Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974)

Someone - or something - is roaming the woods, ambushing young women and draining them of their youth.  The local surgeon calls in an old army friend, one Captain Kronos.  Kronos, who arrives with a hunchbacked professor (as well as some girl he randomly picked up in the woods) in tow, is now working as a vampire hunter, and quickly ascertains that such a creature is responsible here.

This isn't your normal blood-drinking, stake through the heart, can't eat Italian food vampire though.  As the professor helpfully explains, there are hundreds of different types of vampire, each with their own powers and weaknesses.  This one drains youth, rather than blood, and can be expected to be young and gorgeous itself.

The girl with Kronos is young and gorgeous, and in a smarter film perhaps she would have turned out to be the monster.  But no-one, including the script writer, ever seems to consider this possibility.  A shame.  Instead we get a villain so obvious that I was actively disappointed that they weren't a red herring.

"Actively disappointing" might be a good way to sum up this whole film, actually.  Leading man Horst Janson lacks the charisma to make the taciturn Kronos compelling, but I'm not sure many actors would have been up to that challenge.  The script certainly does him no favours in that regard, and it misfires in a number of other ways too, frequently squandering precious chunks of its slender 90 minute run-time on characters and scenes that add little to proceedings.

This was apparently planned to be the start of a new franchise for Hammer Films, but the studio's money troubles sunk that plan.  Based on the one effort they completed, I'm far from convinced we lost anything in not getting a Captain Kronos 2.

Arrow, Season 1 (2012)

Five years after his presumed death by drowning, billionaire playboy Oliver Queen is rescued from an isolated island off the coast of China.  The name of the island?  Lian Yu; which we are told is Mandarin for "purgatory".

Given the name of the place, it's perhaps no surprise that the man who returns from Lian Yu is not the careless, carefree and callow fellow who disappeared half a decade earlier ... though he does his level best to convince everyone that he is.

You see, the man who returns is an avenger (though not an Avenger; wrong comic book universe!) of the wrongs done to his home city.  He was set on this path by his father, who did perish in the disaster at sea, and forged for the purpose by the struggle to survive.

The new Oliver Queen is, overall, full of MANPAIN, even before we factor in the complicated mess that is his love life.

Arrow is a bombastic and really quite silly program that is lifted firstly by the fact that it plays its own bombast straight, and second by an excellent supporting cast of fun characters, who are well performed.  Which is not say that Stephen Amell is bad in the lead role of Oliver Queen - he is quite serviceable, and for those who like such things, he takes his shirt off a lot - but this first season's arc is very much about his character reclaiming from of the warmth and humanity that was knocked out of him by his time on the island.  So he's Broody McBroodsalot for most of the time.  I mean, just look at that mug on the DVD image above!

This is really solid "Batman with a bow" superhero action.  Recommended if you're at all willing to buy into the premise.

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)

A mysterious beast terrorises provincial France.  The king sends Grégoire de Fronsac, a knight and the royal naturalist, to track and hopefully destroy the beast.  Fronsac is accompanied on his quest by his compatriot Mani, an Iroquois shaman who for reasons it will never explain is a kung fu and karate expert (Mani is played by Mark Dacascos, who of course has not one drop of Native American blood.  Sigh.).

Fronsac is knowledgeable enough to be sure he is not chasing an ordinary, but even he is not prepared for what he will actually find ...

Brotherhood of the Wolf is beautifully shot, and has a number of fine action set pieces, and for the first hour I was thoroughly enjoying it.  Alas, it turns out to be a horribly self indulgent movie that stretches to two and a half hours, which is (a) way too long, and (b) a symptom of it attempting to be about three different movies all at the same time, and doing none of them well.  I was actively angry with the film for much of the last half hour.

Also, it is encumbered by a painfully unconvincing romance sub-plot.  Please take note, movie makers: it is not enough for two people to be pretty and to occasionally share a screen to make me believe they are soulmates.  Show me a meaningful connection between them!  And no, having a third character tell the female half: "Sure, he has been sleeping with me, but he has been dreaming of you." doesn't cut it.

The Protectors, Season 1 (1972)

The Protectors are an elite international security agency, working with private persons and with friendly governments on all manner of sensitive cases, including providing bodyguards, searching for missing persons, and recovering stolen goods.  They're led by Harry Rule (played by a now slightly aging, slightly portly "Man from UNCLE" Robert Vaughn), whose principle cohort is the Contessa Caroline di Contini.  With occasional assistance from Paul Buchet (the other man pictured above), this duo tackles terrorists, kidnappers, drug smugglers and corrupt politicians.  They even find time to look for a starlet's missing puppy.

That "missing puppy" episode is a consciously farcical affair that apparently even fans of the show treat with derision, but it might actually be my favourite of the season.  Let's make no bones about it: this is a pretty light and silly show, with scripts that are much longer on action than they are on plot.  Tuning up that frothy nonsense to full-on slapstick as a one-off change of pace worked quite well, I thought, though I wouldn't want it every week.

Ultimately, The Protectors is a harmless but not terribly memorable TV spy show.  I'd rate it as better than supposedly more cerebral Department S from a few years earlier, mostly because it seems to take itself a bit less seriously and because the shorter episodes make for snappier viewing.

Not terrible, but not actively good enough for me to recommend it.

Super Inframan (1975)

Cataclysmic earthquakes devastate cities, while mountains crumble to reveal a giant, monstrous face.  Princess Dragon Mom has awoken from her ten million year hibernation, and intends to conquer the surface world with her army of mutants and skeleton men!

Here she is, addressing the troops

Fortunately for humanity, Science Headquarters - a gleaming facility that for some reasons has scores of martial arts-trained, pistol wielding, silver clad staff - exists, and its chief scientist has a plan to thwart this unforeseen enemy (about whom he seems to know an awful lot, given that whole unforeseen-ness of hers).  He will take one of his best agents and equip him with cybernetic enhancements, allowing him to transform into the deadly monster-fighting hero Super Inframan!

So: this movie.  This movie.  It's kind of like someone in 1970s Hong Kong saw one of the cheesier Godzilla films, and H R Pufnstuf and thought "Two great tastes that go great together!".  And I wholeheartedly agree.  There really are few things in life finer than watching some guy in a spider-themed fat suit trying to do kung fu.

Awesomely terribad.

Robin of Sherwood, Season 2 (1985)

Accompanied once more by the lilting strains of Clannad, Robin of Loxley continues his struggle against the tyranny of Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham.  Also against Satanic Cultists, because this is MYTHIC Robin Hood.  That last element got the show in hot water with Professional Hater of Fun Things, Mary Whitehouse, because apparently you shouldn't show satanists as having actual magical powers, or at all.

As a kid, I loved the supernatural elements of Robin of Sherwood.  The mysterious figure of Herne the Hunter in his cool stag's head outfit, the sorcerous shenanigans of Robin's adversaries, and so forth.  As an adult I am more ambivalent about them, though definitely not for the same reasons as Ms Whitehouse.  For me, the issue is that when you have verifiable magic and supernatural forces actively at work in your setting, it stretches credulity and my sense of verisimilitude if no-one outside the core cast ever seems to acknowledge it.  "Magic is real" is great, but given that, surely the wicked Prince John should have a pet alchemist brewing potions for him, and so forth.

That quibble aside, I generally enjoyed this jaunt back to the days of my youth.  The production values are pretty good for UK show of the era (even if it's sometimes pretty obvious that the castles they're supposed to be living in are not exactly in prime condition), and the cast is solid.  I wish a little more was done with Robin's cohorts, though.  They are sometimes left a bit short of things to do.

If moody medieval adventures sounds like your kind of thing, check it out.

Ghost Shark 2: Urban Jaws (2015)

As Auckland prepares to host the 83rd International Water Convention, it finds itself haunted by the menace of the Ghost Shark: a supernatural predator capable of swimming through (and controlling) any form of water, whether it in be liquid, solid (ice) or gaseous (steam) form.  Fortunately, the city mayor is familiar with the danger this creature presents, and he instantly recognises the signs that one is on the loose, and brings in an expert Ghost Shark Hunter to try and stop it.

Ghost Shark 2: Urban Jaws began life as a fake trailer (obligatory warning: TV Tropes link).  After being posted to YouTube it was re-shared by several prominent websites, eventually generating enough interest that they decided to make an actual film.

This was probably a mistake.

Don't get me wrong, there are some laughs to be had here, in the po-faced, super-serious way that the characters treat farcical events like a man being murdered by his own pot of spaghetti sauce.  There's lots of jaw-clenching and thousand yard stares into the distance and earnest declarations of how terribly grim the situation is, while people are being killed by their kettles and toilets.

Trouble is, this one basic joke is basically all the movie has, and even with a scant 75 minute running time, it wears very thin well before the film is over.

My recommendation?  Just watch the faux trailer that started it all.

The Twilight Zone, Season 1 (1959)

I'm not sure The Twilight Zone really needs introduction, given that it has spawned three TV shows (with a fourth on the way), a film, novels, comics and even a theme park ride, but just in case: this is an anthology series in which each episode presents a stand-alone story.  Generally, the leading characters of each entry find themselves dealing with strange or unusual events, and many episodes end with a twist (M Night Shyamalan was probably a fan) or moral.

In terms of genre, The Twilight Zone covers a fair bit of ground: more I think than is commonly supposed.  The supernatural or fantastic elements of many plots might on the face of it mark an individual episode as 'fantasy' or 'science fiction', but I think that's probably letting the set dressing have too much say in the classification.  Would Romeo & Juliet cease to be a romantic tragedy if it was set in space?  I don't believe so, and I think a similar rule applies here.  Just because an episode like "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" has a final denouement where a character literally wills herself into a movie does not obviate the fact that it's at heart a study of one woman's emotional turmoil and dissatisfaction.

So is it good?  Yes, it is.  Not every episode is a home run, of course (and the episode with a baseball setting definitely isn't); that's the nature of anthology shows.  And naturally some of the stories aren't as fresh or innovative today as they were sixty years ago when they first hit TV screens: but that's at least in part because so many other media works have riffed on them.  I don't necessarily love all the reputed "classics" of this season ("The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street", I am looking at you), but I'd be surprised if you didn't find something to like in offerings like "What You Need" or "The Hitch-hiker".  At the very least, I'd recommend tracking down an online list of the best regarded episodes (many of which are from this first season) to selectively sample the show's wares.