Monthly Archives: February 2013

NO PLOT SPOILERS Guillermo del Toro’s name features large here, and you can sense his hand upon Andrés Muschietti’s debut feature, not always to the best effect. Which is a great pity, because there’s a terrific idea at the core of this supernatural thriller. When a financial manager goes postal in the economic crash and wipes […]

‘The future is where you and I will live’ – wasn’t it the Great Criswell who said that in ‘Plan Nine From Outer Space’? Once we had dreams of flying cars, jet-packs, matter transmitters, foldaway homes, tiny phones and flat TVs you could hang on the wall – and only the last two came true. […]

The British have a strange attitude about comics – we love them in other formats but don’t buy comics much. There has always been a snobbish attitude to les bandes dessinees. We seem to think they can’t involve complex adult themes despite endless evidence to the contrary. So it’s not surprising that the superbly elegant Tripwire, […]

This may be the first of an occasional series to show where characters come from. My mad and melancholy white witch Maggie Armitage may be found in the pages of most Bryant & May novels, usually either helping to solve a crime or making matters worse, but as many of you know she’s based on […]

After hearing the embarrassing interview on Radio 4, in which a hopelessly out-of-his-depth presenter asked Matt Stone and Trey Parker if he should take his granny to the show, I expected an evening of shocking satire. The UK production of ‘Book’ had opened  the night before, and I’d nabbed early tickets by booking so far […]

They used to say that England was a country held back by its own past. I think that can happen to writers, too. As my flat is fast running out of storage space, I decided to do a little life-laundering and get rid of some things I was pointlessly clinging to. First out went my […]

Eek! The Hidden Victorian Mothers are back! (see earlier post) And I don’t like the cut of that blond kid’s jib, either, he looks like a young Edgar Allen Poe. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the children are dead, but I think people are confusing two entirely separate types of photograph. It […]

Richard Briers, who at the very least should have been awarded a knighthood for services to knitwear, died last week and the very wonderful Yoko ‘Wife of the more talented John’ Lennon performed her own tribute to his passing. Nice one, Yokes!

These ladies have turned up lately on several arcane websites – it seems to have been a habit of women to appear disguised in photographs where a baby is involved – it allowed them to hold titghtly to the child while the photograph was being taken, but the end result is incredibly creepy – you […]

It’s starting to feel like Miss World or the Eurovision Song Contest, ie. of no consequence to anyone but the organisers. It has little or no effect on box office and always rewards the wrong films. This year we had ‘Argo’, a pleasant little film which would once have graced half of a double bill. […]