I also enjoyed Angel's inclusion in this season, appearing as an enigmatic person who comes across as a bit neutral in the conflict, before the mid-season reveal that he is actually a vampire. He always felt like someone who was more interesting the less you knew about him. It is Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) who was the biggest surprise in that she gets the most development over the season. She starts off as a self centered popular kid who gets joy in bullying those she sees as beneath her. By seasons end she is fully clued in to the evils of the world and shows her version of respect for the protagonists.

Star Wars - Galaxy of Fear: City of the Dead (1997) by John Whitman - Children's Horror Book Review

Star Wars - Galaxy of Fear was a most surprising series of books in that they were basically the Goosebumps of Star Wars. This 12 book collection were written with children in mind and mainly centered around the young siblings, Tash and Zak, who get into a series of misadventures while travelling around the galaxy with their secretive Uncle Hoole. City of the Dead is the second book in the series, and takes place chronologically three years after the events of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, and just a few days after the first Galaxy of Fear book, Eaten Alive (which apparently was to do with an evil sentient planet). Of course all expanded universe lore has since been ruled non-canon, after reading this one that is probably a good thing! I chose City of the Dead to read as it is a story about the undead.

Hoole, Tash, and Zak hitched a ride on the Millenium Falcon (of course) to the mysterious planet Necropolis, in order to secure a new starship. The inhabitants of Necropolis are a superstitious bunch and hold a special regard for the dead, believing an ancient legend that not to do so will unleash a zombie plague. Zak makes some new friends, and they dare him to enter the Necropolitan cemetery at midnight. Doing so he is more than shocked when he discovers the dead rising up from their graves. While all this is going on the legendary bounty hunter, Boba Fett has arrived on the planet, searching for a wanted mad scientist.   

Star Wars: Death Troopers which came out 2009 was a much better Star Wars zombie story, which wasn't too hard. To be fair, that book was intended for adults and so the horror could be a lot more extreme. Even so, as good as that book was the author just could not resist including some of the popular characters from the films. Their inclusion was quite jarring and so, when City of the Dead immediately has the main characters on board the Millennium Falcon I felt very dubious as to how good this book would be. This book worships the ground Boba Fett walks on, he is stuffed into far too much of the 144 page novel and is always treated as if he is the coolest person ever to exist. If it wasn't for him this would have been a much better story, as it is, like Death Troopers that came much later the presence of film characters ruins events.

Alien: Resurrection (1997) - Sci-fi Horror Film Review (2003 Special Edition)

Alien: Resurrection is the last of the proper Alien films and is one I hadn't seen for decades. Technically I still haven't seen it for decades as for this review I watched the '2003 Special Edition' which includes a new opening and closing scene. Apparently out of all the special editions for the Alien films this is the only one where story elements are not changed up. This adds around four minutes of additional footage, as well as removes some parts that were originally included. It opens with an intro from director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie, The City of Lost Children) who explains somewhat grudgingly that the new version of the film isn't the directors cut, he states the original theatrical version was his directors cut as it had everything he wanted in it.

This takes place 200 years after the end of Alien3, in which Ripley (Sigourney Weaver - Alien series, Ghostbusters) killed herself in order to stop the evil Weyland Yutani corporation from getting their hands on the alien growing inside her. That company has long ceased to exist, however a shadowy branch of the military has managed to clone both her, and the alien inside her on a secret military space vessel. They plan to breed an army of aliens to use as weapons but are unaware of how dangerous this plan is. A group of space bandits, that include among them Call (Winona Ryder - Stranger Things) and Johner (Ron Perlman - Hellboy) arrive on the vessel not long before the resurrected and fully grown alien Queen escapes from confinement, along with a whole bunch of new, more intelligent aliens. Now these bandits must team up with a couple of soldiers, as well as the Ripley clone (that has alien type abilities) in order to escape the doomed vessel.

In my mind Alien: Resurrection was not a great film, I recalled enjoying it but felt that at the time too much time had passed between this and the third film. In reality it wasn't so long. Sure it was five years, but then the gap between Alien and Aliens was seven years, and the gap between that and Alien3 was again another seven years. Getting past the slightly dodgy way Ripley is once again alive and kicking (apparently she was cloned by a blood sample that was retrieved from the prison complex in Alien3) this was a fun film that tries to be an amalgamation of past ones. The horror and suspense is almost non existent, so this has more in common with Aliens, though a much more low key adventure. The aliens are not in huge abundance and usually only appear in ones and twos, or to kill or attack characters from off camera. Along the way you get both facehuggers, the typical aliens, the alien Queen, as well as a new human/alien hybrid who becomes the third acts monster antagonist.

Event Horizon (1997) - Horror Film Review

Some reviews write themselves, some have to be pried out my head and vomited onto screen, Starting off on a bum note but this review of Event Horizon has taken me all day to write, it is trash! Alas even I have off days.

Event Horizon is a classic cult British sci-fi thriller released back in 1997. I first become interested in it after learning that the survival horror video game Dead Space was in part influenced by the film. On a side note it is fun to see the mixed relationship Event Horizon and the video game Doom have. Event Horizon uses a Doom sound effect at the film's start while the plot of Doom 3 is very similar to Event Horizon's.

The film takes place in 2047, a search and rescue vessel under the command of Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) is seeking out an experimental ship called the 'Event Horizon' after receiving a distress signal, seven years after it mysteriously vanished on its maiden voyage. Along with the crew of the rescue vessel is Event Horizon's creator Dr William Weir (Sam Neill) who wants to discover just what happened to his ship. After arriving the crew are puzzled to find it completely deserted. While exploring the ship they start to have vivid hallucinations that seem to point to the fact that something terrible has happened on Event Horizon.

Event Horizon takes quite a while to get going, and up until the last quarter is a slow paced affair with lots of long atmospheric creeping about. Until that last part I was beginning to think that the film was not what I had expected, sure I was enjoying it but it was maybe a bit too slow, and a load of the characters in the film are irritatingly stupid, especially a woman nicknamed Mama Bear who follows a hallucination of her son to her doom despite the fact that if she had two brain cells it would be astonishingly apparent that there was no way on God's Universe her child could be on the damned Event Horizon. The other characters vary between annoying, plain and mean but the film still finds room in its limited main cast of seven or eight, to include a token black comic relief guy (he is a welcome relief as much the film is bleak and dark).

It sounds like I didn't enjoy the film, but I did, it doesn't help that I watched it in chunks rather than in one sitting, that always interferes with my enjoyment of films. The director Paul Anderson has stated that a large amount of violence was cut out of the film to get his film rated, as such you would expect it to be quite tame but no; there is plenty of gore with self mutilation, and inventive killings. The film also pays heavy homage to The Shining, almost like a sci-fi remake of that film at times with rivers of blood, possession, and even two creepy blood soaked girls making an appearance.

Starring quite a few famous actors and with a intriguing plot Event Horizon is a great little sci-fi film combining elements from some of the best horrors to make for a thrilling ride.

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Devil's Child (1997) - Horror Film Review

First of all - hahahaha! Devil's Child is terrible! Heh, ok I got that out my system. This is quite a low budget supernatural thriller.

Basically a girl called Nikki is told by her mum on her mum's death bed to beware of miracles. Soon after a load of weird stuff starts happening. Her mum 'explodes in a church' as one character describes it, her work enemy is mown down by a driverless car, a dog in her apartment commits suicide, and a mysterious and attractive stranger called Alex enters her life.

The film is stupid! It does co-star the excellent Matthew Lillard (of Scream, and Thir13en Ghosts fame) though. It turns out Alex is in fact the Devil. When Nikki was a young girl she had an accident and died. Her mum made a deal with the Devil to resurrect Nikki in exchange for promising the Devil that he can father a son with her.

The film is really rushed in the last quarter. From getting pregnant to having her child takes literally about ten minutes of screen time, yet there's no indication that any time has passed at all. It seems strange Nikki would carry on living in her apartment opposite the flat of the man she is terrified of for the length of the pregnancy, especially considering she discovers earlier in the film the previous tenant of her flat was buried alive in the wall (a subplot completely abandoned later on).

The film has a good soundtrack at least, and some cool generic female fronted rock (played in the background of a hilariously bad 90's photoshoot). I got Devil's Child on DVD real cheap, so can't complain, and it was kind of funny, though unintentionally so.

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